Angel Smith is a reader in modern Spanish history at the University of Leeds. He has worked extensively in the areas of Spanish social and labor history, and the origins and rise of Catalan nationalism, and the crisis of the Spanish Restoration Monarchy (1917-1923). His major works are Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898-1923, and The Origins of Catalan Nationalism 1808-1898. At present I am preparing a book on the fall of Spanish absolutism, covering the period 1808-1833, and writing a general history of Spain from 1789 through to the present day.