ABSTRACT
Wales, with mineral resources and a similar but slightly more advanced society, is a still more interesting test case. There, handicapped in the early stages by lack of capital, lack of entrepreneurs and lack of a potential proletariat, industrialism had to be induced from outside. The result was a semi-colonial economy in which capital was provided in large blocks by English capitalists, encouraged by favourable concessions from local mineral owners, and recruiting over long distances a heterogeneous and at first partially migratory labour force. Hence the importance of London and Bristol merchants, the long, beneficial mineral leases, and the excessive friction of Welsh industrial relations. Hence too the sense of exploitation by an Anglophile gentry and an alien capitalism. As a contemporary English observer ingenuously put it, ‘it was rather curious to observe how few of the inhabitants of South Wales have benefited from the extraordinary wealth their country contains and that the Saxon race of men should have been almost the sole adventurers which have in later times brought this wealth into action, and by their ingenuity, perseverance and adventurous spirit have raised many a noble fortune and laid the foundation of many more.’2 If South Wales was gradually brought into the mainstream of industrialism, its economy still bears today the scars of its semi-colonial past.
