Prologue

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, with His grace and that of the Virgin Mary, His very holy mother, our Lady: here begins the book of instruction for riding well in every type of saddle, composed by King Dom Eduarte, king of Portugal and the Algarve and lord of Ceuta, who started this book when he was still a prince.

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: It is ordained that we should be accomplished in all things, and as the saying has it, “Of making books there is no end” and so for my own diversion and enjoyment, and recognizing that the art of being a good horseman is one of the most important skills that lords, knights, and squires ought to possess, I am writing a few things to assist the development of those who read this book with good will and are willing to do as I instruct.

You should know first of all that you will attain this art more by native talent, by acquiring and maintaining good mounts and having the opportunity to ride them regularly, and by living in a household and country that breeds and values good horsemen, than by knowing anything I will write here, or could be written by those who know more about it than I do, in the absence of good and continuous practice and the other advantages I have just listed. But I am writing this book to teach those who do not know about such things, and for those who know more, to consolidate in the memory those things that seem good to them, and so that they can teach others, correcting the errors I discuss.

Those who wish to possess this art need to have the three main things through which one acquires any art:

I will express my opinions concerning each of these; and even though ability and will cannot really be taught—since in all matters they are granted by nature and special grace rather than by learning— I will write about them to whet the desire and show the ability that we all possess, if we have the will and knowledge.

In 1804, the Portuguese abbot, diplomat, and scholar José Correia da Serra was residing in Paris, having been obliged two years earlier to resign from his position at the Portuguese embassy in London owing to conflicts with the ambassador. Taking advantage of the opportunity to visit the Bibliothèque Nationale—formerly the French Royal Library, now owned by the nation in Napoleonic France—Correia da Serra came upon a four hundred-year old manuscript from his native land. It turned out to consist of two works by Duarte I of Portugal (r. 1433–1438), Leal Conselheiro (“the Faithful Counselor”) and the Livro do Cavalgar (“Book on Riding”). Duarte was known to Portuguese historians as a scholarly monarch, but until this time his reputation rested heavily on references in medieval Portuguese chronicles, since no copy of either of his two major works was known to have survived.

Correia da Serra never publicized his discovery; the manuscript was rediscovered about a decade later, and not until 1843 were its contents finally published. The texts have since been republished several times, but more than two centuries after their discovery, neither one has been made available in a viable English translation. The lack of attention to Duarte outside of Portugal reflects the underdeveloped state of Portuguese studies in the English-speaking world rather than the merits of his work: Duarte is among the most strikingly original authors of the Middle Ages, and had these works been composed by a Spanish or French monarch, they would assuredly be quite familiar to English-speaking scholars.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Canadians gather to observe Remembrance Day. Central to the ceremony is the two minutes’ silence, often followed by a piper's lament. Among those taking part at the national ceremony in Ottawa are the Pipes and Drums of the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa and of the Royal Canadian Air Force Band. Their presence, and the playing of the lament, testifies to the continuing expression of a Scottish diasporic military identity by Canadians. A century ago, at the outbreak of the First World War, military Scottishness occupied a prominent position in Canada. Tied to and sustained by the Scottish diaspora and its influential position in the country, and by links to the British Empire, it was part of a broader pattern reflected in other dominions and colonies. Increasingly adopted and appropriated by broader sectors of Canadian society, Scottishness and military Scottishness was also sustained by characteristics often connected with nationalism and imperialism in Canada, including conservative, militarist and anti-modern sentiments. This chapter will examine the creation and uses of Scottish military identity in Canada leading up to, during and after the First World War, using images as a way of understanding the pervasive influence of visual culture in war-time. Furthermore, many of the wartime manifestations of military

Scottishness in Canada – or at least those manifestations which have survived to the present day – are visual expressions of military Scottishness. Scottish units first arrived in North America during the Seven Years War, where they formed a substantial portion of British forces. Some Scottish veterans remained afterwards, settling in the former New France and elsewhere, and their numbers were gradually augmented by the arrival of other Scottish immigrants. With the outbreak of the American Revolution, Britain recruited these veterans and settlers for units including the Royal Highland Emigrants, the first Highland regiment recruited in North America. After the Revolution, these regiments were disbanded, with many veterans either returning to their Canadian homes or settling in various locations in what are now the Atlantic provinces, Quebec and eastern Ontario. Continuing Scottish immigration, including the arrival of Loyalists leaving the new American republic, added to their numbers and would help shape the creation of military units during the War of 1812 and from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

