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Scotland's Populations is a coherent and comprehensive description and analysis of the most recent 170 years of Scottish population history. With its coverage of both national and local themes, set in the context of changes in Scottish economy and society, this study is an essential and definitive source for anyone teaching or writing on modern Scottish history, sociology, or geography. Michael Anderson explores subjects such as population growth and decline, rural settlement and depopulation, and migration and emigration. It sets current and recent population changes in their long-term context, exploring how the legacies of past demographic change have combined with a history of weak industrial investment, employment insecurity, deprivation, and poor living conditions to produce the population profiles and changes of Scotland today. While focussing on Scottish data, Anderson engages in a rigorous treatment of comparisons of Scotland with its neighbours in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe, which ensures that this is more than a one-country study.
List of contents
- Part 1. Questions and contexts
- 1: Scotland's population: not just a history of crises
- 2: The broad patterns of population change
- 3: Physical, social, and economic contexts
- Part 2. The multiple Scotlands
- 4: Multiple Scotlands: sub-regional patterns of population change
- 5: Multiple Scotlands: the nature and sources of sub-regional change
- 6: Islands
- 7: The major urban centres
- Part 3. Migration and the components and structures of population change
- 8: The components of population change
- 9: Patterns of migration
- 10: Changing age and sex structures and their consequences
- Part 4. Fertility and nuptiality
- 11: Marriage and nuptiality
- 12: Fertility: national and regional trends
- 13: The interactions between fertility and nuptiality
- 14: The first Scottish fertility decline
- 15: Explaining fertility changes since the 1930s
- Part 5. Mortality
- 16: Scottish national mortality and its wider context
- 17: Causes of death
- 18: Spatial variations in mortality and its causes
- 19: Social and economic differences in mortality
- Part 6. Conclusion
- 20: How and why was Scotland different and what may happen next?
About the author
Michael Anderson worked in the University of Edinburgh for forty years, initially in Sociology until he was appointed to the Chair of Economic History in 1979. He was the University's Senior Vice-Principal from 2000 to 2007. Over the forty years he taught a wide variety of Sociology, Economic and Social History, and Social Science Research Design courses. His research interests have included historical work on the family and demography, a large-scale census enumeration book database for 1851, and studies of the social economy of the household, both in the past and, through surveys and interviews, in the 1980s and 1990s. He holds Fellowships of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He served on the Council of ESRC and chaired the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland for twelve years.
Corinne Roughley is Fellow of Hughes Hall Cambridge and has wide-rangng interests in the spatial patterning of people and their activities from the Neolithic to the present.
Summary
A coherent, comprehensive description and analysis of the most recent 170 years of Scottish population history. With its coverage of both national and local themes, set in the context of changes in Scottish economy and society, this study is an essential and definitive source for anyone studying modern Scottish history, sociology, or geography.
Additional text
an important book ... Given the comprehensiveness and thoroughness of its analysis, it is certain that Anderson's book will become the standard work in its field ... It is impossible not to be impressed by the comprehensiveness of Anderson's work.
Report
Rooted in an ocean of statistics, this book could easily have been a daunting read. It is to the author's credit that he has provided the interpretative tools necessary to navigate that ocean meaningfully, comprehensively and with considerable added value to existing scholarship. Furthermore, by harnessing quantitative evidence to qualitative evaluation, he has unlocked some of the individual and community experiences that lie behind the bald figures. This meticulously researched and far-reaching study should therefore be required reading for all who seek to understand the socio-economic, as well as the demographic, history and culture of modern and contemporary Scotland. Marjory Harper, The English Historical Review
