ABSTRACT
Politics in Wales begin with the American revolution. Among a people still substantially monoglot Welsh, first political publication in its own language was a translation of a pamphlet on the British dispute with American colonies. In the eighteenth century, Welsh landowners were painlessly integrated into the broad, acquisitive, astute, ruthless and flexible oligarchy of England and subjected to a handful of magnates, often Anglo-Scottish in origin. Encrusted with its dependent interest groups, buttressed by its myriad hungry servitors and lubricated by deferential but robust Church-and-King ideologies which could find room for Welsh sentiment or sentimentality if safely antiquarian or anodyne in cultural content, the system worked well enough for its purposes. The American struggle, the American example of civic equality and freedom, added a whole dimension to the world of Welsh Dissent during the reform campaigns of 1780s in Britain. In the process it adds a historical dimension to the Jacobinism of Wales.
