the subject. It is written authoritatively and clearly. However, the surprisingly slenderindex and the lack of a full bibliography at the end of the volume surely detract from itsvalue as a work of reference or student text. And the absence of any maps must alsoreduce its value to readers unfamiliar with the political geography of the British Isles.

Mark BrayshayUniversity of Plymouth

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0430, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

David Howell, The Rural Poor in Eighteenth Century Wales (Cardiff: University ofWales Press, 2000. Pp xvi� 317. £35.00 hardback)

REVIEWS 299

In many ways this is an excellent book, providing a wide-ranging economic and socialsurvey of Wales with a particular focus on the nuances of social strati®cation and socialrelations. The prologue deals with patterns of farming (showing that outside of the mostadvanced lowland areas Welsh agriculture remained completely backward), landscape(showing that common and waste remained important and enclosure was late andpatchy), the distribution of land (picking up on themes such as the decline of the smallfarmer and Gentry and the rise of middling and large Gentry estates), settlement andpopulation and the social hierarchy, effectively setting the research agenda for the rest ofthe book. Page 17 introduces a brilliant new phrase, referring to the poor as ``The frayedhem of society''. I wish that I had thought of it. Chapter 2 deals with tenant farmers andsmall freeholders, arguing that the economic lives of such people were fragile, so much sothat rents continued to paid partially in kind throughout the eighteenth century and thatin cultural terms they were backward looking. Chapter 3 deals with craftsmen andartisans arguing, in a very short chapter, that if anything the economic lives of this groupwere evenmore precarious than the lives of tenant farmers. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with thelabouring and `̀ dependent'' poor respectively covering aspects of the economy ofmakeshifts, housing, diet, pressure on the incomes of those who worked after 1750 inparticular, and poor relief as a plank in the economy of makeshifts. Poor relief wasapparently rare inWales prior to 1750 but after 1780 theWelsh poor law appears to haveshared many of the trends in spending, pauper numbers and composition of the pauperhost that we also see in England. The response of the vestries to the growing pauperismproblem is interesting: ``niggardliness was exacerbated by the sour and begrudgingattitude displayed to their paupers on the part of the parish authorities'' (p. 114). In thissense Wales shared characteristics of the regional poor law systems in the west and northwest of England and it would be excellent to see such links drawn out in future work.Chapter 6 deals with strained social relations in Welsh communities and sets up Chapter7, which deals with Welsh popular culture. This is a very interesting discussion,emphasising the dominance of the Welsh language in ordinary lives until well past 1800,portraying popular culture as essentially bawdy and bloody and suggesting that levels ofreligious observance were consistently low. Interestingly, Methodism made inroads intothe middling classes rather than amongst working people. Chapter 8 deals with popularand elite politics and Chapter 9, possibly the most interesting of the whole book, takes onthe thorny subject of riot and popular resistance. Howell argues that ``The ruralcommunity had its own standards and sense of right and wrong which often con¯ictedwith statutory law'', pointing to frequent food riots, wrecking, smuggling and creating asense of an ungovernable society responsible for enforcing its own discipline (p. 209).Chapter 10 deals with localised crime patterns, while Chapter 11 tries to draw togethersome of the disparate strands of the book, suggesting that by 1790 the old order was incrisis and social relations had been poisoned.

300 REVIEWS

This material is well written and cleverly uses primary sources to reveal interesting newperspectives. Yet in some ways the book also represents an opportunity lost. Anyonepicking it up expecting to hear about the Welsh poor law, the economy of makeshifts inWales, the thoughts and fears of the Welsh poor on issues such as inherited or life-cyclepoverty and the gender impact of poverty will be largely disappointed. There are goodchapters on social structure and one chapter on the dependent poor as I have noted, butthe basic assumption of the book is that everyone, from tenant farmers to labourers, was`̀ poor''. The book does little to rectify the observation that there is a ``frustrating want ofknowledge on the precise degree of pauperism in the whole society'' (p. 94). A thoroughdiscussion of terms might thus have been useful early on in the book, or perhaps less inthe epilogue about the Gentry and increasing late eighteenth century opposition to them,and more on the dependent poor under the Welsh poor law. Such discussion could haveset up an agenda for research on the Welsh poor law, about which we know next tonothing. This said, The Rural Poor reminds me very much of the brief adopted by KeithSnell in his Annals of the Labouring Poor, and on these terms it is to be welcomed as avaluable addition to the literature on a much under-studied area.

Steven KingOxford Brookes University

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0431, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804ÿ1946(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. ix-304. $39.50 hardback)

Theorizing geographic concepts such as space, place, and environment, concepts that hadbeenwidely examined as static and given formuch of this century, have preoccupiedmuchgeographic work in the past two decades. What distinguishes Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet'sFrontier Fictions is the argument that nation-building and nationalism in Iran shaped andwas shaped by its frontier regions. Thus, she asserts that not only were conceptualizationsof landand territorycentral to thedevelopmentofnationalist ideology, but that examiningfrontiers allows for a pluralistic understanding of the development of nationalism.Kashani-Sabet begins with the important question of how it is that social constructionsof landand territory evoke such strong feelings among Iraniannationalists.Toanswer thisquestion, sheargues thatwemust lookbacktonineteenth-centuryQajar Iran.Through theconcept of `̀ frontier ®ctions,'' she posits the necessity of historically analyzing the ®ctionsthat have produced a sense of national unity and the frictions and ¯uctuations that haveaccompanied these ®ctions along frontier regions. Ideas about land and territory, thegrowing use of modern maps and map-making techniques, and the rise of the academicdiscipline of geography were tools utilized to construct and contest nationalist ideology.Usingtheemergingconceptsof landandterritoryasthebaseofheranalysis,Kashani-Sabetchronicles thebases for the development ofmodernnationalism in Iran.Over the courseofthe nineteenth century and as a result of the colonial threats of Great Britain and Russia,Qajar of®cials became less concernedwith the expansion of boundaries andmorewith thecentralization, consolidation, and defence of Iran as a modern nation-state. Ideas of landandterritorywerecentral tothisprocess,with `̀ Iran''beingalternately invokedasthecentreof the old Persian Empire, as an Islamic dominion to be protected from the threat ofoutsiders, and as a territory throughwhich inhabitants gain ``rights'' to its use.Around theturn of the century ideas of liberalism, constitutionalism, and economic growth emerged.These newnationalists argued for self-determinationand criticized theQajars for allowingthe `̀ fertile'' lands of Iran to fall into misuse. Revolutionaries and reformists thuscapitalized upon and adapted ideas about land and territory within their own politicalobjectives. This nationalist movement was met with signi®cant resistance within Turkic,