Welsh Journals

FREEDOM FROM WAR: NONSECTARIAN PACIFISM 1814-1914. By Peter Brock. University of Toronto Press, 1991. Pp. 436. £ 35.00. 'Peace history, I think, has by now established its right to an autonomous status within the overall historical discipline.' Thus writes Peter Brock, emeritus professor of history at Toronto, in the introduction to his sixth major study of pacifism; and if his claim is correct he must take much of the credit himself. In addition to distinguished teaching and research in central- and eastern-European history, he established himself in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the doyen of historians of absolute pacifism with monographs on American pacifism up to 1914 and on European pacifism from its origins to the same date, and a survey of world pacifism in the twentieth century which contained important new material on Gandhi. He has now supplemented those with a new trilogy which covers some of the same ground but with much new research and a new way of arranging the material. One, The Quaker Peace Testimony 1660-1914 (York: Sessions Book Trust, 1990), covers the pacifist witness of the Society of Friends in a wide range of countries. A second, Freedom from Violence: Sectarian Nonresistance from the Middle Ages to the Great War (University of Toronto Press, 1991), deals with non-Quaker sects from the Waldensians of the 1170s to the Adventists and Plymouth Brethren of modern times. The book under review here completes the picture by examining the spread of pacifism outside religious sects into individualistic war-resistance and pressure-group politics. Each book is free-standing; but there is a considerable gain in treating them as parts of a single study. For example, the importance of the Quaker contribution to the peace movement becomes more apparent in the light of the Anabaptist- Mennonite and other non-Quaker traditions discussed in Freedom from Violence; and the discussion in the latter work of the persecution of the Nazarenes in nineteenth- century Hungary puts in context the difficulties of the 'non-sectarian' activists with which this book deals. As in all his previous work, Brock demonstrates both an unusual range of chronological and geographical interests and a remarkable linguistic ability. He keeps abreast of scholarly developments on subjects ranging from the early Christian church to the modern peace movement, and is as interested in Slovakia as in Pennsylvania. And the languages he reads range from Russian and Polish to Swedish and Dutch-he has even taught himself enough Welsh to give his two chapters on Wales, which deal largely with Henry Richard, Samuel Roberts and William (Caledfryn) Williams, an edge over non-Welsh historians-so that he feels obliged to apologize where, as in the cases of Bulgarian and Japanese sources, he has to use translations. His endnotes, which are much fuller and more helpful than in his previous trilogy, are thus particularly impressive. Brock's historical method remains determinedly conventional, however; and this may explain why his work has not attracted even wider notice in a profession which has become perhaps too fascinated with methodological innovation. Although numerous shrewdly analytical asides show he could have offered a political and sociological analysis of the environment in which pacifism flourishes or a systematic