The Scots abroad, 1650-1900

This compilation is a list of emigrants from Scotland to different countries. Initially the destinations were countries which had economic links with Scotland. By the seventeenth century, there were significant Scots communities in Scandinavia, Poland, the Netherlands and France, Ulster and the Americas. The political union of Scotland and England in 1707 opened opportunities to Scots in the former English colonies in American and the West Indies. Such opportunities increased as the British Empire expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the nineteenth century Scotland experienced one of the relatively hightest level of emigration of any European country. The information in this book is based solely on primary sources, especially contemporary newspapers and documentary evidence held in the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh.