In the 1960s, Franco's regime launched a campaign to entice European tourists to visit the country, adopting the now famous slogan ‘Spain is different’. Many historians at that time would have concurred with the statement: the country had been absent from two world wars; had only enjoyed a few years of democracy; had experienced an atrocious civil war, even by civil war standards; had been ruled by a military dictatorship for over 25 years (and counting); and was only beginning to catch up economically with the rest of western Europe. Spain's historical development seemed to be atypical of continental trends, and the most renowned historians writing in the 1970s, such as Carr, Nadal and Fontana, focused on how Spain had failed to modernise its political, economic, and social structures within the timing and patterns observed in other European nations. This Spanish exceptionalism had also percolated, albeit rather superficially, to Spain's image abroad, a composite of flamenco, sun, bullfighting, and religious processions that the Ministry of Tourism was willing to tap into and capitalise on.

Several decades and millions of tourists later, Julián Casanova and Carlos Gil Andrés condense the history of Spain in the twentieth century under the revisionist gaze that has emerged in the interim, one which no longer sees the country's past as detached from the continent, nor considers it to be a sequence of failures. The authors have the expertise to trawl through a century of historical events with erudition and depth, and dote on both detail and analysis, which marks this book as an excellent resource for those seeking an introduction to Spanish history or a peek into the most relevant scholarly debates, including less ubiquitous historical questions, such as whether democracy was deepening or not prior to Primo de Rivera's coup.

Despite claiming in the introduction that there are too many names or events for all of them to appear in the book, the authors’ treatment of some political figures – such as Maura, or Alcalá Zamora – is as sagacious as that to be found in specialist works. Those wanting to understand the obstacles that Maura's ‘reform from above’ encountered, or the constraints under which the president of the Second Republic operated, will find lucid explanations in the pages of this book. Conversely, the exploration of the political and ideological trajectory of Alejandro Lerroux, a perhaps secondary but still controversial and omnipresent political actor in the first third of the century, is less perspicuous. Overall, however, the coverage of the most significant political developments and characters is exhaustive and gripping. The analysis of Franco's dictatorship, the transition to democracy, and the first decades of democracy stands out, given the limited space available, as one of the most impressive and instructive of those published to date.

To return to the theses of the book, a key claim is that Spain's tribulations can and should be understood as specific manifestations of European trends, and that while its history has unique elements, it was not singular or anomalous, at least not until the late 1930s. The one tangible abnormality in Spain's history according to the authors is Franco's rule: in his ‘long and cruel dictatorship lies the exceptional nature of Spain's twentieth century in comparison to that of other Western capitalist countries’ (p. 358). The foundations of the dictatorship lie in the civil war, and there is no ambiguity in the book's evaluation of the origins of the civil war: it began with, and because of, the military uprising in July 1936. The chapters on the Second Republic offer a lucid analysis of the social and political cleavages that were tearing Spain apart, but also firmly dismiss those accounts that attempt to blame the Republican-Socialist organisations and the revolutionary left for the violence that ensued.

It is the first four chapters of the book, which analyse the Restoration decades until the proclamation of the Republic in 1931, that argue most forcefully against the ‘Spain is different’ approach. The breakdown of parliamentary monarchy and Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, for example, have too often been seen as an early sign of Spaniards’ penchant for authoritarianism, but Casanova and Gil Andrés point at how this was a general phenomenon all over the continent and part of the crisis of the liberal states in interwar Europe. Other Spanish peculiarities of the period, such as praetorian politics or political violence, are also exposed as not so peculiar when examined through the European lens.

This early section would perhaps have benefitted from an extended introduction with more explicit analysis of the structural differences and similarities between Spain and the rest of Europe. The shadow that the nineteenth century casts in the account of these early decades is very short, too short at times for a novice to grasp the incisive diagnoses that follow. For example, the authors describe the ‘matter of religion’ as one of the most serious hurdles to overcome during the Second Republic (p. 116), but the relationship between the Church, the State, and the people is not referred to until later passages. When they state that the Spanish clergy ‘exerted ideological control that was without comparison in Western societies’ (p. 129), the reason for it is not straightforward to come by. Similarly, explanations of the roots of conflict in the countryside are conspicuously absent from the first hundred pages of the book, despite ‘land reform’ being an omnipresent dispute, and notwithstanding crucial differences in land ownership structure between Spain and most of Europe (acknowledged on p. 118), the origins of which arguably lie in the nineteenth century. For an account of earlier decades, the perceptive reader will be left wanting by this tandem of historians.