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Scottish social and demographic history has seen important developments in the last two decades. Patterns of population turnover, permanent mobility, and emigration are now becoming clear. This article summarises a large body of recent literature on geographical mobility and sets population movement in its social and economic context. A relatively "traditional" economy and society in the seventeenth century, Scotland industrialised rapidly in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Despite its small area, Scotland showed considerable variation in economic structures, social relations, language and geography, notably between the increasingly urbanised and industrialised Lowlands and the more agricultural Highlands. This article stresses the importance of regional variations in mobility structures and changes, and of gender-specific differences, relating its findings to literature on western Europe in order to uncover common and distinctive features. Causes, timing and destinations were specific and contingent, and we should be wary of simple generalisations.