IN 2010 the Scottish government announced a ‘Diaspora Engagement Plan’ outlining an ambitious strategy for connecting with Scots emigrants overseas. A few years earlier, the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies, generously funded by external endowment, had been established in the University of Edinburgh with a prime focus of study on the emigrations of the peoples of Scotland since medieval times.1 Yet the use of the term ‘diaspora’ is not uncontentious. Purists in the social-science community lament the dilution of its original meaning, traditionally employed to describe the forced uprooting and resettlement of peoples outside their homelands.2 The Jews were the classic case of that particular trauma, but the Penguin Atlas of Diaspora (1991) also includes Armenians, Gypsies, black Africans, Chinese, Palestinians, and Irish as other exemplars of diasporic peoples who have suffered the coercive experience.3 The Scots, Welsh, and English, together with most other European nations, are notable by their absence from the list of the dispossessed.
Even if the term ‘diaspora’ can be used in the Scottish case, there are analytical dangers that need to be recognized. The original emphasis on ‘uprooting’ suggests the experience of the emigrant as victim, driven into enforced exile by state oppression or landlords’ decision, a concept that might be very appropriate for certain periods in Scottish history, but on the whole is a distorting myth which does little justice to the complexity of the narrative of emigration over the centuries. In the modern era, in particular, it might serve simply to legitimize the widespread popular belief that most Scots left Scotland after 1700 because of the notorious Highland clearances. This is a perspective that some academic historians would reject root and branch, while others recognize that forced displacement of people in some parts of the country, including above all the Highlands, merits serious attention as an important part of the overall story.
Nevertheless, the use of ‘diaspora’ to describe dispersal of peoples outside their homeland is now well established in a number of contexts. The sociologist Robin Cohen has argued that returning to the Greek root of the word, to ‘scatter’ or ‘sow’, and also its early meaning to describe widespread Greek colonization of the Mediterranean, allows ‘diaspora’ to be used more extensively and meaningfully in emigration history. He goes further and outlines what he sees as the most common features of diasporic peoples: movement from the homeland either because of ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors to several foreign destinations; a collective memory and myth about the old country; a sense of empathy with members of the same ethnic group in the new lands and also the incidence of return movements.4 As this chapter and others will demonstrate (see Chapters 14, 16, 22, 27, 28), most of Cohen’s categories do fit the Scottish experience of emigration remarkably well. This analysis will therefore consider that experience in three parts. Part one presents a general overview. Part two focuses on the great migrations between c.1830 and c.1939, with special emphasis on the reasons for movement. Finally, part three surveys the more recent outward movement between 1945 and the present day.
The Scottish diaspora of the last seven hundred years or more has had several distinctive features. While it has been suggested that by the later twentieth century an estimated 15 million people of Scottish descent lived outside Scotland, the longevity of Scottish emigration, stretching back to the thirteenth century, might indicate that the estimate could still err on the conservative side.5 Considerable outward movement from Scotland, often on a substantial scale, has occurred from the 1400s through to the 1990s. Peaks and troughs of emigration did, of course, characterize that history. Much of the seventeenth century, the decades c.1840 to 1914, the 1920s, and again in the post-war years c.1950 to the 1980s, were phases of quite massive loss of population.6 Again, in the second half of the twentieth century when UK emigration in general was in decline, the Scottish rate of outward movement persisted. Between 1500 and 1990, only in the first half of the sixteenth century, the early decades of the eighteenth century, and the years of global warfare during 1776–83, 1793–1815, 1914–18, and 1939–45 did Scottish emigration fall to more modest levels.7
Another characteristic Scottish feature was the scale and volume of emigration. The best current estimates for 1600–50 suggest an annual average loss of two thousand people. Since most of those who left were young men aged fifteen to thirty, overwhelmingly engaged in military service and petty trading in Europe, it is reckoned that perhaps a fifth of that age group left Scotland at the time. This figure is very close to the more familiar rates of male Scottish emigration for the middle decades of the nineteenth century.8 These early modern levels were matched by few other European countries and regions. The contrast, for instance, with the English pattern was striking. Over the entire seventeenth century a net annual migration of just over seven thousand individuals has been suggested for England. The estimated Scottish figures were between a quarter and a third of this annual rate, though England’s population was around six times that of Scotland between 1600 and 1700.9 It should be stressed, however, as Steve Murdoch and Esther Mijers make clear in Chapter 16, that there is now much more scholarly scepticism about some of the numerical estimates of early modern Scottish migration to Europe that have long been accepted. Eye-catching figures culled from literary sources could have been cited without due caution. First-generation migrants could easily be conflated with second- and third-generation offspring of earlier arrivals because of their Scottish-sounding surnames, so resulting in an artificial inflation of the total numbers of ‘true’ emigrants from Scotland in the period. Moreover, many migrant Scots moved to more than one locality, region, or state during their lifetimes. Both soldiers and merchants habitually travelled to those parts of Europe where the opportunities were greatest, thus making multiple shifts of residence and place of business inevitable and also perhaps encouraging double and treble counting of exiled Scots by the unwary scholar, again leading to inflated estimates. For Poland-Lithuania in particular, recent careful archival research has drastically cut back some of the numbers of Scots that were generally accepted in the past (see Chapter 16).
The evidence for diaspora becomes more robust in the later eighteenth century and thereafter. Once again the contrasting levels of out-migration from Scotland and the rest of mainland Britain were marked. Between 1701 and 1780 about 80,000 English left for America, a total that was more or less the same as the estimated loss from Scotland over those seven decades, though England’s population at the time was nearly eight times greater.10 In terms of absolute numbers, however, even higher levels were reached in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From 1825 to 1938, over 2.3 million Scots left for overseas destinations. When the estimated 600,000 who moved across the border to England between 1841 and 1911 are included in the total, it is little wonder that Scotland has come to be regarded as the European capital of emigration in that period.11 The numbers are striking and the change in scale from the 1700s very marked—80,000 to 90,000 departures for overseas have been estimated between 1700 and 1815.
