John Hopkins

But back at home, rapid industrialization brings some major shifts in the nation's social and political landscape.

Peter Anderson is professor of 20th century Spanish history at the University of Leeds.

These changes create rifts in Spanish society.

The urban, secular lifestyles of the middle classes and working proletariat differ from the rural ways of life of peasant smallholders.

This latter group are still heavily invested in the conservative Catholic Church, which remains extremely influential.

The landowners of southern Spain oppose any threats to their power.

In particular, reforms that jeopardize the control they exert over the landless peasants who work on their estates.

And after the loss of the empire, the military becomes increasingly insular, developing their own specific ideology that aligns closely with the right.

This is especially true of those troops who fight in the Foreign Legion.

In 1912, Spain takes over a strip of land in northern Morocco, meaning that large numbers of troops are now based in North Africa.

While the army may gaze with nostalgia at Spain's imperial past, for civilians, the country is nominally a democracy.

But the system artificially ensures that the conservative and liberal parties take turns forming governments, with votes manipulated by local bosses and power ultimately resting with the king.

In 1923, amid a wave of strike action, a bloodless military coup brings a new government to power.

But though the new dictator, General Primo de Rivera, shares the conservative religious values of groups like the landholding peasants, his regime continues to exclude large numbers of Spanish citizens from the political system.

Supported by the king, Alfonso XIII, the coup hardens conservative attempts to stem the tide of change in Spain.

But progress cannot be held off forever.

In 1930, Primo de Rivera's rule comes to an end after his minor attempts at military reform lose him the support of the army.

The king, compromised by his association with the dictator, desperately tries to revive the pre-1923 political system of alternating power.

But when municipal elections are held, Republican parties secure a convincing win, and King Alfonso goes into exile.

Since there had been a short-lived republic declared in the 1870s, this new one is now declared as the Second Republic.