This book, first published in 1980, describes and analyses the revolutionary years that saw the birth of the first modern Welsh nation and the American Republic. In the last days of the eighteenth century, as the Atlantic world responded to the challenge of the American and French revolutions, the novel industrial capitalism of England planted itself in the Welsh south and east, and disrupted traditional rural community to west and north. Wales, a marginal and poverty-stricken country, was propelled into modernisation, cultural revival, a breach with the Establishment, a millenarian mitigation and its first politics.