Migration and Medical Climatology, the climatic pull upon those leaving Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries University of Dundee

Overview

The Migration and Medical Climatology, the climatic pull upon those leaving Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries project at University of Dundee is focused on the nineteenth and/or twentieth centuries and will focus on one of the main settler destinations for Scottish migrations or compare two or more immigrant locations.

Context

When E. G. Ravenstein (1834–1913) – architect of the ‘laws of migration’ – was asked by the British Association for Science in 1890 to identify the available space in the world left for superabundant European populations to find settlement, he was acutely aware that unfavourable climatic conditions would frustrate any mechanistic distribution of people across the globe. In his analysis, 'to render tropical countries fit places of residence for European colonists it will be necessary either to change the constitution of Europeans or to bring about a change in the climate'.