Writing Spanish history in the global age: connections and entanglements in the nineteenth century

Abstract

Modern Spain has remained largely absent from the debates and narratives of global history. In sharp contrast to the early modern period, the case of Spain in the nineteenth century has been overwhelmingly studied from regional and national perspectives. Fortunately, valuable efforts to integrate this country into wider frames of analysis have emerged in the last decade. Building on these writings, this article will argue that connections and entanglements represent two valuable perspectives, which allow the insertion of the Spanish experience into contemporary narratives of global history. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to ‘decentre’ modern Spain, by moving beyond its territorial borders within the Iberian Peninsula, and by examining its global dimensions, through connections with territories, colonies, and nations on several continents. Second, it aims to reveal valuable insights for current debates on global history, which arise from a focus on a country that is usually considered to have been both marginal and peripheral.

Introduction

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the fertile field of opportunity that nineteenth-century Spain can bring to the study of global history. Throughout this period, and despite losing most of its American territories in the 1820s, Spain retained a global presence that extended far beyond the contours of the Iberian Peninsula. The remaining overseas colonies in America and Southeast Asia, colonial ambitions and footholds in Africa, and its relational framework with Europe made Spain a major crossroads for the processes, interactions, and entanglements that shaped it as much as it shaped other parts of the world. These elements formed a vast network of planetary interactions, involving a myriad of geographies, actors, and structures.

However, the case of this country remains virtually absent in the major debates of the period, especially with regard to international debates, as a special issue of the journal Social History first noted in 2004, and as the historian Adrian Shubert observed again in 2015. ¹ Most historians seem to have passively accepted Eric Hobsbawm’s depiction of nineteenth-century Spain as a ‘persistently out of phase … notoriously anomalous and self-contained country’. ² A direct consequence of these historiographical features is that Spain’s presence is minimal in the two most renowned global histories of the nineteenth century, those of Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel. ³

This absence is striking for two reasons. First, early modern Spain has long been interpreted from the perspective of its interactions and exchanges with Europe, America, and Asia. ⁴ The transformation of this country from being an empire ‘where the sun never set’ into a secondary nation-state in the nineteenth century has had the effect of relegating Spain’s presence in dominant historical narratives. For historians, it seems as if the country’s global dimension vanished with the independence of most of the American colonies. ⁵ Second, historical works on nineteenth-century Spain tend to adopt local and regional frames of analysis, or, at best, national ones. This is in direct contrast to other European cases, such as that of Germany, which have been reconsidered in the light of transnational and global interactions that move beyond the nation. ⁶

If we adopt a similar relational approach to nineteenth-century Spain, two elements make it particularly valuable from a global historical perspective: a robust, centuries-long connection with the Americas and Southeast Asia, and a condition as ‘contact zone’ with northern Africa. Grasping this relational dimension calls for moving beyond the idea of Spain as a nation-state, and instead bringing connections and entanglements with other parts of the world to the fore.

Scholars such as Christopher Bayly and Sebastian Conrad have indeed stressed the importance that connections have for the writing of history from a global perspective, and also the structural transformations that made these connections possible. ⁷ The genealogy of this approach goes back in time. Fernand Braudel and Pierre Chaunu, both specialists of early modern Spain, were among the first scholars who called attention to the importance of recovering lost connections that have little presence in national narratives. Inspired by the work of these two French historians, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Serge Gruzinski have advocated the idea of connectedness to mitigate, if not overcome, Eurocentric approaches. ⁸ More than a nation-state as such, we consider that nineteenth-century Spain should be understood as a junction for numberless connections and entanglements involving a global dimension.

By connected history we refer to mutual influences, interactions, and exchanges between different parts of the world. Likewise, by entangled history we mean the flows of concepts and peoples that intertwine political units, cultures, and societies. ⁹ In the Spanish case, the connected history approach mainly refers to constructing a historical account that integrates the metropolis with the overseas territories that Spain possessed during the nineteenth century. The entangled history approach, in contrast, focuses more on phenomena and processes common across empires, nation-states, cultures, religions, and societies in determined spaces and situations.

This article will introduce a wide range of geographies, actors, and historical processes, which allow inserting nineteenth-century Spain amidst a vast network of global connections and entanglements. In so doing, the case of this country will be ‘decentered’ from its attachment to the Iberian Peninsula, with the aim of resetting a series of world connections that have gone either unnoticed, or have only been partially explored.

In order to meet the abovementioned aims, the article will focus on two ‘big’ topics for which the Spanish case had a direct impact in historical developments taking place around the globe in the nineteenth century; namely, liberalism and empire. Each will be used as an umbrella for related themes, such as constitutionalism, republicanism, and Catholicism in the case of liberalism; and slavery, migration, commodities, and national identities for that of empire. The reason why we chose these two ‘big’ topics over others is because they were major phenomena that shaped core features of the period, and because they both offer vast potential for connected and entangled history approaches, in terms of fresh insights and perspectives provided by the peripheral, often neglected, angle of Spanish history.

Indeed, scholars have long interpreted Spanish history from a premise of backwardness. Influenced by modernization theory and ideal development types, they saw Spain as an illustration of the underside of major historical processes, whether it was the ‘failure’ of its liberal revolution, its weak industrialization, or the demise of its early modern empire. While this paradigm of backwardness has been challenged in the last two decades, the focus of the attention has remained centred on the nation-state. ¹⁰

In contrast, we claim that Spanish liberalism and empire, together with the various sub-themes that we have gathered under these two headings, can be re-examined from an interrelated approach, to shed new light on connections between different world geographies. As a matter of fact, the ideas, actors, and debates that shaped liberalism and empire in the nineteenth century were of hybrid origin, combining European, Atlantic, and global inputs. Alongside other examples of ‘peripheral’ empires, such as the Portuguese, Ottoman, and Russian ones, the Spanish empire raises fundamental questions from a different viewpoint: namely, from the perspective of a declining power, whose state-building process occurred in an imperial as well as a global context.

