14
Since the 1960s the writing of Welsh history has flourished as never before. 1 In important respects this marked a decisive break with the past, a new beginning that sought to recover large swathes of Welsh history excluded or marginalized in previous accounts. Distant origins have lost their final vestiges of explanatory power, while the modern period has attracted unprecedented attention. Rather than adapting frameworks inherited from medieval and early modern historiography, scholarly writing on Welsh history has been increasingly situated in an international world of professionalized history and sought to address issues of concern to other fields of historical scholarship. Admittedly, what has with some justification been widely hailed as a ‘renaissance’ or ‘revival’ of Welsh history from the 1960s 2 has served not only to cement the field’s academic credentials but also to render it more amorphous and elusive, as the centuries-long assumption that its subject was the Welsh people, conceived of as a homogeneous ethnic group, has given way to an emphasis on plurality and diversity. Of course, recent developments in Welsh history are by no means unique in prompting questions about how far an increasing diversity of approaches can be accommodated within the paradigm of national history before shattering it beyond repair. 3 So far, though, these changes have given fresh impetus to the history of Wales both as a field of scholarly enquiry and as a subject of public interest. In particular, by further eroding the dominance originally accorded to the state and high politics, the rapidly accelerating diversification of academic history has helped to confer new salience on the history of Wales as a small stateless nation, be it as a distinctive microcosm of broader developments or by fostering and legitimating new frameworks that have finally laid to rest the notion that the history of Wales after 1282 was an attenuated anticlimax to what had come before.
Over the decades since 1960 Wales has undergone major changes that have both reinforced and destabilized its distinctiveness. On the one hand, it has achieved greater institutional visibility than at any time since the Edwardian conquest thanks to devolution—initially administrative, symbolized by the creation in 1964 of the Welsh Office headed by a Secretary of State for Wales with a seat in the cabinet at Westminster, then also political, following a 1997 referendum in favour of establishing the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff, which subsequently gained primary legislative and tax-raising powers, an expansion of competence reflected in its renaming as Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament in 2020. 4 On the other hand, extensive social, economic, and cultural changes have raised questions about how Wales is to be understood and prompted reappraisals of its history. For example, an important context for the rise of labour history was rapid deindustrialization, ultimately resulting from structural weaknesses in the Welsh economy since the late nineteenth century, that rendered images of modern Wales as a land of heavy industry increasingly anachronistic from the 1970s with the final demise of coal-mining, reinvented as heritage with the opening of Big Pit in Blaenavon as a museum in 1983, as well as the contraction of steel production and the decline of other manufacturing. These developments were further accelerated by the recession of the early 1980s and ensuing economic restructuring. 5
The following discussion proceeds in two stages. I begin by outlining some of the main changes in the nature and scope of Welsh history writing over the past six decades before turning to assess the impact of those changes on broader understandings of the history of Wales.
Changing Approaches
The sharp increase in the amount of Welsh history writing since the 1960s of course belongs to a much bigger story of the growth in the numbers of academic historians resulting from university expansion in western Europe, north America, and elsewhere facilitated in turn by post-war economic recovery. But it gained much of its impetus from specific initiatives within Wales. In particular, the University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies established The Welsh History Review (1960–), the first journal specifically dedicated to the history of Wales, and the monograph series ‘Studies in Welsh History’ (1977–); it also commissioned a third edition of the Bibliography of the History of Wales (1989) that was far more comprehensive than its predecessors. 6 Other new journals, single-volume surveys, and book series, including the Oxford History of Wales, likewise sought to cater for and promote an interest in Welsh history both within and beyond the academy. 7 However, conditions for the development of academic Welsh history, like other fields in the humanities, have been increasingly less propitious since the 1980s, as budget cuts halted university expansion and led to institutional reorganization including the incorporation of the departments of Welsh history at Bangor, Aberystwyth, and Cardiff into larger departments of history by the mid-1990s and the abolition in 2007 of the Board of Celtic Studies, a crucial body for collaborative research and publication in the field for over eighty years. 8
If institutional support for the academic study of the Welsh past has diminished, public interest in the history of Wales has continued, providing a crucial stimulus to producing, and ensuring a demand for, writing on the subject. One symptom of this was the further growth of county, local, and thematically-based history societies, many of which publish journals; another the concerted efforts from the 1980s to promote the teaching of Welsh history in schools that led to the commissioning of books and a television series for primary school children and the inclusion of the subject in Welsh schools in the National Curriculum introduced by the 1988 Education Reform Act. 9 The publication of works on Welsh history in the Welsh language likewise speaks to a determination to cater for the public (together with school and university students studying through the medium of Welsh) as well as to sustain what had become a minority language in a bilingual country. These popularizing, educational, and patriotic agendas were epitomized by the series Cof Cenedl (‘The Nation’s Memory’), an annual collections of essays in Welsh launched in 1986 and published for over two decades whose editor Geraint H. Jenkins aimed ‘to provide an opportunity for the historians of Wales to publish the fruit of their research in a readable and attractive manner for everyone with an interest in the history of their country’, in the hope that it would ‘deepen an awareness of their heritage among the Welsh-speaking Welsh’. 10 Significantly, Jenkins had been urged to establish the series by the former Plaid Cymru leader Gwynfor Evans, who had published a survey of Welsh history in Welsh in 1971, reflecting the wider readiness since the late twentieth century of some academic historians of Wales to adopt nationalist perspectives. 11 The needs and interests of readers outside the academy have been crucial, then, in ensuring the continued writing of Welsh history in Welsh, be they short popular books, substantial general syntheses, or works of original scholarship, many of which have been translated into English, notable examples being John Davies’s substantial 1990 Hanes Cymru, translated as A History of Wales (1993), the only Welsh-language book commissioned by its publisher Penguin, and a multi-volume series on the social history of the Welsh language, published simultaneously in Welsh and English versions. 12 In addition, the proliferation of broadcast media, including the Welsh-language Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C) established in 1982, and dedicated English-language radio stations and television channels for Wales, have provided new platforms to make the history of Wales accessible to a broader audience, including the television series The Dragon Has Two Tongues (1985) and The Story of Wales (2012), the former supplemented by educational materials and some 130 discussion groups, the latter one of several series accompanied by a book. 13 Public engagement with the Welsh past has also been promoted by heritage organizations and museums, including the historic environment service Cadw, established in 1985, which has produced illustrated guidebooks for the monuments in its care, and National Museum Wales’s open-air museum at St Fagans, recently redeveloped as a National Museum of History. 14
