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Hitler's Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War . By Pierpaolo Barbieri . Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University Press , 2015. 349 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendix, notes, index. Cloth, $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-674-72885-1 .
Book Reviews
As the author says in the introduction, "this not a book about Spain . . . [I]t is a story of political economy and war [in Europe] in the tumultuous 1930s" (p. 2). I would dare to add that it is, above all, a story of an outstanding individual--Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, who played several key positions in the German economy in the 1920s and 1930s--and one of his projects, the creation of an informal empire in Spain in the late 1930s.
It is somehow surprising then that half of the introduction, which deals with current political debates and controversies in Spain about her Civil War (e.g., the political use of the past by politicians and individuals), is full of (political) opinions and has nothing to do with the contents of this book (pp. 1-8). The reader learns only on page 9 what this book is about.
Pierpaolo Barbieri wants to demonstrate that Spain is still different, and chapter 1 provides proof of his attempt. Covering many topics, and relying on an outdated bibliography, the author depicts a country on the eve of July 1936 that resembles the one described by Gerald Brenan in Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (1943). It cannot be sustained, for example, that Spanish agriculture "remained trapped in Roman times" and a look at James Simpson's book Spanish Agriculture: The Long Siesta, 1765-1965 (1996) could have allowed the author to draw a different picture (p. 23). Readers can find some really odd references--for example, endnote 49 quotes an early-eighteenth-century book on the arancel--but any academic reference to the tariff policy of Spain in the nineteenth century is missing (p. 268). Finally, the picture of...