Territory remains a focus for identification and territorial identity an enduring topic of scholarly research. This dissertation explores the territorial identity of Cornwall in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study does three things; it defines Cornish identity on the basis of concepts of distinction, integration, process, narrative, context and scale; it applies the model of regional identity formation proposed by Anssi Paasi; and it develops the disciplinary approach of the new Cornish Studies. The subject of the dissertation is the period after the fragmentation of a linguistically based ethnic identity and before the reconstruction of a ‘Celtic’ Cornish identity. A comparative investigation of this phase of the history of identity transformation restores continuity between Cornwall’s industrial and post-industrial periods and provides an account of modern Cornish identity. The first part of the dissertation reviews representations of Cornwall and its people in the early nineteenth century. The focus then shifts to discuss the structures and institutions – economic, social and religious – around which identities cohered. The argument of the thesis is that industrialisation based on deep metal mining gave the Cornish a renewed pride as inhabitants of one of Europe’s first centres of industrialisation. In this sense Cornwall resembled other industrial regions in the early nineteenth century British Isles. However, it also differed from them, most notably in its demography, in the social relations produced by rural industrialisation and in the way its historians had re-fashioned a history of the Cornish as a distinct group. By the later nineteenth century a hybrid identity had emerged, one based on a regional pride induced by industrialisation but one that also looked back to symbols of ethnic distinctiveness. This regional identity nested within identities of Englishness and Britishness that constrained its political potential.

Artefacts relating to tin smelting from tin mills or 'blowing houses' in Devon and Cornwall, plus material from smelting sites that cover a range of dates from the Bronze Age through to the 19th Century, were examined: these include metallic tin, furnace linings, ore samples and slag. Analysis of tin slags from over forty sites was carried out, to determine microstructure and chemical composition. Techniques employed included optical and scanning electron microscopy, X-ray fluorescence and ICP mass spectrometry. Analysis indicates that slag appearance and composition are heavily influenced by local geology. Composition, particularly iron content, is shown to have a strong effect on slag melting point and viscosity, and the implications for the purity of metal produced are discussed. Bringing together the evidence provided by slag chemistry, documentary sources and smelting remains in the archaeological record, changes in tin smelting technology through time, and the consequences thereof, are considered.

<p>On Christmas Day in 1788, on the eve of a year which was to see the entire Atlantic world once more convulsed with revolution and war, a struggling farmer and occasional fisherman from the village of Mousehole in western Cornwall turned his back on the sea. William Carvosso had never found maritime life to his liking, and for some time been looking for an opportunity to, in his words, support himself and his family "wholly on the land." So when that opportunity finally did arise Carvosso was quick to move his young family to a rented farm near the inland village of Ponsanooth. With a little capital and zealous stewardship Carvosso began to thrive in his new home. The move, which at first glance seemed to take the family from cosmopolitan littoral to parochial isolation, was actually the first step of an intergenerational journey that saw Carvosso's children and grandchildren witness convict hangings in Van Diemen's Land, the Tai-ping Rebellion in Shanghai, Blackfoot and Plains Cree horse raids on the Great Plains, and the trafficking of indentured labor from India to the Caribbean. The vehicle which transported the Carvossos about the globe - and which facilitated their rise as a family from the laboring classes to the lower reaches of respectability and beyond - was the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion and its ancillary Missionary Society. The following dissertation is concerned with the Carvossos' movements, and the ideology by which they encouraged, made sense of, and justified their imperial adventures. </p><p>The Carvossos left evidence of their activities scattered about the globe. The greatest concentration of material is in church and missionary collections in London, but they also have a presence in a wide range of provincial and colonial archives and newspapers. Their movement allows us to attend to not just the Empire and the Nation, but to the transnational and the local, the provincial and the metropolitan, and the mutual constitution of those various categories. They were never fixed in one site but travelled from their original home in the village of Mousehole, to Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, Shanghai, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, Jamaica and frequently back to England. The Carvossos identified themselves by turn as Cornish, English, British, or Colonial, depending on their circumstances. Their active participation in transatlantic Methodism, global Evangelicalism, and Cornish Revivalism further complicated the issue of their various imperial identities, and helps reveal the complexities and contradictions of colonial life in the nineteenth-century British Empire.</p> / Dissertation

