Electrical futures for a regenerated Spain: electricity, engineering and national reconstruction after the 1898 ‘Disaster’

ABSTRACT

This article examines the multifaceted political and cultural meanings of electrical supply and technologies in a context of recent loss of an empire and a contested nation-building process. It explores how some Spanish engineers employed electricity to articulate a nationalist modernism that saw electricity as a secure path to development and industrialization, particularly following the final collapse of the overseas empire in 1898. At a time in which several groups confronted the challenges of Spanish modernization and the reconfiguration of post-imperial national identity, electricity became involved in several socio-technical (and energy) imaginaries as well as in techno-political strategies. However, conceptions of how the new ‘electrified’ future should look like varied greatly, especially when dealing with the specifics of designing large-scale electrical infrastructures. Given the diverse professional, social, and political outlooks of the different Spanish engineering communities, mobilisations of electricity were inscribed within complex and evolving social and political agendas. This article highlights the need to understand electrification – and by extension, energy transitions – as a contingent process that must be adapted to pre-existing political and socio-cultural forms to ensure the most socially inclusive and culturally nuanced account of its heterogeneity.

KEYWORDS:

• History
• electricity
• electrification
• Spain
• nation building
• regeneration

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Foundation for the Promotion of Applied Scientific Research and Technology in Asturias (FICYT) under the Clarín-Marie Curie COFUND Post-Doctoral 2017 scheme.

The author thanks Graeme Gooday (CHPS – University of Leeds) for his very helpful support during the research for this paper. Furthermore, the author is grateful to Víctor Durà-Vilà (CHPS – University of Leeds) and Darina Martykánová (Contemporary History Department, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) for their feedback and discussions during the writing-up of this article. Finally, special thanks are due to the members of the Electrical History Research Group at the University of Leeds for conversations and insights concerning this area of research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Even the ‘working class issue’, a dreadful problem that overwhelmed our grandparents, has been solved by means of the subdivision and the cheapness of energy supply …; as a result, workers’ homes have become real factories, dissolving big industrial settlings.” Fabra, Relatos de ciencia ficción, 89.

2. The protagonist’s trip to Buenos Aires coincided with the victory of the “South American Allies” against the US with the crucial support of Spanish “electric submarines” in the Gulf of Mexico. Ibid., 100.

3. Hughes, Networks of Power; Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems.”

4. Kline, “Resisting Consumer Technology in Rural America”; Högselius, Kaijser and van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition.

5. Nye, Electrifying America; Gooday, Domesticating Electricity; Harrison-Moore and Sandwell, In a New Light; Montaño, Electrifying Mexico; Brassley, Burchardt and Sayer, Transforming the countryside; O’Brien, Powering the Nation; Meiton, Electrical Palestine; Ferran Boleda, Els públics de l’electricitat a Catalunya (1929-1936); Mallart, “From Electricity to the Photo Archive.”

6. Tate, “Rural Revolt”; on the “interpretative flexibility” of electricity see Vermeir, “Electricity and Imagination”; also, Abram, Winthereik and Yarrow, Electrifying Antrophology.

7. An early formulation of “energy systems” as a combination of energy converters, resources and its social and institutional organization in Debeir, Deléage and Hémery, Une histoire de l’énergie; also, Hasenöhrl and Meyer, “The Energy Challenge in Historical Perspective.”

8. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy.

9. For the potential of history of technology for a renewed understanding of the nature of nation-building processes, see Hecht, The Radiance of France; Bonneuil, “Development as Experiment”; Harrison and Johnson, National Identity; Moon, “Justice, Geography, and Steel”; Schot, Rip and Lintsen, Technology and the Making of The Netherlands; Krige and Wang, “Nation, Knowledge, and Imagined Futures”; Leslie, “Atomic Structures.” On technology and culture as two entirely coincident spheres, see also Wise, “Architectures for Steam”; Tresch, The Romantic Machine; Saraiva and Matos, “Technological Nocturne.”

10. Macedo, Projetar e construir a nação; Macedo and Valentines-Álvarez, “Technology and Nation”; Saraiva, “Inventing the Technological Nation”; Diogo and Saraiva, Inventing a European Nation; Valentines-Álvarez, “Seeing Like a Factory.”

