British and American volunteers and the politics of dress and demeanour in the Spanish Civil War

When ‘Nationalist’ forces rebelled against the democratically elected government of Republican Spain in July 1936, it precipitated a long and bloody civil war that ended only months before the Second World War began. The conflict was remarkable both for the extent of foreign participation – which included the material and monetary aid of governments (Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy on the Nationalist side, and the Soviet Union for the Republicans) as well as various contingents of international volunteers – and for the revolutionary sentiments it inspired in sections of the Republican zone. The ideological implications of the conflict – the fascist-inspired Nationalists against the anti-fascist, democratic Republic – were also immediately apparent. Recent historiography, however, has moved away from an exclusively political analysis of the conflict to one focusing on cultural interpretations of the war. This article seeks to add to this growing historiography by examining the ways in which volunteers from Britain and the United States interpreted two potent cultural signifiers in Spain during the civil war: dress and demeanour.