The exodus in the century after c.1840 was even greater in absolute terms. At its peak, in the 1920s, over 363,000 Scots left for the USA and Canada in a single decade, although many returned as employment prospects across the Atlantic became less attractive during the Great Depression of the 1930s.12 These figures have to be set against a national Scottish population size of 4,472,103 at the census of 1901. Even before the huge losses of the interwar period, emigration was still immense. In the eight decades before the First World War, for every two babies born who survived past infancy, one was likely to leave Scotland in adulthood.13
Of sixteen western and central European countries considered, three—Ireland, Norway, and Scotland—consistently topped the league tables as the source of proportionately most emigrants. Ireland headed the table in most years. Norway and Scotland fluctuated in their relative positions. However, in three key decades, 1851–60, 1871–80, and 1901–10, Scotland was second only to Ireland in this unenviable championship.14 The upward trajectory was temporarily interrupted by the five years of world conflict from 1914 and then by the short-lived post-war boom until 1921. But, thereafter, the dynamic of mass emigration reasserted itself. Between 1920 and 1929, those leaving Scotland averaged 46,876 per year, a figure that specifically excluded cross-border migration to England. Scots numbered one in ten of the UK population in that decade but accounted for 28 per cent of all British and Irish emigrants to the USA, 26 per cent of those to Canada, and 20 per cent of migrants to Australasia.15 The nation now headed the international league table of European emigration to overseas destinations, a long way ahead of both Ireland and Norway. For the first time since the eighteenth century, Scottish population actually fell in the 1920s by over 40,000. The eminent Scottish writer Edwin Muir was the most eloquent of several commentators to voice deep disquiet: ‘… my main impression … is that Scotland is gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellect and innate character. If a country exports its most enterprising spirits and best minds year after year, for fifty or a hundred or two hundred years, some result will inevitably follow.’16
More emigrants came from mainland Britain as a whole per head of population between c.1850 and 1939 than from most other European countries. But Scottish emigration, at least from the 1860s, was significantly higher per head of population than that of England and Wales. From 1881 to 1931, England lost an average of fourteen inhabitants per thousand, Wales seventeen per thousand, but the Scottish figure was thirty-five per thousand.17 Over the longer period, from the 1850s, the pattern was similar. Annual emigration from England and Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century was one per thousand, but for Scotland the figure was 1.4, and nearly two per thousand in some decades. Overall, England and Wales lost 9 per cent of natural population increase (i.e. births over deaths). In Scotland the fall was around 25 per cent.18
European migration in the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century, especially from Scandinavia, the German states, Spain, and Italy, was marked by visible differences within these countries, with regions of high loss existing alongside others where levels of out-migration were demonstrably less significant.19 The evidence contained in the Poor Law Commission Report of 1844 suggests a different pattern in Scotland for the nineteenth century. Emigration was noted as being common throughout the country with over two-thirds of parishes reporting losses. As Michael Anderson has already noted in Chapter 2, later in the 1860s nine out of ten Scottish parishes experienced net out-migration.20 Studies of emigration to New Zealand for the Victorian period confirm that the last place of residence of emigrants from Scotland was relatively evenly spread and representative of the broad demographic structure of the country.21 Nevertheless, it is still true that the central Lowlands, and especially the towns and cities of the industrial areas, had disproportionate numbers of emigrants after c.1860, particularly so in the case of movement to the USA. But that concentration was primarily a result of changing population settlement within Scotland as urbanization and industrialization intensified and migration from rural counties to the towns and cities accelerated.22
Evidence from some regions of Belgium and France in the nineteenth century also suggests that higher per-capita incomes as a consequence of industrial growth could slow down emigration considerably.23 Similarly, north-western Italy was a major source of emigration before 1900, but as it experienced the spread of industrial development the axis shifted to the poorer central and southern regions of the country. The same process has been described in Catalonia in Spain during this period.24 Economic growth, so it is argued, provides alternatives to emigration and absorbs those who might have left if the onset of better times had not taken place. This model fits Scotland well in the early modern period when poverty, a fragile economy, and recurrent food shortages, sometimes resulting in famine crises in the 1620s and 1690s, were likely to impel large-scale outward movement. But it conflicts with the history of emigration from Scotland in more modern times. Certainly, in the later eighteenth century and possibly through to the 1850s, the Highlands, the poorest region of all, had more emigrants per head of population than other parts of the country.25 But, as the Scottish exodus reached unprecedented proportions, depopulation in the north and west inevitably meant a proportionate and absolute decline in the highland factor. So generally after c.1860, lowland emigration exceeded that from Gaeldom, normally by a factor of seventeen to one down to the First World War.26 Industrialization had radically reshaped Scotland to a greater extent than most European countries, so that by 1910 only one in ten Scots were engaged in agriculture or related employment. At the census of 1911, 60 per cent of the Scottish people lived in towns and cities (as measured by settlements of 5,000 or above). But this economic and social revolution had not stemmed the tide of emigration.27 (For a different perspective on the ‘paradox’ of Scottish emigration see Chapter 27.)
The great flood of Scots emigrants was paralleled by expansion and change in the regions of overseas settlement. In the popular imagination it is the diaspora to the British Empire and the United States that commands attention. Yet as one scholar has noted, ‘in the perspective of the last 700 years, that two-century-long movement to the anglophone Empire was a historical aberration. For at least four centuries before 1707, and increasingly again from the Second World War the main destinations for Scottish migrants have been European.’28 That was indeed the pattern until near the end of the seventeenth century. Fewer than 10,000 Scots had settled in America and the West Indies by then, compared with the many thousands who had left for the European continent.29 (See Chapter 14.)
But in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the emigration axis started to shift towards the Atlantic world. It was arguably one of the most decisive developments in modern Scottish history, but also one of the least understood. The end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 was a factor, since for a time it closed down much of the earlier demand for soldiers in western Europe. Rich pickings for merchants and petty traders in Poland-Lithuania also became less abundant as that country degenerated into a series of internal struggles and foreign wars.30 The new attractions emerging across the Irish Sea, in Ulster, with the distribution of Irish land to Protestant Scots and other settlers from mainland Britain, were also relevant. In this respect, the impact of the ‘Lean Years’ in the Scotland of the 1690s is striking. It was the worst Scottish subsistence crisis of modern times. Hunger and famine-related diseases caused an estimated fall in population of between 5 and 20 per cent between different areas of the country, a figure in the range of relative demographic decline suffered during the Great Irish Famine of the nineteenth century. Perhaps Scotland lost somewhere in the region of 160,000 people, about half of this number directly by hunger and disease, the rest by emigration. The most recent calculations suggest that about 40,000 to 50,000 emigrants left Scotland in these crisis years, though it is highly likely that some later returned to the homeland. Europe, England, and the Americas certainly accounted for some. But Scandinavia and Poland-Lithuania were no longer the favoured areas as they had been in former times. Ulster now attracted the overwhelming majority of Scots migrants. It was in the 1690s, even more so than in earlier decades, that the Scottish identity in whole areas of that province was established and confirmed.31 (See Chapters 22, 27, and 28.)
