Scotland's Populations from the 1850s to Today

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.

• Part 1. Questions and contexts1: Scotland's population: not just a history of crises2: The broad patterns of population change3: Physical, social, and economic contextsPart 2. The multiple Scotlands4: Multiple Scotlands: sub-regional patterns of population change5: Multiple Scotlands: the nature and sources of sub-regional change6: Islands7: The major urban centresPart 3. Migration and the components and structures of population change8: The components of population change9: Patterns of migration10: Changing age and sex structures and their consequencesPart 4. Fertility and nuptiality11: Marriage and nuptiality12: Fertility: national and regional trends13: The interactions between fertility and nuptiality14: The first Scottish fertility decline15: Explaining fertility changes since the 1930sPart 5. Mortality16: Scottish national mortality and its wider context17: Causes of death18: Spatial variations in mortality and its causes19: Social and economic differences in mortalityPart 6. Conclusion20: How and why was Scotland different and what may happen next?

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.