The Spirit of Hispanism: Commerce, Culture, and Identity across the Atlantic, 1875–1936

By Diana Arbaiza

In the late nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs became captivated with Hispanism, a movement of transatlantic rapprochement between Spain and Latin America. Not only was this movement envisioned as a form of cultural empire to symbolically compensate for Spain’s colonial decline but it was also imagined as an opportunity to materially regain the Latin American markets. Paradoxically, a central trope of Hispanist discourse was the antimaterialistic character of Hispanic culture, allegedly the legacy of the moral superiority of Spanish colonialism in comparison with the commercial drive of modern colonial projects. This study examines how Spanish authors, economists, and entrepreneurs of various ideological backgrounds strove to reconcile the construction of Hispanic cultural identity with discourses of political economy and commercial interests surrounding the movement. Drawing from an interdisciplinary archive of literary essays, economic treatises, and political discourses, The Spirit of Hispanism revisits Peninsular Hispanism to underscore how the interlacing of cultural and commercial interests fundamentally shaped the Hispanist movement.

The Spirit of Hispanism will appeal to scholars in Hispanic literary and cultural studies as well as historians and anthropologists who specialize in the history of Spain and Latin America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780268106959

Diana Arbaiza

Diana Arbaiza is assistant professor of literature at the University of Antwerp.

Book preview

THE SPIRIT OF HISPANISM

the SPIRIT of

HISPANISM

Commerce, Culture, and Identity

across the Atlantic, 1875–1936

DIANA ARBAIZA

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

NOTRE DAME, INDIANA

Copyright © 2020 University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Arbaiza, Diana, 1980- author.

Title: The spirit of Hispanism : commerce, culture, and identity across the Atlantic, 1875–1936 / Diana Arbaiza.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019054581 (print) | LCCN 2019054582 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268106935 (hardback) | ISBN 9780268106966 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780268106959 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Pan-Hispanism—History. |

Latin America—Relations—Spain. Spain—Relations—Latin America.

Classification: LCC F1416.S7 A725 2020 (print) |

LCC F1416.S7 (ebook) | DDC 327.8046—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054581

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054582

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail].

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE. Hispanism as Vindication: Spain as Other in

the Age of Commerce

TWO. The Emergence of Hispanic Idealism, 1892–1900

THREE. Complicated Harmonies:

Economic and Cultural

Initiatives in Progressive Hispanism

FOUR. Ramiro de Maeztu and the Search

for a Hispanic

Economic Ideology

FIVE. Commercial Hispanism: Marketing

Spiritual Capital

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Index

IILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Allegorical Float at the Centennial of 1892

Figure 2. Scenes from the Parade of Commerce and Industries in Madrid at the Centennial of 1892

Figure 3. Cartoon Parodying the Centennial Celebrations in Madrid

Figure 4. Cartoon of Columbus in an Advertisement

Figure 5. Allegorical Representations of Spain and Spanish America in El Centenario

Figure 6. Caricature of the United States in La Campana de Gracia

Figure 7. Design for a Proposed Monument to the Discovery for the Chicago Exhibition of 1893

Figure 8. Illustration for an Article on Rodó, Author of Ariel

Figure 9. Illustration of the Metaphor of Sisterhood from Nation to Nation

Figure 10. Cover designs for Mercurio

Figure 11. Front Cover of How Spain Is Loved (1920)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to start by thanking my editor, Eli Bortz, for believing in this project, and the team at Notre Dame for making it possible. Throughout the long process of creating this book, many people have influenced my ideas, but I would like to give special credit to those who had the most direct impact. I am the only one responsible for any errors in this work, but the following people inspired the best aspects of this project.

Even though this book departed enormously from my doctoral dissertation, the intellectual foundation behind it is undoubtedly shaped by my professors at the University of Illinois: Elena Delgado, Joyce Tolliver, and Mariselle Meléndez. Special thanks to Michael Palencia-Roth, who inspired me to research cross-cultural exchanges, and to my advisor, Ericka Beckman, who guided me into new theoretical fields and venues of inquiry. I feel very grateful for her ongoing mentorship and for her valuable feedback on this project.

