Location and Geography. Scotland occupies approximately the northern third of the United Kingdom’s (UK) mainland, encompassing 7.5 million hectares. The area of Scotland is 29,795 square miles (77,168 square kilometers). The climate is cool, wet, and often windy. Much land in the Highlands and Borders is rugged and difficult to cultivate, but the Lowlands and parts of the Borders include prime agricultural land. Scotland is surrounded by the North Sea, offering fish, oil and natural gas, and potentially tidal and wave power.

Demography. In 1997, the population was 5,122,500, with over 3 million persons in the Central Belt. This distribution shows the effects of rural depopulation, especially during the “Highland Clearances” (c. 1790–1830), when landlords forced tenants off their land to modernize the economy, especially through sheep raising. Some tenants were resettled in coastal villages and encouraged to supplement farming with fishing, linen weaving, and kelp manufacture, while many others migrated to the Central Belt or emigrated abroad.

Industrialization led to massive urbanization in the nineteenth century during which the population increased from around 1.5 million to 4.5 million, with the growth concentrated in and around Glasgow. Immigrants from the Highlands and Ireland played a major role in this growth. Today there are around sixty-five thousand native Gaelic speakers. There are approximately twenty thousand Pakistanis, ten thousand Indians, ten thousand Chinese, six thousand blacks (Africa, Caribbean, other), four thousand five hundred “other” Asians, one thousand one hundred Bangladeshis, and eight thousand five hundred from other ethnic groups. There are many people of Italian and Polish extraction. People raised in Scotland will often identify as Scottish, regardless of non-Scottish ancestry.