Modern Historical Preservation--Towards a Global Perspective

Abstract

This volume is devoted to reconsidering the history of historical preservation from an international perspective. 1 Even though the origins of modern preservationism are often traced back to early eighteenth-century Europe, the aim is to address the broader factors behind the global spread of this changing historical sensibility toward ancestral pasts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How, why, and in what form these diverse conservation practices developed in various international settings is the departure point of enquiry. The modern ‘hunger for heritage’ is commonly understood as a cultural by-product of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, which fundamentally altered the perceived relationship between past and present, first in Europe and then in the wider world. While the European roots of this modern political interest in heritage arguably originated with the Swedish Royal Proclamation of 1666, which declared all objects from antiquity to be the property of the Crown, and the 1717 creation of England’s Society of Antiquaries some fifty years later, it was really the ‘dual revolution’ that generated these broader transformations of historical consciousness and claims of political stewardship toward pasts deemed worth preserving. 2 After all, it was during the French Revolution that vast numbers of royal, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical buildings came under new state ownership, sparking wide discussion about the making of a new ‘national’ French past; and it was the Industrial Revolution that inspired the romance of ruins that shaped much of nineteenth-century cultural life, as evidenced in the creation of national museums, cathedral restoration projects, and national park movements, as well as the Victorian cult of antiquities and ancient civilizations. As industrialization spread to other parts of the European continent and North America, so too did the urge to protect relics of the past from the ravages of modernization.

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