A cultural history of deindustrialisation : Central Fife, 1930s–1990s

Abstract

This thesis offers a new interpretation of how industrial communities changed between the 1930s and 1990s. Focussing on the former industrial area of Central Fife, Scotland, the thesis de-centres changes in productive labour in its analysis of community change. It considers how deindustrialisation – the long winding-down of industrial employment – intersected with transformations in popular ideology and norms. The thesis suggests that popular conceptualisations of the area – as once-comprised of strong, solidaristic coal communities – were constructed in retrospect, once coal employment was largely gone. It posits an alternative narrative of change that encompasses a broader range of social spheres, employment contexts, and subjectivities. The thesis argues that deindustrialisation in Central Fife was accompanied by, and was part of, the emergence of a popular liberalism that permeated various aspects of life. Chapter One is the introduction. Chapter Two provides a historical overview of the area’s economic development by drawing upon selected primary and secondary sources, revealing the importance of a wider range of industrial sectors than coal alone to the area’s development. Chapters Three to Five are structured thematically and trace the emergence of a popular liberalism across a range of social spheres between the 1930s and 1990s. They primarily draw from original oral history interviews conducted with local community organisations. Chapter Three considers how gender norms relaxed over time to accommodate notions of individual needs, preferences and choices. Chapter Four explores how postwar Polish and Muslim and Pakistani diaspora communities arrived, settled and developed greater autonomy over their circumstances, and how this trajectory was also discernible in the experiences of Scottish migrants over the same period. Chapter Five explores the decline of constraint in cultures that surrounded a range of economic activities. These cultural transformations were multifaceted and complex, incorporating developments linked to gender, decolonisation and post-war migration.