This article analyses the Welsh presence in twentieth-century Hong Kong, with a special focus on the Second World War and the post-war period up to the present day. Drawing on archival sources from Wales and Hong Kong, newspapers and fieldwork, the article explores community activities in times of conflict and peace, shedding light on the resilience of Welsh associations – the St David's Society and the Welsh Male Voice Choir – across the 1997 handover divide. It also zooms in on the diverse experience of Welsh POWs and civilian internees in Hong Kong during the Second World War and its aftermath. The Welsh experience in Hong Kong reveals contrasting trends: both unity and divergent interests as Welsh, and both close interaction and separation from the majority Chinese population and other nationals. The article argues that the Welsh presence in Hong Kong is one marked by longevity and different global connections.
This article examines the pivotal role of Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (1845–1919) in facilitating transcultural knowledge exchange during China's late Qing reform era (1891– 1915). As head of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge Among the Chinese (SDCGK) in Shanghai, Richard translated seminal texts, for example Robert Mackenzie's The Nineteenth Century: A History (1880) among others, thus shaping China's discourse on history and modernisation as well as paving the way for later reformers and historians to reimagine history beyond both dynastic and imperialist narratives.
This article presents the first case study of the cultural enmeshing of Welsh and imperial ideologies as a result of Empire encounters by analysing the visits of zamindar and Calcutta businessman Dwarkanath Tagore and his nephew Chunder Mohun Chatterjee to the Abergavenny eisteddfodau at the invitation of Lady Augusta Hall of Llanofer. The celebrity cult surrounding Tagore will be compared to the unsuccessful diplomatic campaign of Maratha sardar Rungo Bapojee Gupte on behalf of the deposed raja of Satara, and Gupte's political association with radical Whig MP Lord Benjamin Hall of Llanofer, demonstrating fundamental differences in the contemporary treatment of different regions and rulers of the Indian subcontinent, and their reflection in the Anglophone historiography on India. This essay will lay the groundwork for attempting more differentiated approaches to researching imperial influences on smaller European cultures and different regions of the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century.
This chapter sets out the background and content of this special issue of articles on the theme of 'The Welsh in Asia: New Perspectives on Global Wales in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries'. It begins by assessing the impact of the rise of imperial and global histories on the study of Welsh people and communities worldwide, before setting out the methodological approaches and sources adopted by article authors in this issue. By examining the lives of individual actors and the communities and associations they formed and sustained, the contributions to this volume seek to reposition Wales as an independent actor with its own agency in an Asian and global context.
Between 1945 and 1946, a Welsh Society was active within the British armed forces in Rangoon, formed by members recently engaged in Burma and India, and awaiting repatriation or redeployment. Based on bilingual materials from the National Library of Wales, this article traces the development of this shortlived society, examining its organisational formation, key events, and expressions of Welsh identity. Situated within the broader context of British colonies in Asia, I argue that this wartime edition of an ethnic society from the British Isles was both a conscious assertion of Welshness, and a product of colonial exclusivity and privileges tied to Britishness.
Er i’r ymgyrch derfynol i sefydlu S4C hawlio’i le yn hanes Cymru a mytholeg cenedlaetholdeb Cymreig, nid yw’r llenyddiaeth ysgolheigaidd gyfredol yn rhoi sylw dyledus i resymeg y Llywodraeth Geidwadol ei hun dros ildio a’i sefydlu. Trwy ystyried deunydd archif newydd, mae modd dadlau yr ildiodd y llywodraeth dros y sianel yn bennaf mewn ymateb i don genedlaetholgar ac ymgyrchu torcyfraith a gryfhawyd gan fygythiad Gwynfor Evans i ymprydio hyd at farwolaeth ac ofn gwirioneddol dros ymlediad trais gwleidyddol, arweiniodd at fethiant y Blaid Geidwadol i gynnal disgyblaeth ymhlith ei haelodau seneddol Cymreig.
The Senedd Cymru-Welsh Parliament, Wales's tax-levying, lawmaking Parliament bears little resemblance to the Assembly that began life as a body corporate (with no formal separation of powers between the Assembly and the 'executive') and with no primary legislative powers in May 1999.The story of Welsh devolution since 1999 has been one of considerable instability, as one devolution dispensation has given way to another. As this article discusses, the seeds of constitutional instability and reform were found in the Government of Wales Act 1998 itself. This article focuses on a key internal motor of reform: the body corporate structure.
