The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain
War Loss and Memory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9800808 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Howell (0000-0002-7875-1002, University of York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 123 |
| Issue | 503 |
| Pages | 1086-1088 |
| Publication date | 2008-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The English Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ehr/cen200 |
| OpenAlex | W1996950693 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
These ten essays—three previously published as journal articles and seven in print for the first time—are a valuable addition to the author's previous and significant work on the relationship between Britain and Spain during the Civil War period. The purpose of the collection is to emphasise the impact of the Spanish conflict on Britain. The subtitle connects the essays to a broader literature on loss and memory or forgetting. The introductory chapter addresses the issue of established British perceptions of Spain. Cultural prejudices about ‘Spanish customs’ facilitated the judgement that ‘traditional’ Spain differed radically from ‘modern’ Britain. Auden characterised Spain as ‘that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe’. Perceptions of difference could also breed complacency. Orwell, having fled from Barcelona, looked through the boat-train window at ‘southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult ... to believe that anything is really happening anywhere’. In Baldwin's England generals did not rebel against governments and anti-clericalism did not turn churches into bonfires. British politics did not pit socialists and many liberals against a largely reactionary Catholicism and a traditional élite clinging inflexibly to long-held privileges. Despite such distance, many British socialists and liberals, and on the other side some conservatives and Catholics, defended their competing visions of Spain and, by extension, of a wider Europe. In this liberal Protestant island, aided by Guernica and the mounting evidence of Nationalist mass killings, the left's interpretation eventually proved much more effective
Economic history · Judgement · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Vision · History · Irish and British Studies · Law
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1970 - 2023 (54) |
| Highly cited | No |