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

Introduction

In 1895, the Catalan author and journalist, Nilo María Fabra (1843–1903), published two short stories that constitute early examples of Iberian science-fiction. The first tale, Lo presente juzgado por el porvenir (The Present Assessed by the Future) contrasted Spain’s troubled end-of-the-century with the possibilities of a prosperous future thanks to electricity. Electrical power was envisioned as the trigger for a fast industrialization, replacing steam in factories, ships, and trains. Small electrical engines would enhance a decentralized industrialization deriving from home-based work, hence neutralizing increasing labour unrest.¹ The second tale, Un viaje a la República de Argentina en el siglo XXI (A Trip to the Republic of Argentina in the Twenty-First Century), praised the revolution in modern transportation and communications by describing a journey from Madrid to Buenos Aires in 2003. In this story, electricity captured deeper nationalistic hopes, including Spanish involvements in Africa and an eventual confederation with Portugal and former Latin American possessions. Using a ‘fast-electric’ railroad network, the protagonist crossed the Iberian Peninsula, reaching the Spanish colonies in North Africa via Gibraltar – then a Spanish territory. The journey continued through Dakar – the capital of an imagined Spanish Senegal – to the Canary Islands, where electric submarines would take the traveller to Brazil. Ultimately, Fabra wanted to show the strength of the ‘Latin race’ over the Anglo-Saxons via technological prowess.²

Fabra understood electricity as the galvanizing agent of a rejuvenated nation, providing an account of an electrified future able to inspire social, political, and technical actors while countering perceptions of national decline. This article explores how some Spanish engineers employed electricity to articulate a nationalist modernism that saw electricity as a secure path to national development and industrialization, particularly amid the identity crisis that followed the final collapse of the overseas Spanish empire in 1898 as the outcome of the Spanish-American war. At a time in which several groups confronted the challenges of Spanish modernization and the reconfiguration of post-imperial national identity, electricity became a central element of socio-technical (including energy) imaginaries, a way out of national crisis. However, conceptions of how the ‘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 in a moment where several visualizations of nationhood coexisted.

This paper brings together cultural histories of electricity, electrification, and energies, on the one hand, and histories of techno-nationalism, on the other. Since the pivotal work of T. P. Hughes Networks of Power (1983), historians have tended to conceptualize electrification as the unfolding of large technological systems.³ Conventional accounts tend to view the development of electrical systems as driven mainly by technical, administrative, financial, and political structures. As such, system builders – scientists, politicians, technicians, or utilities’ managers – take central stage in the narratives, as well as in shaping societies according to electricity’s perceived ‘modernity’. Yet such a deterministic approach cannot easily explain the ubiquitous tensions in the history of technological change and the practicalities of non-consensual electrification.⁴ An emerging body of research is broadening the field from different perspectives, including attention to users, practices, everyday life, gender, and the environment.⁵ Historians are also re-evaluating the meanings and ideas implicit in notions of large-scale centralized energy provision, broadly, as well as the changing cultural interpretations of ‘electricity’ over time.⁶ Current studies in energy history are also expanding conventional understandings of energies as merely a set of resources and technologies by addressing the complex factors modelling socio-energetic systems.⁷ These included a fluid amalgam made up of the materiality of energies (resources, infrastructures, devices), perceptions and ideas (including imaginaries and energy utopias), and everyday practices and other social and political processes (e.g. imperialism and colonialism, nationalism, contestations, disputes, and negotiations). These studies are therefore emphasising the need to understand electrification as a contingent process adapted to pre-existing political and socio-cultural forms while accounting for its culturally nuanced heterogeneity.

Furthermore, since electricity and energies appear as woven into the organization of political subjectivities and power,⁸ both energy and electrical histories can benefit from current research on techno-nationalism. Studies on techno-nationalism have underlined the role of technology as a cultural resource to negotiate the open meanings of nationhood.⁹ This was true not only in ‘early industrialized’ nations, but especially in those countries traditionally depicted in their historiography as developmentally backward. In those instances, the transformational power of science and technology was harnessed to flesh out the contours of hypothetical futures where such countries should rise to the top of the industrialized world.¹⁰ Along these lines, engineers and their practices played a decisive role in collectively building technological identities for their respective nations, a task that went beyond the role of experts as ‘system-builders’ in the sense that term is conventionally understood.¹¹ Given their preeminent position as members of transnational networks and their exclusive access to international knowledge and technologies, engineers introduced the mindset of a vibrant future that should have industry and science as its symbols into the processes of nation-building, hence showing the transnational and global dimension of techno-nationalism.¹² Importantly, however, experts negotiated and adapted the cultural promises of science and technology to fit culturally specific ideas drawing upon the historical circumstances, cultural resources, and traditions of each country in a continuous process of negotiation and appropriation.¹³

With these ideas in mind, this article, while reframing the grand theme of Spanish history and identity from a technology- and energy- based perspective, contributes to rethinking and scrutinizing conventional narratives in histories of electrification in two ways. First of all, it shows system-building generally as entangled with broader political processes and ideologies (i.e. nationalism, nation-building and national reconstruction), crisis and perceptions of decadence, and societal hopes related to questions on how to galvanize a new community. Secondly, it indicates how Spanish engineers as ‘system-builders’ engaged transnational cultural ideas that encompassed the development of electricity in the early twentieth century while adapting them to Spain’s local circumstances in this period. By examining the multifaceted political and cultural meanings of electric supply and technologies in a context of recent loss of an empire and a contested nation-building process, I will argue that Spanish engineers formed what Sheila Jasanoff and others have called socio-technical imaginaries as ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of the forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’.¹⁴ As energy historians have recently pointed out, emergent energy regimes were always accompanied by conceptions of desirable futures.¹⁵ However, alternative and overlapping energy fictions run in parallel as they denote different preferences and opposing notions on how to organize societies alongside new energy resources and technologies. The notion of socio-technical (and energy) imaginaries is particularly useful to understand the cultural debates around science, technology and national identity which arose in Spain at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁶ As such, engineers’ discussions and projects drew on wider societal exchanges with different historical actors and audiences shaping energy imaginaries aimed at addressing questions of what a technologically improved future would look like overall and what the specific place of electricity would be in Spain’s economic, political, and social life.

