Socio-Economic Change in Post-War Cornwall: The Dynamics of the Centre-Periphery Relationship

Abstract

Cornwall has been recognised increasingly as an individual component of the United Kingdom’s “multi-national” diversity, part of the series of centre-periphery relationships that obtains within these isles. In addition to the cultural and territorial isolation which characterised the condition of “First Peripheralism”, there was in the era of industrialisation a “Second Peripheralism” of economic and social marginalisation. One consequence of this was the socio-economic “paralysis” which afflicted Cornwall from the end of the nineteenth-century until after the Second World War. Although regional development policies pursued by governments after 1945 appeared to make some contribution to the development of the Cornish economy, in fact they served merely to perpetuate the peripheral condition. The creation of a “branch factory” economy and the emergence of “counterurbanisation” heralded not the incorporation of Cornwall within the United Kingdom’s centre, but revealed the dynamics of peripherality and ushered-in a new era of “Third Peripheralism”.