Wales did not experience the same degree of emigration and depopulation as Ireland and Scotland. Quantifying emigration from Wales is difficult as, after the Acts of Union, it ceased to have any separate legal identity from England and no separate statistics were kept. However, it was certainly much lower per head of population than either Scotland or Ireland. Economic change in the Welsh countryside was a gradual process, without the cataclysmic discontinuities of plantations, clearances and famine. As was happening in England at the same time, the enclosure of common lands was driving small farmers off the land, but the losses of rural opportunities were more than compensated for by the rapid industrialisation of the coalfield areas of south and north-east Wales which began in the eighteenth century. Wales became a land of opportunity that attracted hundreds of thousands of English immigrants in the nineteenth century. The South Wales coalfield area experienced an economic boom (as to a lesser extent did the smaller North Wales coalfield) and rapid urban growth, fuelled by a rapidly increasing birth rate, inward migration from the English Midlands, Cornwall and Ireland, and English financial investment. The population of Wales more than doubled between 1770 and 1851, increasing from around
500,000 to 1,163,000, and it had more than doubled again by 1914. Despite the abundance of opportunities at home, there were those who emigrated because they thought they could do better abroad. The skills of Welsh miners and iron workers were especially in demand in the USA as it began to industrialise in the second half of the nineteenth century. A period of aggressive enclosure of common lands, which mainly benefited major landowners, displaced many peasant farmers from the land during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, fuelling emigration.
The rapid increase in the numbers of English speakers in nineteenth-century Wales began to be seen as a threat to Welsh language, culture and identity. This inspired the most self-consciously Celtic element of the Celtic diaspora - attempts to found Welsh-speaking colonies abroad where Welsh culture could be preserved from Anglicising influences. The first overseas Welsh language communities were founded in North America, such as at Cambria in Pennsylvania and Bangor in Saskatchewan. These settlements proved too successful for their own good because they attracted English-speaking settlers in such large numbers that they soon began to swamp the Welsh speakers. This led to attempts to found colonies outside the English-speaking world, in Russia, Brazil and Argentina. The most successful of these was founded in 1865 in the Chubut valley in Argentinean Patagonia. Of the original 163 settlers only two had any experience of farming and for several years the colony struggled to survive. But survive it did. Beginning in the mid 1870s the colony began to attract new waves of Welsh settlers until by 1914 its population reached about 3,000.
Y Wladfa was a completely self-contained Welsh-speaking community, with Welsh the language of chapel, school, business, law and local government. The Argentinean government had promised that it would recognise
Y Wladfa (‘The Colony’) as one of the states of Argentina but this promise was never fulfilled: it was worried that the presence of the Welsh would provide a pretext for British territorial claims in the area. In 1880 the Argentinean government began to assert control over the rather too independent colony, imposing conscription and, in 1896, Spanish as the language of education. At the same time Spanish and Italian settlers flooded into the valley, quickly outnumbering the Welsh. The Welsh language entered a long decline, but there has been a modest revival in the last 20 years. Welsh heritage is celebrated with eisteddfodau and the old colony has become something of a tourist attraction. While the Patagonian Welsh may be secure for the immediate future, Y Wladfa is not the New Wales its founders hoped for.
World History
