Darwin’s Other Islands will rightly suggest to readers of this journal several further questions thatArmstrong does not address at length. As a recent volume of this journal has shown, the historicalgeographies of islands raise a set of questions additional to, but connected with, scientific descrip-tion and explanation. Darwin looked with an imperial ‘reasoning eye’, a gaze that connected, if ina provisional and changing manner, the mission of the man of science and of empire. More mighthave been done by Armstrong to specify and unravel such connections. The ways in which Dar-win’s published accounts were differently composed depending on the conditions of publicationand the audiences Darwin and others had in mind might be one way of doing this. As a numberof scholars have shown, such considerations matter in better understanding how imperial politicsinterwove with natural historical description in Darwin’s recordings of the Beagle voyage. I wasalso left pondering how Darwin’s descriptive practices and speculative conclusions might be com-pared with other voyaging naturalists of his day. What, in other words, might be gained and whatlost by decentring not only the Galapagos Islands but Darwin himself? Darwin’s Other Islands,with its careful account of fieldwork method, suggests that detailed comparisons between thehuge island mass that is Darwin and the smaller and disappearing islands of other early-nine-teenth-century ships’ naturalists would prove both fruitful and transformative.

Diarmid FinneganQueen’s University, Belfast, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.09.005

785Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 784e826

John Elliott, The Industrial Development of the Ebbw Valleys, 1780e1914, Cardiff, University ofWales Press, 2004, 216 pages, £14.99 paperback.

As its title suggests this is a study of one (strictly two) of the Gwent valleys of south Wales, thenames of whose townships e Ebbw Vale, Newbridge, Cross Keys, Abercarn, Blaina and Abertil-lery e read like the handbook of the Welsh Rugby Union. They are also milestones in any journeythrough Wales’ industrial past, but are known best of all perhaps for the political figures associ-ated with them, Aneurin Bevan and his successor Michael Foot having represented the Ebbw Valeconstituency at Westminster for over fifty years. The fact that these are political rather than in-dustrial figures illustrates one of the points John Elliott is anxious to make, that while theymay lack the powerful connotations of better known coal valleys further west such as theRhondda, the Ebbw valleys made a significant but hitherto unexplored contribution to the indus-trial history of south Wales.

It is a variegated history of iron, coal, steel and water, and in many ways one of lost opportu-nities. As well as industrial processes, patterns of production, export, migration and settlementcome under the author’s searching purview and readers of this Journal will applaud the well-informed attention he accords the determining geology and geography of the area. Its industrialhistory is longer than that of its better known neighbours since iron ore was first mined at Abercarnin the seventeenth century and continued to be mined in outcrops as late as 1865. The early, easyaccess to iron ore and sale coal ensured that growth would be over a long period and settlement

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sporadic. Influential landowners like the Morgans and Hanburys were quick to exploit mineralreserves and devised the means to transport them, but took few steps to provide ameliorative ame-nities of the kind that were common enough elsewhere, not least educational ones. This was rem-edied only with the intermediate schools of the late nineteenth century, and they fell short of theiradvocates’ ideals by opting for an ‘English’ arts-based curriculum rather than the technical andscientific one their society needed. Here, perhaps lies the key why these valleys produced politi-cians and preachers rather than technocrats and engineers.

The author does not spurn the technological details involved in the access and winning of coalsedredging, scouring, and patching, prospecting, sinking and boring e without being boring himself.Poignant moments emerge, like the testimony of a Mynyddislwyn boy haulier in 1842: ‘I do notknow how old I am; father thinks I am eight years old. I do not know when I first went to work,it is a long time since’ (p. 36). Dr Elliott, who has had an industrial and academic career, drawson his professional expertise to examine the commercial and financial performance in terms of con-cepts such as ‘the marketing mix’ and ‘the trading account’, but on the segmentation of those mar-kets even an historian can understand him. Its excellent steam coal took the Ebbw valleys (to theauthor they are geographically plural but grammatically singular, sometimes with infelicitousresults like ‘the Ebbw valleys has .’) to the top of the Admiralty List; it not only lit and raisedsteam rapidly, it was less smoky than others, ‘which was a considerable advantage if creepingup, say, on an unwary Chinese junk’ (p. 57). But the List was not static, and by the beginning ofthe twentieth century there were no Monmouthshire coals on it. By then, though, they were theprimary supplier to railways from the GWR to Egypt and Denmark.

