Introduction

In March 2020, the last remaining underground coal mine in Atlantic Canada was closed. Located in Donkin, Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island, the mine was owned by Kameron Collieries, a subsidiary of the United States–based Cline Group, which also runs coal operations in Alberta, Illinois, and West Virginia, among other ventures. Originally constructed in the early 1980s by the Cape Breton Development Corporation, a federal Crown corporation, but abandoned due to falling coal prices, the Donkin Mine was reopened by Kameron Collieries in 2017, with Nova Scotia Power slated as one of its primary customers. Three years later, as coal prices declined and thirteen reported rock falls triggered concerns over safety, the facility was shut down. The decision, which left 150 miners without work, came and went without significant popular concern.1 This muted response would have seemed unimaginable to many Cape Bretoners in the early twentieth century, for whom the entire economic foundation of the island’s existence was predicated upon the coal and steel industries. Indeed, it was precisely this sort of dependence and disruption that prompted community mobilizations in the 1960s to demand the nationalization of both cornerstone industries.2 Coal had been mined on the island since the early eighteenth century, while steel started production in the first years of the twentieth century. The absence of widespread concern surrounding the disappearance of the Donkin Mine suggests that a particular moment in the island’s history, one shaped deeply by carbon, class, and capitalism, was drawing to a close.

Other indications that the island is passing from an industrial to a deindustrial moment are not hard to find. Demographics tell part of the story. Between 1996 and 2016, the island’s population contracted from 158,260 to 134,124 people, or roughly 15 percent. Underway since the 1970s as Cape Bretoners sought better job prospects in manufacturing in Ontario and, until very recently, the oil patch in Alberta, this demographic decline has slowed in recent years due to the immigration of international students to Sydney, who now make up about 60 percent of the enrolment at the local university.3 Over roughly the same period, the number of children in public schools in the Cape Breton Victoria Regional Centre for Education—the island’s largest school district—has declined by nearly 70 percent, from 41, 286 (1970) to 12,680 (2016) students.4 Not surprisingly, permanent school closures have proliferated. While resilient communities remain on the island, they are often beset by challenges related to economic marginalization, including domestic violence and opioid addiction, as suggested by the 2006 documentary Cottonland and the critically acclaimed 2018 feature film Werewolf.5 In the realm of culture, the experiences of labour that once set the pace of everyday life in the industrial zones have largely slipped into memory, oral history, artistic expression, and even kitsch. In the centre of Sydney, for example—once the island’s “steel city”—an eighty-acre park occupies the site of the former steel plant. The product of a prolonged local struggle for environmental remediation, the park features historical plaques and public art that tell a particular version of the steel story. Bordering the park, many streetscapes are characterized by abandoned houses and crumbling infrastructure, especially in some of Sydney’s oldest working-class neighbourhoods such as Whitney Pier. Meanwhile, across town, a vibrant theatre community often puts working-class stories on the stage to the delight of locals and tourists alike. During the COVID-19 pandemic, one health advisory featured a retro image of a miner’s pit helmet and the message “Wash your hands like a Cape Breton coal miner coming home for dinner.” The end of industry, in other words, has a “half-life.”6 No longer dominant, its residue is manifested in a wide range of social forms—and it lasts.

It was precisely this sense of being situated at the end of an identifiable historical period—the industrial one—that prompted the two of us to wonder, How might current scholarship help us understand the era that was—now that its broad contours are clear to us? Eric Hobsbawm famously limited his study of the twentieth century to the period from the start of World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union (1914–91)—thereby positing a “short” twentieth century marked off by politics as an “age of extremes.” We have taken a somewhat different approach to the century—one that centres industrialization/deindustrialization as a broad organizing principle.7 This approach stretches our sense for the century outside a neat temporal framework and thus focuses our attention on deep trends that took hold on the island in the early to mid-nineteenth century and matured over the next 125 years. That’s our long twentieth century. This approach—moving from a short to a long century—owes much to the work of Giovani Arrighi, who argued in 1994 that capital accumulation during the 1970s and 1980s was causing unprecedented geographical shifts in productive forces, work, and prosperity. For Arrighi, whose long twentieth century begins with the emergence of American capitalist economic power into a global force, this historical period is based on the combined growth of industrial capitalism and a state apparatus designed to protect and enforce rights to property, commerce, and profit.8 Edward Ross Dickinson expands on this approach in his recent book, The World in the Long Twentieth Century: An Interpretive History, writing that “the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first is the period in which human societies were re-shaped, in an often chaotic process but in coherent ways by [ecological, technological, and social] forces.”9 Broadly speaking, this was certainly the case for Cape Breton Island. Our contributors describe, in two discrete sections, the emergence, dominance, and retreat of a particular social and economic order—that of modernist industrial capitalism. And critically, they show how the interplay of the state, cultures, and transnational connections shaped how people navigated these heavy pressures, both individually and collectively.

