On 23 September 1781 Alexander Macleod of Ullinish in Skye informed his kinsman, John Macpherson, a senior figure on the English East India Company's [thereafter EIC] supreme council in Bengal, of the death of his son, Lieutenant Roderick Macleod, while campaigning with the 71st Highland regiment against American patriots in the Carolinas. Ullinish asked Macpherson to extend his protection to his two other sons, Norman and Alexander, officers in the Company's Madras and Bengal armies respectively, and to tell them ‘… to come home wt [sic] whatever acquisitions they have made’. Death in battle in North America and the need to secure profits acquired through military service in Asia speak to the continuities in motivation and radical changes in geography that marked out Scottish society's experience of warfare in the long eighteenth century.

The example of this one, relatively obscure, Skye family fits a much wider pattern. Service in distinctive units of the British army such as Fraser's 71st Highlanders and in the less well-known context of the EIC's military complex chimes with established understandings of Scotland's history in this period. Long acknowledged as a major exporter of manpower – to Ireland in the sixteenth century and the Dutch Republic and Sweden in the seventeenth centuries – changing patterns of military employment are held to have mirrored Scotland's constitutional trajectory. The established European avenues of service gave way to an increasingly Anglo-and then British framework from the 1690s onwards. This is of course a well-known argument and has formed the basis of Linda Colley's cogent conception of military service, along with Protestantism and empire, as one of the fundamental building blocks of Britain and Britishness. Although the work of Stephen Conway, with its revisionist emphasis on the enduring importance of Continental connections, offers an important corrective, the model of British integration remains the widely accepted orthodoxy. The result has been the consolidation of a particular reading of military Scotland in the century or so after 1707. John Cookson and Hew Strachan have emphasised the essentially ‘British’ nature of the country's post-union military ethos and identity. While regimental cultures and modes of militarism – especially the cult of Highlandism – undoubtedly modernised aspects of Scotland's centuries-old martial identity, these were deliberately ambiguous acts of representation designed to complement rather than compete with the pronounced British ethos of the army as an institution.

New Zealand, to borrow from Rudyard Kipling's famous description of Auckland, is the ‘last, loneliest, loveliest’ domain of the Scottish diaspora. Furthest away of all Britain's white settler-dominated colonies from the homeland, it is arguably the one where the Scots were most numerous in proportion to population, and most influential culturally. It is perhaps surprising then, that unlike Canada, South Africa and Australia, New Zealand's First World War expeditionary force contained no units bearing Scottish names or drawing from Territorial units with Scottish identities, and apparently eschewed any links with Scottish military traditions. Instead, this national force marched under the New Zealand name, wearing plain khaki uniforms badged with New Zealand motifs and symbols. The sole exception to this assertion of a homogenous identity was an ethnically branded contingent of Maori, the native inhabitants of New Zealand, who served with distinction at Gallipoli and on the western front.

This chapter will trace the evolution of both Scottish and Maori military traditions in New Zealand and their contrasting fates into modern times. In the twentieth century, distinctive Maori contingents went overseas to fight for ‘King and Country’ in both world wars, to wide acclaim. Following the Second World War, as the imperial connection attenuated and a stronger national identity emerged, the significance of this indigenous warrior tradition steadily increased within the New Zealand military, eclipsing earlier manifestations of military Scottishness in the process. No other native culture has projected its military traditions onto the armed forces of a former British Dominion to a similar degree. This provides an intriguing point of comparison between New Zealand's two ethnically focused military traditions. As one has waxed – the New Zealand army becoming Ngāti Tūmatauenga (the tribe of the warrior God) – the other has waned, with Scottish affiliations, dress distinctions and unit identities in danger of disappearing altogether at the start of the twenty-first century.

Scottishness in New Zealand

James Belich has made the point that it is the over-representation of Scots that most distinguishes settler New Zealand from nineteenth-century Britain. Whereas Scots made up about 10 per cent of the population of the British Isles, they made up 24 per cent of New Zealand's settler population. New Zealand was thus, according to this estimate, twice as Scottish as Britain.

