IN March 2002, miners surfaced from their final shift following the flooding of Scotland’s last deep mine at the Longannet complex. They brought the curtain down on a centuries-long historical saga. My new book tells the story of the end of Scottish coal mining. There were more than 100,000 workers in the coal sector alone at the industry’s peak employment during the early 1920s and still around 80,000 in the late 1950s. Whilst deindustrialisation was often a disorientating experience, in the Scottish case, it was not a sudden one.
Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland tells the story of a profound economic change that unfolded over the course of a time period approximate to a human lifetime. Its pages span the second half of the 20th century into the present, as new shifts in energy sources and employment structures threaten the security of Scottish workers and communities.