Welsh Journals

STABILITY AND CONTINUITY: SWANSEA POLITICS AND REFORM, 1780-1820 THERE has been much recent interest in urban politics and the political nation outside Westminster, focusing on the vitality of the unreformed electorate and its demise in 1832. Much less attention, however, has been given to the collapse of the unreformed corporations, despite the close connections between the two. Urban independents were striving to open up both national politics and municipal boroughs to a wider participatory basis, waging a battle against the system of dependency on both a local as well as a national front. The issues upon which reformers and independents were campaigning were frequently presented in local terms, whereby the corruption, inefficiency, lack of accountability and unrepresentative nature of the government were identified with the unreformed corporations and the continued dominance of neighbouring magnates over local politics. The success or failure of reform, therefore, could be crucially affected by local perceptions of the corporation, its relationship with the rest of the urban community and its independence from aristocratic influence. Welsh towns have been particularly understudied in this respect. Contrary to what one might expect in view of the paucity of refer- ences to Welsh towns and politics in eighteenth-century British historiography, Wales was not completely divorced from English politics, nor was it entirely rural. In the first half of the century, south Wales had been a hotbed of Jacobitism, but towards the end of the century, there was an era of comparative political calm before the development of working-class radicalism in the nineteenth century. It has been suggested that this stability in Swansea disappeared after the 1 See, for example, J. A. Phillips, Electoral Behaviour in Unreformed England (Princeton, 1982); F. O'Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England (Oxford, 1989); J. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism (Cambridge, 1990).