Book Reviews

Abstract

The nature of community is a question which has increasingly exercised historians, anthropologists, and sociologists since the middle of the twentieth century. Traditionall y understood as an ideal which promoted belonging, support, inclusion, and protection, more recent work has emphasised fluidity and contingency, taking account of less positive dynamics of exclusion and xenophobia attached to these feelings. Through a study of the Forest of Dean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this article argues for complexity in local senses of community. It also suggests that the nature of these affective bonds, regional loyalties and patterns of conflict was closely related to the particular conditions of the mining industry which had dominated the local economy since the later Middle Ages.