Religion and National Identity

This book, a study on Scottish national identity, is at one and the same time fascinating but somewhat frustrating. The author takes an innovative approach to the study of Scottish Presbyterianism, attempting to bring an interdisciplinary methodology (as a professor of Information and Learning at Nottingham Business School) to a topic that has hitherto been ensconced in the remit of historians and theologians. The study explores the relationship between theological belief and the detailed recording of transactions, including accounting practices. There are occasions in several chapters where the author spreads his interdisciplinary interests too widely, encompassing references to a discussion of gravestones in England during the nineteenth century and the survival of a separate “O” grade in arithmetic in the Scottish school examination system in the twentieth century. The book is firmly rooted in a close examination of the primary records of Scottish Presbyterianism and the records of kirk sessions, presbyteries, and synods of the Church of Scotland. The author is slightly unfair to himself when he suggests that the evidence has been drawn substantially from five presbyteries with a particular focus on rural, Lowland areas of Scotland. His bibliography contains over nine pages of church records that he consulted.

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