Welsh Journals

tensions between the old liberalism and socialism and then between socialism and Welsh nationalism. Whether Wales would have been better served by a socialist party of Wales is an interesting question. The lack of commitment to Welsh in schools, the development of factories which brought key workers from England and the collapse of the traditional industries have all led to a present-day situation where Welsh is gradually losing its grip on the valley. The whole series, when completed, will provide a powerful body of evidence on the importance of the Welsh language during the formative years of industrialization in south Wales.] AN ANGUCAN ARISTOCRACY: THE MORAL ECONOMY OF THE LANDED ESTATE IN Carmarthenshire, 1832-95. By Mathew Cragoe. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996. Pp. xi, 280. £ 40.00. This book, maintaining the high standards of scholarship and originality of the series in which it appears, the Oxford Historical Monographs, makes a major contribution to the reassessment of nineteenth-century Wales, a contribution whose importance may be somewhat hidden by the Carmarth- enshire label. The label is of course correct; it is a study of landed society in depth in one county. Its implications, however, spread out from south-west Wales to the rest of the country, to England, Britain, and ripples extend to the farthest comers of nineteenth-century Europe. Cragoe is himself concerned with Wales, and with a sharply critical appraisal of the dominant historiography which banishes the landed aristocracy and gentry, and the Anglicans, as alien elements, and paints the history of modem Wales in exclusively nonconformist and Liberal colours. But he is all the time aware that his study contributes to redressing a widespread bias in the writing of history, which fawns on the victors and the successful and marginalizes the defeated and the ultimate failures. Nowhere has this bias been more apparent than in the conventional representations of rural and peasant societies in which the landowners differed from their tenantry in language, religion, or race, and where the landlords in Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, Bohemia, Slovenia or Wales, figure as harsh, unfeeling, intolerant, oppressive, greedy, or tyrannical, and as irrelevant to the history of their countries except as foreign bodies provoking the development of national consciousness. Cragoe picks this landlord stereotype apart with a delicate touch and formidable documentation. In its place. he constructs a much more credible and sophisticated picture of rural society in which behaviour and social relationships were regulated by the mutually accepted precepts of what he terms, in an adroit adaptation of the language of radical history,