This book would not have been possible without the support of my colleagues in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University. I thank Ruth Gross for her endeavors to facilitate my research and for the time and means made available for my archival work in Spain. Even more important was the stimulating and encouraging environment at NC State. I benefited enormously from the exchange with all my colleagues, but I would like to particularly mention Agustín Pastén and Patricia Morgado, as well as Shelley Garrigan, who read several chapters of the book and gave me the sharpest and most constructive criticism. I am profoundly indebted to Elvira Vilches and Jordi Marí for their brilliant scholarly inspiration and their generosity as friends. Our conversations on literature, economy, and national identity were fundamental to this book and their belief in the project one of my strongest motivations.

I was finalizing the manuscript when I decided to move back to Europe. I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Antwerp for providing support and determination during the final stages, especially Rita De Maeseneer, who read and commented on the introduction. In the United States, I owe thanks to Ronald Briggs, and to Lisa Burner for her gracious and insightful suggestions about portions of the book.

During this process I have been fortunate to find a great source of comfort in my friends and families: my aunts and uncles in Spain and my family in Vermont have been incredibly supportive and demonstrated a stoic endurance to listen to my ramblings about Hispanism. The good cheer of my friends in Bilbao sustained me and provided needed distraction. I especially want to thank my parents, Victor Arbaiza and Lucía Tena, who patiently encouraged me in every step of this process and helped my partner and I to take care of our son while I did archival research.

My greatest debt and gratitude go to my husband, Sasha Newell, who was my strongest support intellectually, emotionally, and pragmatically. He read and discussed this book multiple times, and while his luminous thinking always drove me to improve my claims, his company soothed the pains of writing. He entertained our son in intricate board games so that I could work on this book, and he also knew when to remind me of the importance of play.

Finally, my son, Ibai, has been my true inspiration, the person who most motivated me and the one who gave me perspective. Este libro va dedicado a mis dos chicos.

Introduction

In June 2017, Borja Cardelús, a writer and documentary filmmaker, announced in the newspaper ABC the imminent establishment of the Hispanic Civilization Foundation. Cardelús, who also had a brief career as member of José María Aznar’s government, explained in the article that the goal of the organization was to improve the national and international image of Spain. To do so, he declared, the foundation would emulate the rich western nations that had long cultivated their image through cultural media. Spain, Cardelús proposed, did not know how to sell itself, paralyzed by the Leyenda Negra—Black Legend—that attributed to Spain all kind of vices while concealing its achievements. Among these accomplishments he highlighted the ability to create a civilization:

en el mundo occidental solo hay dos, la anglosajona y la hispánica, y esta atesora grandes valores. No solo se compone de una lengua, una religión y una raza mestiza, sino de muchas otras cosas: música, literatura, arquitectura, unidad de costumbres, pasión vital, generosidad, solidaridad, comunicación. . . . Se trata de una cultura riquísima en valores, intermedia entre dos feroces extremos: el totalitarismo marxista y el capitalismo egoísta y excluyente. La Civilización Hispánica matiza ambos excesos, porque se halla impregnada de valores humanísticos cristianos. (2017)

[In the western world there are only two, the Anglo-Saxon and the Hispanic, and the latter accumulates great values. It is composed not only of a language, a religion, and a mixed race, but also by many other things: music, literature, architecture, unity in traditions, vital passion, generosity, solidarity, communication. It is an extremely wealthy culture in values and intermediate between two ferocious extremes: Marxist totalitarianism and the selfish and exclusive capitalism. The Hispanic civilization nuances both these excesses because it is imbued with Christian humanistic values.]¹

Co-promoted by Cardelús and the entrepreneur José Antonio Pérez-Nievas, the organization was officially established in January 2018 with a note of presentation to the press that followed the arguments of the mentioned article. The alarms soon rang. The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Juan Manuel Bonet, defended his institution against the foundation’s accusations of incompetence while the historian José Álvarez Junco warned about the resurgence of a Spanish nationalism sin complejos as a response to the Catalonian independence movement (Hermoso 2018).

