Books

  At the end of the eighteenth century Spain remained one of the world's most powerful empires. Thanks to a period of enlightened absolutism, Portugal, too, was prosperous. But by 1808, all this had changed. Portugal was under occupation and, ravaged by famine, disease, economic problems and political instability, Spain had undergone and extraordinary implosion. Worse was to come: for the next six years, the Iberian peninsula, for three centuries a byword for religious and military aggression, became itself the helpless victim of others, suffering perhaps over a million deaths while troops from all over Europe tore it to pieces. Charles Esdaile's new history of the Peninsular War makes it clear that, in part because of the emergence of the phenomenon of guerrilla warfare, the war was an Iberian tragedy. Spain was ruined and endowed with a poisonous legacy that ultimately produced the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939. Portugal suffered unparalleled disaster, with casualties that h...