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This volume brings together leading and innovative specialists to analyse the main obstacles to the consolidation of democracy in Spain and to debate the principal stereotypes of the traditional historiography of both left and right during the Spanish Civil War.
Why did democratization suffer reversal during the interwar years, while fascism and authoritarianism spread across many European countries?
The essays in this volume consider the involvement of business corporations and of individual businessmen in the politics of the 1930s and 1940s: in the move away from the market and also from democracy, towards state control and authoritarianism, including the massive intervention of the state in property rights. How far did businesses attempt to guide this intervention for their own purposes, and to what extent did they succeed? This debate deals, centrally, with the role of German business, of banks, of industrial corporations, and of small tradesmen in the Nazi regime. An older discussion of how they may have facilitated the Nazi takeover has been supplemented here by an investigation in...
This study challenges the common view that extrajudicial executions in Republican Spain in July 1936 were the work of criminal or anarchist 'uncontrollables'.
Demystifying the Sacred: Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today offers a much-needed analysis of a subject that historians have largely ignored, yet that has considerable relevance for today’s world: the powerful connection that exists between offences against the sacred and different forms of violence. Drawing on cases from revolutionary France to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, the international authors probe the nature and agency of local blasphemy accusations, the historical and legal framework in which they were expressed and the violence, both physical and symbolic, accompanying them. In doing so, the volume reveals how cultures of blasphemy, and related acts of heresy, apostasy and sacrilege, were a companion to or acted as a trigger for physical action but also a form of how violence was experienced. More generally, it shows the importance of religious sensibilities in modern society and the violent potential contained in criticism or ridicule of the sacred and secular alike.
'The Appeal of Insurance is an excellent collection that reflects a growing interest in insurance research within the social sciences. Clearly written and accessible to a variety of audiences, this is a volume of world-class scholarship.'-Luis Lobo-Guerrero, School of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy, Keele University In the marketing of its products, the insurance industry has always depended on a considerable dose of moral exhortation and enlightened appeal. The Appeal of Insurance traces the ways in which insurance over the past three centuries, perhaps more than any other business, has grown in concert with a clientele largely of its own making. Faced with a public that ...
This book commemorates the bicentenary of the landmark Spanish Constitution of 1812. Drafted by Spanish and colonial Spanish American liberals (and non-liberals) holed up in Cadiz as Napoleon’s troops occupied the surrounding hills, this war-time Constitution set out radically to redefine ‘the Spanish nation’ for a new age. In the event, it divided Spaniards and threw into sharp relief the question of Spain’s legitimacy in her American colonies. Cadiz 1812 is a defining moment in the modern history of the Spanish-speaking world. Bringing together specialists in the history, politics and culture of Spain and Latin America (the Cadiz text was a cultural and ethnic document as much as a...
This book examines the most polemical atrocity of the Spanish Civil War: the massacre of 2,500 political prisoners by Republican security forces in the villages of Paracuellos and Torrejâon de Ardoz near Madrid in November/December 1936. The atrocity took place while Santiago Carrillo -- later Communist Party leader in the 1970s -- was responsible for public order. Although Carrillo played a key role in the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975, he passed away at the age of 97 in 2012 still denying any involvement in 'Paracuellos' (the generic term for the massacres). The issue of Carrillo's responsibility has been the focus of much historical research. Julius Ruiz places Par...
Alejandro Lerroux (18641949) was one of the most polemical figures of early twentieth century Spanish politics. As leader of the Radical Republican Party and six-time prime minister between 1933 and 1935, his admirers saw him as a patriot determined to create a Republic for all citizens, while his critics denounced him as an opportunistic demagogue willing to sacrifice the Republic to its enemies. Like his French republican contemporary Georges Clemenceau, Lerrouxs long political journey took him from the fiery radical leftism of his youth to centrist consensual politics. Thus while Lerroux was the most significant advocate of a revolutionary break with Spains monarchical and authoritarian p...
This 2005 book explores the ideas and culture surrounding the cataclysmic civil war that engulfed Spain from 1936 to 1939. It features specially commissioned articles from leading historians in Spain, Britain and the US which examine the complex interaction of national and local factors, contributing to the shape and course of the war. They argue that the 'splintering of Spain' resulted from the myriad cultural cleavages of society in the 1930s that are investigated here at both local and national levels. Thus, this book tends to see the civil war less as a single great conflict between two easily identifiable sets of ideas, social classes or ways of life than historians have previously done. The Spanish tragedy, at the level of everyday life, was shaped by many tensions, both those that were formally political and those that were to do with people's perceptions and understanding of the society around them.