Spanish liberalism: a product with global echoes and local re-appropriations

Liberalism is one of the topics that define nineteenth-century Spain. It is also an issue that conforms to a transnational perspective, since the concept and practices associated with it transcended borders. But liberalism is, above all, a topic that allows the Spanish case to be inserted within a complex process of connections and entanglements that shaped the modern world. To begin with, the term ‘liberal’ itself, as a political concept, was first used by Spanish liberals, before being adopted in 1816 into the English political vocabulary. ¹¹ As Gabriel Paquette has stressed, liberalism in Spain, and also in Portugal and Italy, should not be simply seen as an imported, watered-down appropriation of ‘external’ ideas and events, such as the Enlightenment and the Anglo-North American revolutions. ¹² On the contrary, a much more productive exercise is to rethink the global set of interactions that gave birth to, and shaped, the evolving meanings associated with the term ‘liberalism’. ¹³

As with the German case, Spanish liberalism has traditionally been depicted in terms of exceptionality and backwardness. ¹⁴ More recently, scholars have challenged this perspective by highlighting the strong links between Spanish liberalism and that of other western European countries. ¹⁵ However, and notwithstanding the value of these contributions, it is necessary to go a step further to understand the contours of Spanish liberalism as a fluid element encompassing a wider dimension. Following the summoning of the Cadiz Cortes in 1810, and the proclamation of the Constitution two years later, the global dimension of Spanish liberalism marked the revolutionary process. From Cadiz to Lima, from Havana to Manila, elections were held all over the empire to appoint representatives. Likewise, the Constitution was approved in every corner of the Spanish empire.

These events provided the basis for the encounter and intermingling of different political cultures, and also generated new reactions to liberalism, not only within the different territories that formed the Spanish empire but also beyond them. To give an example, consider the heated discussions held in 1810 over the shape and characteristics to be given to the new parliament. The statesman and philosopher Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744–1811) stood out in this debate. His ties to English thinkers, particularly evidenced by the numerous letters he exchanged with Henry Richard Vassal Fox, 3rd Baron Holland (1773–1840), clearly influenced his opinions, and reveal the importance of transnational transfers in the evolution of Spanish liberalism. ¹⁶ Another important observation that came up in these debates involved the question of which territories should be represented in the new parliament. As the composition of the parliament affected the form that it should take, and the form would affect the relationship among the components, each issue affected the other. Thus, neither can be fully understood separately, for debates over representation necessarily involved the status of overseas territorial possessions. All this gives some indication of the extent to which liberalism, and the responses to it, implied a circulation of actors, ideas, and practices, which must be analysed in a relational perspective.

Equally important to the circulation of ideas and debates at a global scale were the numerous re-appropriations that liberalism underwent in different locations, as well as the importance that political traditions and local specificities played in this process. Thus, while peninsular revolutionaries were particularly attracted to the French and British models, Latin American creoles looked more towards North America for inspiration. Likewise, the new constitutional model passed in 1812 had very different consequences for the Spanish colonies scattered across the planet, such as the Philippines, the Caribbean islands, the African enclaves, and territories on the borderlands. These disparate effects raise new questions about the global circulation of political concepts and practices, which the historiography has not yet explored. The impact of the Cadiz Constitution in imperial territories, the dialogue with European and American revolutionary experiences, and the challenges that political alternatives posed to liberal politics embrace a wide dimension, which makes the Spanish case particularly relevant to one of the main debates in nineteenth-century global history: namely, the raising of a political creed to a universal principle, and its circulation throughout the world. ¹⁷

The global dimensions of Spanish constitutionalism

The Cortes de Cadiz (1810–14), and the Constitution that they produced (1812), mark for many scholars the beginning of modernity and a crucial step towards nation-building in Spain. For this reason, scholars largely interpret the Cadiz experience in strictly national terms. Indeed, from the first authors who traced the origins of Spanish liberalism in the 1950s, to the celebration of the bicentenary of the Constitution in 2012, and up to the present day, the interpretation of Cadiz has barely moved from the classical terms in which modern Spanish history was originally formulated. ¹⁸ In contrast, Latin American and Atlantic historians have underscored the role of the 1812 Constitution in the connections between Spain and the process of independence of the American colonies in the 1810s and 1820s. ¹⁹

All the same, more than an Atlantic document, the Cadiz Constitution embraces a global dimension, which should be explored to plumb the interconnections between cultures and spaces. ²⁰ Indeed, the enactment of the Constitution affected various political and legal cultures around the Hispanic world, where colonial authorities had to rely on linguistic forms other than written Spanish to reach indigenous subjects. A proclamation of the Constitution, signed in Cadiz in August 1812, was translated into different indigenous languages, in order to proclaim the benefits of this political system to indigenous elites and non-Spanish speakers. ²¹ In South and Central America, for instance, the proclamation was translated into Quechua, Sotzil, Cechci, Ixil, and Zeefe. This required borrowing the Catholic Church’s pastoral language to translate modern political concepts into languages whose cultural references and symbolism differed completely from the Spanish political tradition. ²² Moreover, colonial experiences were brought to bear on discussions and resolutions in the making of the 1812 Constitution, since, years before independence, a constitutional corpus of its own had begun taking shape in the American territories. ²³

