For the illustrious Dr Johnson the remarkable feature of a dog walking on its hind legs was not that it was done well or badly but that it was done at all. And to some extent the analogy could be applied to the cultural experience of contemporary Catalonia. When we bear in mind that over the past three centuries there have been little more than four decades when that nation and its signs of difference were not proscribed or persecuted, its continued, dynamic presence nowadays is nothing short of astonishing. What is more, while now free to be appreciated in all its richness, centuries of ignorance on an international scale – a direct corollary of the domestic repression – have left us with only a partial awareness of the phenomenon as things Catalan are all too readily subsumed into an anonymous Spanish whole. It is precisely this deficiency that we would seek to rectify with this volume and, to that end, we begin this introductory essay by casting our gaze back briefly to the early years of the eighteenth century.

The victory of the Bourbon pretender in the War of Spanish Succession in 1714 signified a crippling blow for the status of Catalan particularity and its recognition. Along with other areas of the ancient crown of Aragon, Catalonia had supported the Habsburg candidate, Archduke Charles of Austria. Needless to say, when his rival, Philippe d’Anjou, was installed on the throne reprisals against supporters of the unsuccessful contender were only to be expected. The retaliation, however, was to be savage and annihilatory with the first decrees of the new monarch designed to exact a firm, centralist control with a view to homogenizing the realm into a single, united and artificial whole.

The policy was, of course, brutally successful and spelt disaster for the nation of Catalonia. Indeed, the repression was so pervasive that throughout the eighteenth century it is difficult to perceive any distinctive autochthonous response to the overarching supranational identity imposed by Bourbon hegemony. To all extents and purposes – in this period known as that of decadència – Catalonia had been assimilated.