Historia y Política (ISSN 1575-0361, ISSN-e 1989-063X) was created in 1999. This peer reviewed journal is published biannualy and is an initative of the Department of History of Thought and of Social and Political Movements (UCM) and the Department of Social History and History of Political Thought (UNED). Since 2007, the journal is co-directed and co-edited by Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. The journal intends to tackle political phenomena throughout history from a rigorous academic perspective as well as from the interpretative renewal offered by tools like comparative analysis and the varios social sciences.
Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales
Aquellos autores/as que tengan publicaciones con esta revista, aceptan los términos siguientes: a. Los autores/as conservarán sus derechos de autor y garantizarán a la revista el derecho de primera publicación de su obra, el cuál estará simultáneamente sujeto a la Licencia de reconocimiento de Creative Commons Reconocimiento-No comercial-Sin obra derivada 4.0 España que permite a terceros compartir la obra siempre que se indique su autor y su primera publicación esta revista. b. Los autores/as podrán adoptar otros acuerdos de licencia no exclusiva de distribución de la versión de la obra publicada (p. ej.: depositarla en un archivo telemático institucional o publicarla en un volumen monográfico) siempre que se indique la publicación inicial en esta revista. Plagio y fraude científico La publicación de un trabajo que atente contra los derechos de propiedad intelectual será responsabilidad de los autores/as, que serán los que asuman los conflictos que pudieran tener lugar por razones de derechos de autor. Los conflictos más importantes pueden darse por la comisión de plagios y fraudes científicos. Se entiende por plagio: 1.Presentar el trabajo ajeno como propio. 2.Adoptar palabras o ideas de otros autores sin el debido reconocimiento. 3.No emplear las comillas u otro formato distintivo en una cita literal. 4.Dar información incorrecta sobre la verdadera fuente de una cita. 5.El parafraseo de una fuente sin mencionar la fuente. 6.El parafraseo abusivo, incluso si se menciona la fuente. Las prácticas constitutivas de fraude científico son las siguientes: 1.Fabricación, falsificación u omisión de datos y plagio. 2.Publicación duplicada. 3.Conflictos de autoría.
Rachel Maddow: Prequel: An American Fight against Fascism, Penguin Random House, 2023, 382 págs.
Pablo Alcántara: La secreta de Franco. La Brigada Político-Social durante la dictadura, Madrid, Espasa, 2022. David Ballester: Una historia de la policía española. De los grises y Conesa a los azules y Villarejo, Barcelona, Pasado y Presente. 202
Ramón Villares: Repensar Iberia. Del iberismo peninsular al horizonte europeo, Barcelona, Pasado y Presente, 2023, 245 págs.
Richard Reid: The African Revolution. A History of the Long Nineteenth Century, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2025, 410 págs.
María Antonia Peña Guerrero: Wilhelm Sundheim. Un empresario alemán en la España del siglo xix, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2023, 570 págs.
Alejandro Baer: Antisemitismo. El eterno retorno de la cuestión judía, Los Libros de la Catarata, Madrid, 2025, 176 págs.
Javier Fernández-Sebastián: Key metaphors for History: Mirrors of time, London and New York, Routledge, 2024, XII + 338 pages.
State medicine and medical bureaucracy in the Habsburg monarchy: Public health, medical police, and the governance of medical space with a focus on the bohemian lands (1740-1820)
This article examines the emergence and development of Staatsarzneikunde (state medicine) in the Habsburg monarchy between 1740 and 1820, with a specific focus on the Bohemian lands. It analyzes how public health reforms, rooted in Enlightenment rationality, were mobilized not only as tools of hygiene and disease prevention but also as part of a broader process of state-building, administrative centralization, and knowledge standardization. The creation of a hierarchical medical bureaucracy — supported by education reforms, legislation, and surveillance — reflected an evolving vision of governance that tied medical knowledge to the state’s administrative needs. Rather than adhering to traditional medical historiography that presents these developments as a linear story of institutional and scientific progress, this study draws on the insights of the sociocultural turn and the cultural history of administration. It emphasizes the negotiated and contested nature of medical reforms, shaped by local conditions, resistance, and the everyday practices of physicians, officials, and patients. Inspired by Foucauldian critiques of medicalization and biopolitics, the article further interrogates how medical knowledge became embedded in bureaucratic power structures and contributed to the formation of the modern state. By bridging the historiographical divide between older institutional narratives and newer sociohistorical approaches, the article contributes to our understanding of medicine as both a scientific and a political project. It argues that Staatsarzneikunde functioned not merely as a medical doctrine, but as an administrative vision — a “cosmology” of health governance that influenced the lived experience of public health far beyond the realm of policy ideals.
