Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 1792–1802
Atle L. Wold
Review by Mike Rapport
The Innes Review, Volume 69 Issue 1, Page 108-110

"Atle Wold's monograph is an important contribution to our understanding of the Scottish response to the challenges posed by the wars of the French Revolution. What immediately stands out from Wold's work is the decision to focus not on the ‘French Wars’ as a whole – in other words, not to include the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–15 – but rather to concentrate on Scotland's part in the struggle against republican France between 1793 and the Amiens truce in 1802.... Wold's book is the first volume to focus on Scotland and the war itself – although of course domestic politics and the prosecution of the military struggle were inextricably linked....Approximately two-thirds of this deeply-researched book explores the ways in which the authorities in Scotland reacted to the conflict. In a first chapter, Wold shows how the Scottish authorities reacted to riots, opposition, loyalism and the demands of central government for human and material resources for the war effort. Here, Wold is able to demonstrate how local officials and magistrates occasionally resisted interference in Scottish ways of doing things, even if such resistance was not aimed against the British state itself, but rather at ensuring the more effective enactment of its measures by adapting them to local circumstances and customs. Similarly, the second chapter, on the treason trials, shows how jurists grappled with the problems of legally defining sedition under Scots law. While Wold does not substantially revise the overall picture of courts over-zealously pursuing the government's radical opponents, he does argue that the question of ‘sedition’ highlighted the differences between Scots and English law. The subsequent chapters, on military recruitment and finance, also offer moments where the British government – or more distinctively English – responses to efforts in Scotland ruffled Scottish feathers, particularly in respect of Scotland's fiscal contribution to the war effort, which some English commentators remarked was not a fair share of British-wide taxation...."

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/inr.2018.0168