Race, gender, and deindustrialisation in Britain
This paper will examine the impact of deindustrialisation on Black women’s labour in Britain. In 1951, Britain was responsible for a quarter of the world’s exports in manufactured goods. By 1980, this had shrunk to 7.9 per cent. As deindustrialisation took hold in industrial cities, job losses disproportionately affected the black and South Asian population in Britain, many of whom were readily absorbed into the manufacturing sector in the immediate post-war decades. And yet, historians have not interrogated the impact of deindustrialisation on black women in Britain. While Black and South Asian women were victims of redundancies in factories and thousands lost their jobs in the manufacturing sector, the employment crisis of the early 1980s and the loss of manufacturing jobs were matched by the rise of roles opening up in the ‘feminised’ service sector, which softened the blow of job losses and redundancies Building on the rise of think-thank reports and surveys published on race and labour at the time, this paper demonstrates the racialised implications of deindustrialisation in post-war Britain.
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This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
