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The making of industrial society has often been historicized as integral to the tran-
sition to modernity in the West.1 This transition towards mass society, some schol-
ars of national identity have maintained, involved the loss of communal memory
and the functional need for new constructions of collective memory.2 Yet, the
methodological nationalism in the history of industrialization has obscured the
unevenness of this development at the regional level. Regions, rather than nations
might be the more useful spatial categories for historical studies of industrial-
ization.3 Any traveler crossing highly industrialized nations such as England,
Germany or the United States in the 21st century would be able to confirm this
observation: the concentration of the modern does not necessarily correspond to
the concentration of the industrial. Some parts of these nations have been affected
by industrialism much more profoundly than others. In the course of the industrial
revolutions, large-scale industries including coal and steel production had irre-
versibly transformed the landscape and culture of particular regions around the
world. Urban and rural infrastructures, ecological and agricultural systems, class
and gender relations, labour and ethnic migration, customs and dialects, aesthetics
and memories have all been affected by heavy industries particularly in areas of
high concentration. The industrial region became a foreign country.4
Similarly, regions of heavy industry have often been subject to dramatic pro-
cesses of deindustrialization, which have affected cultures and landscapes of such
regions in virtually all spheres of life.5 Forms of pre-factory deindustrialization
have certainly happened already in pre-modern times and in spaces outside of the
industrialized West.6 Since the mid-20th century, however, energy transitions and
increasing economic globalization have left urbanized regions in highly industri-
alized countries, especially those centering on the ‘old’ industries of coal and steel,
extremely vulnerable. While global market mechanisms have had great impact on
local deindustrialization processes, national economies and political cultures had
some power to determine the speed and timing of such processes. The European
example well illustrates these discrepancies: neoliberal Thatcherism, for example,
in the 1980s showed little patience for the unprofitable coal mining industries in
Great Britain, and the downfall of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe
around 1990 triggered wide-reaching deindustrialization measures. The Rhen-
ish capitalist model, in contrast, allowed for a 60-year (i.e. 1958–2018) transition
Notes
1 Gellner, Ernest. 1964. Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson;
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1962. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson.
2 Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire. Represen-
tations 26: 7–24.
3 Sidney Pollard. 1973. Industrialization and the European Economy. The Economic
History Review 26: 636–648. For the importance of regions in the study of industrial-
ization, see also various chapters in Czierpka, J., K. Oerters and N. Thorade, Eds. 2015.
Regions, Industries, and Heritage: Perspectives on Economy, Society, and Culture in
Modern Western Europe. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
4 Chargesheimer and Heinrich Böll. 1958. Im Ruhrgebiet. Cologne: Kiepenheuer &
Witsch.
5 See e.g. Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, Eds. 2003. Beyond the Ruins: The
Meanings of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
6 Christopher H. Johnson 2002. Introduction: De-industrialization and Globalization.
International Review of Social History 47: 3–34.
7 Stefan Goch. 2002. Betterment without Airs: Social, Cultural and Political Conse-
quences of De-industrialization in the Ruhr. International Review of Social History 47:
87–111.
8 Cf. Daniel Bell. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social
Forecasting. New York: Basic Books; Touraine, Alain. 1971. The Post-Industrial Soci-
ety: Tomorrow’s Social History: Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed
Society. New York: Random House.
9 See, e.g. Valerie Walkerdine and Luis Jimenez Gender. 2012. Work and Community
after De-Industrialisation: A Psychological Approach to Affect. Basingtoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
10 Benedict Anderson. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread and Ori-
gin of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso.
11 Michael Billig. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage; Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger,
Eds. 1982. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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