11. See Chatzis, “Introduction.”

12. Edgerton, “The Contradictions of Techno-Nationalism and Techno-Globalism”; Banerjee, Nucleus and Nation; Van der Vleuten, “Toward a Transnational History of Technology.” Also, see Fox and Guagnini, Education, Technology and Industrial Performance in Europe; Högselius, Kaijser and van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition; also Martykánová and Pan-Montojo, “Los constructores del Estado”; Martykánová and Pan-Montojo, “Between the State and the Market.”

13. See Hard and Jamison’s notion of the “intellectual appropriation of technology” (1998).

14. See Jasanoff, “Future Imperfect,” 4. The notion of imaginary in the history of technology also features in Marcus, Technoscientific Imaginaries; Garcón, L’imaginaire et la pensée technique.

15. Research into past energy imaginaries constitutes a recent and fruitful avenue in energy history, see Sovacool and Brossmann, “Fantastic Futures”; Jasanoff and Kim “Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies.”

16. See Papanelopoulou, Nieto-Galan and Perdiguero, Popularizing Science.

17. To name just a few examples of the important body of literature dealing with science and technology and their place in conforming technological national cultures in Spain, see González Portilla, Maluquer and Riquer, Industrialización y nacionalismo; Saraiva, Ciencia y ciudad; Lafuente, Cardoso de Matos and Saraiva, Maquinismo Ibérico; Medina-Doménech, “Scientific Technologies of National Identity”; De Otaola, Naturaleza patria; Nieto-Galán, “A Republican Natural History”; Herrán and Roqué, La física en la dictadura; Anduaga Egaña, Meteorología, ideología y sociedad; Camprubí, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime.

18. See Saraiva, Ciencia y ciudad.

19. For example, in January 1878, the Madrid city council used Yablochkov electric candles in a public display at Puerta del Sol for the first time – only one year after they were tested at the Wharf of Louvre – to celebrate the wedding of King Alfonso XII.

20. This included opticians, chemists, pharmacists, and experts with specific training in electricity – in particular, the personnel of the Telegraph Corps, created in 1855, which constituted a large technical body distributed throughout the country – and, most importantly, the presence of mining, ponts-et-chaussées (road), military, and, remarkably, industrial engineers. For instance, the School of Industrial Engineers of Barcelona, the only higher education industrial school in the country during the last third of the nineteenth century, collaborated with the industrial businessman Francesc Dalmau, associated with the industrial engineer Narcís Xifra, in the operation of the first Gramme dynamo in Spain (1874), only one year after its presentation at the Universal Exhibition of Vienna (1873). The institution also provided competent technicians to technologically leading companies, such as the Spanish Electricity Co. (1881) — the first company to operate in the country and the sixth in Europe – or Planas, Flaquer & Co. The later was responsible for installing in 1886 a breakthrough urban electrical network that used alternative current in Girona, only 4 years after the invention of the electrical transformer by Lucien Gaulard and John D. Gibbs; for further exploration of this topic, see Alayo Manubens and Sánchez Miñana, “La introducción de la técnica eléctrica.”

21. To better understand the role of engineers in regeneration and nationalism in the Iberian world, see also Swyngedouw, Liquid Power, and Diogo and Saraiva, Inventing a European Nation, 33–55. In this last publication, the authors show the prominent role of Saint-Simonian engineers in the regeneration of Portugal through railways and communication infrastructures after the 1851 coup.

22. Moreno-Luzón, “Political Clientelism, Elites, and Caciquismo.” The establishment’s incapacity (or unwillingness) to incorporate the modernizing demands from large political and social sectors – republicans and democrats, trade unions, regional claims – resulted in continuous and unresolved political crises in a climate of growing social unrest.

23. Feros, “From Empire to Nation.”

24. Historian Juan Pan Montojo and others have emphasized that the “Disaster” did not trigger any major economic or political breakdown, such as those that occurred in France after the 1871 defeat. As Spanish investments returned from the colonies, the economy even profited from the loss and the Restoration’s political crisis did not begin until more than a decade later. See Pan-Montojo, “Introducción: ¿98 o fin de siglo?.”

