Spain’s Military Campaigns in Sardinia and Sicily (1717–1720) According to Jaime Miguel de Guzmán-Dávalos,Marquis of la Mina

The Colección de cuadros y planos sobre de Cerdeña y Sicilia en los anõs 1717, 1720 is an archive of military maps complementing the Memorias written by Jaime Miguel de Guzmán-Dávalos, second marquis of la Mina, who had participated in these campaigns. The Colección illustrates some of the most important events of the Italian campaigns against the Quadruple Alliance of Britain, France, Austria and the Dutch Republic (1717–1720). Comparison of the maps and other drawings with details in la Mina’s Memorias allows us to clarify his main objective in compiling the text, which was to record the operations faithfully for use in military education.     

Colonial Emulation,Competition and Opportunism: A Twentieth-Century Spanish Perspective on the British and French ‘Empire Projects’

ABSTRACT

Through the views of Francisco Franco’s major adviser on African Affairs, this paper reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the long-standing interaction between competing ‘imperial projects’ in the twentieth century. Tomás García Figueras’s (1892–1981) speeches, writings and personal archive provide a long-term and well-informed Spanish perspective on the British and French colonial systems, offering us a model to make sense of three major aspects of inter-imperial relations: emulation, competition, and opportunism. Through this insight into the dynamics of imperial interaction, and the ever-evolving dialogues and exchanges between ‘empire projects’ from around the European peninsula, this article provides some key elements to answer the long-standing question of what motivates empires to expand, adapt, or contract. It illuminates the ways in which officials engaged in the day-to-day running of European empires looked at each other, in search for examples and counter-examples, emulation or, simply, opportunities. Crucially, it illustrates how ‘empire projects’ of varying clout interacted with each other, within the limits of realpolitik but well beyond linguistic obstacles, as the multilingual material assembled in the García Figueras archive clearly attests. It also charts, among national and socio-cultural circles hitherto neglected, the evolution in thinking about colonialism and decolonisation throughout the twentieth century.