Ewan Gibbs, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland

Abstract

Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland was enthusiastically anticipated by a community of scholars associated with “deindustrialization studies”. This loose grouping has sought to advance the study of deindustrialization from the economics of male industrial job loss toward broader readings of the cultural, social, and political effects wrought by industrial ruination. As the author states at the outset, “deindustrialization’s impact was as keenly felt in cultural and political terms as it was economically” (p.1). In many instances, Gibbs reflects and continues this academic endeavour in an expansive study of the deindustrialization of the nationalized coal mining industry in Scotland. The monograph, then, covers issues of gender, community, temporality, and nationhood, while also being firmly rooted in the traditions of Labour History, focussing heavily on the political economies of colliery closures and institutional relationships between the National Union of Mineworkers Scotland Area (NUMSA), the National Coal Board (NCB), and central government. As the work is so rich, this review highlights in turn only a few related topic salient to an Antipode audience: society and gender; temporalities; and political geographies. Before this, it is worthwhile to make some general comments on the mechanics of text. The study moves back and forth across close to a century of histories and memories in multiple coalfields across Scotland, raising concerns of eliding important trajectories and disjunctions in what is clearly a complex and contested past. The task is complicated further by the evocative subject matter and methodologies: extensive archival research and oral history interviews with mining communities, supplemented by cultural, artistic