AHC/WI: Scotland/Wales/Ireland grow (population) at a rate similar to England

https://i.imgur.com/aSEv3xM_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=high

Following these population figures of the constituent nations of the UK it can be seen that England quickly out paced the rest of the nations.

What if rather than England becoming a greater and greater majority, the other parts kept pace proportionally?

How could you manifest this? I do not know the historic reasons that growth was so concentrated in England. Why did Ireland begin to see growth until the famine but Scotland didn't? Was Scotland and Wales growing just as fast but experiencing mass emigration?

How would the nation develop with Ireland having 40 million people, Scotland 30 and Wales 15 (or whatever if someone could plot the rate of growth in excel and figure out what they would be I would appreciate it, not on a computer. Good starting points are probably 1603 and 1707).

The whole country would be much more populous than any European neighbours. How would this impact economic growth and colonisation?
 
Scotland/Ireland/Wales could have more population growth relative to England, but overall, their land is weaker, with Scotland and Wales having quite a bit of land (all the hilly land, the moors, etc.) not suitable to producing large population growth compared to England.
 
Scotland/Ireland/Wales could have more population growth relative to England, but overall, their land is weaker, with Scotland and Wales having quite a bit of land (all the hilly land, the moors, etc.) not suitable to producing large population growth compared to England.

I don't really understand that. Assuming that Scotland and England had equal levels of technology prior to fertilisation how was it they were able to sustain a population of 1 million? If Scotland had half as much farmland as England then it makes sense that they could only sustain 1 million to England's 2.

Are you saying that England differed in how it fed its population? Was Scotland and Wales sustained by hunting or something else where the population growth wasn't possible? From my experience the lowlands of Scotland seem quite arable to me.

Ireland is obviously easier as it just requires no government intervention
 
Remember that Ireland, Scotland and Wales all exported parts of their surplus population to England. Rural economies usually produce more children than the local economy can support and exports to the towns/cities. What England had was the bulk of the British Isles coal, iron ore, lead tin and copper and china clays. And a lot of sizeable rivers near to major population centres (textiles need a lot of water). Industry is what drew the other nations surplus populations in. And because England urbanised more, more people gained access to clean water and vaccination more quickly during the C19th.

At least as many Irish went to Britain as to the USA (well it is much nearer and no native inhabitants desirous of removing one's scalp -except in Glasgow and Liverpool;)). Liverpudlian Irish used to drink to "Liverpool - the real capital of Ireland" (Liverpudlians had a point too, as there were more Liverpool Irish than there were Dubliners).
Jones is the most common Welsh name and also the second most common English name. For much the same reasons
Scotland has less good land per capita than England or Ireland (which is also why the Plantation of Ulster was relatively successful). Not no good land. Less.
Ireland did, but the English parliament let them starve during the famine.
It is more complicated than that, a lot of Prussian and French peasants (not in Irish quantities admittedly) also died during the Potato Famine but this is not remembered as strongly because they were let starve by ..er.. the Prussians and the French rather than by overseas rulers of an alien religion. If you read any serious history of the Famine, you will see that there certainly was a school of thought (proposed mainly by Nassau Senior) that Ireland was overpopulated above its ability to support its population (probably true enough, three bad harvests and 60% of the population had died or forced to emigrate) and providing aid would only perpetuate the problem. Which made it politically difficult for the Government to do as much as it might otherwise have done. But the British government didn't entirely go along with this piece of cool-headed (or cold-hearted) reasoning and did provide aid. Which was really the first large scale attempt by any European government to provide direct famine relief other than by waiving import duties on grain. They weren't entirely up to the task but, given the technology levels of 1849-53, made quite a decent effort. Sadly, they made some errors (as I say it was the first time anything like this had been tried) and among other things imported vast quantities of Indian corn (maize) - known as Peel's brimstone. They didn't think to hand out instructions on how to mill it and quite a lot of Irish people died of starvation in possession of a sack of corn they didn't know what to do with. Knowing this, I have less sympathy with Michael from the fields of Athenry than most - Trevelyan was a government Minister not a local landlord and that was the famine relief corn he was being transported for stealing!
 
Any reason why the body count for these two is so much smaller compared to Ireland? Were the Irish so completely dependent on potatoes?

A blend of multiple factors. The Irish diet at the time did have a larger proportion of potato's to the French and Prussian's, importation of foreign foods into Ireland to try and alleviate the situation which wasn't planned out well due to lack of experience and a large factor was the fact that Ireland was over populated, especially for the time period and the technology of the time.

For comparison pre-famine Ireland had a population around 8.2 million in 1840, while modern day Ireland and Northern Ireland combined have a population around 6.4 million, which it reached through several decades of steady population growth on both sides of the border since WW2.

There's other factors I am missing out but can't recall them off the top of my head.
 
Any reason why the body count for these two is so much smaller compared to Ireland? Were the Irish so completely dependent on potatoes?

Ireland was, as alluded to above, over-populated already, and I think it was also the custom to split farms up between heirs, meaning that after a few generations everybody was trying to get by farming plots of land the size of postage stamps. Potatoes can get you more calories per acre than most other crops, making them a good choice in such circumstances (until the blight comes along and they all start dying off, that is).
 
I think both Ireland and Scotland had higher emigration rates than England, with his saying a lot.

I don't have the statistics but wouldn't be surprised if the growth rate may have been higher than England.

As was stated before, there are plenty of Irish and Scottish descendants in Britain as well.
 
I think both Ireland and Scotland had higher emigration rates than England, with his saying a lot.

Yeah, like the Highland Clearances and the emigration of many Highlanders to various places, before then the emigrations which led to the creation of the Scots-Irish ethnic group and their subsequent emigration to the Americas.
 
