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

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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 regimes 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.

Reviews

Peter Anderson and Miguel ngel del Arco Blanco are two of the most original historians of the vicious repression that followed Francos 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. * Paul Preston, School Professor for the Department of International History, LSE, UK *

Author Bio

Miguel ngel 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 ngel 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.