"Who controls the past [...] controls the future: who controls the present controls the past". In the first century BCE Diodorus of Sicily described a corner of the British Isles he called Belerion and drew attention to the ingenious way the inhabitants extracted tin and the civilised manner they had acquired through trading that metal. In 2012 a tourist may stay in a bed and breakfast near Penzance or buy books from a shop named after that promontory. However, during the nineteenth century a debate amongst historians arose as to the meaning of Diodorus' Greek text, its relationship to other classical texts and the status of Cornwall in antiquity. The discussion involved at least ten treatments specifically of the topic in Cornwall alone and was incorporated into a variety of other narratives. The debate offers an unusual insight into the role of classical texts in the description and understanding of local identity. This thesis looks at passages from the classical world that have been linked to Cornwall and which often have very little academic scholarship relating to them, and examines how they have been interpreted by Cornish historians. It will show how, despite the inconclusiveness of the ancient material, a connection between Cornwall and Greek and Roman traders has been constructed by Cornish writers, and why they were interested in doing so. This thesis suggests that the political and social contexts of local historiographers has actively shaped the interpretations of the texts often assigning a meaning to classical texts that allows a narrative of independence, cultural sophistication and unbroken mining innovation to be constructed concerning Cornwall. As such this thesis will form part of a rapidly expanding inter-disciplinary interest in our understanding of responses to the Classics and to our conception of the formation of regional historical narrative.

Divided into three parts, this thesis maps a cultural history of Barbary captivity; concentrating on the early 17th century leading up to the Civil Wars; an aspect of British-Muslim contact within which the West Country is overrepresented in the archives. However, this wealth of material contrasts sharply with the paucity of popular and public-facing representations. Situating these accounts within wider contexts, this thesis investigates this contrast, exploring the social, cultural, emotional and economic impact of Barbary captivity upon understandings of place and identity. The first part examines representations of being taken captive, the terror and distress of West Country inhabitants, and the responses and concerns of the authorities. The on-going failure to protect the region and its seafarers exacerbated this distress, producing marginalised geographies of fear and anxiety. The second part explores the themes of memory and identity, arguing that how captives were remembered and forgotten had implications for localised and national identities. For those held in Barbary, families and communities petitioned and undertook ransom collections to redeem the captives, providing reminders to the authorities and appealing for wider remembrance as part of the processes of Christian compassion. Nevertheless, the majority of captives were ‘forgotten’, neither ransomed nor leaving their individual mark within the historical record. This part concludes with a discussion of the role of memory in managing and articulating the ‘trauma’ of captivity. The final part examines mobile and fluid identities, concentrating on returning captives and Islamic converts. Early modern theories of identity situated the humoral body of the captive as susceptible to ‘turning Turk’, contributing to wider negotiations of national, ethnic and religious identities. Cultural anxieties were preoccupied with the ill-defined borders of the geographically displaced material body, generating mutable, hidden and shameful identities. In conclusion, sites of cultural trauma are produced, indicated by the subsequent silence regarding this aspect of localised history.

Rural Cornish coastal fishing communities express, and have expressed, varying degrees of ability to develop and retain social resilience capacity, or the ability to withstand ‘shock’ over both ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ onset events in social, political, economic and natural domain terms (Wilson, 2012a). Endogenous and exogenous influences may include natural changes in resources and resource dependency resulting in the loss or depletion of community livelihoods associated with a decline in fishing activities (Brookfield, 2005; Marshall, 2007a), issues of tourism driven change and notions of ‘community’. Four capitals are initially conceptually considered, those of natural, political, social and economic capitals driving institutional change and individual-community behaviour within fishing communities. This is considered for fishing activities and cross-community aspirational or extant forms of resilience building with a particular focus on social memory, community-personal identity (Wilson, 2012b; Wilson, 2013; Wilson, 2014) and critically, power (Chaskin, 2001). This research frames community resilience within a resilience framework on local, national and EU scales. The initial capital approach is further developed and articulated into a novel resilience status and process framework, the community resilience and vulnerability index, or the CRVI. The research fieldwork observes social resilience through empirical qualitative methods supported by an anthropological lens, especially in regard to social issues, trust, confidence, power and agency within fishing communities and trajectories that have been guided by internal and external influences and adaptive change to social networks. One of the research challenges was the building of the CRVI using coupled approaches to coping strategies that may have value both across the Cornish case study communities and into wider community usage.

