This book examines the most polemical atrocity of the Spanish civil war: The massacre of 2,500 political prisoners by Republican security forces in the villages of Paracuellos and Torrejon de Ardoz near Madrid in November/December 1936. The atrocity took place while Santiago Carrillo -- later Communist Party leader in the 1970s -- was responsible for public order. Although Carrillo played a key role in the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975, he passed away at the age of 97 in 2012 still denying any involvement in 'Paracuellos' (the generic term for the massacres). The issue of Carrillo's responsibility has been the focus of much historical research. Julius Ruiz places Paracuellos in the wider context of the 'Red Terror' in Madrid, where a minimum of 8,000 'fascists' were murdered after the failure of military rebellion in July 1936. He rejects both 'revisionist' right-wing writers such as Cesar Vidal who cite Paracuellos as evidence that the Republic committed Soviet-style genocide and left-wing historians such as Paul Preston, who in his Spanish Holocaust argues that the massacres were primarily the responsibility of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The book argues that Republican actions influenced the Soviets, not the other way round: Paracuellos intensified Stalin's fears of a 'Fifth Column' within the USSR that facilitated the Great Terror of 193738. It concludes that the perpetrators were primarily members of the Provincial Committee of Public Investigation (CPIP), a murderous all-leftist revolutionary tribunal created in August 1936, and that its work of eliminating the 'Fifth Column' (an imaginary clandestine Francoist organisation) was supported not just by Carrillo, but also by the Republican government. In Autumn 2015 the book was serialised in El Mundo, Spain's second largest selling daily, to great acclaim.

This book explores the role of cultural heritage in post-conflict reconstruction, whether as a motor for the prolongation of violence or as a resource for building reconciliation. The research was driven by two main goals: first, to understand the post-conflict reconstruction process in terms of cultural heritage, and second, to identify how this process evolves in the medium term and the impact it has on society. The Spanish Civil War (193639) and its subsequent phases of reconstruction provides the primary material for this exploration. In pursuit of the first goal, the book centres on the material practices and rhetorical strategies developed around cultural heritage in post-civil war Spain and the victorious Franco regime's reconstruction. The analysis seeks to capture a discursively complex set of practices that made up the reconstruction and in which a variety of Spanish heritage sites were claimed, rebuilt or restored and represented in various ways as signs of historical narratives, political legitimacy and group identity. The reconstruction of the town of Gernika is a particularly emblematic instance of destruction and a significant symbol within the Basque regions of Spain as well as internationally. By examining Gernika it is possible to identify some of the trends common to the reconstruction as a whole along with those aspects that pertain to its singular symbolic resonance. In order to achieve the second goal, the processes of selection, value change and exclusionary dynamics of reconstruction and the responses it elicits are examined. Exploring the possible impact of post-civil war reconstruction in the medium term is conducted in two time frames: the period of political transition that followed General Franco's death in 1975; and the period 20042008, when Rodriguez Zapatero's government undertook initiatives to 'recover the historic memory' of the war and dictatorship. Finally, the observations made of the Spanish reconstruction are analysed in terms of how they might reveal general trends in post-conflict reconstruction processes in relation to cultural heritage. These insights are pertinent to the situations in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq.

This book looks at how Muslims in Spain have changed legislation linked to religious pluralism and immigration and have fortified Spain's frail history and practice of democracy since 1975. Spanish Muslims have achieved this through active civil engagement and a persistent struggle for rights and for status as immigrants and as citizens on par with ethnic Spaniards. Muslims have interacted with Spanish popular traditions, challenged Eurocentric historical narratives, and used Spanish concepts such as convivencia (peaceful coexistence) and arraigo (rootedness) to expand the prevailing construction of belonging. The Muslim struggle for civil rights took off in earnest in Melilla--with its historic ties to the Islamic Kingdom of Fez up to 1497--between 1985 and 1988, when Muslim residents questioned nativist control of the enclave. Subsequently, from 1989 to 2001, on mainland Spain, Muslims formed independent organizations, pushed for national regularization of undocumented residents, and proposed modifications to immigration laws. A primary focus of the book is on how devout Muslims lobbied to institutionalize Islam in Spain, fought for the right to construct mosques despite heavy nativist resistance, and balanced women's rights in the Muslim community and broader secular context. The author also examines the ways that Muslims have interrogated the memory of the Moor in Spanish history and in popular festivals, such as the Festival of Moors and Christians, and how this has played out in regions with strong nationalist traditions, such as Catalonia. The book concludes with a survey of the writings of Muslim immigrants in Spanish and in Catalan, and how these works have publicized the everyday experience of migration in Spain.

