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The Spanish Empire and its End: A Comparative View in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe SEBASTIAN BALFOUR A striking feature of bibliography of the Spanish Empire and the consequences of imperial collapse in 1898 is its relatively high degree of self-absorption . This seems to mirror the international isolation of its dynastic elite at the time, reliant until the Spanish–American War on family and religious connections rather than on engagement in the system of international relations for the preservation of its empire. It also reflects a traditional view held among Spaniards and foreigners until recently that Spain had a unique destiny. In the 1930s, W. H. Auden wrote “…that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe…”1 In contrast to this tragic view of Spain, the Spanish Right elaborated the myth of a God-given mission, a “destiny in the universal,” as the obtuse Francoist propaganda put it. This sense of particularity rested on a distorted or invented reading of the past in which the conquistadors had brought the only true religion to most of the world and that world was now disintegrating because it was failing to conform to Christian values. The true identity of Spain could only be renewed by cleansing its inhabitants of nonSpanish ideologies emanating from Europe, such as liberalism, Marxism and Freemasonry.2 In fact, as recent literature has stressed, Spain was always part of Europe and shared common dilemmas and historical processes.3 However, Spain has invariably been compared to its northern European or Mediterranean neighbors. There are many obvious parallels between Spain and Italy, in particular, such as the division between an underdeveloped agrarian south and an industrialized north, a weak, clientele-based state, and an authoritarian response in the 1920s and 30s to the resulting cleavages. But there has been little effort in the historiography of Spain to draw wider parallels. In this chapter, therefore, I want to explore analogies and differences with the pre-1914 central European and Eurasian empires. There are of course many areas where comparison would be fruitful, such as religion, monarchy and the military, to name just a few. But I wish to focus, if only briefly, IMPERIAL RULE on war, nationalism, mechanisms of legitimacy, modernization, and relations between core and colonies, as well as between center and periphery within the state itself. In any cursory comparison of the Spanish Empire with the Romanov, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, it is clear that it belongs to a very different model: that of the peripheral, discontinuous empires of 18th and 19th century Europe embracing the old overseas maritime empires and including the Portuguese and the Dutch.4 Unlike the central and Eastern European continuous land empires, the imperial power of these maritime nations rested largely on commerce and by extension on merchant and military navies. The Russian and Austrian empires on the contrary, were continental, military bureaucracies.5 Yet unlike the British Empire, these maritime empires had a weak industrial and military base, which made them vulnerable to expansionist powers, and their domestic legitimacy was limited to the elite so they could not easily draw on popular resources for their defense. With the rise of nationalism in the old colonies and the global expansion of new and old great powers, such as the United States, Japan, Britain, France and Germany, these maritime empires faded or collapsed. A third and later model may be identified in the peripheral European powers that sought to create colonies in what might be described as the third wave of European expansion , the international scramble for colonial space from the 1860s onwards. These included Italy and Belgium and, in a new expansion of the old maritime empires, both Spain and Portugal. However, like the three continental empires in Europe and Eurasia, the power of these peripheral empires depended to a great extent on their relationship with the emerging core of European powers, France, Britain and Germany. As well as the Romanov, Ottoman and Habsburg empires, the problems of nation-building, state legitimating and center–periphery relations in Spain were crucially linked to the retention of the territories of the empire or, as the Spanish elite perceived it in the late 18th century, the overseas provinces of the metropolis. Spain lost most of its empire in the first quarter of the nineteenth century through the revolt of colonial elites of Spanish origin allied with blacks and native Americans. The wars of independence in Latin America saw no...

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