25. See Newcomb, Iberianism and Crisis.

26. Álvarez Junco, “La nación en duda”; Álvarez Junco, Spanish Identity.

27. Harrison and Hoyle, Spain’s 1898 Crisis.

28. Britt-Arredondo, Quixotism.

29. See Harrison, “An Espanya Catalana.”

30. Storm, “The Problems of the Spanish Nation-Building Process”; Mar-Molinero and Smith, Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula. Benedict Anderson’s (1983) conceptual model is particularly relevant here as it allows for more than one interpretation of the “imagined community” to exist at once.

31. The 1898 defeat was also interpreted in techno-scientific terms, as MP Eduardo Vincenti put it in the Spanish Parliament: “We have been defeated in the laboratories and the bureaus first.” López-Ocón, “La formación de un espacio público para la ciencia,” 29.

32. Engineers were consolidated during the second half of the nineteenth century as a particular group of the rising middle classes. Their search for legitimacy as emerging elites of professionals led them to emphasize their professional contribution to material improvements as the precondition for moral and societal progress. Nevertheless, they were not homogeneous; the main split in Spanish engineering consisted in the separation between those who worked as state officials (i.e. the corps of civil engineers who became privileged civil servants), on the one hand, and those who were “free” professionals employed by the private sector (mostly industrial engineers), on the other; see Silva and Lusa, “Cuerpos facultativos del Estado.” Despite divisions, they did share a professional identity characterized by the mastery of specialized knowledge acquired through standardized education and, in theory, by the individual merit of each of its members.

33. Martykánová, “Por los caminos del progreso,” 214–216. Road engineers, for example, represented a techno-scientific avant-garde mostly committed to political progressivism. Some of them held prominent positions within the governments of the “Six Revolutionary Years.” See, also Martykánová, “Remover los obstáculos,” 59–60, and Ferri i Ramirez, El ejército de la paz.

34. Martykánová, “Por los caminos del progreso,” 216–217.

35. On the relevance of the civil engineer, mathematician, statesman, dramatist, and Nobel Prize winner José de Echegaray, see Sánchez Ron, “José Echegaray.”

36. Important initiatives in which the SEIA took part included the National Congress of Electrical Legislation (1914 -1915), and the Assembly of Gas and Electricity Producers (1914). These initiatives were the result of the self-organization of the Spanish electrical sector against the lack of state initiative.

37. For a more in-depth analysis of La ciencia y la industria eléctrica and debates around electricity at the turn of the century from the perspective of the historiography of Spanish nationalisms, see Pérez-Zapico, “Electricity, national identity and regeneration.”

38. The professional distribution of authors is as follows: military engineers/army personnel (16 authors), mining engineers (3), industrial engineers (2), ponts-et-chaussées (road) engineers (1), forestry engineers (1), electrical engineers (1), telegraph personnel (2), scientists (4), physicians (1), unknown (2). Despite the diversity, military engineers and high-rank army officers outnumbered the rest.

39. Some studies have addressed the splits among Spanish industrial engineers in the twentieth century, especially the controversies between technical schools at Madrid and the regions claiming autonomy, with schools oriented to local industrial needs. See Roca-Rosell et al., “Industrial Engineering in Spain.”

40. Nationalism as a cross-cutting ideology able to congregate professionals despite disparate political allegiances has been studied in Valentines-Álvarez, “Seeing like a Factory.” See also Gouzevitch and Inkster, “Introduction: Identifying Engineers in History”; Cardoso de Matos et al., The Quest for a Professional Identity.

41. La ciencia y la industria eléctrica, 5. These calls for unity coincided with the growing institutionalization and delimitation of areas of influence of the five classic branches of Spanish civil engineering, be they the increasingly diversified corps of the state (Mines, created in 1777; Roads, 1802; Forestry, 1848; and Agricultural, 1855) or the independent engineers (Industrial, 1850). This process led to the creation of the Institute of Civil Engineers in January 1905 to represent the profession as a whole. Nevertheless, the diversity of profiles and identities explains why conflicts over areas of responsibility continued, preventing, for example, the institutionalization of electrical engineering at the beginning of twentieth century.

