Nigel Townson

This is a remarkable and satisfying academic work, explaining the history of Spain from the disaster of the Spanish American war of 1898, to the modern day The book is replete with statistics and covers the tortured intricacies of political and social groups, in great detail. However, for me, a general reader, it made sense of the turmoil in the first three decades of the 20th Century, culminating in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39. The relative strengths and weaknesses of the Republican and Nationalist groups are well delineated and make clear why the Nationalists won out eventually - ushering in the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, 'El Caudillo.' While repressive at the outset, the regime did develop over time, leading eventually to Spain's emergence as a democracy (with a re-instituted monarchy), fully integrated in European and World bodies - including the UN, NATO and of course the European Community. The author makes a strong case to rebut the widely accepted view of Spanish exceptionalism - yet Spain's history is particular to itself, the product of its people, politics and colonial history, amongst many influences. My personal view is that Spain's development in the second half of the 20th Century is pretty special - possibly more transformative than in any other western European nation.… (more)

In the 1960s, Francoist tourism slogans pushed the notion that ‘Spain is different’. It wasn’t, and never had been, but the idea stuck and persisted for longer than it should have. So long, in fact, that Nigel Townson’s new history takes disproving it as its central thesis.

An up-to-date history of modern Spain, from 1898 to the present, is a mammoth task, but one which Townson, a historian educated in Britain and working in Madrid, is well placed to attempt. A respected expert on the history of the Second Republic – the period spanning the 1931 deposition of Alfonso XIII, to Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939 – he guides the reader from the regenerationist debates that followed the 1898 disaster, when Spain lost the last of her colonies following the Spanish-American war, and the imperial hangover that ensued, to the not-so-peaceful transition to democracy between 1975 and 1982. He does so via various welfare advances and corruption scandals.

Given Townson’s expertise, it is unsurprising that the book is particularly strong when discussing the politics and challenges faced by the Second Republic and its descent into all out civil war. Townson suggests, convincingly, that Spain’s centrist parties in particular could have done more to stabilise the young democracy. There is, however, some emphasis on the history of the left over the right, which is surprising given that the outcome of the Spanish Civil War was a right-wing dictatorship that lasted for 40 years. Townson draws on important works on Francoism, but his historiographical well is not as deep as it might have been. Francoism, particularly its early period (1936-45), is one of the most heavily researched areas in Spanish history, and it would be impossible to integrate all the latest research into a few chapters. And, of course, this is not just a book about Franco.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Manchester Metropolitan University.… (more)