España, ¿una colonia informal del Imperio Británico?

Sharman, Nick. Britain’s Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power. Springer International Publishing, 2022.

Abstract

The Barrio Inglés de Bella Vista is one of the most mysterious places in Huelva. Tourists wishing to spend a pleasant day in the southwest of Spain would do well to forgo a morning at the beach to stroll through its streets. The experience has a halo of exoticism. In the middle of a province full of Catholic churches and blocks of flats, the stroller will be surrounded by diaphanous rows of Victorian houses, escorted by other curious buildings, such as a beautifully crafted Presbyterian chapel and a Protestant cemetery. Such a bucolic setting will immediately raise historical questions - how did this miniature England get here? If you ask the tour guides, they will share a suitably amiable tale: it all began with the Rio Tinto Company Limited. This company acquired the Rio Tinto copper mines in 1873 and built the site as a home for its technicians and workers. Visitors will leave the site with the impression that they are leaving behind the heritage trace of a history of shared progress, economic growth and socio-cultural modernisation. What he does not know is that the English Quarter of Bella Vista is the testimony of a past much more complex and much less friendly than what is perceptible in the immediacy of its landscape. Such a past conceals an unequal commercial, financial and geostrategic subordination relationship. This relationship placed the Spanish Monarchy partially at the mercy of British interests. Nicholas Sharman's Britain's Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950, uncovers the keys to this phenomenon with astonishing clarity and systematicity.