Cornwall, Kent and London

Abstract

Emigration from Cornwall outstripped all other counties in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century: it was at the top of the league table of per capita emigration. The international adjustment by the Cornish migrants was framed by the income differential which had decisively widened under the impact of the much more successful copper mining operations overseas. Cornish emigration showed that the effects of mining decline were written on top of the conventional processes of rural decline as the industrial economy of Britain expanded, sucking away much of the demographic revolution. Cornwall and Kent were two variants of the general responsiveness of rural England to the opportunities of emigration and the imperatives of population shifts. Kent was a more purely rural county, with little mining activity, but adjacent to London.