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.