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Towards World Heritage: International Origins of the Preservation Movement, 1870–1930

Melanie Hall has brought together in this volume an excellent group of scholars, each of whom has contributed purposeful essays on international origins of the theory and practice of heritage conservation. While the literature in heritage studies has proliferated over the last decades, remarkably few publications have investigated the early social and political contexts and conceptual foundations of the discipline. This book substantially addresses this need and will be a useful and stimulating addition to seminar reading lists. It should also find a more general audience among all those practicing in the fields of heritage studies, interpretation, and management. Together with Rodney Harrison’s Heritage: Critical Approaches (2013), Hall’s well conceived and edited work provides an improved basis for more critically informed understandings of the origins of historic and scenic preservation, generally, and the changing purposes and meanings embedded in these activities. The volume’s essays were first presented in a 2006 Boston University conference intended to explore the international origins of the concept of world heritage during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hall provides an insightful introduction explaining the importance of this avenue of inquiry, noting that the “ascendancy of international cooperation on matters of ‘heritage protection’ occurred in the context of empires and during a period of enormous change” (p. 2). Indeed the origins of heritage, as an implied group inheritance, reinforcing individual and national identities, recurs as a theme throughout the volume’s essays. This is the period identified by Eric Hobsbawm for the intensity of its “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), and the authors here provide case studies and analysis on related themes of heritage invention, as it were, by churches, states, and empires. Each essay provides thoughtful analysis of the motivations and means of developing the concept of international heritage primarily through the conservation of buildings and landscapes. Hall divides the essays into two groups, “Cases Studies,” and “Framing the Practice,” with the latter group of essays emphasizing the institutionalization of heritage management under a variety of social and political frameworks. The editor’s own essay on the preservation of Niagara Falls is a fitting point of departure. As the author notes, this was the first true “international, trans-national preservation effort” (p. 3), and its significance in this regard is under appreciated. The restored and preserved landscape became a rich embodiment of a new era of Anglo-American cooperation and governance in North America during the decades following the American CivilWar.WhileHall adds little to the discussion of theNiagara preservation campaign in the U.S., she does fully examine the international, specifically Anglo-Canadian, motivations that led to the establishment of coordinated reservations on either side of the border, which she describes as an accomplishment not only of scenic preservation, but of“cultural diplomacy” (p. 39). The nature and value of this achievement was tested and proved in coming years, particularly in disputes over the regulation of the diversion of water from the falls for industrial purposes, and “provided precedence for the concept of world heritage” (p. 43). The great strength of this volume is the formidable array of scholars writing on diverse topics and case studies. Erik Goldstein, for example, contributes a fascinating account of the complex international management and preservation of the sixth-century church, the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul. Since becoming a mosque after the fall of Constantinople in heritage & society, Vol. 8 No. 2, November, 2015, 189–194