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Francisco Cambo and the Modernization of Spain: The Technocratic Possibilities of Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

Spain entered the twentieth century as a relatively underdeveloped nation still deeply rooted in her traditional past. Spanish life had barely begun to experience the stresses of social and economic transformation that recent scholars have identified with the modernization process. Toward the end of the last century, Spanish industry grew at a rapid pace, particularly in the Basque and Catalan regions, but the nation as a whole continued to lag behind the rest of Western Europe in the years before 1914. Although the recently formed trade union movements expanded in response to the new complex of urban-industrial problems, their organizational and political strength remained ineffective until World War I. In the other regions of Spain an agrarian economy, replete with strong anarchist movements, dominated and determined a social order in which provincialism, widespread subsistence living standards, and extensive illiteracy persisted.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1975

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References

1 Black, G. E., The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York, 1966), pp. 85, 116Google Scholar.

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3 Cambó's more important books include Elementos para el estudio del problema ferrovaria en España (Madrid, 1918)Google Scholar; Viut meses al ministeri de foment (Barcelona, 1919)Google Scholar; En torno del fascismo itatiano (Madrid, 1924)Google Scholar; Las dictaduras (Madrid, 1929)Google Scholar; Per la concòrdia (Barcelona, 1930)Google Scholar. The best biography of Cambó is by Pabón, Jesús, Cambó, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 19521969)Google Scholar, but even this author scarcely deals with Cambó's ideas on fascism.

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115 The left denounced him as the “murderer of the revolution,” Solidaridad Obrera, July 19, 1917, p. 1, while the conservatives saw him as a political innocent appealing to those Spaniards, mainly Castilians, who would destroy him; cf. Carr, , Spain, p. 504Google Scholar; de Burgos y Mazo, M., Paginas hisóricas (Madrid, n.d.), pp. 106ff, 139Google Scholar.

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34 Ibid., p. 16.

35 For quotes, Cambó, , Las dictaduras, pp. 136138Google Scholar; and Centellas, , Las dictaduras y el señor Cambó, p. 151Google Scholar for comments on the simplistic quality of dictators.

36 Centellas, , Las dictaduras y el señor Combó, pp. 8996Google Scholar for a dictator's personal qualities and pp. 101–104 for its relevancy to Spain's dictatorship.

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39 Ibid., pp. 177, 180.

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46 Ibid., pp. 74, 239.

47 Ibid., pp. 112–120, 122.

48 Ibid., p. 52.

49 Ibid., pp. 79–85; Manuel, Frank E., The Politics of Modern Spain (New York, 1938), pp. 52, 60Google Scholar. For the fascist trappings in Spain in the 1920's see Manuel again, pp. 52–56.

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