Britain's regional mortality: a legacy from disaster in the Celtic periphery?

Are the differences in Britain's contemporary regional mortality partly a legacy from the disasters which befell nineteenth-century peasant populations? The rise of Britain's industrial cities was linked with recruitment from populous but vulnerable peasant economies in the (largely Celtic) north and west of the British Isles, and in Glasgow this was linked with exceptionally high mortality. Three ways of accounting for the first of these linkages, between industrial cities and peasant migration, are considered, drawing on analyses of rural Malthusian pressures, of the industrial labour market, and of cultural divisions on the Celtic periphery. These accounts all predict a particular urban and regional geography of mortality which is confirmed in nineteenth-century data. Different accounts also suggest somewhat different durations for this pattern, and preliminary exploration of readily available data on secular change in relevant areas up to 1971 show that Malthusian explanations are unlikely to account for much of the effect, while the economic and cultural structures described are worth exploring further. Alternative explanations of regional or ethnic mortality cannot all be ruled out at this stage but discussions of contemporary regional mortality differences need to take into account the history of the peasant populations in the former British Isles as a whole.