Historia contemporánea (Jun 2020)
Towards «Hispanidad» via London. The Influence of Ramiro de Maeztu's British Period in the Creation of a Pan-Hispanic Project (1905 – 1934)
Abstract
In his influential essay Defensa de la Hispanidad (1934), Ramiro de Maeztu vindicated the Spanish colonization of America and argued that the resulting shared culture of the Spanish-speaking nations should be the basis for political collaboration. Despite the common assumption that Maeztu developed these ideas in 1928-30, when he was Spanish ambassador to Argentina, his journalistic output shows that many of them were developed by 1911-12, when he was working as a foreign correspondent in the United Kingdom. This points to the importance of Edwardian London in the genesis of Maeztu's pan-Hispanism. On the one hand, it allowed him to befriend Latin American intellectuals such as the collaborators of the journal Hispania; on the other, it exposed him to British debates about their own Empire. The «Hispanidad» thus appears as part of a larger revision of the history of European colonization and the future of old colonial projects.