An island about twice the size of the province of Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton extends outward into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where that waterway opens into the North Atlantic, a lobster claw–shaped appendage to the Nova Scotia mainland. To casual observers, the island is perhaps best known for the Cabot Trail, located in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and the Celtic Colours International Festival. Both are marquee tourist experiences—although a significant golf economy, centred largely on the island’s west coast, where fishing, farming, and coal mining once dominated, is fast expanding.10 As their names suggest—with words like “Highlands” and “Celtic” prominently included—these attractions have capitalized on the island’s real and imagined Scottish past and parlayed it into highly successful visitor experiences with international “brand recognition.” As the local newspaper boasted, “New York City-based magazine ‘Travel + Leisure’ . . . ranks Cape Breton as No. 8 on a list of the world’s top island destinations.”11 Yet matching other places in Canada and around the world where “heritage” and tourism are combined, this public-facing representation of the island masks a more complex and intriguing history.

For the roughly 6,300 Mi’kmaw people who live on the island, Cape Breton is and has always been Unama’ki—one of the seven traditional districts of Mi’kma’ki and historically the seat of the Mi’kmaw Grand Council or Sante Mawiomi. Present in the Atlantic region from about 10,600 BCE, the Mi’kmaw first encountered Europeans on a sustained basis in the late fifteenth century, when Basque fishermen—who likely named the island “Cap Breton”—became a regular presence in coastal waters. As the European reconnaissance of the western hemisphere expanded in subsequent decades, an Atlantic world took shape—drawing Unama’ki/Cape Breton more deeply into a zone of colonial exchange that in time spanned the globe. French imperial dreams found concrete expression on the island beginning in 1713 with the establishment of the French-fortified town of Louisbourg. As the eighteenth century shaded into the nineteenth, the wider Atlantic system was reconfigured. The Seven Years War ended the formal French presence on the island and elsewhere, while the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars reconfigured other empires, notably the British, and redirected global commerce and emigration. By then, French-speaking settlers had returned, and for them, the island became the local site of a broader Acadian diaspora. Tens of thousands of Scottish migrants followed between 1815 and 1838. Looking out from their coastal and rural settlements, the island appeared to be a new world version of the landscape they had left behind: not Unama’ki or Acadie but Ceap Breatainn. Within a single generation of Scottish settlement, however, a process of industrialization began on the island—signalling, from our vantage point, the start of the long twentieth century.12

As the chapters that follow illustrate, the people and places linked to these deep histories were drawn into this modernizing orbit in various ways, bringing with them and transmitting forward through subsequent generations particular presences and expectations. Put simply, Unama’ki, Acadie, and Ceap Breatainn persisted, albeit in modified and divergent ways. To borrow from Margaret Conrad and James K. Hiller, the island has been made and remade, imagined and reimagined, over time.13

This multilayered understanding of the island throws into stark relief the instability of the conceptual category of “Cape Breton Island.” The generations of historians and archaeologists linked to the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site—itself a product of the island’s turn to tourism in the face of industrial collapse—understood this notion especially well. Early scholarship from this group, which included A. J. B. Johnston, Christopher Moore, Ken Donovan, and Sandy Balcom, placed a strong emphasis on the social history of French officials, soldiers, and fishing families while positioning the rise and fall of the fortress within a broader colony to nation narrative—one suitable for a national historic site under construction beginning in the 1960s amid the rise of policies of biculturalism that recognized the persistence of French-speaking cultures within Canada.14

