Welsh Journals

and notices the considerable number of Scottish administrators in India. He stresses, too, the impact of German literature on Scotland's writers during the 1790s and thereafter, though he seems to overlook the academic side of the German revival when making the surely exaggerated claim (pp. 95-96) that the dynamism of Scotland's universities was unique in eighteenth-century Europe. Bruce Lenman has written an account which provides a concise and informative synthesis of a large body of specialized literature: just how large is demonstrated very usefully by a comprehensive and critical 'Note on Further Reading'. Yet it is an account which avoids the danger of reading like a textbook. The author's style is relaxed and informal, with some pleasant touches of humour (as well as some unpleasant misprints). His survey is enlivened by numerous telling miniature biographies, including most of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightment. And in each of his chapters the discussion is allowed to move freely between political, economic and cultural matters, without losing its coherence. Here, then, is a book which is likely to prove as rewarding and thought- provoking for the general reader as for the student of Scottish history. It deserves to have a wide appeal. HUGH DUNTHORNE Swansea CUSTOM, WORK AND MARKET CAPITALISM. By Chris Fisher. Croom Helm, London, 1981. Pp. xvi, 203. £ 12.95. Marginal men in a peripheral economy, the destruction of their customary community rights and the transformation of these rights into private property are the subjects of Dr. Fisher's study. In part the customary rights of the free miners of the Forest of Dean had depended upon the decay of crown control in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century and the encouragement of their depredations because of the officials' perquisites. In consequence, an extra-parochial, small-scale economy flourished on the basis of mining, timber and the pasturing of sheep. However, by the 1830s major changes had undermined this economy as capital and crown were in collusion. By 1841 'foreigners' were dominant in controlling the collieries and even those of the free miners were dominated by six men; further crown administration had recovered, had fenced, its full quota of forest and ended encroachments. Crown and capitalist had an interest in securing full title to their property and the Mines Act of 1838 began the process of removing the free miners' rights. The miners responded by fighting crown officers, poaching deer and attacking fences, all to little avail. Disputes arose again in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, but now the miners had ceased to look backwards to an older social conservatism and forwards to the advantages of private property and individualism. The concentration in mine ownership had led to the 'little butty' system, and when a miners' union was formed in the boom of the 1870s it had only the sectional interests of the butties at heart; the daymen whom they employed were ignored. Similarly, proposals to introduce