Spain: A Unique History (29 page)

The reasons for slow development were numerous, to the extent that the absence of protectivism might simply have encouraged an almost exclusive concentration on the production of agriculture and raw materials. The persistent price of war was certainly a factor, to which might be added the litany associated with underdevelopment: infertile soil, low agricultural productivity, slow formation of capital, inadequate transportation and finance systems, poorly educated labor, and an absence of entrepreneurship. The critics are nonetheless correct that concentration on the internal market for industrial growth was inadequate for rapid advance.

It is important to place Spain's economic record in broader perspective. Although no major transformation had taken place during the eighteenth century, there had been steady growth, with the beginning of changes in commerce and production that helped provide a basis for later advances. The expansion of commerce in all of western Europe, including Spain, had been dramatic during the second half of the eighteenth century, and the most important part was the growth of Spanish commerce with other European countries. Comparatively little of Spain's domestic production, as distinct from its commerce, was connected with the American empire, so that the economy was affected surprisingly little by the latter's loss. Trade had remained strong with Europe until 1805, and soon began to expand once more after the end of the Napoleonic war.

The fashion once was to regard Spain's economic performance in the nineteenth century as a complete failure, a wasted opportunity, but it was, in fact, a period of fairly constant change and expansion, the main exception being the first third of the century from 1805 to 1840. Those years were a time of decisive change and growth in the more advanced parts of the Western world, but Spain was held back by the destruction wrought by the French invasion, followed by the country's own internecine struggles. All this proved a great handicap in the beginning of the dynamic nineteenth century, even though a significant recovery was soon made.

In general Spanish economic growth moved pari passu with that of Europe, but started at a distinctly lower level than in the more advanced countries, so that, in an era of rapid growth, it had to run fairly fast not to lose proportionate ground, and at the close of the nineteenth century seemed nearly as far behind the most advanced countries as in 1800. Thus, despite steady growth, as of 1900 certain statistics might be read to make it appear that Spain was relatively more backward than it had been a century earlier. The Spanish economy would not really begin to make up ground with northwestern Europe until the era of World War I and the 1920s.

The third quarter was generally the most expansive time of the nineteenth century, the economy growing rapidly in the 1850s and from 1866 to 1873, until the disaster of the First Republic. In general, the total growth rate, according to Prados de la Escosura, averaged 1.84 percent per year between 1850 and 1883, slowing somewhat in the latter part of the century. By the 1880s certain conservative compromises in policy had been made, foreign investment dropped, and there was some closure of the economy. After 1900, however, the rate increased once more to 1.34 percent until 1913, and then to 1.49 percent for the years 1913-20, the economy reaching its first phase of modern "take-off" during the 1920s, when it averaged 3.54 percent growth per year. Another way to put it is that total domestic production tripled between 1830 and 1910, after which it accelerated considerably further. Altogether, per capita income nearly doubled during the nineteenth century, even though it remained far below that of the most advanced countries. This was in general a steady and creditable performance, which by the 1920s was finally achieving rapid growth.

Throughout the nineteenth century economic growth surpassed the expansion of the population. Foreign trade grew steadily in volume and also expanded its place within the domestic economy, as the changes in the terms of trade for most of the century favored Spain, minerals and food exports maintaining their price level while the cost of major manufactured imports proportionately declined. During the middle decades of the century, the liberal regime began to build the infrastructure for a modern economy, with the creation of the rail networks, financial and institution reforms, and the expansion of mining. The Catalan textile industry gained strength, and minor industrial nuclei also developed elsewhere, sustained growth of Basque metallurgy beginning after the last Carlist war. In the late nineteenth century, per capita income was about the same as that of the united Italy, until the latter began a takeoff in the 1890s, which Spain would not equal for nearly twenty-five years.

Agriculture expanded more slowly during the nineteenth century, continuing the eighteenth-century pattern of growing extensively but not intensively. In Roman times the peninsula had been famous for its production of wheat, wine, and olives, and this focus had not substantially changed. Food production rose slightly more than the growth in population, but the "first agricultural revolution," which had taken place in northern Europe and relied on greatly increased uses of fertilizer and new plowing techniques, simply could not be applied in the Mediterranean environment. The "second agricultural revolution," emphasizing the beginning of mechanization and artificial fertilizers, began to appear in Spain only after 1900. During the first decades of the twentieth century, modernization and increased productivity advanced, albeit rather slowly, only to be interrupted in the 1930s.