Meanwhile, southern European liberals quickly translated the Cadiz Constitution into Italian and Portuguese. The Constitution influenced the one adopted in Palermo, Sicily, in 1812, and served as a model in Portugal and many Italian states in the 1820s. ²⁴ Examining private correspondence and mapping the circulation of texts and political exiles suggest new understandings of this key constitutional moment in which a myriad of local interests became entwined in a global, mutually sensitive dynamic. ²⁵

Indeed, the circulation of the Cadiz Constitution was one of several key influences that shaped constitutional cultures during the ‘age of revolutions’. Crucial actors in this transnational circulation of ideas were Spanish liberals, who went into exile in 1814 and 1823, following Ferdinand VII’s victory over liberal governments. Most of these exiles established themselves in Paris and London, where they made contact with other political refugees from Europe and Latin America. These personal encounters had a direct impact on the political programmes and revolutionary activities of post-Napoleonic Europe, and the new liberal regimes that emerged during this period. ²⁶

Evidence of this cross-pollination of ideas was provided by the revolutionary wave of the 1820s, when the impact of the Cadiz Constitution was felt in Europe and beyond. First, in Portugal and independent Brazil, a new constitutional culture emerged in the 1820s, which revealed a ‘tremendous influence’ from the Cadiz experience. ²⁷ The Decembrist revolutionaries in Russia also eagerly followed the Spanish revolution. Although news was slow to arrive, and was often inaccurate, the Decembrists viewed Colonel Rafael del Riego’s pronunciamiento in the Spanish town of Cabezas de San Juan (January 1820) with a blend of enthusiasm and romance, to the point that ‘its power succeeded to ignite in them revolutionary passion and a sense of solidarity’. ²⁸ In fact, several Decembrists possessed copies of the 1812 Constitution in their private libraries, and there is evidence that they thoroughly discussed the text. Contacts between Russian and Spanish liberals were also established through figures such as Juan Van Halen, an officer who joined the tsar’s army after fleeing Spain. ²⁹ Last but not least, echoes of the Cadiz Constitution reached Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, where the text was discussed and celebrated. In response, Spanish liberals sent a dedicated copy of the 1812 Constitution to the Bengali intellectual Rammohan Roy. ³⁰

The 1812 Constitution affected the Spanish colonies in Asia as well. In the Philippines, the constitutional experience transformed the internal equilibria between Chinese and mestizo communities, and created a new set of political discourses that paved the way for new grounds of action for subaltern groups. ³¹ Symbolic forms, such as festivities and ceremonies for celebrating the promulgation of the Constitution, articulated the links established between the constitutional system and the new social contract among privileged and non-privileged groups.

From Asia to America, as well as in Europe, the translation of the new principles, in both linguistic and symbolic terms, took place in different contexts and under different constraints, so as to accommodate the constitutional project to the cultural particularities of each space. Political and religious authorities had to adapt the new political language to dominant religious beliefs and cultural references. ³² This is why the Cadiz Constitution must be examined through its Spanish imperial dimension, as well as through the European and American experiences of liberalism that traversed the Western world during this period. Only in this way it is possible to situate Cadiz in a broader history of transfers and common themes, which touched Europe, the Americas, and the rest of the world. ³³ The significance of the 1812 Constitution thus not only possesses a global dimension but also involves a complex set of connections between cultures, regions, and continents.

Responses to liberalism: republicanism and Catholicism

Republicanism and Catholicism were two major responses to liberalism in the nineteenth century. Although the understanding of these two concepts cannot be limited to their relationship with liberalism, both emerged as powerful alternatives to liberal politics, not only within Spain but also beyond it. Exiles, ideas, actors, and contacts circulated throughout Europe, the Americas, and beyond. In addition, both republicanism and Catholicism provided vehicles for competing universal conceptions of humankind, which implied an alternative relationship between state and society. In the Spanish case, these alternatives emerged as a challenge to liberal politics, as they forged connections to Europe and beyond. Just as had occurred during the establishment of constitutional regimes, the responses to liberalism also involved interaction with European, Atlantic, and global contacts.

Although the origins of republicanism in the Spanish empire arose in the American territories in 1810, and even some years earlier in Venezuela, because of their association with the quest for independence, republican theories did not find purchase in the territories that remained in the empire. When they started to re-emerge in the metropolis in the 1840s, republicans faced persecution from liberal authorities. As a result, exile and international cooperation became two characteristics of mid-nineteenth-century Spanish republicanism. It was in periods of political agitation that contacts among republican groups and actors increased. The year 1848 represents one of these key moments. Although historians have neglected the impact of the 1848 European revolutions in Spain and its dominions, new research reveals a similar dynamic to the one that characterized the European cases. ³⁴ Furthermore, in the 1850s and 1860s, Spanish democrats contributed to the formation of a transnational, democratic, political culture in Europe, and also acted as brokers between continents. ³⁵

Seen through the lens of connections and entanglements, Spanish republicanism presents significant points of contact with recently discovered interconnections in the Italian case. New works on the lives of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini have demonstrated the transnational, Atlantic, and even global inspirations taken from these two charismatic revolutionaries. ³⁶ Although no comparably charismatic Spanish icon exists, some historical figures do provide valuable insights. General Baldomero Espartero is one such figure. He not only became a legend among progressive liberals in Spain but was also highly connected and respected in Latin America, where he participated in the wars of independence. Indeed, the military officers who were close to Espartero were known as the ‘Ayacuchos’, because of their participation in the Battle of Ayacucho in Peru in 1824.

