ABSTRACT
In the 500 years between 1250 and 1750 Scotland’s population perhaps doubled to a total of 1·2 million. Three generations later in 1841 it had doubled again to 2·6 million and grew by more than a quarter in the next generation to reach 3·3 million in 1871. The expansion was most dramatic in the west of Scotland, where the population grew three times faster than the national average. When Dr Alexander Webster conducted his enumeration of the population between 1752 and 1755 he estimated that 181,000 persons lived in the western region. With the exception of the bleak Southern Uplands and Borders, it was then the least populous of Scotland’s major regions. Only one person in seven lived in the Clyde-Ayrshire district, while over half the total population lived in the Highland counties north of a line joining the great estuaries of the Clyde and Tay. But thereafter the vigorous growth of population in the west of Scotland began to redress the balance. In each decade from 1801 to 1871 the population in the west outpaced the growth in other Scottish regions, and in the forty years of most explosive growth from 1801 to 1841, the increase was over 20 per cent per decade. The demographic expansion of the west of Scotland was inexorable, yet it was not till the decade 1861–71 that its population finally equalled and then surpassed that of the Highland counties. In 1871 nearly 1·25 million people were crowded into the region and only 86,000 fewer lived north of the Highland Line. The Highlands and west of Scotland each then contained just over one third of the total population, and both these regions supported about as many people as had been counted by Webster in the whole country in the 1750s.