42. Nieto-Galán, “The images of science.”

43. La ciencia y la industria eléctrica, 14.

44. Ortega adopted the 1901 official figures, the first to be released by the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, Trade, and Public Works, which indicated an average annual rise in energy production of 7,317 kW between 1893 and 1901. These results indicated that the Spanish output was not falling behind that of other European countries. See Bartolomé, “Los límites de la hulla blanca.”

45. La ciencia y la industria eléctrica, 191.

46. See Junguito, “Importación, niveles de protección y producción del material eléctrico en España.” The penetration of foreign economic groups into the Spanish electricity market was early. In 1882 the Anglo-Spanish Electricity Co. was founded in Barcelona and in 1889 the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesselschaft (AEG), in cooperation with the Deutsche Bank, established the Compañía Madrileña de Electricidad (Madrid Electricity Company) and other 34 power plants shortly after. Thus, large electrical equipment manufacturers promoted their financial and technical expansion in other markets by ushering in local electrification processes.

47. Edgerton, “The Contradictions of Techno-Nationalism and Techno-Globalism,” 4–10.

48. La ciencia y la industria eléctrica, 184.

49. Ibid., 18–20. Despite optimistic visions and the existence of incremental innovations through the adaptation of foreign technology, overcoming external dependency on electrical equipment was impossible due to cost differences, the absence of national products or their imperfection.

50. Between May and June 1899, Cervera was dispatched by the Spanish Army to investigate Marconi’s wireless stations on the English Channel. In 1901 and 1902, he went back to Spain and set up a regular radiotelegraph connection between Tarifa, Spain, and Ceuta, Morocco. On 22 March 1902 he founded the Spanish Wireless Telegraph and Telephone Corporation to exploit the patents obtained in Spain, Belgium, Germany, and England.

51. See Valentines-Álvarez, “The Quest for the Technological Soul of a Nation.”

52. The author established a genealogy of inventions that went back to the tin can phone. Boyer later denied English authorship, which had been granted to Robert Hooke in the seventeenth century, and recounted a French scientific journey to New Granada and Ecuador in 1870 during which observers identified natives utilizing tin can phones “by the name of phonoscope, since the conquest of the New World by the Spanish.” Hence, the rope phone was well-known to the Spaniards “two hundred years prior to Hooke’s invention,” as the argument went. La ciencia y la industria eléctrica, 145.

53. Ibid., 64–65.

54. Ibid., 23.

55. The chapter “A Spanish Invention. Aluminum-Carbon Electric Storage,” which announced the patent of Doctor Eduardo Semprún, pointed out the problems of its commercialisation in the country, forcing Semprúm to travel abroad in search of funding: “In our nation inventors often have little luck, and only when foreigners seize our products is when we regret not to have been careful enough.” Ibid., 122. Indeed, despite the successful initial impulse, the Spanish electrical sector did not find an adequate industrial culture given the small size and immaturity of the market, the limited availability of capitals and material resources to produce electricity (coal included).

56. The Meteorological Observatory of Manila was one of the top research facilities for electricity and magnetism but was no longer of any use to Spain following the loss of the Philippines in 1898. And in the 1890s, Cuba was the location of the sole Electrical Engineering School project.

57. Benito Ortega, for instance, began his chapter by denouncing the ruling class’s views, which showed that they had not fully comprehended the central role of industrial modernization for national well-being. La ciencia y la industria eléctrica, 190.

58. See Saraiva, Ciencia y ciudad, and Martykánová, “Por los caminos del progreso.”

59. This technocratic or proto-technocratic pose drew on an internationally shared rhetoric built during the last two decades of the nineteenth century according to which objectivity and neutrality were inherent features of the so-called “applied sciences.” See Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise; Schatzberg, “‘Technik’ Comes to America”; also, Martykánová and Pan-Montojo “Los constuctores del Estado.”

60. For a further treatment of some of the ideas in this and the following section from the viewpoint of energy history (in particular, cultural histories of energy), and, to compare engineers’ imaginaries with those of other historical actors, namely the Spanish Catholics and the anarchist labour movement, see Pérez-Zapico, “A Way Out of Darkness.”

