Introduction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Far from simply being a ‘bookend’ of the industrial age, deindustrialization is an integral part of capitalist development and thus has a long history. In the North American context, the early scholarship on deindustrialization emerged from the efforts to resist plant closures as they were happening. More recently, the field of deindustrialization studies has been reinvigorated by authors who have shifted the centre of gravity from the US Rust Belt to Europe and increasingly to other parts of the world. This introduction traces the emergence and recent transformations in the field of deindustrialization studies. It also introduces this themed issue on the politics of deindustrialization, which tells the stories of shuttered mines, mills, and factories within the wider restructuring of the international division of labour in the late twentieth century. The articles, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, extend outward to how workers, their unions, state actors, and the general public responded to the challenge of deindustrialization. The authors are all affiliated with the ‘Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time’ (DePOT) research project (deindustrialization.org), which brings together many of the world’s leading deindustrialization scholars to put the field in transnational perspective. By extending the range of comparisons and scales of analysis, this special-themed issue invites us to broaden our understanding of deindustrialization, both thematically and methodologically.