Introduction: Collective Memory in the Context of Economic Crises and Transformations

Memory narratives of economic crises and transformations often leave powerful long-term legacies that not only feed into subsequent political debate but are also drawn upon as purported lessons in addressing contemporary challenges and crises. Such dynamics could be observed during the 2007/8 global financial crisis (Cassis and Schenk 2021), as much as during the European state debt crisis of the early 2010s (Verovsek 2014; O’Callaghan 2012). Still more dramatically, in Russia, narratives of the economic and social dislocations of the ‘lost 1990s’ have arguably contributed to the rise of imperialist revanchism over the last decades (Malinova 2023), while ‘Trumpist’ economic nationalist agendas in the United States have continuously harked back to imagined past ‘Golden Ages’ of power and prosperity ever since the mid-2010s. These prominent examples notwithstanding, little attention has so far been paid to the economy in the discipline of memory studies. Our book seeks to provide a broad mapping of the different ways in which analyses of the economy/memory nexus can be approached, with contributions brought together under the broad theme of economic crises and transformations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This introduction elaborates on the ‘state of the art’, highlights the main contributions of the volume and briefly introduces the individual chapters.