The Coloniser Colonised: Legacies of Britain’s Informal Empire in Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACT For over a century from the 1830s to the 1940s, Spain was subjected to British diplomatic and economic power, designed to ensure the country complied with the British Empire’s strategic and commercial interests. Supported by Britain’s use of military force at key moments of crisis, this amounted to ‘informal imperialism’, as described by Gallagher and Robinson in their famous 1953 article, which suggested free trade imperialism drove the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. The experience left Spain with a number of economic and political legacies that undermined its capacity to develop a modernised economy. This article explores three of the most important effects: an unbalanced economy, deepened political divisions, and increasingly autarkic political and economic policies. It concludes that the Spanish experience was a harbinger of a more general process of imperial economic colonisation by the new commercial powers that emerged from the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, led by Britain. It suggests these legacies were also evident in the newly independent post-Second World War colonies as they freed themselves from the grip of the European empires.