Welsh Journals

understand and change their world. This emphasis is reinforced by some of the individual contributions, including Jose Harris's brief but convincing re- appraisal of Britain's alleged 'failure' to produce an influential sociological school of thought which grappled with the social issues facing a collectivist society. Such an approach shifts attention from the cynical actions of political actors to the idealism of political thinkers. At the same time, however, a concentration on the vitality and radicalism of Liberalism in the face of its new challenges, on the mid to late Victorian period and on themes rather than the chronology of change, creates a partial picture. As Martin Pugh's chapter on Liberal attitudes to women's suffrage shows, in practice Liberalism's conception of community and citizenship could be quite exclusive, and as Lewis recognizes, Liberalism's moral populism in Wales and elsewhere could verge on the anti-democratic and marginalize social reform. Moreover, the radicalism and vibrancy of Liberalism in the 1870s and 1880s was not necessarily echoed in later developments. The difficulty some forms of Liberalism had with xenophobic nationalism, militarism, socialism, the war- time state, separatist nationalism and other factors are not addressed, and the Liberal party's failure to sustain an adaptive ideology is not considered. It may be that the successful and popular radical tradition correctly highlighted by these essays none the less contained more strands and more weaknesses than this wide-ranging and important collection would have us believe. DUNCAN TANNER Bangor POWER, CULTURE AND CONFLICT IN THE COALFIELDS: WEST VIRGINIA AND SOUTH WALES, 1900-22. By Roger Fagge. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996. Pp. x, 290. £ 45.00. Roger Fagge has written a brave, if only partly successful, work of comparative history. His scholarship is rooted in an appreciation of the development of labour history, and although his own verdict is that his monograph 'contributes to the ongoing battle to rescue miners from the ahistorical stereotypes of the "Archetypal Proletarian"' (p. 262), thankfully the battle remains largely in the background. (Most combatants might be forgiven for thinking that the war had been fought and won some time ago.) Instead the emphasis is placed upon the comparative dimension, in six chapters which examine economy, society and culture, industrial relations and politics in two coalfields which, within their own national contexts, became bywords for industrial militancy.