An alternative perspective is that, with the primary exception of the two great international wars, the economy had been growing steadily, if slowly, since the 1680s. By the late nineteenth century agricultural productivity was clearly rising, though also slowly. This slow transformation had finally reached a point by the early years of the twentieth century that two major modern industrial zones had been consolidated, and a basis had been created for further industrialization and the introduction of more modern technology. Accelerated growth that began to make up ground, starting to close the gap with the advanced economies, finally occurred in the early part of the new century, climaxing with the prosperity and growth spurt of the 1920s, after which worldwide depression, civil war, world war, and restrictive state policies combined to end growth for two decades. The "disaster" of 1898 paradoxically played a role, because it produced a repatriation of capital that helped fuel domestic expansion, shortage of capital being a prime factor in limiting growth during the nineteenth century.
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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a significant increase in life expectancy, which, according to one computation, had reached fifty-one years by 1910.
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This figure, if correct, would indicate that for the first time in several centuries a key index of well-being was beginning to approach that of the advanced countries. The population had doubled since the late eighteenth century, reaching approximating 20 million, with a significantly higher standard of living, something apparent since about the middle of the nineteenth century. The liberal regime could not be considered an economic failure, though neither was it a spectacular success.
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Spain's loss of most of its empire partially paralleled the experiences of Great Britain, France, and Portugal. Like its European counterparts, after 1825 Spain had retained a portion of its overseas possessions (initially more than France, for example). During the rest of the century, the remaining parts, especially Cuba, enjoyed great saliency in Spanish policy and in official discourse. Despite the enormous drain of the Ten Years' War, the Restoration regime continued to stress the importance of empire, necessary not so much to Spain's economy, though that was of some significance, as to its self-image and its place in the world. Cuba held a special place in the nation-building discourse of the period.
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Official policy deemed it to be a direct extension of Spain itself, with representation in Madrid but hence not eligible for self-government. This foreshadowed the policies of France and Portugal in the mid-twentieth century. It constituted the major political error of Cánovas's career, but one that was relatively commonplace in the history of European imperialism. Only Britain, after the experience of 1775-83, learned to avoid such mistakes in the future, particularly in dealing with the English-speaking dominions. The change in British policy developed during the nineteenth century and formed the basis for the eventual Commonwealth, which in turn did not fully emerge until the century that followed.

Even in the late eighteenth century, trade with Spanish America amounted to scarcely more than half the country's total foreign trade, and though trade with the Antilles increased threefold between 1850 and 1900, it in fact increased less rapidly than did Spanish commerce with the rest of the world, declining to only 12 percent of the total by 1890. Spanish exports to the Antilles may have increased in volume, but as a percentage of total exports they dropped to 17 percent by 1894. By that time Spain provided 35 percent of Cuba's total imports, but received only to percent of its exports. The economic importance of the imperial market and its resources to Spain was persistently exaggerated. As it would turn out, much of that limited market would be retained by the Spanish economy after 1898.

The Restoration system was consistently reformist, and its reformism by 1890, when the regime was firmly established, might have included autonomy for Cuba, even with the realization that this was likely to lead eventually to independence. Evolution was of the nature of the regime, but four centuries of history, together with the apparent failures of modern times, deprived the leadership of self-confidence in national well-being without the empire, though its loss might, with foresight, have been phased in by degrees. To have done so, however, would have gone against the grain, not merely of Spanish policy, but of the entire culture of European imperialism at the height of its expansion in the late nineteenth century. British leaders could reconcile themselves to the almost complete autonomy of the English-speaking dominions first because ties remained very close, and second because the "new" British empire of the nineteenth century was in no danger and had become the grandest in the world. Even Portugal had a large new empire in Africa, but for Spain remnants of the old empire made up the only empire there was. For Spanish leaders to have adopted a different policy would have required a kind of superhuman vision, courage, and self-confidence, which they simply did not possess.

Although the Spanish empire was clearly the weakest of the European empires, with the possible exception of Portugal's, its destruction at the hands of the United States is also correctly seen as merely the Spanish instance in a series of defeats for weaker, less developed Catholic and Orthodox (and also Muslim) states, usually at the hands of Protestant countries. The first example was the defeat of France by newly united Germany, touching off a considerable discussion in France about French failure and inadequacy, which was nonetheless greatly palliated by the enormous expansion of the French African empire during the decades that followed, something that Spain had neither the desire nor the means to emulate or to contest. It would be the vortex of the new French imperialism, not any independent Spanish initiative, that would finally draw Spain into Morocco during the years 1906-13.
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The disaster years for the peripheral European states began with the veto by Britain of further Portuguese expansion in southern Africa in 1891, followed by the humiliating defeat of Italian forces by a black Ethiopian army five years later, which, for the time being, halted all further Italian expansion. The Greek irredentist invasion of Thessaly was thoroughly defeated by Turkey in 1897, while the same year that witnessed Spain's defeat saw Britain block further French expansion in Africa. Nine years after Italy was defeated by an African army, the Tsarist Empire was defeated by an Asian army and navy. In 1912 the Ottoman Empire was almost eliminated from Europe altogether. There is no absolute common denominator to these experiences, for France retained a gigantic empire and was one of the most modern countries in the world, while the Tsarist Empire remained a great power that had simply lost a strategically awkward war. All five of the south European countries, however, could see themselves as laggards in modernization who either had further lost status or, in the case of Italy, could not attain it.

It has been observed that there was a much greater reaction in Spain to the loss of the remnants of empire than to the loss of most of the original empire in 1825. The reasons for this difference had to do with the greater increase in literacy and political self-consciousness, together with the expansion of the intelligentsia by the end of the century, and the fact that the defeat occurred at the height of worldwide European imperialism, whereas 1825 had been a relative low-point in general European empire. In fact, "disaster literature" began by the mid-1890s at the latest, well before the so-called disaster, as an expression of the mood of self-criticism and regenerationism that had already set in during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

What is extraordinary is that the authors of the disaster literature and the writers of the "Generation of Ninety-Eight" had such a skewed perspective on their country. There was great preoccupation with failure and stagnation, partly because of the humiliation in military affairs, when in fact modernization was finally beginning slowly to accelerate, and for the first time the country was beginning to improve even in comparison with the more advanced economies. "Europeanization" was seen as both a problem and a goal, but at the beginning of the twentieth century Spain was in closer consonance with western Europe than at any time in the past hundred years or, possibly, the past three centuries. Part of the problem was that most of this writing was done by journalists and literary men with an uncertain relationship to empirical reality.