The climate reasons, pressures and incentives that led to emigration have been neither straightforward nor uniform The author reviews the significant ways in which environmental change impacted on human behaviour in the two centuries before climate change reached the present point of crisis.

Graeme Morton is Professor of Modern History at the University of Dundee where he is also Director of the Centre for Scottish Culture. His research is focussed on the study of migration, the Scottish diaspora, national identity and the weather.

Introduction: Building on Climatic Causation; 1. The Weather Watchers; 2. Meteorological Periodisation; 3. Environmental Determinism and the Chance of Life; 4. The Climatic Push; 5. Boosting the Settler Environment; 6. Settlement of Body and Mind; 7. Leaving the Cold Country; Bibliography