In addition, the Spanish case provides insights for historians of technology and, in particular, historians of techno-nationalism. The Iberian Peninsula has been a prominent testing ground for arbiters looking to determine how much science and technology may alter national histories. This process has included addressing the shifting meanings of scientific research and technological systems and their links to power structures and political struggles. In those former or fading imperial powers that saw themselves as backward throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as was the case in Portugal and Spain – although this was not a phenomenon limited to these nations – the apparent need to look for new emblems of development and progress was likely more intensely felt. Moreover, both countries experienced dramatic political shifts and changes in their respective state formations throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, with regimes that ranged from monarchy to republic, from liberal democracy to different forms of authoritarianism and dictatorship. Technological nationalism remained at the core of the political economy and legitimation strategies of each regime and its historical participants, despite political ruptures. Scientific ideas and material devices were continuously reworked to put forward several visualizations of nationhood at the service of building up the state.¹⁷

In the nineteenth century, grandiose technological artefacts and new infrastructures (namely roads, canals, railways and telegraphs) augmented established national epics to become symbols of the nation and of a new modernity celebrated through public ceremonies in which different experts, entrepreneurs, politicians, workers, the press, and the general public participated.¹⁸ Electricity was, therefore, mobilized within a pre-existent technological nationalist language in Spain and the general public often discovered the new technological achievements at public or state ceremonies.¹⁹ However, with the ‘Disaster’ of 1898, debates around electricity underwent a slight modification, and the modes of appropriating electricity became inextricably linked to concerns of national decadence. At the turn of the century, when nationalism had become more pronounced and in a climate of aggressive international competition, the ‘regenerationist’ discourse emphasized the necessity of developing the potential of the country. These aims included the exploitation of natural resources and the consolidation of strong national industries. Therefore, although public works, mines and railroads still mattered (noting, too, that these last two sectors had been left to private companies, mostly foreign, during the nineteenth century) the advent of electricity offered cultural, political, and technical leaders a unique opportunity to accelerate development and modernization. Plus, the assimilation of electrical knowledge and technologies from pioneer countries was considerably quick and successful thanks to the decided support of an outstanding group of well-trained, up-to-date Spanish professionals.²⁰ Hence, engineers used electricity to articulate their visions of a forward-looking nation while reasserting their role in society by advancing top-down solutions to bring development to an allegedly decaying Spain.²¹

The first section of this article will show how engineers’ ideas of industrial progress and technological prowess through electricity in Spain became enrolled within a narrative of technological nationalism. These visions included discussing the cultures of innovation in Spain and producing a genealogy of Spanish innovations. Engineers’ energy imaginaries also expressed wider political aspirations as they sought to legitimize their role in ruling a reinvigorated nation. The second section explores how engineers’ ideas about the country’s energy assets were seen as instrumental for attaining a rapid industrialization. It details how (hydro)electricity was infused with nationalist messages of independence through visions of a self-sufficient and limitless non-coal power supply. The third part discusses how energy imaginaries influenced concrete material assemblages and the tensions that ensued given the fundamental (techno)political nature of electrical infrastructures. Given the variegated identities of Spanish engineers, discussions over large-scale electrical projects involved contentious politics of national integration, social cohesion, and relations with Europe, Portugal, and Northern Africa.

Engineers and electricity after the 1898 ‘Disaster’: electrical futures for a regenerated Spain

After the short parenthesis of the ‘Six Democratic Years’ (1868–1874), the Bourbon Monarchy was restored in Spain in 1874 and began the Restoration era (1874–1931). This regime represented a conservative reaction aimed at overcoming the political instability and civil strife of previous periods through massive political and economic clientelism.²² During this crucial period the country lost the remnants of its overseas empire – i.e. Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Caroline Islands, and the Philippines – in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War (1898).²³ The defeat, generally known as the ‘Disaster’, has long been seen as a watershed moment in Spanish history; however, its connotations have been re-evaluated in recent years.²⁴ The ‘Disaster’ did not trigger the same responses and attitudes among all historical actors; furthermore, …, narratives about Spain’s downfall should be contextualized in a broader international framework – or at the very least, a European one – characterized by lingering declinist anxieties not necessarily limited to a particular end-of-the-century pessimistic atmosphere.²⁵ Yet, as historian Álvarez Junco has noted, the defeat acted as a catalyst for the discrediting of the national project as it epitomized the long decay of Spain throughout the nineteenth century.²⁶ Debates on the challenges of modernization acquired an unprecedented urgency amid an increasing pressure coming from those sectors opposed to the Restoration’s political establishment. A huge range of forces were convinced that profound reforms were needed as ‘regenerationism’ — a deliberately vague concept and movement that predated 1898 — gained prominent public visibility.²⁷ Some attitudes towards Spain’s self-perceived decline included promoting nostalgic representations of an idealized imperial past.²⁸ Others, however, saw in the ‘Disaster’ a unique opportunity to instantiate newly progressive, democratic, or secular values. Moreover, some proposals came from regionalist or other nationalist movements aiming at modernizing the country from the perspective of the prosperous industrial areas.²⁹ In sum, competing political agendas strived to become the hegemonic representations of the ‘regenerated’ nation amid the crisis of Spain’s classical nineteenth-century liberalism.³⁰

Since industrial backwardness was identified as one of the main causes of the Spanish defeat, science and technology became ubiquitous within the controversies launched by ‘regenerationism’.³¹ Spain did industrialize during the second half of the nineteenth century, but it did so at considerably slower pace than other European countries, and also in a more uneven fashion. At the end of the century, the approaches of the Restoration regime had been clearly inadequate to shrink the gap between Spain and the leading industrial countries. Engineers thus became activists within ‘regenerationism’ due to their legitimacy as the holders of techno-scientific knowledge. However, they did so not only as individuals committed to specific political currents, but also as members of socio-professional groups.³²

It must be clarified that the Restoration marked a period of change in what it meant to be an engineer. In the face of the open politization that had characterized the second half of the nineteenth century – despite strategic calls for avoiding overtly partisanship – the Restoration reinforced the tendency towards pragmatism.³³ The change in engineers’ discourse correlates with the achievement of a prominent social position since the Restoration reaffirmed the privileged stand of the official engineering corps. In addition, by the end of the century, the size of technical works grew and diversified, leading to a greater role for those occupations understood as liberal professions, mostly industrial engineering.³⁴ Importantly, however, political stability was understood as a measure of success in the competition between countries, especially after the ‘Disaster’. Hence, engineers’ priorities shifted, and they endeavoured to place more emphasis on the need to reinforce the prestige of the nation in the international sphere. Therefore, by the end of the century, engineers of all bodies and professions tended to embrace positivism and present themselves as the bearers of progress, capable of fostering the strength of the nation through technical projects and the acceleration of industrial growth.

