The Cornish Overseas

The story of the migration of the Cornish people throughout the world is an epic. First and foremost a maritime land, with links to the greater world beyond these islands stretching back into prehistoric times, Cornwall has experienced waves of emigration throughout its long history. 



 



 

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The story of the migration of the Cornish people throughout the world is an epic. First and foremost a maritime land, with links to the greater world beyond these islands stretching back into prehistoric times, Cornwall has experienced waves of emigration throughout its long history. The Cornish Overseas details the global impact of the most recent of these waves – the ‘Great Emigration’ that lasted for a little more than a century from 1815 until the First World War and after.

Cornish historians have long recognised the international significance of this wholesale scattering of the so-called Cousin Jacks and Jennies, but have yet to fully understand the consequences of this phenomenon. Including much new research undertaken in recent years, Philip Payton illustrates the effects on each region of the incursion of the Cornish diaspora.

Philip Payton is one of the world’s leading scholars of the movement of Cornish people over time, both within the United Kingdom and to the major mining and agricultural districts of the world. His accessible narrative covers the United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, continental South America and elsewhere.

The story of the migration of the Cornish people throughout the world is an epic. Philip Payton is one of the world's leading scholars of the movement of Cornish people over time, both within the United Kingdom and to the major mining and agricultural districts of the world. His accessible narrative covers the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, continental South America and elsewhere, and includes much new research undertaken in recent years.


 




From the Introduction:

“Cornwall is one the great emigration regions of Europe. First and foremost a maritime land, with links to a greater world beyond these islands stretching back even into prehistoric times, Cornwall has experienced at least two great waves of emigration in its long history. The first is shrouded in mystery, that still unexplained Dark Age exodus from south-western Britain which – somewhere between the 4th and 6th centuries AD – took hundreds, possibly thousands of settlers to the Armorican peninsula, present-day Brittany. Although its origins are obscure, the result of this emigration are everywhere apparent – not only in the common placenames and saints’ dedications that are evidence of the long historical entwinement of Cornwall and Brittany but in the expressions of present-day pan-Celtic sentiment which range from the twinning of Cornish and Breton towns to the formal regional accord between Cornwall County Council and the Département of Finistère.

“The second wave of mass Cornish emigration, that wholesale scattering of the so-called Cousin Jacks and Jennies known to modern scholars as the ‘Great Emigration’, is a far more recent phenomenon – running for little more than a century from 1815 until the First World War and after – but it has been truly global in its impact and may have consequences which even now are not fully played-out, let alone fully understood. Cornish historians have long recognised the international significance of the Great Emigration. A.L. Rowse considered that ‘the story of the Cornish emigration is the biggest and most significant of Cornish Themes’, a claim that he put to the test in The Cornish in America, published in 1969. A.C. Todd and John Rowe – those two other founding fathers of Cornish emigration history – also helped to pioneer the study of the Cornish abroad, pointing the way for alter writers who would take the story beyond the United States and Mexico to encompass Australia, South Africa, South America and elsewhere. Yet it is only very recently that we have been able to construct an overview of the Great Emigration in its entirety, to pull together the numerous strands of an extraordinarily complex and intriguing phenomenon. The result is this present volume: The Cornish Overseas.”