INTRODUCTION

In his statistical study of urbanization, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, Adna Ferrin Weber (1899) considered the relative growth of London and Glasgow in relation to the national populations of England and Scotland, and described Glasgow's growth as exceptional. He attributed this to its great variety of natural resources and its fortunate location. It occupied the position of a great commercial centre like London, it had a climate favourable to textileworking, like Manchester, and it lay in the middle of a great coal and iron district, like Birmingham. He added to these aspects of initial advantage, each responsible for the initiation of phases of growth, the idea that the force of attraction of a centre was proportional to its mass. In other words, the concentration, and both the relative and absolute growth of population in terms of numbers and time, varied in direct relation to the size of the centre, thus providing an explanation for its pattern of growth directly related to industrial and commercial development. Agglomeration of industry and people increased as a function of scale economies in the nineteenth century and these scale economies acted as an in-built accelerator to the process.

The effects of these processes of industrial and commercial agglomeration on the dynamics of population, in terms of its components of change, its internal structures and its spatial behaviour, are directly observable. In the case of Glasgow, as in that of other large cities, the nineteenth century may be divided into two main phases in both industrial and population terms, corresponding to what Friedlander (1974) has described as the ‘urban transition’. In the first phase, Glasgow developed a broad industrial base, with textile-working dominant and the industrial workforce concentrated around the small and medium-size industrial units of the city core, sustained and increased by largescale waves of in-migration replacing the losses caused by high death rates from contagious disease. In the second phase, while the spectrum of industry remained broad, more narrowly specialized heavy industries rose to overwhelming dominance and large-scale production units sought peripheral locations, attracting migrants from a population growing more on the basis of natural increase than net migration.

In the general sequence of long-run development, Glasgow exhibits in the nineteenth century broad areas of comparison with British port-cities such as Liverpool.