Building an Empire and Bringing About a Famine: The Allied Economic Blockade of Spain during the Second World War (1939–1945)

Abstract

This article focuses on the Francoist ‘New State's’ foreign policy as a means of explaining the failure in food supplies which led to ‘Franco's famine’ in the early 1940s. It contends that eschewing strict neutrality in favour of pro-Axis policies after the outbreak of the Second World War contributed to creating the famine. Faced with Spain's Germanophile stance, first Britain, and later the United States, took a series of measures aimed at preventing any form of Spanish participation in the war. Most significant among these was the strictly managed economic blockade of Spain, which exacerbated problems of basic supply that had already been created by the dictatorship's policy of autarky. The result was the aggravation of famine conditions. The article will further demonstrate that the dictatorship was perfectly aware of the blockade's effect on the population and the suffering it caused.