- Política, economia i guerra [Politics, economics and war]
- La ciutat del Born. Barcelona 1700 Collection
- Albert Garcia Espuche (director)
- Barcelona City Council. Museu d’Història de la Ciutat
- Barcelona, 2012
- 286 pages
The Política, economia i guerra (2012) volume of the Barcelona 1700 collection includes articles by Albert Garcia Espuche, Joaquim Albareda, Eduard Puig, Eduard Martí, Rosa M. Alabrús, Agustí Alcoberro, Neus Ballbé, Francesc Miralpeix, and Miquel Gea, Laia Santanach and Juan Álvaro González. The last three writers collectively penned an article dedicated to “La reconstrucció de la Ciutadella” [The reconstruction of the Ciutadella], in which they explain not only the detailed planimetry used by the architect Joris Prosper van Verboom to plan the Ciutadella according to Vauvan’s model, but also their own computerised 3D reconstruction of the Ciutadella, which is now on show in El Born, as if it were a 1/500 scale model.
While the volumes of the Barcelona 1700 collection can be framed within micro-history and draw basically from Barcelona’s magnificent notarial archives, this volume, on the other hand, focuses more on pre-war power structures and the social and political consequences of defeat. Any historian will immediately realise that the volume contains the interpretation of Joaquim Albareda, who contributes two pieces: “Política, economia i guerra” [Politics, economics and war] and “Ramon de Vilana Perlas”. Long gone are the days when the word “decadence” could be used to refer to the 17th and 18th centuries, and Albareda’s studies have been pivotal in explaining the change in the interpretation model which helped to rediscover a Barcelona that was the maritime centre of the Mediterranean, capable of trading actively with the whole of Europe and tapping into the Dutch political model.
In pre-war Barcelona, the city’s local government was the expression, in the words of Albareda, of the “constant mobility of political personnel, far from being occupied by a hereditary class, as was the case with the councillors of Castilian cities”. In this Barcelona, with a dynamic patrician structure, and a Catalonia very closely linked to its own constitutions, a distinct self-awareness was possible, one which now, from the thesis of republicanism, we identify as nationalist and integrating. The more we learn of the history of the 17th and 18th centuries from first-hand sources, the more obvious it becomes that popular Catalan nationalism has lain at the core of the country over time.
The link between the citizens of Catalonia and their freedoms has been demonstrated repeatedly, often in the form of war, over the centuries. But it is highly significant that continuity in the country’s history has to be understood in terms of civil liberties. According to Giovanni Botero, one of the most interesting political philosophers of the Baroque, Barcelona “seems to be a free republic rather than a subjugated city”. And as Albareda writes, “the absence of royalty, a veritable drawback in the political sense, was an advantage when defining a policy on its own terms, a more republican one”. A reading of the text points to a very patent consequence. In a period of absolutist and centralising tendencies, absolutist power could not tolerate a dynamic and commercial Catalonia and Barcelona –and what was even worse– that these were linked to their own political, democratic and self-centred policies. A large part of this country’s political tragedy took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was obvious that the two poles of power (traditional and mercantilistic versus imperialist and centralist) were incompatible.
The defeat of 1714 and the awful international defence of the Catalan case led Pau Ignasi Dalmases to write: “With the Catalans enslaved, and Catalonia ruined, our own misfortunes will have worked to the benefit of the Germans, English, Dutch and Portuguese”. This kind of “unlucky awareness” has accompanied Catalans over three centuries. It is simply time to put it behind us.