Abstract
Reviewed by: Juan Eloy Gelabert Gonzalez, University of Cantabria, Spain
This collection of essays originates from a conference held at the Spanish Embassy in London in October 2013 to commemorate the 300-year anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht. A panel of British and Spanish historians and jurists share a set of chapters about ‘The Historical Context’ (eight contributions) and ‘The Legal Context’ (four). The book includes an Appendix (‘The Treaty’) with the text in English, Spanish and Latin, plus a selected bibliography including titles published up to 2013. While the contributions by British historians outnumber the Spanish by five to three as regards the historical profile, in relation to the legal topics the Spanish outnumber the British three to one.
The book starts with an introductory essay by John Elliott, setting the Anglo-Spanish conflict within the context of fears shared by ‘the Protestant states of Europe’ about Louis XIV’s ambitions to ‘universal monarchy’. Whereas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Spain and the Dutch Republic had seemed to the English to represent the main danger to the balance of power in Europe, by this time France and Spain presented the main threat. Elliott does not avoid the domestic (Spanish) side of the war, ‘in many respects a… civil war’. This aspect of the conflict is the concern of two of the Spanish contributions (those of Professors Palao Gil and Arrieta Alberdi). The first widens the focus to embrace the initial attitude (1700–1705) of the new Bourbon King towards the foral constitution of the Spanish Monarchy, the ‘Turn’ of 1705, ‘The Occasion’ of 1707, and the political decisions eventually taken that same year; that is, the abolition of the particular political constitutions of the Kingdoms of Aragón and Valencia (fueros), followed by that of Catalonia in 1714. The author links the first two cases to changes in the composition of the ministry at Court (increasingly more afrancesado and prone to royal absolutism and centralization), and the progress of war (Bourbon victory at Almansa in May, 1707). The author devotes special attention to the Catalan case (just as authorities did at the time). While barely a month elapsed between the fall of Zaragoza and the abolition of Aragonese fueros, the same decision-taking process in relation to Catalonia took more than one year. It carried an international dimension which Aragón and Valencia lacked. Austracist representatives had signed the so-called Pact of Genoa in 1705 with the Allies, and even Louis XIV looked at the Catalan case with a political sympathy not shared by his grandson Philip. The outcome of these two attitudes was the preservation of Catalan civil law in those aspects that did not hamper the royal agenda.
While a civil war was being fought on Spanish soil, England and Scotland worked for the Union of the Crowns. In an original essay with even a pinch of counter-factual history, Professor Arrieta compares both processes, looking back as far as 1603–1604, when the composite Spanish Monarchy was being scrutinized as a potential model for the proposed Union.
As a complement to the Spanish essays describing the political situation in Madrid, Professor Hoppit’s contribution offers a vision of British court politics from 1688 to 1711 and their influence on what he labels as ‘war weariness’. He sketches the factors – political as well as financial – leading to British ‘disengagement’ from the war, an attitude he detects as early as 1707, but which accelerated from 1709 onwards, along with the increase of the tax burden to an extent capable of attracting the attention of preachers and pamphleteers. This first block of essays includes contributions on the economic aspects of the Treaty, such as that by H. Thomas on the slave trade, and Storrs on the much-debated issue of the ‘Revival of Spain’ after the war. The social aspect of the story (the Old and New Gibraltarians) deals with the re-population of the colony under the new British rule.
‘The Legal Context’ opens with a pair of complementary essays – British and Spanish – reviewing the legal status of Gibraltar from 1830 to 2013, while showing the different alternatives attempted so far by Britain, Spain and the UN to reach an ‘accommodation’ on the case. As the next contributions show, this is not an easy task since Article X of the Treaty, for instance, does not specifically draw the borders between the British and Spanish territories. The conclusion is rather disappointing, and ‘accommodation’ is thus ‘unachievable’ (sic). Article X reappears again in the last contribution where the author posits that British initiative in the Gibraltar Constitution of 2006 means an alteration of the mentioned article (since it includes a reference to ‘self-government’), and, accordingly, a violation of the third condition specified in Article X that allows Spain to ‘redeem’ the territory.
To sum up, this is a concise, well-grounded and up-to-date synthesis of a topic in international relations and law, both ancient and contemporary, which will be an indispensable work of reference for further studies on Utrecht, Gibraltar and British–Spanish relations in early modern times.