Spain: A History

Words that define this book: accurate, engaging, reliable, fascinating, scholarly, solid... Even the Spaniards awarded this exacting Englishman with the famed "Prince of Asturias Award" and an honorable doctorate from the University of Madrid. This book is a must read for any Iberophile!

First, you must realize that a 300-page book that covers 2500 years of history can only accomplish the briefest of surveys. This book does a solid job with this task. The text is sensibly divided into nine chapters, each covering a distinct historical period. Raymond Carr is the editor and author of one chapter. Considering that each chapter has a different author, the book has a remarkably unified feel. Carr has done a good job making sure each chapter supports the others and avoiding redundancy. There is good balance as well; most chapters touch on social, demographic, economic, and cultural trends as well as the obligatory political narrative. This gives the reader nice insights into the character of each period and helps to understand the course of events. Also, there are several high-quality pictures included, a bonus for a short survey history book. The bibliography has helped me choose other books to read. It is organized by chapter, which is helpful although some referenced books ought to have been included under more than one chapter.I do have one complaint: there is no chapter on Islamic Spain. This topic is not covered at all, except peripherally when the Moors directly impinge upon the medieval Christian kingdoms. The Moorish presence is probably the single factor that, more than any other, distinguishes Spanish history from that of other Western European countries. Islamic Spain also made a huge contribution to the development of Western civilization by serving as the avenue for the reintroduction of Aristotle's works to Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Also, most of Spain was under Islamic rule for about 500 years. These facts are all discussed from the outsider view point of the Christian kingdoms, but I feel a chapter highlighting the nature of Islamic civilization in Spain would have been a tremendous addition.Overall, however, the book quickly familiarizes the reader with the broad panorama of Spanish history in a coherent and enjoyable way. If you need such an introduction, I recommend this book.[Reviewer's background: I am a non-historian who mostly reads history in his spare time. After a fascinating trip to Spain, I decided to pick this book up as my first introduction to its history.]

Since it is written by various authors, the book is not entirely of an even quality. The earlier parts and the last chapter are the best. But it is all reasonably good. It is fairly clear cut and brief so you do not get bogged down. It has a great reading list for further adventures. It does not have a lot of nit-picking footnotes that I have to compulsively read. It does have a lot of excellent and helpful black and white illustrations. I rarely finish a history book. I finished this one.

I am shortly leaving on my third trip to Spain and, every time before I go, I try to read another history of the country. This time around it was this book, Spain: A History. Oxford University Press can usually be counted on to put out a good product and this book is no exception. It is a nice coverage of the very complex past of Spain from pre-history to the present. It is edited by Raymond Carr but the individual chapters were written by different authors. Carr himself covers only the period from 1833-1931.Ironically, it is Carr's section that I find the weakest of the book. He wanders through so many different names and governments that I became a bit lost. This is one of the main dangers about writing of Spain's recent past, I guess, since it seems that the leadership often changed minute by minute. Still, the earlier sections of the book are much more engaging.Overall, I found this book to be a good read. It is quite detailed but still rather brief. Sometimes these histories tend to get lost over a thousand pages or so. This book can be read in a reasonalbe amount of time. I was also pleased to see how the importance of regionalism in Spain is brought out. For anyone interested in getting the big picture of Spanish history, this is a book for you.

For all our extensive resources concerning specific period in Spanish history, we still lacked (believe it or not) a good, comprehensive history of Spain. This new volume, edited by award-winning historian Carr, gives a clearly-written, concise history of Spain from prehistoric times through the present day, complete with very nice black-and-white photos and color plates. The text, written by eminent historians from Carr to Henry Kamen (Philip of Spain), is detailed and engaging yet accessible to the lay reader. A great find for English-speaking students of Spanish history.