Other lesser-known republican and democrats also carried their beliefs far beyond the Atlantic space. For instance, the failure of the Cavite mutiny in the Philippines (1872), and of the cantonal revolt in Cartagena (1873), led to the imprisonment of many revolutionaries in the Pacific island of Guam. Over the next decades, political prisoners were sent to Spanish footholds in Africa, such as Fernando Poo in equatorial Africa, and Ceuta and the Chafarinas islands in North Africa. In these penal colonies, metropolitan Spanish revolutionaries made the acquaintance of freed slaves, who had returned to Africa, and of pro-independence activists from Cuba and the Philippines. ³⁷

However, it was not only progressive ideas that spread across borders during the nineteenth century. In addition to republicans and democrats, there was a wide network of ultra-conservatives who rose up in rebellion against the new liberal states. Although the existence of a ‘white international’ remains open to debate, historians have stressed the importance of approaching the opposition to liberalism from a broad perspective. ³⁸ Consequently, the great impediments hindering Spanish liberals’ efforts to overthrow the ancien régime, which resulted in three civil wars during the nineteenth century, were not a Spanish oddity but rather represented one of the harshest expressions of a continental, or even global, episode.

Moreover, historians have challenged the depiction of ultra-Catholics as remnants of a fallen social order, revealing instead the great capacity of this group to reinvent its cultural and political imaginaries. The ‘invention’ of a new model woman, for instance, became a powerful metaphor, through which Catholic propagandists sought to promote a religious revival in the public sphere. In so doing, they equipped the Church with a new gender discourse, which was adapted to changes in the political scenario. ³⁹ In these and in other respects, cultural transfers across national borders became decisive in the process of defining nascent political cultures. Neo-Catholics on both sides of the Pyrenees shared the same anxiety towards the revolutions of the 1870s, and they collaborated in defining a new set of ideas and discourses to combat the evils that they perceived in the turn of events. ⁴⁰ Likewise, religious devotion gained momentum in the nineteenth century, becoming a common element in Catholic resistance to secularization and the collective understanding of the ‘nation’ on both sides of the Atlantic. ⁴¹

With the resurgence of religion in the public sphere, more and more voices called for the spreading of Catholicism to new peoples and lands, for example in northern Africa. Spain’s Queen Regent Maria Cristina (1858–1929) stood at the forefront of numerous initiatives that promoted Catholicism as part of the ‘civilizing mission’ that Spain was duty-bound to play in the Moroccan empire. ⁴² Here again, deploying broader sensitivity reveals that the case of Spain was neither unique nor exceptional, but rather epitomized a broader nineteenth-century global pattern. Indeed, many rich, in-depth accounts describe Christian missionary expeditions to the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia which often contradicted or modified colonial plans for expansion. ⁴³ And yet, despite this Catholic revival, religious missions in this period are still largely considered to have been a ‘Protestant phenomenon’. ⁴⁴

The nineteenth-century Spanish empire: a space of global interactions

Spain’s position in the wider world began to change when most of its American colonies gained independence in the 1820s. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Spain was relegated from a major colonial power of the early modern period to a marginal position. The initial wave of independence left Spain with remnants of its former empire in the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico), in the Pacific (the Philippines and some islands in the Pacific), and in toeholds in equatorial and northern Africa. War against the United States in 1898 led to the loss of the remaining colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, thus intensifying the perception of Spain’s decline in the international arena. Alongside Portugal, China, and the Ottoman empire, the Spanish case appeared to illustrate aptly what Lord Salisbury referred to, in a famous speech at the Royal Albert Hall on 4 May 1898, as the ‘dying nations’. Looking at the world’s future, the British prime minister predicted that ‘the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict amongst civilized nations will speedily appear’. ⁴⁵

The way in which scholars have traditionally explained the history of the Spanish empire in the nineteenth century recalls Salisbury’s words. In contrast to the era of expansion that the British and French empires experienced during this period, Spain is often depicted as a fossilized empire, unsuccessfully clinging to the remnants of its former glory. However, as Richard Kagan has explained, this idea of decline draws on ‘Prescott’s paradigm’, according to which Spain’s loss of empire is the product of ‘an unhealthy combination of political despotism and religious bigotry’. ⁴⁶ Britain and the United States stood in direct contrast. In the view of William H. Prescott (1796–1859), a Harvard-based historian who was a pioneer of the discipline in the US, these two countries embodied the virtues of Protestant European nations, as manifested in their democratic institutions, religious freedom, and laissez-faire economic policies. ⁴⁷

While Prescott’s paradigm casts a long shadow over Anglo-American approaches to the history of the Spanish empire, significant efforts have been made in the last decade to revisit colonial legacies in the historiography. ⁴⁸ And yet, Spain’s absence in recent comparative approaches to the history of modern empires suggests that the effect still lingers. ⁴⁹ From a global historian’s point of view, three considerations could help to remedy the situation. First, it must be noted that the loss of territorial possessions in the 1820s and 1898 did not put an end to Spanish presence outside Spain, but rather changed its nature and contours. For instance, scholars such as Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette have shown that migration, trade, and the exchange of ideas between the former metropolis and the new Latin American republics remained robust throughout the century. ⁵⁰ Thus, hispanismo was consolidated, particularly after 1898, into a new formula, which strengthened the cultural and linguistic bonds across the Atlantic. ⁵¹

In addition to efforts to maintain influence in the American continent through informal means, Spain retained a territorial presence in Africa. The country ruled the colonies of Equatorial Guinea and the Spanish Sahara, held presidios along the North African coast, exercised a protectorate in northern and southern Morocco from 1912 to 1956, and long considered the Canary Islands to be a colony rather than an integral part of Spain. Though limited in size, these territories afforded political and economic elites a ‘new empire’, on the basis of which they imagined Spain as a colonial power in the twentieth century. ⁵² The fact that these efforts lasted well into Franco’s dictatorship, just as in Portugal, reveals the endurance of global connections, and with it the need to examine the particular forms and mechanisms through which those connections persisted.