The dramatic expansion in the thematic scope of Welsh history writing, especially the turn towards social history, has been closely linked to a shift in chronological priorities. Since the Elizabethan period histories of Wales had included depictions of medieval Welsh society based mainly on the Welsh laws and Gerald of Wales, supplemented, especially from the later nineteenth century onwards, by fiscal surveys and other documents produced after the Edwardian conquest, while the growth of economic history in the first half of the twentieth century contributed to the study of society in early modern and modern Wales. However, in line with broader historiographical trends, after 1960 the study of society became much more central than previously to understandings of the Welsh past. In an important appraisal of, and agenda for, Welsh history writing in 1970 Glanmor Williams (1920–2005), who played a highly influential role in the development of the field from the 1960s onwards, acutely observed that the ‘intensified interest in social history’ since the mid-twentieth century served to legitimate ‘the validity of Welsh history as a field of study’, since ‘[i]ts connecting-thread is not political or constitutional history but social development’, with a particular focus on ‘that complex of features…which made the Welsh different’. 15 Accordingly the ‘general approach’ of social history ‘is one which is particularly well adapted to the task of reconstructing the Welsh past and it ought probably to be the forte of Welsh historians’. 16 This approach thus served to refute the view that Welsh history was ‘an inferior kind of history’, as Williams had been told after graduating at Aberystwyth in 1942, a view the article repeatedly sought to dispel. 17 These ideas also informed Williams’s call for a rebalancing of the chronological framework of Welsh history by abandoning ‘the traditional division between medieval and modern Wales, with the watershed at the Act of Union of 1536’, and replacing it with ‘one between Wales before the Industrial Revolution and Wales since’. Fundamental to his argument that the latter period, beginning around 1760, should therefore receive equal attention and resources to the former was an assessment of the period’s significance in the social history of Wales, namely that ‘the communities in which most Welsh people now live have been created by and since the Industrial Revolution’, that the availability of far more evidence than for previous periods allowed ‘the detailed analysis of social change’, and that ‘the Industrial Revolution is one of the two or three great basic changes in the nature of human existence’ (a view ultimately indebted to the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe’s concept of a Neolithic revolution analogous to the industrial revolution). 18 Although as general editor of the Oxford History of Wales Williams allocated only two of the six projected volumes to the period from 1780 onwards, 19 his call for an adjustment of chronological emphasis signalled an important shift in priorities exemplified by the single-volume histories of Wales published by Gwyn A. Williams and John Davies in 1985 and 1990 respectively. 20 These works also reflected a greater readiness from the early 1980s to investigate developments since the 1880s, 21 a tendency taken further in subsequent accounts extending coverage down to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
At the other end of the chronological spectrum, recent decades have witnessed the final demise of the emphasis on distant ancestry that was a central tenet of Welsh historical thinking since the early Middle Ages; instead, in line with scholarship on ethnogenesis elsewhere in medieval Europe, historians have located the origins of the Welsh in the post-Roman period. 22 True, general histories of Wales have continued to open with (usually brief) accounts of prehistoric inhabitants, based on the findings of archaeology. 23 However, in most cases this seems to signal deference to a long-established convention rather than a conviction that prehistory was an essential constituent of Welsh history in the way it had been earlier in the twentieth century for J. E. Lloyd and H. J. Fleure, who sought to identify continuities in physical and also cultural characteristics from the earliest peoples settled in Wales to the Welsh of the present day. Coverage of prehistory in works of Welsh history since the 1960s has been predicated, then, not on racial or genetic continuity, but rather on the twin assumption that the fundamental framework for the history of Wales is geographical or territorial and therefore that all inhabitants within that space are its subjects. This shift away from an emphasis on ethnic origins is clear in John Davies’s 1990 volume, whose opening chapter on pre-Roman ‘beginnings’ maintains that ‘[t]o begin with “history” and to ignore “prehistory” is to lose sight of the basic fact that, when the people of Wales first appeared on the stage of history, almost every development of importance had taken place’, from farming and metalworking to fine art and literature; they also had most of ‘the technical knowledge which would maintain the economic foundations of society, at least for the following eighteen centuries’. 24 Davies’s treatment of prehistory is therefore at one with the significance he attached to the industrial revolution; as for Glanmor Williams, each marked an important stage in the social development of Wales that was sustained by economic developments resulting from technological innovations.
The turn towards social history was the most prominent instance of the participation of historians of Wales in a much wider diversification of academic historiography also seen in the rise of cultural history, the history of women and gender, black and minority ethnic history, and global history, all of which sought to recover aspects of the past ignored or marginalized in previous accounts. True, long-established modes of enquiry have persisted alongside, and in some important respects underpinned, these new approaches, not least, for medievalists especially, the opening up of fresh perspectives and avenues of enquiry though the editing and analysis of sources. 25 Historical geographers, landscape historians, and archaeologists have continued the study of medieval settlement and also applied such approaches to later periods in work exploring human interaction with landscapes and other aspects of the natural environment, including a survey of south Wales from prehistory to the twentieth century in a series edited by the pioneering landscape historian W. G. Hoskins. 26 Moreover, the treatment of social history has been uneven. Wendy Davies has highlighted ‘the absence of a social history of early medieval Wales’ that addresses issues central to the historiography of other European societies, though she tried to remedy this in a regional study of south-east Wales, based on a major reappraisal of charters, as well as in a general synthesis which opens with chapters on ‘Land, Landscape and Environment’, ‘Economy’, and ‘Social Ties and Strata’ before turning to political and religious developments, the aspects of the period emphasized in previous accounts. 27 Nor did the opening of new horizons signal the end of political history; rather, they helped to reinvigorate it. For one thing, they broadened understandings of the nature of power in pre-modern Wales, as scholars built on studies earlier in the twentieth century to investigate the fiscal resources of the thirteenth-century princes of Gwynedd, the forms of lordship in the March of Wales and its impact on peasant society, or the social networks and cultural patronage sustaining the authority and status of the late medieval and early modern gentry. 28 The expansion of the franchise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has led to the political history of modern Wales, like that of Britain and other democracies more generally, being situated in its wider social context. 29 A turning-point in this regard was a 1963 volume by Kenneth O. Morgan which demonstrated that there was a distinctive Welsh dimension to modern British political history by offering the first detailed analysis of the transformation resulting from the ascendancy of Welsh political Nonconformity and nationalism, together with ‘the growing awareness of opinion outside Wales of the distinctive needs of the Principality’, in the half-century after the 1868 general election. 30 Both Morgan and other historians have pursued this theme further over subsequent decades, mainly in relation to the organization and electoral fortunes of individual political parties and Welsh devolution. 31
Much has also been written on Welsh religious history, again set in its social context. Glanmor Williams broke new ground in two substantial volumes, the first on the later medieval Church in Wales (1962), which he undertook in order to provide background and context for the second, the first full study of the Reformation in Wales, whose appearance in 1997 marked the culmination of over half a century’s work by Williams on the subject. 32 The post-Reformation period has also continued to attract attention, with, for example, studies of individual religious denominations as well as of churches’ responses to modern industrial society. 33 One important new theme has been the transformation of Wales from a Christian to a largely post-Christian society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To take a notable example, R. Tudur Jones (1921–98), professor of church history and later also principal of the Independents’ training college in Bangor, and author of histories of the English Congregationalists and Welsh Independents published in the 1960s and 1970s, argued in his Ffydd ac Argyfwng Cenedl (1981–2; translated as Faith and the Crisis of a Nation) that the decline of organized religion in the Wales of his own day had its roots in multiple changes from 1890 to 1914, the most damaging of which was the uncoupling of Nonconformity from the Welsh language and culture that for centuries had transmitted a distinctive Welsh Christian tradition. 34 This decline is also a central concern of a 1999 study of Christianity in twentieth-century Wales by D. Densil Morgan, and its significance ‘as one of the most important changes in Welsh society over the past century’ has been emphasized in general accounts of Welsh history. 35
The rest of this section focuses on three new developments in Welsh history writing since 1960 that are particularly pertinent to understandings of Wales and the Welsh discussed in the subsequent section of the chapter: modern labour history, women’s and gender history, and studies of immigration and ethnic diversity.
