In 1989, British Petroleum (BP) made the largest onshore investment in the company’s 72-year history in Scotland by expanding its Grangemouth petrochemical complex. Construction and operation were promised to generate between 1,200 and 1,500 jobs, but upon the project’s completion, over 1,000 industrial jobs were lost in the town, and employment never increased. This research explains this outcome by embedding it within a history of post-World War II deindustrialization and engaging with E.P. Thompson’s moral economy and the concept of “noxious deindustrialization”: expanding environmentally destructive capacity and shrinking industrial employment. It illuminates what the buildup and later transgression of moral economy promises looked like for a town experiencing rapid but fragile expansion on the back of petrochemicals, a modern, highly toxic, and land-intensive industry. Using oral history and archive study, the research establishes the presence of noxiousness in Grangemouth from the mid-twentieth century onward. Between 1951 and 1970, industrialization, urban expansion, and paternalistic corporate practices shaped customary notions that embedded the petrochemical sector into the community, justifying concerns about pollution, smells, and the industry’s intensive requirements on land. Between 1970 and 1989, the moral economy was transgressed as the planning system was dismantled and BP’s welfarist responsibility to Grangemouth lessened under economic liberalization. Amid growing environmental concerns globally, noxiousness became intolerable. Noxious deindustrialization accelerated with changes in energy prices, consolidation of private power, and discovery of North Sea oil, leading to company restructuring and job cuts in BP Chemicals. Consequently, the link between employment, population growth, and economic security broke down.

The city of Gelsenkirchen, a center of mining located in the most industrialized part of Germany, the Ruhr region in the west, had the dubious honor of inspiring a mocking name for interior design: from the 1930s onward, the heavy, ornate furniture the working class showed a taste for was known as “Gelsenkirchen Baroque,” a term that lampooned how an ascending group did not know the difference between propriety and pompousness. While the city of Gelsenkirchen forged a “Barock Krieg” to eradicate the term in the 1950s, it chose a more successful strategy to change the feeling rules toward Gelsenkirchener Barock in the early 1990s. With the city grappling with the consequences of deindustrialization, the municipality aimed at rehabilitating its image and the original pride of the furniture’s working-class owners by celebrating a Gelsenkirchener Barock festival, the city’s biggest PR initiative to this day. Marrying conceptual history, emotions history, and design history with social history, the article goes beyond the individual case study and shows that to understand taste-making processes, the emotional politics they entailed are crucial. The highly emotional debates over value and taste in specific historical and spatial contexts are vital for grasping the development and change of feeling rules.

Labor in the textile and garment industry is at the heart of a series of recent books on South Asia. Together these books document the different scales at which textile and garment work has been structured and restructured over the last century, and its implications for workers, their health as well as collective solidarity. Across the countries of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, the industry developed and declined in vastly different temporalities and rhythms. Yet, as these works reveal, workers have often been confronted with similar challenges brought on by the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial development. In each case, textile and garment workers have been forced to navigate transitions to premature deindustrialization, closure, or national/transnational industrial policy changes. The books center workers and their long “post”-industrial or industrial “afterlives,” as they cope with the dramatic changes in the global manufacturing of textile and garment.

Scholars of various backgrounds have noted how societies across the globe have come to rely on more and more policing and incarceration since the late 1970s. To date, however, detailed analyses of the causes and consequences of this “punitive turn” have been limited to the Global North, with the vast majority of studies focused on the expansion of states’ capacity for violence. This article offers a corrective to the global study of the punitive turn by tracing the rise of South Africa’s private security industry from its inception in the late apartheid period to its current position as one of the largest of its kind in the world. Using newspaper reports, archival material from the apartheid state’s security apparatus, and ethnographic interviews of former and current members of the security industry, it shows how counterinsurgency doctrine, civil war, and deindustrialization shaped South Africa’s punitive turn, precipitating a process where violence was devolved from the state to private actors, including local militias, vigilante groups, and private security firms. This process, it is argued, is far from anomalous, and should be seen as a paradigm for the way the post-1970s punitive turn has unfolded in the majority of the world.

This article explores the long roots of swadeshi (economic self-reliance) in nineteenth-century India, focusing on attempts at industrial revival through pedagogical institutions, exhibitions, and associations. These roots, which influenced the Swadeshi Movement and Gandhian swadeshi activity in the early twentieth century, demonstrate how it is impossible to understand swadeshi without taking an extensive global perspective. Indian thinkers engaged in contemporary global economic debates and with British imperial deliberations on free trade and protection; they fine-tuned comparative perspectives on the Indian economy through international travel and their readings of global history. In a similar spirit, Indians forged core swadeshi techniques through observing associational, institutional, and technological innovations across the British empire and the wider world. History was a powerful motivating force. Popular conceptions of deindustrialization under colonial rule fired Indians’ imaginations about a past when the country was a global powerhouse for manufactured exports—and directly stimulated specific swadeshi endeavours. Situated at the confluence of profit-making and patriotism, swadeshi enterprise in the nineteenth century created some unexpected alliances: between Britons and Indians, colonial officials and nationalists, and urban intellectuals and small-town entrepreneurs.

