Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier in British America

by Matthew P. Dziennik

More than 12,000 soldiers from the Highlands of Scotland were recruited to serve in Great Britain’s colonies in the Americas in the middle to the late decades of the eighteenth century. In this compelling history, Matthew P. Dziennik corrects the mythologized image of the Highland soldier as a noble savage, a primitive if courageous relic of clanship, revealing instead how the Gaels used their military service to further their own interests and, in doing so, transformed the most maligned region of the British Isles into an important center of the British Empire.

Genres: History

319 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 2015

About the author

Matthew P. Dziennik is Assistant Professor of British and British Imperial History at the United States Naval Academy. His work focuses on warfare in the early British Empire, with a particular emphasis on the empire's use of non-English soldiers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Reviews

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having finished this monograph up I come away wondering just who it was written for. While the subtitle is an accurate enough explanation of the topics the author is dealing with, Dziennik writes with the assumption that you already have a good handle on the history of the British army, Anglo-Scottish relations, and Colonial America, so this is not the first book you should read on the subject. What Dziennik really wants to examine is the mentality of the Highland soldier post-Culloden, particularly as it relates to North America, between the gentry trying to bolster their social & economic status, and the enlisted men who were prepared to put life & limb on the line to win an imperial land grant, and secure their own personal position. While I'm highly impressed with Dziennik's scholarship there is no denying that there are points where this book is a slog.