Most of the foundation’s website remains under construction, leading one to wonder whether it will truly attain the ambitious project of developing a series of multimedia content to promote Hispanic civilization. Yet, regardless of the success of the foundation’s future efforts, its establishment is itself quite symptomatic of a surge of Spanish conservative nationalism. In 2013, Santiago Abascal, leader of the ultra-right party Vox and former president of the Fundación Denaes (Fundación Para la Defensa de la Nación Española), extolled the virtues of Spain’s civilizing work (2013), a discourse closely followed by the leader of the Partido Popular, Pablo Casado, during a recent electoral campaign (Pablo Casado: La Hispanidad 2018). Nuanced by contemporary rhetoric, this nationalism still reveals a haunting circularity in its attempts to strengthen Spain’s national unity and international status by drawing on an idealized imperial past and on the notion of a global Hispanic identity due to the colonial legacy. Reading the mission of this foundation, one cannot help but see parallels between this and the earlier discourses of Hispanism, the movement of rapprochement with Spanish America that flourished from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century. The distinction that Cardelús established between Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic evokes Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s civilizatory dichotomy in the prologue to the Antología de poetas hispano-americanos, published in 1893. His list of music, literature, architecture brings to mind the vision of Rafael de Altamira in the early 1920s of shared Hispanic artistic expressions. The ultimate series of oppositions with which Cardelús defined this Hispanic identity—in contrast with Marxism but also selfish capitalism—are strikingly reminiscent of Ramiro de Maeztu’s conception of la Hispanidad, a derivation from late nineteenth-century conservative Hispanism that emerged in the late 1920s and amalgamated traditionalist, Catholic, and fascist values. This last reference by Cardelús to a particular economic worldview within Hispanic civilization has a long tradition in Hispanist rhetoric, and it is central to this book’s analysis of the Hispanist movement. Alongside appeals to the common language, culture, and values—and even religion and race in some cases—defenders of Hispanism argued that Hispanic nations shared a unique economic philosophy, a statement that seems to return once again in characterizations such as Cardelús’s.

This book considers Peninsular Hispanism as an overlooked site of Spanish thought on global capitalism and Spain’s marginal role within it. Also called Hispanoamericanismo, Pan-Hispanismo, or even Americanismo,² Peninsular Hispanism has been consistently called out as a nationalistic discourse of imperial nostalgia. This book draws on those readings but especially underscores its neoimperialistic character, exploring how, from the late nineteenth century, Hispanism was envisioned as a source of both symbolic and material regeneration: a cultural and economic reconquest. At a time when European powers were embroiled in an accelerated imperialistic race, Hispanism captivated multiple generations of Spaniards who considered the remaining relationship with Spanish America as a potential restitution for their colonial loss and diminished role in the world order. In reaction to the construction of the Spaniards as inept and unskilled for the economic activities of modern life, Hispanism developed the representation of the Hispanic community as a superior, antimaterialistic race, a characterization that would acquire a central importance in Spanish nationalism. This construction of Hispanic idealism not only rewrote the depiction of Spain as a commercial Other in Western modernity, it was also envisioned as an advertising device to reenter Spanish American markets, appealing to the solidarity of a Hispanic community that allegedly held a less utilitarian worldview. The historical period investigated in this book—stretching from the Restoration to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War—overlaps with the rise and decline of Hispanism as a project aiming to achieve the symbolic and material regeneration of Spain. As Hispanism was mobilized simultaneously as a compensatory response against capitalism and a strategic discourse to encourage commerce with former colonies, Hispanism became a site of active debate about how to reconcile moral and material interests in Spain. The Spirit of Hispanism sheds light on Spanish aspirations of shifting from a model of territorial domination to one of economic and cultural hegemony in Spanish America. At the same time it explores how Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs conceived the relationship between Spanish culture and modern commerce. The study of Hispanism from the vantage point of the interrelationship between economy and culture seeks to elucidate the development of the movement during the period of this study, but it also clarifies the incongruous and yet frequent juxtaposition in contemporary Spanish public culture of the notion of a particular Hispanic economic ethos with blatant calls to better sell the brand Spain.