First, the growth of modern Welsh labour history in the 1970s and 1980s epitomized the rethinking of the history of Wales as primarily social history in which the period from the industrial revolution onwards was of equal significance to everything before and thrust working people (or rather, for the most part, working men) centre stage for the first time as actors in their own right. 36 Moreover, for a significant number of historians, this required the framing of modern Welsh history as above all the story of the working class, especially in the most heavily industrialized counties of Glamorgan and Monmouth that contained over 60 per cent of the Welsh population by 1911. 37 The turn towards modern industrial Wales marked a decisive break with the dominance of the pre-modern, and especially the medieval, period in Welsh historiography which resulted from the fusion of external example—in the form of the social, and especially labour, history that had developed elsewhere since the 1960s—and particular circumstances in Wales. As we have seen, the rebalancing of historiographical emphasis was advocated and influentially supported by Glanmor Williams, a specialist in the history of the later medieval Church and, above all, the Reformation but also, crucially, a native of Dowlais with first-hand experience of industrial south Wales during the severe economic depression of the inter-war period—a combination of the professional and the personal that informed a broad vision of Welsh history in which, he believed, the working-class society he came from formed an essential part. 38 The rise of labour history resulted above all from the emergence of a new generation of politically engaged historians incited by the example of a burgeoning field of radical and labour history to recover the history of the working-class communities of south Wales threatened by increasing deindustrialization, an endeavour facilitated both by the favourable funding climate in an era of university expansion and by close ties with the labour movement. 39 These new currents gained further momentum with the foundation in 1970–1 of Llafur: The Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, which brought university historians together with trades unions (Dai Francis, Communist leader of the National Union of Mineworkers in south Wales, played an instrumental part in the society’s adoption of the Welsh name ‘Llafur’) and others in local communities to promote work in the field, including through its journal, Llafur, a major platform over the past half-century for writing on modern Wales. 40 The society thus gave a further impetus to the democratic character of Welsh history writing as an enterprise extending beyond the academy evidenced earlier in the twentieth century in eisteddfod competitions and works aimed at the educated public, including students in adult education; indeed, the journal’s editors declared in 2000 that ‘Llafur stands in the tradition of the adult education movement’. 41 Some of its members also contributed to efforts in the early 1980s to breathe new life into the teaching of Welsh history in schools. 42
Articles published in Llafur belonged to a wider constellation of work that devoted unprecedented attention to the working class in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Wales. The radical ambitions of the early years of the new Welsh labour history achieved substantial realization in The Fed (1980), an officially commissioned history of the South Wales Miners’ Federation in the twentieth century by Hywel Francis (1946–2021), son of Dai Francis, and Dai Smith (1945–), who sought to fuse institutional and social history, presenting the miners’ union as ‘intimately associated with its society’ and declaring that ‘[t]he making of, and struggle for, trade union organisation…is for us one of the great creative acts of working people’. 43 This innovative intervention in social history was also emblematic in its conception as an act of scholarly retrieval, demonstrated by references to a wealth of written and oral sources deriving from the union and its members, which was intended in part to furnish those communities with a usable past that could provide inspiration for the future. 44 The book thus gave narrative shape to efforts over the previous decade, in which both authors had participated, to rescue and preserve sources relating to the history of the south Wales coalfield that led to the establishment of the South Wales Miners’ Library at Swansea in 1973. 45
The wide range of monographs and articles published on the social history of modern Wales since the appearance of The Fed in 1980 merit far fuller treatment than is feasible here. 46 Suffice it to say that writing on that history has become increasingly diverse, as staple preoccupations of labour history such as class conflict and political organization have been complemented by studies of topics such as popular culture, sport, and health in working-class communities—a broadening of focus acknowledged by the change of Llafur’s subtitle to The Welsh People’s History Society in 2001. In significant measure, of course, this simply mirrored an increasing diversification of the historian’s agenda elsewhere, which, like labour history earlier, stemmed from the desire to recover histories of social groups that had hitherto been largely hidden. However, new approaches were adapted selectively (for example, postmodernism had little impact), reflecting the particular character and interests of the fairly small number of historians working on Wales. 47 Nor has work focused solely on working-class communities: the impact of aristocratic and other landowners both on rural society and on industrial and urban development has also been assessed, while the urban middle class has started to receive attention. 48
Turning, second, to writing on women and gender, it should be stressed that until the late twentieth century historians of Wales shared a fundamental characteristic with most of their predecessors since the Middle Ages: they were nearly all men. As Kenneth O. Morgan has observed, the ‘extraordinary renaissance’ of Welsh historical writing since the 1960s ‘was the product of a remarkably small group of scholars’ who were ‘overwhelmingly male’. 49 This began to change as female historians took the lead in opening up the history of women and gender in Wales from the 1980s, some two decades after this approach began to flourish among historians of many other European societies. 50 Work on the pre-modern period has focused primarily on the legal status and political agency of women, especially in the Middle Ages, although the socio-economic status and occupations of urban women, female literacy and religious devotion, and witchcraft have also attracted attention. Some of these studies appeared in a 2000 essay collection on women and gender in the early modern period that opened with a pioneering survey of women in late medieval Wales and broke new ground with a study of masculinity as evidenced by male riotous behaviour. 51
More has been published on the modern period, initially in reaction to the labour history written from the 1970s, whose focus on male industrial workers tended to ‘take male culture and identity…as read, the norm against which other identities are judged’. 52 Although, as elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, work on the history of women in modern Wales was stimulated by the intersection of ‘history from below’ and the women’s movement, and although women accounted for 40 per cent of the Welsh workforce by 1980, feminist historians closely associated with Llafur who endeavoured to include women in Welsh labour history initially faced an uphill task. 53 Deirdre Beddoe starkly summed up the magnitude of the challenge in a lecture to the society in 1980: ‘The history of women in Wales and therefore the history of people in Wales has yet to be written.’ 54 True, she acknowledged that a start had been made. 55 However, modern Welsh women’s history only began to make a significant impact a decade later, a change heralded by the appearance of Angela V. John’s 1991 edited collection Our Mothers’ Land—an ironic nod to the ‘Land of My Fathers’ celebrated in the Welsh national anthem—that served as both manifesto and showcase for its subject. 56 The momentum generated was acknowledged by John in her introduction to the reissue of the volume in 2011, which noted a significant increase in books and other publications in the field over the intervening two decades, among them Beddoe’s history of women in twentieth-century Wales, while emphasizing that much still needed to be done, including, crucially, the integration of this work into ‘the understanding and writing of all Welsh history’. 57 John has also recovered the lives of Welsh middle-class women and assessed their role in the struggle for women’s equality. 58 Some historians of modern Wales have also begun to explore masculinity, especially in working-class communities, as part of a broader use of gender as a category of analysis focused on the construction of masculine and feminine identities, an approach that has complicated understandings of society predicated on a division between the private family sphere and the public spheres of work and politics. 59 The same is true of recent studies of key episodes of rural protest and industrial militancy from a gendered perspective as well as of LGBT history. 60 While the implications of work on women and gender in Wales have so far had limited impact on general syntheses, tentative steps in that direction are evident at least in writing on modern Welsh history. 61