Steel making in the Ebbw valleys had a remarkable longevity and Dr Elliott takes us throughthe phases of development that would culminate in the transformation that took place between1935 and 1947 when Ebbw Vale steel again emerged triumphant. It had survived the inventionof the hot blast in 1829; turned to coal at the end of the century, and nearly collapsed in 1929,but in the mid 1930s the government for once intervened to avoid a social catastrophe, forcedthe Bank of England to make a six million pound loan, and by the end of the decade theEbbw Vale works were ‘at the vanguard of the most radical transformation of the British [steel]industry since the inventions of Bessemer and Gilchrist in the 1850s and 1870s and managed tosurvive until the restructuring of the European industry of the 1990s’ (p. 95).

South Wales’ heavy dependence on coal prompted the late Professor L.J. Williams to askwhether Wales was in any meaningful sense industrialised at all. Dr Elliott applies this questionto the Ebbw valleys and like John Williams laments the failure to develop secondary industries inthe years of expansion between 1850 and 1914. Symbolic was the experience of the Crumlin Via-duct Company that built bridges for the world from Blackfriars to Buenos Aires. The Crumlinviaduct was one of the wonders of industrial Wales; and a fine lithograph of it rightly gracesthe book’s cover (where it is carelessly misdated as c. 1806, fifty years before it was built e notthe publishers’ only slip). It lasted until its demolition in the 1960s, almost eighty yearsafter the company that built it went bankrupt. Yet the Crumlin Viaduct Works was the only en-gineering company of any international standing to be found in western Monmouthshire in thenineteenth century, and Dr Elliott plausibly explains the stunted development of secondary indus-try in the Ebbw valleys in terms of inadequate technical education provision that led for instanceto a deficiency in key precision craft skills like tool making. While such factors as the reluctance ofthe ironmasters to diversify also played a role, the crucial missing link was the one that might have

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connected educational provision to industrial need and created an environment conducive to thedevelopment of indigenous entrepreneurs. And always there was the dominating presence of thecoal industry whose insatiable demands transcended even the limitations of a basically ineffectivetransport system.

Local government too was ineffective when it came to getting things done. The Ebbw valleyswere split into eleven local councils (where Merthyr and the Rhondda were each single authori-ties) and competing self-interests worked against the improvements in public health until it wasalmost too late. Disease and high mortality continued far longer than they should have, and bythe turn of the century these valleys ‘had become a very dangerous place to live and particularlyto raise children’ (p. 158), with endemic measles and diphtheria making it one of the most disease-ridden places in the country. The solution lay in concerted action to provide a clean water supplyand improved sewerage. A reservoir site in the Black Mountains was selected in 1906, but the damdid not become wholly operational until 1928. The highest in Britain at the time, it had taken overtwenty years to build and cost four times its original estimate but the virulent sanitation problemsof the Ebbw district had belatedly been met.

A rushed final chapter devoted to ‘the people’ tries to pour a gallon of molten metal into a pintpot, and the attempt to encompass within fifteen pages ‘the politics of the welfare state, the pres-ervation of the Welsh language and the drive towards devolution and for fifty years or so of rugbyfootball’ (p. 179; why fifty?) was doomed to failure. This unsatisfactory bolt-on apart, JohnElliott’s scrupulously researched and well-written monograph is in all other respects an unquali-fied triumph.

Gareth WilliamsUniversity of Glamorgan, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.09.006

David Harrison, The Bridges of Medieval England: Transport and Society 400e1800, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 2004, 249 pages, £45 hardback.

Ancient bridges are both picturesque objects beloved by artists, and marvels of engineering. Asthey were rebuilt or replaced in the 19th and 20th centuries, they became objects of nostalgia;then they were forgotten, except by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. They com-missioned Edwin Jervoise to travel the country searching for and recording the fabric of oldbridges. He systematically recorded information on 5000 bridges which was published in a seriesof regional volumes in 1930e1936. Little work has been done since on a national scale. DavidHarrison set himself the task of rediscovering the bridges of medieval England and in doing sohas recovered an important element of economic geography of the country. However, this isno historical geography; it is the traditional historian’s fare of careful documentary research, crit-ical review of a wide-ranging literature, and discernment of new frameworks of understanding. Itmust also be said straight away that this book is mainly about the bridges: it says much less abouttransport and society than the title suggests.