The impact on Spain of Anglo-French informal imperialism in the colonization of Morocco, 1898–1914

In the decade before the First World War, Spain failed in its attempt to establish an independent role in the fierce competition between the French, British and German Empires for influence in the Western Mediterranean. The exercise of informal power by France and Britain forced Spain’s Restoration elites to conform to British and French imperial interests in France’s colonization of Morocco. The article suggests Spain’s governing parties were unable to manage the essential mediating role for collaborating elites in informal empires, as defined by Ronald Robinson, between the demands of the imperial powers and the political pressures arising from changing social forces within the country. Spain’s dilemma was an early example of the conflict that faced many newly independent colonies later in the twentieth century: how to reconcile the growing aspirations for national self-determination in a world dominated by competing imperial powers, themselves increasingly facing internal contradictions and crises.