Professional journals served as forums for discussing wider societal concerns in addition to purely technical and business-related ones at a period when conversations on national regeneration grew more prominent within a burgeoning public sphere. Engineers took advantage of these spaces to specify their visions of the country, its past, present, and future, as well as their own place in society. The journal La Energía Eléctrica (The Electrical Energy) is one of the primary sources for observing how electrical innovations were received. Although technical magazines entirely dedicated to electricity predated 1898 —the first one being published in 1883 — this journal will be the most stable throughout the 1898–1931 period. Gumersindo Villegas Ortega, a senior officer in the Telegraph Corps, established the journal in Madrid in July 1899. However, significant changes were made starting in November 1900, the most notable of which was the selection of José de Echegaray (1832–1916), a renowned scientist and General Inspector of Civil Engineers, as its new editor.³⁵ The publication sought to represent the Spanish electricity industry during this new era by assembling the most significant figures in the Restoration’s technological and scientific establishment. Indeed, from 1902 onwards, La Energía Eléctrica played a major role within the corporate organization of that industry as it was transformed into the official newsletter of the Spanish Electricity Industry Association (SEIA) and, in 1903, of the Spanish Electrical Union (SEU).³⁶ Consequently, although the Spanish public was acquainted with electricity since the early 1870s, the defeat of 1898 adapted the emergent energy regime to national (and nationalistic) demands.

With the objective of swaying public opinion and persuading political leaders to adopt technological initiatives, La Energía Eléctrica published the volume … La ciencia y la industria electrica en España al subir al trono S.M. el Rey Don Alfonso XIII (The Electrical Science and Industry in Spain at the time of His Majesty the King Alfonso XIIIth’s Enthronement). The purpose of this book was to support the growth of electricity in Spain sending a message to the so-called ‘regenerationist’ monarch, who was 16 years old at the time.³⁷ Importantly, La Energía Eléctrica sought to galvanize Spain’s multiple engineering communities, as professionals from various corps contributed to the volume.³⁸ Obviously, engineers exhibited a wide variety of training backgrounds, practices, and agendas, which, in turn, elicited divergent professional, political, and regional allegiances.³⁹ However, one may argue that, in countries like Spain, the technology-driven demands brought about by hurried attempts at industrial modernization, coupled with nationalism and the ‘regenerationist’ atmosphere, introduced the possibility of a shared set of objectives for this group of professionals.⁴⁰ Along these lines, the editor of the book, the military engineer Eduardo Gallego (1873–1959) — later editor-in-chief of La Energía Eléctrica — expressed in the introduction how engineers should lead the campaign to ‘strengthen the fraternal bonds that must always exist among Spanish electro-technicians independently of their profession … so that we can increase our prestige among the scientific world’.⁴¹

The book was instrumental in setting up a specific historical narrative of Spanish decadence based on ostensible scientific and technological weaknesses and failures. In doing so, engineers engaged wider end-of-the-century conversations on the position of science and technology in Spain’s broad history and cultural traditions. This fervent, protracted argument about whether or not Spain had a true scientific culture – the so-called ‘polémica de la ciencia española’ or controversy on Spanish science – resulted in tense debates.⁴² Some engineers, such as Francisco del Río Joán, positioned themselves with all those intellectuals denouncing the alleged ‘three centuries of Spanish backwardness’ describing a ‘minor’ and ‘weak’ scientific practice that had gradually languished since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, according to Del Río, the ‘painful mutilations’ of Cuba and the Philippines could inaugurate a national dawn; in this new historical period, Spain should not raise ‘the old banner of its legendary military fierceness, but the symbolic caduceus of Industry and the Arts’.⁴³

Accordingly, techno-nationalism dominated the fledging ‘Spanish’ electricity industry as engineers dreamed of a powerful nation with a self-sufficient ‘electrical science’ and energy industry. For instance, José Benito Ortega, a military engineer and the head of the Madrid-based firms Mediodía and Castellana, noted in his chapter on ‘The Spanish Electrical Sector in 1902’ that the nation had 859 power plants in 1902 as opposed to just 7 in 1889.⁴⁴ For Ortega these numbers meant that ‘our Fatherland is awakening from its lethargy’.⁴⁵ Ortega, on the other hand, had to recognize the critical role of foreign finance and technology in the early development of Spain’s electrical industry.⁴⁶ According to research on techno-nationalism, national usage of technology does not in itself rely on autochthonous breakthroughs because most technologies circulate (or have circulated) well beyond national borders.⁴⁷ As a result, plans for regenerating Spain through technologies of electrification would be based on an international circulation of technologies carefully repurposed as tools of techno-nationalism. Owing to this, Ortega deemed foreign initiatives as positive since they were ‘taking large numbers of Spanish capitalists out of their lack of engagement and lethargy’. Most importantly, they were showing Spaniards the ‘secrets of industrialism, that we now apply and follow almost independently from alien mentors’ hence, allowing the creation of a completely nationalized electrical industry in which Spanish entrepreneurs would compete ‘in quality with the most accredited foreign brands in a short time’.⁴⁸

Some chapters contained in-depth analyses of Spanish breakthroughs as proof that the country was ‘shaking up the foreign tutelage’, as techno-nationalism encouraged engineers to explore the nation’s ability for innovation. Francisco del Río, for example, applauded ‘those champions of practical electricity … the intelligent and encouraging phalanx of our inventors, intellectuals, and propagandists … whose knowledge, initiatives and efforts have initiated the movement of our intellectual restoration’.⁴⁹ Along these lines, the book highlighted some seminal achievements as these professionals tried to promote Spanish patents and engage national businessmen in their exploitation. There were some significant successes that foreign media was reporting on. A case in point were the works carried out by Commander Julio Cervera Baviera (1854–1927) on radio and wireless telegraphy, in close-cooperation with Marconi.⁵⁰ However, the quest for a national ‘electrical science’ led to exaggerating Spanish contributions to the global narrative of science. As studies on techno-nationalism prove, nationalistic accounts often included scrutinizing the role of science and technology in national histories and even ‘inventing’ national narratives around technology.⁵¹ Since the desire for techno-scientific regeneration needed an historical basis to legitimize Spain’s aspirations, the chapter, ‘The Telephone, Historical Overview from its Invention up to Now’ — authored by telegraph officer Agustín Boyer – claimed a preeminent place for Spain among the discoveries that had brought about the telephone.⁵² There were other implausible claims in the book, for instance, the announcement of ‘a technical procedure to reduce energy prices’ attempted by the forestry engineer Clemente Figueras (1845–1908) that, supposedly, would store ‘atmospheric energy directly extracted from the ether’.⁵³

With these ostensible advancements in mind, expressed with nationalistic pride, the idea of a future Spain whose strength would depend on recognizable national electrical innovations was being envisioned by engineers.