61. Sudriá, “La restricción energética.”

62. For similar worries in Victorian Britain see Kapoor, “Who Has Seen the Wind.” Some chapters of La ciencia y la industria eléctrica, including “Rational Uses of Coal”, written by mining engineer Luis de la Peña, reflected common concerns about high coal prices in Spain as well as global worries about the potential for depletion of energy resources in the early twentieth century.

63. Odriozola, “El aprovechamiento de la energía hidráulica en Cataluña.”

64. Costa’s “hydraulic regenerationism” envisioned national development through the accelerated intensification of agriculture through a vast programme of public works, dams, and irrigation canals included. However, Costa’s project was fundamentally agrarian (even anti-industrialist) since he considered that Spain was not prepared for an industrial revolution. See Orti, En torno a Costa; Swyngedouw, “‘Regeneracionismo’”; Frolova, “Landscapes.”

65. “Las pequeñas industrias,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 5, 10 Jan 1901, 240–241.

66. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, energy distributions at 8, 10, and 15 kilometers with tensions of 12,000 volts have been successfully tested; this, in turn, elicited an optimistic mood among engineers. As a matter of fact, La ciencia y la industria electrica en España contained the chapter “Two Power Transmissions” discussing the high voltage distributions attempted in Madrid and Denia – of 30 kilometres each – by the Marquis of Santillana and the Count of Orgaz. In order to increase engineers’ sense of patriotism, the author of the text, civil engineer Antonio González, lauded their achievement: “They have introduced in Spain the handling of high tensions, so widespread abroad. …they have thus demonstrated once again that Spanish engineers can conceive and develop important projects without relying on any foreign surname.” La ciencia y la industria eléctrica, 168.

67. “Las pequeñas industrias,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 5, 10 Jan 1901, 240–241.

68. Boletín de la Unión Eléctrica Española. “Nuestra potencia hidráulica (conclusión),” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 21, 10 Nov 1908, 101–102.

69. See Bartolomé, “¿Fue el sector eléctrico un gran beneficiario de ‘la política hidráulica’ anterior a la Guerra Civil?.”

70. “El Salto de Bolarque,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 11, 10 June 1906, 101–103. For an exploration of this way of representing infrastructures built upon an earlier and well stablished techno-nationalist language, see Saraiva, Ciencia y ciudad.

71. Menga and Swyngedouw, “States of Water.” On large infrastructures as “technopolitical geographies” that re-mapped the nation while re-arranging the territory, see Hecht, The Radiance of France.

72. Indeed, the transition from thermo- to hydro- electrical production in Spain occurred between 1910 and 1920, water being the hegemonic source for electricity production until the 1960s.

73. “La fuerza hidráulica que puede utilizarse en España es mayor de diez millones de caballos útiles. ¿Podrán emplearse?,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 20, 25 Oct 1917, 229–233. For García, Catalonia became an example for these energy aspirations since it was one of the top areas in terms of energy production, with emerging “national” enterprises raising significant sums of money, such as La Canadenca (865 million pesetas), La Energía Eléctrica (40 million), and La Catalana (50 million), albeit with significant foreign participation.

74. “Aprovechamiento de las fuentes naturales de energía que existen en España,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 18, 25 Sept 1924, 225–228. Since the European conflict, La Energía Eléctrica echoed transnational explorations of alternative energy resources to produce massive amounts of electricity, e.g. through the exploitation of volcano gasses, “Sobre nuevas fuentes de energía.” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 13, 10 July 1917, 149–151.

75. Electricity companies thus adopted a minimum-risk defensive strategy adjusting their supply to Spain’s weak demand. This explains why, contrary to some engineers’ desires, they did not lobby for a coherent state-led hydroelectrical policy. See, Bartolomé Rodríguez, “La red nacional.”

76. “At the point where the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean meet, Spain has an endless treasure of billions of electric HP that can be used according to the solid principles of Science … Such electric power could reach the pitheads in such quantities that would melt the most resistant metals; national transportation could also take advantage of electricity beyond need at lower prices and without any competition; nitrogen fertilizers may be also extracted … in higher quantities for the needs of our agriculture; all industries could profit from it beyond any limit up to the high of convenience.” Zurano Muñoz, Las corrientes del estrecho de Gibraltar, 7–8.