Over time, this broad scholarly emphasis within the Cape Breton Field Unit of Parks Canada shifted from a nationalist to an Atlantic world framework, tracking one of the key trends reshaping the study of the colonial era in the region generally.15 As a result, the complexities of transatlantic influences, French-Indigenous relations, gender and identity dynamics, and slavery have come to the fore and thus challenged the relevance of the singular bounded category of “Île Royale” in the past and its value as a device to organize historical interpretation in the present. Historian Anne Marie Lane Jonah’s careful comparative consideration of the lives of the Guinea-born slave Marie Marguerite Rose and Acadian Jeanne Dugas—both of whom lived and worked at Louisbourg—underscores this point well. Their experiences, Lane Jonah concludes, “demonstrate the complexity of the community and the inadequacy of the ‘two founding nations’ narrative. Historians have pushed their research beyond the most readily available records, such as official correspondence, to be able to go past the traditional political history engrained with power, wealth, and gender biases.”16 The specific interpretive dilemmas presented by the category-stretching lives of Rose and Dugas are emblematic of the challenges of conceptualizing “pre-Confederation” Atlantic Canadian history generally. Where and how should the “geographic . . . and temporal lines of inquiry . . . be drawn?” asks Jerry Bannister in “Atlantic Canada in an Atlantic World?”17

Robert Morgan was attuned to the different ways people defined their island home historically and the difficulties this presented for the historian drawn to the analytical category of “Cape Breton Island.” A highly influential writer, archivist, and popular historian, Morgan’s two-volume, empirically driven Rise Again! argues that the island’s history represented a progressive effort at identity creation. The title of the book—as local readers understood—said it all. “Rise Again” is also the title of a song written in 1984 by Sydney-born songwriter Leon Dubinsky for the Rise and Follies of Cape Breton Island, a musical theatre review that emerged in response to the island’s economic difficulties.18 Popularized by the Rankin Family, the song offers a rousing call for Cape Bretoners to overcome adversity; it is—arguably—the island’s unofficial anthem. For Morgan, then, the history of Cape Breton Island was best explained as the incremental realization of a common, collective sense of self, a narrative in which the multiethnic, multicultural, multiclass residents came to embody a shared spirit as “Cape Bretoners” distinct and apart from Canadians, Maritimers, or Mainlanders.19

Elements of this perspective were first advanced by Ken Donovan in “Reflections on Cape Breton Culture,” which was published in 1990 as part of a collection of essays titled The Island.20 In that essay, Donovan argued that since the 1960s, a generalized, shared sense of being a “Cape Bretoner” had emerged on the island, one fashioned out of a widely shared Anglo-Celtic ancestry, common experiences of hardship, and determination to remain on an island that had rarely made life easy for anybody, whatever one’s background. Viewed broadly, both Morgan and Donovan were on to something: a meaningful collective Cape Breton identity did emerge in the 1960s and found expression in a wide range of forms, notably the community responses to the collapse of industry at the same time.21 Traditional music, art and craft, and literature carried some of this sensibility forward. Ronald Caplan’s superlative oral history project, Cape Breton’s Magazine, which ran from 1972 to 1999, provides an excellent tangible example of this lingering effect. Yet as our work on the end of the steel industry reveals, that collective sensibility was highly contingent on the economic crisis of the time and had limited reach outside the predominantly white population of the industrial communities. Moreover, without a common dependence on a shared way of life—coal or steel, for example—or an easily identified external enemy, that sensibility has changed over time, just as earlier attachments to and understandings of the island have done. “We take too readily to heart those interpretations which flatter ourselves,” Cape Breton historian Don MacGillivray wrote in 1985 while reflecting on the art of Ellison Robertson, “declining to deal with or make room for those which are more deeply questioning and ultimately more honest.”22

How then to explain or “make room” for the ways in which the island has been made and remade, imagined and reimagined over time? Variations of this question face all historians as they engage with their scholarly and political preconceptions, various historiographical traditions, and the interpretive potential of the evidence they have amassed. Our approach is rooted in large measure in the broad historiographical traditions in which we have been socialized as scholars—deindustrialization, labour and working class, and regional history. Part of the answer also lies in the scope of the individual chapters that follow. Our “call for papers” for this collection was wide open—anything that focused on the island was welcome. To our surprise and delight, most of the submissions touched upon the broad sway of industrial capitalism in some way. Had the contributors engaged with environmental history, for example, our parameters would have shifted toward the Anthropocene and incorporated longer chronologies of time, geology, evolution, and energy regimes—a framework that Claire Campbell has written about in the context of Atlantic Canada.23 As our earlier reference to Eric Hobsbawm suggests, we have found an older set of conceptual categories derived from the British Marxist tradition to be especially useful in navigating the intricacies presented by the chapters in this collection: notions of emergent, residual, and dominant cultures. Raymond Williams effectively describes the first two of these concepts in his 1977 Marxism and Literature: “The ‘residual’ . . . has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process . . . as an effective element of the present. . . . By ‘emergent,’ I mean first that new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created. But it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture . . . and those which are substantively alternative or oppositional to it.”24 “Dominant” culture, contrarily, is composed of both emergent and residual elements. This approach owes a debt to the Gramscian notion of cultural hegemony—the commonsensical support for the status quo produced by the dominance of a given group in society.25 It is not, however, all-encompassing. Williams reminds us, “It is a fact about the modes of domination that they select from and consequently exclude the full range of human practice.”26 Dominant culture is defined by the prevailing set of social and economic relations; it can be challenged or made absent from the private or metaphysical spheres, for example, or also through individual and collective action based on alternative or oppositional visions of the future. Indeed, it is from within such places that challenges to the dominant mode frequently emerge.

