Kirsty Hooper's The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession is a particularly insightful contribution to understanding the changing place of Spain in modern British imagination. When the Spanish Empire declined in the early nineteenth century, the ancestral “Black Legend” that made Spanish people a nation of inquisitorial and violent conquerors in British eyes, gave way to romantic images of Spain, which became an exotic and appealing place for those Britons who were building their own empire. In line with the abundant literature on the ways Britons have seen Spain over the last two centuries, Hooper explores this progressive change, with special emphasis on the period from the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada (1888) to the outbreak of the Great War (1914). Based on both archival material and secondary sources, Hooper offers a systematic analysis of the sociocultural and economic activities that enhanced British knowledge about Spain during that specific period and beyond—such as tourism, academic research, music, exhibitions, trade, and even the circulation of Spanish objects. Hooper is a well-known expert in the history and literature of Galicia, and her research works often focus on the peripheric cultures and regions of Spain. This is also the case in here, where Hooper unearths relevant primary sources to study images of the diverse cultural communities within Spain, rather than focusing exclusively on Castile and Andalusia. This unusual emphasis on the Spanish periphery is enough merit to consider Hooper's book an exceptional one, but there are other aspects that make this research work a relevant contribution.

Hooper argues that the change in the power relationship between Spain and Britain in the early nineteenth century was the primary factor that reconfigured the position of Spanish culture in the British imagination. The independence of Spanish colonies in Latin America led to a competition between the United States and the main European countries for economic control over the new Latin American states. Although Spain became a less powerful actor in the international sphere, this shift sparked off a new interest in Spanish culture in Britain, where Spain was seen as a kind of springboard to Latin America. It was in this context of shifting and competing power relations that Spanish culture became an object of orientalist fascination in the British Romantic imagination. These complex shifts reframed the British attitude toward an old competitor, triggering an unprecedented British “emotional and economic investment” in Spain (309), that put the country under “British cultural, economic and diplomatic dominance” (29). Hooper firmly argues that Spain maintained political sovereignty but became part of Britain's “informal empire” by the beginning of the twentieth century (309). Other authors, such as Robert D. Aguirre (Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture, 2005) and Matthew Brown (Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, 2008), have understood the relationship between Latin America and Britain in the same way, but Hooper provides the first systematic approach to the British strategies that prepared “the ground for Spain's absorption into the contested sphere of Britain's informal Hispanic empire” (45).

Hooper convincingly demonstrates that Spanish culture was more present in Edwardian Britain than ever before. In the late nineteenth century, according to Hooper, a variety of transformations in industry, travel, journalism, and education “democratized” knowledge about Spain among Britons (303). Although this may be true for both British elite and some members of the emerging middle class, the spread of Spanish culture across the whole of British society is perhaps overestimated. Until the Great War, for instance, there was not a decided advocacy of Spanish language education in Britain, and consequently the number of Britons who learned the language or studied Spanish culture was insignificant in the Edwardian era. In 1908, however, the creation of the Gilmour Chair of Spanish at the University of Liverpool paved the way for the professionalization of British scholars in the field of Spanish Studies, as Hooper shows in the second section, “Ask the Experts: Spanish Studies and the Struggle for Authority.” Hooper unearths valuable archival material to describe how James Fitzmaurice-Kelly became the first British scholar of authority in Spanish literature, contributing to “establish a scholarly infrastructure for Spanish Studies” in Britain (124). However, Hooper's account omits that, for instance, Edgar Allison Peers—the actual instigator of Spanish Studies in Britain—downplayed Fitzmaurice-Kelly's academic authority and contribution to the development of British Hispanism.

Hooper also focuses on what she calls “Spain's Edwardian tourist boom” (160) that saw “thousands of British tourists” (304) step onto Spanish soil. It is difficult to know how significant the number of Britons traveling to Spain was, especially as the country was still seen as a dangerous and uncomfortable destination. Certainly, Britons wrote many travel guides to Spain, and accounts of their visits often transmitted an exotic image of Spanish culture and helped British readers to overcome “fears about Spain's dangerous otherness” (131). Hooper offers an exhaustive compilation of British travelers’ testimonies that makes the reader think that the expression “tourist boom” is not exaggerated, but accurate. Furthermore, the detailed description of British “involvement” (160) in Spain's emerging tourist industry is probably the most brilliant part of Hooper's book, which sheds light on a topic that is essential to our understanding of British-Spanish relations in the twentieth century.

In sum, Hooper's book covers a set of interesting topics that exhaustively explain the making of Britons’ “obsession” with Spanish culture. There is no doubt that The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession will be a compulsory reading for those interested in the changing place of Spain in British imagination in the early twentieth century, but also for those studying the cultural process shaping modern British-Spanish relations.