On Historicising the War in Spain

Abstract

In the early 2000s a popular British history magazine commissioned me to write a historiographical essay on the war of 1936–9 in Spain, only then to say that they wouldn't be able to publish my text because their readers ‘wouldn't recognise in it the war they knew’. The essay I'd written analysed the conflict in 1930s Spain in the context of the many cognate ones catalysed across continental Europe by the war of 1914–8. All these conflicts were, in one way or another, conflicts between those who wanted to preserve the hierarchical social and political structures of the pre-1914 European world, already shaken by the First World War, and those who sought to effect some form of levelling social and political change, whether by reformist or revolutionary means. Everywhere, including in Spain, such conflicts arose from a common hinterland of accelerating urbanisation, industrialisation and, crucially, from the accompanying processes of increasing migration from countryside to city.