Jacqueline Riding - Jacobites: A New History Of The '45 Rebellion

So Bonnie Prince Charlie led the rebellion to claim the throne for the Catholic Stuarts exiled in Rome, where Charles was born, he was also half Polish. What is not known is, in fact, they actually triumphed considerably at Prestonpans where they took over the country of Scotland, after lighting the fiery cross which was a message to the chiefs that there was going to be a war. Actually the general of the Jacobites, Lord George Murray was in fact Protestant. They recruited a Manchester regiment, but they left before they traversed back to Inverness. One of the great feats of Culloden, despite having thousands of men slaughtered and losing, was the triumph of Ghillies MacBean, who was six feet four inches, the tallest Jacobite in the ranks, smote down 13 government soldiers single-handedly at Culloden with his basket-hilt broadsword before being bayoneted to death.  

John Lewis Gaddis - On Grand Strategy

One thing that permeates from the writings of Machiavelli is a severe distrust in authority. Machiavelli would know this being a former torture victim and incarcerated prisoner of war by the Medici and the Catholic Church. Machiavelli wrote in his works that an invading army should seek the favour of the inhabitants and not subject the people to oppression, but seek to gain the favour of the people. He was for the working class, and his works were read by the great military generals like Napoleon Bonaparte. Machiavelli was sort of like a socialist before socialism, this fact was noted by Antonio Gramsci who held Machiavelli, the father of modern political science in high esteem. Machiavelli is quite often cited by many political scientists. 

Nigel Tranter - Tales And Traditions Of Scottish Castles

Scotland could always punch above its weight, no matter how many foes they were challenged to. There was a rich tradition of raising armies. To think that they beat the English on more than one occasion, where England had upwards from five times the Scottish population at the time. The English after feuding with the Scots for hundreds of years, they soon came to the realisation that these people were tough and hardy, so they employed them with a measly sum to fight on their own front lines. The old guard of clansmen had died with their culture and the new young men would not know what being in a clan meant. Scotland was mainly a regional area, so you can imagine the people would be poor, and if tempted with reward, would lay down their life for a cause.

John J. Mearsheimer - The Tragedy Of Great Power Politics

Political realism has its roots in E.H. Carr's analysis of Thucydides, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, who all they can approve that they did not call themselves realists at the time of their writings. It holds the value of the state and classical realists believe that man is innately selfish, whereas neorealists believe states are selfish due to the anarchical state system. The classical branch of realism has its roots in Hobbes' Preservation Theory, which he states people are selfish. It can also include Machiavelli's revolutionary undertakings of an armed rebellion against the greedy banking family of Florence, the Medici. Thucydides and Machiavelli were both military men and wrote a lot about military strategy, including the Thucydides Trap. Kenneth Waltz was the first writer to pen the term neorealist. Realism is essentially an amalgamation of a few different theories.

Nancy Goldstone - Daughters Of The Winter Queen

What is evident in Scottish history is, which not many people know about, is the culture of challenging religion. For example, the famous occultist Aleister Crowley had a property on Loch Ness, which he apparently summoned the devil in. There is a culture of witchcraft and the last known person to be burned alive in the British Isles for witchcraft; a Mrs. Janet Horne came from the Highlands, Dornoch specifically. The last person to be executed for blasphemy, in 1697, in the entire British Isles, a Mr. Thomas Aikenhead was a student from Edinburgh. The Aikenhead trial was pioneering because it led to leniency in religion, the Scottish enlightenment would not have happened, because the whole endeavour was to veer people away from the Bible. David Hume's contribution to atheism, in his published work Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, was the biggest contribution to atheism prior to Darwinism.

Barry R. Posen - Restraint: A New Foundation For U.S. Grand Strategy

Most empires throughout history have a reoccurring theme. They were built by slavery and it is only for mankind to find the use of their rights that they will progress. Of course, liberal governments do not want people telling them what to do and how to act, and if they are told that they are wrong they will react with a great force, such as the nature of fascism. So when a slave class will tell their owner that they do not deserve the chains and want more which they certainly are entitled to, the master will reply with violence and such is war. Remember some of the first people put in concentration camps by the Nazi party were in fact, socialists.

