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Recent publications concerning the Spanish Civil War have shown that British policy towards Spain was governed by a fear of left wing politics, as well as class prejudice and racism towards the Spanish proletariat. This article focuses on the activities and opinions of diplomats stationed in Spain during the conflict, revealing that their reports were decisive in forging the policy of Non-Intervention. Specifically, it examines correspondence between the Barcelona Consulate and the Foreign Office which occurred during the first six months of the war. It uses Norman King, the Vice Consul in Barcelona as a case study, establishing that his reports serve as a pertinent example of Britain's malevolent neutrality

This article explores the construction of anticlerical collective identities among Spanish workers from the late nineteenth century, outlining the ways in which the daily experience of the Church generated and intensified anticlerical sentiment. From the turn of the century, political, social and cultural changes sparked by industrialization and ruralurban emigration altered the face of 'traditional' Spanish popular anticlericalism; newly politicized workers increasingly identified the Church as part of the repressive machinery of the Restoration Monarchy's political system. As workers struggled to fend off the ever-expanding central state's intrusions into their domestic space and the Church's influence over innumerable aspects of everyday life (including, crucially, its control of public spaces) they constructed their own, strongly anticlerical 'workers' public sphere' grounded in alternative forms of socialization, cultural activities, and new secular rituals.

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Indrukken van de microdynamiek van revolutionair en contrarevolutionair geweld Bewijs uit laat-koloniaal Zuidoost-Azië en Afrika vergeleken roel frakking en martin thomas Based on a comparison of decolonisation conflicts in Southeast Asia and Africa, in this contribution, Roel Frakking and Martin Thomas study the local population's experience of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence. The authors approach the microdynamics of violence based on concepts of political violence developed in the context of research into civil wars. The microdynamics of violence are studied by means of three themes.The first concerns the striking asymmetry in power relationships that typify decolonisation conflicts, dealing with various violence strategies. The second theme is the nature and composition of locally recruited paramilitary groups that were involved in much of the local violence studied here. Making a target of the local population, who were not involved in the acts of war, but whose status as 'citizens' acutely exposed them to violence, is the third theme. From these themes, the authors distil the concept of 'internal border areas'. They argue that these areas were 'grey areas', in which the power of the colonial state became fragmented. It was in precisely these areas that the state security forces and their adversaries were involved in the most violent clashes in their attempts to enforce the local population's cooperation, and hence obtain structural social control.