Per Högselius gives keynote lecture at coal history conference

Last week I spent in the historical heartlands of the German coal and steel industry: the Ruhr district. As hard coal production in Germany is now coming to an end, historians in the region have increasingly started to reflect on what the long and dramatic age of coal in the Ruhr has meant. At the German Mining Museum (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum) in Bochum a major research project is just about to be finished, and I was invited to give the keynote lecture at the international conference organized in this connection, “Boom – Crisis – Heritage: King Coal and the Energy Revolutions after 1945“. In my talk I decided to reflect broadly on Europe’s energy history over the past 100-150 years, trying to discern, in particular, two major transnational dynamics that over the years have interacted with each other in highly interesting ways and increasingly so as Europe’s indigenous fuel reserves are depleted: on the one hand, internal European integration processes in energy (in material and political terms), and on the other, Europe’s growing entanglements with the rest of the world in energy. Have a look here at my lecture, entitled “The European Energy System in an Age of Globalization“.

Participating in the conference was rewarding. Especially the combined energy history and energy heritage perspectives offered a valuable setting for debate. Coal was, of course, at the centre here, but oil and nuclear power were also touched upon. As for coal, presentations featured studies of Germany, the Czech Republic, Britain, France, Belgium and even China. These all have something in common: coal production has now been totally phased out or, as in the Chinese case, is in a phase of decline. But the “after-lives” of coal mining varies a lot from place to place. Many earlier coal-mining regions are now facing hard times. But in the Ruhr area something very interesting is happening: the whole district is becoming a hugely popular tourist attraction, and the former coal-mining complex of Zollverein in Essen, which we visited as part of the conference, has been turned into a UN World Heritage site that attracts over a million tourists every year – more than any other tourist attraction in Nordrhein-Westfalen, apart from the famous cathedral in Cologne! There is a touristic “Route der Industrie-Kultur” that sweeps across the Ruhr district, and the change of perspective is truly striking. Yet the Ruhr district, once the engine of German industrialization, is still struggling with depopulation and a range of other social problems.