Why so few migrants from so many places and so many from only a few places? Cornish migration flows to the Americas in the nineteenth century

"Billig (1995) has convincingly described the process whereby ‘banal nationalism’ becomes a taken-for-granted part of the discourse of everyday life. Academic communities are hardly immune from this process with studies of international migration over-determined by analysis at a nation-state scale. However, in contrast as long ago as 1960 Thistlethwaite was calling for investigation of migration flows at the level of the village or region to specific destinations overseas. This was reinforced by the turn to regional migration studies with Baines (1985) stressing the need for a revised spatial focus of analysis of migration flows from Britain. His research had uncovered markedly uneven regional demographic patterns obscured by national figures. But what had accounted for this contrasting relative incidence of migration in the past: why did people migrate from some communities and not others? Baines subsequently called for finer mesh local studies that would yield more insight about migrants’ motivation than large-scale quantitative analyses (1991; 1994). Yet, there are still relatively few investigations that examine the details of the migration process from the British Isles, who the migrants were, the type of communities they came from and what kinship and recruitment networks supported their migration decisions (a notable exception is Hudson and Mills 1999). The relative incidence of migration and its variation over space has also been noted by observers of contemporary international migration. Faist (2000) pondered a baffling puzzle: ‘Why are there so few migrants from so many places and so many from only a few places?’ It was possible to speak of mass immobility on the one hand and mass migration on the other, but how could this apparent paradox be reconciled? Yet mass mobility and mass immobility can in fact be viewed as the outcomes of the same process as the resources inherent in ties between people bound together in networks, groups and communities are often locally specific. In consequence there is a need to move away from rigid micro versus macro distinctions to study the detailed form and content of migration flows. This implies a meso-level analysis of migration movements centred on the functions of migration networks (Faist 2000). How do migration chains come into being and how do they function? What is the specificity of migrant resources that enable the formation and sustenance of migration networks; how do these resources encourage or prevent migration and importantly; how easily are these transferred (Faist 2000)? This paper applies these questions to the specific case of Cornwall, described by Baines (1985) as an ‘emigration region comparable with any in Europe’. In the three decades from 1860 to 1890 the annual average rate of overseas migration from Cornwall is estimated to be over nine per thousand inhabitants. This was two to three times the rate of emigration from England and a level of emigration only exceeded in Europe by Ireland at this time. Moreover, mass overseas migration had been a feature of Cornish society since the late 1830s. What factors accounted for its consistently high levels of male and female migration? The aim of this paper is twofold. Utilising a unique database of 38,000 nineteenth century migrants from Cornwall to the Americas, we will provide an example of the fine-mesh local study of migration flows called for by Baines, by identifying and mapping some patterns of migration from Cornwall to the Americas. For even within this relatively small region there was considerable selectivity and variation of migration flows over both space and social variables. Our analysis highlights differences in the timing, gender and occupational make-up, parish of departure and destination of migrants. Second, using this information, we tackle the issue of scale raised by Faist by moving away from macro- and micro-structural analyses to explore the causes of those heterogeneous patterns within a meso-level paradigm. This centres on the formation, sustenance and functions of Cornish migration networks to explain mass immobility and mass mobility."