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.