77. “Here is a way for Spain to look victorious and with haughty superiority to the wound that history has inflicted on us. This is how our triumph would be great and glorious, rising from the pedestal of science and work.” Ibid., 11.

78. As elsewhere in Europe, the period was marked by strong economic and industrial nationalism. For example, the push towards a national electricity sector increased; even if foreign enterprises retained considerable power, the extraordinary benefits obtained during the conflict led to the acquisition of foreign assets by Spanish financial groups. See San Román López, “El nacionalismo económico.”

79. This infrastructural techno-scientific path to development partially drew on what Johan Schot and Vicent Lagendijk have called “technocratic internationalism,” an ideology that infused large networks and infrastructures with political values – in their case with ideas of international peace and global prosperity. Schot and Lagendijk, “Technocratic Internationalism.”

80. On the significance of Pulgar and “National Catholic” engineering in a later period, see Camprubí, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, 41–76.

81. “La nacionalización de la energía eléctrica,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 22, 25 Nov 1917, 257–259.

82. “Congreso Nacional de Ingeniería,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 10, 25 May 1919, 117–120.

83. Due to the country’s diverse weather regimes, rivers in the central plateau have a dry season of 5 to 6 months, starting in June. In the Cantabrian area, the dry session is reduced to 3 months from July to September, whereas in the Pyrenees it occurs in January and February when water supply is at its peak at the central and Cantabrian areas. Consequently, flow regulation was deemed necessary for the exploitation of at least 38.34 percent of the Spanish hydroelectric potential. An overview in Bartolomé Rodríguez, “¿Fue el sector eléctrico un gran beneficiario de “la política hidráulica’ anterior a la Guerra Civil?.”

84. Schot and Lagendijk, “Technocratic Internationalism.” See also, for the Portuguese case, Diogo and Saraiva, Inventing a European Nation, 91–112.

85. However, this was compatible with a greater involvement of the state in issues such as the regulation of energy prices during the 1920s or a vast funding campaign of hydraulic works. This was especially true during the Primo de Rivera’s Dictatorship (1923–1930), which represented the authoritarian exit to the Restoration’s political crisis. Among other priorities, the policy of modernization of the regime consisted in the development of public works and technical infrastructures (e. g. highways, railways and ports) and the strengthening of reservoirs for their triple use: irrigation, water supply and electricity production. Nevertheless, electric markets followed the same pattern of low state regulation. See González Calleja, “La España de Primo de Rivera.”

86. “Technopolitics” is a concept that captures the hybrid forms of power embedded in technological artefacts, expertise, systems, and practices. Rather than a mere tool of politics, technopolitics emphasises technology as a mode of politics. See Hecht, The Radiance of France. For the case of electrification, see Meiton, “Electrifying Jaffa.” Although Meiton does not describe the grid as a technopolitical project, he ostensibly discusses how electrification in Palestine was inherently political since electrical infrastructures mediated and influenced the strategies of both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism.

87. In fact, the most active entrepreneurs in the Spanish electricity sector were the presidents of the Basque electric holding, i.e. a set of companies backed by the Banco de Vizcaya. As the head of the Official Chamber of Electricity Producers and Distributors until his passing in 1925, Urrutia personally oversaw the corporate structure of the Spanish energy sector.

88. “Utilización de la energía hidroeléctrica en España,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 6, 25 March 1919. 73–74.

89. It should be remembered that, a month before Urrutia’s conference, in February 1919, a general strike which originated in the major electricity company in Barcelona paralysed much of the industry of Catalonia. This strike, that lasted for forty-four days, was a milestone in the attainment of the 8-hour day in Spain.

90. “La Red Nacional de Energía Eléctrica,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 5, 10 March 1921, 49–50.

91. “Utilización de la energía hidroeléctrica en España,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 6, 25 March 1919, 73–74.

92. “España puede y debe ser la primera nación que establezca la red nacional de distribución de energía eléctrica,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 8, 25 Apr 1921, 90–92.

