Mark Lawrence. The Spanish Civil Wars: A Comparative History of the First Carlist War and the Conflict of the 1930s.

Abstract

Since it ended on the eve of the Second World War, the historical significance of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) has been kept alive by an immense outpouring of scholarly and popular literature on the subject. Despite the various and important ways in which they shaped the course of Spanish history from the nineteenth century on, the same cannot be said of the almost forgotten Carlist civil wars that erupted intermittently between 1833 and the end of the century. In recent years, a small but growing number of Spanish and foreign historians, including the British academic Mark Lawrence, have been trying to redress this historiographical imbalance by focusing scholarly attention on the Carlist conflicts. The historical similarities linking the Carlists’ dynastic struggles of the nineteenth century with Spain’s civil war are examined in detail by Lawrence in his innovative comparative study The Spanish Civil Wars. It is the author’s contention that, for all their contextual differences, the First Carlist War (1833–1840) is comparable to the much better known Spanish Civil War because the former established a recurring pattern of geographically and ideologically defined civil and political strife that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.