This book examines the most polemical atrocity of the Spanish civil war: The massacre of 2,500 political prisoners by Republican security forces in the villages of Paracuellos and Torrejon de Ardoz near Madrid in November/December 1936. The atrocity took place while Santiago Carrillo -- later Communist Party leader in the 1970s -- was responsible for public order. Although Carrillo played a key role in the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975, he passed away at the age of 97 in 2012 still denying any involvement in 'Paracuellos' (the generic term for the massacres). The issue of Carrillo's responsibility has been the focus of much historical research. Julius Ruiz places Paracuellos in the wider context of the 'Red Terror' in Madrid, where a minimum of 8,000 'fascists' were murdered after the failure of military rebellion in July 1936. He rejects both 'revisionist' right-wing writers such as Cesar Vidal who cite Paracuellos as evidence that the Republic committed Soviet-style genocide and left-wing historians such as Paul Preston, who in his Spanish Holocaust argues that the massacres were primarily the responsibility of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The book argues that Republican actions influenced the Soviets, not the other way round: Paracuellos intensified Stalin's fears of a 'Fifth Column' within the USSR that facilitated the Great Terror of 193738. It concludes that the perpetrators were primarily members of the Provincial Committee of Public Investigation (CPIP), a murderous all-leftist revolutionary tribunal created in August 1936, and that its work of eliminating the 'Fifth Column' (an imaginary clandestine Francoist organisation) was supported not just by Carrillo, but also by the Republican government. In Autumn 2015 the book was serialised in El Mundo, Spain's second largest selling daily, to great acclaim.

Paris in the summer of 1937. A giant funeral procession wends its way from the city center eastward toward the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, accompanied by the sounds of Chopin's funeral march. The photojournalist Gerda Taro had been killed in the Spanish Civil War a few days earlier. Thousands come to pay their last respects to the emigree from Hitler's Germany. The poet Louis Aragon speaks at the graveside, young girls hold up a large portrait of the deceased. Why did the French Communist Party honor a foreigner - one who was not even a member of the Party - with a "first-class" burial? Ernest Hemingway is said to have found Gerda Taro while searching for "better Germans", the term he used to describe Germans fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Taro is today considered one of the path-breaking pioneers of photography. She captured some of the most dramatic and widely published images of the Spanish Civil War and was the first female photographer to shoot images in the midst of battle. Her willingness to work close to the fighting set new standards for war photography and ultimately cost her her life. Taro stands alongside early twentieth century war photographers like Robert Capa and David "Chim" Seymour. Her death, the first fatality during war coverage, garnered worldwide attention. She had broken new ground, as a woman and as a photographer. Despite this, Gerda Taro has largely fallen into oblivion, especially in comparison to her colleague and partner Robert Capa. Whether gender and religion played a role in this would require a separate investigation. In any case, in her study of women resisting fascism, Ingrid Strobl reaches the conclusion that a combination such as woman-Communist-Jew represented a threefold stigma, and would almost guarantee Taro's exclusion from official history, both in the East and the West. It has been almost twenty years since the first biography of Gerda Taro, written by Irme Schaber, led to Taro's rediscovery as a photographer. Since that time, the discovery of the "Mexican Suitcase", containing more than 800 of her photos, has made new research on Taro possible. In this new, fully revised biography, Irme Schaber presents groundbreaking insights regarding cameras, copyrights and the circumstances surrounding Taro's death.

Meet the inspirational woman behind the much-publicized emergency medical evacuations of wounded children from war-torn Sarajevo At the height of the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, Ellen Blackman could no longer bear the televised images of wounded children desperate for medical care. So she set off for Bosnia. There she shared the tragedies and occasional triumphs of a brave people whose world was crumbling around them while a seemingly indifferent world stood by. And despite tremendous bureaucratic and dangerous obstacles, she got the children out.

