If I had used the subject catalogue of the Spanish National Library in Madrid to compile sources for this essay, it would have been very brief because the term “maritime history” has never been used in its catalogues; instead, the books we might include are classified under “naval history. “ This has at least two causes: the youth of a sub-discipline which even internationally has emerged only in the past forty years, and the relative backwardness of maritime history in Spain.

To comprehend the historiography of Spanish naval and maritime history in this century it is essential to consider the naval history of nineteenth-century Spain. That century opened and closed with calamitous defeats, at Trafalgar at the hands of Great Britain in 1805 and at Santiago de Cuba and Cavite (1898) against the United States. The latter debacles cost Spain its last colonies in America and Asia and marked its transformation into a second-rank maritime and political power. In 1899, Prime Minister Antonio Maura stated that “for centuries Spain has been launching navies…and covering with them defeats and shame.” Such opinions pervade the works of the major authors to write about that century. In 1912, for example, Joaquin Costa pointed out that “Spain has never exhibited the attitudes of a naval power.” This profoundly negative assessment of Spanish naval history also characterized the limited number of works on merchant shipping. With few exceptions, most were influenced by the loss of the colonies, the abolition of differential flag duties in 1868 and the decline of the sailing fleet. Decline, stagnation and failure were terms usually employed to describe Spanish merchant shipping in the nineteenth century.

If Spanish historians turned their backs on the sea at the beginning of this century, they were slow to execute an about-face. The few works on nineteenth-century merchant shipping written before 1950 remained pessimistic. Moreover, the decline in significance of Spanish maritime industries has done little to encourage the study of things related to the sea. In subjects like naval history and foreign commerce, Spanish scholars have tended to focus on the imperial age, neglecting the recent past.