Welsh Journals

affairs, repeatedly stressed that they were being offered land, not self- government. The government at Buenos Aires remained suspicious of the intentions of the Welsh; they thought that they were the agents of British imperialism. Lesser officials on the spot behaved oppressively. Questions were asked in the House of Commons, and the nationalist, Lewis Jones, is found expressing his gratitude and his admiration for the 'British flag', the support of the oppressed. Matters became worse when compulsory military training on the Sabbath was forced upon the Welsh. Mr. Williams reveals for the first time that they appealed to the British government to take over the territory on the specious grounds that Sir John Narborough had annexed it in 1670 in the name of His Majesty, King Charles II. Stranger still, the two envoys sent to London to see Lord Salisbury were Thomas Benbow Phillips, formerly of Brazil, and Michael D. Jones's own son, Llwyd ap Iwan. Nothing came of their mission, but it had the unexpected result of obtaining better treatment for the Welsh. Mr. Williams is on happier ground in describing the exploration of the land, and the discovery of a fertile valley, Cwm Hyfryd, far away in the Andes. His book leads to the ironical conclusion that the whole enterprise, carried out with so much hardship and bravery, did little to solve the problems of Wales but contributed immensely to the development of the Argentine. It was the Welsh who both won the hitherto disputed territory to the south of the peninsula for the Argentine and cultivated it. Furthermore, when Argentine and Chile submitted their frontier dispute to arbitration by the British government, it was the presence of the Welsh in Cwm Hyfryd which again won that fertile land for the Argentine. It is pleasant to note that in 1958 Patagonia, at last, became a 'province' within the Republic, with self-government in local affairs. The descendants of the Welsh, absorbed into the Argentinian population, seem happy in their lot as citizens of the Republic. It is pointless to mourn their loss. DAVID WILLIAMS. Aberystwyth. THE WELSH ECONOMY: STUDIES IN EXPANSION. Edited by Brinley Thomas. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1962. Pp. xv + 217. 30s. This book is the result of a series of studies undertaken in the past few years in the Economics Department of the University College of South Wales, Cardiff. Professor Brinley Thomas reprints his well-known article on 'Wales and the Atlantic Economy' and also contributes chapters on post-war expansion and on the unemployment cycle. He shows that, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial Wales was part of the export sector of the British economy, and fluctuations in activity tended to be inverse to those of the domestic sector in England. When the Welsh export industries were prospering, they could easily absorb the inflow of labour from rural Wales. When Welsh industry was comparatively depressed, English industry was booming, and so any