History Compass 5/3 (2007): 943954, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00407.

A History of Disasters: Spanish Colonialism in the Age of Empire

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara*
Fordham University

Abstract

Historians have long relegated colonialism to the margins of modern Spanish history. Spain lost the majority of its overseas empire in the Spanish American revolutions of the early nineteenth century. It was a late, reluctant, and small-scale participant in the partition of Africa. Recent scholarship, however, is bringing colonialism back to the center of Spains nineteenth and twentieth centuries.This article examines these findings and considers their consequences for narratives of Spanish marginality and modernity. Special attention is given to two recent works: John Tones War and Genocide in Cuba and Sebastian Balfours Deadly Embrace.

When Spaniards took to the streets in 2002 and 2003 in the millions to protest the invasion of Iraq, they did so for many reasons.They objected to the unusual alliance that the Prime Minister Jos Mara Aznar struck with the United States and Britain.They distrusted US motives for going to war.They criticized the trampling of international institutions and laws. Spaniards own experiences and memories of colonial wars also shaped their view of the coming conflict. New works by John Tone and Sebastian Balfour demonstrate clearly why they would object to military entanglements in the former colonial world.The Spanish-American War of 1898 is widely known in Spain as the Disaster (el Desastre). In short engagements with the United States, Spain lost its Pacific and Atlantic fleets. Its last stand in the environs of Santiago de Cuba was short-lived.The protracted war with Cuban separatists that began in 1895 was even more devastating. Historians have frequently described it as Spains Vietnam. So many lives were lost, so much destruction wrought and to so futile an end.While Tones War and Genocide in Cuba adds weight to this comparison, Balfours Deadly Embrace forces one to realize that Spanish wars in Morocco, hard on the heels of Cuba, were equally brutalizing and destructive.Again, the loss of life was appalling. So too were the counterinsurgency tactics adopted by the army. It is useful to see these new studies in relation to a growing body of work that has addressed Spanish colonialism in the modern era, especially in the nineteenth century.The year 1898 is a benchmark in Spanish history and historiography. Spain lost its remaining Caribbean and Pacific colonies (Cuba,
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Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam) after the short war with the United States. For decades, historians paid far more attention to the decolonization that followed it instead of the colonialism that preceded it. Such is no longer the case. Beginning in the 1980s, numerous historians in Spain and the former colonies turned their attention to the colonial relation and asked how it persisted and what consequences it had for the political, cultural, economic, and social development of metropolis and colonies alike.While the motives for retrieving this history and the methods employed are diverse, the findings have transformed understanding of Spain as a colonial power in the prelude to 1898.1 It is now clear that the Caribbean colonies, in the aftermath of the Spanish American revolutions of the 1810s and 1820s that deprived Spain of its continental empire, became privileged sites of Spanish immigration, enterprise, and export. Both Puerto Rico and Cuba became thriving plantation colonies in the nineteenth century; Creole and Peninsular planters and merchants imported unprecedented numbers of African slaves and Chinese indentured workers and, with the aid of the colonial state, took advantage of legal mechanisms to exploit the free peasantry. Spanish agriculturalists, manufacturers, and shippers relied on the colonies as protected markets for their goods and services and would mobilize to defend their privileges in moments of political turmoil.Their profits, and those of Spaniards returned from the colonies, ramified throughout the Spanish economy, especially in peripheral regions such as Catalonia, Valencia, and Cantabria. Colonial politics were contentious and dynamic. Cuba saw two major uprisings for independence (186878, 187980) before the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1895. In response, the Spanish state grudgingly carried out reforms that included the abolition of slavery and the extension of constitutional guarantees to both colonies in the latter part of the century. In the Philippines, Spanish economic involvement was less intense but was picking up steam at the end of the century after a series of important reforms.Also gaining momentum were the demands of Filipino patriots tired of military rule and the heavy hand of religious orders in the colonys educational and intellectual life.The Filipino Revolution of 1896 had broad support around the archipelago. When the Americans arrived in the Caribbean and the Pacific in 1898 they expected to find societies degraded by centuries of political and religious absolutism.To their dismay, they found instead in Cuba and Puerto Rico well-organized political parties, a rich associational life, an active press, and long-standing goals of independence and/or self-government that jived badly with the US policies of Americanization, tutelage, and tight political control. Even more alarming, they encountered in the Philippines a nationalist movement unwilling to lay down its arms before the new overlord. Like Spain before it, the US then undertook a brutal counter-insurgency.2 Tones War and Genocide in Cuba provides careful insight into the political and military turmoil in Cuba on the eve of the North American invasion.
