Abstract
AbstractThe development of motor vehicles and their mass production and consumption during the first decades of the twentieth century had significant economic and social effects. The developed Atlantic countries, world leaders in vehicle production, were the protagonists of the success of the car. However, the globalization brought about by the second industrial revolution drew in other countries on the periphery, thanks to transport technologies, telecommunications, and the media. Thus, the consumption patterns and lifestyles of the ‘centres’ and the ‘peripheries’ tended to become more uniform, especially among the urban population. This included an interest in travelling and leisure activities in general. The link between the use of motor vehicles and new tourism practices in Spain between 1918 and 1939 provides an excellent viewpoint from which both to analyse the country's economic and social transformation during this period and to relativize the degree of backwardness observed in Spain in other studies. In this respect, we provide evidence which shows that, despite being a country of the so-called European periphery, Spain had similar patterns of consumption of durable consumer goods, such as the motor vehicle, as other, more advanced countries. There is therefore room to reconsider what has been termed ‘Spanish backwardness’.
Highlights
The development of motor vehicles and their mass production and consumption during the first decades of the twentieth century had significant economic and social effects
The link between the use of motor vehicles and new tourism practices in Spain between and provides an excellent viewpoint from which both to analyse the country’s economic and social transformation during this period and to relativize the degree of backwardness observed in Spain in other studies
We provide evidence which shows that, despite being a country of the so-called European periphery, Spain had similar patterns of consumption of durable consumer goods, such as the motor vehicle, as other, more advanced countries
Summary
Mom maintains that the history of mobility is a key element in uniting the experience of movement with the medium that enables it and does not just represent a way of investigating how people move and goods circulate and a way of thinking about human societies He eschews the basic thesis within the historiography that traditionally divides the evolution of the car into two stages through the ‘toy-to-tool myth’, and points out that any study of the tourism–motor vehicle relationship cannot disregard the development of transport Mom argues that the analysis of road-traffic motorization in the early twentieth century makes it possible to talk about an Atlantic mobility culture as part of the Western modernization of society This was a continuous process rather than a revolutionary change and can be better seen from the perspective of user behaviour as a starting point than from the quantitative and technological development of their vehicles. According to Rostow’s analysis, this stage was reached by countries such as the United States, Canada, and the UK before the Second World War
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