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Book cover for No Country for Travellers? open access

Publication date: 14 August 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088733

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

No Country for Travellers?

British visitors to Spain and Portugal, 1760–1820

Rosemary Sweet (Author),  Richard Ansell (Author)

No Country for Travellers? explores the rise and nature of British travel to Spain and Portugal between 1760 and 1820, across a region that is conventionally overlooked in studies of British travel to Europe. Drawing on extensive archival and printed sources left by travellers in the period, Rosemary Sweet and Richard Ansell reveal the unheralded significance of the two countries to eighteenth-century British culture, and their attraction as destinations long before the Peninsular War and nineteenth-century romanticism. Along the way, the book’s compelling narrative reveals the realities of Iberian travel, the different itineraries that travellers followed, the place of Spanish and Portuguese cities in the British imagination, and the importance of mediators in cultural exchange, on the Iberian side as well as the British. The travellers’ memoirs reflect changing perceptions of Spain and Portugal as modernisation raised new hopes that vied with pessimism and ancient prejudice, and also the persistence of cultural stereotypes, while the counterintuitive relationship between civilian travel and armed conflict emerges through a case study of the Peninsular War. Finally, focusing on contemporary fascination with the Alhambra in Granada, the authors examine the rise of British interest in Iberia’s Islamic history, with its significance for contemporary understandings of ‘Europe’.

List of figures
List of abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Maps

1 Anglo-Iberian relations and the British view of Spain and Portugal
2 Travelling in Spain and Portugal
3 Itineraries and destinations
4 Religion, women and bullfights
5 The British and Spain in the 1770s: Lord Grantham’s circle
6 Iberia writes back: transnational exchange and international competition, 1779–1808
7 Civilian travel and the Peninsular War
8 Engaging with Spain’s Islamic past
9 Conclusion

Appendix: British and Irish Travellers to Portugal and Spain, c. 1760-1820
References
Index

DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800088733

Publication date: 14 August 2025

PDF ISBN: 9781800088733

EPUB ISBN: 9781800088740

Hardback ISBN: 9781800088719

Paperback ISBN: 9781800088726

Rosemary Sweet (Author)

Rosemary Sweet is Professor of Urban History and Director of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester.

Richard Ansell (Author)

Richard Ansell is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London.

‘Sweet and Ansell’s book is a remarkable study that profoundly renews our knowledge of travel in Spain and Portugal, 1760-1820. Many readers will benefit from this book: historians, art historians and literary scholars, as well as the curious and the amateur, travellers and tourists.’
Gilles Bertrand, Grenoble-Alpes University

‘Sweet and Ansell offer a comprehensive history of British engagement with Iberia which contends with the stereotypes of the peninsula which were embedded in early modern confessional and civilisational hierarchies. It is a foundational work which will open up new avenues of research in eighteenth-century European history for years to come.’
Melissa Calaresu, University of Cambridge

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