Hitler's infamous political tract was first published in 1925-26 and has been widely translated since. This edition contains a detailed introduction which analyses Hitler's background, his ideology and his ruthless understanding of political power.

It was the summer of 1993, at the height of the genocidal Serbian siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. No longer able to bear the television images of tearful wounded children desperate for medical care, a young Chicago woman decided to take action. She flew to Sarajevo determined to do whatever she could to help the children. Ellen Blackman's planned ten-day trip turned into an eight-month ordeal - and a triumph of will. Ellen shared the tragedies and occasional triumphs of a proud, brave people whose universe was crumbling around them while a seemingly indifferent world stood by. Harvest in the Snow tells of dodging bullets in Sniper Alley, smuggling relief supplies over hostile borders, and struggling just to live in the nightmare world of a nation at war with itself. And miraculously, despite tremendous obstacles, she got the children out. Ellen was the catalyst for the much-publicized emergency medical evacuations of children that you saw on television. This is her dramatic story.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) engaged an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, John Dos Passos, to name only a few. The idealism of the cause - defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war - and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia. Paralleling the outpouring of writing and art, the war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology. So many different countries participated directly or indirectly in the war that Time magazine called it the 'Little World War'; Spain served in those years as a proving ground for the devastating technologies of World War II, and for the entire 20th century.

In the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War is perhaps best remembered through the exploits of thousands of foreign volunteers from across the globe who joined the International Brigades - a force of communists, socialists and others who took their opposition to fascism to extraordinary lengths. Their passionate political commitment to Spain's cause and determination in battle placed them among the crack troops of the Republic's People's Army. Yet while much has been written about the political, social and cultural significance of the brigades and their experience in Spain, less has been said about their performance as front-line troops. It is this military history that Alexander Clifford focuses on in vivid detail in this highly illustrated new study which reassess their impact within the Republican People's Army. His account tells the story of the brigades as combat units, tracing the course of each major battle in which they fought and showing the drastic changes they underwent as the war progressed - from an untrained militia in 1936, to the tried and tested shock troops of 1937, to a shadow of their former selves by 1938 after repeated maulings and the introduction of Spanish conscripts to fill their ranks.

On May 20, 1938, a young man from the Bronx informs his parents that he is leaving for the Catskills to begin his new job as a waiter. Instead, he sails for Europe to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, the opening round in the fight against Hitler and Mussolini. The man, Dave Lipton-the author's uncle-sends letter after letter home detailing his hopes and begging for forgiveness. He never receives a reply.Decades later, Eunice Lipton stumbles upon clues for this silence, uncovering details of Dave's exhilarating political life in New York, his shuttered romantic life, and his deep friendship with another volunteer. A Distant Heartbeat tells a tale of passion and heroism, centered on a fierce competition between brothers, a packet of missing letters, and the unforeseen results of family betrayal.

Living with History focuses on a particular aspect of heritage preservation in the twentieth century: destruction and postwar reconstruction in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, and The Netherlands. This book establishes a status quaestionis for the historiography of wartime and postwar preservation, and sets these particular developments in preservation history in the context of the general evolution of architecture and urbanism. The authors investigate the specific role of conservationists and heritage institutions and administrations in the overall reconstruction and examine the part played by architects and planners in heritage preservation.

On 26 April 1937, a weekly market day, nearly sixty bombers and fighters attacked Gernika. They dropped between 31 and 46 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs on the city center. The desolation was absolute: 85 percent of the buildings in the town were totally destroyed; over 2,000 people died in an urban area of less than one square kilometer. Lying is inherent to crime. The bombing of Gernika is associated to one of the most outstanding lies of twentieth-century history. Just hours after the destruction of the Basque town, General Franco ordered to attribute authorship of the atrocity to the Reds and that remained the official truth until his death in 1975. Today no one denies that Gernika was bombed. However, the initial regime denial gave way to reductionism, namely, the attempt to minimize the scope of what took place, calling into question that it was an episode of terror bombing, questioning Francos and his generals responsibility, diminishing the magnitude of the means employed to destroy Gernika and lessening the death toll. Even today, in the view of several authors the tragedy of Gernika is little less than an overstated myth broadcasted by Picasso. This vision of the facts feeds on the dense network of falsehoods woven for forty years of dictatorship and the one only truth of El Caudillo. Xabier Irujo exposes this labyrinth of falsehoods and leads us through a genealogy of lies to their origin, metamorphosis and current expressions. Gernika was a key event of contemporary European history; its alternative facts historiography an exemplar for commentators and historians faced with disentangling contested viewpoints on current military and political conflicts, and too often war crimes and genocide that result. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies

