Fifteen years ago, Raymond Carr’s Modern Spain gave English-language readers one of the most complete and careful histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain. His study began in 1808 and ended in 1939, and thus deprived readers of his excellent blend of well-researched fact and intelligent interpretation on the period in Spain from the end of the Civil War, through the dictatorship, to the renewal of democracy in 1975.
Carr’s new book covers the years from 1875 to 1980. Franco’s death has made it possible for modern Iberianists to write about the Franco regime from previously inaccessible materials, but it is a major disappointment that Carr or his editors have chosen to devote only thirty pages to this era. Much of his focus falls on the period between 1875 and 1923, a time certainly crucial to all that followed, but a period already well-served by a number of good monographs that are here used to enrich Carr’s earlier coverage—a process of skimming the cream from the milk.
It is an exercise that enables Carr skillfully to synthesize what has been written by others, while ignoring his own fairly recent work, done in conjunction with Pablo Fusi, on Franco’s dictatorship. Students of Latin American politics can learn a great deal about authoritarianism, corporatism, and dependency from studying modern Spain, but not from this book.