The third development I wish to highlight is a burgeoning scholarship since the 1970s on immigrants and ethnic minorities in Wales, which has likewise challenged established understandings of the Welsh past by recovering the histories of groups marginalized in previous accounts. 62 One important step in this direction, albeit with precedents ranging from early modern chorographical writing to the work of William Rees, was Rees Davies’s treatment of Norman, English, and other foreign settlers, together with the marcher lordships they established, as integral to—and constituting an important English dimension of—medieval Welsh history (I return to Davies at the end of this chapter). 63 By contrast, historians have written little about the English in modern Wales. 64 Instead, they have focused on less numerous but more visible ethnic minorities, often by mapping the particularities of ethnic diversity in individual migrant communities. 65 In addition, this work has analysed the relations of minority ethnic communities with the majority population to puncture complacent assumptions of Welsh tolerance of outsiders, most sharply in studies of violent attacks on minorities, notably anti-Irish riots and the 1919 race riots in Cardiff. 66
Locating Wales and The Welsh
Studies of immigrants and ethnic minorities reflect two broader tendencies in Welsh historical writing over recent decades, namely a greater readiness than previously both to question what is meant by Wales and Welshness and to situate the history of Wales in the context of other histories. In 1970 Glanmor Williams treated the first issue as essentially unproblematic, asserting that ‘the soundest justification for Welsh history…is the simple historical fact that the Welsh have a history of their own which, despite its close links with the history of other European peoples and especially with that of the other British peoples, is in marked respects different’. 67 However, as that statement makes clear, he also implied that the historiography of Wales was inherently comparative and belonged to a larger whole, not only making a distinctive contribution to the history of Britain and Europe and deriving its legitimacy from conforming with ‘the criteria normally applied to any other historical writing published in the British Isles’ but exemplifying ‘the claims of the little communities’ within a ‘common humanity’. 68
This does not mean, of course, that Williams adhered to a static or essentialist view of Wales or Welsh identity: he was perfectly aware of the country’s considerable regional diversity (indeed, his 1970 article was partly an apologia for local history) and of attempts to construct notions of Welshness in the past. Moreover, he and other scholars had previously explored ideas of Welsh nationality over the previous two decades. 69 Nevertheless, interest in these issues has intensified since the 1980s, influenced by a growing body of scholarship on nationalism and national identity, as historians of Wales have shown a much greater readiness than their predecessors to treat national identity as a historical phenomenon requiring investigation rather than a given that can be taken for granted. Thus particular aspects of how the Welsh have imagined themselves or been imagined by others have come under scrutiny, as studies cited in previous chapters demonstrate, including the entangled notions of British and Welsh identity in different periods, negative portrayals of the Britons and Welsh and their land by outsiders from Bede to the 1847 Blue Books, the rhetorical mobilization of ‘Wales’ and ‘the Welsh’ by thirteenth-century princes and nineteenth-century Nonconformist Liberals, and legendary and romanticized constructions of Welsh history. Similarly, general accounts of Welsh history have included introductory chapters explicitly addressing concepts of identity. 70
The unprecedented attention devoted to modern Welsh history has also prompted debate about ideas of Wales and the Welsh. While there has been general agreement that Wales was transformed from the late eighteenth century onwards as a result of industrialization, opinions have differed regarding the impact of this transformation on the continuity of a deeply-rooted sense of Welsh nationhood. Insistent though he was on the significance of the industrial revolution as a crucial turning-point, Glanmor Williams assumed that the history of Wales still constituted a unified field in which modern developments belonged to a much longer story of a distinctive society, a view compatible with the long-established preoccupation of Welsh historians with the making of the Welsh people. Kenneth O. Morgan has also emphasized the continuity and unity of Welsh history and his work on the modern period has deployed Welsh nationality as a central organizing principle. 71 Thus a prominent theme of his first book was the growth of political nationalism within Liberalism in late nineteenth-century Wales and its subsequent decline, while, as its title suggests, his 1981 Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980, interpreted the century it covered as an era of national revival fostered by increasing democratization, one of a raft of major changes in the structure of political and social authority that Morgan also highlighted. 72 True, rather like some of the patriotically-minded Welsh Liberals of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods whose significance he did so much to elucidate, Morgan portrayed the history of Wales from the late nineteenth century in progressionist terms, declaring that from the 1880s ‘colonized, “neglected”, impoverished Wales took its first conscious steps out of prehistory and the fantasies of the “twilight” towards a new era of modernity and fulfilment’. 73 Yet the metaphor of ‘rebirth’ implied the existence of a sense of Welsh nationhood in the past and that modernity marked the latest stage in an evolutionary journey rather than a radically new departure.
By contrast, one of the leading protagonists of Welsh labour history mounted an impassioned and provocative challenge to such assumptions. For Dai Smith, recovering the history of a modern south Wales shaped by mining and the collective action of coalfield communities was more than a matter of tacking on a further chapter to previous narratives of Welsh history; instead it demanded a radical rethinking of that history which involved exposing the inadequacy of interpretations advanced in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century era of Liberal dominance. Introducing his 1980 edited collection A People and a Proletariat, Smith argued that the making of a modern Welsh people was inextricably linked to the making of a working class and dismissed a raft of works of the 1880s to 1920s, including O. M. Edwards’s Wales, as ‘Gwaliakitsch…that was out to lobotomise all the Welsh on behalf of some of them’. 74 Smith renewed and extended his assault on what he considered a dangerously disabling historiographical legacy in Wales! Wales? (1984), a companion to a television series he presented, in which he again criticized the quest for a chimerical unity in the past that shunned Wales’s diversity, particularly in the modern period, a view encapsulated in his often-quoted truism that ‘Wales is a singular noun but a plural experience’. 75 For Smith, the society of the south Wales coalfield, which reached its zenith between about 1880 and 1920, differed radically from any Wales that had existed previously. 76 Yet the contrast with Morgan was essentially one of emphasis, since in insisting that this society represented a singular form of Welsh modernity, one of whose key hallmarks was a predominantly English-speaking culture, Smith nevertheless claimed a place for it within the longer arc of a history of Wales, stressing that it was no ‘mere equivalent of English history’. 77 For Smith, then, the industrial working class of south Wales supplanted the Nonconformist, rural, and predominantly Welsh-speaking gwerin lauded by O. M. Edwards as the true culmination of Welsh history; moreover, whereas Edwards had portrayed the gwerin as the successors of the medieval princes, Smith’s working class—not unlike the congregations memorialized by early historians of Welsh Nonconformity—constituted a new Welsh people, an entirely modern creation lacking any moorings in a distant past.
