Geographers: regenerationism and territorial division (1879-1899)

Abstract

A period of reform was initiated towards the middle of the decade of the 1870s when the restauration process was reasonably well consolidated. The conservative government appeared to be willing to reorganize the regional Administration of the nation, and hence named an administrative reform commission in 1879. The recently founded but already active Madrid Geographical Society, taking advantage of the reformist intentions of the government, organized a series of debates on the regional division of Spain, with the purpose of acquiring prestige and influence. Between 1879 and 1881, geographers, geologists, engineers, historians and military personnel, such as Coello, Saavedra, Pirala and Gómez de Arteche, took part in such discussions. As a result, Lucas Mallada present a project for the regional division of Spain.

However none of these initiatives led to positive action, and in fact, by the beginning of the 1890s the reformist spirit which had marked the beginning of the previous decade had not only disappeared but had even been replaced in certain intellectual circles by pessimism (and in the case of some authors this reached fatalist extremes). After the loss of the colonies in 1898, and as a result of this pessimistic attitude, regenerationist literature, introduced several years previously by Lucas Mallada, was developped into a political activist programme. Important contributions to the formulation of such regenerationist manifestoes, which emphasised the decentralization and regional control of public administration, were made by geographers and closely vinculated people such as Joaquin Costa, Macias Picavea and Leopoldo Pedreira. These debates, projects and programmes are indicative of the active participation of geographers in regional politics during the Restauration period.