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The author is a historian of Spain who previously authored a study of the guerilla resistance to the Napoleonic occupation in the early nineteenth century.3 His two books are joined not only by an interest in military history but also by close scrutiny of the nationalist myths that accrue to wars of liberation. In what will be the books most controversial argument,Tone argues that the Cuban War of Independence was far from a story of the people in arms demanding their freedom after centuries of Spanish domination. In the authors view, the Cuban insurgency was the work of a dedicated minority. Military leaders such as Mximo Gmez and Antonio Maceo, veterans of the earlier war against Spain (the Ten Years War, 186878), devised a strategy that would inflict maximum damage upon the local economy.They also put a premium upon invading the western half of the island where the bulk of the population and wealth were located. In the previous war, the Spanish army successfully bottled up the insurgency in Oriente, the eastern end of the island, by constructing a fortified trench from coast to coast.This strategy kept the insurgents away from the great cities and sugar plantations of the west. But in 1895 and 1896, Gmez and Maceo were initially triumphant. Maceo spearheaded the invasion of the west, leading a column to very western end of the island in Pinar del Ro.Tone insists that Cubans in the western provinces, no less than the Spaniards, experienced Maceos arrival not as liberation but as an assault by a virtually foreign people. Differences of wealth, race, and incorporation into the Spanish colonial system divided the easterners and westerners. In Tones view, Cubans were far from a nation unified in battle against Spain.4 Maceo and Gmezs tactics gave them the upper hand early on.The Cuban insurgents sought to avoid pitched battle with the Spanish but even when forced into open confrontation, they fought far more shrewdly.Tone demonstrates that the Cubans would disperse and fire from cover, making themselves into difficult targets. In contrast, Spanish commanders insisted on exposing their men to maximum risk by deploying them in infantry squares in open spaces.Though possessed of more soldiers and firepower, the Spanish military squandered any advantage by sticking to outmoded tactics. Tactical incompetence was only one symptom among many of the malaise that characterized the Spanish military. Soldiers died by the thousands, not in combat but in their camps, ravaged by Yellow Fever and other maladies. Poor food, inappropriate uniforms for tropical warfare, and squalid conditions immobilized the enormous Spanish army for long periods of time. The turning point in the war was the arrival of General Valeriano Weyler as Captain General of Cuba. He replaced General Arsenio Martnez Campos, a politically astute and well-connected figure who was nonetheless incompetent as a military commander.Weyler had deep colonial roots. He served in Cuba during the Ten Years War and later was Captain General
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in the Philippines. In his first tour in Cuba, he emerged as one of the most flexible Spanish military thinkers. Instead of insisting on pitched battles and the occupation of space, Weyler formed his own guerilla squads that lived off the land and sought out rebel bands. Returning to Cuba in 1896, he rebuilt the system of trenches that divided the island. He also turned full force to a policy of reconcentrating the civilian population into fortified camps and towns. His main goal was to cut off the many sources of support that Cuban forces received from the rural population. Tones analysis of reconcentration is careful and well documented. He demonstrates how these efforts to manage the civilian population and to undermine the insurgency led to a humanitarian disaster.Tens of thousands of Cubans died in the Spanish camps.Tone evaluates the broad range of estimates, from 60,000 to 300,000 deaths, and concludes that the closest estimation is that between 155,000 and 170,000 civilians died in the camps, approximately 10 percent of the pre-war population of Cuba. More Cubans perished upon release and return to a ravaged countryside.They, not the soldiers of the opposing armies, were the main casualties of war. Like his debunking of the nation in arms,Tones treatment of reconcentration will also engender disagreement and debate, especially his argument that the Cuban strategy of total war helped to create the dislocation that led to reconcentration.Tone writes:
People...had been forced to make a choice:They could head into the hills with the insurgents or flee to Spain...As refugees, they helped to undermine the Spanish regime in Cuba, either by using up resources or by providing foreign journalists with the hideous spectacle of their starvation and death. In this way, dying refugees had an important part to play in national liberation. Gmez and Maceo did not make war with bonbons any more than Weyler did. Nor should we expect them to have been more humanitarian than the Spanish.That was not a fantasy in which the soldiers who fought to free Cuba from Spain could afford to indulge.5

If there is a weakness in this bold and challenging work it is in its final reflections on the impact of colonial war and decolonization on Spain.The author is content to rehearse a well-known trajectory that leads from 1898 to 1936.The seeds of the Spanish Civil War were in the Spanish-American War.The Spanish army after the humiliations of Cuba and the war with the United States was the breeding ground for radical right-wing generals like Francisco Franco.This view is not incorrect; indeed, Balfours book fleshes out this skeletal history in convincing fashion. Rather, after such careful scrutiny of battles, strategy, political decision-making, leading figures such as Weyler and Gmez, and the impact of the war on Cuban civilians, this broad-angle conclusion is less than satisfying.The reader is left wondering about the days immediately following defeat, decolonization, and repatriation to Spain. For example, while the responses of leading politicians and intellectuals to the Disaster are familiar, what of the soldiers who served in Cuba? Few historians could relate these histories as well as Tone.
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Sebastian Balfours Deadly Embrace picks up part of the story. Spain was in a vulnerable position after 1898, potentially the patsy of aggressive European powers like Germany.6To assure its territorial integrity, especially of insular possessions such as the Canaries and the Balearics, the Spanish government entered into alliances with England and France, ending decades of isolationist foreign policy. Morocco was the key to this new position. Spain served as an intermediary in the territories over which England and France could not agree. For the English, a Spanish protectorate in the northern regions of Morocco would keep France, and Germany, away from Gibraltar and add a buffer to its protection of the sea-lanes to India. Many Spanish politicians and intellectuals were wary of international engagement.They argued that Spain must turn inward in search of rejuvenation. Regarding Morocco in particular, they saw little prospect for economic or political benefit.The conservative political leader Francisco Silvela, earlier a critic of the total war policy in Cuba, commented:
We should banish from out thoughts the idea that the situation in Morocco represents profit and wealth for us, when, on the contrary, it is the source of poverty, sterility, and stagnation for Spain, and we accept it and we have to maintain it merely to avoid worse ills of a political and international nature.7

Nonetheless, not only the pragmatics of alliance with France and England drove Spain into Morocco; there was also diverse support for such an adventure throughout the country.8 Intellectuals and pundits preoccupied with regeneration after the calamity of 1898 viewed a Moroccan protectorate favorably. Some went so far as to argue that four centuries of empire in the Americas had been a historical detour. Spains real mission, unfortunately interrupted in 1492, was in North Africa, the long delayed prolongation of the conquest of Granada. Economic interests in the peninsula were also eager to join in the Partition of Africa. Groups that lost their protected markets in the Caribbean and Pacific hoped to regain new reserves for their goods and services.The lure of mining fortunes was also great. The most important institution supporting a mission to Morocco was the army.Weakened and discredited during the wars with Cuban and Filipino insurgents, then humiliated by the United States in 1898, the army was in search of vindication.While it could target domestic enemies such as anarchists and Catalan nationalists, it saw in Morocco a fresh field for territorial expansion and aggrandizement. Balfour shows that in the early years of the occupation, Spanish strategy was divided. Most politicians favored the use of bribery and accommodation with the tribes under its nominal authority.The army, however, preferred to assert Spanish dominance through force. In the early stages of the occupation, this latter strategy produced military defeats that far exceeded the losses incurred against Cuban and Filipino forces. For example, in 1909, a Spanish commander blithely marched into a lethal ambush in the Barranca del Lobo that cost him his life and that of hundreds of Spanish troops.
