Benjamin Martin has written the definitive history of Spanish labor organization, from the painstakingly slow onset of industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century through the turbulent years of the Second Republic. Weaving together data on wages, working conditions, and living standards throughout this period, and carefully analyzing efforts by elites and workers to address the desperate conditions suffered by the laboring classes, Martin elucidates the factors that led Spanish society toward ideological polarization and civil war. Comparisons with conditions elsewhere in Western Europe provide a perspective that is largely missing in studies of Spanish labor, thereby clarifying further the ways in which Spain’s path to modernization differed from those of neighboring countries.
The book devotes separate chapters to each of the major ideological groups in the Spanish labor movement. Martin demonstrates a keen sensitivity to variations across regions and to the role of rural and urban migration in shaping patterns of labor organization and behavior. His interpretation also pays careful attention to the interactions between state policies toward labor and the shifting power relations between different sectors of the labor movement. The failure of elites and the state to reach a lasting accommodation with labor is a recurrent theme, as is the tendency of reformist governments to confront the labor problem with reforms that were too incomplete or too late to be effective.
The Agony of Modernization stands out among Spanish labor histories as the first to take full advantage of the wealth of regional studies carried out over the past two decades by Spanish social historians concerned with the evolution of local conflicts in the decades leading up to the civil war. The bibliographical essay at the end of the book offers a useful guide to scholars interested in particular facets of the story, which Martin has stitched together in an exhaustive yet highly readable fashion.
The title of the volume is perhaps misleading, for the agony of modernization in Spain did not end with Franco’s victory. The 1950s and 1960s were a period of unprecedented industrial expansion, the impact of which shaped both the character of the political transition after Franco’s death and the role of the labor movement in the liberal democratic order. Yet this detail does not detract from Martin’s achievement, for his study covers a major gap in the historical literature. Martin’s concluding chapter on labor relations during the Franco regime can be supplemented by any of a number of recently published works, including several in English, that analyze labor during the dictatorship and transition. The study of labor after the consolidation of Spanish democracy remains to be written, but an author contemplating such a work will benefit from Martin’s insights into the origins of the Spanish labor movement.
