Demographic history of Scotland

The demographic history of Scotland includes all aspects of population history in what is now Scotland. The earliest surviving archaeological evidence of human settlement is of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer encampments. These suggest a highly mobile boat-using people, probably with a very low density of population. Neolithic farming brought permanent settlements dating from 3500 BC, and greater concentrations of population. Evidence of hillforts and other buildings suggest a growing settled population. Changes in the scale of woodland indicates that the Roman invasions from the first century AD had a negative impact on the native population.

There are almost no written sources from which to reconstruct the demography of early medieval Scotland. This was probably a high fertility, high mortality society, similar to developing countries in the modern world. The population may have grown from half a million to a million by the mid-fourteenth century when the Black Death reached the country. It may then have fallen to as low as half a million by the end of the fifteenth century. Roughly half lived north of the River Tay and perhaps 10 per cent in the burghs that grew up in the later medieval period. Inflation in prices, indicating greater demand, suggests that the population continued to grow until the late sixteenth century, when it probably levelled off. It began to grow again in the relative stability of the late seventeenth century. The earliest reliable evidence suggests a population of 1.2 million in 1681. This was probably reduced by the "seven ill years" of the 1690s, which caused severe famine and depopulation, particularly in the north. The first national census was conducted in 1755, and showed the population of Scotland as 1,265,380. By then four towns had populations of over 10,000, with the capital, Edinburgh, the largest with 57,000 inhabitants.

Overall the population of Scotland grew rapidly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whilst the Lowland Clearances caused depopulation in the affected areas, only local net population reductions occurred in the Highlands during the Highland Clearances.^[a] By 1801, Scotland's population had reached 1,608,420 and it grew to 2,889,000 in 1851 and 4,472,000 in 1901. By the beginning of the twentieth century, one in three lived in the four cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. Glasgow emerged as the largest city, with a population of 762,000 by 1901, making it "the Second City of the Empire". Despite industrial expansion there were insufficient jobs and between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression about two million Scots emigrated to North America and Australia, and another 750,000 to England. The Scots were only 10 per cent of the British population but they provided 15 per cent of the national armed forces, and eventually accounted for 20 per cent of the dead in World War I (1914–18). With the end of mass migration, the population reached a peak of 5,240,800 in 1974. Thereafter it began to fall slowly, moving down to 5,062,940 in 2000. There was also a decrease in some urban populations as a result of policies of slum clearance, overspill and relocation to new towns, with the population of Glasgow falling from over a million in 1951 to 629,000 in 2001. Rural areas also saw a loss of population, particularly in the Highlands and Hebrides.

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