The First World War transformed Scotland's relationship with military service, reversing the trends of the previous hundred years and reconnecting with those of the eighteenth century and earlier. The emergency of 1914–18, while traumatic, was transitory, but it also left a national legacy. Scottish society, learned and industrious, thrifty and devout – at least in the stereotypes – re-acquired a patina of militarism which it has subsequently proved reluctant wholly to shed. Here, Scotland compares less with its southern neighbour, England, which by the early twenty-first century has become remarkably distant from its military legacy, and more with the Dominions of the pre-1914 British Empire. The constitutions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada all pre-date the First World War, but the first two nations have increasingly linked their identities with the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, as Canada has done with the more successful, but also more bloody, battle of Vimy in 1917. The ‘white’ Dominions entered the war as self-conscious members of the British Empire, but emerged with an enhanced sense of their own distinctiveness. Today Australia in particular, by invoking the ‘Anzac spirit’, venerates its accomplishments in war, despite its commitment to democracy, international order and other liberal values. Its capital, Canberra, is dominated by war memorials, and by the Australian War Memorial in particular, as it looks across to parliament. Scotland confronts comparable paradoxes. It is sceptical of war's utility and yet vests a surprisingly large element of its national identity in martial trappings.

During the eighteenth century, the leading figures of the Scottish enlightenment rejected Scotland's reputation as an exporter of soldiers, arguing that fit, able-bodied men should devote their energies to more productive pastimes. During the Seven Years War (1756–63) Scotland stood aloof from the English debate on compulsory service in the militia for this reason, and thereafter its leading economic theorist, Adam Smith, used his argument for the division of labour to favour a professional army rather than universal military service. Recruiting in the Highlands plummeted, as much because of the rural depopulation following the Clearances – another symptom of the drive for economic growth – as because of a high-minded aversion to the profession of arms.

Thus spoke Scottish aristocrat, Member of Parliament, sportsman, and leading light of the rifle volunteer movement Francis Wemyss-Charteris- Douglas, Lord Elcho, later earl of Wemyss and March, as he presided over a public meeting of Scottish residents in London held at the Freemasons’ Tavern in the West End, on 4 July 1859. The meeting had been convened conjunctly by the Highland Society of London and the Caledonian Society of London in order to consider the formation of a Scottish volunteer corps in London. Two months earlier, the British government had accepted and authorised proposals to form a part-time military reserve of volunteer units throughout the country, answering public concerns over the perceived instability of continental politics and the potential for a French threat to the immediate security of the British Isles, with the British regular army heavily committed to imperial garrisons overseas. The countrywide response to the volunteering call, in organising activity, subscriptions raised and men enrolled had been strong. In the view of Lord Elcho,

As it proved, there was no backwardness about volunteering in Scotland, nor among those Scots domiciled south of the border. In England, as part of the countrywide surge in amateur military organisation set off in 1859, recruiting for Scottish volunteer companies began in London, Liverpool and Newcastle. The Scottish volunteers achieved an enduring presence in the capital, one that has lasted into the twenty-first century. In the northern English cities the idea and recruiting effort underwent periodic revival, first as a result of the South African War and then as part of the great national recruiting effort of the first year of the First World War.

If the South African contribution to the war effort made a material difference to the Allied cause in 1914–18, it was on the scrublands of South-West Africa and on the savannahs of Tanganyika, rather than in the fields of France and Flanders. Early during the conflict, South African forces rapidly and decisively suppressed a pro-German rebellion by dissident Afrikaners. Prime Minister Louis Botha personally led the South African invasion of the vast, though ill-defended, German colony in what is now Namibia, giving the British Empire one of its few victories of 1915. And in German East Africa (now Tanzania), Minister of Defence Jan Smuts in 1916 led an imperial army, including a large South African contingent, against the Schütztruppe and Askaris of Von Lettow Vorbeck. Though Smuts's efforts have been much disparaged by subsequent historians because of his inability to crush his antagonist, under his leadership the British did in fact gain control over the key urban and agricultural areas and communications routes. Yet when the Botha government began, even before the conflict was over, to commemorate South Africa's military achievements, they concentrated on the role that the country had played on the western front. Here, South Africa had sent a mere brigade of white combat troops and a contingent of black troops to serve as labourers. Both were, of course, a tiny element in the vast Allied armies, far too small to affect the outcome of the struggle. They were there for reasons of political symbolism, to help stake South Africa's claim to a seat at the peace negotiations. Given the uncertainly evolving political relationship between the Dominions and Whitehall, it was by no means clear that the ‘colonials’ would be directly represented when the post-war settlement was made. A military presence in the central theatre of the war would provide Pretoria with the moral leverage to get a voice in the process when the time came.

