Oxford University Press's Great Battles series is aimed at a general readership as well as enthusiasts looking for detailed analyses of specific military engagements. The volumes situate battles within their historical contexts, highlight scholarly debates surrounding them, and discuss their immediate impact, cultural legacies, and commemoration. The series seeks to remind buffs and the rest of us of the importance of military history.
The Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746 was the last large-scale military engagement in the last major fight to restore the exiled house of Stuart to the British throne. The defeat of the Jacobites on that day signaled the consolidation of state power in Britain. That event in turn forwarded both the integration of Scotland into the United Kingdom and the expansion of the British Empire.
In keeping with the remit for volumes in the Great Battles series, Murray Pittock's Culloden begins with two broad chapters on Jacobitism and the Rising of 1745 and concludes with three chapters discussing the aftermath of the battle, its historiography, and its commemoration. Chapter 3, on the battle itself, is informative, drawing on a range of sources including recent archaeological finds. Some readers will find the level of detail in that chapter daunting, but Pittock deftly uses his narrative to advance an argument with important political, historiographical, and cultural resonances: the Jacobites, contrary to long-standing myth, formed a conventional army. Despite their savage reputation, at Culloden they relied primarily on firearms, not swords.
Was Culloden a great battle? The Jacobites lost that day and never fully regrouped, but even if they had won at Culloden, it is difficult to imagine a scenario under which they could have achieved their strategic objective and placed a Stuart king on the throne. By the time of the engagement they were cut off from supplies and literally starving. Virtually all historians, including Pittock, agree that the turning point for the Rising in strictly military terms came earlier, when the Jacobites decided to withdraw their troops from England.
Pittock insists that Culloden was nonetheless pivotal because of its cultural impact. He suggests that after the battle the whole Jacobite phenomenon was reinterpreted, and Culloden came to represent the triumph of modernity against a force of backward-looking, traditionalist, primitive Scottish Highlanders. Our whole view of history may have changed as a result, because a particular view of progress took hold in Scotland and influenced the rest of the world through the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. In contesting this outlook, as he has throughout his career, Pittock is pushing back against a strong, pervasive myth—a quaint, trivializing view of Jacobitism associating it with the Highlands, ancient tradition, and clan loyalty. The Jacobites were led by sophisticated military thinkers, and, according to Pittock, most of them believed that they were fighting for Scotland generally, not for any specifically Gaelic cause.
It is important to dispel the image of Jacobites as primitives, but in making his alternative claim for the general Scottish character of the Rising, Pittock overstates his argument on several levels. He underestimates the ideological importance of dynastic loyalty, acknowledges but downplays the role of sectarian differences, and comes close to denying the linguistic and cultural separation dividing Gaelic-speaking and English-speaking Scots. Pittock is skeptical of those who emphasize the ways in which Jacobitism divided Scots because that analysis has political implications. It serves to lessen our appreciation of the deep-rooted power of Scottish nationalism (146). He writes, “it has always been tendentious to say that more Scots fought against the Jacobites than for them at Culloden” (83). Nonetheless, perhaps unfortunately, even if that statement is tendentious, it is true.
Pittock is far more interested in the Jacobites than in their opponents, and this leads him to slight not only the Scots who fought for George II but the British army in general. Even if the Jacobites believed that they were engaged in a national struggle for Scotland, their opponents had much more complicated views. Some supporters of George II denigrated all Scots, but it was also common for them to emphasize the “Highland” character of the Rising. Others clearly viewed the suppression of the Rising as a police action, holding all the Jacobites criminally responsible, viewing them first and foremost as British subjects and interpreting their actions as treason. These strands of thought long predated the Battle of Culloden, and we need to recognize this if we hope to understand what happened immediately after the fighting ended.
Pittock's analysis of the combat is incisive and important, and should disabuse anyone who still thinks that the Jacobites were primitives. His later chapters on the aftermath of the battle, historiography, and commemoration illuminate the ways in which the battle has been successively reinterpreted, revalued, and infused with politically charged meanings. But Pittock's insistence that the battle itself was the critical turning point, that a new set of prejudices began to take shape that day, weakens his analysis of the intellectual and cultural history of anti-Jacobitism. It also undermines his ability to explain why the victorious army opted to kill rather than capture its defeated adversaries. Unable to advance any cultural explanation for the slaughter of the Jacobite soldiers, Pittock falls back on a nearly trivial analysis: it was a bad decision taken by one evil British commander, the Duke of Cumberland.
