Welsh Journals

2. WALES AS A PLURAL SOCIETY John Giggs and Charles Pattie INTRODUCTION Instead of arguing that the population [of Britain] is culturally homo- geneous and admitting a few 'special cases', it seems to be more realistic to recognise that our society is in fact plural, with clear differences of class, ethnicity and sense of nationhood. Furthermore, this plurality has not appeared suddenly but is deeply embedded in our history most notably the differences between Scotland, Wales and Ireland, the Protestant/ Catholic division, and the divisions by class. Postwar immigration has added a new dimension, with the advent of coloured minorities. (Chisholm, 1990, pp. 42-3) The views expressed in the quotation cited above will surely elicit a fervent 'Amen!' from most Celtic historians and social scientists. For far too long British history and British social science have, in fact, meant English history and English social science, with only cursory attention given to matters in the 'Celtic Fringe' (G. Williams, 1977, 1978, 1983; Rees and Rees, 1980; Frame, 1990). However, the past 25 years have witnessed an exponential increase in research into both Celtic and British topics. There are now simply too many publications to attempt a complete bibliography here, but a few truly British analyses merit citation (e.g. Hechter, 1975; Massey, 1984; Kearney, 1989; Champion and Townsend, 1990; Davies, 1990; Frame, 1990). There are, of course, many important subjects which remain as yet largely unresearched. Thus there have been remarkably few geographical studies of the Irish, Scots and Welsh who have settled in England, when one considers the longue durée of the links between the four nations. In the postwar period in particular it has been the settlement of New Commonwealth and Pakistani (NCWP) immigrants which has captured the attention of scholars. The Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers for example have, since 1968 (M. Williams, 1988 and updated to 1991) included five papers on the