Kathryn Cooper has produced a highly-detailed and well-constructed volume offering a number of fresh perspectives on the migration and emigration patterns and networks characteristic of Cardiganshire in the nineteenth century. Using data from the census and a variety of other sources, she discusses the origins, occupations, age structures and residential distribution of those leaving the county for the industrial areas of south Wales and the haberdasheries, gardens, mills and building sites of London, Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. This is complemented by a consideration of the funding, promotion and mechanics of emigration to North America, usually by way of the port of Liverpool. Apart from those who were fed up with the tedium of rural drudgery and sought a more vibrant social and cultural life, most were driven to leave the county of their birth by the combined effects of land hunger, agrarian depression, the decline in the fortunes of the lead mining industry and the overall lack of employment opportunities as the nineteenth century wore on. So it was that hundreds of small farmers, labourers and rural craftsmen headed south or east to seek their fortunes among the English or the south Walians, or westwards to Aberystwyth or Aberaeron and thence to Liverpool and the exciting uncertainties of a transatlantic voyage.

Cooper's earlier chapters set out the economic and socio-cultural background to the story. In doing so they rework an already well-tilled field, reminding us that there is little new to be said about the lead mining industry of Cardiganshire, or, indeed, its nineteenth-century agriculture. Time and again the old myths are reiterated. The hoary argument that the small farmer was socially and economically no better than a farm labourer, deriving from a single witness statement to the 1882 Richmond Commission, appears here once again in the face of abundant documentary and testamentary evidence to the contrary. Did tenants really want to buy their freeholds in the late nineteenth century and thereby exhaust such meagre capital they may have had? Not at all. Most were forced to do so to avoid their birthrights being bought up by English or, worse, south Walian entrepreneurs.

Dr Cooper is at her best when she writes of the processes of migration and emigration. On the other hand, we get little idea of how people felt about quitting their home hearths; of the angst, the despair, the frustration, the anticipation, the excitement. Since the local sources offer few clues, subsequent students of emigration might consider searching the files of transatlantic archives and newspapers for evidence of flesh to apply to the rather bare statistical skeleton. In doing so they will find Dr Cooper's work an invaluable companion. Before I sat down to write this piece I took a long walk in the uplands of the central Cardiganshire parish of Trefenter. Under a depressingly grey December sky and in the teeth of a westerly gale I struggled through a treeless morass of moor grass tussocks, sphagnum moss and peat bog. All around me lay the remnants of deserted holdings and their tiny associated enclosures. Day after day of unremitting labour on unforgiving boggy soil under leaden, rain-sodden skies with chapel on Sunday as the only relief must have seemed a grim prospect to a young man of enterprise in the second half of the nineteenth century. No wonder many left. There may have been compelling economic reasons for quitting, but I suspect that for every homesick Cardi in the suburbs of London, the factories of Manchester, the coalmines of Pennsylvania or the plains of Ohio, there were half a dozen who were glad to have got away.