However, other historians of modern Wales have followed Glanmor Williams and viewed Welsh history as an evolutionary process, in which the transformations of modernity were part of a much longer story. In his 1985 When Was Wales? Gwyn A. Williams (1925–95) resembled Dai Smith in emphasizing the radical changes resulting from industrialization and stressing the need to rectify the marginalization of the English-speaking Welsh, but was readier to situate modern developments within conventional chronological parameters beginning in prehistory and also to situate Welsh history firmly in the context of Britain. 78 As we have seen, John Davies’s 1990 Hanes Cymru (‘History of Wales’) also begins in prehistory and makes the industrial revolution a crucial turning point, while Martin Johnes, though devoting over half of his 2019 survey Wales: England’s Colony? to the period since the eighteenth century, opens with the Roman conquest of Britain and insists that ‘[t]here is a link between the Wales of today and the Wales of early medieval times and even before. It was from those people that the idea of Wales evolved…To take them out of the story makes no sense.’ 79
As its title indicates, Gwyn A. Williams’s When Was Wales? interpreted the whole of Welsh history in constructivist terms that privileged its contingent and malleable character. 80 Thus, while the book left its readers in no doubt that Wales had been fundamentally transformed thanks to industrial and demographic growth from the late eighteenth century onwards, he set this in the context of a succession of crises since the early Middle Ages that resulted in the Welsh having continually to reinvent themselves, ‘usually against the odds, usually within a British context’, a long-term perspective no doubt facilitated by having taught Welsh history from the Palaeolithic to the present while a lecturer at Aberystwyth (1954–63) and by the shift in the focus of his own research from the Middle Ages to the modern period. 81 Paradoxically, then, Williams located the continuity of Welsh history precisely in its ruptures, offering an interpretation that emphasized the dynamic interaction of human actors and their environment, an emphasis announced by echoing a much-quoted dictum of Marx: ‘Men and women make their own history. But they do not make it in circumstances chosen by them.’ 82 Yet he concluded his book by expressing doubts whether the Welsh could recreate themselves once again following what he regarded as the seismic changes represented by the rejection of devolution in the 1979 referendum and the election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, assisted by a substantial increase in the Conservative vote in Wales, which had therefore ‘finally disappeared into Britain’. Together with the ensuing acceleration of the pace of economic restructuring, these changes posed nothing less than an existential threat to ‘my people…who have for a millennium and a half lived…as a Welsh people’ but were ‘now nothing but a naked people under an acid rain’. 83 If Dai Smith was the elegist for a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘world of South Wales’, Williams appeared to sound the death knell of ‘Wales’ tout court. By contrast, Williams’s dynamic of persistent national renewal inspired John Davies to conclude his book by declaring that the best was still to come, while Martin Johnes has subversively echoed Williams by stressing that ‘the choice of individuals…in conditions not of their own making’ had ensured the survival of Wales into the early twenty-first century and observed that a widespread sense of Britishness among people in Wales had continued alongside their espousal of a stronger identification with Welshness in the first decade of devolution. 84
If, in line with wider historiographical developments, a growing diversity of approaches has led to interpretations of Welsh history becoming more fragmented, that history has also become more clearly delineated as a result of efforts to set it on a wider stage extending beyond Wales. 85 Studies of particular themes and topics, ranging from medieval kinship to aspects of twentieth-century industrial society, have mostly compared Wales with other parts of Britain, Ireland, or the European continent. 86 Some of these, moreover, have been undertaken by scholars specializing in fields other than Welsh history. There has also been a greater readiness than previously to introduce a comparative dimension in works dealing principally with Wales, exemplified by Rees Davies’s insistence in his major synthesis of the period 1063–1415 that the history of Wales should be seen ‘as part of the histories of western European societies’, a view reflected in comparisons not only with Ireland and Scotland but with continental Europe. 87 The author of three major books on medieval Wales, Davies (1938–2005) is particularly significant in this connection as he also took a leading role from the 1980s in promoting the adoption of Britain and Ireland as a historiographical framework that both complemented and complicated the islands’ individual national histories. 88 As such he belonged to a wider body of medieval historians who sought to challenge Anglocentric narratives in academic historiography. 89 He may also be seen as making a critical intervention with respect to the ‘British history’ advocated by J. G. A. Pocock. 90 Focusing on ‘the formation of British political communities’, Pocock attached less significance to Wales, which lost any vestiges of statehood in 1282, than to England, Ireland, and Scotland; likewise other historical studies adopting a ‘four nations’ approach, while providing a framework that recognized Wales, have unsurprisingly also exposed its precarious and subordinate status within that larger whole. 91 In advocating ‘British history’ as ‘a text…on which we can conduct exercises in comparative history and thereby sharpen the focus of our questions and interpretations’ as a corrective, or at least a supplement, to national historiographies, Davies adopted a broader view of political and social development that opened a space to counteract such marginalization. 92
This in turn points up how Rees Davies’s comparative approach to the medieval history of Britain and Ireland exemplified an abiding commitment to historiographical reflection given early expression in two articles on Marc Bloch. 93 More specifically, its roots may be traced to his work on the March of Wales, a constellation of lordships that resisted neat containment in national boundaries and whose diversity necessarily made its study ‘an exercise in comparative history’. 94 As well as emphasizing the lordships’ significance as enclaves of English power and settlement in medieval Wales, Davies rejected the tendency of previous historians to regard the March’s fragmentary and diverse nature and the extensive powers of its lords as a problematic anomaly for royal authority resolved only by the Acts of Union. Instead, he drew on ‘the studies of continental historians’ who ‘have directed attention away from “the state” to “lordship and what belonged to lordship” and have shown that the gulf between royal lordship and noble lordship was, generally speaking, far less significant than the English experience might suggest’. 95 In his last, posthumously published, book Davies sought to show that lordship provided a compelling framework for a comparative study of Britain and Ireland that offered an alternative to analyses focused on English royal expansion. 96 True, he readily acknowledged the strength of the English kingdom and its impact on its insular neighbours. From the 1990s, influenced by recent scholarship emphasizing the remarkable durability of the kingdom as a state over the previous millennium, Davies argued that the kingdom’s deep-rooted elision of England with Britain explained why the widespread domination achieved by Edward I resulted in an English, rather than a looser-limbed British, empire, with long-term repercussions, an argument articulated most fully in his 2000 volume The First English Empire. 97 Nevertheless he portrayed English expansion, not simply in terms of the state’s domination of the periphery, but rather as a wider process driven to a significant extent by English settlement and involving interaction with the peoples and political cultures of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. By the same token, he argued for the significance of the ‘Celtic’ peoples, including the Welsh, for a broader understanding of medieval society. ‘There is no reason after all why the fastnesses of Wales or Ireland should be any less interesting or rewarding prima facie than the high valleys of Catalonia or the Alps—or Montaillou—in the study of the varieties of medieval social organization and consciousness.’ 98