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Though the army retrenched and was able to extend its control after that defeat, the policy of accommodation with local leaders prevailed through World War I. The horrific defeat suffered by Spain at Anual in 1921, however, decisively transformed the struggle for mastery. Balfour demonstrates how the disaster was a catalyst in the development of the Army of Africa as a ruthless and interventionist force.9 The disaster had its beginnings in more aggressive Spanish policies.With World War I at an end, Spanish officials felt ready to undertake substantial military operations. In the eastern zone of the Protectorate, they clashed with local elites such as Mohammed Abdel Krim.Abdel Krim and his family initially saw a Spanish protectorate as a means to modernize their homeland without the heavy-handed rule of the French. However, as the scant returns of the Spanish occupation become clear,Abdel Krim turned against Spain. In an effort to subdue him and other local leaders in the east, the Spanish army sought to extend its effective zone of control far beyond the environs of Melilla. Under the command of Manuel Fernndez Silvestre, himself coaxed on by the monarch Alfonso XIII, the army unwisely opened a broad front, one, moreover, easily severed from the Melilla supply lines. Isolated at Anual, Silvestre finally realized the extent of Krims resources and influence among the disparate tribes of the region. Rather than wait for relief (that might never have come in sufficient force anyway), Silvestre ordered a retreat to Melilla, which quickly turned into a rout. Historians estimate that between 8000 and 12,000 Spanish troops were killed in less than three weeks. The political consequences of this new colonial disaster are well known.The military and the crown tried to stymie the investigation of the defeat. But as opposition to these tactics grew back in Spain, General Miguel Primo de Rivera intervened in 1923 to ensure the survival of the monarchy. He dissolved the Spanish Cortes and ruled as dictator until 1930. Balfour focuses on the armys response to the disaster: the driving force of the professionals of the colonial army in the months and years that followed was a spirit of compulsive revenge.As in Cuba, officers opted for total war.10 Balfour chronicles in close detail the brutal tactics that officers and enlisted men alike turned to as the army reclaimed the territory lost at Anual. Beheadings were routine. So too was the destruction of villages and farmland, including the use of chemical weapons. In 1921, the military advance was brought to a standstill by the government, which wanted to resort to the older policy of bribery and accommodation.When Primo de Rivera overthrew the civilian government, the officers in Africa responded enthusiastically, especially those who had founded the Tercio, Spains Foreign Legion.11 Though Spain continued to suffer setbacks against Abdel Krim, it eventually countered in alliance with France, carrying out a brutal war of conquest. Here is the heart of Balfours research. Not only has he given students and scholars a gripping narrative of Spanish actions in Morocco. He has also
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provided a fine-grained account of the methods of counterinsurgency and the formation of a colonialist mentality that would have dire consequences for Moroccans and Spaniards alike:
the war in Morocco was marked by a progressive descent into brutal methods of military engagement and repression...The relative failure of the enlightened colonial strategy of winning tribes over by bribes and by token respect for local authorities led to the hegemony of the militarist discourse by 1919, whereby the defeat of the enemy by whatever means should precede the march of civilization.12

The army was well aware that it had to keep methods of terror like beheadings secret from public opinion back in Spain.The same was true of chemical warfare, a tactic deployed ruthlessly after Anual to make up for the armys woeful preparation and supply. Balfour argues that a conspiracy of silence has reigned in both Spain and Morocco until recently. In Spain, officials began this silencing from the first moment by referring euphemistically to chemical bombs in military correspondence (special bombs, X bombs) and by excising contracts and purchases from official archives.13 So how was Balfour able to bring this secret history to light?Through the painstaking and far-ranging research that characterizes this work. Balfour found newly declassified material in British and French archives. He also pieced together fragmentary evidence from the major Spanish military archive, the Servicio Histrico Militar, and from the archive of the Royal Palace in Madrid (Alfonso XIII was an advocate of chemical warfare). Finally, he conducted interviews with Moroccans with memories of the events. Spain made inquiries about the purchase of mustard gas and other chemical weapons at the close of World War I. The French were resistant but Germany agreed to send a scientist to Spain to oversee the production of mustard gas at a factory, named for Alfonso XIII, outside Madrid.Weapons were also produced in Melilla. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the Spanish army withdrew to defensive lines to clear the field for intensive bombing raids in the eastern and western zones of the protectorate. Planes purchased from England and France delivered mustard gas, tear gas, and other chemical agents.They also dropped TNT and incendiary bombs.Though the military directly targeted Abdel Krim, the main goal was to hit towns, markets, crops, and water supplies to weaken the civilian population. Spanish technology for bomb delivery was rudimentary and inaccurate. But based on numerous conversations with survivors from that era and evaluation of public health trends, Balfour shows that the Spanish strategy had dire consequences for the peoples of the Rif. His informants recall the saturation of the landscape and crops with poisonous gas.Among the evocative photographs snapped by the author is one of Mohammed Amar Hammadi holding up a Spanish bomb carrier used to deliver mustard gas, which his family had recovered and hidden for years. Hammadis mother and two sisters died of cancer.The rate of cancer from the areas bombarded in those years remains far above normal.
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Brutal as these tactics were, Balfour concludes that chemical warfare and aerial bombardment, like the use of reconcentration in Cuba, weakened the insurgency.The Army of Africa, with the Spanish Legion and Moroccan Regulares at its core, ultimately vanquished Krim and asserted control over the Protectorate.The protracted counter-insurgency had a decisive effect on the worldview of the colonial officer corps, shaping it as a distinctive interest group within the Spanish military:
As in the First World War, the experience of war in itself was highly disjunctive, setting veterans apart from those officers who had stood outside it because they had been too old or too young or had managed to evade it.Their long service in the Army of Africa and their sporadic contact with Spain had turned them into an elite of officers alienated from civilian politics at home and imbued with a strong sense of mission to redeem Spain from its supposed decadence.14

This fervent, and by implication alien, patriotism and militarism stood in stark contrast to the reactions of rank and file soldiers from the peninsula. While they left a much scanter and piecemeal paper trail than did the military elite, Balfour nonetheless does reach some conclusions through memoirs, newspaper accounts, and interviews with the few surviving veterans of the Moroccan campaigns. In many cases upon returning from Morocco, Spanish recruits embraced an active anti-militarism, especially in highly politicized regions like Catalonia.They also consistently expressed sympathy and identification with Moroccan peasants, whose hardships resonated with their own in the metropolis.15 The Army of Africas hostility towards the Second Republic, proclaimed with the abdication of Alfonso XIII in 1931, was instinctive but inchoate. Though officers shared the view that the colonial army was central to Spanish unity and greatness, their political leanings were diverse. Some were monarchist, others favored military government, many were even republican in their sympathies, though staunchly opposed to the radical left-wing parties. Balfour tracks how these diverse tendencies came to coalesce in response to the polarization of metropolitan politics.Though there were aborted military uprisings as early as 1932, the turning point was the militarys role in suppressing an uprising in Asturias, a mining region in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, in 1934.The general staff, headed at the time by Franco, called in the Army of Africa to put down the workers rebellion, which it did with consummate cruelty. Legionnaires and Moroccan Regulares carried out summary executions and brutalized the local population.16 Asturias was an important precedent, even though the military plotters were initially reluctant to use the Army of Africa as the spearhead of the uprising in 1936.They expected to overthrow the Republic quickly by organizing broad support among the officer corps around the peninsula.They failed.Almost half of the armed forces remained loyal to the Republic when Franco declared against it on July 17, 1936. Moreover, anarchist and socialist militias took up arms against the generals.With only one third of the
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peninsula under their control, but the entire Protectorate, the plotters looked to the Army of Africa to rally them to victory. Along with intervention and support from Germany and Italy, the use of the Army of Africa was decisive for the so-called Nationalist forces. Moroccan Regulares and Legionnaires were the most battle-hardened troops on either side.They were in the vanguard of the fiercest battles: the shock-troops of the rebel forces, their cannon fodder.17 Of the 78,504 Moroccan troops, Balfour reports that one in every eight...was killed and almost every one of those who survived was injured at some time or other.The Legionnaires too, suffered high proportions of casualties, though these statistics are harder to reconstruct. 