Sometimes the interplay of emergent, residual, and dominant cultures can be glimpsed just by walking the streetscapes in the contemporary postindustrial zones of Cape Breton Island. Plummer and Ross Avenues in New Waterford, named for Dominion Coal Company managers, now traverse a town without a single remaining colliery. Disco Street and Vulcan Avenue in Sydney, signalling the iron and steel industry, now lead toward a community green space instead of the hulking integrated steel mill. Located in the city’s historically working-class Ashby neighbourhood, Cornwallis Street, originally named after the colonial founder of Halifax, was recently renamed “Legacy Street” at the behest of Mi’kmaw activists. Cornwallis, of course, was responsible for the “scalping proclamation” that the British colonial government enacted against the Mi’kmaq population of the region.27 On a clear day, it is possible to stand on the former Cornwallis Street and see the Mi’kmaw community of Membertou, which was once located on Sydney Harbour before being moved by the state to its current location in 1926. Over the past three decades, Membertou has emerged as a consequential local and regional actor by consistently challenging the authority of municipal, provincial, and federal authorities over its day-to-day operations. Persistent treaty memories rooted in the eighteenth century, Indigenous language revitalization, and creative leadership have provided the grit upon which the community’s resurgence has found traction. Viewed broadly, the contrast between these places is striking: as the fortunes of former blue-collar areas such as New Waterford and parts of Ashby have waned, the political and economic presence of Membertou—once derided as an impediment to modern life—has surged. Here as elsewhere the industrial moment—as Fred Burrill has noted—was also a settler moment.28 That relationship is now changing in a drastic fashion: as the dominant ebbs, the residual and emergent cultures flow forward.

This sense of the past has helped us frame Cape Breton in the long twentieth century. Our thinking is represented well by the image on the book’s cover, which in our imagination evokes the changing Cape Breton landscape and the idea of generational change. In a vintage car, the driver and his passenger, maybe retirees, surveil the legacies of the long twentieth century as they travel to the Cabot Trail and reflect upon the changes they have witnessed over the decades—both formations and legacies. Inside this volume, our contributors describe, in two discrete parts, the emergence, dominance, and retreat of a particular social and economic order—that of modernist industrial capitalism. In part 1, “Formations,” the chapters explore the changing fabric of Cape Breton’s economy and culture after the industrial boom of the 1860s. This includes how settler and Indigenous cultures were affected by and responded to these massive changes. In part 2, “Legacies,” we delve more deeply into the role of the state in both cementing the industrial order and preparing for its change from a dominant into a residual culture form. This transition occurs within the context of the global industrial crisis of the late twentieth century, the concurrent turn to the tourist economy, and the ongoing deindustrialization of the island, all of which continue to impact the lives of residents.

There is a rich and illuminating body of scholarship dedicated to Cape Breton’s industrial past, and this collection is indebted to it. Part and parcel of the broader social history revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s that drew attention to neglected peoples and regions, Del Muise, Michael Earle, Don MacGillivray, Ian McKay, and David Frank wrote extensively about the origins of Cape Breton’s working class, the character of class conflict, and the dynamics of labour politics—specifically its distinctive radical expressions. Frank’s magisterial biography of coal miner and communist James Bryson McLachlan, who championed the cause of the coal miners for more than three decades in the early twentieth century, is perhaps the best-known example of the scholarship.29 In contrast, scholars studying rural Cape Breton challenged the sometimes too-neat Marxian explanations of nineteenth-century urbanization and proletarianization of rural populations. Rather than existing simply as a population of rural agrarians whose class positions were deterministically shaped by the rapid growth of coal and steel—according to authors such as Rusty Bitterman and Danny Samson—settler residents of rural Cape Breton experienced a more complicated process of class formation. In this sense, they crafted their own worlds and impacted the way in which the state of Nova Scotia came to respond to social, economic, and cultural transition. As Danny Samson argues, “The making of modernity in rural Nova Scotia was a fragmented and contested process and . . . distinct class interests led and defined a series of debates on the future direction of social development in the province. . . . While capitalist modernity emerged within the countryside, it did not do so naturally, inevitably, or unopposed.”30 Meanwhile, rural Cape Breton in the early and mid-nineteenth century was also defined by the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands, as European settlers squatted upon and were thereafter assigned legal rights to Mi’kmaq territory.31

