Tag: social reform

• Robert Owen (1771-1858) of Newtown, Montgomeryshire

  

  Industry, Community, and the Moral Reconstruction of Society Few individuals produced by rural Wales exercised an influence so disproportionate to their origins as Robert Owen (1771–1858) of Newtown. Born in a modest Montgomeryshire market town at the edge of upland Wales, Owen became one of the most consequential social thinkers of the Industrial Revolution, a…

  Antony David Davies

  28/02/2026

  History

  books, British Industrial History, Cooperative Movement, Cooperative Movement History, Early Cooperative Societies, Economic History, Education Reform History, History, History of Education, History of Socialism, History of Work, Industrial Britain, Industrial Revolution, Labour History Britain, marxism, Montgomeryshire Figures, montgomeryshire-history, New Harmony Indiana, New Lanark, Newtown, Nonconformist Wales, philosophy, Politics, Robert Owen, Social History Britain, social reform, Utopian Socialism, Welsh biography, Welsh heritage, Welsh history, Welsh Industrialists, Welsh intellectual history, Welsh Reformers, Welsh Social Reformers, Welsh Thinkers

• The Treachery of 1847: How the “Blue Books” Colonised the Welsh Mind

  

  In 1847 three substantial parliamentary reports were laid before Westminster under the unromantic title Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. Their blue covers gave them their enduring popular name, the “Blue Books”, and their conclusions, or at least the spirit in which those conclusions were delivered, detonated across…

  Antony David Davies

  13/02/2026

  History

  19th-century-wales, anglicisation, Blue Books 1847, books, Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, British state and Wales, Chapel culture, class and respectability, cultural assimilation, cultural colonisation, cultural trauma, Cymraeg, education, education in Wales, gender and nationhood, heritage and identity, Historical memory, History, history of Wales, industrial Wales, internalised oppression, language shift, language suppression, Nonconformity, parliamentary inquiry, Politics, politics of language, postcolonial Wales, psychological colonisation, Rebecca Riots, Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry 1847, Rural Wales, social reform, Victorian morality, victorian-wales, Wales and England relations, Welsh Chapels, Welsh culture, Welsh devolution context, Welsh education history, Welsh history, Welsh identity, Welsh language, Welsh nationalism, Welsh women, writing