T.M. Devine - The Scottish Nation: A Modern History

Devine specialises in modern history and the diaspora of the Scottish people, but there can be one clear thing to note, even though Scotland gave so much in the industrial age, so many inventions and so many soldiers in the colonisation period, Scotland has never been properly unified and is often torn apart with allegiances. I personally think the purest most Scottish culture was the culture of clans and disbanding this culture lead to the destruction of a people because people are typified by their own culture. The Scottish state was a collection of clans and the king of the day had to unite these different clans, as most often were fighting against themselves. Scottish culture is the clan system, and the language is the Scottish Gaelic tongue. Eradicating this is piercing a dagger blow into a people. 

John Lewis Gaddis - The Cold War

The war of theory, communism versus liberalism is the constant and tumultuous affair that has dominated the US policy for many years; it was likely to result in wars or in fact many wars simply by causing friction in values. One must wonder why there is this system of capitalism, or it could be said of monarchies as well that there is a giant system in a state that only favours the rich or the royalty. Thomas Hobbes' theory could never be more pertinent, of the average person having a life that was 'nasty, brutish and short'. So what needs to happen? Well in the words of George Monbiot, overthrow capitalism, this is a system that is eating up the planet. Once capitalism is overthrown humanity may have a fighting chance at survival because they are their own worst enemy.

Michael Penman - Robert The Bruce: King Of Scots

Bruce had been typically fighting guerrilla warfare up until Bannockburn. At Bannockburn, he used the massed ranks of the spears to defeat his opponent, the English. When one is outnumbered in a conventional setting they should use guerrilla warfare to gain an advantage and pick off weaknesses. Of course, the weakness of the pike became aware years later as although they could dispatch of cavalry, but when they faced halberd, the halberd was specifically designed to cut the end of a pike. Robert Bruce's ability to take guerrilla warfare to an open battlefield changed warfare forever. This is England, they about five times more populated at the time and their cavalry was absolutely terrifying and had only just been defeated for the first time at Stirling Bridge.

John Mearsheimer - Why Leaders Lie

The question often arises to me why so many countries are at war or have been at war, yet their citizens can get along so well. It is because of politicians manufacturing spin. They can create an enemy and tell the people who they govern who to fight and who to go to war with. Politicians and propaganda go absolutely hand in hand and it is how they are in power because they have harnessed the propaganda machine and a government who controls the propaganda machine will control the people, they can tell the people who to fight and they will rely on man's basic setting which is warlike as Thomas Hobbes states in his theory on human nature. Harness the power of the propaganda machine and a politician will have power. Von Clausewitz states that war is the extension of politics, it should be noted that war is not the extension of the people, but only politics and politicians specifically. Hobbes theory asserts that people are naturally dim-witted and coerced into decisions. He often boasted of reading more books than anyone and you can see he had a distrust for people in general.

John Guy - Mary Queen Of Scots

Mary Stuart's partaking in the murder of Lord Darnley is thwart with intrigue. The guards of his household found him outside in the garden naked after hearing a bomb going off. He was not actually killed by the explosion, he was murdered and then the bomb was set off. When he participated in the murder of Rizzio, Rizzio was stabbed around 50 times in the chest. Mary Stuart's whole story of murder and revenge is seriously interesting and is the source of many books. I myself personally own about half a dozen books on Mary Stuart and they are a story of how a strong woman had her power stripped away from her from revenge. But she did succeed in having a child who inherited the throne of the not just Scotland but the British Isles. That was her lasting testament.

John Lewis Gaddis - The Landscape Of History: How Historians Map The Past

This work by Gaddis is likened to the work of the great E.H. Carr who not only was the first political scientist to use the term ''realism'' as a reaction to idealism, the dominant theory of the time, but Carr was a journalist and historian. Carr argued against empiricism in history in his classic What Is History? which is a must-read for any academic who handles facts. His famous quote was ''study the historian, not the history'' because he believed that a historian would develop bias that would deter the truth in their findings, rather than viewing a scenario from the past objectively and free of bias. Carr was also a bit of a radical and was once labeled by a critic a ''shocking old Soviet apologist''.