This observation illustrates how Davies’s comparative approach, precisely because it sought to transcend the ‘established historiographical traditions’ of individual nations, 99 offered a means of enhancing the visibility and significance of Welsh history, although of course there was much more to it than that. But any explanation of Davies’s preoccupation with Britain, in particular, needs to recognize that it was in no small part a highly personal matter informed by a sense of dual identity: of being primarily Welsh but also inescapably British. 100 His Welshness was rooted in the rural, Nonconformist, Welsh-speaking society of his upbringing, a background he compared to that of O. M. Edwards, which lived on in his imagination in an adult life divided between England and Wales. 101 He was keenly aware that the Welsh were intrinsically linked to Britain through their origins and subsequent history and convinced that their future therefore depended on ensuring political arrangements in the island that would counter the danger of homogenization posed by a politically dominant England. The First English Empire thus articulated what for Davies were highly contemporary concerns, which he expressed more explicitly and passionately in a public lecture he gave in Welsh in Aberystwyth that touched on the constitutional significance of Scottish and Welsh devolution following the 1997 referenda. 102 His emphasis on the importance of collective or social memory focused on heroes, not least national heroes such as Owain Glyndŵr, and his warnings of the existential threat posed to nations that lost their memories spoke to similar concerns and were similarly framed both in academic terms, as in a passing allusion to Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’), and with reference to the prospects for Welsh nationhood. 103
If Davies focused on the experiences and mentalities of people in a medieval Wales subjected to domination and conquest and sought to highlight its significance in a comparative perspective, in the early twenty-first century increasing attention has been given to Welsh participation in and attitudes to the modern British Empire, part of a wider transnational turn that has also embraced aspects of industrial history. 104 The exposure of Welsh involvement in slavery, including the Pembrokeshire-born Sir Thomas Picton’s ‘brutally authoritarian’ rule as military governor of the slave colony of Trinidad and the profits ploughed into the Penrhyn estate near Bangor in north Wales from its Jamaican slave plantations, is an important aspect also recognized by the Welsh Government in a recent audit of statues and street names in Wales commemorating beneficiaries of the slave trade. 105 While this writing belongs to a much wider historiographical reckoning in Britain and Ireland with the legacies of empire, several scholars have given it a distinctive inflection, be it by exploring racially charged images of imperial subjects overseas in Welsh writing or by conceptualizing, and problematizing, the Welsh as both colonizer and colonized, exemplifying a ‘subaltern imperialism’ in which Wales ‘was a beneficiary of empire while…its language and culture were “othered” by metropolitans’—a perspective adopted in recent studies of the complex interactions between the Welsh and indigenous peoples, notably with respect to Calvinistic Methodist missionaries in north-east India and the Welsh colony in the Argentinian province of Chubut, Patagonia. 106 Work on the latter belongs to a growing number of studies of the Welsh as an ethnic minority, especially in the Americas and Australia, notable for their focus on the challenges of maintaining the Welsh language and other markers of ethnic identity faced by such diaspora communities as they were increasingly assimilated into their host societies. 107
The adoption of global perspectives is but the latest instance of how Welsh history writing since the 1960s has taken new directions informed by wider historiographical developments that have led to much more diverse and inclusive accounts of the Welsh past. They also exemplify the unprecedented shift of focus in this period to the making of a modern Welsh people, albeit one that coexisted with a continuing interest in the medieval and early modern history of Wales (as well as in its Roman and prehistoric past, now largely the preserve of archaeologists). Yet work on empire and diasporas also illustrates how this thematic, chronological, and geographical expansion has offered new opportunities to address the perennial question of what made the Welsh who they were and are, a question to which I return in the Conclusion.
Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century. Huw Pryce, Oxford University Press. © Huw Pryce 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746034.003.0015
1 Assessments of this writing include Pryce, ‘The Modern Historiography of Medieval Wales’; Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 414–27; Neil Evans, ‘Writing the Social History of Modern Wales’; O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’; Johnes, ‘For Class and Nation’; Dai Smith, In the Frame, 131–59; Miskell, ‘Introduction: Industrial Wales’. Further assessments are referred to in nn. 52, 62, 104 below.
2 E.g. Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Reading History: Modern Wales’, 49; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Glanmor Williams, ‘The Castor and Pollux of Welsh History’, 12–13.
3 This is particularly true with respect to ‘non-spatial Others’ of the nation, defined as ethnicity, class, religion, and gender: Berger and Lorenz, ‘Introduction’, 2. For comparable issues in recent Scottish historiography see Roger A. Mason, ‘The State of Scottish History’, esp. 172–3.
4 Johnes, Wales since 1939, 217–19, 223–5, 293–9, 412–17, 437–8; Kevin Williams, ‘The Dragon Finds a Tongue’; Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament, ‘History of Devolution’.
5 R. Merfyn Jones, ‘Beyond Identity?’; Martin and Wiliam, ‘Debating Nationhood’; Gooberman, From Depression to Devolution, 51–61, 85–93, 113–22, 151–5, 217–21.
6 Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Glanmor Williams, ‘The Castor and Pollux of Welsh History’; Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Welsh History Review—Fifty Years On’. Philip Henry Jones, A Bibliography, 3rd edn., lists almost 22,000 items.
7 See e.g. Charles-Edwards and Evans, ‘Introduction’, 1–2.
8 University of Wales/Prifysgol Cymru, ‘Developments—Merger and Reconfiguration’.
9 Jeremy and Maddox, ‘A Seamless Web’; Gareth Elwyn Jones, ‘History in the National Curriculum’.
10 Cof Cenedl, ed. Jenkins, quotation from vol. [1], [x].
11 Cof Cenedl, vol. [1], ed. Jenkins, [x]. Gwynfor Evans, Aros Mae (translated as Land of My Fathers). For comment on the ideological perspectives of academic historians of Wales see Okey, ‘Plausible Perspectives’; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘ “Taphy-land Historians” ’, 24–6.
12 John Davies, Hanes Cymru, translated as A History of Wales (see also O’Leary, ‘Obituary: John Davies (1938–2015)’); Hanes Cymdeithasol yr Iaith Gymraeg/The Social History of the Welsh Language, gen. ed. Jenkins.
13 Colin Thomas, ‘When Was Welsh History?’; Blandford and McElroy, ‘Memory, Television and the Making of the BBC’s The Story of Wales’; Gower, The Story of Wales. Books accompanying television series by R. Merfyn Jones, Dai Smith, and Martin Johnes are noticed below, nn. 61, 75, 79.
14 Rhiannon Mason, Museums, Nations, Identities, 148–51, 161–70, 173–5; Dafydd, ‘A Museum by the People for the People?’.
15 Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, quotations at 55, 57.
16 Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 59.
17 Jeremy and Maddox, ‘A Seamless Web’, 118; Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 55, 56, 61, 63.
18 Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 61. See also Glanmor Williams, History in a Modern University, 20; Neil Evans, ‘Casting Nets’, 87–8; O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’, 275–6; Chapter 13, n. 124.
19 The volume covering 1780–1880 has not appeared.
20 Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?; John Davies, Hanes Cymru. Similarly almost half of Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, covers the period after 1776. By contrast, almost 60 per cent of The Tempus History of Wales, ed. Morgan, covers the period down to 1536, and less than 30 per cent the period after c.1750.
