After decades of dictatorship and outward tranquillity, Iberia seems on its way towards political reawakening. In the space of four months the prime ministers of both countries have been toppled, Carrero Blanco of Spain murdered and Caetano of Portugal deposed by a military coup. Whether these changes (aside from the immediate and inevitably harsh circumstances in which they take place) are for better or worse is of course debatable, but there seems to be little room for doubt that they are inevitable as both countries make progress in their economic and social development.
The books under review here may contribute to shed some light on the early stages of these halting processes of social change. What both books have in common is that they address themselves roughly to the same audience core: the college and university students. Neither of them has bibliographical footnotes, and Livermore’s Portugal does not even have a reference list; in a brief preface the author remits the reader to other histories of Portugal written by himself. Payne’s book is more scholarly and also more successful although its price may make many instructors hesitate before making it required reading for large classes.
Although it undoubtedly was written with the college population in mind, Livermore’s book is also intended for a more general audience as it is part of a series of short national histories; what he has attempted to do is to “deal with the evolution of Portuguese society.” To achieve this in a short book he has included “the main events of political history with some account of social organization.” I am quoting the preface’s words because they describe quite accurately Livermore’s method of exposition. The book opens with Prehistoric Portugal and ends with Marcelo Caetano at the helm. It is divided into eight chapters, chronologically ordered, and within each chapter the same procedure is followed: first, main events of political history (kings, queens, ministers, wars, battles), then social institutions (political structure, social structure, forms of land tenure, legal systems, and so on). Thus although it is competently written and there can be no doubt about Livermore’s familiarity with the subject, it does not make exciting reading. The author’s main preoccupation seems to have been to fit as many facts as possible into two hundred pages, and while he has succeeded remarkably well one wonders whether it may not have been a Pyrrhic victory. The facts are all there but they do not interrelate, political events (histoire evenementielie) following their own pattern while social institutions seem to trail behind more or less on their own. It would have been better to relegate reigns and battles to a chronology and attempt a more interpretive and lively approach.
Payne’s book has many virtues, among them the comparative approach. Not only does he underline historical parallels and contrasts between the two countries but he often makes institutional comparisons with other lands such as Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and Poland. This gives a desirable wide scope to the institutional background which Payne has integrated much more successfully than Livermore into his narrative of events, thanks chiefly to a more selective approach. Instead of mechanically splitting the text into two sequences, the “political” and the “institutional,” Payne emphasizes institutional factors when and insofar as he feels they help to understand certain periods or events. Thus the book has special chapters on “Medieval Catholicism,” on “Early Modern Catholicism,” and on “Society and the Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” in addition to special sections on economic and social topics within each chapter whose length varies with the general relevance and historical import.
The first volume of A History of Spain and Portugal takes the narrative of events up to the end of the seventeenth century. It devotes little attention to premedieval Iberia, perhaps agreeing with Américo Castro’s thesis that the Spanish nation is a product of the medieval Christian Reconquest of the Peninsula from the Moslems. The second volume carries the story from the installation of the Bourbon dynasty on the Spanish throne, and the restoration of Portuguese independence under the Braganças in 1640, to the present. Each volume has its own bibliography but the pagination is correlative and the same alphabetic index is appended to both volumes. The reader will also be grateful for the frequent maps and chronologies.
What Payne has set out to do is to incorporate into a textbook structure all the innovations and reappraisals of recent scholarship. A lot of attention is devoted to economic history and to social structure, with quantitative definitions of the class composition of the population and, for the modern period, macroeconomic statistics: industrial production indices, occupational distribution of manpower, and so on. Art and literature, by contrast, receive very synthetic treatment which, in this reviewer’s opinion, is perfectly correct in a book of this kind.
In spite of its virtues, Payne’s book has shortcomings too. Several of them are questions of detail although not negligible. His estimate of the increases in gold and silver circulation in Europe as a consequence of the importation of American treasure (p. 281) is exaggerated in the light of more recent works than Hamilton’s such as, for instance, Spooner and Braudel’s contribution to the Cambridge Economic History. This and several others which it would be tedious to enumerate are mistakes which can be easily corrected. There are other problems with Payne’s approach which this reviewer finds more important and also less easy to pinpoint. For instance, Payne (unlike most Spanish historians) recognizes the relationship between the Iberian Reconquest and the European demographic expansion of the years 1000-1300, but it is not sufficiently emphasized, although the comparison between Poland and Spain in the late medieval and early modern period (pp. 328-30) seems to imply a full grasp of this relationship and is an excellent piece of comparative history.
In his study of contemporary Iberia one can also detect an impatience with the left which seems almost anger at their having failed. The opening paragraph of the section on “The Spanish Revolution” is extremely confusing (Pp. 646-7) but one of its main points seems to be that calling the “leftist zone” the Loyalists “is somewhat misleading for there was no attempt to remain loyal to the constitutional Republican regime.” This statement itself is also somewhat misleading. But why not make the same point about the rightist zone being called the Nationalists? Why was the colonial army of Africa more “national” than the government of Madrid? There are other passages which evidence a similar attitude: embarrassing events for the Franco or the Salazar regime are not mentioned, such as the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, or the assassination of Humberto Delgado, the main leader of the opposition to the Salazar regime until his death, whereas trivial points are emphasized to stress the “indepen dence,” for instance, of the rightist side vis-à-vis its fascist allies in the Spanish civil war. Thus on page 654 it is said that the Falange was not an “imitation of the Nazi or Fascist parties” because it appealed to Spanish tradition “going back to the authoritarian monarchy of Fernando and Isabel.” Well, a Spanish fascist party could hardly pretend to go back to the purity of the Aryan race or to the greatness of Caesar’s Rome. It imitated Nazis and Fascists, however, in that it attempted to create a nationalist mythology by harking back to the glorious days of a distant past. The accumulation of small details of this sort in fact gives Payne’s account of twentieth-century Iberia a definitely conservative flavor.
In spite of this bias and some factual inaccuracies, however, Payne has written a valuable book, incorporating the accretions of more than two decades of scholarship. The style is clear and effective, in the best style of haute divulgation, and it will be widely read by students and teachers of Iberian history for many years to come.