ABSTRACT
Throughout the twentieth century, Cornwall, in the far southwest of England, experienced the protracted contraction of its traditional primary industries: fishing, agriculture, and mining. The county’s mining history is long and proud: four thousand years of metal extraction peaked in the nineteenth century when the county produced over half the world’s copper and tin, and developed and exported the hard-rock-mining industrial revolution around the world. Metal mining declined through the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, with the last tin mine, South Crofty, closing in 1998. China-clay extraction, which began in the mid-eighteenth century, produces about two million tons of kaolin for export, but as the industry has become more capital-intensive, it has had a series of large retrenchments in the last fifteen years. The resulting socioeconomic decline has been exacerbated by a dispersed rural population, the absence of a large population focus, the industry’s distance from large urban centers, by market failures, and by a lack of civic leadership.
