Industrial Celts: Making the modern Cornish identity, 1750-1870

by Bernard Deacon

Industrial Celts explains how Cornwall’s early industrialisation produced a unique society and a distinct regional culture. Socially, Cornwall became home to a dispersed paternalist society. In economic terms, it was based on mining and merchant capitalism. Culturally, it was dominated by Methodism. The twin symbols of mining and Methodism became central to a sense of Cornishness, encapsulated in the popular dialect literature that flourished in the mid-1800s. At the same time, identification of the Cornish as Celts became more widespread. That self-description had been recognised by Cornish historians as early as the 1700s and did not have to await either the later ‘Cornish Revival’ or romantic, metropolitan dreamers. Moreover, early de-industrialisation and mass emigration meant that Cornwall’s rural industrial economy and society retained material differences well into the twentieth century. However, the sense of identity produced by its industrialisation had its limits and proved incapable of competing with more powerful territorial discourses. Industrial Celts, a revised and more accessible version of Bernard Deacon’s doctoral thesis, restores the importance of Cornwall’s industrial period to the modern sense of Cornishness and is an essential addition to the corpus of scholarly work on Cornwall’s past.

262 pages, Paperback

Published March 10, 2018

About the author

Bernard W. Deacon is a multidisciplinary academic, based at the Institute of Cornish Studies; he has previously worked for the Open University and Exeter University’s Department of Lifelong Learning. His main research interests are:

18th and 19th century Cornish communities
The Cornish language and its revitalisation
Cornwall's population and how it has changed
How peripheral regions are governed
Who are the Cornish and how their identity is presented

Deacon is a fluent Cornish language speaker, and represents the Institute of Cornish Studies on the Cornish Language Partnership. In 2007, he was re-elected as Chairman of Cussel an Tavaz Kernuak (The Cornish language Council).