A Missionary Nation

Race, Religion, and Spain's Age of Liberal Imperialism, 1841–1881

Scott Eastman

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781496204165
• eBook ISBN: 9781496228307
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

A Missionary Nation focuses on Spain's crusade to resurrect its empire, beginning with the so-called War of Africa. Fought in Morocco between 1859 and 1860, the campaign involved more than forty-five thousand troops and led to a long-lasting Spanish engagement in North Africa. With popular support, the government backed French invasions of Indochina and Mexico, and many veteran soldiers from the African war were reenlisted in the brutal and protracted conflict following the reannexation of the Dominican Republic in 1861. In addition, expeditions to West Africa built a colonial presence in and around the island of Fernando Po. Few works in English have examined the impact of these nineteenth-century imperial ventures on Spanish identity, notions of race, and culture. Agents of empire—from journalists and diplomats to soldiers, spies, and clerics—took up the mantle of the "civilizing mission" and pushed back against those who resisted militarized occupations. In turn, a gendered, racialized rhetoric became a linchpin of Spain's growing involvement in North Africa and the Caribbean in the 1850s and 1860s. A Missionary Nation interrogates the legacy of Hispanic identities from multiple axes, as former colonies were annexed and others were occupied, tying together strands of European, Mediterranean, and Atlantic histories in the second age of global imperialism. It challenges the prevailing notion that secular ideologies alone informed imperial narratives in Europe. Liberal Spain attempted to reconstruct its great empire of old, but the entangled issues of nationalism, race, and religion frustrated its efforts.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “The War of Africa Has Been the Dream of My Entire Political Life”
• 2. They “Were Calling Us Their Liberators”
• 3. The Visual Culture of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Spanish Imperialism
• 4. Order, Progress, and Civilization
• 5. Anatomy of an Uprising
• 6. Death to Spain!
• 7. The Traveling Society of La Exploradora
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Scott Eastman