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A big driver of the large amounts of Scottish service in mercenary units in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the later Highland Clearances, were the fact that Scotland was relatively overpopulated for what its economy could produce for most of the early modern era.

First, what exactly was causing this? I would have figured with the Highland and Western Isle economy being based around clan tenant farming that this would have acted more as population control than anything because its would simply mean that land would be divided further and further until people were basically landless. Was it a lack of serious diseases hitting Scotland? I'm pretty sure they were just as vulnerable to plagues as elsewhere in Europe at the time.

Could it rather be that the lowland regions were the ones that were overpopulated instead, or both?

I'm aware that Washington's army in the Revolutionary War was almost 1/2 ethnically Scottish during the middle part of the war (this stemmed from the ethno-religious component of the war in which Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and other low church dissenters were almost unanimously supportive of the American cause while High Church Anglicans and Catholics and Quakers supported the British), and much of this was driven by large amounts of forced migration.

How exactly could this have been avoided? An earlier plantation of Ulster (although Ulster later became quite overpopulated and also saw large migration to America after a drought and the rise of rack renting) might have done the job, but would an earlier attempt at squashing the clans by the Stewart monarchs achieved the same? Or would that have been impossible? What about a more distant POD, such as a more successful Viking colonization of the Western Isles and territorial control of much of the western and northern coast?
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