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“The Wounds of Class”: A Historiographical Reflection on the Study of Deindustrialization, 1973–2013
Author(s) -
High Steven
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
history compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.121
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1478-0542
DOI - 10.1111/hic3.12099
Subject(s) - deindustrialization , scholarship , historiography , politics , mill , resistance (ecology) , sociology , political science , political economy , social science , history , economy , economics , law , ecology , biology , archaeology
This article examines 40 years of multi‐disciplinary scholarship on deindustrialization in North America and the United Kingdom. This field of research emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a political response to successive waves of mill and factory closures that devastating industrial towns and cities, displacing millions. A way of life seemed to be passing out of existence. Why was this happening? What did it mean? Could it be stopped? This essay identifies three distinct waves of scholarship: an initial activist generation of scholars who worked with the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, the cultural turn towards the meaning of deindustrialization in the early 2000s, and the socio‐cultural exploration of working‐class culture in a post‐industrial age. As we will see, the scholarly focus has broadened from the causes of industrial decline and resistance to job loss, to its effects and long‐term consequences.