21 O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’, 254.
22 Philip Henry Jones, A Bibliography, 3rd edn., 9, 37 (‘Sub-Roman Britain and the Emergence of Wales’); Geraint H. Jenkins, Concise History of Wales, 31–3; Charles-Edwards, Wales (Glanmor Williams originally intended this volume in the Oxford History of Wales to begin in prehistory: personal information).
23 E.g. Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, 1–11; The Tempus History of Wales, ed. Morgan, 11–37; Geraint H. Jenkins, Concise History, 1–21.
24 John Davies, History of Wales (2007), 1–24, quotations at 2.
25 For examples see Chapters 2–4.
26 See e.g. Glanville R. J. Jones, ‘The Tribal System in Wales’; Landscape and Settlement, ed. Edwards; Stephen Hughes, Copperopolis; David Jenkins, The Agricultural Community, esp. ch. 2 (and discussion in Trefor M. Owen, ‘Community Studies in Wales’, 48–51); Linnard, Welsh Woods; Moelwyn Williams, The Making of the South Wales Landscape.
27 Wendy Davies, ‘Looking Backwards to the Early Medieval Past’, quotation at 197; Wendy Davies, An Early Welsh Microcosm; Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages. See also Sims-Williams, The Book of Llandaf.
28 E.g. Stephenson, The Governance of Gwynedd, part 2; J. Beverley Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, esp. chs. 5–6; R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society; A. D. Carr, The Gentry of North Wales; J. Gwynfor Jones, The Welsh Gentry.
29 Neil Evans, ‘Writing the Social History of Modern Wales’, 481.
30 Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics; cited here from 1991 paperback edn., quotation at vii. See also Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Wales in British Politics: Forty Years On’.
31 E.g. The Labour Party in Wales, ed. Tanner et al.; Andrew Edwards, Labour’s Crisis.
32 Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church; Glanmor Williams, Wales and the Reformation. See also Glanmor Williams, Welsh Reformation Essays, and discussion in Olson and Pryce, ‘The Reluctant Medievalist?’; Gareth Elwyn Jones, ‘The Tudor Historian’, 64–70, 75–8.
33 E.g. R. Tudur Jones, Hanes Annibynwyr Cymru; White, The Welsh Methodist Society; E. T. Davies, Religion in the Industrial Revolution; Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, Communities, chs. 1–5; Pope, Building Jerusalem.
34 R. Tudur Jones, Ffydd ac Argyfwng Cenedl; R. Tudur Jones, Faith and the Crisis of a Nation; appraisal in D. Densil Morgan, ‘Y Gair a’r Genedl’.
35 D. Densil Morgan, The Span of the Cross; John Davies, A History of Wales (2007), 486–90, 551–2, 621–2, 706–7, quotation at 487; Johnes, Wales since 1939, 160–70, 360–2.
36 For the subordination of economic to social questions in Welsh labour history see Miskell, ‘Introduction: Industrial Wales’, 2–3.
37 Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 236–7.
38 Glanmor Williams, A Life, 1–15, 112; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Sir Glanmor Williams’, 1–3, 7–8; Neil Evans, ‘Casting Nets’, 87–91. An early example of Williams’s encouragement of working-class history is his editing of Merthyr Politics, comprising lectures by four other historians to the Merthyr branch of the Workers’ Educational Association in 1964–5.
39 For the wider context see Richard Price, ‘Histories of Labour’; Gentry, ‘Ruskin, Radicalism and Raphael Samuel’.
40 Hopkin, ‘Llafur’; Neil Evans, ‘Labouring Men’.
41 Neil Evans and Mari Williams, ‘Editorial’, 4.
42 Jeremy and Maddox, ‘A Seamless Web’, 120–1.
43 Francis and Smith, The Fed, 2nd edn., quotation at xvi.
44 See the foreword to Francis and Smith, The Fed, 2nd edn., xxii–xxiii.
45 Hopkin, ‘Llafur’, 133.
46 For assessments see O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’; Neil Evans, ‘Labouring Men’.
47 Croll, ‘ “People’s Remembrancers” ’ (and response in Neil Evans and Mari Williams, ‘Editorial’); Croll, ‘Holding onto History’. Both Foucault’s understanding of power and the ‘linguistic turn’ are used to analyse urban society in Merthyr Tydfil in Croll, Civilizing the Urban, esp. 7–10, 64–7, 91–2, 217–19.
48 E.g. David W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales; John Davies, Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute; Cragoe, An Anglican Aristocracy; Miskell, ‘Intelligent Town’, esp. ch. 6.
49 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Consensus and Conflict’, 18.
50 Cf. Nelson, ‘Family, Gender and Sexuality’; Hufton, ‘Women, Gender and the Fin de Siècle’.
51 Johns, Gender, Nation and Conquest, with overview of previous studies at 6–8; Suggett, A History of Magic; Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Towards a History of Women’; Michael Roberts, ‘ “More Prone to be Idle and Riotous” ’.
52 O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’, 255. For a recent survey of work in the field see Ward, ‘Towards a Welsh People’s History’.
53 Ward, ‘Towards a Welsh People’s History’, 255–6; Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Women Workers in Wales’, esp. 539. Cf. Shoemaker and Vincent, ‘Introduction’, 1.
54 Deirdre Beddoe, ‘Towards a Welsh Women’s History’, quotation at 32.
55 Deirdre Beddoe, ‘Towards a Welsh Women’s History’, 37.
56 Our Mothers’ Land, ed. John. See also W. Gareth Evans, Education and Female Emancipation.
57 Angela V. John, ‘Two Decades of Development’, quotation at 8; Deirdre Beddoe, Out of the Shadows. See also Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 429.
58 Guest and John, Lady Charlotte Guest (first edition 1989); Angela V. John, Turning the Tide; Angela V. John, Rocking the Boat.
59 O’Leary, ‘Masculine Histories’, 262–74.
60 Rhian E. Jones, Petticoat Heroes; Bruley, The Women and Men of 1926; Leeworthy, A Little Gay History of Wales.
61 Chris Williams, Capitalism, Community and Conflict, 62–9; R. Merfyn Jones, Cymru 2000, ch. 9; Russell Davies, Hope and Heartbreak, 107–8, 263–323; Johnes, Wales since 1939, index entries for ‘gender’, ‘masculinity’, ‘women’.
62 For the modern period a key text, focusing on ‘visible ethnic minorities’, is A Tolerant Nation? Ethnic Diversity in Wales, ed. Williams et al.; revised as A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales, ed. Williams et al., quotation at 8. See also the wide-ranging historiographical survey in Neil Evans, ‘How White Was My Valley?’.
63 R. R. Davies, Conquest, esp. chs. 4, 10, 14–16. Cf. R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society, 6: ‘The March was of secondary interest in the evolution of an independent Welsh political tradition and it has thereby occupied a back-seat in Welsh historiography.’
64 Johnes, ‘For Class and Nation’, 1262. For sociological studies of the English in Wales see Day et al., ‘ “There’s One Shop You Don’t Go Into” ’, and references given there.
65 E.g. A Tolerant Nation? Ethnic Diversity in Wales, ed. Williams et al.; O’Leary, Immigration and Integration; Parry-Jones, The Jews of Wales.
