Nicola Martin

I am a transatlantic military historian, specialising in eighteenth-century British imperialism and Jacobitism. My first monograph, The British Army in Scotland and North America 1745-1775: militarisation on the fringes of the empire (2025) investigated how the direct and indirect experiences of the army in Scotland were transferred and adapted to the challenges it faced in North America, causing a paradigm shift in how commanders viewed imperial populations and implemented empire.

My research is focused on British imperialism in throughout the long eighteenth century. I combine top-down approaches that examine the role of the British army in implementing empire with bottom-up approaches that foreground the ways that Indigenous peoples, Scottish Highlanders, French Canadians, and colonial settlers were impacted by, and impacted on, empire. My first book investigated the overarching cultural frameworks, individual circumstances, and local conditions guiding the actions and understandings of British army officers as they waged war, pacified hostile peoples, and attempted to assimilate ‘other’ population groups within the British Empire. It demonstrated the impact of the Jacobite Rising of 1745-46 on British imperialism in North America and centred the material role of British army officers in the imperial crisis that led to the American Revolution.

My current research develops this focus on the British army and eighteenth-century imperialism in numerous ways: examining how the laws of war were used to both moderate conventional warfare and justify state sponsored violence, investigating the role of Whig loyalists in shaping British policy during the Jacobite era, and interrogating specific military-civil interactions throughout the empire.