The Birth of Modern Politics in Spain - by G Thomson (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book challenges the view of Spain as backward, 'timeless' and isolated from wider European movements: impervious to modernity. By tracing the diffusion of democratic ideas and republican associations in the towns and villages of eastern Andalucia between 1854 and 1875, Spain is shown to have shared fully in Europe's mid-nineteenth-century democratic enthusiasm. Small-town democrats captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of rural people who viewed politics as an esoteric pastime occupying only the wealthy and the educated. They achieved this by using the press for delivering their message, by organising clandestine Carbonari societies for extending their support and fighting elections, by preparing for (mostly abortive) popular insurrections, and by dramatising the analogy between the Italian Risorgimento and Spain's own regeneration. Hence, during the two decades of political conflict that preceded the 'Glorious' Revolution of September 1868, Spain moved from patrician to mass politics." "The book explores this political awakening by tracing the heated rivalry between two neighbours from Granada's second city of Loja, the centre of the region of study. The lives of Conservative chieftain General Ramon Maria Narvaez, Duke of Valencia, appointed seven times as First Minister by Queen Isabel, and Rafael Perez del Alamo, a veterinarian-blacksmith who in July 1861 led Spain's first civilian 'socialist' mass uprising, exemplify the two competing visions of political modernity that divided Spain during the nineteenth century, and had such tragic consequences for the twentieth."--BOOK JACKET.

Book Synopsis

An in-depth study of the reception of Democratic ideas in mid-19th Century Spain on the provincial and local level, and how they influenced the political process and fuelled the numerous conspiracies and insurrections directed at the Bourbon monarchy, between the failed uprisings in Spain in 1848 and the First Republic in 1873.

Review Quotes

'The book is an essential read for historians specialising in nineteenthcentury Spain and for those interested in the transnational rise of mass politics in the decades after 1848.' - Eric Storm, Leiden University, English Historical Review

About the Author

GUY THOMSON teaches history at the University of Warwick, UK and has published extensively on Mexican and Spanish regional history. His books include Puebla de los Angeles Industry and Society in a Mexican City, 1700-1850 (Boulder, Colorado, 1989), Patriotism, Politics and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico, Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra (Wilmington, Delaware, 1999), The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Americas (Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 2002), and Visiones del Liberalismo Política, identidad y cultura en la España del siglo XIX (University of Valencia, 2008)