Regional Identity and Economic Change: The Upper Rhine 1450-1600
Tom Scott
Abstract
The current debate about the best methods of European organization — central or regional — is influenced by an awareness of regional identity, which offers an alternative to the rigidities of organization by nation-state. Yet where does the sense of regionalism come from? What are the distinctive factors that transform a geographical area into a particular ‘region’? This book addresses these questions in this study of one apparently ‘natural’ region — the Upper Rhine — between 1450 and 1600. This region has been divided between three countries and so historically marginalized, yet this book is ... More
The current debate about the best methods of European organization — central or regional — is influenced by an awareness of regional identity, which offers an alternative to the rigidities of organization by nation-state. Yet where does the sense of regionalism come from? What are the distinctive factors that transform a geographical area into a particular ‘region’? This book addresses these questions in this study of one apparently ‘natural’ region — the Upper Rhine — between 1450 and 1600. This region has been divided between three countries and so historically marginalized, yet this book is able to trace the existence of a sense of historical regional identity cutting across national frontiers, founded on common economic interests. But that identity was always contingent and precarious, neither ‘natural’ nor immutable.
Keywords:
regional identity,
economic change,
Upper Rhine,
European organization,
regionalism,
nation state,
fifteenth century,
sixteenth century
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 1998 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198206446 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206446.001.0001 |