Hispanism: Between Nationalism and Neoimperialism

Hispanism, the movement that sustained the position that Spain and Spanish America should engage in a more intimate association on account of their common bonds, flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century along with many contemporary movements advocating a transnational identity—Pan-Latinism, Pan-Americanism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Germanicism. Within this trend, Hispanism was the only movement that rearticulated a postcolonial relationship between a former metropole and its colonies. It participated in some of the rhetoric and political ideology of these movements calling for the establishment of alliances among ethnicities or cultures that superseded the concept of nations. Yet, in the nineteenth century, the articulation of Peninsular Hispanism was tightly connected with the development of Spanish nationalism. Indeed, while the success of Hispanism as a transnational ideology is somewhat ambiguous, the recycling of Hispanist discourse in Spanish nationalism is daunting.

Hispanism never materialized in an association of states like the British Commonwealth, nor did it develop into an international cultural organization like the Francophonie. The economic outcomes of Hispanism during the period covered in this book were much less substantial than what had been projected, and the measures that Hispanists continued to propose in the late 1920s to strengthen the relationship with Spanish America must have given their audience a dismal sense of déjà vu. After a few decades of Hispanist campaigns, even supporters of the movement confessed their desperation at the seeming stagnation of the rapprochement. Historians such as Álvarez Junco have therefore dismissed the movement as hollow rhetoric without tangible results (2013, 317), a description that seems to reproduce the most pessimistic presages of those Hispanists. Yet, Álvarez Junco obviates the close connection between Hispanism and Spanish nationalism in his otherwise excellent study on the formation of Spanish identity. In underscoring the crucial relationship between Hispanism and Spanish nationalism, my analysis engages with a series of works that have underscored Spanish colonialism’s central role in constituting Spanish modern identity. Spanish intellectuals involved in the Hispanist campaign were quite explicit about the role that Spanish America held in their imagination of the Spanish nation. As Rafael María de Labra wrote in 1912, "sin América no se comprende á España" (1912a, viii) [Without America, we cannot conceive Spain]. Born in Cuba, this liberal intellectual had, like many of his generation, a personal connection with the recent colonial past, but he spoke of an abstract that he considered crucial to understanding Spanish identity: the presence of Spanish America, which he recovered through the Hispanist movement.

In recent years, scholars of colonial history have warned about the simplistic shortcut of presenting political history as a transition from empire to nation-state or defining nation against empire. Multiple works have called for consideration of the interconnection of both in their formative discourses (Stoler and Cooper 1997, 22; Burbank and Cooper 2010, xi), and some studies have even shown that nation-state and administrative empire were in some cases integrated in the same sociopolitical system (Wilder 2005). While nation building and empire building are considered mutually formative constitutive projects in Great Britain and Holland, the case of Spain is a more complex one given that Spain was a declining colonial power during the nation-building period in the nineteenth century. Spain had lost a vast part of its empire in the early nineteenth century and would lose the remainder of it in 1898, though until the mid-twentieth century it still maintained a modest colonial hold in what today constitutes Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea. The fact that Spain thus epitomized a minor colonial power did not entail, however, that the idea of empire was insignificant in Spanish culture and nation building. Susan Martin-Márquez has explored the impact of those remaining African colonies on definitions of Spanish national identity that translated into Spanish cultural production, while several scholars (A. Blanco 2012; Krauel 2013; Santos-Rivero 2005) have also noted that Spanish literary production at the turn of the century was unequivocally pervaded by an imperial consciousness regarding Latin America. On the other hand, multiple historians have argued that the lost empire in Latin America still exerted a powerful influence in the construction of Spanish nationalism. Already in 1980, Martin Blinkhorn suggested that the idea of the Spanish Empire was deployed as a foundational icon of modern Spanish identity that transcended the Disaster of 1898, an instrumentalization of the idea of empire that Sebastian Balfour (1997) traced up to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The role of the empire in Spanish nationalism was more recently examined in the volume compiled by Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Philips about the paradigms that dominated Spanish historiography about its colonial history in Latin America. In this collection, several essays point at the increasing relevance acquired by this past in nineteenth-century Spain, although it is perhaps Antonio Feros who most clearly articulated the implications of this obsession with the colonial period. For Feros, nineteenth-century historiography on Spanish colonialism in Latin America was not just a defensive reaction to the so-called Black Legend, but an imperial and colonial narrative appearing as a central chapter in the process of constructing Spanish nationalism (2005, 111).

