Welsh Journals

growing industrial town, the latter a clothing and agricultural centre in comparative decline. A convincing case is made out for local political spontaneity, especially from about 1740, one demonstration of this being that the provincial press did not, as has often been supposed, simply copy the news and views of London papers. Much evidence is produced of lively political debates, demonstrations and disturbances in these towns. But it is misleading to convey the impression that political initiatives outside London were confined to them. Even before the Yorkshire Movement of the late 1770s put county meetings at the heart of politics there had been similar responses from rural areas. A more serious doubt raised by this study is whether it does not implicitly claim too much,. Until the early nineteenth century London took the lead in urban politics. The Wilkite movement in Newcastle, for example, was merely an echo of metropolitan events. There are also some errors of detail. The statement that John Wilkes wrote an 'Essay on Women' [sic pp. 72, 219] has alarming implications of ignorance. The Middlesex Journal was a radical newspaper, but not a Wilkite one; it supported his rival, John Horne (cf. p. 215). Prime Minister Bute resigned in 1763, not 1764 (p. 213). The county town, and parliamentary borough, of Beaumaris is described as a 'tiny village' (p. 151). And so on. Finally it must be said that the absence of a bibliography is reprehensible in such a heavily footnoted work, imposing tedious back-checking on serious readers. PETER D. G. THOMAS Aberystwyth An ATLAS OF INDUSTRIAL PROTEST IN BRITAIN, 1750-1990. By Andrew Charlesworth, David Gilbert, Adrian Randall, Humphrey Southall and Chris Wrigley. Macmillan Press, 1996. Pp. 225. £ 40 hardback, £ 13.50 paperback. In June and July of 1919 demonstrations took place throughout south Wales against the armed intervention of the British government in Soviet Russia. The response of the newspaper, the Saturday Journal, was to print posters showing a map of Great Britain in white but with south Wales painted blood-red and with the words 'the hotbed of Bolshevism' written across the poster. The contributors to this valuable new volume agree that 'in industrial protest and strikes, geography matters'. As is fitting for their task the contributors are a mixture of geographers and historians who, in a developing field, set out to survey the historical geography of industrial