A landmark study which reconsiders in fresh and illuminating ways the classic themes of the nation's history since the sixteenth century, as well as a number of new topics which are only now receiving detailed attention. Places the Scottish experience firmly in an international historical experience.

• Introduction: The Study of Modern Scottish History


• Part One: Some Fundamentals of Modern Scottish History


• 1: T.C. Smout: Land and Sea: The Environment


• 2: Michael Anderson: The Demographic Factor


• 3: Colin Kidd and James Coleman: Mythical Scotland


• 4: Stewart J. Brown: Religion and Society


• 5: Cairns Craig: The Literary Tradition


• 6: Robert Dodgshon: Clearances and the Transformation of the Scottish Countryside


• 7: T.M. Devine: A Global Diaspora


• Part Two: Reformation, Regal Union and Civil Wars 1500 - c.1680


• 8: Andrea Thomas: The Renaissance


• 9: Jenny Wormald: Reformed and Godly Scotland?


• 10: Laura Stewart: The 'Rise' of the State?


• 11: T.M. Devine: Reappraising the Early Modern Economy 1500 - 1660


• 12: Alasdair Raffe: Scotland Restored and Reshaped: Politics and Religion


• 13: Elizabeth Ewan: The Early Modern Family


• 14: Patrick Fitzgerald: The Seventeenth Century Irish Connection


• Part Three: Union and Enlightenment c.1680 - 1760


• 15: Karin Bowie: New Perspectives on Pre-Union Scotland


• 16: Steve Murdoch and Esther Mijers: Migrant Destinations


• 17: Clare Jackson: Union Historiographies


• 18: Daniel Szechi: Scottish Jacobitism in its International Context


• 19: Alexander Broadie: The rise (and fall?) of the Scottish Enlightenment


• 20: Anne-Marie Kilday: The Barbarous North? Criminality in Early Modern Scotland


• Part Four: The Nation Transformed 1760 - 1914


• 21: Stana Nenadic: Industrialisation and the Scottish People


• 22: Douglas Hamilton: Scotland and the eighteenth-century Empire


• 23: Gordon Pentland: The Challenge of Radicalism


• 24: Richard Rodger: The Scottish Cities


• 25: Graeme Morton: Identity within the Union State


• 26: Ben Braber: Immigrants


• 27: Angela McCarthy: The Scottish Diaspora since 1815


• 28: Esther Breitenbach: Impact of the Victorian Empire


• Part Five: The Great War to the New Millennium 1914 - 2010


• 29: E.W. McFarland: The Great War


• 30: Richard J. Finlay: The Inter-War Crisis: The Failure of Extremism


• 31: Graham Walker: The Religious Factor


• 32: Catriona M. M. Macdonald: Gender and Nationhood in Modern Scottish Historiography


• 33: Ewen Cameron: The Stateless Nation and the British State since 1918


• 34: Iain McLean: Challenging the Union


• 35: George Peden: A New Scotland?: The Economy


• 36: David McCrone: A New Scotland?: Society and Culture

T. M. Devine previously held the Glucksman Research Chair in Irish-Scottish Studies, was Director of the AHRC Centre in Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and was Deputy Principal of the University of Strathclyde. He holds Honorary Professorships at the Universities of North Carolina and Guelph, and has won all three major prizes for Scottish historical research. He is Fellow of the British Academy and Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was appointed OBE for services to Scottish History (2005) and awarded Scotland's supreme academic accolade, the Royal Gold Medal, by HM the Queen on the recommendation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001.
Jenny Wormald was previously C.E. Hodge Fellow in History at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She was a British Academy Reader in the Humanities and has held Visiting Professorships at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the University of the South, Sewanee, and Research Fellowships at the Shakespeare Folger Library, Washington, DC, and the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries (Scotland), and the Royal Society for the Arts.