In examining the most influential icons in the national culture of modern Spain, Balfour pointed at three events other than the so-called Discovery of America: the Reconquest of Spain in the Middle Ages, the Second of May uprising against the French, and the victories against rebellious Moroccans in nineteenth century (1997, 2). While these icons had a similar importance as organizing myths in the formation of Spanish national identity, several authors, including Balfour, have argued that Spanish nationalism took particular pride in the American colonization as a means to assert its imperial status during what Eric Hobsbawm called the Age of Empire (1875–1914) (1989, 2–3). This imperial past provided certain symbolic value to compensate for what had been lost, but as Schmidt-Nowara (2006) demonstrated, Spanish intellectuals also strove to instrumentalize this imperial past for the concrete purpose of maintaining their remaining possessions in America and Asia. According to Schmidt-Nowara, nineteenth-century Spanish historiography elaborated a master narrative about colonial history by which to justify continuous dominance in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The success of these efforts was relative since, as noted by Schmidt-Nowara as well as Kohichi Hagimoto (2013), intellectuals in these colonies contested the metropolitan imagination of history. Yet, the fact that Spanish colonial historiography had a questionable reception in the colonies does not diminish that, from Spain, it was consciously conceived as both an exercise in nation building and an effort to integrate the remaining colonies.

The obsessive rewriting of the imperial past in Latin America clearly indicates the interconnection of nationalism and imperialism in late nineteenth-century Spanish culture. Hispanism not only absorbed this historiographic discourse but also furthered the relevance of imperialism in national identity. In his thorough study on Hispanism, Isidro Sepúlveda Múñoz (2005) studied how the imperialistic dreams of this movement contributed to the development of Spanish nationalism through several decades. As he showed, the role of Spanish America in the formation of Spanish nationalism is clearly exposed when considering how Spanish intellectuals and politicians of diverse ideological backgrounds took shelter in Hispanism well into the twentieth century. The preoccupation with the idea of the Spanish Empire during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera translated into the regime’s official sponsorship of the Hispanist project (Boyd 1997). Franco’s regime also tried to instrumentalize the persistent nostalgia for the Spanish Empire in America by appropriating the discourse of la Hispanidad, the most reactionary derivation of Hispanism, which Alistair Hennesey even qualified as an ideology of surrogate imperialism (2000). In his insightful study of the republican exiles in Mexico, Sebastiaan Faber (2002) pointed out that despite their progressive political views, these intellectuals still imagined Spanish America as the sole remaining field in which they might exert cultural hegemony. This diaspora endorsed a more progressive brand of Hispanismo, emphasizing equalitarian values of republicanism and social justice that contrasted with the Hispanist discourses of the Falange Española (Spanish Phalanx) that influenced the Mexican right (Pérez Monfort 1992). Nonetheless, Faber commented that their concept of Hispanism deleted the heterogeneity of the American nations and even the Iberian peninsula (2005, 89–90). As I understand it, Faber suggests that even if some particular Hispanism aimed at establishing a nonhierarchical relationship, such an initiative would be undermined by the very same idea of the Hispanic world, a spurious and essentially imperialistic concept that obliterates the multilingual and multicultural world encompassed by the category Hispanic. These studies finally demonstrate that Peninsular Hispanism, in all its various ideological and temporary articulations, was a manifestation of Spanish nationalism inextricably linked to the idea of empire that absorbed the cultural specificities of the former colonies as well as those of Iberian communities.

