ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century Spain was torn apart by two civil wars between rival claimants to the throne. An unstable and short- lived republic (February 1873–December 1874) gave way to a constitutional monarchy under Alfonso XII. The 1876 Constitution introduced a bicameral parliament and by 1890 universal male suffrage was established. But, if a new age of political enlightenment seemed at first to be dawning, it was not to be an age of gold: in the ‘Disaster ’ year of 1898, the economically valuable Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were all lost to the United States.
