Spain: A Unique History by Stanley G. Payne Read Free Book Online

literature. Though it was possible to read no more than a fraction of the enormous bibliography pertaining to the subject, that bibliography had not yet undergone the exponential expansion that took place during the latter part of the century and which would make such an enterprise by a single scholar totally impossible within any finite amount of time. My goal was not merely to narrate facts but to render intelligible the peninsula's history, so that most subsections of each chapter were organized by concepts, not chronology. In general I think that I was successful in achieving an analytic focus on the subject matter that generally made sense, although some points would have to be modified as a result of the massive research by historians during the decades that followed. The most original aspect for me was coming to grips with the history of Portugal, which first gave me an understanding of that country's history and decisively broadened my perspective on the peninsula.
    Crowell was soon taken over by Dun and Bradstreet, which immediately lost interest in the project, so that I managed to redirect it to the University of Wisconsin Press, thanks to an invitation from Thompson Webb, its director. This initiated my long collaboration with this university press. A History of Spain and Portugal came out in two volumes in 1973, remained in print for about fifteen years, and was briefly a History Book Club alternate selection. A slightly revised and expanded Spanish edition was finally published in five brief paperback volumes by Carlos Alberto Montaner's Editorial Playor in Madrid between 1985 and 1987, enabling the Portuguese chapters to be grouped together as a one-volume Breve historia de Portugal (1987), which for several reasons was at that time unique among publications in Spanish on Portugal. An inexpensive reprint edition was done by Editorial Grupo five years later, and a digital edition of the original first volume of the English edition was later made available by the digital publisher LIBRO in 2002.
    From the time of my first visits to Barcelona and Bilbao in 1958-59, and after my initial discussions with Aguirre and Vicens Vives, I had formed considerable interest in the peripheral nationalisms. I thought that they were important in the country's contemporary history and would also be important in the future, though for some time neither I nor many others would understand how large a role they would play in the politics of a future democratic Spain. After 1970 the emergence of a radical form of Basque nationalism in ETA achieved greater prominence than the more moderate initiatives of the Catalanists, exactly the opposite of the relative salience of the two movements during the years of the Republic.
    My original intention was to prepare simply a very long article on the politics of Basque nationalism under the Republic for a special issue on contemporary Spain to be published by the Rivista Storica Italiana . 17 During the summer of 1971 I visited the University of Nevada in Reno to spend a brief period researching the collection of the Basque Studies Program, initiated there not long before. I had known the noted Basque bibliographer Jon Bilbao for nearly fifteen years, having been introduced to him by Aguirre and having stayed at his home in Guecho briefly during an earlier visit to Bilbao. He and the anthropologist William Douglass, the long-term director of the Basque Studies Program, urged me to expand the long article into a short monograph on early Basque nationalism. I had never conceived of this as a full-length project, but at that time there was scarcely any scholarly literature on the topic, so over the next year and a half I expanded this into a brief account of the early political history of the Basque movement, up to 1937. 18
    During those final years of Franco's life, the cultural environment was becoming progressively relaxed, even as politics became more active. I developed some ambition to publish