Reading History: Modern Wales

The study of modern Welsh history is flourishing as never before. Even in these straitened times the corpus of dissertations, monographs, learned articles and works of synthesis continues to grow. Indeed, the fact that the study of the past is one of the few remaining growth industries in Wales has prompted one critic to observe wryly that the Common Market might well place a quota on further research on the grounds that there are now more Welsh historians than there are sheep per acre on Welsh hills. The Renaissance has occurred over the past twenty-five years and the degree of progress has been such that the learned conclusions of Welsh historians about the most critical aspects of the history of modern Wales found in A.J. Roderick ed., Wales through the Ages (vol. II, Llandybi'e, 1960) are so dated that they seem almost to belong to another world. The present cultural plight of Wales and the stubborn refusal of many of its people to abandon their historic identity have provided considerable grist for scholarly mills.