While this collection represents an addition to this existing literature, there are several ways in which framing the island’s history through the long twentieth century signals a departure from the guiding debates of earlier scholarship. The first generation of historians who focused on Cape Breton Island were profoundly influenced by the social history turn of the “Acadiensis School.”32 Naturally, the underdevelopment thesis featured heavily in these works—frequently focusing on political economy and the myriad ways that Canadian regionalism had promoted growth in the “centre” as opposed to the “periphery.” Rather than relitigating this debate, our authors recognize regional inequality as a baseline and employ the notion as a way of approaching other national and transnational considerations. Moreover, earlier works focused extensively on both immigration and the intellectual influence of organized labour and radical politics on the island’s nascent working class and its culture. Our authors expand upon this in a variety of ways; one positions economic development within the context of a cultural Anglosphere, while others explore the influence of Black nationalism and rights-based discourse on Cape Breton culture and identity. This collection also seeks explicitly to centre the experiences of communities and cultures that have been underrepresented in the writing of twentieth-century Cape Breton history. Certainly, the literature on the island’s history has not been bereft of excellent work on race, gender, class, and ethnicity—but it is our goal to centre these histories alongside those that explore regional political economy or the white working class, which have both traditionally garnered the lion’s share of scholarly attention. In this sense, our authors bring to the foreground stories of Black steelworkers and their families in Whitney Pier, the cultural activities of the Acadian ethnic minority, and the experiences of the Mi’kmaw people in the industrial zones through the long twentieth century.

Our two guiding parts are meant to convey a sense of modernist industrial capitalism’s influence as a broad field of force and activity beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and the range of accommodations and adaptations that emerged as its power waned after World War II. Don Nerbas anchors part 1 with his discussion of the Cape Breton economy during the 1860s, when a boom in the coal industry marked a period of rapid expansion. In contrast to earlier literature, which signalled the end of the monopoly of the General Mining Association (GMA) as launching a period of free-market growth, Nerbas argues cogently that industrial development during the period was, in fact, predicated upon a deeply engrained set of colonial understandings of economic activity. For our purposes, this effectively connects the emergent forces of industrial capitalism in Canada to the residual influences of the traditional staples economy and the early coal industry that preceded it. The reach of empire can also be detected in the analysis provided by John G. Reid, which provides a bottom-up examination of leisure in an industrializing context; cricket, in his study, is explored as a space wherein gender, class, and racial identities were challenged and asserted in early twentieth-century Cape Breton.

Claudine Bonner, Ronald Labelle, and Martha Walls each take a closer look at the ways in which the dominance of industrial capitalism affected, was understood, and was challenged by three distinctive groups in Cape Breton. Bonner examines the formation of the St. Philips African Orthodox Church and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Hall in the working-class neighbourhood of Whitney Pier to reveal assertions of collective Black identity in the industrial city of Sydney. Labelle focuses on Acadian communities and identities in Industrial Cape Breton beginning in the nineteenth century and reflects on the bittersweet nature of Acadian national identity. Despite the strong efforts of the community, much of the cultural heritage of Acadian groups in the island’s industrial communities was subject to assimilation. Walls’s chapter describes the ways in which Indigenous peoples, especially women, were singled out as specific barriers to “progress” as the industrial era matured. Central to her study is the notorious expropriation of the King’s Road Reserve in Sydney, which was later renamed Membertou.

David Frank’s contribution introduces part 2 by considering the case of C. B. Wade, research director for District 26 of the United Mineworkers. By addressing the emergence of industrial legality in the 1940s and 1950s, his study provides a bridge between the collection’s two sections. Wade grappled intellectually and politically with the consequences of modernist industrial capitalism while working within a labour movement that was increasingly satisfied to accommodate the dominant culture. In the context of the Cold War, Wade’s marginalization suggests the frustration of the radical culture that the coal miners had developed over many decades. This foreshadows some of the challenges examined in later chapters. Ken Donovan’s contribution contextualizes Cape Breton’s history during the mid-twentieth century in terms of global conflict. In tracing the transatlantic experiences of a Dutch war bride, Donovan reflects upon the conditions of poverty in the wartime Netherlands and in Ingonish, Cape Breton, and considers how one woman’s experience conformed to or challenged expectations of rural women on the island. Donovan’s sensitive portrayal also reminds us that, despite the broad sway of modern industrial life emanating from Cape Breton County and elsewhere, communities “down north” retained distinctive patterns of life, labour, and loss. Not everyone was on the move to Sydney, Halifax, Toronto, Fort McMurray, or the “Boston states.” Indeed, history looks different from the countryside.33

