De-industrialization and Globalization

Abstract

The problem of de-industrialization has undergone a decisive transmutation in the past two decades, roughly from the moment when it was linked to proto-industrialization at the Budapest Economic History Conference in 1981. Also interacting with the remarkable efforts of Immanuel Wallerstein and his colleagues who dated the formation of a “world economic system” from the expansion of European conquest and trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its place in historical and sociological analysis rapidly transcended local concerns (such as the warmly received 1982 study by Bluestone and Harrison of the American “rust belt”) and has become an element in the overall problematique of global capitalism. Only very recently, however, have the necessary studies (and hence theoretical perspectives) formed an appropriate critical mass to integrate the concept of de-industrialization fully into the long-term history of economic globalism. We are coming to understand that the phenomenon at the tip of the tongue of every head of state and the source of massive (and lethal) protest that came to be termed “globalization” in ordinary parlance around 1990 is hardly new and, most importantly, not simply a one-way street originating in the West.