This chapter opens up a fuller discussion of how sites of socialisation outside the family reworked the meaning of stories about the past. Looking at Huddersfield, it focuses on the consequences of selective grammar schooling for disrupting ‘traditional’ attachments to working-class cultures of politics, shifting people’s class- and place-based identities and weakening the political status of memory. It explores these issues from the perspectives of both socially mobile grammar school leavers and their parents left in Huddersfield. It also highlights cases in which parents and their children concurred about these issues.

What was the contribution of European integration to the economic history of Western Europe? Also on this issue, the EU often claims to have been both important and successful while, in fact, there is surprisingly little research on its economic effects. This chapter argues that the EC did indeed contribute to growing material prosperity in the member states during the Cold War. However, this contribution remained rather modest, at well below half of 1 per cent additional GDP growth per annum. The European Community had greater weight in relative terms during the 1970s and 1980s than during the 1950s and 1960s, even this has been generally overlooked to date. It thus played a greater role once the post-war boom was over, and, without it, the slump would have been even worse. Those aspects aside, the location of the economic within the integration process remained curiously vague during the Cold War. Economic integration was on the one hand an end in itself to promote prosperity; on the other it was always just a means to achieve overarching political objectives.

The Introduction provides a guided tour of the content of the book, highlighting its main themes and historical sequences of crises and slumps. It discusses the frequency and intensity of recessions; the relationship between war and recessions; the impact of hyperinflation on economic activity; the role of currency crashes, debt, and macroeconomic crises on output; and the role played by populist political cycles in producing severe economic contractions.

This chapter summarizes the main episodes of output contraction and crises across subsequent decades and relevant sub-periods in the long twentieth century. It interprets the main findings of the book and draws lessons for the design and implementation of policies that can be effective to anticipate and cope with macrocrises and main recessions.

Chapter 4 documents the worldwide intensity and duration of the Great Depression and focuses on the causes and consequences of the Depression in center and periphery economies. It examines the role played by the gold exchange standard, the lack of an international hegemonic power to coordinate and guide an effective international response to the shock, the response of monetary and fiscal policies, the timing of leaving the gold standard, and other factors. The chapter discusses the role of price deflation in exacerbating/ameliorating economic decline and the effects of war preparation in the United States, Germany, and other countries to put these economies back in a growth track.