66 Miskell, ‘Reassessing the Anti-Irish Riot’; Neil Evans, ‘The South Wales Race Riots of 1919’; Neil Evans, ‘Through the Prism of Ethnic Violence’. Brooks, Hanes Cymry, esp. ch. 2, has recently addressed a further aspect of these relations by exploring the history of ethnic minorities among the Welsh-speaking Welsh.
67 Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 57.
68 Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 59–60, 62, 65–6, quotations at 63, 66.
69 Glanmor Williams, ‘The Idea of Nationality in Wales’; Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Twf Hanesyddol y Syniad o Genedl’; Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics; see also Kenneth O. Morgan ‘Welsh Nationalism’. Glanmor Williams later returned to these issues in his Religion, Language and Nationality in Wales, chs. 1, 6.
70 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, ch. 1 (‘Wales in the Eighties’); R. R. Davies, Conquest, ch. 1 (‘Wales and the Welsh’); Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, ch. 1 (‘Introductory: Which Wales?’); Charles-Edwards, Wales, ch. 1 (‘Introduction: The Lands of the Britons’). See also Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, ch. 8 (‘Whither Wales?’).
71 An approach criticized in Daunton, Review of Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation. Okey, ‘Plausible Perspectives’, 33, identifies inconsistencies in Morgan’s treatment of Welsh nationality and attributes these to ‘the Lib-Lab historiography he has inherited and enriched’.
72 Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics; Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of Nation, esp. ch. 14.
73 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, 25.
74 David Smith, ‘Introduction’, quotation at 8.
75 Dai Smith, Wales! Wales?, quotation at 1; revised as Dai Smith, Wales: A Question for History.
76 See also Dai Smith, Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales, and the review by Chris Williams, ‘Searching for a New South Wales’.
77 David Smith, ‘Introduction’, 12.
78 Geraint H. Jenkins, The People’s Historian; Dai Smith, ‘Obituary: Gwyn A. Williams 1925–1995’; ‘Bibliography of Gwyn A. Williams’ Work’. Dai Smith, Wales! Wales?, 40–4, provided only a brief survey of pre-modern Welsh history by way of contrast to modern developments.
79 Johnes, Wales: England’s Colony?, 175.
80 Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?. The book grew out of a BBC radio lecture that sold out within a fortnight: Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales? (1979); Geraint H. Jenkins, The People’s Historian, 11.
81 Quotation: Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, 304. An early instance of this chronological range is Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Twf Hanesyddol y Syniad o Genedl’, a penetrating survey of changing ideas of nationhood in Wales from the post-Roman period onwards.
82 Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, 5. Cf. Reid, ‘Inciting Readings’, esp. 548–9.
83 Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, 295–306, quotations at 297, 305.
84 John Davies, Hanes Cymru, 661–2 (and cf. John Davies, A History of Wales (2007), 710–11); Johnes, Wales since 1939, 426–33, 445 (quotation). See also Johnes, ‘Wales, History and Britishness’, with comment on Williams at 605–6; Johnes, Wales: England’s Colony?, 167, 170–1, 173; and the arguments for a plural and hybrid postcolonial (or post-national) Wales in Chris Williams, ‘Problematizing Wales’, esp. 11–17.
85 Glanmor Williams, ‘Local and National History’, 59–60; R. J. W. Evans, ‘Nonconformity and Nation’, 231.
86 Book-length studies include Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship; Given, State and Society in Medieval Europe; Nice, Sacred History and National Identity; Brooks, Why Wales Never Was; Ward, Unemployment and the State in Britain. For a rare foray beyond Europe, extending comparisons to China, see Hill, ‘Ethnic Administration’.
87 R. R. Davies, Conquest, viii.
88 See esp. The British Isles, 1100–1500, ed. Davies; R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest; R. R. Davies, The First English Empire; and more generally Pryce, ‘Robert Rees Davies’.
89 Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles 1100–1400. See also Britain and Ireland 900–1300, ed. Smith; Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery.
90 R. R. Davies, ‘In Praise of British History’, offers an apologia predicated on the contention (at 9) that ‘British history has not in truth arrived’.
91 Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’; Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History’; Robbins, ‘Forever a Footnote?’, 218–22, 235–6; Bourke, ‘Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History’, quotation at 748. See also Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales’, 132–3; Kidd, ‘Wales, the Enlightenment and the New British History’; O’Leary, ‘ “A Vertiginous Sense of Impending Loss” ’.
92 R. R. Davies, ‘In Praise of British History’, 18.
93 R. Rees Davies, ‘Marc Bloch’ (1965); R. R. Davies, ‘Marc Bloch’ (1967). Note also the historiographical (and geographical) focus of Davies’s inaugural lectures at Aberystwyth and Oxford: R. R. Davies, Historical Perception; Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain.
94 R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society, 9.
95 R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society, 1–10, 65–6, 249–73, quotation at 66. Cf. R. Rees Davies, ‘Marc Bloch’ (1965), 74, which urged Welsh historians ‘to raise their sights beyond the historiography of England and to try and imitate some of the methods of French historians’.
96 R. R. Davies, Lords and Lordship.
97 R. R. Davies, The First English Empire, 3, 26–30, 49–53, 195–6; R. R. Davies, ‘The English State and the “Celtic” Peoples’. Cf. Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch; James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State.
98 Rees Davies, ‘Kinsmen, Neighbours and Communities’, 174.
99 R. R. Davies, ‘In Praise of British History’, 18.
100 R. R. Davies, Beth Yw’r Ots Gennyf I am—Brydain?, 2–3. Cf. R. R. Davies, ‘On Being Welsh’, 30, 36, 40.
101 R. R. Davies, ‘On Being Welsh’, 30–1.
102 R. R. Davies, Beth Yw’r Ots Gennyf I am—Brydain? (reference to devolution at 2); Broun, ‘A Second England?’, 84–6.
103 R. R. Davies, The Revolt, 338–42; Rees Davies, Owain Glyn Dŵr, esp. 12; R. R. Davies, ‘On Being Welsh’, 35–6.
104 The Atlantic, imperial, and continental European dimensions of this turn are assessed in O’Leary, ‘Power and Modernity’. For a recent study situating an important aspect of Welsh industrial history in a transnational perspective see Evans and Miskell, Swansea Copper.
105 Aled Jones and Bill Jones, ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire’; Chris Evans, Slave Wales, quotation at 96; Wales and the British Overseas Empire, ed. Bowen; Llywodraeth Cymru/Welsh Government, The Slave Trade.
106 O’Leary, ‘Revolution, Culture and Industry’, 260 (quotation); Aled Jones, ‘Culture, “Race” and the Missionary Public’; Andrew J. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism; Aaron, ‘Slaughter and Salvation’; Lucy Taylor, ‘Global Perspectives on Welsh Patagonia’; O’Leary, ‘Power and Modernity’, 48–52.
107 Glyn Williams, The Desert and the Dream; William D. Jones, Wales in America; Aled Jones and Bill Jones, Welsh Reflections; Ronald L. Lewis, Welsh Americans; Robert Llewellyn Tyler, The Welsh in an Australian Gold Town; O’Leary, ‘Power and Modernity’, 42–4.