Second, Spain actively participated in the broader process of European expansion of the second half of the nineteenth century, though with more modest results than other countries. Thus, the consolidation of the liberal state in the 1840s animated Spanish political elites to undertake a series of military expeditions in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. According to Stephen Jacobson, this array of ‘micromilitary interventions’, which involved short-lived conflicts with a limited display of armed force, consisted of attempts to increase political influence and gain new territory. They can be divided into two phases. The first was a series of interventions in Vietnam, Morocco, Santo Domingo, Mexico, and along the coast of Chile and Peru between 1858 and 1866. A second wave focused on the Moroccan empire between 1893 and 1926. ⁵³

Although the net outcomes were meagre, these overseas military campaigns led to a series of connections between distant geographies. To give an example, Spain’s intervention in Morocco during the so-called ‘War of Africa’ (1859–60) popularized a racial and civilizing discourse, which Cuban white elites subsequently borrowed to counter the political rights’ demands being made by Afro-Cubans. The same racial discourse, and even some of the same men, played an important part during Spain’s annexation of Santo Domingo (1861–63), which was carried out under the pretext of resisting the invasion of ‘coloured’ Haitian troops. ⁵⁴ All these overseas interventions challenge the traditional depiction of the Spanish empire as ossified and inert in the nineteenth century, and reveal a map of planetary interactions that global historians have largely overlooked.

Third and finally, occupying a secondary position on the international stage does not necessarily imply historical decline. Josep M. Fradera has shown that the narrative of decline and fall neglects the complexity of imperial transitions. While the territorial losses in continental America were an undeniable setback to Spain’s position in the global order, what followed was not a transition ‘from empire into nation’ but rather a period of imperial retreat, or, to put it more precisely, of ‘orderly withdrawal’. ⁵⁵ The premise behind this idea is that empires were not at all monolithic entities, and that, on the contrary, they possessed an extraordinary capacity for resilience. Challenging the narrative of decline and fall reveals the importance of considering adaptive strategies (legal, economic, and ideological) in imperial transitions that are usually considered secondary. Therefore, examining how Spain designed a new constitutional order to maintain its colonies appears not as something unique, but rather as part of a broader challenge that other empires, such as the British and the French, also faced.

Mobility: forced and free

The global nature of nineteenth-century Spain can also be examined through the mobility of people. Many slaves, slave traders, political refugees, and migrants moved across borders and continents throughout the century. What makes the Spanish case particularly relevant to the question of slavery, from a global perspective, is that Spain was the last European power to abolish slavery, in 1873 in Puerto Rico and in 1886 in Cuba. Only Brazil in the Atlantic world took longer, abolishing slavery in 1888.

Moreover, although the Spanish empire was from the mid nineteenth century far smaller in terms of territory than the British and the French empires, it possessed what has been referred to as ‘probably the richest colony in the world’ – Cuba. ⁵⁶ Also called by contemporaries the ‘jewel in the crown’, this island became the world’s largest sugar producer in the 1830s. Behind its economic success stood a plantation system that required massive imports of workers each year. According to some estimates, ‘between the 1790s and the abolition of the slave trade, Cuba imported approximately 780,000 African slaves, as well as more than 100,000 Chinese indentured labourers who were reduced to de facto slavery’. Such figures make the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean the largest slave market in Latin America during the nineteenth century. ⁵⁷

All these factors help to explain why slavery and abolition are probably the two topics for which the Spanish case has been most integrated into global narratives. ⁵⁸ Indeed, the large slave population in Cuba and Puerto Rico had the effect of placing Spain at the centre of the international agenda on the restriction and abolition of the slave trade, and then of slavery itself. Although agreements forbidding the slave trade had in fact been signed between Spain and Great Britain in 1818, planters in the Caribbean continued trafficking slaves well into the 1860s. The reluctance of sugar planters to comply with international agreements led to a tug-of-war on a planetary scale. On the one hand, Britain carried out several interventions along the African coast, for example in Spain’s area of influence in Equatorial Guinea, and established patrols in the Atlantic to enforce the abolition of the trade. These interventions had repercussions in global politics, to the point that the historian Fabian Klose has described them as the cradle for humanitarian intervention in international law. ⁵⁹

On the other hand, traders of many nationalities became crucial to meeting the continuous demand for slaves from the Spanish colonies, as well as from Brazil. The case of agents such as Pedro Blanco is particularly revelatory of a commerce in human souls which transcended national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. Born in Malaga, Blanco was a slave trader who operated from the mouth of the Gallinas river (in today’s Sierra Leone), where he had established a ‘factory’ called Lomboko. From this base, he formed a partnership with a local chief named Siaka, whose daughter he married, with the aim of supplying slaves to the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, but also to Trinidad and the American South. ⁶⁰ His and many other examples illustrate the persistence of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, regardless of the trade’s formal legal abolition. They reveal the important role that a multinational range of individuals played in financing and laundering the benefits obtained through this illegal trade, as John A. E. Harris has recently examined. ⁶¹

