The Politics of Industrial Closure: Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time

By Steven High and Stefan Berger

The Politics of Industrial Closure explores how the political consequences of neoliberal globalization have led to the decline of industrial regions across Western Europe and North America.
Co-editors and historians Steven High and Stefan Berger, and the team of contributors, depict that deindustrialization and its legacies have long-term impacts by diving into its ongoing manifestations and aftermaths. With collaboratively written chapters exploring Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, this volume examines the impacts of deindustrialization, demonstrating that it is an uneven geographical, spatial, and temporal process. This study transcends the local and regional investigations that often predominate deindustrialization studies, and the wider transnational and cross-national perspective of this work highlights the ways that geography matters in the deindustrialization process. This collection pursues diverse avenues of investigation into deindustrialization in hopes to understand the deep roots of recent, universal, and political phenomena.
The Politics of Industrial Closure considers deindustrialization as yet another form of dispossession within global capitalism and seeks to break out of a unitary understanding of the problem of deindustrialization.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1049800559
• ISBN13: 9781049800554
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Length: 420 Pages