Historical Cultures of Labour Under Conditions of Deindustrialization, first conference of the European Labour History Network, Turin, 14–16 December 2016

Deindustrialization is a global phenomenon but its effects have been more intense in some regions than others. The post-industrial age as heralded by Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine is possibly yet to come, but the widespread historical transformations societies have faced already in the second half of the twentieth century, in the course of often localized deindustrialization processes, deserve further attention. The history of deindustrialization is not only an economic history, it is also fundamentally political and cultural and has attracted an increasingly multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years. Prominent scholars in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia such as, for example, Steven High, Sherry Lee Linkon, Tim Strangleman and Laurajane Smith have emphasized the cultural dimension of deindustrialization and shown how representations of collective identity and memory have been transformed under such conditions. Contemporary ‘historical culture’, that is, ‘the practical articulation of historical consciousness’ (Jörn Rüsen) has been shaped in various ways by the historicization of the industrial past. The most illustrative example of such representation since the 1960s has been the construction and maintenance of ‘industrial heritage’ which, according to the International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage, ‘consists of the remains of industrial culture which are of historical, technological, social, architectural or scientific value’. The most paradigmatic region in Europe, where ‘industrial heritage’ has become an ‘authorized’ (though not uncontested) heritage discourse, is the Ruhr in Germany. And this is where the initiative for the foundation of a new network on the history of deindustrialization has begun.