Franco's Famine: Malnutrition, Disease and Starvation in Post-Civil War Spain

At least 200,000 people died from hunger or malnutrition-related diseases in Spain during the 1940s. This book provides a political explanation for the famine and brings together a broad range of academics based in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia to achieve this. Topics include the political causes of the famine, the physical and social consequences, the ways Spaniards tried to survive, the regime's reluctance to accept international relief, the politics of cooking at a time of famine, and the memory of the famine. The volume challenges the silence and misrepresentation that still surround the famine. It reveals the reality of how people perished in Spain because the Francoist authorities instituted a policy of food self-sufficiency (or autarky): a system of price regulation which placed restrictions on transport as well as food sales. The contributors trace the massive decline in food production which followed, the hoarding which took place on an enormous scale and the vast and deeply iniquitous black market that subsequently flourished at a time when salaries plunged to 50% below their levels in 1936: all contributing factors in the large-scale atrocity explored fully here for the first time.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Famine not Hunger? Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and Peter Anderson Part I. Famine and Malnutrition in Spain: Political and Socio-Economic Conditions 1. The Famine that 'Never Existed: Causes of the Spanish Famine, Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco 2. Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism: Hunger Seen through the Lens of Biophysics, Manuel González Molina, David Soto, Juan Infante and Antonio Herrera 3. Tracing the Physical Consequences of Famine and Malnutrition in Franco's Spain, José Miguel Martínez Carrión and Javier Puche Gil Part II. Famine and Poverty and Daily Life 4. Iniquitous Famine: Marginalized Mothers and Children, Peter Anderson 5. When There Was Nothing. An Ethnography of the Years of Hunger in Post-War Extremadura: memory and Representation of Scarcity, David Conde Caballero, Lorenzo Mariano Juárez and Julián López García 6. 'Pícaros de posguerra'. Turning to Crime to Survive Famine and Malnutrition in Early Francoism (1939-1952), Gloria Román Ruiz Part III. International Responses 7. 'Starving Spain'. International Humanitarian Responses to Spain's Hunger Crisis, David Brydan Part IV. The Politics of Cooking 8. The Production of Autarkic Subjectivities: Food Discourse in Franco's Spain (1939-1959), Lara Anderson 9. A Recipe for Rationing: Women, Cooking and Scarcity During the Early-Franco Dictatorship, 1939-1947, Suzanne Dunai Part V. Memories of Malnutrition and Famine 10. Remembering the Spanish Famine: Official Discourse and the Popular Memory of Hunger during Francoism, Claudio Hernández Burgos and Gloria Román Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco is Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Granada, Spain. He is the co-editor, along with Peter Anderson, of Mass Killings and Violence in Spain, 1936-1952: Grappling with the Past (2014). Peter Anderson is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century European History at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Friend or Foe? Occupation, Collaboration and Selective Violence in the Spanish Civil War (2016) and The Francoist Military Trials: Terror and Complicity, 1939-1945 (2009). He is also the co-editor, along with Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, of Mass Killings and Violence in Spain, 1936-1952: Grappling with the Past as well as being co-editor of the journal, European History Quarterly.

Review :
This rich and varied collection of articles ... offers a wide-ranging and coherent introduction to the familiar topic of the “years of hunger,” reframed as “Franco's famine.” As such, it continues along the salutary path of integrating Spanish historiography into comparative debates and conversations. Peter Anderson and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco are two of the most original historians of the vicious repression that followed Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War. That repression saw tens of thousands of executions and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed in prisons. The team assembled by Professors Anderson and Del Arco Blanco demonstrate how, in addition, incompetent agrarian policies, food distribution dependent on the black market and the sheer malevolence of the regime, saw many hundreds of lives were destroyed by malnutrition. This innovative volume is an exciting contribution to the historiography of post-Civil War Spain.