One may well wonder for what sort of readers this chronology was put together. Tired businessmen? Undergraduates preparing term papers? Professors writing lecture notes? Panelists in a guessing game? Most or all of these would have benefited more from a conventional history, offering a systematic narrative and description and going out on the limb to make judgments.
Instead Martínez has chosen to present his readers with the raw materials of a monograph: an almost apologetic introduction, well laid out maps and tables, a useful bibliography—and, at the center of these, a great sequence of events stretching from 1128 (“The Fuero Viejo de Castilla declares that no one could work mines in the ‘land property of the King.’ ” p. 19) to December 31, 1967 (production figures and a natural gas agreement). As Martínez himself admits, it is difficult to distinguish between milestones and ornamentation. As he does not admit, his dates and data will require further research by a genuine historian, since he gives no documentation.
It appears that the non-book has reached England too.