Medical professionalism and Committee of Union and Progress in the late Ottoman Empire.
This article addresses the professionalisation of medicine in the Ottoman Empire at a period when the empire was undergoing major political changes. It also examines the impact of medical education on politicisation in the late Ottoman period. Specifically, the study focuses on the influence of the worldwide rise of modern medicine in the 19th century on the modernisation paradigm that dominated the the Military School of Medicine in Istanbul. This article is based on the memoirs of the Unionists, particularly those written by physicians, as well as on sources from the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives. A new generation of medical students in the period of Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) saw the modern medicine and newly rising modern shools as instruments of social and political mobility in the service of the Ottoman state in crisis. The solution to the crisis was reflected in the concepts of modernization and progress and evolved into a clear demand for a constitutional monarchy among some doctors and medical students during the Hamidian era. The secret organisation set up by medical students to solve the problem of strengthening the empire vis à vis the Western powers and the micro-nationalisms, transformed into the most important opposition force, the Committee of Union and Progress. The committee urged the sultan to reinstate the Constitution and the Parliament, which led to the major change in the Ottoman political history, known as the 1908 (or Young Turk) Revolution. The article focuses on the nationalist aspirations of physicians and how these aspirations interacted and overlapped with their professional identity.
The psychopathology of the revolution in Spain (1880-1923): Psychiatric discourses and professional interests
The article examines how the clinical gaze of Spanish psychiatrists was shaped in relation to social problems and revolutionary movements in Spain between 1880 and 1923. To this end, it considers how professional concerns and strategies influenced their discourses and perspectives on social protest. In the first part, it explains why, until the 1910s, they analysed social problems and revolutions exclusively from an individual clinical perspective, setting aside collective psychopathological interpretations. It shows how the weakness of nineteenth-century psychiatry and the State’s lack of interest in its proposals led psychiatrists to focus their efforts at professional legitimisation on psychiatric expert reports, concentrating their attention on clinical issues and individual behaviour, particularly in the case of anarchists and regicides. In the second part, it examines how, from 1910 onwards, as a result of the country’s situation and the growing role of medicine in its regeneration, psychiatrists progressively incorporated a collective psychopathological view of revolutionary movements and their leaders, pathologising social and political protest. The sources used include publications in specialised journals, articles in the general press, lectures, psychiatric expert reports, and treatises on psychiatry and criminology.
The science in the public arena: Doctors, political representation and expert knowledge in early Spanish Liberalism
Since the Constitutional Triennium (1820-23), Spanish parliament became a key platform for physicians who strove to make their voices heard and opinions taken to account on issues such as public health policies and legislation adapted to the principles of liberalism, professional regulation, etc. Governing élites, absolutists and liberals alike, endorsed the notion of the need for governmental intervention in health-related issues, and, at the same time, the physicians fought to monopolize their authority in the field of medicine, improve their image and ensure their position as a group among the social élites of the time. To have physicians represented among the deputies in the parliament who would intervene in the new legislation was seen as a fundamental goal. In this article, we discuss the political and professional implications of this professional strategy of medical professionals between 1830s and 1860s, after the fruitful experience during the Constitutional Triennium. The progressists among the physicians put into practice several strategies to get to positions of power; this link between professional struggle and specific political movements had its advantages and gave its fruits, but also some negative implications. We analyse the results of this strategy showing that physicians’ political representation contributed to the acknowledgement of the physicians’ expert authority in the medical field and helped their social ascension to the point that they became part of the «forces vives» of their communities in the following decades.