The story in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is more familiar (and is covered in detail in Chapters 22, 27, and 28). The Scottish diaspora spread far and wide over this period: the thirteen colonies that constituted the United States of America from 1783; British North America (later Canada); the Caribbean Islands, India, Australasia, and South Africa. These were the main areas of settlement until the second half of the twentieth century, though the West Indies and India were essentially ‘sojourning’ colonies where the prime objective in the eighteenth century and later for most migrants was to make some money and then return to Britain to live in comfortable status in later life. But by c. 1900 Scots were also to be found in significant pockets in the cattle estancias of Argentina and Uruguay, the trading towns of the River Plate estuary, as coffee and tea planters in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and as physicians, teachers, engineers, traders, and missionaries throughout Africa, China, Japan, and South Asia.32 The Scottish diaspora from the later eighteenth century now became global in range and impact.
The age of European migration across the globe in the nineteenth century was made possible by a series of related influences. As the populations of states increased and social tensions within them become more common, so governments became more interested in emigration as a potential safety-valve for emerging political problems. In Britain, the ideology of ‘systematic colonization’ became a fashionable set of ideas and theories in the views associated with Edward Gibbon Wakefield and others. Building on the theories of Thomas Malthus, it was argued by advocates such as Wakefield that emigration could be a blessing rather than a curse, creating markets abroad for British industry while, at the same time, easing demographic pressures at home. These views became widely influential. In 1837 the New Zealand Association was formed in London along the lines suggested by Wakefield to support emigration to the Antipodes. The new thinking also inspired government intervention in the emigrant trade, particularly to Australia, still thought too distant and unappealing to attract unsubsidized immigration. Between 1828 and 1842, 180,000 emigrants sailed for Australia.33 Most were assisted by a scheme of bounties through which colonial governments paid ships’ masters and merchants a fee to recruit potential settlers from Britain and Ireland.
However, these changes in elite attitudes to colonization were less significant than advances in communications: ‘the physical links improved and thickened into virtual bridges—hundreds of large ships, sailing or steaming regularly; whole systems of long-range canals; whole systems of trunk railroads’.34 The steamship is rightly regarded as a key development, but it is important that the earlier and parallel improvements to sailing-ship design are recognized too; bigger vessels, wooden hulls with iron all helped to prolong the age of sail, particularly for long-distance voyages until the 1880s.35 Related developments in commerce were also deeply significant. During and after the Napoleonic Wars, British North America became the nation’s main source of timber, accounting for 75 per cent of all such imports in 1819–23. This was a boon to the Atlantic emigrant traffic because empty timber ships took a human cargo on their return voyages.36 It was a similar story as far as the importation of wool from Australia and New Zealand was concerned: ‘On the long voyage out from the UK the clipper ships carried human beings; on arrival at ports in New Zealand and Australia, the steerage berths were cleared away and the ‘tween decks filled with wool bales for the voyage home.’37 Indeed, it was above all the profitability of the wool trade that made the long-distance emigration to New Zealand a lucrative enterprise over several decades.
Of course, the development of the ocean-going steamship was catalytic. Although the cost of steamship travel was actually about a third dearer than crossing by sailing ships, the new vessels soon radically increased speed, comfort, and safety. In the 1850s it took six weeks to cross the Atlantic from UK ports. By 1914 the average voyage time had fallen to around a week. By drastically cutting voyage times the steamship also removed one of the major costs of emigration: the time between embarkation and settlement during which there was no possibility of earning.38 This was especially crucial for the skilled and semi-skilled urban tradesmen who comprised an increasing proportion of Scottish emigrants in the later nineteenth century. They were now able to move on a temporary basis in order to exploit high wages or labour scarcities at particular times in North America. This factor also explains the increasing scale of return emigration. By 1900 it is estimated that around one-third of those Scots who left their homeland came back sooner or later.39 The evidence from New Zealand suggests that returns became more common over time. Returnees rose from 36 per cent of outward sailings between 1853 and 1880 to 82 per cent of the 1 million outward sailings between 1881 and 1920. The increases corresponded exactly with the impact of transport innovation on the New Zealand route.40
The most dramatic and decisive advance made possible by the steamship was paralleled by the railway and the canal, which ensured that emigrants could be quickly and easily transported from all areas through the national network to the port of embarkation. Agreements were commonly made between shipping and railway companies, allowing emigrants to be transported free to their port of departure. The expansion of the railroad in North America brought similar benefits. By the 1850s the completion of the Canadian canal network and the associated railway development facilitated access to the western USA by allowing emigrants to book their passage to Quebec and Hamilton and then by rail to Chicago. The links between steamships and railways led to the provision of the highly popular through-booking system by which emigrants could obtain a complete package, with a ticket purchased in Europe allowing travel to the final destination in America. Chambers’ Journal in 1857 described it as a ‘prodigious convenience’ that would ‘rob emigration of its terrors and must set hundreds of families wandering’.41
Scots emigrants had a particular advantage because the railway system existed alongside a number of major shipping lines operating from the Clyde, which by the 1850s had developed a worldwide network of services. The significant passenger companies were the Albion, Allan, Anchor, City, and Donaldson lines, sailing mainly on a number of routes across the Atlantic; the City Line to India; the Allan Line to South Africa, and, from the 1860s, the Albion Line to New Zealand. In addition, some of the major railway companies in Canada played a vigorous proactive role in the emigrant business. They recognized that the railway was not simply an easy and rapid mode of transport for new arrivals from Europe but was also the most effective way of opening up the wilderness and prairie territory to permanent settlement. The mighty Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR) became very active in the promotion of emigration as a result. In 1880 it had been allocated 25 million acres of land between Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains by the Dominion government. In order to generate profit, the company had to increase traffic through expanding areas of settlement, and to achieve this goal it embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign in Britain designed to stimulate emigration to the prairies. Scotland was specifically targeted, and agents of the CPR toured rural areas, giving lectures and providing information. The CPR even sought to reduce the hardships of pioneering by providing ready-made farms in southern Alberta, with housing, barns, and fences included as part of the sale.42
