Demographic history of Scotland towns had populations of over 10,000, with the capital, Edinburgh, the largest with 57,000 inhabitants. The Highland and Lowland Clearances led to the depopulation of rural areas, but overall the population of Scotland grew rapidly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1801 it had reached 1,608,420 and it grew to 2,889,000 in 1851 and 4,472,000 in 1901. By the beginning of the twentieth century, one in three lived in the four cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. Glasgow emerged as the largest city, with a population of 762,000 by 1901, making it "the Second City of the
Geography of Scotland in the early modern era after the famine of 1595, as prices were relatively stable in the early seventeenth century. Calculations based on Hearth Tax returns for 1691 indicate a population of 1,234,575. This level may have been seriously effected by the famines of the 1690s. The first reliable information available on national population is from the census conducted by the Reverend Alexander Webster in 1755, which showed the inhabitants of Scotland as 1,265,380 persons. Compared with the situation after the redistribution of population as a result of the clearances and the industrial revolution that began in the eighteenth century, the population was evenly spread