8 Estimates of emigration from Scotland itself remain very doubtful. One contemporary observer reckoned that 20,000 left in the decade from 1763 to 1773; Another guessed that 30,000 Scots may have sailed in the years 1773-75. A modern estimate has been made by I.C.C. Graham, who found actual records of 15,989 departures Scotland in the years 1768-75, and an additional 4,256 arrivals culled from American records. He concludes that the emigration totaled 20,245 from 1768 to 1775. A leading Scottish historical demographer, Michael Flinn, agrees that “it seems very unlikely … that emigration from Scotland in the 18th and early 19th century ever sustained an average of much more than about 2,000 per year for more than a few years at a time.” An American scholar, T. L. Purvis, reckons that emigration from Scotland was approximately 62,500 in the period 1707-75. If the annual flow was between 1,200 and 1,500 a year, then the magnitude of Scottish migration to America in the period from 1717 to 1775 was probably in the range of 70,000 to 80,000. Cf. Ian C. C. Graham, Colonists from Scotland: Emigration to North America, 1707-1783 (Ithaca, 1956,); Michael Flinn, ed., Scottish Population History (Cambridge, 1977), 443; Thomas L. Purvis, “The European Ancestry of the United States Population, 1790,” WMQ3 41 (1984), 85-101.

9 Recent and authoritative estimates of Scottish and Irish migration by Dickson, Graham and Flinn are too low to square with estimates of the population identified as Scotch Irish, Scottish and Irish in studies of the U.S. Census of 1790 by the McDonalds (above 25%), Purvis (21.6%) or even Barker (14.3%). These estimates by American historians can be reconciled with the findings of Irish and Scottish demographers only if many immigrants called “Scotch-Irish” in the United States were Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Scots, or English borderers.
   It is important to bear in mind that the entire population of Scotland was only about one million in 1650, increasing to 1.5 million by 1800. Ireland’s population was 2.5 million in 1650, rising to 5.25 million in 1800; England’s was about 5.75 million in 1700, rising to 9.25 million in 1800.
   Migration from the north of England and Wales to the backcountry has not been estimated with precision in this period. Scattered evidence suggests that it may have been roughly equal to the flow from the north of Ireland and much larger than from Scotland. One statistical straw in the wind is a study of servants from Britain and Ireland mentioned in the Charleston Gazette from 1733 to 1773, which found the following numbers from Britain and Ireland: Irish and Scotch-Irish, 38.6%; English and Welsh, 40.0%; “Scotch,” 21.4%. See Warren B. Smith, White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1961), 44-48.