These initiatives by a large organization in attracting settlement to the prairie provinces were but one manifestation of a wider revolution in communicating the attractions of emigration to the peoples of Europe. The letters of emigrants to their families at home had always been the most influential medium for spreading information about overseas conditions. With the steamship, railway, and telegraph, this traditional form of communication became even more effective as postal services became still more frequent, increasingly reliable, and speedier. Emigrant letters, written as they were by trusted family members, retained a great significance as the more credible source of information on overseas employment, prices, and wages. Letters were sometimes supplemented by remittances sent home to relatives.43
Returning migrants were also a key source of information. It is wrong, for instance, to assume that those who came back did so because they necessarily experienced failure and disillusion in the New World, although some were indeed in this category. The Scottish press printed articles from time to time about emigrants who had returned with ‘blighted hopes and empty purses’. The steamship revolution was bound to mean that the number of emigrants returning could increase markedly when conditions in the receiving countries temporarily deteriorated. However, many returnees had originally left Scotland with no intention of settling permanently in America. This was especially the case with tradesmen and semi-skilled workers. In the north-east of Scotland, for instance, several hundred granite workers migrated annually to American yards each spring, before returning to Aberdeen for the winter. Coal miners from Lanarkshire also developed a tradition of temporary movement for work in the USA. Masons and other skilled building workers were in great demand on a seasonal basis. By the 1880s there seems to have been a willingness to go overseas at relatively short notice. In the latter part of that decade, for example, scores of Scottish building tradesmen who had responded to advertisements in the press descended on Austin, Texas, when work on the state capital was halted by a strike of American workers. Evidence from Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, and England suggests that the ‘failed’ returning migrants were usually in a minority. There seems no reason to suppose that the Scottish pattern was any different. ‘Successful’ returnees must indeed have been a potent source for spreading knowledge of overseas conditions in local communities and even a positive influence in encouraging further emigration.44
To these personal and family networks was added in the later nineteenth century a veritable explosion in the quality and quantity of information available to potential emigrants. The Emigrants’ Information Office opened in 1886 as a source of impartial advice and information on land grants, wages, living costs, and passage rates. Circulars, handbooks, and pamphlets were made available in greater volume and were valued because of their avowed objectivity. Even more important were local newspapers. Advertisements for ships’ sailings, information on assisted passages, numerous letters from emigrants, and articles on North American life were very regular features as the Scottish population was relentlessly bombarded with all the facts of the emigration experience. Overseas governments and land companies also became more aggressive, professional, and sophisticated in promoting emigration. In 1892, for instance, the Canadian government appointed two full-time agents in Scotland who undertook a tour of markets hiring fairs, agricultural shows, and village halls. The illustrated lecture, using the magic lantern, was a favourite device. W. G. Stuart, the agent for the north, was even able to deliver his presentation in Gaelic if the audience required it.
From the 1870s to the First World War, the Canadian government’s aim was to settle the Prairie West with immigrants who would establish an agricultural foundation for the Dominion. The key influence on the booster strategy was Clifford Sifton, the Minister of the Interior from 1896 to 1905. He pioneered the first emigration communications plan by flooding selected countries with appealing literature, advertisements in the press, tours for key journalists who then filed flattering copy on their return home, paying agents’ fees on a commission basis for every immigrant who settled in Canada, and giving bonuses to steamship agents for promoting the country in the United Kingdom. The rural districts of Scotland were especially targeted because of their historic links with Canada and the country’s reputation for experienced farmers and skilled agricultural workers.45
Yet even the revolution of communications and information would have been insufficient if it had not been for the gargantuan increase in demand from the industrializing countries of Europe for the raw materials and food produce of the new lands. It was the explosion in the export of timber, wool, meat, mutton, cotton, and other staples to feed the industries and rising populations of Europe that powered the new economies and so made them increasingly attractive places in which to settle and work. The transformation was fuelled by the massive export of capital from Britain after c.1850, a process in which Scotland had a leading part. Between 1865 and 1914, the UK invested over $5 billion in the USA alone, facilitating the construction of railways, the reclaiming of land, and the building of towns without which large-scale settlement from the Old World would have been impossible.46
In turn, the great immigrations were neither uniform nor persistent but were triggered intermittently by a series of booms that sucked in labour at different times, in different countries, and in diverse regions of each country. Some of these could last for several years, others were more short-lived. When they collapsed, return migration, especially in the later nineteenth century, tended to occur.47 In essence, the combination of better communications, superior flows of information, and the huge rise in staple exports from the primary producers had created a new international labour market in which workers were no longer constrained by national frontiers. This pattern goes a long way to explaining the changing attraction of different destinations, as the syncopation of boom and bust was often different in the various settler societies. The model helps us to understand why Scottish emigration shifted rapidly from the USA to Canada in the years before the First World War but back again to the USA in the 1920s.
This, then, was the new environment for mass international migration, which deeply influenced the Scottish exodus as well as that of other nations. What the context cannot explain, however, is why Scotland, by any standards a successful industrial economy in the vanguard of Victorian modernity, lost so many more of its people than the European or mainland British average before 1930. The puzzle is compounded by one additional feature. Unusually, like England, Scotland was also a country of substantial immigration as well as emigration. By 1901, around 205,000 Irish born had made their homes in Scotland. Indeed, Irish immigration was proportionately greater in Scotland than England. Only 2.9 per cent of the population of England and Wales were Irish in 1851. The Scottish figure was 7.2 per cent. To the Irish should be added about 40,000 Jews, Lithuanians, and Italians who mainly arrived between 1860 and 1914 in Scotland, together with an unknown number of English moving from south of the Border.48 (See Chapter 26.)
Traditionally, and perhaps still in popular opinion, the conundrum could be resolved by consideration of the plight of the Highlands in Scottish history. Until the middle decades of the nineteenth century the region did indeed contribute disproportionately to the total Scottish outflow. In more precise terms the western Highlands and Islands did so; most of those who left the parishes of the southern, central, and eastern fringes, at least in the first instance, made for the lowland towns.49 The factors explaining the highland exodus are far from simple. The far west was a poor, conservative peasant society where, through subdivision, the access to land, albeit in minute holdings, was still possible for the majority. The regional society most closely comparable within the British Isles was the west of Ireland, which was broadly similar in its poverty, social system, and tenacious attachment to peasant values. For these very reasons, however, emigration from that area was limited compared to Ulster and the eastern districts of Ireland.