When a failed right-wing military coup provoked civil war in Spain, in July 1936, the Spanish government made a worldwide plea for help. In Britain, Aid Spanish Committees sprang up nationwide. Nowhere was empathy more keenly felt for the working people of Spain than among the people of Glasgow, which became the hub of the Scottish Aid for Spain movement. Glasgow was also home to an enterprise which was to make a significant contribution to the Spanish Republic the Scottish Ambulance Unit (SAU). The Unit was the brainchild of a wealthy Glaswegian philanthropist, Sir Daniel Macaulay Stevenson (18511944). The Units valiant and tireless work soon earned it an excellent reputation among Republican forces and as news of its remarkable work spread, volunteers became affectionately known as Los Brujos The Wizards. However, the off-duty activities of some of the SAUs members earned it an altogether different kind of reputation, and the Unit was soon to become immersed in scandal which tarnished its good name. Donald Gallie was a member of the first SAU team to arrive in Madrid (there would be three successive expeditions). He was 24 years old when Civil War broke out. His family shared a strong sense of commitment, and this, together with Donalds love of travel and adventure, is what impelled him to volunteer for service. His skills as mechanic would prove invaluable in the aid and transport given to casualties. His Diary is a remarkable document, and its publication a significant event in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War.

"A remarkable act of personal history: brave, revelatory and unflinchingly honest" WILLIAM BOYD "There is no-one writing in English like this: engaged humanity achieving a hard-won wisdom" DAVID MILLS, The Times Lord of All the Dead is a courageous journey into Javier Cercas' family history and that of a country collapsing from a fratricidal war. The author revisits Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to research the life of Manuel Mena. This ancestor, dearly loved by Cercas' mother, died in combat at the age of nineteen during the battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest episode in Spain's history. Who was Manuel Mena? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment to the author, or a young idealist who happened to fight on the wrong side? And how should we judge him, as grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, interpreting history from our supposed omniscience and the misleading perspective of a present full of automatic answers, that fails to consider the particularities of each personal and family drama? Wartime epics, heroism and death are some of the underlying themes of this unclassifiable novel that combines road trips, personal confessions, war stories and historical scholarship, finally becoming an incomparable tribute to the author's mother and the incurable scars of an entire generation.

Patience Darton's unpublished letters and papers from 1930s Spain and 1950s China are at the heart of this new biography by Angela Jackson, together with testimony from recorded interviews and a wealth of photographs that illustrate the life of this remarkable woman. 'For us it was Heaven' tells the story of a young, upper middle-class nurse in the 1930s who becomes dramatically caught up in Spain's civil war and the passionate political issues of her times, but whose intimate writings reveal emotions and attitudes that will strike a chord with most self-aware and determined women today. While Patience nursed near the front lines in Spain, she met and fell in love with Robert, a German volunteer in the International Brigades, deeply committed to fighting fascism. Their passionate relationship coloured the rest of her long life, taking her to communist China and then, finally, back to Spain. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

With a foreword by Jon Snow. In July 1936 insurgent Spanish troops organized a military coup to oust the elected Republican government in Madrid. The rebel generals expected to force a quick, clean regime change but they failed. The botched uprising turned into a bloody civil war. Hundreds of thousands died in a bitter conflict which tore the country apart and rapidly turned into the prelude for an even greater conflict yet to com--the Second World War. The siege of Madrid was the key battle of the war. The world watched and waited for the city to surrender as General Franco's Nationalist army, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, closed in on the Spanish capital. But Madrid did not fall. Madrilenos fought tooth and nail to defend their city. Helped by volunteers from fifty other countries--the International Brigades--they held out against all the odds until the end of the conflict in 1939. Despite its central role in twentieth-century history, the siege of Madrid is an episode largely hidden from today's visitor. There is no guide to the war sites and few clues for the inquisitive traveller who wants to know more. Frontline Madrid fills that gap. This unique guide book explains what life was like in the city under siege and what happened in the battlefield dramas. The simple to follow maps and diagrams make it easy to visit the frontline sites. The vividly written descriptions bring events and people compellingly to life. The role of prominent individuals, British and American--Orwell, Hemingway, John Cornford - is explored. Off the beaten track, from the University district in the city centre to the mountains of Guadarrama less than an hour away, the remains of the war in Madrid can still be found--gun emplacements, bunkers, trenches and occasional debris. Frontline Madrid retraces the footsteps of those who lived through the conflict to take the reader on a tour in time. The usual tourist traps are left far behind to enter the gripping world of a war which shaped modern European history.

