Spain Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959-1975

Abstract

The publication of a book in English detailing recent trends of research on the last years of Francoist Spain is well overdue. Between 1959 and 1975 Spain became a modern industrial nation. As two of the contributors to this excellent volume, Pablo Martín Aceña and Elena Martínez have written, ‘Spain stepped into the First World and joined the exclusive club of those countries with a p.a. income of $2000 or more’ (p. 34). Yet this is the first comprehensive English-language study of this period since the appearance in 1976 of Paul Preston's edited volume, Spain in Crisis. After 1975, historians have tended to focus on the bloody origins of the regime in the civil war and the ‘hunger years’ of the 1940s. In his perceptive introduction, Nigel Townson notes that concentration on the early Franco period has been a feature of a ‘Marxist revisionist school’ that equates Francoism with fascism (p. 6); Edward Malefakis in the concluding essay criticises ‘essentialist’ historians who deny the reality of Francoist pragmatism (p. 251).

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