In part, what made the western Highlands different from patterns in the Irish West was the incidence of soldier emigration from the region. It was probably the most recruited area of the British Isles in the period 1775 to 1783 and again between 1795 and 1815.50 This not only established a tradition of mobility and spread knowledge of overseas destinations, but the military settlements created after the Seven Years War and the American War also acted as the foci of attraction for successive waves of highland emigrations. Scottish Gaeldom was also different because it was much more subject to intense levels of commercialization than the communities of the west of Ireland. The rent inflation of the post-1760 period, the ‘modernization’ of the social system through the destruction of the old joint tenancies, the imposition of the croft system and the clearances for sheep, all represented the powerful impact of ‘improving’ ideology and lowland market forces on traditional society. Up to c.1820, the highland emigrations can be regarded as attempts to resist the forces that were transforming the old ways so painfully and rapidly. Internal protest was muted but the alternative of emigration was significant and preferred to migration to the south, perhaps because of the ‘independence’ that came from the possibility of holding land across the Atlantic.51
The mass outward movement of highlanders after 1820, and especially in the famine of the 1840s and 1850s, was deeply significant. That period between 1846 and 1856 saw particularly high levels of loss from the region, on one estimate accounting for about a third of the population of the western mainland and insular parishes from Ardnamurchan in the extreme west to Cape Wrath in the north. Several localities experienced even greater ouflows.52 Thereafter, however, the highland share of overall Scottish emigration became much less.
It might reasonably be suggested, however, that the Gaels who moved to the Lowlands in the first instance and then eventually emigrated were concealed within the numbers of those who left directly from urban areas. Yet the proportion of first-generation highlanders in lowland towns and cities in the 1851 census was rarely more than 10 per cent, and in Glasgow, for instance, significantly lower than that.53 Scots who gave a town or city as their last place of residence before departure, though born in rural districts, were much more likely to have originally moved from a lowland farm or village rather than a highland croft. The Highland clearances cannot then explain, either directly or indirectly, mass Scottish emigration after c.1860 even if they were important between the 1760s and the Famine. Therefore, if we are to reach any substantive conclusions on the origins of this national movement afterwards, the clues have to lie in the lowland countryside and the urban/industrial areas of the Central Belt.
To a significant extent the very nature of Scottish economic transformation in the period after c.1760 became the vital context for extensive emigration. Far from restraining outward movement by providing new employment and material improvement, as in some parts of Europe, the distinctive nature of Scottish industrialization may have actually stimulated a continuing exodus of people. Basic to the Industrial Revolution in Scotland was profound change in rural social and economic structures. In the Lowlands, farms were consolidated, subtenancies removed, and the terms of access to land became more rigid and regulated.54 (See Chapter 6.) Over time, fewer and fewer had legal rights to farms as consolidation accelerated and subdivision of holdings was outlawed. As numbers rose through natural increase, the mobility of people became inevitable. Peasant proprietorship in Scotland (commonplace throughout central and southern Europe) was unknown, and by 1840 most lowland rural Scots were non-inheriting children of farmers, farm servants, country tradesmen, textile weavers, and day labourers. The Scottish Poor Law before 1843 was also notoriously hostile to the provision of relief for the able-bodied unemployed, though, in practice, modest doles were often given. The majority of the population of the lowland countryside therefore relied mainly on selling their labour power in the market to survive. It was inevitable that the ebb and flow of demand for labour enforced movement upon them, not least because for farm servants accommodation and employment were limited. To be without a job was also to be without a place to stay. Even before 1800 such domestic mobility was already present, and some suggest this gave Scotland a higher incidence of internal migration than countries such as France or the German states.55
In the nineteenth century internal migration within Scotland certainly intensified. There were at least five reasons for this.56 First, population was rising while both agricultural and industrial opportunities in rural areas were stagnant or, especially after c.1840, contracting rapidly. In consequence, the proportion of the natural population employed in agriculture declined markedly from 24 per cent in 1841 to 10 per cent in 1911. Second, most permanent agricultural workers on Scottish farms were ‘servants’ hired on annual or half-yearly contracts, who received accommodation as part of their labour contract. The unemployed farm worker, who inevitably had lost his home as a result, had no choice but to move to seek for a job. Third, Scottish urbanization was notable for its speed and scale. The proportion of Scots living in settlements of over 5,000 rose from 31 per cent in 1831 to almost 60 per cent in 1911. The vast majority of the new urban populations were from the farms, villages, and small towns of the lowland countryside. Fourth, the first phase of industrialization down to c.1830 had extended manufacturing employment, especially in textiles, in rural areas. During the coal, iron, and steel phase, production concentrated more intensively in the central Lowlands, the Border woollen towns, Dundee, Fife, and Midlothian. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Scottish industrial capitalism was its extraordinary concentration. This process ensured a rapid shedding of population from areas of crumbling employment to the regions of rapid growth in the Forth-Clyde valley. Fifth, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, clear evidence emerged of a growing rejection by the younger generation of the drudgery, social constraints, and isolation of country life. The towns had always had an attraction but now they seduced the youth of rural society as never before.
The interaction of all these influences produced an unprecedented level of mobility. The 1851 census shows that no less than a third of the Scottish population had crossed at least one county boundary. Demographic research has demonstrated also that in the 1860s the vast majority of parishes in all areas were experiencing net outward movement of population. Heavy losses in the Lowlands were especially pronounced in the south-west region and in many parts of the east from Berwick to Moray. The only areas attracting people were in the central zone and the textile towns of the Borders. As Michael Anderson and Donald Morse suggest: ‘The conclusion must be that almost the whole of rural Scotland (and many of the more industrial and commercial areas also) were throughout our period, unable to provide enough opportunities at home to absorb even quite modest rates of population increase.’57
This demographic pattern is crucial to an understanding of the roots of Scottish emigration. Scots were mobile abroad in part because they were increasingly very mobile at home.58 Emigration, then, could be seen as an extension of migration within Scotland, because it was much less challenging after 1860 with the revolution in transatlantic travel associated with the steamship and railways. Such a suggestion is entirely consistent with the point made earlier that most emigrants in the later nineteenth century were urban in origin, because almost certainly concealed within this category were many who had been born into an agricultural or industrial artisan background in the countryside and had moved to the towns before leaving Scotland altogether.
Equally, some evidence suggests that from the later nineteenth century the volume of emigration varied inversely with internal migration. People in country farms and villages searching for opportunities elsewhere seem to have been able to weigh the attractions of the Scottish towns against those of overseas destinations and come to a decision on the basis of these comparisons. In the decades 1881–90 and 1901–10, for instance, there was heavy emigration, with 43 and 47 per cent respectively of the natural increase leaving the country. In the same twenty-year period, movement to Glasgow and the surrounding suburbs fell to low levels, while there was actual net movement out of the western Lowlands. On the other hand, during the 1870s and 1890s emigration declined but larger numbers moved to the cities and towns of the west.59 This pattern suggests an informed and mobile population that had access to sources of information such as newspapers, letters from relatives, and intelligence from returned migrants, which enabled judgements about emigration to be weighed and considered.