In this article, we explore the impact of colliery closure programs across the nationalized British coal industry. We chart the regional disparities in these and the mobilization of community opposition to national protests, leading to the national miners’ strikes of 1972, 1974, and 1984–5. This article demonstrates how closures have changed the industrial politics of mining unions for miners, junior officials, and managers and have increasingly alienated NCB officials and mining communities. We demonstrate how this undermined the ideals of nationalization. This is examined through moral economic frameworks and within the context of changes to the UK’s energy mix, with implications for contemporary deliberations on public ownership, energy transitions, and regional development.

This introduction sets out the context for the special feature on gender and deindustrialization. It briefly outlines the development of research in this field and the contribution made by the articles included in this issue, before pointing to some directions for future research.

This contribution takes stock of the growing research on deindustrialization from a gender perspective. Much of the work in deindustrialization studies is rooted in local studies, within single national contexts. This article provides a perspective that cuts across case studies and national historiographies. It reviews findings on the implications of deindustrialization for working-class masculinities and considers the extent to which research has privileged a focus on white masculinity in crisis (a theme which is more present in some national contexts than others). The article goes on to show how a more complex and nuanced understanding of gender, class, and race is emerging. It highlights women workers’ experience of deindustrialization and considers the ways in which deindustrialization is associated with a restructuring of gender relations. Acknowledging some of the limitations of the current state of research, the article points to a number of potential avenues for further enquiry.

This article stems from a project aiming to investigate women's unemployment in the phase of deindustrialization that affected Western European countries from the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis. Countries such as Italy and France, with both a strong working-class movement and a vibrant feminist movement, have had to face economic crises since the mid-seventies and from the eighties have witnessed how neoliberal capitalism started to heavily reshape the global labor market. The old stereotype of female salary as ‘pin money’ within the household budget was again publicly put forth. How did women experience unemployment? What did it mean in terms of their social status, economic independence, sense of self, relationship to the home? To answer these questions and to understand the reconfiguration of class and gender identities, I focus on two milestone cases of labour struggles that are recognized as turning points in the history of the affirmation of neoliberal dynamics: the crisis of FIAT in Italy and of LIP in France. Despite their being at the center of many academic investigations as fundamental sites of resistance, their outcomes in terms of unemployment and particularly the gender dimension of this phenomenon have been largely overlooked so far. I will delineate a comparison between the two cases by drawing on my past research about trade union feminism in the two countries, on archival sources, published accounts and oral histories of two key activists in these struggles. Key factors that will be analysed are: women's participation in the collective mobilisations in the face of unemployment, their relation to the domestic sphere and to care work, their ability to build female networks within their wounded communities.

With a modified formalization of Heckscher–Ohlin theory as the basis of a novel econometric specification, this paper uses worldwide data over three decades to estimate how the effects of greater openness on industrialization vary among countries with differing endowments of land relative to labour. The results confirm the theoretical prediction that greater openness reduces manufactured output shares in land-abundant countries, while increasing them in land-scarce countries. The implications of these results for trade and development policy are debatable.

The rise of crack cocaine in the late 1980s propelled the war on drugs. The experience of Canton, Ohio, shows how the response to crack solidified mass incarceration. A declining industrial city of 84,000 people in northeast Ohio with deep-seated racial divides, it was overwhelmed by aggressive, enterprising crack dealers from outside the city. In response, politicians and residents united behind the strategy of incessant arrests and drastic prison sentences. The law-enforcement offensive worsened conditions while pursuing African Americans at blatantly disproportionate rates, but few people engaged in reframing the drug problem. Instead, a punitive citizenry positioned punishment as the principal remedy. The emergency foreclosed on more comprehensive assessments of the city’s tribulations, while the criminal justice system emerged as the paramount institution.

Current explanations of demand for anti-dumping protections focus on the role of the business cycle, and fluctuations in real exchange rates. However, empirical evidence supporting these explanations is based primarily on the experience of industrialized countries. Here, we examine anti-dumping petitions in a broader sample of thirty-four industrialized and middle income countries from 1978–2015. We also propose a new determinant of demand for anti-dumping petitions—changes in the pattern of industrial production between developed and developing economies over this period have contributed to deindustrialization in advanced economies and premature industrialization some developing countries. These changes threaten established industries and motivate them to demand protection.