| Sumario: | The article analyzes the role of the second cities of Hamburg, Germany and Barcelona, Spain in the in the building of their nation's autonomy, culture and law in the late nineteenth century. In Spain, by contrast, autonomous principalities were brought together by the different project of enforced state-building: Castile expanded its power and influence over Spain's other territories. As a result, the duchy of Catalonia lost its independence, with the last remaining autonomous political institutions being abolished by the Bourbons in the eighteenth century. Post-independence Catalonia retained elements of its separate civic and legal traditions well into and beyond the nineteenth century. In the case of Hamburg, it was the city's medieval status as a Free Hanseatic City that could be invoked to bolster contemporary claims to economic autonomy. Yet the Hanseatic trope not only legitimated particularist aspirations, it also tallied with themes in the official discourse of empire. The establishment of the free port was a result less of political than of economic unification in Germany. In a paradoxical twist, the status of the law in the quest for Catalan autonomy resulted from Catalonia's having lost its political independence earlier than the city-state of Hamburg. After 1716, Catalan civil or foral law was celebrated as the remaining institutional manifestation of Catalan identity, which had implications for the development of federalism in Spain in general. In 1851, a process of national codification began that, as in the German case, threatened regional legal autonomy.
|
|---|