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a very clear sense of the changes under way in his community and of the enduring realities of peasant life. Elections, parliaments and wars come and go, Methodism and Freemasonry take root, turnpikes arrive and lands are drained, but suffering continues and the toll of disease is relentless: few readers will come away from this book without a greater sense of gratitude for modern medicine. Thomas opens a window onto the popular mentality of this region not only in what he records as custom or belief, but in all the asides about local individuals' reputations- he himself was reputed a wizard, a centenarian widow of Barry was an alleged witch ('all folks about dread her'), the best Latinist in the neighbourhood was thought a conjurer, and even the healer David Jones was believed to have acquired his skills through a dream. This is the stuff of pre-industrial peasant life and few British sources of such richness survive. A short review cannot do justice to the treasures and pleasures of this book. It is carefully edited and lightly footnoted, contains some excellent illustrations, and is thoroughly indexed. It will become a familiar tool for scholars working in a range of fields from local history to popular culture and it should recommend itself as salutary bedside reading to a wider audience. JOHN SPURR Swansea Disraeli AND THE RISE OF A NEW Imperialism. By C. C. Eldridge. University ofWales Press, Cardiff, 1996. Pp. viii, 116. £ 7.95. The history of the British Empire has recently come back into academic fashion, in mainstream history as well as in competing post-colonial discourses. Peter Marshall's Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the British Empire (1996) gives a good, accessible survey. Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins, in British Imperialism (1993), have helped put imperial questions back where they should be, at the centre of debate about British political and economic history. The multi-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, of which two volumes have now appeared, will provide an authoritative statement of the current state of the argument, and integrate the product of thirty years of scholarship that has too often remained scattered in journals and mono- graphs, read mainly by specialists in one or another region of what was once the British Empire. For many years, both as writer and as teacher at the University of Wales, Lampeter, Colin Eldridge has maintained the British Empire as a suitable focus of study and the high politics of British Imperialism as a necessary, central part of that study. His Disraeli and the Rise of a New