What were Spain's other colonies doing during the Spanish Civil War?

by HiggetyFlough

Excluding Morocco.

k1990

There's a (very) short answer to this: excluding Spanish Morocco, there weren't any.

The longer answer/context of this: Spain's empire was in decline throughout the 19th century, with a wave of independence movements sweeping through South America. The end of the last vestiges of Spanish empire came with their defeat during the Spanish-American War in 1898 — as part of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, Spain ceded control of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States, and gave up control of Cuba, the crown jewel of the Spanish empire. The last Spanish possessions in the Pacific were sold to Germany in 1899 as a direct consequence of the Treaty, which had effectively destroyed Spain's colonial foothold in Asia.

Thereafter, all that was left were small colonies in North and West Africa. It's difficult to overstate quite how dramatic the shock of the defeat in 1898 was to Spanish society. It represented the end of centuries of Imperial Spain, and a body-blow to Spain's view of itself as a global power. In particular, the loss of Cuba — which to many Spaniards was regarded almost as an extension of the metropole, not as a colony — was a huge psychological and economic blow to Spain.

What followed was a period of social fracture and attempted 'regeneration' of Spanish civil and political society; attempts to address superstructural issues in turn-of-the-century Spain, and increasing popular demands for social and economic reform. Eventually, the failure of the post-1898 political system created the conditions which allowed Primo de Rivera to declare his dictatorship in 1923. After that, you have the Second Republic and then, finally, the civil war.

As a relevant side note: there's a school of thought which argues that the military adventurism of the early 20th century in North Africa, and the rise of the Africanistas (including both Franco and Emilio Mola) in the army officer corps were part of a conservative reaction to that post-imperial identity crisis; that they represented an attempt to restore Spanish imperial prestige after the humiliation of 1898.