Constructing Industrial Pasts

Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation

Stefan Berger

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781836950714
  9781789202908
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789202915
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Since the 1960s, nations across the "developed world" have been profoundly shaped by deindustrialization. In regions in which previously dominant industries faced crises or have disappeared altogether, industrial heritage offers a fascinating window into the phenomenon's cultural dimensions. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, even as forms of industrial heritage provide anchors of identity for local populations, their meanings remain deeply contested, as both radical and conservative varieties of nostalgia intermingle with critical approaches and straightforward apologias for a past that was often full of pain, exploitation and struggle.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures, Maps and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Introduction — Preconditions for the Making of an Industrial Past: Comparative Perspectives
• Chapter 1 — ‘Sooty Manchester’: (Re)Presenting an Urban-Industrial Landscape
• Chapter 2 — Where Is ‘Red Clydeside’? Industrial Heritage, Working-Class Culture and Memory in the Glasgow Region
• Chapter 3 — Industrial Heritage as Place Making: The Case of Wales
• Chapter 4 — The Steel Industry in Welsh History and Heritage
• Chapter 5 — Cornish Mining Heritage and Cornish Identity: Images, Representations and Narratives
• Chapter 6 — Industrial Heritage and the Remaking of Class Identity: Are We All Middle Class Now?
• Chapter 7 — The Agents of Industrial Heritage in the Midst of Structural Transformation of the Latrobe Valley, Australia
• Chapter 8 — ‘Hardly a Cause for Tears’: Job Insecurity and Occupational Psychology Culture in Italy – Oral Narratives from the Falck Steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni, Milan
• Chapter 9 — Between Dream and Nightmare: Political Conventions of the Industrial Past in the North of France
• Chapter 10 — Memory Culture and Identity Constructions in the Ruhr Valley in Germany
• Chapter 11 — Sounds of Decline: Industrial Echoes in Asturian Music
• Chapter 12 — The Coal-Environment Nexus: How Nostalgic Identity Burdens Heritage in Romania’s Jiu Valley
• Chapter 13 — A Special Kind of Cultural Heritage: The Remembrance of Workers’ Life in Contemporary Hungary – Case Study of Ózd
• Chapter 14 — Ruins for Politics: Selling Industrial Heritage in Postsocialist China’s Rust Belt
• Chapter 15 — The Heritage of the Chinese Eastern Railway: Symbol of Colonization and International Cooperation
• Conclusion — Narrativizations of an Industrial Past: Labour, the Environment and the Construction of Space in Comparative Perspective
• Index