The First World War transformed Scotland's relationship with military service, reversing the trends of the previous hundred years and reconnecting with those of the eighteenth century and earlier. The emergency of 1914–18, while traumatic, was transitory, but it also left a national legacy. Scottish society, learned and industrious, thrifty and devout – at least in the stereotypes – re-acquired a patina of militarism which it has subsequently proved reluctant wholly to shed. Here, Scotland compares less with its southern neighbour, England, which by the early twenty-first century has become remarkably distant from its military legacy, and more with the Dominions of the pre-1914 British Empire. The constitutions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada all pre-date the First World War, but the first two nations have increasingly linked their identities with the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, as Canada has done with the more successful, but also more bloody, battle of Vimy in 1917. The ‘white’ Dominions entered the war as self-conscious members of the British Empire, but emerged with an enhanced sense of their own distinctiveness. Today Australia in particular, by invoking the ‘Anzac spirit’, venerates its accomplishments in war, despite its commitment to democracy, international order and other liberal values. Its capital, Canberra, is dominated by war memorials, and by the Australian War Memorial in particular, as it looks across to parliament. Scotland confronts comparable paradoxes. It is sceptical of war's utility and yet vests a surprisingly large element of its national identity in martial trappings.

During the eighteenth century, the leading figures of the Scottish enlightenment rejected Scotland's reputation as an exporter of soldiers, arguing that fit, able-bodied men should devote their energies to more productive pastimes. During the Seven Years War (1756–63) Scotland stood aloof from the English debate on compulsory service in the militia for this reason, and thereafter its leading economic theorist, Adam Smith, used his argument for the division of labour to favour a professional army rather than universal military service. Recruiting in the Highlands plummeted, as much because of the rural depopulation following the Clearances – another symptom of the drive for economic growth – as because of a high-minded aversion to the profession of arms.