Emigration from the Scottish Highlands in the 19th and early 20th Century

This paper models and analyzes emigration from the Scottish Highland from 1801 to 1901 to explain why people from the area uprooted and ventured to new cities and countries. Data for the project comes from three principal sets... [ view full abstract ]

This paper models and analyzes emigration from the Scottish Highland from 1801 to 1901 to explain why people from the area uprooted and ventured to new cities and countries. Data for the project comes from three principal sets from the UK Data Archive: census data from Scotland in the 19th century and yearly data on employment for varying occupations, yearly employment data for varying occupations from the UK Data Archive, data on real wages of unskilled and skilled laborers from 1870-1970 in the U.K and data on real wages of unskilled and skilled laborers in the United states, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden, and Denmark. The project models migration from the Scottish Highlands as a function of total employment in the Highlands, total employment in destination countries, wages in the Highlands, wages in the destination countries, and a variable that measures the difficulty of emigrating between the home and destination country. Preliminary results show a sharp decline in population across the counties in the Northern Highlands beginning in 1851, five years after the potato blight. This implies that emigration from the Highlands increased following the potato blight due to a shortage of food.