Another nexus in global slavery was the traffic in Chinese workers, commonly referred to as ‘coolies’. In the 1840s, Spanish agents established a recruiting station in the Portuguese enclave of Macau in South China, with the aim of sending labour to the Americas. Catalan and Basque trading firms, such as the Zulueta family, became central in directing Chinese workers to the ports of Callao and Havana. ⁶² It has been estimated that around 220,000 coolies arrived in Peru and Cuba between 1850 and the late 1880s, in the face of the increasing difficulty of obtaining slaves. ⁶³ The fate of coolies became entwined with that of other ethnic groups, who also ended up in the Spanish Caribbean. In Cuba, for instance, coolies shared tasks with black Africans, who were brought to the island through the illegal slave trade. ⁶⁴

In the case of Peru, coolie workers mixed with natives and African slaves, who were less numerous in the Andean countries than they were in the Caribbean Basin and Brazil, and, later on, with European and Asian immigrants, who started migrating legally to Peru at the end of the nineteenth century. ⁶⁵ Labourers were needed to work on extracting guano and in sugar estates, the two most profitable activities of the newly independent country, while native Peruvians refused such work because they did not find it profitable enough. ⁶⁶ The flow of Chinese labourers provides the opportunity to study a community whose involvement in economic activities across very diverse territories touches on important issues, such as the boundaries between contract labour and slavery, as Jürgen Osterhammel has suggested. ⁶⁷

Moreover, the pressing need to find alternative sources of labour for Cuban plantations encouraged the Spanish authorities to participate in new colonial adventures in Southeast Asia. On the pretext of the killing of two Spanish missionaries, in 1857 France and Spain embarked on a punitive expedition in Cochinchina (Nguyen Vietnam), which lasted until 1862. From the French perspective, this intervention was primarily motivated by the desire of Napoleon III to increase France’s standing as a colonial power, and open the Southeast Asian market to French economic interests. ⁶⁸ In contrast, the aims behind Spain’s participation have largely gone unnoticed. No doubt, these were more modest, and partly reflected attempts to increase Spain’s prestige in the international arena. Yet, in addition, there were more prosaic concerns: the increasing difficulties in obtaining slaves from Black Africa led the Spanish authorities to look at Asia as a potential, untapped, source to fulfil the demand for labour from the sugar plantations in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Shortly after the peace treaty was signed, a royal decree was issued in 1864, authorizing the introduction of Vietnamese workers into the Caribbean. ⁶⁹

All this reveals the decisive importance that Cuba and Puerto Rico had on Spain’s mid-nineteenth-century international policy. The economic needs of these two colonies became a powerful stimulus for the micro-militarist expeditions that Spain undertook in America, Africa, and Asia in the mid nineteenth century. ⁷⁰ Indeed, the Caribbean colonies, by order of the authorities in Madrid, covered many of the costs incurred, as William Clarence-Smith has shown. ⁷¹ Furthermore, the shadow of the two ‘sugar islands’ was felt in Spain too, and one cannot fully comprehend the demise of the Democratic Sexennium (1868–74), or the Bourbon Restoration (1874–1923), without considering the pressure exerted by Cuban plantation elites for a pro-slavery regime in Spain. ⁷² The metropolis thus remained the indisputable centre of political power, but many of its decisions – in America, Africa, and Asia, and also in Spain itself – were qualified in Havana.

Migration is a second crucial topic for which the Spanish case sheds new light on the understanding of global human mobility. As the primary destination for thousands of Spanish immigrants, Argentina has received much scholarly attention. One interesting example of the close bonds that linked the two countries took place in 1905. Suffering desperately from an agricultural crisis, the municipal authorities of Boada, a town of 1,146 inhabitants near Salamanca, sent a letter to the Argentinian president, Manuel Quintana, offering that the town’s whole population would emigrate en bloc, municipal authorities included, if Argentina would admit them and provide the means. The example of Boada, so illustrative of the severity of the agricultural crisis in fin-de-siècle Spain, reflects the advantages of an approach that examines connections with other parts of the Atlantic world. ⁷³ The case of Galician migrant associations in Latin America is another example. The historian Xosé M. Núñez Seixas has shown how these associations can be looked at as a valuable laboratory, in which the complex processes that form hybrid identities can be studied. ⁷⁴

In a similar vein, historians have directed their attention to North Africa, in order to uncover alternative patterns of migration. Thousands of impoverished farmers from south-eastern Spain moved to Algeria from the 1830s, such that ‘at the end of the nineteenth century … more Spanish than French lived in certain départements of Algeria’. ⁷⁵ These patterns of migration, however, did not always align with the interests of Spanish political authorities, who actively sought to redirect migration flows towards Morocco, which at the time was regarded as the ‘natural’ destination for Spanish colonial expansion. ⁷⁶ Migration therefore represents another area where Africa and the Americas are attracting attention in the writing of modern Spanish history from a transnational perspective. At the same time, the massive flows of population that were involved reveal another facet of the global ‘mobilities’ that characterized the nineteenth century. ⁷⁷