So then would the goal of such such growth to make the communities happier at home such that emigrating is not as appealing? Whether that being done by stimulating city growth and so avoiding rural emigration to London or by tightening rules on leaving the nation.

If they were limited in their emigration would we see English levels of growth or do Malthusian constraints activate
 
So then would the goal of such such growth to make the communities happier at home such that emigrating is not as appealing? Whether that being done by stimulating city growth and so avoiding rural emigration to London or by tightening rules on leaving the nation.
The surge of emigration was probably much too great to be absorbed locally. At the same time as the huge levels of emigration, the cities/towns of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness, Dundee, Dumfries, Cardiff, Aberystwyth, Belfast, Derry/Londonderry, Dublin and Cork were also experiencing hitherto unparalleled levels of urban growth. Medicine and economic growth had advanced to the degree that, although admittedly unpleasant places for the very poor, Victorian cities were not downright population sinks that they had been hitherto.
 
Well presumably more places could become cities as happened in England.

I am having trouble finding percentage of potential arable land because for some absurd reason the UN definition is land currently used for farming not land that could be used.

The total area of agricultural holdings in Scotland is 5.7 million hectares, equating to 73 per cent of Scotland's total land area (7.8 million hectares) . Just over half of the agricultural land comprised of rough grazing, with about a quarter taken up by grass, and about ten per cent used for crops or left fallow. The remaining land consisted of woodland, ponds, yards or other uses.

Additionally, almost 0.6 million hectares of land is used for the common grazing of livestock.

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Agriculture-Fisheries/agritopics/LandUseAll

Basically useless of course since it's not historical and my guess is that Scottish lands are under utilised for sociopolitical reasons. Likely economic too, if wool makes more than wheat why make wheat even if you could.

Can't find anything for England alone but it's 6 million for the whole of the UK so 2 million would be Scottish roughly. So there seems to me to be plenty possibility.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/arable-land-percent-of-land-area-wb-data.html

Indeed even if we imagine the British Isles to have hit the limit on food output why can't we distribute England's growth across the UK? Possible? Impossible prior to refrigeration?
 
Scotland has a lot of marginal land (thin soil and hill farming). Donegal and West of Ireland similar. Sufficient to give a farming family a slightly above subsistence existence but that is decreasingly attractive as the industrial economy develops and more and more goods, foods and services become available. Very small surpluses (if any) so no prospect of moving to cash based commercial farming. A lot of marginal land in Wales also, I am told but not an expert on Wales personally.
Cities develop where the economic prospects are - availability of access to transport networks, water supply for growing population, food markets, access to raw materials for industry. England had more big rivers and estuaries, more minerals and china clay and more cash based commercial farming. Therefore it developed more cities. Now you can posit Stirling, Berwick, Limerick, Armagh or Waterford becoming a bigger town, or even a city, if they had got all the breaks but even that wouldn't have diverted away more than 5-7% of the outward flow of Irish or Scots emigration
 
Yeah, like the Highland Clearances and the emigration of many Highlanders to various places, before then the emigrations which led to the creation of the Scots-Irish ethnic group and their subsequent emigration to the Americas.

The Scotch-Irish are actually descendants of Ulster Scots.
 
Scotland has a lot of marginal land (thin soil and hill farming). Donegal and West of Ireland similar. Sufficient to give a farming family a slightly above subsistence existence but that is decreasingly attractive as the industrial economy develops and more and more goods, foods and services become available. Very small surpluses (if any) so no prospect of moving to cash based commercial farming. A lot of marginal land in Wales also, I am told but not an expert on Wales personally.
Cities develop where the economic prospects are - availability of access to transport networks, water supply for growing population, food markets, access to raw materials for industry. England had more big rivers and estuaries, more minerals and china clay and more cash based commercial farming. Therefore it developed more cities. Now you can posit Stirling, Berwick, Limerick, Armagh or Waterford becoming a bigger town, or even a city, if they had got all the breaks but even that wouldn't have diverted away more than 5-7% of the outward flow of Irish or Scots emigration

I always think Cork could have become a major industrial city if it became the ship building hub of a united British-American empire. Belfast could have also had a lot more growth without the sectarian violence.
 
I always think Cork could have become a major industrial city if it became the ship building hub of a united British-American empire. Belfast could have also had a lot more growth without the sectarian violence.
. Agree with you about Cork, though, even OTL it is the Irish Republic's second largest city and the island of Ireland's third largest.
Belfast, not so sure. Already 35% of Northern Ireland's population live with in Greater Belfast (the conurbation not the Belfast City Council boundary limits). This conurbation includes two cities Belfast (pop 320,000) and Lisburn (pop 120,000) plus the district council areas of Castlereagh (pop 95,000) Newtownabbey (pop 90,000) and Hollywood and North Down (around 50,000). If you also factor in the dormitory towns within a thirty minute drive of Belfast Centre -Comber, Newtownards, Bangor, Carrickfergus, Ballyclare and Larne, then you are talking 45% of the population of our wee Province. As the Americans say, Enough already!
There were (serious) sectarian episodes in Belfast (as opposed to punch ups in local pubs) in 1912 and 1922-23 but neither seriously impeded urban growth (there were more Southern protestants coming in than there were Northern Catholics intimidated out basically). By 1968, when our famous Troubles took a violent turn urban flight to the suburbs had already begun around ten years previously, as had planned evacuation to new developments outside Belfast (Downpatrick, Antrim, Crumlin and the new city of Craigavon) to expedite slum clearance. Belfast's population was already in decline by then, irrespective of the sectarian violence
 
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