T. M. Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History Of The Dispossessed

Devine is a master in the field of Scottish history, and his scope is interested in modern history and the diaspora of Scotland. Tales from the clearances are quite harrowing and not for the faint-hearted. First, the soldiers were butchered when the cannon fired grapeshot on a stationary Clan Donald and torn asunder. When the government had won the day they rounded up the Jacobite supporters and murdered them in cold blood. After outlawing their culture they decide to evict everyone to be cleared for sheep farming. They didn't just clear people off the land, there are accounts of the government setting crofts alight with people still in them. The Highlanders were then sent to the far reaches of the world as refugees. The common perception of Scots was that they were lower than criminals.

John Lewis Gaddis - Strategies Of Containment

The USA took great pleasure in containing the spread of communism throughout the world, they did it for years last century and proudly championed an unregulated and privatised economy, not that it got them anywhere because of the GFC really proves that capitalism cannot work because as Thomas Hobbes states, man in his essence is naturally greedy. Neo-liberalism is really a deluded perception because there is no regulation, it does not take trusted advice into account, in fact, it rejects advice and the believer is under a delusion of grandiosity. So deluded is this individual driven by greed he will not see his or her impact in the bigger sphere of things. This grandiosity will lead an individual into violence in a totally liberated 'wild west' of every man for himself.

Nigel Tranter - The Bruce Trilogy: The Steps To The Empty Throne: The Path Of The Hero King;The Price Of The King's Peace

To understand Robert the Bruce as one of the leading figures in the history of Scotland, one has to understand that the famous victory of Bannockburn was a seriously grandiose victory that kept the hopes of a nation alive. The English army numbered 20,000 strong. 1,000 English knights whose gallop must have felt like the loudest thunderstorm imaginable. 3,000 Welsh archers who were so well trained they could have 5 arrows in the air at once from one archer. 16,000 footsoldiers to face the army of 10,000 Scots, who were bolstered by the appearance of the gallowglass and men of the isles,  led by Angus Og, some of the most skilled warriors of their day who had mastered the use of the very long and dangerous claymore.

John Mearsheimer And Stephen M. Walt - The Israel Lobby: And US Foreign Policy

The United States of America has given Israel US$3 billion annually since 1985, and yes that is, in fact, foreign aid, Israel not being considered a developing country. They (Israel) are not a colonial power, they do not want to colonise Palestine and subject the Palestinians to colonial rule, and fundamentally change their state by force to adopt their methods. Israel wants to absolutely and utterly wants to wipe them from the face of the Earth. Zionism is an idea of domination and the target is Palestine, simply because they are different and are in the way of progress. Islamaphobia in the 21st century is demonstrated in the Israel and Palestine conflict. The USA may boast that it gives one of the most amounts of foreign aid of any country, but plenty of it goes to Israel and its Islamaphobic regime.

Ronald McNair Scott - Robert The Bruce: King Of Scots

Robert the Bruce was the claimant to the throne of Scotland during the Wars of Independence. On his father's side, he was descended from Normans who had settled in Scotland, granted land by William the Conqueror, but on his mother's side he was the great-great-grandson of David of Huntingdon, whose grandfather was David I, once the king of Scotland, so the royal house went from being predominantly the Gaelic and Pictish fusion of House of Alpin to Norman kings. It has loosely been Norman families speaking French from Bruce onwards right through the Stuarts. Bruce was quite a warrior also, in the battle of Bannockburn they were outnumbered 2-1 to the English, and with cunning hedgehog formations managed to defeat the English. He also famously rode out and beheaded a challenger, alone, with his battle-axe, an English knight named Henry de Bohun.

Stephen Van Evera - Guide To Methods For Students Of Political Science

Stephen Van Evera proposed the Offense-Defense theory which is basically; war will be more common in where conquest is easy and war will happen when states have large defensive or offensive opportunities. When there is conquest is when there is little resistance from an invading force, to simply resist is to deny the expansion of an invading army, and it sends the message to the opposing generals that this expansion could be dangerous. By simply having armies does not mean there will be war, armies can actually be a deterrent for war because of opposing armies having the realisation that two strong sides will negate each other out. Lying down without resisting an invading army is simply giving up your lands for free and inviting a foreign power to actually take more and more land.

