Regional Identity and Economic Change: The Upper Rhine 1450-1600 - Hardcover

Tom Scott has written a learned, well-reasoned, and sophisticated piece of scholarship with a superbly detailed bibliography. This book offers much to someone interested in the Upper Rhine and in economic development in preindustrial Europe. (Sixteenth Century Journal)

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'? Tom Scott 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 Dr Scott 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.