In essence, lowland rural emigration was not induced so much by the reality or the threat of destitution or deprivation as by the lure of opportunity. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canada and Australasia were the great magnets for those who wished to work the land, while rural tradesmen and industrial workers tended to opt more for the USA. From emigrant letters and newspaper articles one can piece together the attractions of emigration for both small tenants and farm servants. A primary incentive was the possibility of owning a holding that was relatively cheap to acquire and increasingly made available for purchase in developed form by land companies and Dominion and provincial governments. In Canada and Australia, land was plentiful whereas in Scotland even wealthy farmers were dependent on their landlords, with tenure regulated by a detailed lease enforceable at law and other sanctions. The Scottish tenants’ agitation of the 1870s showed the tensions that these relationships could sometimes generate. In the colonies, on the other hand, owner-occupation, the much desired ‘independence’, and the right to bequeath the hard-worked land to the family were all on offer and at reasonable rates. The strains imposed by the Agricultural Depression in the 1870s and early 1880s added to discontent in some areas and further increased the attractions of emigration. The Board of Agriculture in 1906 reviewed the reasons for the decline in the rural population and concluded with respect to Scotland that:
Many correspondents refer to the absence of an incentive to remain on the land and of any reasonable prospect of advancement in life, and it is mentioned in some districts, particularly in Scotland, many of the best men have been attracted to the colonies, where their energies may find wider scope and where the road to independence and a competency is broader and more easy to access.60
This can be seen most vividly in the pages of the weekly People’s Journal, Scotland’s most popular periodical of the time, selling at a penny per issue. By 1890 its total circulation over a six-month period was reckoned to have reached 51/2 million at home and abroad with an average of 212,000 copies printed each week. The Journal proudly boasted that it ‘enters more Scottish Households than any other Newspaper’ and was ‘sold by 10,000 newsagents’. Importantly, it was ‘specially designed to promote the interests of the working classes’ and crucially, virtually every issue had articles on emigration worldwide, providing comment, advice on changing employment conditions, and the opportunities available overseas for people from both town and country.
Ironically, the dynamic heart of the Scottish economy, the regions of advanced industrialism, were the main sources of emigrants after c.1860. But, when the nature of urban and industrial society is probed more deeply, key fault lines are revealed that make the exodus more comprehensible. For a start, huge social inequalities were entrenched in those manufacturing districts of the nation where armies of semi-skilled, unskilled, and casual labourers serviced the mighty industries of mining, shipbuilding, engineering, and textiles. Notoriously, west-central Scotland and the Dundee area in particular proportionately had relatively few professional, commercial, and managerial classes.61 Some of the lower middle class might have had the chance to move up the social scale with energy, talent, and connections. But it was much more difficult and often impossible for those below to ‘get on’ and achieve advancement. The barriers, even to minimal social mobility, for the vast majority of the population of Victorian Scotland, seem to have been granitic and enduring.
One telling indicator was the background of students in the Scottish universities. They did attract from a much broader social range than Oxford and Cambridge but, even so, the hard evidence does not entirely support the myth of the ‘democratic intellect’. The Argyll Commission’s analysis concluded that a third of students in the nation’s universities came from professional families and over a half from the middle classes as a whole. The sons of skilled artisans with traditional skills—carpenters, shoemakers, and masons—were also represented. But the offspring of miners, farm servants, and factory workers were notable by their virtual absence. The leading historian of the Victorian universities has concluded that the son of a church minister was one hundred times more likely to go to a Scottish university than a miner’s son, and that ‘most working class students were drawn from the very top stratum of their class, while neither the rural poor or the factory workers, or the unskilled workers in the towns had more than a token representation’.62 The celebrated ‘lads o’ pairts’ (boys of talent) did exist but they were few and far between. Against this background, the aspirational attractions of the overseas territories, even if much exaggerated in the booster literature, must have struck a chord with many.
Another factor of considerable relevance was the reward to labour. Relative to England and Wales, industrial Scotland was a low-wage economy. Despite variation between sectors, Scottish wages were often up to 20 per cent below the equivalent in English trades before c.1860, though the evidence suggests a degree of convergence thereafter.63 Yet when costs of living are taken into account, on the eve of the First World War in 1914, most earnings in Scottish manufacturing still lagged 10 to 12 per cent behind those in English industrial areas.64 Of course, there is no inevitable correlation between low wages and emigration. What is critical is the relative differential between opportunities at home and overseas. In the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that differential between western Europe and the New World became greater. Wages and opportunities were increasing at home, but they were doing so with even greater speed overseas because the American economies were very rich in resources but grossly underpopulated. Those with industrial skills and experience were especially in demand.65 The scenario for mass emigration from societies such as Scotland was clearly emerging as the previous constraints on movement crumbled. Ignorance of conditions across the Atlantic and in Australasia diminished further as more and more information was disseminated through the press, government sources, emigration societies, and advice from previous emigrants. This was widely absorbed into Scottish society where literacy levels by the standards of most countries in Europe were high. Emigration therefore became available to many more as income levels rose in the later nineteenth century. The sheer cost had been a significant obstacle to many in previous times. Detailed analysis of migration in Scottish rural society after 1870 has suggested a marked increase in social expectations, a change partly related to higher wages but also to further expansion in educational opportunities after the legislation of 1872 compelling higher levels of school attendance.66 It may have been the case that there were similar attitudinal changes among many urban and industrial workers, which made more attractive the lure of greater opportunities overseas. This was where the transport revolution became of key importance, since now the essential infrastructure had emerged to define and shape a truly transatlantic labour market.
