ABSTRACT
This chapter considers in what ways and to what degree the processes and patterns of migration in Scotland differed from those of England during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and examines the background influences that produced such differences. For England a good deal of research has been undertaken into the nature and role of migration in early-modern society. In studying controls on mobility in any early-modern society it is difficult to distinguish between the theoretical effects of national legislation and local power structures that may have controlled population movements, and the ways in which these frameworks actually operated at local and regional levels. The geographical origins of migrants to Edinburgh changed markedly during the eighteenth century. In Scotland there was no counterpart of England’s wood-pasture regions as areas of in-migration and squatter settlement. Certainly there were regional variations in the farming economy and in the structure of rural society.
