A Social History Of Spanish Labour

Focusing on organization, resistance and political culture, this collection represents some of the best examples of recent Spanish historiography in the field of modern Spanish labor movements. Topics range from socialism to anarchism, from the formation of the liberal state in the 19th century to the Civil War, and from women in the work place to the fate of the unions under Franco.

Insightful and accessible, A Social History of Modern Spain is the first comprehensive social history of modern Spain in any language. Adrian Shubert analyzes the social development of Spain since 1800. He explores the social conflicts at the root of the Spanish Civil War and how that war and the subsequent changes from democracy to Franco and back again have shaped the social relations of the country. Paying equal attention to the rural and urban worlds and respecting the great regional diversity within Spain, Shubert draws a sophisticated picture of a country struggling with the problems posed by political, economic, and social change. He begins with an overview of the rural economy and the relationship of the people to the land, then moves on to an analysis of the work and social lives of the urban population. He then discusses the changing roles of the clergy, the military, and the various local government, community, and law enforcement officials. A Social History of Modern Spain concludes with an analysis of the dramatic political, economic, and social changes during the Franco regime and during the subsequent return to democracy.

This collection of articles covers a crucial period of Spain's history, from the rise of Franco to the crucial Stabilization Plan of 1959. Separated into four chronologically divided sections, it focuses largely on the international reactions to and the involvement of other powers in the Spanish Civil War, including an examination of French and British reactions to the situation in Spain, and Soviet, German and Italian involvement and the period of the Second World War, with a particular focus on Spain's relations to the Axis and Vichy France especially during the period of 1940/41 when a Spanish entry in to the war was most likely. The fate of the Spanish refugees and exiles in Britain and France is also highlighted, as is Spain's international position in the aftermath of the Second World War and particularly the attitude of the former Allies, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the USA. The volume ends with Spain's response to the unfolding economic co-operation and integration in Western Europe.

Since the explosion of the indignados movement beginning in 2011, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of the “public sphere” in a Spanish context: how it relates to society and to political power, and how it has evolved over the centuries. The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere brings together contributions from leading scholars in Hispanic studies, across a wide range of disciplines, to investigate various aspects of these processes, offering a long-term, panoramic view that touches on one of the most urgent issues for contemporary European societies.

This volume suggests a new way of doing global history. Instead of offering a sweeping and generalizing overview of the past, we propose a ‘micro-spatial’ approach, combining micro-history with the concept of space. A focus on primary sources and awareness of the historical discontinuities and unevennesses characterizes the global history that emerges here. We use labour as our lens in this volume. The resulting micro-spatial history of labour addresses the management and recruitment of labour, its voluntary and coerced spatial mobility, its political perception and representation and the workers’ own agency and social networks. The individual chapters are written by contributors whose expertise covers the late medieval Eastern Mediterranean to present-day Sierra Leone, through early modern China and Italy, eighteenth-century Cuba and the Malvinas/Falklands, the journeys of a missionary between India and Brazil and those of Christian captives across the Ottoman empire and Spain. The result is a highly readable volume that addresses key theoretical and methodological questions in historiography. Chapter 7 is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

As one of Europe's great industrial and revolutionary centres Barcelona has been in need of a detailed social and cultural history, yet there is actually a paucity of detailed research. This book redresses the balance. Focusing on the entire twentieth century, it allows for the emergence of long-term trends, and deals with both classic and newer themes of labour history. This novel and authoritative work will interest not only those working on Spain, but all scholars and students of comparative history.

The period from 1898 to 1923 was a particularly dramatic one in Spanish history; it culminated in the violent Barcelona “labor wars” and was only brought to a close with the coup d’état launched by the Barcelona Captain General, Miguel Primo de Rivera, in September 1923. In his detailed examination of the rise of the Catalan anarchist-syndicalist-led labor movement, the author blends social, cultural and political history in a novel way. He analyses the working class “from below” and the policies of the Spanish State towards labor “from above.” Based on an in-depth usage of primary sources, the authors provides an unrivalled account of Catalan labor and the Catalan anarchist-syndicalist movement and thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of early twentieth-century Spanish history.

This collective volume aims at studying a variety of labour history themes in Southern Europe, and investigating the transformations of labour and labour relations that these areas underwent in the 19th and the 20th centuries. The subjects studied include industrial labour relations in Southern Europe; labour on the sea and in the shipyards of the Mediterranean; small enterprises and small land ownership in relation to labour; formal and informal labour; the tendency towards independent work and the role of culture; forms of labour management (from paternalistic policies to the provision of welfare capitalism); the importance of the institutional framework and the wider political context; and women’s labour and gender relations.