This is the first book on John Edward Lloyd (1861-1947), widely regarded as the founder of the modern academic study of Welsh history. Published to mark the centenary of Lloyd's most important achievement, "A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest" (1911), this intellectual biography reassesses Lloyd's significance by setting his work in the context of his life and of the ideas and scholarship of his time. It thus provides a case study of how the past of a small, stateless nation was reconfigured to provide a new narrative of national origins.