Why does Wales need new books about race?
Charlotte Williams introduces a new series of studies from University of Wales Press that will help Wales reevaluate its relationship with the rest of the world
It is now a feature of historical consensus and continuity that Wales is and always has been ethnically diverse. Global connections through exploration, exploitation, through trade and industry, through missionary activity and the social and intimate connections of personal encounter have shaped what Wales is today. The nation’s history and heritage, literature, art, and landscape – both built and natural – are marked by these entanglements.
In the current era these processes and exchanges that characterise Wales’ past have come under closer scrutiny. Stori Cymru is being revisited as the legacies of colonialism and imperialism are being interrogated, lost histories uncovered and revealed, understandings of identities and belonging broadening and the challenges of racial inequalities and misrepresentations being addressed by strident policy interventions. Public monuments, street names and country houses are being reconsidered in the light of Wales’ connections with slavery, as well the legacies of Welsh industries such as iron, copper, coal and wool.
This revisionism is occurring in public policy and in social and cultural life but is also keenly apparent in research and scholarship. Academic disciplines are engaging with the process of decolonisation in considering what and how knowledge is generated, valorised and communicated. Studies with a focus on Wales are being reshaped by both a ‘globalising turn’, in expanding their axis and reach of analysis, and by a ‘decolonising turn’ in the revisiting of disciplinary content, methodologies and terminologies.
Interest in race/ethnicity studies is growing and developing apace. Students, teachers, practitioners, policy makers and the general public are keen to explore the national context in these terms. A new series commissioned by the University of Wales Press seeks to capture this moment, consolidating existing work in race/ethnicity studies and prompting new research and scholarship.
It is undoubtedly the case that race/ethnicity scholarship in Wales has hitherto been marginal and dispersed within the broad range of disciplines that constitute Welsh studies. Although a bedrock of race studies stretching back some forty years provides a strong foundation on which to develop and craft new and innovative disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, there has been a noticeable failure to embed the perspectives and methodologies this work offers or to coherently integrate it into mainstream study of Wales. Examples abound. Why did the sociology of Wales not capitalise on Ken Little’s groundbreaking study of the pre-Windrush settlement of a black community in Britain? Little’s volume, which centred on Cardiff, had a much broader relevance and remit in that it delineated this community against a background of the black presence in Britain as a whole, making it ‘the first book to look at the history of black people as a distinct group’. Little’s study may have been questioned for its representation of the black community but it was nevertheless a detailed and methodologically sound piece of sociology of immense historical significance.
We can ask further, why did the historiography of Wales fail to account for Welsh involvement in the colonial enterprise of slavery and why was the term Imperial Wales used in such a restrictive sense in the nation’s history books, accounting solely for trade and industrial exchanges but not for the consequent social and cultural impacts of that migratory encounter of peoples. The movement of people and the flow of cultural ideas is central to the history of Wales and its relationship with the wider world.
The bit-part explanation is the evident tension between studies that seek to establish a national boundary as their focus and studies located in the complex web of global interconnections; the tension between nationalism and nation building and placing Wales’ within the matrix of global encounters. If the nexus of Welsh/English relations has dominated the historical narrative, it is now apparent that today’s multicultural realities demand a much broader viewing of Welsh engagements across the globe. If the silences in the history books served a narrative of Welsh oppression devoid of culpability then now is the time to revise that portrayal. So, we must ask, how do we place Wales in its world without compromising the role that a nation’s history, literature and arts plays in defining itself for itself?
The disciplinary dearth has had a number of impacts, both in terms of the knowledge deficit but more acutely on the ways in which the narrative of Wales and Welshness has developed. Ideas about tolerance, internationalism, inclusiveness and a certain distancing from colonial incursions all require interrogation. Acknowledgement of the presence of black and minority ethnic peoples in Wales past and present, and their lived experience, needs a context.

Revealing that the country is less monochrome than it was once perceived to be, and a little less white, is important but should be part of a bigger story of change and development. A race/ethnicity studies focused discretely on presence would chart the development of a new specialism but could be seen as merely adding decoration to the existing structure of thought and knowledge base without changing that knowledge in deeper and more significant ways. The strong underpinning rationale for the proposed series is the ways in which Wales is being reshaped and reimagined through its racial and ethnic diversity. It will tell us as much about Wales and Welshness as it will about the presence of ethnically diverse groups who have been living in Wales over generations.
The ambition is for a suite of texts, straddling and connecting interdisciplinary concerns, that will locate Wales within more general trends in scholarship that embrace a refreshed transnationalism and that take us beyond much of the methodological nationalism that has characterised Welsh studies in the past.
It is as yet early days in the commissioning process but forthcoming texts will consider the changing nature of Welsh studies, the broad range of migrations to Wales, Welsh settler colonialism in Patagonia, the Pennant family and their connections with the slave trade, missionary encounters and much more.
What these texts will demonstrate is that as well as excavating more of the hidden histories of minorities in Wales we need to confront the way in which global connections and the minority presence have shaped our understanding of Wales beyond the old trope of host/minority relations. Embedding diversity as a central theme in Welsh studies takes us beyond disciplinary concerns towards an examination of change and transformation in society itself.
Charlotte Williams and Neil Evans are Series Editors for ‘Race/Ethnicity: Wales and the World’, a groundbreaking new series from University of Wales Press.