Spain not only exported large numbers of migrants abroad but also became a stopping point for ethnic minorities following global circuits of migration. For instance, coastal Spanish towns became a transit point for the Syro-Lebanese diaspora seeking to cross the Atlantic. Yusuf Bey, for example, the Ottoman consul in Barcelona, complained of Lebanese migrants who wandered and begged the streets in torn clothes, spreading stories of massacres of Christians committed by Muslims in the Near East. ⁷⁸ In great numbers, these migrants reached Latin America in steamships departing from French and Spanish ports. They also travelled to the West African coast, from where they were sometimes sent back to Europe. In 1905, for instance, the government of French Guinea deported to Tenerife eleven Syrians who had disembarked in Conakry without proof of identity. This shows that, in addition to entering the Americas in their millions, these migrants also reached western Europe and West Africa. ⁷⁹

Likewise, Jewish migration became an important issue in nineteenth-century Spain, especially because of the way in which Spanish liberals had to come to terms with the expulsion of Jews from Spain back in 1492. From 1868 on, hundreds of Sephardim obtained Spanish citizenship. Later on, when the fourth centenary of the Jews’ expulsion was commemorated in 1892, Spanish liberals started a campaign to return citizenship to Sephardic Jewish descendants (the so-called Ladinos). At that time, Spanish scholars visiting Salonica were astonished to find something akin to medieval Iberia flourishing under the Ottoman rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. ⁸⁰ Indeed, when Greek forces conquered this town in 1912, thousands of Sephardic Jews preferred to emigrate and apply for different citizenships, above all Spanish, although those who benefitted the most from Spain’s open-door naturalization process were Sephardic Jews from Morocco. ⁸¹

Connected markets and commodities

Along with the movement of people, trade in the territories under Spanish sovereignty provides another important dimension in the connected history approach. As the world’s foremost sugar producer, Cuba exerted significant influence over the Spanish political economy, and its policies concerning slavery and slave trade, while it supplied the most important markets of Europe and the Americas. ⁸² The sugar exports from Cuba to the United States rocketed in the mid nineteenth century, to the point that the US became the most important market for this product (from 17% in 1840 to 91% in 1894). Spanish demand, in contrast, remained extremely low during the same period (comprising 10% and 2% of Cuban orders respectively), despite the introduction of highly protectionist tariffs. This situation became so untenable that the tension between Cuban producers and Spanish authorities fuelled Spanish fears of a future annexation of Cuba by the United States. ⁸³

Cotton is yet another example of a raw material whose production involved a dense network of Atlantic connections. Much of the industrialization of Catalonia can be traced back to this single commodity. ⁸⁴ The United States, via Cuba and Puerto Rico, became the main cotton supplier for Catalan mills in the nineteenth century, but the American Civil War (1861–65) cut off the supply, with severe effects for Spanish industry. ⁸⁵ One nefarious outcome was the so-called ‘cotton hunger’ (fam de cotó), which severely affected Catalan textile production, and, indirectly, the entire Spanish political system. ⁸⁶ The constant efforts by national authorities to introduce protectionist policies that would enable them to maintain the Caribbean territories as privileged suppliers for the metropolis failed to attain their objective. This made the Catalan example a manifestation of what Sven Beckert has called ‘the empire of cotton’, connecting the globe beyond political boundaries. ⁸⁷ The impact of inter-imperial competition and the reshaping of global markets for raw cotton were also felt elsewhere, as the Indian uprising of 1857 and the Egyptian rebellions of the second half of the nineteenth century clearly demonstrate. ⁸⁸ This is why not only connections between Spain and the Caribbean but also entanglements with North America and Asia should be examined in order to fully grasp the complexities of the historical processes at work.

The Philippines presents another case where the imbricated nature of global commodities, together with Spain’s presence in Asia, can be examined. The characteristics of this colony differed greatly from Spain’s possessions in the Caribbean, as did the policies of the metropolitan authorities. In contrast to the protected character of the markets in Cuba and Puerto Rico, from the late eighteenth century those of the Philippines were progressively opened to international trade, and numerous British, German, and US firms set up shop in Manila. ⁸⁹

The growing hostility from the British and the Dutch, and the collapse of the Manila Galleon in 1815 (that is, the trans-Pacific route that for more than two centuries had linked the Philippines to Mexico), convinced Spain that liberalizing the economy was the only formula that would allow it to preserve its remote possessions. ⁹⁰ While these measures illustrate the capacity of empires to adjust to changing scenarios, the change in colonial policies also led to new commercial opportunities. For instance, employees of the Spanish Royal Philippine Company created joint ventures with British companies during the boom of the opium trade, in the 1810s and 1820s. The geographical proximity of the Philippines to China, abundant capital, and the ability to fly the Spanish flag, which gave ships access to advantageous ports such as Macau, were some of the benefits that British merchants found in the Philippines. This led them to enter into partnerships with Spanish merchants, most of whom were of Basque origin. ⁹¹

Another example is tobacco. In 1781, Spanish authorities imposed a monopoly on marketing the product, with the aim of financing the colonial administration in the Philippines through local sales. However, the arrival of British and American companies in the early nineteenth century coincided with a boom in consumption throughout Asia and the Pacific. From that time, ‘exports of Filipino tobacco leaf and hand-rolled tobacco products began to flow to markets in Australia, California, Singapore, Hong Kong, and southern China, as well as to Spain’. In fact, the consumption of ‘Luzon tobacco’ became a distinguishing trait of well-off sectors in Canton. ⁹² The examples of opium and tobacco thus show that, even when Spain’s presence in Southeast Asia was marginal, its jurisdiction over the Philippines opened many opportunities for business through trans-imperial and transnational cooperation. ⁹³

Intercultural dialogues in the making of national identities

Few topics in modern Spanish history have attracted as much interest as the forging of national identities. The number of works devoted to the topic is immense, and a stream of new publications continues to feed the debate. Paradoxically, this ongoing interest in re-examining collective identities has not resulted in any serious attempts to introduce international and transnational spaces into the analysis. Even in the most influential works, Spanish modern identity continues to be confined to the nation-state. ⁹⁴ This is the result, in part, of an ingrained habit that sees the state as the predominant, if not the sole, agent in ‘inventing’ the nation, neglecting the crucial role that imperial and global interconnections also played in the process.