In reviewing this scholarly literature, I underscore the connection between imperialism and Spanish nationalism to sustain my presentation of Peninsular Hispanism as an ideology of neoimperialistic character. Because of the coincidence of Spanish decay with the imperialist expansion of European nations in the late nineteenth century, the Hispanist movement can be considered as a postcolonial ideology. With the prefix post I do not imply the superseding of an imperial consciousness, but rather that Hispanism emerged as a restitution for the loss of continental Spanish America and as an anticipated reparation for what was foreseen at the time as the imminent loss of the remaining colonies in America and Asia. Beyond the interpretation of Hispanism as a transparent articulation of the centrality of empire in Spanish national formation, I propose Hispanism as a movement that attempted to create a kind of economic and cultural neoimperialism (without aspirations of political domination). Hispanism originated as a symbolic substitute for the political power and material wealth that Spain did not possess, but its advocates also expected that their cultural bonds with Spanish America could dynamize Spanish economic life. The fact that most of the financial dreams Hispanism inspired did not come to fruition has led most scholars to focus on the movement’s dreams of cultural hegemony, without giving due consideration to material goals or the way the fantasies of cultural and economic reconquest shaped each other. I was inspired by Ángel Loureiro’s groundbreaking article emphasizing how revisions of Hispanism often diminished the commercial interests at stake in the movement. As he explained, successive generations of Peninsular intellectuals were haunted by the specter of Latin America (2003, 68) and aspired to symbolic authority. Furthermore, they also hoped that the Spanish cultural legacy could literally be translated into financial retribution: According to the proponents of Hispanism, one consequence of the Spanish legacy in Latin America is the spiritual debt incurred by the colonized. Indeed, Latin America is seen by Spaniards at the end of the nineteenth century as symbolic and material compensation for Spain’s economic and political dejection (2003, 69). Loureiro thus highlights some concrete ambitions of the movement that are overshadowed by the dominant conception of Hispanism as simply a movement of imperialistic nostalgia. Also frequently overlooked is what has been called the commercial or practical Hispanism, which when discussed at all is usually understood as a parallel, divergent phenomenon. While Hispanism has traditionally been conceived as an exclusively culturalist movement, I depict the entanglement of the cultural and economic strands of Hispanist thought, the dialectic, tensions, and interrelations of which constitute the crux of this book.

In presenting Hispanism as a form of neoimperialism, I suggest that this phenomenon attempted to create a supranational formation that went beyond a political or territorial bond and aspired to exert a new cultural and economic dominion over Spanish America against other competing powers. I am drawing upon a recent tendency in colonial studies to reconceptualize the definition of modern imperialism beyond the territorial model that has been considered the exemplar. As Ann Laura Stoler critiqued, colonial studies have tended to concentrate on Northern European empires such as the British, French, Dutch, or Belgian and subscribed a myopic view of empire that sidelines a wide range of imperial forms as anomalous (2006, 127). By contrast, scholars of U.S. interventions in Spanish America have not hesitated to call these by their imperial name. For Stoler, the United States is only one of several atypical cases of what she calls imperial formations (2006; Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue 2007). These go beyond the idea of bordered and bounded polities to create a dynamic of rule through the production of exceptions and the redefinitions of categories of belonging. Hispanism was not quite the imperial formation that the United States became in Spanish America, since materially it never achieved such an unfortunate level of intervention as the United States. Yet, the expectations of many Hispanists and their discourses against the United States leave few doubts about their desire and vocation to become such. From the beginning, Peninsular Hispanists revealed clear economic incentives, a sense of entitlement to symbolic authority, and even aspirations to create commercial, educative, and legal pan-Hispanic leagues.

Lenin’s conception of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism exerted a strong influence on postcolonial studies that, up until the 1970s, privileged a political economic analysis of colonialism. Scholars then began arguing that colonial issues were excessively folded into the study of global capitalism and turned to more cultural readings of the phenomenon. However, this important correction, which provided space for examining cultural domination and the practices of racial and gender exclusion, prompted a distancing between questions of colonialism and of capitalism. While postcolonial studies have benefited from the post-Marxist acknowledgment of the partial autonomy of the cultural field from the economic sphere, Arif Dirlik has thoughtfully noted that within the difficulty of defining colonialism and its long history, what truly characterizes and anchors modern European colonialism is its bidirectional and formative relationship with capitalism: Modern European colonialism is incomprehensible without reference to the capitalism that dynamized it, just as the formations of historical capitalism in Europe may not be understood without reference to colonialism (2002, 441). The recognition of this relationship opens up the field for culturally informed analysis of the political economy of colonialism and how the political, the economic, and the cultural became mutually influenced in modern colonialism.

