A review by mickbordet
Culloden: Scotland's Last Battle and the Forging of the British Empire by Trevor Royle

2.0

This book should probably have been called "Dettingen and Fontenoy and the Forging of the British Empire", but I guess that would not have sold as many copies. The focus is on the group of officers present at Culloden, most of whom were also present at the other battles, so there's lots of political shenanigans, old-school-tie appointments and people making bad decisions costing thousands of lives being promoted thanks to nepotism and the good old English class system. Of all the books I have read about the Jacobite rebellion (and there have been a few), I would say this one spends the least time actually going into detail about Culloden, despite the title, though it is the first that takes such a strong view from the Hanoverian side of the battle.
So, in essence, this is a book about how a gang of entitled thugs (Scottish and Irish as well as English) learnt how to stamp down a whole culture, starting with genocide and tying it up with self-serving laws to ensure the pockets of the English aristocracy remained well-lined, then applying the same ideas in North America and India. We get very little insight into the impact of the peoples affected and lots of 'justification' that it was all for the best in the long run.
All in all, though I did learn more than I previously knew about American history, the book left a very unpleasant taste.