18 Balfour pursues another colonial transfer. Colonial warfare endowed the leaders of the Army of Africa with a virtually messianic belief in their centrality to the nation and its redemption. In combating the Republic, they mimicked the ruthlessness used in vanquishing the colonial foe. Balfours argument about the mirroring of the colonial and metropolitan battlefields is suggestive rather than persuasive; it points to important areas of research into the complex consequences of colonial expansion. Conclusion: Postcolonial Spain In the recent debates over American imperialism, scholars have observed that what the European and US empires of the modern age have in common is their insistence that each is unlike any other.19 Spain has historically been no different from the United States, France, or Great Britain in narrating its exceptionality. My own research has focused on how Spanish colonial apologists in the nineteenth century crafted a discourse and imaginary of exceptionality based on ideas of political and religious assimilation and miscegenation. Officials and intellectuals believed that Spain was unusual among the European powers because it had sought to implant its institutions and to recreate its civilization in the overseas empire. Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, in this view, were not colonies but fragments of the Spanish nation as integral as Castile or Andalusia. Colonial patriots, not surprisingly, saw things differently.20 Another version of Spanish exceptionality emphasizes the countrys marginality to the second wave of European expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonialism figures only on the edges of most narratives of modern Spanish history. However, the works ofTone, Balfour, and of the many scholars who have reconsidered the Caribbean and Pacific colonial regimes in recent years, demonstrate that colonialism was a decisive force in shaping metropolitan politics, culture, migration, foreign policy, and economic development.While England and France expanded in South Asia and North Africa in the nineteenth century, Spain assumed a defensive posture, concentrating on restructuring the remaining colonies for more effective governance and exploitation.The abolition of slavery in Cuba and
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Puerto Rico, the role of the religious orders in the Philippines, and the incorporation of the colonies into the Spanish constitutional order were among the many issues that reverberated between the metropolitan center and the colonial periphery.As War and Genocide in Cuba demonstrates, defending its hold on the last colonies was a matter of supreme importance to Madrid. It drove the state and its agents to extract deadly sacrifices from Spanish and Cuban subjects alike. After the Spanish-American War, Spain was left with no choice but to break out of its habitual isolation and to seek new alliances. Its engagement with England and France during the heyday of aggressive imperial rivalries forced it to participate belatedly in the Scramble for Africa. Balfour demonstrates with careful and imaginative research the long-term consequences for Moroccans and Spaniards alike brought about by the Protectorate and colonial warfare.The leaders of the Army of Africa came to believe that they redeemed Spain on the battlefields of the colony and later on those of the metropolis.We can make educated guesses about how Moroccans and other Spaniards diverged from that vision of Spains colonial mission. More research, inspired by works like War in Genocide in Cuba and Deadly Embrace, will add their voices to the narrative of modern Spanish history. Those voices echo distantly to this day.The outpouring of protest against the Iraq adventure, as well as Aznars disregard for those protests, shows that the history of Spanish colonialism has not come to an end with decolonization.The desperate efforts of Africans to reach the Canary Islands, cross the Straits of Gibraltar, or storm the security fences surrounding the enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta indicate that Spain is still very much connected to the former colonial world. Increased Spanish investment in Cuba and other Latin American countries provokes frequent allusions to a new conquest.Within Spains very borders, the surge of immigrants from former colonies in Africa and Latin America has forced reckonings with aspects of the past including colonialism and the great waves ofSpanish migration to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.While the dynamics of these histories are peculiar to Spain they nonetheless share clear parallels with other Western European countries grappling with the legacies of colonialism and decolonization.Though Spain appeared peculiar in the age of empire given the repeated colonial disasters, perhaps we can now say that as a postcolonial nation, it is ordinary in the exceptionality of the historical challenges it confronts. Short Biography Christopher Schmidt-Nowara is Associate Professor of History, Fordham University. He has recently published two books on aspects of Spains colonial history: Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends (co-edited with John Nieto-Phillips) and The Conquest of History: Spanish
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Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. He is currently working on study tentatively titled Local Hispanisms: Lineages of Power in the American Empire after 1898. Notes
* Correspondence address: Department of History, Fordham University, Lincoln Center, Lowenstein 916D, 33 W60th St, New York, NY 10023, USA. Email: schmidtnowar@fordham.edu.
