Winner of the 2025 Frank Watson Book Prize

Why did Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries know so little about their past and even less about those who controlled their history? Is the historical narrative the only legitimate medium through which the past can be made known? Are novelists and historians as far apart as convention has it? In an age when history grounds any claims to national status, these are important questions and they have implications for how Scottish history has evolved, and how Scottish identity has been understood up to the present day.

Scottish history is not simply the distillation of Scotland’s past: authors shape what we know and how we judge our forebears. This book investigates who decided which Scottish voices of the past would be heard in history’s pages and which would ultimately be silenced. It sketches a picture of a narrow and privileged cultural elite that responded belatedly to a more democratic age and only slowly embraced women writers and the interests of ‘average’ Scots. Integrating historical fiction and popular histories in its appreciation of the Scottish historical imaginary, it most importantly tells the story of why, despite the interests of politicians and others, a truly British history has never emerged.

'A brilliant, scholarly yet highly readable work which enlarges our understanding of what Scottish history is, and reinforces why it really matters' - James Robertson

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'An exceptionally rich and original contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the historical discipline in modern Scotland . . . The book stands out for its importance to Scottish History as a field. It will be central to training and to scholarship for a generation and beyond'

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'the book is nothing less than an essential tool of biographical reference for anyone interested in Scottish history and those who have written about it in the last 200 years... a triumph of research and argument which looks sure to provoke discussion and debate for many years to come'