Thus, the habitual and historic internal mobility of the Scots could now be translated fully into global movement. In the same way as they had long compared wages and employment within Scotland, it was now easier than ever before to evaluate opportunities in New York, Toronto, Chicago, Johannesburg, and Melbourne in relation to those in Glasgow, Dundee, and Edinburgh. The income differentials were often so great and the skills shortage in the New World so acute that many thousands could not resist the temptation, especially since, in the event of failure, the return journey home was but the price of a steamship ticket. The chances were also there, of course, for the skilled of that other advanced economy, England. But it is hardly surprising that the Scots found emigration more irresistible. Scotland was still a poorer society than England and the difference between opportunities at home and abroad was greater for its people. Quite simply, they had more to gain by emigration.67
But it was not simply because the rewards of industry at home could not compete with those abroad or in England. Scottish emigration also attained such high levels because of the peculiar economic structure of the society. It had a higher proportion of its inhabitants employed in industrial work by 1871 than any other country in western Europe apart from England. But unlike England, the majority of the employed male population in Scotland were heavily concentrated in the capital-goods sector of shipbuilding, coal, metals, and engineering. To an unusual extent, many of these activities were heavily dependent on the export market. The Scottish economy lacked the cushion of a growing service sector and a range of industries catering for the domestic consumer that were emerging south of the border.68 After 1830 the British economy as a whole became subject to more extreme fluctuations in the trade cycle, whereas in Scotland the amplitude and duration of cyclical change was more violent because of the tight interrelationships within the heavy industrial structure, the bias towards foreign markets, which were inherently fickle, and the relative weakness of domestic demand.
This economic insecurity was basic to emigration. Violent fluctuations in employment were integral to Scottish industrial ‘prosperity’ even in the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian expansion. Their scale and frequency can be seen in the building industry, which employed about 7 per cent of the occupied male labour force in the 1880s. Between 1881 and 1891 the numbers employed fell by 5.1 per cent, rose by 43.3 per cent from 1891 to 1901, and contracted again by a massive 21.4 per cent over the years 1901–11.69 Not surprisingly, emigration was at its height at the bottom of these cycles. Because fluctuations were probably more savage and longer lasting in Scotland, it is reasonable to assume that the volume of outward movement would be greater than south of the border. The dramatic peaks in Scottish emigration, during the later 1840s and early 1850s, the mid-1880s, from 1906 to 1913, and in the 1920s, all took place in periods of serious industrial depression at home.
In the final analysis then, it would seem that most Scots left their native land in search of opportunity, ‘independence’, and an ambition to ‘get on’, aspirations which, for the reasons described above, could not easily be satisfied in the homeland itself. It is significant that the very poor and destitute of the towns and cities were not usually accounted among the emigrants in any great numbers. Most of those who left may have had few resources but normally had at least some modest means. Pressure to go was not irrelevant—as witnessed by the correlation of economic downturn at home and increased emigration abroad. But what comes through strongly from the evidence is the central importance of individual human choice and decision, even if these attributes were themselves powerfully influenced by the prevailing structural forces of society, ideology, and economy.
A few years after the end of the Second World War, a Scottish National Party pamphlet was published with the title Beware of Emigration. It argued that ‘nothing has sapped the life of Scotland more in the last 150 years than mass emigration’, and lamented that it was always the lifeblood of the nation, ‘the young and enterprising, the skilled craftsmen and … the back-bone of industry’ who were the first to leave.70 Few took note of the warning. Scottish emigration, inevitably constrained by six years of global conflict, quickly returned to pre-war levels soon after 1945 and for some decades thereafter. Between 1951 and 1981, 753,000 Scots left the country, around 45 per cent of them for England and the rest for new lives overseas. As Table 7.1 demonstrates, there was fluctuation over time in outward movement, but emigration at high levels was sustained throughout the period, though with some signs of deceleration by the later 1980s.
Table 7.1 Net Migration from Scotland, 1931–89 (thousands)
From 1951 to 2006 net migration loss, defined as the difference between the number of people moving to from those leaving a country, was about 825,000, described by one authority as ‘a staggering amount’ from a nation of little more than five million.71 Most of this haemorrhage occurred before the 1990s, as in that decade there began a phase of relative balance with the number of immigrants coming to Scotland starting to equal the number of emigrants leaving the country. Once again, as in the past, the Scottish experience contrasted with that of England and Wales. Scots continued to supply a disproportionate number both of Britain’s internal migrants and also its emigrants.72 As a result, Scotland’s share of the population of the United Kingdom fell from 11 per cent in 1914 to just over 9 per cent by 1981. Between 1921 and 1961 the population of England grew by nearly one-third; Scotland by only 5 per cent. Emigration on a substantial scale was sustained much longer north of the border. Historians of English emigration describe a postwar surge in the 1950s and 1960s, which started to wane by the 1970s. Not so in Scotland.73
As late as 2003 to 2006, over 217,000 Scots left for other parts of the United Kingdom or overseas. Those who went abroad numbered 82,200 over that four-year period. However, it should be borne in mind that the cumulative figure of annual outflows inflates ‘real’ emigration because it includes a substantial proportion of Scottish students, many of whom later returned home after completion of study, together with English-domiciled and overseas students going back after training in Scotland and hence not ‘Scots’ by any normal definition.74
Again, until near the end of the twentieth century, Scotland failed to attract enough immigrants to compensate for these large losses. The Irish once again moved in large numbers to England after 1950 but not to Scotland. Similarly, Asian migration to Britain tended to peter out as it approached the north of England. In 1966 a mere 2 of every 1,000 Scots were natives of the New Commonwealth. The figures for England and Wales were over twelve times greater. The difference in order of magnitude was such that it suggests Scotland was not regarded as a land of opportunity from the immigrant perspective, as it had been in the nineteenth century.75
Eventually, however, it was the increase in immigration to Scotland that began to make for a more favourable migration balance. By 2004 total in- and out-migration was about 70,000 per year, in each direction, resulting in a net loss of just 2,000 people, a radical reduction compared to most years in the twentieth century and earlier. By 2004 this small loss had even turned into a favourable balance of over 27,000, then 19,800 in 2005, and 21,600 in 2006.76 Two factors were influential. First, there was a significant growth in English immigration to Scotland, with 220,000 first-generation English in 1951 compared to 408,984 in 2001, an overall rate of increase of 84 per cent. The English-born are now by far Scotland’s largest immigrant group.77 Second, Scotland shared in the sharp rise in immigration to the United Kingdom from the countries that joined the European Union in May 2004. Poland was the prime though by no means the only source. The Polish Consulate in Edinburgh considered that the number of Polish immigrants to Scotland rose rapidly to around 50,000 by the end of 2006. Current (2010) estimates of the incomers vary between 75,000 and 85,000.78