The blasts of progress are finding among us a multitude of sympathetic organs. As soon as Marconi discovers wireless telegraphy, Commander Julio Cervera applies his special coherer to his invention; as soon as one speaks of the wonders of Tesla, the forestry engineer Clemente Figueras stands out in Las Palmas, announcing the use of atmospheric electricity with universal applications.⁵⁴

As part of the same narrative, the evaluation of the ground-breaking inventions made in Spain also had the intention of criticizing the absence of an acceptable scientific and industrial organization in the country.⁵⁵ Some chapters expressed bitter disappointments due to the absence of a national bibliography on electricity, Spanish electrical terms, national school of electrical engineering, and electrical laboratories.⁵⁶ But in addition to picturing a technologically-advanced country, the book also helped these experts develop a shared set of (political) objectives by praising engineering skills and, most importantly, criticizing traditional political elites.⁵⁷ In this respect, engineers regarded their training as part of a wider political commitment to improve the nation’s material infrastructures as well as shaping a new mindset; a mindset based on ideals connected to the standards of integrity typically ascribed to the practice of technology and science that, in turn, would put an end to widespread corruption and oligarchic rule. Although these sentiments were not entirely new, and followed a professional ethos already established since the mid-nineteenth century,⁵⁸ at the turn of the twentieth century these experts tended to emphasize engineering as an apolitical practice and to represent technological modernization as an objective capable of generating broad consensus among different political ideologies, placing themselves above partisan divisions.⁵⁹ Consequently, engineer’s socio-technical (and energy) imaginaries had the strategic value of reinforcing their position and self-perception while asking for a greater role for qualified professionals in the effective management of the country. However, as we will see in the last section, their infrastructure projects also exhibited concrete political positions.

A country full of energies: hydroelectricity and national regeneration

Engineers’ visions for a reinvigorated nation revolved around a transnational narrative that equated the advancement of nations with the amount of energy produced and consumed. The factories of nineteenth-century industrial Europe gave rise to this Western-dominated energy epistemology, which fit the objectives and tactics of imperial capitalism and linked intense energy usage with civilizational notions of human well-being, and (unlimited) economic expansion. These high-intensity energy ideas were modified in Spain to accommodate local plans for an eventual industrial modernization that would reshape the country’s political power.⁶⁰

The lack of a good energy endowment has long been viewed by Spanish economic historians as one of the major obstacles to the country’s industrialization. This approach takes into account the uneven quality and geographic distribution of coal, which led to expensive extraction and transportation costs.⁶¹ Engineers also identified Spain’s industrial development as being locked into an ‘iron loop’ of energy scarcity and coal dependence: on the one hand, national industries were unable to obtain affordable energy prices; on the other hand, there was insufficient industrial demand to justify the installation of power plants. Consequently, by the time electricity was being used, the ‘coal question’ — a term expressing socio-technical worries regarding the ability of domestic coals to support Spanish economic regeneration — emerged into the public awareness. Engineers were therefore concerned about the role that energy ought to play in restoring national prosperity.⁶²

Owing to national coals being poor and scarce, engineers envisioned a culture of self-sufficiency via the systematic exploitation of the country’s hydraulic assets. The role of hydraulic assets in the automation of Catalonia’s cotton textile industries, which began in the eighteenth century, has been widely discussed in Spanish historiography. In contrast to the British coal-iron paradigm, this phenomenon fostered regional industrialization processes.⁶³ As the twentieth century approached, Spanish engineers (re)discovered water’s industrial possibilities. Even before the ‘Disaster’, water had become a key consideration in Spanish political and socioeconomic debates and evolved into the symbolic image around which many ‘regenerationist’ tendencies gathered. In fact, some thinkers articulated Spain’s overall modernization around hydro-technical imaginaries, particularly the Joaquín Costa, an Aragonese politician (1846–1911) who promoted a techno-utopian vision of how effective control of the nation’s water supply would bring about a national renaissance.⁶⁴

Engineers borrowed from ‘hydraulic regenerationism’ the idea of shifting the gaze to the country’s ‘latent energies’ which, in their opinion, had not been properly exploited previously. Therefore, it was a moral imperative to use those assets to transform the nation both literally and figuratively. In January 1901, La Energía Eléctrica published the article ‘The Small Industries’, authored by the military engineer and geographer Severo Gómez Núñez, who also participated in the book La ciencia y la industria electrica en España. In it, he stated that the ‘improvement of the national spirit’ should be based on the mobilization of ‘countless non-listed waterfalls’ that will offer electricity to an infinite number of new companies run by ‘Spanish capital and Spanish workers and businessmen’.⁶⁵ As in La ciencia y la industria electrica en España, the journal would call on entrepreneurs and local engineers to identify those assets. This campaign coincided with the journal’s attempts at adapting existing regulations to the improvements on long-distance power transmission to promote the industrial exploitation of the country’s hydraulic resources.⁶⁶ Given the ‘too liberal’ character of existing laws, La Energía Eléctrica specifically supported the adoption of new water legislation ‘aimed at preventing these resources and elements of industrial life from passing into foreign hands’.⁶⁷ In this context, some engineers envisioned surpassing coal-dependent countries, given Spain’s generous water riches:

Our hydraulic power is much higher than that of England and Germany; the industrial supremacy of these nations, based on the wealth of their coal basins, must inevitably be replaced by the new electrical industries created on the basis of the ‘white coal’ … ; the thousands of HP spawned by these mines will be eternal, and when the coals of Cardiff or Newcastle have thrown away their last tons, electricity, the prodigy of our century, will continue to exist in the whole world.⁶⁸

Therefore, in engineers’ hands, the concept of ‘hydraulic regenerationism’ aimed at generating a wider demand for hydroelectricity and, subsequently, for major infrastructure investment which also included further claims for a coherent national hydraulic policy.