Olivia Munoz-Rojas critically examines the wartime destruction and post-war rebuilding of three prominent sites in Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. Each case highlights different dimensions of the material impact of the conflict, the practical challenges of reconstruction and the symbolic uses of the two processes by the winning side. The books reveals aspects of the Spanish Civil War and the evolution of the Franco regime from an original and fruitful angle as well as more general insights into the topic of wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction of cities. The title -- Ashes and Granite -- aims to capture, visually and texturally, on the one hand, the damage caused by the war and, on the other, the Franco regimes concept of the ideal Hispanic construction material. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection of urban and political history and theory, planning and architecture, the book draws largely on unpublished archival material. Key features of the Franco regimes rebuilding programme are considered, such as the priority given to rural reconstruction and the persistent search for a national architectural style. The case of Madrid centres on the failure of the Falanges ambitious plans for a neo-imperial capital as illustrative of the regimes gradual shift from state planning to privately driven urban development. The case of Bilbao focuses on the reconstruction of the bridges of the city to demonstrate how, occasionally, the regime managed to turn destruction and reconstruction into opportunities for successfully marking the beginning of what was perceived as a new era in Spains history. Finally, the opening of Avenida de la Catedral in Barcelona exemplifies how wartime destruction sometimes facilitated the implementation of controversial planning, acting as a catalyst for urban redevelopment. Moreover, the opening of the avenue contributed to the disclosure of the ancient Roman city-wall, allowing the regime to appropriate the ancient legacy symbolically. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

Born to fanatical religious zealots, deeply wounded by an unloving mother and a weak father whom he hated, Norman Bethune struggled throughout his life to overcome deep emotional scars. Sexually inhibited, given to outbursts of near psychopathic rage, this wounded doctor healed himself through healing others. In the mid-1930s, Bethune emerged as a renowned surgeon fighting the twin plagues of disease and fascism. When Franco launched his offensive, Bethune travelled quickly to Madrid, organised a mobile transfusion service and, often under fire, brought blood to the wounded at the front. David Lethbridge presents the complex of Bethune's unique activities and personality as they intersected with history: His engagement with medical, political, and military civil war players, and the Communist party; his cadaver blood transfusion work with the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, Hermann Muller; the profound effect that the Malaga atrocity had on him, and the role it played in his attempt to build children's cities outside war zones; his meeting with Graham Spry a high-ranking functionary in the Canadian social democratic party, the CCF; the unravelling of Bethune's romantic relationship with the Swedish journalist Kasja Rothman; the implications of his friendship with Henning Sorensen, a possibly secret member of the Communist Party of Canada, and the circumstances of the conspiracy that led to Bethune's ejection from Spain. The book concludes with Bethune's political tour throughout North America raising funds and public awareness on behalf of the Spanish Republic.

At its peak in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the so-called Spanish Reconquest transformed the societies of the Iberian Peninsula at nearly every level. Among the most vivid signs of this change were the innovative images developed by Christians to depict the subjugated Muslims and Jews within their vastly expanded kingdoms. In Art of Estrangement, Pamela Patton traces the transformation of Iberia's Jews in the visual culture of Spain's Christian-ruled kingdoms as those rulers strove to affiliate with mainstream Europe and distance themselves from an uncomfortably multicultural past.