93. Ibid. For another example of engineers building reactionary versions of industrial modernity, see Antoniou, Assimakopoulos and Chatzis, “The National Identity of Inter-War Greek Engineers.” Also, Portuguese engineers embraced radical authoritarian alternatives to democracy to undertake the ambitious reengineering of the country, especially during World War I and the crisis of the First Republic. See Diogo and Saraiva, Inventing a European Nation, 104–107.

94. Herranz-Loncán, “Infrastructure Investment and Spanish Economic Growth.” Some works have nevertheless oversimplified the role of infrastructure policy as only driven by the desire to maintain a centralist system managed from Madrid, see Bel, “Infrastructure and Nation Building.” In this sense, cultural and political historian, José Álvarez Junco, has discussed how the state’s economic hardships throughout the nineteenth century conditioned its capacity to fulfil cultural homogenization through infrastructures. See Álvarez Junco, “La nación en duda.”

95. “La Unión Eléctrica Española. Nuestros trabajos de propaganda,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 11, 10 Dec 1903, 17–18.

96. “Establecimiento de una red de distribución de energía eléctrica en España,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 7, 10 Apr 1919, 82–85; La Energía Eléctrica, no. 8, 25 Apr 1919, 93–97.

97. “España puede y debe ser la primera nación que establezca la red nacional de distribución de energía eléctrica,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 8, 25 Apr 1921, 90–92.

98. Núñez, “Nation-Building and Regional Integration.”

99. Deep local and regional disparities would develop from the consolidation of peripheral markets brought about by the spread of hydroelectricity. Prior to the Civil War, electricity in Spain was unevenly spread, with the biggest consumer areas being the peripheral markets of Catalonia (435 kWh per capita) and the Basque Country (400 kWh per capita), followed by Madrid and Valencia (200 kWh per capita on average). Other regions, such as Andalusia or Galicia, had internal coordination, while Castile and Extremadura showed a negligible amount of electricity consumption. See Bartolomé Rodríguez, “La red nacional.”

100. For instance, the Mancomunitat de Catalunya (1914–1924), a confederation of Catalonia’s four provinces, sought to develop the boundaries of a new nation through educational and technological initiatives, namely, by building extensive electrical, hydraulic, road, rail, and telephone networks. See Roca-Rosell, “Ciencia y sociedad en la época de la Mancomunitat de Catalunya.”

101. “Crónica e información. La red eléctrica nacional,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 4, 25 Feb 1927, 62. An overview from the Portuguese perspective in Cardoso de Matos, “Hydroelectricity in Portugal.”

102. “Los Saltos del Duero,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 2, 25 Jan 1928, 13–18.

103. An example in “Importación de energía a Francia procedente de Suiza,” La Energía Eléctrica, no. 16, 25 Aug 1923; 201.

104. Supporters of this pan-Iberist political project – mostly republicans, democrats, and anarchists – had indeed relied on technology to fulfil those socio-technical imaginaries, e.g. through the connections by telegraph between Lisbon and Madrid (1856) or rail (1866). See Saraiva, Lafuente and Cardoso de Matos, “Tecnología y frontera”; Pereira, “The Technodiplomacy of Iberian Transnational Railways.”

105. In 1906, Manuel Antón y Fernández, Professor of Sciences at the Central University of Madrid, had proposed an Ibero-Afro-American railroad at a conference organized by the engineer León Torres Quevedo. That same year, the Duke of Almodóvar, as Minister of State, submitted the project to the Algeciras Conference and, again in 1907, to the Tenth International Peace Conference at The Hague. See Gayoso y Sevilla, Comunicaciones y rápidos transportes terrestres, 4.

106. The Iberian-gauge describes railways using track gauge of 1,668 mm as adopted in Spain and Portugal as respective national standards in the mid-nineteenth century. The commonly cited reasons for this adoption include the features of Spain’s landscape (more mountainous than that of France or the UK), but also national security concerns that recommended the avoidance of foreign use of the railroad.

107. Gayoso y Sevilla, Comunicaciones y rápidos transportes terrestres, 24.

108. Hasenöhrl and Kupper, “Historicizing Renewables.”

109. Turnbull, “Review.”

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fundación para el Fomento en Asturias de la Investigación Científica Aplicada y la Tecnología [AC A 17-33].