Some of these socio-technical and energy imaginaries were partially incorporated by the Restoration political elites, as they strategically appropriated certain ‘regenerationist’ demands. Hence, hydraulic policies would become law, including the Hydraulic Works Plans of 1902, 1909, and 1911. These schemes sanctioned the direct intervention of the state in the execution of public infrastructures, although the lack of an appropriate budget policy would jeopardize the effectiveness of these works. Moreover, the basic axis of the Restoration’s hydraulic policy favoured irrigation and rural interests over industrial uses of water, energy production included.⁶⁹ Notwithstanding this, some large-scale projects were enthusiastically received by engineers. In June 1908, for example, La Energía Eléctrica reported on a visit to the Salto de Bolarque’s dam, one of the first major infrastructures to supply Madrid through a long-distance power transmission from the nearby province of Guadalajara. This undertaking effectively inaugurated the massive supply of hydroelectricity to large urban areas from large reservoirs in the 1910s.⁷⁰ The author of the piece – engineer José G. Benitez – celebrated the patriotism of engineers and other industrialists that participated in the initiative, especially the promoter – the Basque banker Estanislao Urquijo (1872–1948) — who had only employed Spanish experts. As such, the dam represented the fruitful cooperation between different national engineering corps (road, industrial, and military), turning modern water infrastructures into political landscapes.⁷¹

Socio-technical imaginaries for an industrialised Spain relying on an (almost) unlimited power supply through hydroelectricity were propagandized particularly during World War I. Energy shortages during the conflict emphasized the advantages of water over coal so that, more than ever before, the possibility of transitioning to a (hydro)electrical energy regime amplified progressive visions of economic (and political) independence paired with national resurgence through a cheap and abundant power supply.⁷² In October 1917, the engineer G. J. de Guillén García repeated the same idea concerning the endless possibilities of hydroelectricity in an article suggestively titled, ‘The Hydraulic Power that Can Be Used in Spain is Greater than Ten Million Horsepower. Could It Be Used?’:

Today, all waterfalls can be exploited with the help of electricity; with a simple wire, their force is transported hundreds of kilometres where it is wanted. So much so that in Barcelona part of the machines, looms, and so on, are moved with the energy produced by the immense water jumps situated on the peaks of the upper Pyrenees … .⁷³

Additionally, the European conflict pushed engineers even further in their search for alternatives to produce energy since war and its aftermath accentuated the lack of domestic production. The renowned mining engineer José de Madariaga highlighted in a lecture at the Royal Academy of Physical and Natural Sciences in 1924 the need for a systematic study of the nation’s energy resources to produce electricity that should include water, gas, oil, but also wind and tidal power.⁷⁴

Around that time, setting a national grid was considered as the only way to exploit and connect those assets. However, not all engineers agreed on those optimistic views regarding national energies and their role in triggering a self-sustained, promising industrial future. Professionals like Sánchez Cuervo argued against the misguided belief that an endless rise in energy supply would lead to larger industrial demand in a series of articles published in 1926 that attacked the ‘evil of electrification that is seemingly haunting Europe’. In reality, businesspeople were turning away from the ‘national mobilization’ strategy advocated by some engineers. Electrical companies were especially concerned with the Spanish markets’ capacity for consumption and continually feared overproduction.⁷⁵ However, it is worth noting how top-down solutions to engineer the country’s problems also connected with wider social demands and expectations built around transnational understandings of energy abundance as the key to an unlimited horizon of growth. In 1927, the lawyer Emilio Zurano Muñoz (1857–1943) published his book Las corrientes del estrecho de Gibraltar como fuentes de energía eléctrica (The Sea Currents of the Strait of Gibraltar as a Source of Electric Power). There, he suggested the exploitation of the tidal power converging at the Strait of Gibraltar as a way of boosting Spain’s industrialization.⁷⁶ Even if Zurano was not able to describe the technical process required to store such power, he argued that engineers should accept the moral duty to implement solutions to fulfil his vision of a limitless power supply. Zurano’s text clearly inserted this energy-utopia in an ultranationalist narrative since the exploitation of Gibraltar’s tidal energy would epitomize the ‘glorious crown placed over the tomb of Trafalgar Heroes’, alluding to another traumatic episode in Spain’s military history, the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Most importantly, this technological endeavour would exemplify ‘the science and genius of the Spanish race’, thus restoring Spain’s rightful place among other industrialized countries in a time when memories of the ‘Disaster’ persisted.⁷⁷

Setting the grid, building a nation

The industrial character of the European conflict, despite Spain not being directly involved, reinforced the need to accelerate Spanish industrialization and thus close the gap with more developed nations.⁷⁸ Moreover, energy shortages during the war, due to increasing coal exports to the combatant nations and lack of domestic production, starkly revealed the limits of internal energy resources. In a context where coal dependency was exacerbating the so-called social question, which involved an increasingly organized working population, hydroelectricity represented a virtual unlimited and reliable national asset. Within that frame, setting a national grid captured engineers’ imagination as a way to entirely reorganise the country’s energy sector.⁷⁹ In 1915–1917, the engineer, physicist, and priest, José Agustín Pérez del Pulgar (1875–1939), initiated debates on a national electricity network through the pages of the Jesuit magazine Ibérica with a series of articles later reissued in La Energía Eléctrica.⁸⁰ His piece ‘The Nationalization of Electricity’, published in October 1917, discussed Switzerland’s electrification as a relatable example of a country suffering coal scarcity. Nevertheless, the appeal of the Swiss case relied on its ‘political system’, particularly the seemingly absence of ‘any political or military upheaval’. Pulgar’s understandings of large-scale electrification entangled energy provision with broader notions of ‘national independence’ defined at various levels. First, the national grid would guarantee a constant power supply regardless of the ‘whims’ of private companies. Secondly, it would prevent energy shortages due to labour disputes as he supported state-led electrification. Thirdly, the grid would secure national independence from foreign countries in terms of military capacity. Finally, and most importantly, a regular and unlimited energy supply would boost a strong ‘national’ electrical equipment industry, ensuring the country’s technological superiority.⁸¹

Whilst discussing the invigorating effects of grid power supply, Pérez del Pulgar sparked a technical debate that remained alive for several years. In December 1918, a Royal Order from the Ministry of Public Works requested a plan for the electrification of the country to the Permanent Electrical Committee, a consulting body created in 1911–1912 and dependent on the Ministry of Public Works. Simultaneously, the First Congress of Spanish Engineering, held in 1919, attempted to outline a global scheme for Spain’s self-sustained industrialization. In December 1919, a subcommittee composed by engineers from different corps was appointed to discuss the feasibility of a national grid as it called upon the patriotism of ‘all our industrialists and technical personnel’ which were required ‘to use the unprecedented opportunity given by the Congress to contribute … to the promotion of Spanish industrial life, which in the electro-technical field so many hopes hold for our resurgence’.⁸² This event, organized by the Institute of Civil Engineers, brought together the associations of ponts-et-chaussées (roads), mines, forestry, industrial and agricultural engineers, and tried to coordinate the different engineering specialities as well as to increase their influence in public, economic, social, and political life. Military engineers, however, ended up having a noticeable influence given the hegemony of protectionism and economic interventionism. In fact, military engineers, through the Industrial Mobilization Commissions that dated back to 1915, had already proposed the need to analyse the availability of national resources (including energy and raw materials) to replace imports and, consequently, asked for a decisive intervention of the state in guiding industrial policies.

