Un pueblo traicionado

A Betrayed People is a contemporary history of Spain written by a British historian who loves this country and who has spent fifty years studying its past. Our rich and tragic history allows many approaches; This book does not fall into paternalistic or exceptionalist interpretations, but it follows the deficiencies of the Spanish political class between the Bourbon restoration of 1874 in the figure of Alfonso XII and the beginning of the reign of his great-great-grandson Felipe VI in 2014. The result is a complete journey and balanced that inevitably underlines how the country's progress has been hampered by corruption and political incompetence, and how these two factors have repeatedly led to the collapse of social cohesion and violent repression by the authorities. A story that intertwines the themes of the influence of the Army and the Church, the popular rejection of the ruling classes, the bitter social conflict, economic backwardness and territorial tensions, and that places them in their international context. Thus we went from the despair of the crisis of 1898 to moments of optimism and progress in which social reality managed to act on political power, until we reached the current situation, of a pessimism similar to that of the late nineteenth century.