Social Disorder in Britain, 1750-1850 The Power of the Gentry,
Radicalism and Religion in Wales Tauris Academic Studies London:
I.B. Tauris, 2011 Hardcover. x+259 pp. ISBN 978-1848855038.
£59.50 Reviewed by David W. Howell During the turbulent years of
social and political unrest in Britain between 1750 and 1850,
Wales was to experience corn riots in the 1790s and 1800-01, the
Merthyr Rising of 1831, the Chartist Rising at Newport in 1839
and the Rebecca Riots of 1839 and 1842-43. Indeed, the early
nineteenth-century iron towns clustering around Merthyr were the
most unsettled part of the Before embarking on this two-pronged
enterprise, Professor Thomas commendably investigates the social
and economic hinterland in successive chapters entitled ‘The
Welsh Squirearchy’—who as the ruling landed class he somewhat
uncritically disparages as feckless, idle and incompetent—and
‘The Peasantry of Wales’, a chapter which undertakes a broad-
ranging examination of both the farming population and rural
industrial workers