Rachel King, UCL Institute of Archaeology & University of the Witwatersrand

Unpacking the entanglement of heritage, loss, and growth in the 20th century

For a field preoccupied with value, heritage studies overall has seen rather less engagement with economic history than one might expect. The turn of the millennium saw mounting anxieties over the pitfalls of cultural commodification in an increasingly inter-connected world: loss of cultural knowledge through mass production and consumption; essentialised ethnicities that were up for grabs by politicians and markets alike; and the perennial concern over a loss of ‘authenticity’ that so vexes those invested in circumscribed notions of heritage (see e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 2010). This wave of scholarship was arguably about the economics of heritage at a particular moment in time but it did not concern itself with economics in the sense of trying to understand how value has been produced and consumed within specific markets and their logics, or through the distinct financial instruments and mechanisms that have emerged as influential transnationally.

My point here is: if, as Trinidad Rico and I (2024, pp. 1–2) have recently argued, heritage is best understood as a value-making practice then it makes sense to consider how value-making works within specific economic regimes, paradigms, institutions in specific historical contexts.

I’m not the first to make this observation, and I’ve drawn inspiration from work by Kat Lafrenz Samuels (2018), Sophia Labadi (2022), and Albino Jopela (2017) on how heritage values have been negotiated within specific global institutions (the World Bank, UNESCO) and development paradigms (‘the cultural turn’, the sustainable development era, etc.). Jopela’s (2017) doctoral work locates these institutional processes within a historical trajectory of regional solidarity in southern Africa: first during the liberation period, and then during the push to memorialise transnational and national liberation heritage sites in the twenty-first century. For me, Jopela’s research joins historical research by Will Carruthers (2022) and Marie Huber (2021) in delineating how heritage-making – in its most bureaucratic sense – could serve as a vehicle for Cold War-era geopolitical and financial manoeuvring.

There is currently a surge of interest in studies of Cold War heritage politics (and their legacies), but a perspective centring African histories must take cognisance of another major transformative period on the continent: the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) rolled out during the 1980s that compelled African governments – many of which had only achieved sovereignty within the preceding 10-20 years – to roll back state services as a condition of development financing (among other measures). In my latest book, The Neoliberalisation of Heritage in Africa (2025) I drew together literature from economics, political science, geography, anthropology, history, and archaeology to outline how the SAPs and related neoliberal market logics have re-shaped the role of public heritage in different contexts on the continent.

Among other takeaways, this work has driven home the fact that development eras never really end – both because their material legacies continue (where state functions are performed by NGOs, where households are encouraged to provide their own utilities rather than expect this of government, etc.) and because of specific mechanisms that perpetuate them. For one, The Continent reported in 2023 on the Investor-State Dispute settlement system, wherein private companies can sue African countries to protect investments made in those countries, with fossil fuels given special protections (Ebikeme, 2023). The corollary, then, is that African nations must mortgage their sovereignty over regulatory matters to do with protecting their environments, cultural resources, and climate change targets in order to avoid legal penalties in the millions or even billions of USD – a rather different scenario to recent criticisms of development histories portraying these as benevolent, one-sided, or outdated. These legacies, too, are a form of heritage.

My position, then, is that close attention to the specifics of economic history can illuminate heritage value-making within economic frameworks, and that this approach is useful both for understanding large and pervasive global systems, as well as more localised processes.

A useful illustration of this – and the subject of my next book, Salvage: Who Pays for the Disappearing Past? – is the polluter pays principle (PPP), which has been foundational to the creation of the cultural resource management industry worldwide. The Valetta Convention is often cited as a sea-change event that heralded the arrival of the PPP with respect to archaeology: the Convention compelled developers to mitigate their archaeological impacts, and effectively created the development-led archaeology sector in Europe (Kristiansen 2009).

But there is a deeper and more varied set of histories here. In its European context, the PPP was promulgated in 1972 as part of an approach aimed at facilitating and tracking economic growth across – among other things – the member nations of the European Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and other transnational institutions (Schmelzer, 2016). One of the key tenets of the PPP here was that as a market-based instrument it offered a way to manage environmental fall-out from development projects in a way that kept associated costs stable across political borders (Meyer, 2017). The PPP allowed developers, environmentalists, and states to, in theory, have it all : capital could flow, economies could grow, and all without destroying the planet.

