The Disaster of 1898
In a short war with the United States, Spain loses Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the last of its overseas empire.
- The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 — Sebastian Balfour, Oxford University Press (1997)
- Spain: A History — Raymond Carr (ed.), Oxford University Press (2000)
- Catalan Nationalism: Past and Present — Albert Balcells, Macmillan (1996)
After the US battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbour, the United States went to war with Spain in April 1898. The Spanish fleets were destroyed at Manila Bay and Santiago de Cuba, and in the Treaty of Paris that December Spain gave up Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. For a country that had once ruled half the world, the shock was profound, and it fed both Spanish “regenerationism” and the rise of Catalan and Basque nationalism.
- The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 — Sebastian Balfour, Oxford University Press (1997)
- Catalan Nationalism: Past and Present — Albert Balcells, Macmillan (1996)
The "Spanish–American War" was fought in a country whose own revolutionaries had already all but defeated Spain on land. The mock battle of Manila in August 1898, staged to keep Filipino troops out of the city, and the Treaty of Paris are remembered as a double betrayal.
- History of the Filipino People — Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Garotech (1990)
- In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines — Stanley Karnow, Random House (1989)
Why it matters today
"El Desastre" set off a long national soul-searching about why Spain had fallen behind Europe. The writers of the "Generation of '98", Unamuno, Machado and others, shaped how educated Spaniards thought about their country for decades.
Catalan industry lost its protected colonial markets, and many Catalan businessmen concluded that the Madrid state was incompetent; political Catalanism grew quickly in the years that followed.
For Filipinos 1898 was no "disaster" but the year they declared independence, on 12 June, only to have Spain sell the islands to the United States for $20 million in the Treaty of Paris without a single Filipino at the table. It is the hinge between three centuries of Spanish rule and the American era.