Overall, the grid was aimed at addressing the scarcity and dispersion of energy resources in Spain as well as the low performance of Spain’s incipient electricity markets. As such, the most ambitious plans for electrification included the construction of big reservoirs to regulate Spain’s volatile rivers.⁸³ Also, large thermoelectric powerplants were to be built to absorb low-quality coals in northern mining areas. With this set of infrastructures in place, the electrical network would maximize the output of the nation’s energy assets by interconnecting complementary hydroelectric and thermoelectric areas. According to the most optimistic views, this virtually unlimited energy supply would immediately create wider industrial demand and promote further electro-intensive sectors, e.g. electro-metallurgical and electro-chemical national industries. As such, Spanish nitrogenous fertilizers would flourish, ending the external dependence while modernizing agriculture. Some of these views followed Pérez del Pulgar’s confidence on the possibilities of establishing the solid foundations of a strictly national electric equipment industry thanks to grid energy supply. Moreover, a consistent flow of energy would even solve another major industrial issue of the interwar period: the so-called railway problem, or the necessary renewal of Spanish railroads through their electrification at a time in which private concessions were going to expire after almost sixty years of use.

As in other European countries, the state was asked to promote these initiatives, either through its direct implementation or by subsidising the grid. These views were consistent with the growing interventionism in the electricity sector during and after the European conflict in Spain and abroad. Specifically, the economic imbalances, supply crises, and inflation produced by the war, together with the growing relevance of industrial power supply, re-addressed the question of the state’s involvement within the electricity sector.⁸⁴ Nonetheless, while in some European countries the intervention of the state was decisive vis-à-vis the reorganization of the post-war hydroelectric sector – e.g. by financing large-scale projects – initiatives in Spain relied almost uniquely on private companies.⁸⁵

Under these circumstances, no national grid project among the three designed during the Restoration era prospered. Still, exchanges over this matter were intense and showed the contentious ways in which politics could be embedded into engineering practices.⁸⁶ The central question was the type of nation to be shaped through the grid. Given the diversity of Spanish engineering communities and the political nature of these endeavours, large-scale electrical infrastructures showed the contested ways in which the future could be imagined. Crucially, technopolitical projects served to address wider political, social, economic, and nationalistic worries in a process in which the material properties of electrical infrastructures also played a role. Evidently, there was no clear consensus on the scope of the grid, despite general claims over the necessity of electrifying Spain. Juan Juan Urrutia (1866-1925), one of the grid’s most ardent supporters and the founder of two of Spain’s most renowned electrical enterprises — Hidroeléctrica Ibérica and Hidroeléctrica Española — campaigned for the concentration of energy production in high-performance power plants. For him, the exploitation of the country’s hydraulic resources could not depend on small producers. These views were consistent with his position as representative of Basque capitalism based on integrated holdings.⁸⁷ Furthermore, the social consequences of such electrification scheme were remarkable, as Urrutia firmly believed that cheap energy supply from large industrial cores would remedy social discontent at a time of increasing labour strife due to coal shortages and inflation. He explained in March 1919 at the Catholic Institute of Arts and Industries (ICAI) that for the grid to be feasible, producers and consumers, as well as the state, would need to work together very closely. As a result, this infrastructure encapsulated deeper yearnings for social harmony through technological undertakings:

… we are living in a century of great integrations, great socializations, great cooperation, great trade-unionism: workers’ unions, energy unions, capitalist unions; and the state, acting as an intermediary, welding these great activities of all sorts … won’t this energy ring become a symbol of that unity?⁸⁸

Urrutia’s corporate views reveal the conservative ideology shared by some of his fellow engineers. In this vein, their socio-technical and energy imaginaries offered an opportunistic narrative – as well as a technopolitical strategy – to sublimate the many conflicts of the Restoration (i.e. class struggle, unemployment, and lack of democracy) without formulating them in terms of a conflict, and by focusing merely on techno-managerial solutions, hence avoiding deep political reform.⁸⁹ The same harmonic societal visions were fostered by those engineers discussing the projects for a national grid with King Alfonso the XIIIth in 1921:

setting the grid would benefit all social classes since the enormous diffusion of electricity will motivate its widespread use, benefiting both large and small industries, and also both the landowner and the modest worker, … ⁹⁰

Despite Urrutia’s prestige in Spain’s electro-technical milieu, other engineers proposed alternative electrification schemes which encapsulated the same hopes for social reform although in opposite directions. In March 1919, one article titled ‘Using Hydropower in Spain’ replied to Urrutia’s conference at the ICAI criticizing his biased views as coming from a ‘capitalist’ and ‘great industrialist’. Contrary to Urrutia, the author (whose name did not appear in the journal) contended that a centralized energy provision was detrimental for small producers and went on to support a kind of ‘industrial communism’ that foresaw an alternative configuration of the electrical sector relying on decentralized local producers:

As long as a country does not have small-scale industry, agriculture and welfare relying on those below, Mr. Urrutia, the country will not be industrial, nor agricultural, nor will it live in peace. … No. The social problem has no solution in the patronage of the capital, much less in favouring big business, but in the creation and promotion of small industries, and in the communism - or the tendency towards communism - of the already existing large ones.⁹¹

Gervasio de Artiñano (1873–1938), another Basque industrial engineer and MP as Catholic candidate in 1918–1919, endorsed the same decentralized views. In an article issued in April 1921, he also emphasized the social implications of that scheme as it would prevent ‘the slightest danger of monopoly or exploitation by large companies’ through a ‘common, popular, and truly national supply’ benefiting in particular ‘small industries and crafts’.⁹² His views, however, favoured a much more conservative agenda, given his closeness to Catholic agrarian unions and conservative circles. As such, hydroelectricity was seen as an ally in triggering an industrialization based on rural industries, hence reviving home-based work and craftsmanship as the vectors upon which society was to be organized. Electrical power has the potential to counteract the inexorable accumulation of energy and machines in large units, as well as its harmful repercussions: increased labour discontent and radicalized worker’s unions.⁹³

If alternative views regarding the scope of the grid engaged discussions on how to amalgamate an increasingly fragmented society, engineers also addressed other important nationalistic topics while considering the geographical layout of the grid. Hughes’ analysis on the growth of electrical systems tends to suggest the deterministic, technocratic-driven idea of the need for a highly centralized management for the system to operate as a ‘coherent whole’. The Spanish case illustrates how the implementation of a centralized system is historically contingent rather than unavoidable. Naturally, choosing a centralized model had strong political implications – including particular conceptualisations of the nation – besides strictly technological choices. Spanish economic historians have indeed pointed out how ‘extra economic’ factors such as politically-driven decisions – e.g. national unification or the influence of local networks of political influence – mattered in the historical unfolding of large-scale infrastructures, often times jeopardizing their advertised role in increasing productivity and economic growth.⁹⁴

