ABSTRACT
Spain is a country normally seen as a laggard in terms of modernity but venerable in terms of tradition. Sandwiched between the apparently more significant histories of early modern Spain and the Spanish Civil War, the nineteenth century evokes images of failure, of empires lost, of civil strife, of dynastic clashes, of militarism, and of progress held in check by the forces of tradition. The cultural impact of Spain’s eclipse by the Great Powers, the overhaul of its monarchy and church, and its frequent wars and revolutions, was rich and variegated. The year 1898 experienced the El Desastre, the loss of Spain’s remaining world empire and an attendant transformation in the political and intellectual shape of Spain’s new century. The historian Juan Pablo Fusi called nineteenth-century Spain a ‘country of centralism in theory, but of localism and regionalism in practice’. Historians for most of the twentieth century wittingly or unwittingly believed in the ‘two Spains’.
