Cornish identities and migration: a multi-scalar approach

In this article we argue that theories of transnationalism have value in exploring the historical context of migration and that historical contexts help to shape such theoretical conceptualisations. Historians of migration have now begun to engage more directly with the literature of transnationalism, focusing on the networks that linked settler and home communities. Here we add to this by examining a nineteenth century migrant community from a British region through the lens of transnationalism, applying the concept to the case of the Cornish, whose economic specialisation produced culturally distinct Cornish communities on the mining frontiers of North America, Australia and South Africa. In doing so we bring together the issues of scale and time. We review the multiple levels of the Cornish transnational space of the late nineteenth century, which exhibited aspects of both core transnationalism and translocalism. This waned but in the later twentieth century a renewed interest in a transnational Cornish identity re-emerged, articulating with changing identity claims in Cornwall itself. To better capture the experience of the Cornish over these two very different phases of transnationalism we identify another subset of transnationalism– that of transregionalism. ___________________________________________________________________ Anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, political scientists and economists have been keen to populate the multidisciplinary conceptual space of transnationalism (Vertovec 1999). In contrast, it has been claimed that historical perspectives are ‘largely lost’, with historians seemingly more reluctant to embrace the concept (Vertovec 2001). But the supposed reluctance of historians to adopt the conceptual framework of transnationalism is overstated. Comparative historians have had a longstanding interest in studies that cross the borders of nation-states. Indeed, there have been intermittent calls, particularly by American historians, for an explicit ‘transnational history’ that pays attention to themes that cut across national boundaries (Tyrell 1991; Thelen 1999). Transnational history in this sense has a potentially huge agenda, exploring connections between places and movements