Towards «Hispanidad» via London. The Influence of Ramiro de Maeztu's British Period in the Creation of a Pan-Hispanic Project (1905 – 1934)

• Main Author: David Jiménez Torres
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: UPV/EHU Press 2020-06-01
• Series: Historia contemporánea
• Subjects: hispanidad; ramiro de maeztu; londres; hispanoamericanismo; reino unido; españa
• Online Access: https://www.ehu.eus/ojs/index.php/HC/article/view/20964

In his influential essay Defensa de la Hispanidad (1934), Ramiro de Maeztu vindicated the Spanish colonization of America and argued that the resulting shared culture of the Spanish-speaking nations should be the basis for political collaboration. Despite the common assumption that Maeztu developed these ideas in 1928-30, when he was Spanish ambassador to Argentina, his journalistic output shows that many of them were developed by 1911-12, when he was working as a foreign correspondent in the United Kingdom. This points to the importance of Edwardian London in the genesis of Maeztu's pan-Hispanism. On the one hand, it allowed him to befriend Latin American intellectuals such as the collaborators of the journal Hispania; on the other, it exposed him to British debates about their own Empire. The «Hispanidad» thus appears as part of a larger revision of the history of European colonization and the future of old colonial projects.