Collective Memory of Economic Crises and Transformations

"This is a pathbreaking book which explores the multiple inter-connections between the economic and the mnemonic - sorely neglected in the memory studies literature over recent decades - in a timely and stimulating way. The editors articulate a clear agenda and the chapters are coherently structured around it, as well as being exceptionally well-written. The book will be read with great profit by scholars and students from across the humanities and social sciences." — Patrick Finney, Faculty of Humanities, Aberystwyth University, UK.

This book seeks to advance a more systematic analysis of the relationship between collective memory and the economy. It addresses both the field of memory studies (where economic aspects are underexplored) and economic history/political economy, where few people take collective memory seriously. This book employs different concepts, approaches, and methodologies to the study of collective memory, and it addresses a variety of specific empirical aspects, brought together under the broad theme of economic crises and transformations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributions highlight a variety of economic carriers of memory narratives, with an equal focus on the role of such narratives for the political management of economic transformations, as well as on their significance for longer-term social and cultural change. This book constitutes an agenda-setting exercise for a new field of studies, demonstrating the conceptual and empirical potential it has to inspire more in-depth research in the future.

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. He is also executive chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr and Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has published widely on nationalism, memory, deindustrialization, industrial heritage and the history of historiography. His latest monograph is History and Identity: How Historical Theory Shaped Historical Practice (2022).

Thomas Fetzer is Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations, Central European University, Austria. His research and publications focus on social and cultural dimensions of international economic integration. He is particularly interested in the relationship between nationalism and political economy. Publications include Paradoxes of Internationalization: British and German trade unions at Ford and General Motors, 1967-2000 (2012), and, as co-editor (with Stefan Berger), Nationalism and Economy: Explorations into a Neglected Relationship (2019).