Paper Short Abstract:

Examining the closure of textile mills in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the southern coast of India, and its parallel reinvention as a tourist attraction at the end of the 20th century, this paper argues for non-metropolitan histories of structural economic change in the global South.

Paper Abstract:

Large metropolitan cities have typically served as the point of empirical reference for histories of industrial change in India. The development of the composite textile mill was at the heart of Indian industrialization in the 20th century. Its decline towards the end of the 20th century and the far-reaching impact on large cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, is well documented. But the closure of textile mills was equally consequential for many medium and small cities in India such as Pondicherry, Indore, Hisar and Nagpur, even if their vagaries did not always register at the macroeconomic level. How do the histories of non-metropolitan places extend and alter our understanding of the variegated realities of deindustrialization within India and beyond? How do differing legal and political regimes, regional histories and economic contexts shape how places experience, absorb, respond to and remember structural economic change?

Using secondary and archival sources, the paper excavates the closure of textile mills in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the southern coast of India, and its parallel ongoing reinvention as a site of (colonial) heritage tourism at the end of the 20th century. It argues, further, for theorising deindustrialization from the global South, where legacies of colonialism and globalisation have decisively influenced postcolonial economic trajectories. Extending deindustrialization studies beyond its origins in the North Atlantic reveals new modalities and temporalities of deindustrialization. What are the implications of these asymmetries, between the global North and South, and between the metropolis and the province, for our understanding of deindustrialization?