Electricity, national identity and regeneration in Spain around 1900

ABSTRACT

This article analyses how electricity and electrical technologies were used to generate a whole series of narratives about national regeneration in a context of national (and imperial) decline. It will follow the debates that the advent of the “electrical era” triggered among a group of Spanish engineers that in 1902 published the book La ciencia y la industria eléctrica en España al subir al trono S.M. el Rey Don Alfonso XIII. The publication acted as a memorandum addressed to the young monarch aimed at encouraging the promising applications of electricity in Spain. As members of an international community, engineers embraced the alleged universal promises of electricity but adapted them to Spain’s local conditions. Accordingly, through the pages of the book they used technologies of electrification and electricity as cultural resources to refashion national identity and establish the foundations of a new modernity. By analysing how Spanish engineers conceived the relationship between energy and the future of the nation, this article aims at enriching the historiography of Spanish nationalisms through the lenses of the history of technology (particularly, histories of techno-nationalism) and cultural histories of electricity and energies.

KEYWORDS:

• History of Technology
• Electricity
• Spain
• Nation building
• Restoration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Historians Marx (1964) and David Nye (1994, 1997) analysed the role of technology in shaping US national narrative, opposing it to the foundational myths of the European countries.

2. La Ciencia y la industria eléctrica en España al subir al trono S.M. el Rey Don Alfonso XIII. Madrid: La Energía Eléctrica, 1902.

3. For example, historian Álvarez Junco has stressed the incapacity of Spanish Monarchy to fulfil any of the tasks that characterized modern nation-states in nineteenth century due to its economic penuries. These included the creation of a powerful public sector capable of financing infrastructures (Álvarez Junco 1998, 441). Darina Martykánová and Juan Pan-Montojo remind us that, notwithstanding the scarce achievements, public works wielded huge symbolic power, as they came to embody one of the main objectives of the providential action of the new liberal state (Martykánová and Pan-Montojo 2021, 79).

4. Techno-nationalism in Spain also included subnational developments. See Valentines-Álvarez (2018) or Anduaga Egaña (2011a).

5. However, electricity and electrification encompassed variegated imaginaries, from the rhetoric of modernization and industrialism to the romantic and the occult. See Vermeir (2016) and Morus (1998). It could be argued that the abstract nature of electricity in its natural form allowed for many culturally constructed associations. However, other energy sources contained multiple imaginaries and ideas about desirable futures, a phenomenon that included fossil fuels such as coal. See Seow (2014, 13–14).

6. Ideas on electricity and regeneration also moved across national borders, pertaining to broader cultural concerns on national decadence. On the role of electrotherapy in Victorian Britain, see Stark (2020, 106–137).

7. An important part of the “regenerationists” was nevertheless primarily concerned with the weakening of Spain’s geopolitical position; their proposals sought decisive actions from above under the leadership of a new, redefined political elite capable of integrating the emerging sectors of (bourgeois) society. See Juliá (1998) and Suárez Cortina (1999).

8. This way of looking at public works – in particular, hydraulic infrastructures – was not new and stemmed from the tradition of Enlightenment reformism. See Martykánová and Pan-Montojo (2020, 64).

9. An approach to the readers of these journals, or the Spanish “scientific middle class,” in Glick (2014 [1988], 188–238).

10. The professional distribution of the authors is as follows: military engineer/army personal (16), mining engineers (3), industrial engineers (2), road engineers (1), forestry engineers (1), electrical engineers (1), telegraph personal (2), scientists (4), physicians (1), unknown (2).

11. For example, the military engineer and brigadier Eduardo Gallego fought in the campaigns of Mindanao, Luzón and Cavite, in the Philippines. The engineer and artillery commander Severo Gómez Núñez (1859–1939) was member of the Havana Defence Board and the military engineer and commander Julio Cervera campaigned in Puerto Rico, resisting American troops at the Battle of Guamaní (August 1898).

12. Mateo García de los Reyes (1872–1936) will end up being Marine Minister during the Civil Directorate whereas captain Severo Gómez Núñez will have a seat on the National Council of Fuels.

13. Cervera ran as a candidate for the Parliament in 1891, 1893 and 1908, obtaining a seat for the Republican Radical Party.

14. Praising the Jewish and Arab scientific legacy was nothing entirely new in early twentieth century debates on the Spanish science. However, pointing to past cultures and religions in an attempt to rise alternative political and nationalizing claims was important, especially given the prevailing narrative of unity and homogenization around which the national epic was built and that repeatedly neglected cultural, ethnic or religious diversity. See Feros (2017).

15. Historian Agustí Nieto-Galán (1999) has argued that the distorted views arising from the “polémica” have prevented an adequate assessment of the real achievements of Spanish science. These included, for example, the development of astronomy, mathematics, shipping, artillery, medicine or botany during the reign of Philip II, the undertakes during the beginnings of the Bourbon dynasty, or other endeavours during the years of progressist and liberal-conservative (moderado) governments during the reign of Isabel II.

16. As Darina Martykánová (2017, 29–39) points out, praising cautiousness, pragmatism and the legitimate pursuit of material interests was a rhetorical strategy aimed at redefining what it meant to be an elite man while giving greater prestige to technical knowledge and legitimizing engineers’ aspirations.

17. Several works convincingly prove that the “regenerationist” discourse framed the post-1898 crisis as a problem of decaying virility. See Cleminson and Vázquez (2011), and, above all, Aresti (2014). The role of gender in the construction of the public image and aspirations of Spanish engineers during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, a period in which the profession was being defined, has also been addressed in Martykánová and Núñez-García (2020).

18. I have borrowed the notion of energy-masculinities from Dagget’s (2018) petro-masculinity. Through the concept of petro-masculinity Dagget emphasizes the gendered experience of energy systems and their role in constructing cultural identities and political subjectivities. Specifically, Dagget suggests that masculine identity – and the patriarchal orders that it supports – is important for understanding energy cultures, including patterns of consumption.

19. On feminine representations of electricity see, Wosk (2001, chapter 3).

20. The chapter measured the years left for England to completely exhaust its coal reserves by calculating the nation’s consumption rates. Alarmingly, England only had 250 years left (La ciencia y la industria eléctrica 45).

21. The Aragonese politician Joaquín Costa (1846–1911) articulated a project for the regeneration of the country based on engineering skills, technology, and, most importantly, collective will. Costa’s “hydraulic regenerationism” envisioned national development through the accelerated intensification of agriculture through a vast programme of public works, including dams and irrigation canals. Historians such as Ortí (1996), however, have defined this techno-utopia as a “retro-progressive” reformism; a fundamental agrarian – even anti-industrialist – developmental scheme that tried to avoid the social conflicts of widespread industrialization.

22. Ortega followed the 1901 Statistics, the first to be issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, Trade and Public Works, that showed annual increases in energy production of 7,317 kW on average between 1893–1901.

23. Spain was indeed hyper-dependent from external supply companies since the very beginning. Foreign electric equipment companies – and the financial groups behind them – were willing to ensure and expand the market for their products so that they would create several power plants. A case in point was AEG, which initiated it supply to the capital via its own company – the Madrid General Electricity Co.—along with other 34 small power plants throughout the country. The strategies of transnational electro-technical conglomerates in Spain in Hertner (1986).

24. Paradoxically, the only project for an Electrical Engineering School was to be carried out in Cuba in the 1890s. In addition, the journal La Energía Eléctrica would campaign for the creation of electrical engineering as an official degree in the first decade of the twentieth century.

25. One of the best centres for research on electricity and magnetism was the meteorological observatory of Manila, in the Philippines, run by the Jesuits and lost after 1898.