1

Among the touchstones are Astrid Cubano-Iguina, El hilo en el laberinto: Claves de la lucha poltica en Puerto Rico (siglo XIX) (Ro Piedras: Ediciones Huracn, 1990);Jordi Maluquer de Motes, Nacin e inmigracin: Los espaoles en Cuba (ss. XIX y XX) (Oviedo: Ediciones Jcar, 1992); Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Cuba/Espaa, Espaa/Cuba: Historia comn (Barcelona: Crtica, 1995); Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, Miguel ngel Puig Samper, and Luis Miguel Garca Mora (eds.), La nacin soada: Cuba, Puerto y Filipinas ante el 98 (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1996); Josep M. Fradera, Colonias para despus de un imperio (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2005). 2 An excellent study of the rude welcome given the new American rulers after the initial military occupation in Puerto Rico and the Philippines is Julian Go,The Chains of Empire: State Building and Political Education in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, in Julian Go and Anne L. Foster (eds.), The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 182 216.Also on the imperial transition, see Francisco Scarano, Liberal Pacts and Hierarchies of Rule:Approaching the Imperial Transition in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Hispanic American Historical Review, 78 (1998): 583 601; Louis A. Prez, Jr., The War of 1898: Cuba and the United States in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 3 John Lawrence Tone, The Fatal Knot:The Guerilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon in Spain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 4 Tones interpretation stands in stark contrast to works that have emphasized the potentially unifying effects of the war. See Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868 1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 5 J. L.Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895 1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 2045. 6 Recent re-evaluations of Spains domestic and foreign political situation after 1898 include Javier Moreno Luzn (ed.), Alfonso XIII: Un poltico en el trono (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003); Juan Pan-Montojo (ed.), Ms se perdi en Cuba: Espaa, 1898 y el fin de siglo, 2nd edn. (Madrid:Alianza Editorial, 2006). 7 Qtd. in S. Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8. 8 On Spanish interest in Morocco from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, see the excellent essays in Eloy Martn Corrales (ed.), Marruecos y el colonialismo espaol (18591912): De la guerra de frica a la penetracin pacfica (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2002). 9 Balfour, Deadly Embrace, 52. 10 Ibid., 83. 11 On the topic of the militarys increasing hostility to civilian government in the early twentieth century, see Geoffrey Jensen, Irrational Triumph: Cultural Despair, Military Nationalism, and the Ideological Origins of Francos Spain (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2002). 12 Balfour, Deadly Embrace, 124. 13 Ibid., 12830. 14 Ibid., 183. 15 Ibid., 23233. 16 Ibid., 256. 17 Ibid., 312.
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18 19

Ibid., 31213. Ann Laura Stoler and David Bond, Refractions off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times, Radical History Review, 95 (2006): 93107. 20 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).

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2007 The Author History Compass 5/3 (2007): 943954, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00407.x Journal Compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd