Neil Evans - Writing a Small Nations Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, 1850-1950

Writing a Small Nations Past

Wales in Comparative Perspective, 18501950

Edited by
NEIL EVANS
Cardiff University, UK
AND
HUW PRYCE
Cardiff University, UK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2013 Neil Evans and Huw Pryce

Neil Evans and Huw Pryce have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Evans, Neil, 1948
Writing a small nations past : Wales in comparative perspective, 18501950 / by Neil Evans and Huw Pryce.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-5062-7 (hardcover)
1. WalesHistoriography. 2. WalesHistory19th century.
3. WalesHistory20th century. 4. HistoriographyCase studies. I. Pryce, Huw. II. Title.

DA722.E93 2013
942.90072dc23

2013019350

ISBN 9781409450627 (hbk)

Lowri Angharad Hughes Ahronson, Director of the Language Scheme, Bangor University

Stefan Berger, Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute of Social Movements, Ruhr Universitt Bochum

Ciaran Brady, Professor of Early Modern History and Historiography, Trinity College Dublin

Dauvit Broun, Professor of Scottish History, Glasgow University

T.M. Charles-Edwards, Jesus Professor of Celtic Emeritus, University of Oxford

Nancy Edwards, Professor of Medieval Archaeology, Bangor University

John S. Ellis, Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan-Flint

Neil Evans, Honorary Research Fellow in History, Cardiff University

R.J.W. Evans, Regius Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oxford

John Gould, Doctoral Student in Archaeology, Bangor University

Ralph A. Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History, Swansea University

Adam J. Kosto, Professor of History, Columbia University

Peter Lambert, Lecturer in History, Aberystwyth University

Marion Lffler, Research Fellow, University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth

Prys Morgan, Emeritus Professor of History, Swansea University

Paul OLeary, Senior Lecturer in Welsh History, Aberystwyth University

Huw Pryce, Professor of Welsh History, Bangor University

Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, formerly Senior Lecturer, University of East London

Ian Wood, Professor of Early Medieval History, Leeds University

All the chapters in this volume, apart from the first, originated as papers given at a conference in July 2011 at Bangor University to mark the centenary of the publication of J.E. Lloyds A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest. We are very grateful to our fellow contributors for being so ready to speak at the conference and to revise their papers for publication, to Ashgate for taking the volume on, and also to Janet Davis for compiling the index. The aim of the conference was to reflect on writing about the Welsh past during Lloyds lifetime and to set this in a European context, especially with respect to the history of small nations within multinational states. The same is true of the present collection. Accordingly, while Lloyd and his History make frequent appearances in what follows, the main focus of the book lies on the wider historiographical landscape to which they belonged.

Neil Evans
Huw Pryce

Neil Evans and Huw Pryce

The restoration of medieval relics and the destruction of medieval ideas are what we see going on all around us in the nineteenthntury.2

The leader writer in a Cardiff newspaper in the mid-Victorian period got right to the heart of the culture of the age. He was drawing attention to what has been seen as a duality in thought since the industrial revolution. On the one hand, an organic conception of society, represented by the predominant styles of architecture of the period which looked back to the past; on the other, triumphant liberalism impatient with the past and seeing it only as a background against which the achievements of the nineteenth century could be better displayed. Surveying almost 200 years of British thought, Raymond Williams concluded: The development of the idea of culture has, throughout, been a criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society.3 What both these currents of thought have in common is an engagement with the past. Carl Schorske argues that such an approach is a distinctive feature of the era. It was characteristically one in which people were thinking with history or, to use the term of Friedrich Schlegel, it was an age of backward looking prophets. In the eighteenth century philosophy had been the dominant approach (with history a mere handmaiden) and in the twentieth century modernism would be based on an indifference to the past. Like postmodernism, it rejected history as process.4 Central to thinking with history was historicism, a much contested term which is sometimes also translated at historism. Its essence was the view that the present was shaped by events in the past and most radically that meant simply by those events and not by providence or any other trans-historical force such as an unchanging human nature, reason or natural law. This viewpoint entered European consciousness by the late eighteenth century and a century later it had crossed the Atlantic to the United States. While the conception developed out of the Enlightenment, it was in many ways a break with Enlightenment modes of thought.5