ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book. This book concentrates on a military analysis of the state's responses to the three Jacobite campaigns in the eighteenth century which took place on British soil, rather than as a narrative. It refers to the state's professional forces as regulars, which was the term most commonly used by contemporaries who were not Jacobites. Although the Jacobites ultimately failed, people should remember that this was not preordained, as Black notes, 'Military history is the most obvious field in which it is dangerous to adopt the perspective of hindsight. War is not always won by the big battalions'. Some scholars have argued that the Jacobites could have been victorious in 1745, especially if there had been a successful French landing and a Jacobite advance on London from Derby. Historians have termed this new creation the 'fiscal-military state' and successful foreign policy for much of the eighteenth century was its result.
