Deindustrialization studies have been characterized by methodological nationalism. There are at least two explanations for this. First, in most countries, redundancies arising from closures of mines, mills, and factories have been the visible face of deindustrialization, with less public attention to incremental contraction, a much greater source of lost employment. Second, because closures were always place-specific, their negative impact was experienced intensely at the community level. Political unease relating to deindustrialization therefore tended to have local, regional, or national foci. In a foundational text, published in 1999, Jefferson Cowie used the case of RCA to show how this made deindustrialization so difficult to resist. Community-based protests were powerless, in an economic environment where RCA could move operations across state lines within the USA, from New Jersey to Indiana, and then across national frontiers to Mexico. Cowie’s book was fittingly titled Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-year Quest for Cheap Labor.

Subsequent scholarship has tended to concentrate more on deindustrialization’s immediate effects and longer-running consequences than its broader economic and political frameworks. Recognizing this, Steven High and Stefan Berger position The Industrial Politics of Industrial Closure as an important intervention. “Scaling up our analysis,” they pushed a big team with 24 other authors to collaborate in small groups, integrating region- and nation-specific perspectives in thematic-based transnational studies (p. 7). The editors led this task as acknowledged researchers in the field. High is the principal investigator of “Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time,” or DePOT, funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Berger directs the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

The book has 12 chapters. Seven directly advance the editors’ ambitions. Organized thematically, they explain commonalities and differences in three or more countries, permed from Britain (sometimes focusing on Scotland or Northern Ireland), Canada, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the USA. Chapter 4, for instance, takes the theme of resistance. “The history of deindustrialization is the history of protest,” it begins, before focusing on closures in steel, coal, and automobile manufacture across five countries (p. 115). National contexts are explored in time periods distinguished by the changing international political economy: “growth,” 1950–1970; “crisis,” 1970–1990; and “triumphant neoliberalism,” since 1990. Analysis is then refined through discussion of the protagonists, the spaces (peripheries versus centers), and the forms of resistance.

Six other chapters share this multi-author, transnational approach, and thematic structure: on spatial dynamics, looking at geography and uneven economic development (Chapter 1); “explanations,” ranging across political orientations of governments, technological innovations, and business decisions, particularly those taken by multinationals (Chapter 2); the state management of closures (Chapter 3); populism and “nativist” political responses to closures (Chapter 5); the politics of closures in textiles, where the gendered exploitation of women employees in the sector internationally was compounded by political indifference to the loss of women’s jobs (Chapter 7); and “dispossession” of economic resources across the capitalist world (Chapter 12).

Of the other five chapters, three focus on just two countries: on deindustrializing countrysides (Chapter 6); campaigns to save steel production and employment (Chapter 8); and the complications facing industrial museums arising from deindustrialization (Chapter 9). Valuable perspectives nevertheless arise, although without the same transnational reach as other chapters. There are two more chapters, intriguing outliers, the value of which could have been spelled out more clearly. The first is an art project in Italy, which indirectly highlights the losses to manual workers arising from deindustrialization. It places images of twenty-first century migrants, employed in warehousing, retail, and sex work, within photographs of mid-twentieth century proletarians (Chapter 10). The second is a short photo essay from Germany’s deindustrialized Ruhr coal region, highlighting the continued presence and reminders of the industry despite closures, with images, inter alia, of abandoned surface buildings, wind turbines, and a memorial to mine workers (Chapter 11).

What do we learn from this varied and impressive collection? Closures were painful for those who experienced them. They were managed most carefully, or least carelessly, by social democratic national or regional governments, where they related to sectors with higher trade union density, and where men formed the overwhelming portion of the workforce affected (coal and steel especially). Reflecting further, perhaps three broad categories of closure are inferred, although not explicitly stated. First, there are closures which were programmed (my term) by policy-makers, generally in basic industries where the state was the employer or at least chief user or sponsor. These closures involved mass redundancies over multiple sites, with hundreds of thousands of workers affected. Second, there are closures which were designed (my term again) by businesses, adjusting to changing market conditions and new technological possibilities, or to secure new locational advantage such as proximity to markets or, more commonly, cheaper labor. Third, there are closures which stemmed from business failure, with financial losses making continued operations impossible.

The sectoral focus in The Politics of Industrial Closure means that we learn more about programmed closures than those which stemmed from business decisions and failures. This raises a final observation about the relationship between business history and deindustrialization studies. There are important methodological and practical challenges associated with business histories of deindustrialization, not least in accessing firm-level archive materials. Oral history investigation and careful study of local, regional, and national government records can often offset this difficulty. In any case, and by whatever means, further investigation of business strategy and decision-making will illuminate further the transnational history of deindustrialization which High, Berger, and their colleagues have successfully advanced in this book.