Since European settlement in 1788, in total, about 600,000 Scots have made their homes in Australia. While earlier in the twentieth century as many as 12 per cent of Australians claimed to be of Scottish descent, the most recent census shows a figure of 7.6 per cent. Today, the main legacy of the early Scots settlers is a small but strong Scottish cultural identity and heritage within Australia's now much larger and more diverse population. The influence of Scottish military traditions and identity in Australia dates back to the arrival of a battalion of the 73rd Highland Regiment in New South Wales in 1810. From the 1860s several home-grown ‘Scottish’ volunteer militia units were then established in the Australian colonies. This chapter discusses the influence of Scottish military heritage and traditions in Australia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, focusing particularly on a perceived dominant Scottish influence within a small number of Australian infantry battalions during the First World War. This includes the 56th Australian Infantry Battalion, one of a limited number of units where a larger proportion of officers and men were of Scottish descent, or had pre-war service in militia units with Scottish heritage and identity. A junior Australian officer serving with the 56th observed of Scotsmen in his unit that they displayed ‘A military fervour akin to religious fanaticism’, underlining how, within these units, the links to Scottish heritage were seen as a positive factor and a strength. Yet against this was set a general view across the Australian forces and among senior command during the First World War that units should identify exclusively as Australian.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century up to the First World War, around two million Scots emigrated overseas, primarily to the USA and the British Dominions: a remarkable rate of migration given the total population of Scotland by the middle of the nineteenth century was still under three million. The initial waves of migration resulting from the Highland Clearances saw most Scots emigrants go to North America, but about 10,000 made the longer journey to Australia between 1837 and 1857.

In 1856 Sydney-based Freeman's Journal, a paper catering for the Catholic Irish immigrant community in the city, reported on the patriotism of the Scots. The paper was asking why ‘a Scotchman [is] a more genuine, more unmistakable patriot than an Englishman – a Frenchman – an Irishman’, and the answer was clear for the writer:

Consequently, the paper went on, ‘true love of country … is best recognized by deeds’, and in the Scottish immigrant community such deeds were carried especially well by means of ethnic clubs and societies. Through these, the report concluded, the Scots were ‘acting together for each other's benefit’ – and ‘no matter how long he may have been absent from his native land’. In fact, so profound was the Scots’ commitment to ethnic associations – at least according to a story published in the Belfast News-Letter – that two Scots shipwrecked on a remote island in the Atlantic, by the time the captain of a ship who came upon them by coincidence, had founded on that island a variety of associations, including a St Andrew's Society and a Burns Club. The two were also hosting Highland Games and had established both a curling and a golf club. As the newspaper aptly concluded, the Scots ‘may be defined as an Association-forming people’.

This humorous take on the Scots’ propensity to come together in ethnic clubs and societies should not detract from a critical fact: Scottish associationalism remains one of the defining characteristics of the Scottish diaspora near and far to this day. In New Zealand, the British Empire's farthest outpost, there were at least 130 Scottish ethnic associations by the early twentieth century; these were chiefly comprised of Caledonian societies, but also Burns clubs and Gaelic societies. A few decades later, the 1928–9 Scots Year Book lists 1,288 Scottish societies around the world, though not all of them were actually ethnic societies.

On the morning of 1 September 1880, as the column from Kabul breakfasted near Kandahar, Major Ashe, who served on the staff of Major-General Sir (later Lord) Frederick S. Roberts, observed that:

Thereafter in the ensuing battle of Kandahar, the 72nd (later the 1st Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders) and the 92nd Gordon Highlanders would win fresh laurels in the first of a series of military triumphs, and some tragedies, over the next twenty years that would confirm the worldwide reputation of the Scottish soldier. That reputation had been forged since the Nine Years War (1688–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) as a loyal and resolute servant of the British Crown. It was tested by the response to Jacobite risings, or rebellions, of 1715 and 1745–6, bolstered by imperial service in North America, India and throughout the empire; and enhanced by engagement with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic forces. Yet as the empire approached its zenith in the late nineteenth century, the fighting reputation of the Scottish soldier attained fresh heights in achievement, reportage and imagery. This imagery firmly associated the Scottish soldier with a distinctive concept of Scottish identity, expressed within the British army and imbued with an imperial purpose. The Scottish diaspora responded by creating Highland regiments, as ‘a wave of manifestations of Scottish identity’ swept through the colonial world in the 1880s, largely stimulated by the formation of Caledonian societies.

Scottish regiments and ‘Highlandism’

In 1881 the recently elected Liberal government established the context within which the Scottish, and in particular the kilted, soldier would thrive. By endorsing the regimental reforms of Hugh Childers, the secretary of state for war (1880–2), it established nine double-battalion and one single-battalion Scottish regiments (six of which had Highland status and five were kilted). The ten Scottish regiments represented some 14 per cent of the seventy double-battalion regiments and one single-battalion regiment formed across the United Kingdom.