This is volume 4, covering the time from the massacre of Glencoe to the end of Jacobitism. In four volumes of more than 1500 combined pages the series "The History of Scotland" deals with something less than two millenniums of Scottish history. Every single volume covers a certain period in an attempt to examine the elements and forces which were imperative to the making of the Scottish people, and to record the more important events of that time.

Paul Hopkins, an authority on early Jacobitism, sets the Massacre of Glencoe in its true context. The book describes the tensions in the Highlands between the Restoration and the End of the Revolution and the influence on the Highlands of national politics. Besides filling a blank in our knowledge of the Highlands in the decade following the Massacre, the book transforms our perspective on lowlands politics by showing that the Inquiry was part of a secret patriotic campaign to break the aristocracy's political stranglehold and increase the Scottish parliament's powers.