Like Bonner, Labelle, and Walls, Heather Sparling examines how a distinctive population on the island handled the protracted socio-economic changes of the twentieth century in cultural terms. Focusing on Cape Breton’s Gaelic community, Sparling highlights the roles that cultural workers played in the collection, preservation, and transmission of Gaelic song through informal and formal networks of association and across time and space. In this way, Sparling suggests, cultural workers—who came from inside and outside the island’s Gaelic communities—looked both backward to a historical moment when Gaelic song and language was a lived reality in rural and (to a lesser extent) urban life on the island and forward to a period when the same cultural expressions provided the basis for a burgeoning tourist industry that placed a high price on authenticity. In the next chapters of the collection, Lachlan MacKinnon, Will Langford, Anne-Louise Semple, and Del Muise offer contrasting views of the island’s economic transition in the latter years of the “long twentieth century.” MacKinnon’s chapter focuses on the industrial economy in decline, homing in on a moment of conflict in the Cape Breton coal mines—the 1981 coal strike. In this account, MacKinnon reveals the changing nature of work in the deindustrializing coal mines, generational differences affecting miners and their union, and the significant pressures faced by the island’s storied industrial working class in the twilight of the long twentieth century. Langford’s piece interrogates the actions of the “development state” in Cape Breton after the 1960s—specifically, efforts to expand aquaculture in the Bras d’Or Lake. Importantly, he reflects upon the different meanings that these efforts held for Indigenous and settler communities, noting moments of conflict and acquiescence between the two groups. Muise and Semple explore this economic transition in the context of the island’s annual Celtic Colours festival, reflecting upon this annual event as a tool of a particular mode of state- and arts-led economic development.

Thinking about Cape Breton’s history in the long twentieth century presents an opportunity to reflect upon the significance of this collection for the field more broadly. The ways in which people on the island engaged in their economic practices and social world-building were heavily dependent upon which island they imagined themselves to inhabit. Cape Breton Island, Unama’ki, Île Royale, Ceap Breatainn—each came with its own set of social understandings and relationships. Of course, this is true of any settler colonial place; in all of these relations, there exist the underpinning violence of the structural displacement of Indigenous peoples, the importation and growth of industrial capitalism, and the gendered and racial dimensions of life in twentieth-century Canada. Further to this, the collection reveals how various groups dealt with the rise and fall of the industrial order. Industrialization prompted a historical moment wherein life for many residents on the island was shaped around the political economy of coal and steel. With the structural system of modernist industrial capitalism in full retreat, the remaining residents of Cape Breton have turned their collective attention to what lies ahead.

In doing so they remind us of the various ways that capitalism is routinely reformulated and reconstructed in available spaces over time. If one form of modernist capitalism has subsided, alternatives are constantly surfacing—whether in the form of successful Indigenous communities, tech-driven knowledge and service economies, speculative bubbles in the (relatively) inexpensive local housing market in the aftermath of the COVID-19 global pandemic, or the much-touted tourist economy. Likewise, the challenges facing us all as we collectively shift closer to a global environmental crisis are coming to bear on daily life on the island. Rising global temperatures and sea levels have produced high rates of coastal erosion, which threaten small communities, local economies, and national historic sites and parks. Weather patterns continue to dramatically shift. Between 2016 and 2022, Cape Breton experienced two extreme weather events—a major flood that destroyed a portion of a neighbourhood in Sydney’s south end and Hurricane Fiona, which left many islanders without electricity for more than a week and crippled infrastructure for much longer. Whatever the shape of Cape Breton’s history in the twenty-first century, it will require the formulation of new identities, solidarities, and practicalities that rise to meet these challenges. Whether or not these things also contain the seeds of their own destruction, they will also certainly produce their own tensions and oppositional impulses—which may spur new opportunities to “Rise Again.” Historians and other scholars, too, are part of this process, not least because we may identify the formations and legacies that proved valuable in the past and may provide support for whatever reconstructions inevitably follow.