Conference on Industrializing Regions

Presented at the conference on Industrial Regions in Bochum yesterday. The whole conference seems to be dominated by economic historians. On the positive side, I am getting another insight into how economic history deals with space. On the negative side, these attempts to describe regions from an economic perspective are for the most part not very innovative and often not very convincing. It is mostly “container” space and it is easy to make out the flaws of such concepts, even when focussing on economic history. But on a whole, the conference made me think about my own work on surface mining again.