scholarly journals ‘Shanghai-Madrid Axis’? Comparing British Responses to the Conflicts in Spain and China, 1936–39

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOM BUCHANAN
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Chinese Cities ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe impact of the Sino-Japanese War on Britain has generally been overshadowed by the impact of the Spanish Civil War, which broke out a year earlier. Indeed, the only book on the subject, Arthur Clegg's Aid China (1989), is subtitled A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign. Yet, for a few months in the autumn of 1937, these two campaigns achieved a kind of parity in British public perception. British opinion was united in condemnation of the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities, and, at its peak, the ensuing campaign attracted a broader range of supporters than the movement in solidarity with the Spanish Republic. For instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury publicly criticised Japan's actions in a way that would have been unthinkable in the case of Franco's Spain. Moreover, some acts of solidarity with China (such as the refusal by British dockers to load Japanese ships) went beyond what the supporters of the Spanish Republic could hope to achieve. This article makes a comparison of the two campaigns, and examines the interconnections between them. It not only sheds new light on the ‘forgotten’ campaign for China, but also asks why Spain – unlike China – became the ‘Great Cause’ of the later 1930s.

“The heart above the ruins”: Miriam Waddington’s Poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and Jewish Canadian Literature

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
War Consequences

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.

Losing the Thread

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Powell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cotton Trade

Losing the Thread is the first full-length study of the effect of the American Civil War on Britain’s raw cotton trade and on the Liverpool cotton market. It details the worst crisis in the British cotton trade in the 19th century. Before the civil war, America supplied 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton. In August 1861, this fell to almost zero, where it remained for four years. Despite increased supplies from elsewhere, Britain’s largest industry received only 36 per cent of the raw material it needed from 1862 to 1864. This book establishes the facts of Britain’s raw cotton supply during the war: how much there was of it, in absolute terms and in relation to the demand, where it came from and why, how much it cost, and what effect the reduced supply had on Britain’s cotton manufacture. It includes an enquiry into the causes of the Lancashire cotton famine, which contradicts the historical consensus on the subject. Examining the impact of the civil war on Liverpool and its cotton market, the book disputes the historic portrayal of Liverpool as a solidly pro-Confederate town. It also demonstrates how reckless speculation infested and distorted the raw cotton market, and lays bare the shadowy world of the Liverpool cotton brokers, who profited hugely from the war while the rest of Lancashire starved.

Studying Desertion in the spanish Civil War

Desertion ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
Théodore McLauchlin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Armed Group ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Group Characteristics

This chapter develops the account of desertion primarily in the context of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, which clarifies the role of several variables through Spain. It looks at many different organizations on both the rebel side and the Republican side in order to examine the impact of different armed group characteristics on desertion. It uses the Spain case study to understand desertion dynamics in a particularly fascinating civil conflict. The chapter focuses on the Republican side, analyzing the dynamics of its relatively high rate of desertion at various points in the conflict. It demonstrates norms of cooperation and coercion at the micro level to statistically assess individual soldiers' decisions to fight or to flee.

scholarly journals Unrecovered objects: Narratives of dispossession, slow violence and survival in the investigation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 428-446
Author(s):  
Layla Renshaw
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Mass Grave ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was triggered by a military uprising against the democratically elected Popular Front government. Away from the battlefield, this war was characterized by the politically-motivated murder of thousands of civilians, many of whom were buried in clandestine graves throughout Spain. Following Franco’s victory and subsequent dictatorship, there were strong prohibitions on commemorating the Republican dead. A radical rupture in Spain’s memory politics occurred from 2000 onwards with the founding of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory and other similar pressure groups that have organized the exhumation and reburial of the Republican dead. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in communities in Castile and León, and Extremadura as they underwent mass grave investigations. It examines the experience of theft and dispossession that occurred as part of the Francoist repression of Republicans. Accounts of these episodes focus on stolen and looted objects robbed from the dead during the killings, from the graves’ post-mortem, or from surviving relatives as part of the systematic dispossession of Republican households that occurred during the war and immediate post-war period. These narratives surface with frequency during the investigation and exhumation of mass graves. Despite the fact that many are lost forever, these stolen possessions can function as powerful mnemonic objects with a strong affective and imaginative hold. The narratives of dispossession explore themes of survival, the experiences of women and children, and the impact of slow violence. By invoking theft and stolen objects, these stories highlight forms of trauma and forms of memory that may not be represented fully by the dominant investigative paradigm of the mass grave exhumation with its inherent focus on death, cataclysmic violence and the tangible, physical traces of the past.

scholarly journals Studies on Anticlericalism in Contemporary Spain

2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Pérez Ledesma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Contemporary Spain

Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, and cultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Spanish Civil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in other European states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain. José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashed by these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergy were assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres were burned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000 priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a few years ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid by Spanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to this lack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summary of publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later, Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’, or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field of history, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado have likewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of what Gilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon as devotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.

scholarly journals Repositioning Resistance: Basque Separatism, Religion and Cultural Security in Regional Queensland, 1945–1970

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Robert Mason
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Overwhelming Majority ◽  
Historical Injustice ◽  
Civilian Population ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Market Town ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Over Time

On 26 April 1937, German bombers attacked the civilian population in the Basque market town of Guernica. The event has become synonymous with the brutality of the Spanish Civil War, but its impact on the Basque diaspora has not been the subject of detailed investigation. Large numbers of Basques emigrated to live in north Queensland, and the overwhelming majority can be traced to the hills surrounding Guernica. Those living in Australia only became aware of the atrocity over time, but the symbolic importance of Guernica increased over the subsequent decades as hundreds more Basques arrived in Queensland's north. The bombing itself was traumatic, but it was understood in the context of an emigration and historical injustice wrought by Spain's Nationalist dictatorship.

scholarly journals The Nurses No-One Remembers: Looking for Spanish Nurses in Accounts of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-92
Author(s):  
Sioban Nelson ◽  
Paola Galbany-Estragués ◽  
Gloria Gallego-Caminero
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
National Policy ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Skilled Nursing ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Franco Dictatorship ◽  
International Volunteer

Accounts of Spanish nursing and nurses during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) that appear in the memoirs and correspondence of International Brigade volunteers, and are subsequently repeated in the secondary literature on the war, give little indication of existence of trained nurses in country. We set out to examine this apparent erasure of the long tradition of skilled nursing in Spain and the invisibility of thousands of Spanish nurses engaged in the war effort. We ask two questions: How can we understand the narrative thrust of the international volunteer accounts and subsequent historiography? And what was the state of nursing in Spain on the Republican side during the war as presented by Spanish participants and historians? We put the case that the narrative erasure of Spanish professional nursing prior to the Civil War was the result of the politicization of nursing under the Second Republic, its repression and reengineering under the Franco dictatorship, and the subsequent national policy of “oblivion” or forgetting that dominated the country during the transition to democracy. This policy silenced the stories of veteran nurses and prevented an examination of the impact of the Civil War on the Spanish nursing profession.

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