The age of immigration and settlement in Wales was followed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by an age of social mobility in which a number of families of Welsh and immigrant heritage were able to migrate to English shires, towns and ports, most successfully after the Glynd & wcirc;r revolt. They might change their names and alter their identities, make fortunes and adopt political allegiances in new environments; some maintained contact with their homelands, others not. Three generations of Newtons of Pembrokeshire are an example of this mobility and social transformation in the fifteenth century.
During the years 1948-70, the culturally accepted place of birth for Welsh women shifted. In the 1940s most Welsh women gave birth at home. By the 1970s it was a small minority. While the Welsh transition was particularly marked, it reflected a more general trend of hospital replacing the home as the usual place of birth across the UK. This article looks at how this move to hospital birth influenced the ways in which mothers and midwives thought about home birth. Based on a small oral history collection of interviews with fourteen respondents who lived or practiced in south Wales between 1948 and 1970, the article will analyse the ways in which risk in home birth were articulated by each group, and between the different individuals within these groups. It will consider what the risks of giving birth at home were, whether and how they were changing, and how the portrayal of risk in mothers' and professionals' stories of home birth compared with accounts of risk in hospital birth. While demonstrating the multiple understandings of risk people held, it will posit that, despite their different attitudes towards and experiences of home birth, risk became a common trope of narratives of home birth at this time.
The 1834 New Poor Law saw the reordering of local government across England and Wales. Wales experienced an imposition of reformed poor law administrative structures designed to combat changing economic and social conditions in Midland and Southern England. Such reform fed into the building of modern centralised state power against Welsh traditions of parochial management providing a deep point of conflict. As with several European states new welfare legislation was imposed where the population (including those responsible for delivering it) spoke a different language to those tasked with introducing it. However, language was more than a 'practical' consideration. Some paupers, advocates and union officers continued corresponding and translating official guidance into Welsh: it was clear this was also a means of lingering contestation against an administrative imposition.
'Wales and the French Revolution', a recurring trope of Welsh history, implies a direct relationship between Wales and France. This article argues that the key transnational relationship for the people of Wales during the 1790s was to their own British state and their related identities as Britons. The focus is Walter Davies (Gwallter Mechain), bard, scholar, and a Welsh Briton of the modern imperialist state. Wales of the revolutionary decade was bloodier, more British, and more in the shadow of Burke than often portrayed.
The circumstances for the establishment and subsequent history of a number of Norman lordships in Carmarthenshire by fief holders from Devon and Somerset in the early twelfth century have been surveyed in detail by Bruce Coplestone-Crow. The present article adds to that body of scholarship by a closer examination of the lordship of St Clears and its relationships with the Anglo-Norman and Flemish families of north Devon, the dynasty of Deheubarth and the Geraldines of Pembrokeshire. It also pays particular attention to the parentage of William fitz Hai and attempts to clarify the relationships of Princess Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, client-king of south Wales for William I from 1081 to 1093.
Drych y Prif Oesoedd gan Theophilus Evans oedd un o lyfrau hanes mwyaf poblogaidd Cymru. Mae'r erthygl hon yn astudio'r Drych yng ngoleuni astudiaethau'r cof, ar y berthynas rhwng mannau'r cof a chof diwylliannol. Bydd yn amlygu arwyddocâd lleoedd penodol wrth i Evans geisio gwreiddio'i naratif yng Nghymru. Er mwyn astudio'r berthynas rhwng y Drych a mannau'r cof, asesir sut y mae adfeilion ac enwau lleoedd yn cael eu defnyddio yn y naratif i ddyrchafu'r Cymry fel cenedl hynafol, anrhydeddus dan fendith Duw. Caiff amcanion gwladgarol a chrefyddol y Drych eu hastudio ochr-yn-ochr, gan ddangos sut y defnyddiwyd mannau penodol er mwyn dysgu gwersi moesol i'r Cymry.
Acquiring and displaying war trophies from the First World War was a means of mobilising civilians to support the war effort and legitimising what they had been told of Allied military victories. The enemy's weapons also became symbols of sacrifice before the formalised commemorations in the 1920s. The initial corporate enthusiasm for war trophies in Pembrokeshire can be interpreted as the determination to ensure the sacrifice and efforts of individual communities in helping to win the war received recognition. There were also elements of civic rivalry. However, the initial public enthusiasm for obtaining and maintaining trophies disappeared in the early 1920s as an unwelcome reminder of the losses sustained during the war.