Recently there has been considerable interest in Cornish ethnicity reflected both by a rise in the numbers in Cornwall who identify as Cornish and by academic research. Cornish studies have constructed a regional narrative embracing Celticity and an economy based on primary industries, particularly mining, from which has evolved a distinctive culture. This study adopting an ethnographic approach, extends Cornish studies by considering a number of elements which have not previously been addressed. These include investigating how identity may be played out in a particular place to see whether there may be differences in how ethnicity is performed within Cornwall, looking at how it may be practiced collectively in the context of civil society and examining the relationship between ethnicity and place identity. Three settings within Penzance have been selected to represent some of the issues prevalent in twenty first century Cornwall. They include a study of festivals celebrating ethnicity and place identity, an investigation of how kinship and ethnicity are the basis for social cohesion on a social housing estate and an analysis of a dispute over harbour re-development reflecting tensions between regeneration and conservation. Investigating the civil society associated with each of these settings has identified a number of discourses which influence place images, are the focus for debate and reflect different ways in which ethnicity is articulated and performed. Influences on Cornish identity have been exposed which have not been previously explored by Cornish Studies including the relationship between civil society and the state, the importance of place mythology and the impact of inward migration. The study concludes that collective identities, ethnicity and place images are constantly in flux driven by discourses debated within the micro-politics of civil society and that the overarching narratives of Cornishness contain tensions and cleavages which help explain the fractured nature of much of public life in Cornwall.

The subject of this study is the period of independent banking in Cornwall, from the formation of the Miners’ Bank in Truro in 1771 to the absorption of Dingley’s Launceston Bank by the National Provincial in 1922. Undertaken within the perspectives of the `New’ Cornish Studies, it aims to provide an assessment of the objectives, strategies, and operational decision-making of banking institutions in Cornwall. A comprehensive analytical narrative of their development forms the core of the study, building on the existing literature and augmented from a range of fragmentary primary and secondary sources, much of it from family archival papers. The nature of this material, and the general lack of quantitative financial data relating to individual institutions, has made a qualitative sociological approach the most appropriate. With the careers of individual bankers predominant, the narrative is also strongly biographical in content and emphasis. An analytical technique based on thick description has been used to enlarge upon the possibilities contained in the often meagre evidence. Both the historical narrative and the subsequent theoretical analysis are conducted from a standpoint situated within a Cornish bank; established in Geertzian fashion from the author’s own long commercial experience in a traditionally-minded business. This experience is aligned with that of contemporaneous writers on nineteenth-century banking practice. In similar manner, a theoretical standpoint within the contemporaneous sociological thought of Tönnies and Weber has been adopted, as being the most appropriate to the consideration of the forms of organization under investigation. From this standpoint, the analysis is projected forwards into the growing corporatism and branch expansion of the amalgamation era. This is undertaken through a game-theoretic evolutionary assessment of decision processes; and a consideration of the roles of path creation and path dependency in institutional development.

Artefacts relating to tin smelting from tin mills or ¿blowing houses¿ in Devon and Cornwall, plus material from smelting sites that cover a range of dates from the Bronze Age through to the 19th Century, were examined: these include metallic tin, furnace linings, ore samples and slag. Analysis of tin slags from over forty sites was carried out, to determine microstructure and chemical composition. Techniques employed included optical and scanning electron microscopy, X-ray fluorescence and ICP mass spectrometry. Analysis indicates that slag appearance and composition are heavily influenced by local geology. Composition, particularly iron content, is shown to have a strong effect on slag melting point and viscosity, and the implications for the purity of metal produced are discussed. Bringing together the evidence provided by slag chemistry, documentary sources and smelting remains in the archaeological record, changes in tin smelting technology through time, and the consequences thereof, are considered. / R. F. Tylecote Memorial Fund, administered by the Historical Metallurgy Society, and the Francis Raymond Hudson Memorial Fund.

Bibliography: v. 1, leaves 356-387.