Modern capitalist colonialism provoked mixed evaluations in Spain, but for the most part the profitability of the enterprise was not questioned. During the second half of the nineteenth century the belief in the benefits of modern colonialism was quite extended—at least in comparison with more skeptical visions of it in the eighteenth century—and economic interests played an important part in its development. However, scholars have noted that there is not a strong case to argue that colonialism translated into greater wealth accumulation in Great Britain or France (Huttenback and Davis 1988; Marseille 1984). As Stoler and Cooper have put it, territorial colonialism might not have been as profitable as expected, while the ‘imperialism of free trade’ may well have been the better bargain (1997, 19). This idea evokes the warnings of the early classical economists about the challenges and costs of maintaining an empire, but it also brings us to more recent evolutions in the practice of capitalism. Globalization might appear as a way to conceive of the world that distinguishes our present from the world of colonialism and neocolonialism, but as Dirlik has pointed out, we might well consider it as a stage that has superseded colonialism in the development of capitalism (2002, 429–30).

In returning the debate to Hispanism, the presentation of imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism leads us to the particular situation of Spanish capitalism in the nineteenth century. Against the pessimistic interpretations with which Spanish economic history in the nineteenth century was traditionally conceived, historians such as David Ringrose (1998) and Gabriel Tortella (1981; 2000) have proved that the economic evolution in Spain was not so radically different from nor so much behind the rest of Europe. This rectification does not entail that Spain’s economic modernization was equal to that of the leading industrial countries, but it imbricates Spain within European capitalist development. This definitely brings to mind the debates in Spanish America and Spain about the complex inscription of these regions within the idea of modernity. Several scholars have brilliantly deconstructed the discourse of European modernity as an exclusionary model (Dussel 1995; Zea 1992; Mignolo 2000; Dainotto 2007), but Ernesto Laclau (1971) has particularly questioned the location of Latin America at the periphery of capitalist modernity, suggesting rather that it belongs at the center. I am bringing up Laclau’s idea of Latin America because I find it illuminating in considering Hispanism. As a declining imperial power immersed in the process of economic modernization, late nineteenth-century Spain might initially appear as the subaltern of capitalist modernity and certainly of modern colonialism. However, recent revisionism in economic history not only questions this supposed exclusion of Spain from capitalist modernity but also proposes the emergence of Hispanism as an unequivocal attempt to create a kind of commercial and cultural empire. While Hispanism might not have achieved successful material outcomes, the replacement of a territorial model of colonialism with one of a cultural and economic nature still foreshadowed a model of neocolonialism tightly connected to the development of capitalist modernity.

In presenting Hispanism as an attempt at cultural and economic reconquest, this book seeks to elucidate the integral interlacing of culture and commerce in Hispanism. It not only examines discourses that supported this interrelation, but also indicates how the cultural and economic sides influenced each other in a more primordial way. Identitarian discourses that invoked the bonds of history, language, and spirit were often dictated by the market interests of authors who found themselves in an increasingly professionalized world and who were painfully aware, like many entrepreneurs and economists, of the marginal role of Spain in the world economy. Hispanism served as a compensatory discourse for such a diminished role, but it was also envisioned for many as a project that could actually transform Spain’s material circumstances. The connections between the two sides emerged in moments of explicit support for commercial initiatives on the part of representatives typically categorized within the culturalist line, while the so-called practical Hispanists also exposed a significant culturalist component in the rhetorical frame they deployed to appeal to consumers. Both intellectuals and entrepreneurs resorted to theories of political economy, ranging from doux commerce to economic Krausism, to ennoble and legitimate a transatlantic trade that allegedly would establish the basis for arts to flourish and Hispanic solidarity to strengthen. A crucial concept throughout this book is the idea of a spiritual capital that Peninsular Hispanism’s proponents imagined they held over Spanish America. The term is obviously indebted to Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, but it is also directly borrowed from Hispanist texts that frequently referred to the tesoro espiritual [spiritual treasure] the Spanish still possessed in America. Peninsular Hispanism posited a spiritual affinity shared with Spanish America as a result of the cultural legacy of the Spanish colonization, and adherents considered that this spiritual capital conferred on them a prestige or proximity that increased the possibility of actually accruing material wealth. As the Spanish American rapprochement unfolded, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and politicians coincided in viewing Hispanism as a potential means to regenerate Spain symbolically but also materially.

My analysis follows several studies that analyzed the relationship between literature and economy since the development of the field of new economic criticism in the