'We don't travel much, only to South Africa': Reconstructing Nineteenth-century Cornish Migration Patterns

Abstract

Intr o du cti onDudley Baines poses a key question about nineteenth-century migration: 'why did some places produce relatively more migrants than others which were outwardly similar?' 1 Yet pursuing an answer to this question is problematic in two ways. First, there is no agreed consensus on the scale to be adopted. In Britain most demographic data available to the historian of nineteenth -century migration is organized at regional, county or at registration district (RD) level. Te average size of the latter units were around 20,000 people. Although this enables investigation at a sub-county level, meeting Baines' point that neither regional nor county scale is sufciently sensitive to answer the relative migration question, it does not allow for easy testing of his further suggestion that the appropriate migration unit might be at the much smaller village or local community level. But the fuid process of immigration may need to be approached more fexibly. Charles Tilly has argued that the 'efective units of migration were (and are) neither individuals nor households but sets of people linked by acquaintance, kinship and work experience '.2 Transferring attention in this way from spatial units to neighbourhood, family or occupational networks tends to emphasize one of the broad approaches put forward by migration historians to explain the propensity to migrate, the existence of information networks, the other being economic conditions .3Te existence of information networks linking kin and community groups is seen as playing a particularly important role in the international migration

Communities, families and migration: some evidence from Cornwall

“…The strong correlation that exists at a Registration Sub-District level between emigration to North America and the mining industry reinforces this conclusion and St Agnes consistently experienced an emigration rate at least double the Cornish norm in the four decades between the 1850s and 1880s (Deacon 2007 forthcoming). More difficult to explain is the higher untraced residual amongst Falmouth women, who were much less inclined to move overseas.…”