Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Praetorian Duke: Leopoldo O'Donnell and the Synthesis of Liberty and Order in Isabelline Spain

The Praetorian Duke: Leopoldo O'Donnell and the Synthesis of Liberty and Order in Isabelline Spain

O'Donnell, Redmond

Paperback

Spainish & Portuguese History

ISBN13: 9798235006607
Publisher: Silverback Books
Published: Jul 13 2026
Pages: 422
Weight: 1.07
Height: 0.94 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

The Praetorian Duke: Leopoldo O'Donnell and the Synthesis of Liberty and Order in Isabelline Spain

He commanded cavalry through the streets of Madrid three times in one lifetime, and served as Prime Minister of Spain three times as well. Leopoldo O'Donnell, Duke of Tetuán, descended from the exiled kings of Tyrconnell, rose from a wounded captain in the Carlist Wars to become the most powerful centrist statesman nineteenth-century Spain ever produced. His Unión Liberal held moderates and progressives together through nearly five years of unprecedented stability, built Spain's first national railway network, and carried Spanish arms to triumph in Morocco. But the same hand that signed railway concessions had, a decade earlier, signed off on one of the most brutal slave-trade fortunes in the Atlantic world, and presided over Cuba's Year of the Lash, a campaign of torture and mass execution that destroyed a generation of free Black leadership. The Praetorian Duke follows O'Donnell from the ruin of Gaelic Ulster to the barracks of San Gil, asking the question Spanish history has never fully answered: what does it mean that the man who nearly gave Spain a lasting liberal center financed it with the currency of human bondage? Drawing on British consular records, Spanish military archives, and the full arc of a career built entirely on the sword, this is the definitive reckoning with a man conservative historians call a savior and progressive historians call an executioner, because, this book argues, he was unmistakably both.

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