Robert Burns - Selected Poems

Robert Burns was the songwriter and poet of the tongue of Scots and in assembling many works, his fierce nationalism shone through. He was a firm supporter of the Jacobites and this has resonated with Scottish nationalists the world over, for Robert to become a revolutionary figure. He was himself born into quite an impoverished background and had a firm belief in the rights of man, demonstrated in his famous phrase "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!'' He also was an influence on modern and contemporary songwriters like Bob Dylan, who cites ''A Red, Red Rose'' as one of his all-time greatest lyrical influences. Burn's typifies the nature of the Scots, fiercely proud but romantic. He is the human voice in the desolate highlands that has cast its spell on many people who have wandered through it and fallen in love with its radiant beauty.

Kenneth Waltz - Man The State And War: A Theoretical Analysis

Kenneth Waltz was the first to use the term neo-realist, which is a system of realism that asserts that states battle for power with each other in an anarchical system, and that drives their motives. Neo-realists could be interpreted as being critical of the United Nations, because of the anarchical system it implements. The United Nations has a duty to keep the peace and ensure there are basic democratic freedoms in the states that protect their innocent people. In an anarchical system between states, the UN is simply not doing its job, and when states do not follow the rules of the UN, then perhaps it is failing in its duty to keep the peace. The UN was established to ensure there would be peace and human rights, not to repeat the atrocities of WWII.

Moray McLaren - The Scots

Throughout Scottish history, there is a sense that the Scots were the subject of colonisation by the English, as a target that must be oppressed, a threat. The clan system was foreign and an unknown system to the English, whose system was the kings and the church, had a relative control over the people. This is not the case in Scotland, as it has been proven that clan chiefs could have armies of their own and the clansmen were paid in accommodation rather than riches. The Scots were subject to colonialisation from day one and put up one hell of a fight in resisting for hundreds of years. They were freedom fighters, in the face of oppression. The oppression they felt was outlawing of their culture, suffocation of Gaelic culture, and the subsequent murder of their men of fighting age, one that could be seen as a violation of human rights, because they were confronted with indiscriminate violence in the days after their nation had fallen at Culloden. There were not only English guilty of these crimes of terrorism towards the Scots, but other Scots.

Hans J. Morgenthau - Politics Among Nations: The Struggle For Power And Peace

Hans J. Morgenthau is part of the classical realist branch. They argue for nothing higher than the state in international relations. Realists are split into three categories. Classical realists argue that politics is driven by man's selfishness. Neo-realists believe that states act within the anarchic state system, all states vying for power. Neo-classical realists are somewhere in the middle. E.H. Carr devised the branch of IR theory realism after fusing the works of Hobbes, Thucydides, and Machiavelli and he proposed realism the opposite to idealism. E.H. Carr launched a massive criticism on idealism (liberalism) in his book The Twenty Year's Crisis. Carr outlines that idealism cannot see forward, whereas realism and specifically Marx who he held as a realist were far-seeing into the future.

Nigel Tranter - Rob Roy MacGregor

Nigel Tranter incorporates history into his stories, not like John Prebble who is a fact-based journalist, assembling pieces from the annals of time, Tranter is probably similar to Sir Walter Scott in his tales have a fictitious element and there is artistic license. Rob Roy MacGregor was an outlaw who became a folk hero, immortalised in the work, Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott, he became a figure of resistance to colonialism. He had the CV to back this up; he actually fought in the Jacobite Risings. He will be forever remembered as the outsider hero, standing up against foreign colonisation. He waged a private battle against the 1st Duke of Montrose; James Graham after MacGregor failed to pay back a loan and became a wanted man. Many MacGregors can be found in Ireland because they were outlawed because they were not pardoned for their participation in the Jacobite Risings.

Carl Von Clausewitz - Campaign Of 1812 In Russia: A Prussian Officer's Account From The Russian Imperial Headquarters

Carl von Clausewitz actually never saw any of his works published in his lifetime and were all published by his wife posthumously. His works are probably best described as historical accounts of warfare, famous battles consisting of Napoleonic Wars. The French Revolutionary Wars are one of the key moments in history when there was a rejection of the monarchy of the day and transformation into a republic. Hugely influential when you consider that France is the most successful nation in terms of battles won, who maintained a strategic dominance throughout Europe historically. The revolution set the standard for republics to overthrow their oppressive monarchies the world over, and Napoleon was hugely inspired by the Jacobite campaigns.