The racial alloy: The science, politics and culture of race in Spain, 1875--1923

This dissertation examines the development of racial thought in Spain between the period 1875 and 1923. Paying close attention to the forms in which racial thought was defined in the nascent discipline of Spanish anthropology and then applied in social policy, this dissertation explores a relatively unstudied topic in Spanish history, despite the proliferation of the subject in other European contexts. The shifting and complex nature of Spanish political life in this period also provides the backdrop for this study. Primarily interested in uncovering a topic usually dismissed or rejected by Spanish historians, this dissertation demonstrates that not only did racial thought exist within the Spanish scientific and political milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also that notions of racial identity pervaded a variety of discussions of Spanish social and cultural thought as well. First attempting to define the various racial concepts as they developed within the disciplinary development of anthropology, this dissertation then discusses how these ideas were used in the applied science of Spanish criminology. The final chapter explores how the unique Spanish concept of race was applied by one Spanish politician, first trained as an anthropologist, to repatriate Sephardic Jews, in a project defined in scientific terms of regenerating moribund and degenerate Spain. This dissertation concludes that not only did ideas about race exist in Spain, but that race itself was a prismatic category through which a variety of often conflicting political groups expressed their diverse views of Spain and Spanish social problems. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that the fractious political differences of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain were rooted in a far more unified pool of political ideas dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.