It could perhaps be predicted that the acute austerity and rationing of necessities in the years after 1945 would have resulted in a new surge of emigration, especially for a generation that still had vivid memories of the profound poverty and insecurities of the 1930s.79 More difficult to explain, and awaiting detailed research, was not only the continuation of outward movement for several decades after the 1950s but also its considerable increase in scale. After all, economic recovery and material improvement had proceeded apace in the 1950s. It was in 1957 that Harold Macmillan made his oft-quoted remark: ‘Let’s be frank about it, most of our people have never had it so good.’ His comment had particular relevance to Scotland, which had endured a good deal of pain for much of the interwar period. Now unemployment, the curse of the 1930s, fell to historically low levels. Between 1947 and 1957, Scottish unemployment was remarkably stable and only varied between 2.4 per cent and 3 per cent of an insured labour force, even though that had actually increased significantly by over 690,000 between 1945 and 1960. There were now jobs for virtually everyone who wanted to work. Full employment also brought rising incomes. The average working-class household in 1953 was reckoned to be 2.5 to 3 times better-off than in 1938. For a time, even the gap in average wage levels between England and Scotland narrowed. The nation’s health improved, not simply because of the new prosperity but also as a result of legislative changes and scientific advances. The National Health Service from 1948 extended free treatment to all, while by the Education (Scotland) Acts of 1945 and 1947 local authorities could insist on the medical inspection of pupils and the provision of free treatment. Antibiotics were introduced for the first time on a large scale in the mid-1940s and soon wiped out tuberculosis, the killer disease of countless young adults in the past. By 1960, Scotland’s infant mortality rate was the same as that of the USA and close to the figures for England and Wales. Rising living standards in the 1950s were confirmed by the steady increase in the range of new appliances, such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and electric cookers, which made homes easier to run. Leisure patterns were transformed by the television and, for a long time after its introduction, cinema audience figures tumbled. The number of TV sets grew from 41,000 in 1952 to well over 1 million 10 years later, an explosion that was fuelled partly by the huge demand for televisions at the time of the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. The nation’s long-term housing crisis was now also tackled for the first time on a large scale with an extraordinary total of over 564,000 new houses built in the two decades after 1945. As the urban slums came down, many thousands of Scots for the first time had decent houses, with inside toilets and equipped to modern standards.80
Yet these major gains in living standards failed to stem the flow of Scots emigrants. Wage levels and real incomes in the 1950s and 1960s, despite the better times, were indeed marginally behind those of England, but it is generally agreed that these small differences cannot convincingly explain why so many left.81 The Toothill Committee Report on the Scottish Economy in 1960, for instance, was sceptical of any likely connection between economic vicissitudes at home and levels of emigration abroad. They ‘could find no clear relationship between unemployment and emigration rates … no doubt whatever the conditions at home, many Scots still migrate as they have done even during the most prosperous period’.82 Indeed, Scots emigrants in this period were on the whole more highly skilled and came from better social backgrounds than those who moved to England for work.83
Much more study of motivation is needed, but again, as in the past, the movement abroad seems to have been aspirational and therefore spurred on by the material improvements at home that engendered a new spirit of optimism and desire for even greater opportunities. The late twentieth-century communications revolution including television, the telephone, and air travel also made emigration easier than at any point in the past, as well as providing more immediate and appealing information on the higher quality of life that was possible abroad at the very time when rising incomes were making emigration more affordable. A vital factor was the enthusiastic commitment of Commonwealth governments to encourage white, and especially British, emigration from the late 1940s. The most elaborate and successful recruitment campaigns were mounted by Australia.84 For the Australian people the nightmare scenario of Japanese invasion and occupation during the Second World War had almost become a horrendous reality. In the years of peace thereafter, ‘populate or perish’ therefore became the national mantra in an attempt to provide a demographic bulwark against future enemies. The result was legislation in 1947 promising subsidized fares of £10 for each adult emigrant and free passage for children under the age of fourteen. Additional migration offices were opened in British cities. Bureaucracy for potential migrants was cut, countless glossy brochures were distributed depicting sunny outdoor lifestyles in Australia, and information sheets were produced offering the British settlers special support for health and social security. In the 1960s and 1970s Scots made up between a quarter to a third of the British exodus to Australia. Only in 1973 was this ‘White Australia Policy’ abandoned and immigration targets reduced.85
Other countries also developed their own policies. In 1952 the USA eased immigration restrictions and in subsequent years Scots comprised over a quarter of all British emigrants there. Indeed, for a time, visa allocations to Britain were so generous they were never completely taken up. Canada until 1962 gave preference to immigrants from the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, while New Zealand offered £10 passages for key workers from 1947 until 1975. But by that decade, overseas immigration policies had become much more restrictive, with a consequent decline in the volume of emigration from Britain.86
Scotland is a nation that has experienced many generations of outward movement on an unusually large scale. This made for a ‘greater Scotland’ beyond the seas which, for better or worse, had a significant effect, not only on the countries of settlement in many parts of the world (as indicated in Chapters 14, 16, 22, 27, and 28) but also on the homeland itself: major demographic loss; the mass exodus of the young, resourceful, and energetic; repatriation of profits earned in foreign climes by Scottish adventurers; cultural and educational transfers from Europe, America, and Asia. All of these factors, and others, must have had a profound and complex impact on the moulding of the Scottish nation, and modern scholarship is only now beginning to unpick them. It is an important task for researchers of the future.
Armitage, David, ‘The Scottish Diaspora’, in Jenny Wormald, ed., Scotland: A History (Oxford, 2005).
Cage, R. A., ed., The Scots Abroad: Labour, Capital, Enterprise (London, 1985).
Ditchburn, David, Scotland and Europe (East Linton, 2000).
Devine, T. M., Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (London, 2003).
—— To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora 1750–2010 (London, 2011).
—— Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society (Edinburgh, 1992).
Gray, Malcolm, ‘Scottish Emigration: The Social Impact of Agrarian Change in the Rural Lowlands 1775–1875’, Perspectives in American History, vii, 1973.
Grosjean, A., and Murdoch, S., eds., Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2005).
Harper, Marjory, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2003).
—— and Constantine, Stephen, Emigration and Empire (Oxford, 2010).
McCarthy, Angela, Personal Narratives of Irish and Scottish Migration, 1921–65: ‘For Spirit and Adventure’ (Manchester, 2007).
—— ed., A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities Since the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 2006).
Mackenzie, John M., and Devine, T. M., eds., Scotland and Empire (Oxford, 2011).
Murdoch, Steve, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe 1603–1746 (Leiden, 2006).
Smout, T. C., Landsman, Ned C., and Devine, T. M., ‘Scottish Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Nicholas Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move (Oxford, 1994).
Worthington, David, Scots in Hapsburg Service 1618–1648 (Leiden, 2003).