The Industrial Revolution and Industrial Regions

Where industry came from

Before the mid-1700s most manufacturing in Europe was cottage industry: households spun and wove at home, paid by the piece, with production limited by human muscle. The Industrial Revolution replaced this with the factory system, where power, machines and workers were concentrated in one building.

It began in Britain because four things happened in the same place: coal fields next to iron ore, a steam engine that turned coal into rotary power, capital accumulated from trade and colonies, and enclosure that pushed rural labour into towns.

Why regions, not scattered plants

Early industry was tied to coal, because coal was heavy and expensive to move. Factories clustered on coalfields, and clustering itself became an advantage: shared suppliers, a pool of trained labour, and knowledge that leaks between firms. Alfred Marshall called these agglomeration economies.

The result is that manufacturing is not spread evenly. It appears as a small number of dense industrial regions: the English Midlands, the Rhine-Ruhr, the North American Manufacturing Belt, the Kanto plain, and later the Pearl River Delta.

Fordism, post-Fordism, deindustrialisation

Fordism means mass production of standard goods on an assembly line, in large vertically integrated plants, with relatively high union wages. Post-Fordism means flexible production: smaller batches, just-in-time delivery, outsourced components, and production split across many countries.

When core regions lose manufacturing employment to cheaper locations, the process is deindustrialisation, and the abandoned region is called a Rust Belt. Governments answer with growth poles, special economic zones and export processing zones that offer tax breaks and duty-free imported components.