In any event, difficulties about how to organize the complex regional political structures of Spain existed long before the national grid was discussed, for example, when the Spanish Electricity Industry Association (SEIA) was creating its institutional framework in 1903. Its president, Santiago Corella, supported a centralist strategy as he imagined the nation as a large electrical network emerging from Madrid:

Madrid will therefore be our central power-station or energy-receiving station … regional associations will be transformer stations, from where through large feeders and power lines energy will be taken to the production or consumption centres.⁹⁵

In that context, proposing an over-centralized electrification scheme had obvious political implications. For example, the 1919 draft of the report of the Permanent Electrical Committee envisioned a system reliant on a peripheral line with several derivations to supply each region. As Figure 1 shows, despite considering peripheral subsystems, all power lines were nevertheless headed to Madrid. Secondary power lines would also derive from Madrid to connect second rank coal and consumer areas.⁹⁶

Figure 1. The 1919 draft of a national grid for Spain. Image credit: Digital Periodical and Newspaper Library. National Library of Spain. La Energía Eléctrica, no. 8, 25-04-1919, 95: http://hemerotecadigital.Bne.es/issue.Vm?id=0005255435&search=&lang=en.

By contrast, Pérez del Pulgar’s draft (as proposed to the Congress of Spanish Engineering in July 1920) was more organic and adapted to Spain’s river basins with a view to store ‘in a parallel line to them all their energy’ (see Figure 2). It also followed the layout of the main railways, thus facilitating their eventual electrification and intended not to stray too far from the production and consumption centres. In this case, the centralized model was not obvious.⁹⁷

Figure 2. Perez del Pulgar’s national grid project (1920). Image credit: Digital Periodical and Newspaper Library. National Library of Spain. La Energía Eléctrica, no. 7, 10-04-1921, 75: http://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/issue.vm?id=0005258211&search=&lang=en.

Finally, the third and last project (proposed in 1928 by the Society of Electrical Assemblies during the late Primo de Rivera Dictatorship) envisaged a grid emanating from local and regional subsystems, interconnecting power plants within regions. The ensuing national network would be based on those emerging regional subsystems – the Andalusian, Levant, Catalan, Galician, Cantabrian, and Central – each of them operating autonomously with the decisive intervention of the state to connect them. As shown in the Figures 3, 4 and 5, this layout would result in a large crown (not peripheral but mid-range, i.e. located between the centre and the periphery) that, in any case, would converge in Madrid.

Figure 3. Sociedad Española de Montajes Industriales’ (Spanish Association of Industrial Assembly) project for a national grid (1923). Image credit: National Library of Spain. DL/2541543. Sociedad Española de Montajes Industriales. Extracto del proyecto para la red eléctrica nacional de España (Extract from the project of a national electrical grid for Spain). Madrid: Nuevas Gráficas, 1928, 17. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 4. Sociedad Española de Montajes Industriales’ (Spanish Association of Industrial Assembly) project for a national grid (1923). Image credit: National Library of Spain. DL/2541543. Sociedad Española de Montajes Industriales. Extracto del proyecto para la red eléctrica nacional de España (Extract from the project of a national electrical grid for Spain). Madrid: Nuevas Gráficas, 1928, 17. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 5. Sociedad Española de Montajes Industriales’ (Spanish Association of Industrial Assembly) project for a national grid (1923). Image credit: National Library of Spain. DL/2541543. Sociedad Española de Montajes Industriales. Extracto del proyecto para la red eléctrica nacional de España (Extract from the project of a national electrical grid for Spain). Madrid: Nuevas Gráficas, 1928. Reproduced with permission.

With these ideas in mind, some engineers were legitimizing a certain political view of nationhood with the grid embodying notions of a centralized nation with a strong state able to undertake the country’s industrialization, thereby integrating different regions and national resources under the central management of Madrid. These ideas were in line with broader initiatives by the political elites of the Restoration to renationalize the nation from the top down, especially in the wake of the ‘Disaster’.⁹⁸ The dynamics of Spain‘s electrification would demonstrate the greater influence of regional subsystems and the complexities of an electrical network emerging from the many Spanish industrial zones rather than one deriving from Madrid. In fact, other engineers, particularly those with regional attachments, were more inclined to decentralization.⁹⁹ Given the variety of industrial and technological cultures present in the nation as well as the wide range of social and political actors, this reality made sense owing to the cultural relevance and diversity of the various Spanish regions. Furthermore, certain cases from this period provided proof of the impact of electrical infrastructures on regional and subnational developments.¹⁰⁰

A centralized grid for Spain was certainly never attained; however, some partial interconnections did capture other socio-technical aspirations, particularly those seeking to integrate not merely regions but also favouring cross-border and transnational exchanges. In a conference in February 1927, engineer Gervasio de Artiñano speculated about the type of technological and economic cooperation with Portugal that electrifying Spain would entail, particularly when discussing the potentialities of the Duero basin.¹⁰¹ In 1926, a Spanish law had indeed addressed the co-management of the so called ‘international section’ of that river along the Spanish-Portuguese border ensuring its exploitation by both countries. The law was the result of almost 20 years of debates and negotiations with engineers particularly committed to developing Luso-Spanish cooperation. Consequently, engineers such as Enrique Pereira celebrated in 1928 this accomplishment as an example of Spain’s regeneration since the vast amount of energy to be produced would be capable of boosting the electrification of both nations:

The powerful drive of your waters [the Duero River], acting on the turbines, will buzz on the magnetic field of the dynamos, and the electrical fluid will flow from their terminals with those fantastic voltages where the amp would already represent more than 100 HP. … And there will be light in the villages, heat in our houses, drive in vehicles, power in industries, activity in the electrochemistry and another one hundred factories, more and more profitable. This is electricity, wonder of wonders, that will sing to carry to the most remote continents, through ethereal vibrations, all the musical inflections of our splendid Spanish language.¹⁰²

Around those years, Spanish technical press was enthusiastically covering the laying across Europe of the first transnational networks of the post-war era.¹⁰³ However, the cooperation with Portugal had deeper implications as it updated old political utopias, namely the nineteenth-century ‘Iberian Federalist’ dream which had been argued for as a solution to remedy both Portugal and Spain’s alleged backwardness.¹⁰⁴

Grid power supply offered one last example of how the national community was to be rethought through electrical infrastructures, in this case, via the plausible electrification of Spanish railroads. By the time the promise of a regular energy supply through the grid was publicly debated, another technopolitical project captivated the imagination of some engineers: the Ibero-Afro-American electric railroad (IAA). Although its feasibility had been previously addressed, debates around the grid put it again on the spotlight, particularly in early 1919.¹⁰⁵ Whilst discussing the IAA, engineers used electrical infrastructures once again to address divergent visualizations of nationhood that included disputed notions on how to interconnect Spanish regions but also how to reach Europe and Northern Africa (see Figure 6). In this regard, some engineers urged the application of the international gauge to link Spain’s railroads with the rest of the continent and surpass the limitations of the Iberian track.¹⁰⁶ This technical issue, however, resonated with further ‘regenerationist’ worries about Spain being a country that had been isolated for too long from the general movement of ideas in Europe, partially due to geographical obstacles.