Indeed, national identities were not shaped within closed borders, nor were they simply built upon the ruins of decaying empires. Rather, they were the product of cultural transfers, re-adaptation, and opposition to other political communities, in a context of imperial reconfiguration and global interconnections. ⁹⁵ All these elements were tightly knitted together in modern Spain, a product of its condition as a contact zone between Europe, Africa, and the American continent.

Over the nineteenth century, liberal governments staged several military expeditions in North Africa, during which Moroccans were portrayed as the ‘Other’ against which Spanish identity could be readjusted or formulated. ⁹⁶ This is only one side of the story, however. On other occasions, themes and notions associated with Africa also exerted a powerful attraction on Spanish cultural and political elites, and became recurrent elements in national narratives. A wide range of cultural productions (paintings, writings, and songs) evoked the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages with unabashed nostalgia, and fed the fantasy of a ‘blood brotherhood’ that linked the lands between the Pyrenees and the Atlas mountains. ⁹⁷

America also featured prominently in Spain’s national imaginary, though in a contradictory manner. Hence, the discovery and conquest of the Americas in the early modern period became a central element in explaining Spain’s status in the world. ⁹⁸ In contrast, the legacy left by Spain’s nineteenth-century imperial past is much less clear, mostly because the historiographies of colonialism and nationalism have not merged into a single narrative. This situation is in direct contrast to other countries with a less tangible imperial past, such as Germany and Italy, where postcolonial approaches have contributed to a thorough redefinition of the study of identity. ⁹⁹ Fortunately, in Spain as well, some authors have actively argued in favour of ‘bringing the empire back in’. ¹⁰⁰

Moreover, this process often transcended the imperial framework, and was influenced by a myriad of connections and exchanges that circulated on a global scale. For instance, the legislative framework that England and France designed to rule their overseas colonies directly influenced the way that Spain sought to re-order its empire, after the loss of the continental American territories in the 1820s. ¹⁰¹ Likewise, progressive Spanish elites of the late nineteenth century saw the United States as a model of modernity, in the form of republicanism, democratic rights, and technological innovation. The US Constitution influenced one of the most radical documents in Spain’s legal history, the Constitution of 1869. ¹⁰²

Yet the entanglements between the two countries were far more complex than a simple clash between tradition and progress, and they travelled in both directions. In California, for instance, the opening of the Panama Canal provided an opportunity for the elites to invent a Hispanic identity within the United States. The historical raw material on which the myth was based lay in Spain’s well-known imperial legacy. The early modern explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475–1519) was portrayed as the founding father of a region then seeking to find a place for itself in a country dominated by the Protestant and Anglo-Saxon traditions of the East Coast. ¹⁰³ For decades afterwards, a romantic imaginary of Spain, populated with flamenco dancers, gypsies, and rural bandits, fascinated North American audiences. ¹⁰⁴

The upsurge in orientalist images about Spain following the opening of the Panama Canal was not new, however. A similar imaginary had already captivated European travellers and writers in the mid nineteenth century. ¹⁰⁵ Yet Spanish elites did not simply observe passively while such myths were created and reformulated; they reacted by elaborating a new national discourse of their own that combined tradition with modernity under the constraints that they faced. ¹⁰⁶ In contrast to state-centred perspectives, the above-mentioned examples show that any understanding of the Spanish nation-building process that does not take into account the European or American imaginaries of Spain, as well as the reactions of local actors to them, is, by state-of-the-art standards, woefully incomplete.

Conclusion

What can nineteenth-century Spain bring to the field of global history? In this article, we have argued that the Spanish case, often neglected in international scholarship, could provide new angles of analysis. Its scant presence in key contributions, such as those of C. A. Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel, should be amended. Contrary to the common tendency to consider Spain as a decaying power, we have briefly shown, through different topics and themes, how the country was deeply engaged within a wide set of global connections. Therefore, the globe, and not just the Iberian Peninsula, should be considered when writing modern Spanish history.

This approach implies an alternative understanding of modern Spanish history. Rather than providing empirical analysis, our aim in this article has been to advocate a new research agenda, in the light of recent scholarship. We believe that tracing connections and entanglements will reveal the extent to which Spain served as a contact zone between Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. Beyond its condition as a nation-state, we have argued in favour of ‘decentring’ the country, to use the expression coined by Natalie Zemon Davis. National histories should be situated in a wider scope, where ‘plural voices [are taken] into the account’. ¹⁰⁷

In other words, writing connected history implies ‘decentring’ the units that usually form the core of the analysis. As the concept of Europe seems to change ‘from solid to gas state’ when integrated into global interactions, according to Kris Manjapra, so does the case of Spain. ¹⁰⁸ The country is released from its territorial attachment to the Iberian Peninsula, and even to Europe, if the connections and entanglements with distant territories are brought to the forefront of the analysis. The range of topics in global history that would be enriched by integrating Spanish history is immense. In this article, we have dealt with a set of examples that illustrate the potential that this approach encapsulates. Ultimately, all these considerations imply rethinking the very concept of ‘Spain’, and merging it into the field of global history.