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

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 remains a theme of enduring interest and has generated an immense bibliography in numerous languages. Such attention is perhaps proportionately greater in the United Kingdom than anywhere else outside Spain, all of the major narrative accounts in English (by Hugh Thomas, Anthony Beevor and Paul Preston) having originated there, the first two appearing in two quite different versions a good many years apart. By comparison, even Spanish historians do not seem greatly interested in the First Carlist War (1833–40), a longer conflict that cost even more lives in proportion to the total population, though not such widespread economic destruction. Depending on how one counts, there were at least four different internecine conflicts between liberals and traditionalists in Spain between 1821 and 1876, making nineteenth-century Spain the ‘land of civil war’, but the First Carlist War was the mostly costly and also, in the long run, historically the most decisive. It has nonetheless failed to draw much attention outside the country, with the exception of John F. Coverdale’s The Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War (1984), and this dearth made very welcome Mark Lawrence’s commendable account, Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–1840 (2014).