Collective Memory of Economic Crises and Transformations

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.