Modern Spain

1808 to the Present

Pamela Beth Radcliff

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119369929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Modern Spain: 1808 to the Present is a comprehensive overview of Spanish history from the Napoleonic era to the present day.

• Places a large emphasis on Spain's place within broader European and global history
• The chronological political narrative is enriched by separate chapters on long term economic, social and cultural developments
• This presentation of modern Spanish history incorporates the latest thinking on key issues of modernity, social movements, nationalism, democratization and democracy

PART I
1808–1868: THE ERA OF THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION

1
SPAIN IN THE “AGE OF REVOLUTIONS”

To begin the history of modern Spain in 1808 is, as is always the case in periodization, a somewhat arbitrary decision. In the traditional “failure” model of modern Spain, 1808 marked the moment when the tottering old regime, including its vast but poorly managed empire, was delivered the death blow by the invasion of Napoleon’s armies. In this version, because liberal ideas were imported and imposed from the outside, the revolutionary era was more ephemeral in its long‐term impact, the opening act in an ongoing struggle between “two Spains,” in which the “modern” sector was always the weaker. In the revisionist version, 1808 was still a crucial turning point, the beginning of a liberal and national revolution that opened Spain’s modern era and demonstrated parity with what was happening in the rest of western Europe.

The year of 1808 serves both narratives because it symbolizes the inauguration of the “triple crisis” of the old regime, including the dynastic crisis sparked by the abdication of the Bourbon king and his heir, the sovereign crisis generated by the invasion of French troops and the constitutional crisis produced by the weakened legitimacy of the Spanish monarchy.¹ The resistance against the French, which led to the convocation in 1810 of a constitutional parliament, or Cortes, that claimed its legitimacy from the sovereignty of the nation, unleashed Spain’s version of the political revolution that came to define the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even though the “age of revolutions” was followed by an absolutist restoration in 1814, whose founding principle was to return to the status quo ante “as if such things had never happened,” in the words of the new King Ferdinand VII’s decree, there was no going back to the eighteenth‐century Spanish monarchy. Thus, the issues raised in this period opened a new political era that defined the parameters of debate and struggle for the next century and a half.

While 1808 marks a convenient opening act of the “modern” era in Spain (similar to 1789 for France), this political turning point was embedded in a longer transitional period, from the 1780s to the 1820s, marked by long‐term structural changes and short‐term economic crisis. At the global level, this transition culminated in radical changes in forms of government and regulation of the economy, as well as dramatic shifts in the global distribution of power. At the same time, there were significant continuities across an old regime that was more dynamic than once believed, and an emerging liberal order that took root slowly and unevenly.²

In the failure narrative, Spain was thought to be left behind during this era of global transformation, but the revisionist scholarship has painted a more dynamic portrait of an economy and society that embarked on a trajectory of gradual growth and change in the late eighteenth century that continued into the twentieth century.³

As a jumping‐off point for a book on modern Spain, this chapter will provide a snapshot of the early nineteenth century, from Spain’s position in the global order to its economic and social structure, and ending with the political crisis of 1808–1814 that marked the, admittedly porous, boundary between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The metaphor of a “snapshot” taken from a moving train communicates better than a more static word like “baseline” a non‐linear transition from the old regime to the modern era.

Spain in Europe and the World, 1780s–1820

At the European center of the transitional and tumultuous period of the “age of revolutions” were the major empires of the era, especially the Spanish, French and British, which came into intensifying conflict around an increasingly global network of trade, commerce and consumption.⁴ (See Map I.) All the imperial governments responded to this competition with reforms aimed to better capture and channel profits and revenues for their benefit.⁵ The need for larger and more secure income streams was in turn driven by the increased military expenditure of overseas empires engaged in global warfare. But such reforms also generated colonial revolts, particularly in the Atlantic empires, which required yet more military expenditure to suppress. The fiscal crisis that afflicted all the major empires also encouraged risky political reforms, most famously the French monarch’s summoning of the representative institution, the Estates General, which launched the iconic French revolution.

Map I The Spanish Empire, 1800

In contrast to the classic Marxist narrative that interpreted this economic and political crisis as the result of an industrial and bourgeois class revolution that set in motion the unraveling of old‐regime Europe in the late eighteenth century, recent scholarship downplays the impact of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth‐century political crisis. Scholars now accept that the picture of a European industrial transformation as well under way by the early nineteenth century was greatly exaggerated. Thus, in 1840, 45 percent of the world’s industrial production came from Britain, with a second industrial node emerging in Belgium only after the 1830s.⁶ From this perspective, there is no failed industrial or bourgeois revolution to explain for the Spanish case.