The South African government's approach to celebrating the nation's role in the war took an oddly Scottish turn. The centrepiece of their official story of the conflict was the heroic resistance of the South African Brigade at Delville Wood, during the battle of the Somme, among them the kilted South African Scottish Regiment, more formally known as the 4th South African Infantry.

This volume emerged from an international research colloquium in 2012, jointly organised by National Museums Scotland and the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies, University of Edinburgh, funded by the Scottish Government and administered by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Historians and museum curators from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were invited to join with their Scottish counterparts to consider the functioning, and the meaning, of ‘military Scottishness’ in different Commonwealth countries and in Britain from the late Victorian period to the present day, with a particular focus on the impact of the First World War. Another key objective was to throw light on the ‘hidden’ culture of social networking which potentially operated behind local regiments and military units among Scotland's global diaspora. This edited collection, therefore, provides a comparative overview of the nineteenth-century emergence of military Scottishness and explores how the construction and performance of Scottish military identity has evolved in different Commonwealth countries over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it looks at the ways in which Scottish volunteer regiments in Commonwealth countries variously sought to draw upon, align themselves with or, at certain key moments, redefine the assertions of martial identity which the Highland regiments represented.

Between the 1820s and 1914 over two million people emigrated from Scotland, settling primarily in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Emigration and outward migration have been constant features of the Scottish demographic experience. The official population statistics reveal a massive haemorrhage of people from Scotland, which placed Scotland as one of Europe's top three ‘exporters’ of people, second only to Ireland. Indeed, despite the comparatively small size of its population there is a general impression of the Scots numbering ‘among the most migration-prone of all European peoples’. According to Graeme Morton, such was the fundamental effect of demographic mobility on Scottish society ‘that emigration – both permanent and temporary – became an experience common to many Scots’. One of the means of identifying a diaspora is the fact that it ‘tends to occur over an extended period of time, incorporating second, third and future generations’. Here the Scottish diaspora scores rather highly, for one of the most significant characteristic features of the Scottish experience is not just its relative scale but also the prolonged nature of the nation's migratory experience.

Over the last two decades or so the subject of Scottish emigration across the globe has blossomed as a core focus of research for modern historians. Broad studies have been published in addition to some on more specific themes such as return migration, the Scottish military, Scots and slavery, and the Scottish factor in empire, to name but a few of the topics which have resulted in important contributions. It could even be argued that there might now be something of a ‘diasporic turn’ in modern Scottish historical studies. If so, it is all to the good. For far too long students of Scottish history have concentrated exclusively on the homeland and failed to take account of the broader Scotland, the ‘Scotland’ originating from the vast migrations over the centuries which left imprints on Europe, England, Ireland, the Americas, the colonial Caribbean, Africa, Australasia, Asia and many other places across the globe.

Looking outwards can also provide manifest intellectual benefits for historians of small nations. As they pursue the study of the people who have gone away, so they may become more familiar with the potential pitfalls of introspection, parochialism and filiopietism, and the multiple connections of transnationalism and internationalism. But even then, rigorous contextualisation, allied with comparative analysis, must also surely be added to the mix. Until recent years numerous books on the Scots abroad since the nineteenth century have been replete with boosterism and ethnic conceit. Undeniably that genre may have leavened the pride in the identity of Scots living both at home and abroad. Nevertheless it marred the possibilities of a truly realistic and convincing perspective which was sensitive to historiographical balance and regard for both the lighter and darker aspects of the remarkable global migrations of the Scottish people.

A Global Force adds to the more sophisticated studies which have been plotting the worldwide significance of the Scottish diaspora. This scholarly and richly referenced volume adds a novel and intriguing dimension to existing contributions by focusing on countries in the Empire, dominions and commonwealth which have adopted Scottish regimental styles in their military formations. The authors all demonstrate the vital allure of Highlandism.