Industrial Revolution in Scotland by 1800. In 1800, 17 per cent of people in Scotland lived in towns of more than 10,000 inhabitants. By 1850 it was 32 per cent and by 1900 it was 50 per cent. By 1900 one in three of the entire population were in the four cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. Glasgow emerged as the largest city. Its population in 1780 was 43,000, reaching 147,000 by 1820; by 1901 it had grown to 762,000. This was due to a high birth rate and immigration from the countryside and particularly from Ireland; but from the 1870s there was
Geography of Scotland in the early modern era life of their displaced workers, enclosures led to unemployment and forced migrations to the burghs or abroad. There are almost no reliable sources with which to track the population of Scotland before the late seventeenth century. Estimates based on English records suggest that by the end of the Middle Ages the Black Death and subsequent recurring outbreaks of the plague may have caused the population of Scotland to fall as low as half a million people. Price inflation, which generally reflects growing demand for food, suggests that this probably expanded in the first half of the sixteenth century, levelling off