Art of Estrangement scrutinizes a wide range of works--from luxury manuscripts and cloister sculptures to household ceramics and scribal doodles--to show how imported and local motifs were brought together to articulate and reinforce the efforts of Spain's Christian communities to renegotiate their relationships with a vibrant Jewish minority. The arsenal of stereotypes, symbols, and narratives deployed to characterize Jews and their changing social roles often paralleled those found in contemporaneous literature and folklore; they ranged from such time-honored European formulae as the greedy usurer and the "Jewish nose" to locally resonant conflations of Jews with Muslims. The book's close, contextualized reading of works from the late twelfth through early fourteenth centuries draws on recent scholarship in Iberian history, religion, and cultural studies, shedding new light on the delicate processes by which communal and religious identities were negotiated in medieval Spain.

Patience Darton's unpublished letters and papers from 1930s Spain and 1950s China are at the heart of this new biography by Angela Jackson, together with testimony from recorded interviews and a wealth of photographs that illustrate the life of this remarkable woman. 'For us it was Heaven' tells the story of a young, upper middle-class nurse in the 1930s who becomes dramatically caught up in Spain's civil war and the passionate political issues of her times, but whose intimate writings reveal emotions and attitudes that will strike a chord with most self-aware and determined women today. While Patience nursed near the front lines in Spain, she met and fell in love with Robert, a German volunteer in the International Brigades, deeply committed to fighting fascism. Their passionate relationship coloured the rest of her long life, taking her to communist China and then, finally, back to Spain. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

In 1940, Daily Telegraph correspondent Henry Buckley published his eyewitness account of his experiences reporting form the Spanish Civil War. The copies of the book, stored in a warehouse in London, were destroyed during the Blitz and only a handful of copies of his unique chronicle were saved. Now, eighty years after its first publication, this exceptional eyewitness account of the war is republished with a new introduction by acclaimed scholar Paul Preston. The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic is a unique account of Spanish politics throughout the Second Republic, from its foundation of 14 April 1931 to its defeat at the end of March 1939. It combines personal recollections of meetings with the great politicians of the day and intimate accounts of dramatic events with a deep understanding of Spain - its people, politics and culture. Providing a fascinating portrait of a crucial decade of contemporary Spanish history and based on an abundance of the witness material, this important book is one of the most enduring records of the Second Republic and is therefore essential reading for anyone interested in the Spanish Civil War.

Diego Velazquez spent his formative years at the center of artistic life in seventeenth-century Seville, a gateway to the New World characterized by intellectual debate, religious fervor, and mounting ethnic tensions. Yet critics have often divorced the painter's novel style and subject matter from the city's unique pictorial and cultural traditions. In Diego Velazquez's Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville, Tanya J. Tiffany demonstrates that Velazquez's works not only engaged Seville's social practices but also raised issues of vital importance to seventeenth-century Sevillians. As a young artist, Velazquez contended with such essential questions as women's place in society, the nature of artistic creativity, the role of religion in everyday life, and the incorporation of racial minorities into Christianity. This study offers close readings of individual paintings with regard to their historical framework, critical context, and early reception. Through this approach, Tiffany illuminates well-known masterpieces and also highlights the fluid boundaries between high art and popular forms of visual expression.

Despite the repression, violence, and social hardship which characterised Spanish life in the 1940s and 1950s, the Franco regime sought to win popular support by promoting its apparent commitment to social justice. David Brydan reveals the vital role which the idea of the Francoist 'social state' also played in the regime's ongoing search for international legitimacy. Using research from eighteen archives across six countries, Brydan shows how social experts, particularly those working in the fields of public health, medicine, and social insurance, were at the forefront of efforts to promote the regime abroad. By working with international organisations in Geneva, Paris, and New York and with transnational networks of colleagues across Europe, Africa, and Latin America, they sought to sell the idea of Franco's Spain as a respectable, modern, and socially-just state. They were internationalists, but they were Franco's internationalists. In telling this story, the study disrupts our understanding of the modern history of internationalism. Exploring what it meant for Francoist experts to think and act internationally, it challenges dominant accounts of internationalism as a liberal, progressive movement by foregrounding the history of fascist, nationalist, imperialist, and religious forms of international cooperation. It also brings into focus the overlooked continuities between international structures and projects before and after 1945. The case of Spain reveals the contested and heterogeneous nature of mid-twentieth century internationalism, characterised by the competition between overlapping global, regional, and imperial projects.