Joseph Harrison

Big Business and the Failure of Right-Wing Catalan Nationalism, 1901–1923

The rise of modern Catalan nationalist sentiments dates from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In essence, these sentiments reflected a growing political, intellectual and, to a lesser extent economic resentment within the region of Catalonia against the Restoration regime which was imposed upon Spain in 1875. The breakthrough of Catalan nationalism, or regionalism as it is sometimes called, to become a significant force in Spanish politics followed the victory of four Catalanist candidates in the elections to the Cortes of 1901. Shortly afterwards the groups responsible for that electoral success came together to establish what was, with the possible exception of the Socialists (P.S.O.E.), the first modern political party of Spain, the Lliga Regionalista . Significantly, the foundation of the Lliga marked a turning point in the nature of Catalan nationalism, or at least its dominant strain. Of the four candidates elected in 1901, all for Barcelona seats, three represented economic interests. Indeed, much more than that, they were, or had been, presidents of three of the most powerful big business organisations of the region.

Reviews: Nicholas Coni, Medicine and Warfare: Spain, 1936—1939, New York and London: Routledge/Cañada Blanch Studies on Contemporary Spain, 2008; xxv + 266 pp.; £65.00 hbk; ISBN 9780415385978

energies of the young (particularly figures like Gardiner) prevent Fowler from presenting a more rounded account of youth culture. The ambition of earlier studies of youth culture, such as Resistance Through Rituals, which gets very short shrift here, were precisely driven by the desire to understand the connections between structures, cultures and biography. Whilst such an approach to youth culture contained many flaws, Fowler’s patronizing dismissal of cultural studies of youth – along with most postwar sociology and history – on the grounds that it is ‘devoid of serious scholarly analysis’ (196) is simply ill-informed and ill-judged. The analysis of working-class youth subcultures represented in books like Resistance, with the undoubted shortcomings of its historical understanding of postwar youth culture, offer a powerful theorizing of ‘youth culture’. Fowler’s rich and rewarding book, for all its empirical panache, could have benefited from a little of the theoretical sophistication of that earlier cultural study of youth.

Spanish backwardness in historical perspective

A recurring theme which runs through all three of the books under review is Spain’s overwhelming backwardness throughout its contemporary history together with the latter’s marked impact on the country’s belated economic, social and political development. Gabriel Paquette’s eloquent and tightly written monograph analyses the ideas which motivated Spain’s Bourbon reformers during the second half of the eighteenth century at home and in its Atlantic economies. Under Charles III and his less gifted successor Charles IV, the country’s policymakers set about renovating ‘a diffuse, haphazard and unwieldy state apparatus’ in an attempt to restore the monarchy’s prestige and influence (p. 2). The ever-present spectre of war, he argues, forced the Crown, with its predilection for the concentration of power, to embark on an assault on the old order with its robust corporate entities, superabundance of privileges and regional semi-autonomy, without any apparent master plan. In its place, the reformers sought to construct a unified nation state, subservient to the monarchy. The intellectual basis for a generation of enlightened reformers, especially during the 1770s and 1780s, were works of political economy and technical manuals in translation. Thwarted in the peninsula by a combination of recalcitrant mercantile and agrarian elites plus entrenched ecclesiastical authorities, the main political laboratory for Caroline experiment proved to be the colonies of Spain’s farflung imperial periphery, with their dynamic economies, burgeoning populations and relatively fluid administrative structures. Rather than simply copying foreign ideas – from Britain, Naples, Denmark, Prussia, Russia, Holland and France – Bourbon ministers, prominent among them Gerónimo de Uztáriz and Pedro Rodrı́guez de Campomanes, criticized, adapted and even rejected them. Paquette quotes the liberal reformer Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, who averred that ‘our industry is not particularly inventive, and in its

Reviews : Adrian Shubert, The Road to Revolution in Spain. The Coal Miners of Asturias, 1860-1934, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1987, xiii + 183 pp; US

discussed. Interestingly, the best described change, and the one Behar treats as the most radical and significant, takes place between her first visit to the field in 1978 and her last visit in 1984. Private property and independent enterprise continue to increase as more people withdraw their animals from communal herding arrangements; the consolidation of plots reduces interaction and further erodes the sense of community; mechanization and other innovations give people higher incomes and more leisure time; a new urbanization of summer residences alters the relation between values of agricultural and residential property; town-dwelling heirs to village houses convert them to vacation homes for their own use or to rent to others. In general, the cultural continuity with the past detected at the beginning of the field-work becomes more tenuous. Behar’s approach is cogent as ethnography of history. She returns in the end to the villagers’ sense of the past, in legend and in their treatment of documents. Here she notes a significant difference between consejo and casa. The documents of the council are treated with respect and conserved: the consejo as institution is

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a prime victim of Spanish economic backwardness. More specifically, Valencian farmers, whose livelihoods increasingly depended on sales of such items as oranges, rice, onions and potatoes to the markets of northern Europe, paid the price of a persistent trend in Spanish commercial policy towards autarky, as reflected in the ultraprotectionist tariffs of 1906 and 1922. With the demise of free trade areas south of the Pyrenees, the interests of Valencian agriculture, one of the few genuinely competitive sectors of the Spanish economy, were gradually subordinated to those of the dominant social classes within Spain the cereal growers of Castile and the industrial lobbies of Catalonia and Euskadi. Matters came to a head in the early 1930s when Valencian farming was virtually paralysed as a result of the recession in world trade combined with renascent protectionism and the drawing up of bilateral agreements which excluded Spain. More than any other measure, it was the Ottawa Agreement concluded between Britain and Commonwealth producers, which came into force in January 1933, that seriously disrupted regional agriculture. The imposition of a duty of 3s 6d per cwt. on imports of oranges into Britain, to safeguard growers in South Africa and Palestine, was to have disastrous consequences in Valencia, which produced 70 per cent of the nation’s crop. Valencia’s plight, however, was scarcely recognized by the politicians, both left and right, of the Second Republic, apart from the name arcadian, Ricardo Samper. No one better understood the predicament of Spain’s agricultural exporters than Romdn Perpina who, in 1929, was chosen as director of the newly-founded Centro de Estudios Econ6micos Valenciano. This welcome and valuable addition to Spanish economic historiography comprises four separate works by this distinguished Valencian economist, first published in the early and mid 1930s, together with an excellent background introduction by Jordi Palafox. In the first of

Reviews on Spanish History Review Article : Román Perpiñá Grau, De Economía Crítica, 1930-36, Valencia, Institució Alfons el Magnànim, Diputació Provincial de València, 1982. 408pp

As the Great War drew to a close, businessmen, economists and politicians south of the Pyrenees came increasingly to view the European conflict, in which Spain had remained neutral, as four years of wasted opportunities for almost all sectors of the Spanish economy. Admittedly, individual farmers and manufacturers amassed considerable fortunes supplying the belligerent nations with foodstuffs, war materiel, clothing and other items for which the latter, at least initially, appeared to have insatiable appetities. Yet what proportion of their windfall profits went towards improving agricultural techniques or re-equipping manufacturing industry

The failure of economic reconstitution in Spain, 1916-23

The rise of Basque nationalism as an expression of the political sentiments of the Spanish Basque Country reflected regional opposition within the provinces of Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa and Alava to the tottering Restoration regime.l A Basque nationalist party, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco, was founded in Bilbao in 1906 and soon had a small number of successes at both municipal and provincial level, particularly in the province of Vizcaya. In 1917 nationalist candidates