If this sounds mis-guided in hindsight, the OECD was not alone in this belief: successive global environmentalist summits from the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment to the 1992 Earth Summit (where the PPP was codified as convention Principle 16 of the Rio Declaration) all adopted an approach to conservation premised on the idea that we could find technical, scientific solutions to allow continued industrial growth within the limits of Earth’s carrying capacity. Hence why, when we stop to think about it, the PPP is so aspirational in design and so neoliberal in execution: polluters should be responsible for avoiding and limiting impacts, but these impacts and associated mitigations are costed according to market forces (even in the most heavily regulated contexts) which will always affect development’s bottom line.

The 1992 Earth Summit produced the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which codified the PPP and other associated principles in support of sustainable development. Image CC, author unattributed.

The policies and instruments I have just described were conceived of with respect to natural heritage rather than cultural heritage. The former has been folded into the PPP framework via different political, legal, and financial processes across the globe. In many African countries, for instance, conditions imposed by international lenders from the 1980s onward have compelled states to adopt specific measures for assessing environmental and cultural impacts. The implementation of these has varied widely, with similarly wide-ranging impact for development-affected people and their heritage, as I reviewed in The Neoliberalisation of Heritage in Africa.

Globally, though, the outcome of the PPP framework is inevitably a weighing-up of (notional) economic progress against things that are simply not measurable by the same costs or metrics: attachments to place, archaeological contexts, bioarchaeological data, connections with ancestors, and more. The most poignant illustration of this perverse weighing-up lies in cases where ancestors have been exhumed, reburied, and relocated so that industrial development can proceed, which Dineo Skosana (2025) describes as a trauma that is (at least in South Africa) a continuation of multi-generational violence and expropriation.

South Africa’s Medupi Power Station, which was subject to massive protest for continued global investment in fossil fuels and for environmental and heritage injustices. Image CC, JMK.

For anyone who thinks that green or blue economies will resolve this, space doesn’t permit me to explain why this is not to be; details to come in my new book Salvage. Given the state of our myriad environmental and economic crises, the time is right for archaeology and heritage management to reflect carefully on our place within this system – recognising that these are professions that many have entered because of a desire to protect and preserve, but also considering where we can challenge out-dated beliefs in economic growth that underlies them.

Bibliography

Carruthers, W. (2022) Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology. Cornell University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501766466.

Comaroff, J.L. and Comaroff, J. (2010) Ethnicity, Inc. 2. print. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press (Chicago studies in practices of meaning).

Ebikeme, C. (2023) ‘The secretive colonial tribunal crushing Africa’s reforms’, The Continent. 129th edn, 17 June, pp. 26–27.

Huber, M. (2021) Developing heritage - developing countries: Ethiopian nation-building and the origins of UNESCO World Heritage, 1960-1980. München Wien: De Gruyter Oldenbourg (Africa in Global History, 1).

Jopela, A. (2017) The politics of liberation heritage in postcolonial southern Africa, with special reference to Mozambique. PhD thesis. University of the Witwatersrand.

King, R. (2025) The Neoliberalisation of Heritage in Africa. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009435321.

Labadi, S. (2022) Rethinking Heritage for Sustainable Development. London: UCL Press.

Lafrenz Samuels, K. (2018) Mobilizing heritage: anthropological practice and transnational prospects. Gainesville: University press of Florida (Cultural heritage studies).

Meyer, J.-H. (2017) ‘Who should pay for pollution? The OECD, the European Communities and the emergence of environmental policy in the early 1970s’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 24(3), pp. 377–398. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1282427.

Rico, T. and King, R. (2024) ‘Introduction: epistemic journeys’, in R. King and Trinidad# Rico (eds) Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies. UCL Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800083790.

Schmelzer, M. (2016) The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316452035.

Skosana, D. (2025) No Last Place to Rest: Coal Mining and Dispossession in South Africa. Wits University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.18772/12025039292.

Rachel King is Associate Professor in Cultural Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and honorary researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests include historical and contemporary archaeology, African Studies (with a focus on southern Africa), heritage in and for development, and critical approaches to knowledge production in the historical sciences. Her most recent publications include Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies (co-edited with Trinidad Rico) and The Neoliberalisation of Heritage in Africa.

Unnatural Economies