Apart from the British exception, industrialization trajectories in the rest of Europe only began to diverge dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even then, national industrialization statistics would still be misleading. That is, most of the nineteenth century continental industrialization would be concentrated in a core area of central Europe that encompassed regions of various countries, including northern Italy and northern France, western Germany and Belgium, all of which shared the favorable conditions of rich coal deposits, navigable rivers, dense population and fertile land. Furthermore, industrialization was not the only path to economic growth and greater prosperity. Thus, some of the most “successful” European economies based their growth on agriculture and commerce well into the twentieth century, as was the case with the Netherlands and the rest of France. Even in England, the majority of adult workers in the mid‐nineteenth century still worked in the agricultural sector, while less than 5 percent worked in factories.

Like industrialization, urbanization also proceeded gradually, at least until the 1870s. Thus, the basic patterns of spatial organization of cities had not changed much from the outset of the sixteenth‐century expansion to the 1780s. During this period, the global urban population grew slowly, from 9 percent in 1600 to 12 percent in 1800, a percentage that did not increase significantly until after the 1870s. While capital cities like London, Paris and Berlin doubled in size in the first half of the century, most continental Europeans, including Spaniards, lived in small towns and villages.⁷ The point is that the impact of urbanization, like industrialization, was both uneven and fairly limited in scope outside of England in the early nineteenth century.

If most Europeans lived and worked in an agrarian economy and society in the early nineteenth century, there was also tremendous variety within this sector. One model was France, with a majority of commercial family farms and a prosperous peasant class. Another structure dominated in the eastern European countries like Poland and Russia, in which most farmland was divided into huge aristocratic estates worked by serf labor, often with low productivity. A third agrarian reality was small subsistence farming, in which poor peasants still operated on the margins of the commercial economy. In many of the European countries, but especially Spain, this variety of agrarian structures co‐existed within their national borders, shaped by landowning patterns, connection to markets, soil fertility and topography, and population density. Thus, just as there was no monolithic transformation to an industrial and urban society, there was no uniform “traditional” agrarian society waiting to be transformed.

What was happening across the globe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a series of “industrious revolutions,” powered by rising consumer demand, which reorganized both production and consumption and increased trade as well as specialization, including in the form of the slave plantations of the Caribbean and North America.⁸ In the Atlantic world of the Spanish, French and British empires, merchants created links between goods and consumers, bringing tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco from the Americas to European households. In Spain, a burgeoning calico industry in Catalonia fed the fashion trends of well‐heeled consumers across the empire.⁹ These industrious revolutions produced great wealth, but also dramatic inequalities, within societies and between them. On the global level this inequality inaugurated the “great divergence” in wealth, life expectancy and productivity between western Europe and the rest of the world that became one of the defining themes of the nineteenth century.¹⁰

At the same time, the hierarchies within Europe, between core and periphery, were also shifting, but in the eighteenth‐century economy Spain’s future as a European power was still hard to predict. Key to Spain’s potential success in the shifting global economy was building a more effective trading and commercial relationship with its American colonies. The successful reconstitution of empires to meet the challenges of the global economy would be a crucial factor in determining which states emerged from the crisis of the late eighteenth century as great powers in the nineteenth century. By 1820, the future trajectory of European imperialism was not yet clear. In some cases, reconstitution involved losing some colonies and gaining others, as with Britain and France, while Spain took the less advantageous route of colonial contraction (between 1810 and 1825 it lost continental America) and reorganization of its remaining colonies in the Antilles and Philippines.¹¹

Still, Spain’s colonial contraction was not an inevitable outcome of the eighteenth‐century crisis. Thus, the eighteenth‐century Spanish monarchy was making a valiant and at least partially successful attempt, with the so‐called “Bourbon reforms,” to transform itself from a “conquest” empire into an effective commercial empire, an effort which was not by any means destined for failure and dissolution.¹² Although it was true that Spain’s position as the old empire put it in the defensive position of having to scramble to adapt to the rapidly evolving commercial and imperial dynamics, the image of a sclerotic and desiccated Spanish empire that was waiting for one straw for the entire edifice to come tumbling down has been convincingly challenged. Transatlantic loyalty to the Spanish monarchy remained strong throughout the Napoleonic period, even as creole and metropolitan elites tried to negotiate a common solution to the crisis of imperial sovereignty. The loss of the ...