Czechisierung: Expressions of nationalism by Czech physicians (1870s-1910s)
The article explores the nationalism of (ethnic) Czech physicians aimed at their (ethnic) German colleagues during the second half of the 19th century in the Czech Lands, which were part of the multinational Habsburg Monarchy. “National issues” were discussed by physicians and laymen in medical journals of Czech and German physicians, physicians‘ edited memoirs, as well as general press in both Czech and German languages. Besides analyzing these sources, my research also focuses on institutions that were foci of nationalist rivalries. The study thus addresses the issue of introducing the Czech language into teaching at Charles University, the efforts to divide the university into Czech and German ones, the uneven conditions after this division actually took place, the inequality concerning the appointments to managerial positions and salaried posts in hospitals and clinics, illustrated by the famous public controversy surrounding the appointment of the head of the surgical clinic in Prague, as well as the issue of the use or non-use of the Czech language in the treatment of only Czech-speaking patients.
Debating the local transition: Contested visions of democratizing municipal Government in the 1970s-1980s
This article contributes to the efforts to problematize the democratization of municipal government as a discrete phenomenon, rather than as a subset of the state-level process of transition. Not everyone agreed on the parameters of local democracy, and this article highlights the contested visions that were articulated by the major actors, including the citizen movement activists, the political parties and the federation of municipalities. It argues that there were features specific to the discourse on municipal democratization and that these constituted part of a fundamental ongoing debate in Spanish constitutional culture since the early 19th century. In broad terms, the field was divided between those who viewed municipal democratization as a secondary and subsidiary process that would be implemented from above and those who framed it as a distinct and constituent feature of a substantive democratization. Even though all parties formally rejected the old centralist model, in practice, the centralizing and municipalist traditions still shaped the terms of the debate.
Asabiyyah versus mamlakhtiyut. Factionism and sense of statehood in the political culture of the Holy Land (1920-1959)
This article analyzes the failure of Palestinian nationalism to overcome cultural, religious and political factionalism, as opposed to the success of Zionism in managing it during the period 1920-1959. To this end, he focuses on two concepts specific to the political culture of each: the asabiyyah, in the Palestinian case, and the mamlakhtiut, in the Jewish case. The first term, which is the protagonist of Ibn Khaldun’s Prolegomena, has been usually translated as «tribal solidarity» and «sectarianism» but it would also be that element which «gives body» and «vigor» to a group. Regarding the second term, it was coined by David Ben Gurion to express the transcendent scope of the State and the need to put its construction before the internal tensions motivated by political, religious and cultural differences.
The mysterious death of the UCD. The territorial factor in the configuration of the Spanish political system
This article discusses how the configuration of the political system at the beginning of democracy was deeply related to the intensification of territorial political dynamics and demands for self-government. In order to highlight the importance of this factor, too often underestimated in analyses of the political configuration, we analyse the part less apparently affected by territoriality, as is the case of the Spanish political right. Using new sources generated by UCD government ministries and state apparatuses and combining them with more traditional press sources, the aim is to shed new light on how the government dealt with the creation of the State of Autonomies and to what extent it determined the development and implosion of the governing party. Methodologically, in this sense, the work departs from analyses centred only on the internal political dynamics of the UCD elites, to carry out a multi-level analysis that places territoriality at the analytical core, also taking into account, dialectically with the development of the centrist party, the actions of the other political forces in the same field. The paper concludes that the strength of regionalism and plurinationality was key in the development and configuration of the Spanish political system.
Arrows on the chevrons: Tensions and clashes in women’s health care during the Blue Division campaign
This article aims to shed light on the tensions and conflicts of competence experienced between the Women’s Section of the FET and the JONS (SF) and the Military Health Service in relation to the nurses sent to the Russian front to support the volunteers of the Blue Division. In carrying out the study, we consulted the correspondence of Mercedes Milá Nolla, creator of the Ladies Auxiliary Corps of Military Health, the letters of some nurses sent from the hospitals at the front, as well as SF circulars and reports. From these we can see that the clashes and quarrels over the control and classification of female health personnel dated back to the Civil War, and how they were a reflection of the political conflict in the sphere of male power between the Army and a Falange ready to assert its totalitarian project by controlling any sphere of organisation. The conflict situation led to a bicephaly in women’s health that continued throughout the Russian campaign and even afterwards, with each group maintaining and administering its own spheres.
