New Perspectives on Welsh Industrial History

• The book features eight chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of Welsh industry and tackling a range of themes from gender to class, and from and identity to globalisation. • A substantial introductory essay surveys the main developments in the historical study of industrial Wales, serving as a useful introduction not only to this volume, but also to the historiography of Welsh economic and industrial history. • There is a particularly strong concentration of chapters on the twentieth century, hitherto probably the most neglected period of study in modern Welsh industrial history. The four chapters in the volume which deal exclusively with the twentieth century offer some important new insights, particularly into the Welsh steel and manufacturing industries. • The volume features an extensive bibliography, providing students and other academic readers a comprehensive and up-to-date resource for further reading and research. • A number of graphs, tables and illustrations give the volume a visual dimension and provide some key quantitative data on patterns of employment, production and output.

New Perspectives on Welsh Industrial History is a collection of eight essays examining different aspects of industrial development in Wales. It includes essays on the Welsh copper, coal and steel industries, and on the growth of the manufacturing sector after the Second World War.This volume tells a story of Welsh industrial history different from the one traditionally dominated by the coal and iron communities of Victorian and Edwardian Wales. Extending the chronological scope from the early eighteenth- to the late twentieth-century, and encompassing a wider range of industries, the contributors combine studies of the internal organisation of workplace and production with outward-facing perspectives of Welsh industry in the context of the global economy. The volume offers important new insights into the companies, the employers, the markets and the money behind some of the key sectors of the Welsh economy – from coal to copper, and from steel to manufacturing – and challenges us to reconsider what we think of as constituting ‘industry’ in Wales.