Plans drawn up by the British Army to deal with rebellious Scots following the Jacobite Rising set the template for some of the most brutal acts of empire, according to a new book.

In what was the final pitched battle fought on British soil, the army of Charles Edward Stuart, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' was routed by the Brits and the repercussions were swift and savage.

Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland, instructed his men to give "no quarter" to wounded rebels left on the field of battle, who were put to death on discovery.

Prisoners were taken to England to stand trial for high treason, with the sick on prison ships tied to dead bodies and thrown into the Thames.

More than 100 common men were executed, as were the Earl of Kilmarnock and the Lord Balmerino.

The kilt and other Highland dress was banned on pain of six months' imprisonment for a first offence, while a second would lead to the recidivist being "transported to any of His Majesty's plantations beyond the seas, there to remain for the space of seven years".

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However, were it not for the then relatively recent Act of Union things could have been even worse, according to a leading historian.

Professor Murray Pittock has contributed a chapter to Harfleur to Hamburg: Five Centuries of English and British Violence in Europe, which deals with the period after Culloden and will expand on the subject in a forthcoming book Vile Spot: the British Army and Imperial Policy in Scotland after Culloden to be published by Oxford University Press.

He explains that many of the acts which would later be inflicted upon the colonies were planned for Scotland by the British army, but politicians baulked at terrorising the people with whom they shared a state.

Professor Pittock told The Herald: "The British army wanted an Irish policy, that meaning the one Cromwell had adopted: population transplantation, mass hangings, killing people out of hand.

"The British politicians were really against this because of the union, and the army didn’t seem to understand that these were citizens of the same state - so you couldn’t just presume everyone was guilty and kill them. You might be able to do that in a colony but you can’t do it in the same state.

“There was a big struggle between the army and the politicians over that and in the end the politicians got their way - officially at least - but what there was a perpetual struggle with the British Army in Scotland.

The Herald: The Battle of Culloden

“In 1746, 40% of the peacetime strength of the British Army was used to garrison Scotland.

“So we’re talking about a large force, and one that finds it very difficult to leave because problems keep on happening.

“What they find is that they don’t understand Scots law, and they have to try and circumvent the sheriffs by getting customs and excisemen to carry out their dirty work for them – sometimes even covert assassinations judging by the commanding generals’ order books in the 1750s.

“There’s a huge military vs political struggle about what’s possible in Scotland, then in Canada in the 1750s the military get their own way and they get to transplant the French population in Acadia, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

"The Duke of Cumberland says that he’s glad 'we were able to do at last to the French what we should have done in Lochaber'.

"Of course those population transplantations at the hands of the armed forces and local colonial administrations go on right up to the Mau Mau wars in Kenya in the 1950s.”

While political sensibilities may have prevented such horrors in Scotland, that doesn't mean they didn't rule with a heavy hand.

Professor Pittock explains: "The British Army were found throughout Scotland in the 1740s and 50s it was not just the Highlands – in fact it was very heavily in the boroughs.

“There are huge examples of overreaction, for example they send five companies of fusiliers to try and suppress a ball in Leith where people were supposed to be wearing white roses and Jacobite colours.

“They are very, very jumpy throughout this period and very active.

"There’s a war going on until 1748 so it’s actually very difficult for them, they can’t deploy troops to continental Europe because they’ve got to hold down areas in Scotland.

“At first they try and use English troops only and then they find they can’t collect rents without using Scottish troops and things like that.

“This goes on for a very long period, it only starts to be relieved when the decision is finally made to have large scale Scottish recruitment for the Canadian front in the Seven Years War.

“There’s an awful lot of material out there about this but nobody has really written about it, certainly in the Scottish perspective, in any depth – it’s almost a kind of, ‘we better not go there’.

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“The book as a whole goes there, it looks at a lot of things like the unprovoked attack on Copenhagen in 1807 to the civilian bombing policy in World War II and right back to Henry V in medieval England.

“There’s a lot there, and it’s not self-flagellation. but it is saying that England, and then Britain, isn’t better than other countries.

"Actually quite a lot of official policy has been geared to very extensive forms of unacknowledged violence against civilians going back hundreds of years.

“I’m not saying that this isn’t found elsewhere, of course it is, goodness me just look at Ukraine right now. But it’s important when looking at conflict not to pretend that you were always a goodie.”

While there was and remains a movement for Scottish independence, the movement has been peaceful and political.

In stark contrast is Ireland, first in the struggle to establish the Republic of Ireland and later in Ulster before the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

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Professor Pittock says: "The difference, in a way, is that Ireland was treated so badly in the 17th and 18th centuries.

“After the union in 1801 it would have been very difficult to treat Ireland any worse than Scotland but in the 1650s and the 1790s you could treat people who rebelled a lot worse.

“They were in a colony or subordinate kingdom, not the same state, so if you wanted to be totally paradoxical you could say that actually the union was the saving grace of post-1746 Scotland because otherwise it would have been much worse.

“Because so much Irish experience was formulated at a time when Ireland was treated so very badly, the recourse to violence was much closer to the surface.

"To take us into 20th Century Irish history, one key factor was that the unionists armed and were not prevented by the British government from doing so.

“So when the unionists armed with Larne gun-running in 1913, then guess what? The nationalists armed and you got what you got.

“Fundamentally the British government was not prepared to stop the unionists arming and not prepared to tell its own officers to uphold the law, so naturally Irish nationalists took to more extreme measures.

“Scotland is completely different. Although it’s hard for anyone to imagine it strictly speaking the union did benefit Scotland after 1746 because people weren’t treated so badly – but they were treated very badly and the British Army really tried to ignore the union as much as it could. The politicians had more sense.

"It was always going to be different from Ireland, there are many different situations: in particular political and religious differences between the two.

“But unquestionably one of the reasons this has been left alone until now is that it’s probably been seen as something which would stoke resentment.

“There’s been a desire to see the Jacobites as a minority who didn’t really count for much and once they were defeated it all went away.

“Well, it didn’t all go away, but one of the reasons for ignoring it up to now is that it suggests there’s really more tension and more violence in the United Kingdoms - as they were then called - than we’d like to think now.

“Had it been as extreme as the army wanted it’s difficult to know what the long-term consequences would have been, because the resentments would have been huge."