A historical overview of Plataforma per Catalonia and an analysis of its legacy in Vox and Aliança Catalana (2003-2024)
Plataforma per Catalonia (PxC) was an Islamophobic, far-right, and autonomist party founded in 2003, headquartered in Vic (Barcelona) and led by Josep Anglada. The party achieved significant municipal presence between the 2003 and 2011 local elections and attempted to expand at the state level. However, its growth was halted by an internal crisis in 2014 that led to Anglada’s expulsion and coincided with the rise of the Catalan independence process. In the 2015 local elections, PxC collapsed and eventually dissolved in 2019. This study draws on party documentation, existing research on PxC, and press sources. It argues that PxC stood at the crossroads of local, Catalan, and state politics, and that its trajectory has influenced both Vox and Aliança Catalana.
The Bloch problem and Francoism against the mirror. Global perspectives, historical comparisons and the Eastern European socialist States
This article offers a global and comparative historical perspective on Francoism, taking as its starting point Marc Bloch’s famous assertion that individuals resemble their time more than their parents. If we take this idea seriously, then comparing Francoism with the classical fascisms after 1945 loses its meaning, since those «parents» ceased to exist and we cannot know how they would have adapted to the new time. The article proposes that, from the 1950s onward, it is more useful to compare Francoism with the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe. At the same time, global history helps us understand Francoism not as an isolated regime but as one shaped by exchanges of many kinds with different states and political actors. Both the comparison with the East and the global perspective reveal a Francoism adapted to its time. However, the article questions certain enthusiastic and uncritical uses of global history: by emphasizing that Francoism was integrated into the global currents of its time, we risk overlooking the enduring features it maintained and instead imagining a natural evolution of the regime toward democracy. In this sense, appealing to time while forgetting the stubborn persistence of the parents —its fascist matrix— blurs the history of Francoism and ultimately yields an overly complacent interpretation of the regime’s development.
Miguel Díaz Sánchez: Fronteras de papel. Franquismo y migración interior en la posguerra española (1939-1957), Valencia, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valencia, 2024, 270 págs.
Alejandro Quiroga: Miguel Primo de Rivera. Dictadura, populismo y nación, Barcelona, Crítica, 2022, 416 págs.
Christopher Clark: Primavera revolucionaria. La lucha por un mundo nuevo, 1848-1849, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2024, 984 págs.
Susana Sueiro Seoane: El anarquista errante. La aventura transatlántica del tipógrafo Pedro Esteve (1865-1925), Madrid, Ambos Mundos, 2024, 702 págs.
José Luis Agudín Menéndez: El Siglo Futuro. Un diario carlista en tiempos republicanos (1931-1936), Zaragoza, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2023, 558 págs.
Nigel Townson: The Penguin history of modern Spain 1898 to the present, London, Allen Lane, 2023, 608 págs.
Anna Catharina Hofmann: Una modernidad autoritaria. El desarrollismo en la España de Franco (1956-1973), Valencia, Publicacions de la Universitat de Valencia, 2023, 481 págs.
Violence and murder of Spaniards deported to Mauthausen. A quantitative analysis
The recovery, access, collection, and addressing of the methodological complexities arising from the study of the mortality recorded at the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen have enabled historiography to produce highly precise overall assessments regarding the elevated levels of violence that occurred and were deliberately concealed within the facility. However, the Spanish case remained pending a necessary revision that would situate it within the European debate on Nazi deportation. Building on the ongoing efforts and following a meticulous analysis of the documentation salvaged from the camp; the listings compiled by the American authorities responsible for investigating war crimes in the camp after Liberation; the volumes published by the French Ministry for Veterans and War Victims; the existing and accessible lists of survivors; documentation produced during the post-war period; and the more than twenty databases from projects as ambitious as that of the Austrian Mauthausen Memorial, it has been possible to develop a new analysis of Spanish mortality in the Austrian camp based on an essentially definitive accounting. The results obtained allow for the identification of significant patterns in the murder of Spaniards, an operation concentrated between 1941 and 1942 that became particularly systematic in the Gusen subcamp and in Hartheim Castle. The final outcome of these measures was an extremely high mortality rate among this cohort, which stood at fifteen percentage points above the camp’s average.
