The last book-length study of Scottish population history was published in 1977, and it stopped in 1939. This book uses much hitherto unexploited material to throw new light on many topics. It sets current and recent population changes in their long-term context, exploring how the legacies of past demographic change have combined with a history of weak industrial investment, employment insecurity, deprivation and poor living conditions to produce the population profiles and changes of Scotland today. A major argument of this book is that Scotland has had multiple population histories, with great variability in population change, migration patterns, nuptiality, fertility, and mortality, and that these can be directly linked to its wide diversity of topography, climate and natural resources, which are in turn significantly linked to the many differences in local agrarian systems, settlement patterns and housing, transport accessibility, and local industries and other employments. This diversity and these linkages are explored throughout the book. However, the book also shows that, on all the major demographic variables, there have been features that stand out as making Scotland different both from England and Wales and from other parts of Europe. Emigration was higher, nuptiality lower, marital fertility higher until the 1980s, and mortality persistently higher, especially in the West Central Belt of the country; the only exception, in a comparative context, was low infant mortality in the later nineteenth century. The reasons behind these differences are extensively explored.