Good read: Wales, the first and final colony - by Adam Price MP

[geardaddy]

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/wales-first-final-colony---2070487
The speech Adam Price, the MP for Dinefwr and East Carmarthenshire, presented to the Institute of Welsh Politics on November 16, 2009

Institute of Welsh Politics, Annual Address, Aberystwyth, 16th November 2009

I hope you will forgive me a moment of self-parody, but it almost always necessary in Wales to begin any address with an apology. This is a politics lecture which is two thirds history, and one third psychology. I hope at the end of the address you will agree that there is more logic here than may first appear in giving this address at an Institute for Welsh Politics:

The case for the defence is this: that for a fundamentally new politics to flourish in Wales we need a new psychology which has at its heart the idea of Wales, and of ourselves within it, as making our own history.

History does not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme - said Mark Twain. So it is that Wales, for much of its history an anomaly, today finds itself anomalous again. Before the Act of Union we were a conquered nation that was never fully subdued. Post-devolution we're a post-colonial country still waiting to be decolonised. It is these contradictions that describe our present predicament: we are a hybrid state living in the cracks between a dependent past and an independent future.

This lecture is unabashedly didactic. It hopes to convince you of three propositions no less revolutionary for all their simplicity; that the longue duree of English imperialism began here in Wales; that the deepest legacy it has left is psychological. And that national liberation, if it is to mean anything, has to be a liberation of the mind. Otherwise we will be condemning ourselves to be not just the first but also the final colony.

To begin at the beginning. English imperialism can perhaps be described as Wales's greatest and most terrible export. What was tried and tested here, soon became the template for what one English historian has called the "thousand year Reich" of the English empire. It is a pedigree we appear to have worked very hard to forget. The title of "First Colony" is a crown of thorns more often claimed by the Irish – most recently in setting the scene for the 2005 BBC series of The Sceptred Isle that focused on Empire. And yet the Normans settled Wales a near century before Ireland, and the Statute of Rhuddlan, formally annexing Wales, predates its Irish equivalent, the Statute of Kilkenny by about the same number of years. Whatever the Irish suffered, we sadly suffered first.

A more plausible case for English colonialism's origins perhaps could be made by the Cornish. But Cornwall was merged with Wessex before England as a nation proper had been formed. So though it may be the great unspoken fact of our identity, we in Wales were indeed the first piece in England's empire.

But does enough of our past qualify as colonial in the classical sense for this to have relevance for us today?

Answering that question means looking in turn at each of the six core features of colonialism: military conquest, settlement, cultural assimilation, political subjugation, economic exploitation and racial discrimination. There is plenty of evidence of all of them at work in Wales over the best part of a millennium, but the most obvious and least debatable is the brutal fact of the conquest itself: Even today Edward’s I’s ring of iron stands as a potent reminder of our colonial past. The Normans’ castle building programme in Wales remains the most concerted effort at the pacification of an occupied country in European history.

Of course, Wales was to prove, in that classic formulation, an easier country to conquer than to hold. England's new rulers quickly extended their control of the river valleys and coastal lowlands seasonally vacated by a farming people that in the Summer moved their stock to the hills. In some important sense, they never conquered Wales above six hundred feet where their heavily armoured knights lost their advantage over Welsh archers and lightly armed infantry. Indeed the "piecemeal, long-drawn out and uncompleted' nature of the English conquest of Wales was why it had to be done again and again. The highlands and the forest remained in the hands of a Welsh insurgency using the tactics of guerrilla warfare as described by that mixed-race Cambro-Norman Gerallt Cymro. Between 1090 and 1415 Wales was a country in rebellion or else under siege, raiding or being raided, celebrating victory or coping with defeat in a landscape for the English occupying power as hospitable as Helmand, for the Welsh as merciless as Fallujah.

Much more at link.

[tnlurker]

1. For later reading

[grasswire]

2. ditto

sounds fascinating

[fedsron2us]

3. You might say exactly the same about the Norman conquest of England in 1066

Military conquest, settlement, cultural assimilation, political subjugation, economic exploitation and racial discrimination all followed that event. In fact it was the exact template of what was to happen to Wales and Ireland later.