The Guardia Civil in the mirror: The impact of the Spanish gendarmerie model on the creation of the Guarda Nacional Republicana in Portugal, 1910-1926
The organization in Portugal of the Guarda Nacional Republicana during the First Republic (1910-1926) meant a milestone in the maintenance of public order because it became the first police with presence in the whole country. Although some scholars have pointed out the influence of some European gendarmerie models on this process, few studies have addressed this topic. This article analyzes the reception, reformulation and effect of the model of the Guardia Civil, and its impact on the foundation and deployment of the GNR. On the one hand, it studies the discourses on the Spanish gendarmerie with the aim of identifying the meanings and representations associated to the idea of the Guardia Civil, as well as the reconceptualization of the Spanish gendarmerie model. On the other hand, the article examines the public policies and legal regulations that shaped the GNR, comparing its characteristics with the Guardia Civil’s features in order to verify to what extent the Portuguese governments were inspired by the Spanish force. It concludes that the Guardia Civil archetype was a major reference in the design of the GNR. The republican elites used this institutional format in a strategic and selective manner, highlighting some of its attributes and removing others. Furthermore, the existence of a number of common traits in both forces that were not present in the French Gendarmerie allows to elaborate an Iberian gendarmerie model, understood as a variation of the ideal type of gendarmerie, which has been built on the French organizational matrix.
Police practices in a transforming city, Madrid 1908-1923
Police forces during Spanish Restauración have been studied primarily in their role as a repressive force of protest and very tangentially in its development as an institution designed to guarantee the law and prosecute crime. This research incorporates approaches applied to other contemporary police systems to address two questions: the extent to which police modernization occurred in Spain between 1908 and 1923 to meet the challenges of the new urban life and how to characterize the Restauración as a regime of rights and liberties in the light of everyday police practices. The case study chosen is the city of Madrid and the primary sources obtained from the court records including police reports, affidavits, and other police, that provides us very rich information on police action. The analysis is divided into three sections. First, the study of the different actors involved in the maintenance of order in the streets, which shows the dependence of the police on other auxiliary figures such as doormen, janitors, street night watchmen. Second, the introduction of new identification technologies following a increasingly interest in exercising control over the identity of citizens. Thirdly, the implementation of crime prevention strategies by judges and security forces based on an excessive use of imprisonment and arrests, mostly executed upon popular classes.
«Modern sovereigns». Alberto Aguilera’s Police Regulation for the Concierges of Madrid (1898)
In 1898, Alberto Aguilera, in his capacity as Civil Governor, passed the Police Regulation for the Concierges of Madrid. The main objective of its articles was to take advantage of the potential of these employees in surveillance tasks and turn them into auxiliaries of the authorities. This work draws on legislation as well as on newspaper and judicial sources to study the problematic articulation of police activity and the informal control tasks carried out by the concierges. The piece starts by looking at the context of the shortcomings of the Spanish public security structure in a context marked by rapid urbanisation as well as the centralisation and professionalisation of the state police apparatus. It goes on to analyse Aguilera’s project and pays special attention to the intersection of the public and private spheres, which is evidenced by the assignment of quasi-police tasks to private-sector workers. The article concludes with an examination of the concerns expressed by the neighbourhood about the measure —which was eventually repealed due to the opposition of owners, tenants and concierges— as an invasion of their privacy and rights. The study proves that the processes of modernising public security showed their structural weaknesses with the use of non-police auxiliaries and met with a certain degree of resistance. It also shows that, despite the failure of this initiative, similar laws were passed in the following decades and the use of concierges became ingrained in police culture and practice.