Figure 6. Project of an electric railroad to connect Northern Africa and the strait of Gibraltar with the Spanish northern border and Europe. Image credit: National Library of Spain. VC/640/30(1). Gayoso y Sevilla, Francisco de Borja, Marquis of Camarasa. Comunicaciones y rápidos transportes terrestres entre la frontera norte de españa y el estrecho de Gibraltar (Convenience of the Communication and Rapid Land Transports between the Northern Border of Spain and the Strait of Gibraltar). Madrid, 1919, 30. Reproduced with permission.

Before and after the ‘Disaster’, the notion of ‘Europe’ was employed as a symbolic resource to overcome national backwardness; naturally discussions over Spanish identity included passionate disputes concerning ‘European’ ideas and values that included science and technology. Many political groups and authors (including the intellectuals of the ’98 Generation) developed a somewhat simplistic opposition between those who considered that Spain should rely on its national resources and traditions to overcome its problems, and those who supported a ‘Europeanized’ Spain. In this regard, the IAA could contribute to that necessary ‘Europeanization’. However, some engineers were also aware that the IAA could favour other agendas, including promoting an active involvement in Northern Africa by joining Spain’s Western Sahara possessions with the Moroccan Protectorate via the colony of Ifni.¹⁰⁷ In defining a plausible ‘neo-imperial’ identity for post 1898 Spain, the IAA project included plans to connect an eventual Spanish Africa with the Americas through sea planes flying from Dakar to Pernambuco (Brazil) with the crucial support of wireless telegraphy and several signal ships. Experts considered that the journey from Western African colonies to Brazil could be then achieved in less than 16 hours, echoing Nilo Maria Fabra’s late nineteenth-century techno-utopias.

Nonetheless, the IAA elicited strong criticisms, as in the 1919 brochure authored by the Marquis of Camarasa, Comunicaciones y rápidos transportes terrestres entre la frontera norte de España y el estrecho de Gibraltar (Communication and Rapid Land Transports between the Northern Border of Spain and the Strait of Gibraltar). There, Camarasa explained the ‘negative consequences’ of a project motivated by external pressures and ‘hidden interests’ that may result in the imposition of the ‘French track’. For him, the Iberian gauge was a symbol of national independence and sovereignty, hence essential for Spanish (and Portuguese) security. Those heated exchanges would lead to the cancellation of the project, although the IAA would show once again the contentious ways of (re)thinking national identity through electrical infrastructures. In any case, engineers’ practices could not be extricated from the efforts to overcome political, social, and cultural challenges, even through an infrastructure project so bold that would have amazed the late sci-fi author Nilo María Fabra.

Conclusions

Electricity in early twentieth-century Spain was used as a material and cultural resource to address perceptions of national (and imperial) decadence, social unrest, and the eventual reconfiguration of political power amid a contested nation-building process after the 1898 defeat. The variety of socio-technical (and energy) imaginaries produced by a number of national engineers sought to restore Spanish splendor and galvanize a traumatized nation to a new vitality while triggering ideologies of large-scale modernization, strengthening engineering practices, increase their prestige and status while refashioning notions of Spanishness. Technical journals, as the one analyzed in this article, played a fundamental role in ontologically producing ‘electrification’ as part of a narrative of technological nationalism that included notions of economic and, crucially, political independence and self-sufficiency in tune with an international turn to economic nationalism in early twentieth century. This example may prompt historians of electrification to re-interpret conventional technocratic sources reflecting the perspectives of actors at the core of electrical system-making: engineers and utility managers.

Furthermore, there are several takeaways from the Spanish case that may be of interest to historians of technology and energy. First of all, ideas involving energy and national development in Spain were not imposed by a narrow swath of experts but rather tested and negotiated with different engineering communities and actors putting forward several conceptualizations of nationhood. If many social and political actors saw power networks as potential unifying forces, in both political and economic terms, electricity also potentially facilitated alternative decentralized futures. Hence, by showing the different frameworks through which electricity was comprehended, the Spanish case can helpfully explain the contested nature of technological change, electrification and, by extension, of energy transitions.

Secondly, the creation of different meanings of power supply in Spain was fostered at the intersection of the materiality of electricity, transnational understandings of energy as liable to notions of unlimited growth, regional trajectories of nationalism and perceptions of national decline. Consequently, understanding the multifaceted histories of technology and energies implies examining their meanings as being situated in the societies, cultural, and historical processes within which they emerged. Historians therefore need to pay attention to both social and material infrastructures and to questions of meanings and evolving national, communal, and individual identity (or identities) alongside engineering concepts and policy decisions.

Finally, and related to the previous idea, histories of energies and technologies must be contextualised within larger frameworks of historical change, particularly in moments of crisis – assumed or real. Recent studies have rightly pointed out how moments of crisis can encourage the promotion of new energy systems by articulating notions of a desirable future.¹⁰⁸ These views of a promising future through emergent energy regimes were (and are) usually grounded on specific anxieties and historically situated concerns. In Spain, perceptions of loss of political power, nationalism, and resource scarcity – particularly coal and its incapacity to restore Spain’s former splendour — were powerful drivers in shaping (hydro)electrical imaginaries.

Amid the current global energy crisis, some scholars are prompting us to write political histories of energy as a way of ‘denaturalising’ our current energy systems.¹⁰⁹ This task includes offering critical insights into the specific actors, institutions, decisions, and processes that shaped trajectories of energy consumption and production in the past and their influence on current energy practices. The Spanish example may contribute to these debates by offering a comprehensive account of how electrification can evolve in a process adapting to localized socio-cultural needs and political concerns. Far beyond ‘triumphalist’ and ‘modernist’ teleological narratives of progress and efficiency, the Spanish case shows how technological and energy change should be understood as a contentious and often non-consensual political, economic, social, and cultural process involving not only experts, innovators, and institutions, but also a diverse range of political agendas and social demands.

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.

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].

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.”