For almost a century, Scotland and the Liberal Party (and its Whig antecedents) were as one. Between the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the general election of 1922, only once did Scottish Liberals fail to emerge as Scotland's single largest party. More often than not it had both a majority of seats and votes. Party and nation became synonymous, with Scottish Liberal policy and thought influencing national identity and permeating public discourse.

The same would also become true of, successively, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party over the century that followed the strange death of Liberal Scotland. But none of those parties came close to matching either the extent or consistency of the Liberals’ electoral hegemony. And even after the Scottish Liberal Democrats – as the party became following a merger with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – had been reduced to Scotland's third (or even fourth) party, between 1989 and 2015 it continued to exert a disproportionate influence over the politics of Scotland, particularly in the constitutional sphere.

All of this might come as a surprise to those familiar with a sizeable literature on Scottish politics and history. Library bookshelves bulge with tomes on the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Labour, but not the Liberals or Unionists despite their shared dominance of Scottish politics until the mid-20th century. Writing in 1998, the political scientist Peter Lynch (an exception to this rule) noted that the Scottish Liberals had ‘seldom come to the attention of academic observers’, with the ‘notoriously thin’ literature on political parties in Scotland ‘thinnest in relation to the Liberals and Liberal Democrats’.

The historian I. G. C. Hutchison also noted a similar ‘deficiency’ in the literature, which tended to overemphasise the Home Rule question and ‘Red’ Clydeside. Hutchison, however, has chronicled the Scottish Liberals of 1832–1924 in judicious detail. More recently, Ewan Cameron has picked up that baton, while in the field of political science the late James Kellas paid more attention to the party than most. Even dedicated histories of the Liberals neglect the Scottish party. Chris Cook mentions Scotland only in the context of the Scottish Parliament, while David Dutton merely in general geographical and electoral terms.