The Industrial Revolution and the Regional Geography of England

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the widespread belief, shared by geographers and historians, that industrialization destroyed regional distinctiveness in England as elsewhere. After an outline of the complex regional structure of pre-industrial England, it is demonstrated that all kinds of social movements and political pressure groups were regionally fragmented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that distinctive social and cultural traits began to be recognized as characteristic of particular regions, and that people began consciously to identify themselves with the regions in which they lived. This development of regionalism in England was dependent upon the essentially regional structure of the early industrial economy which, in turn, was related to the importance of waterway transport and the sparseness and fragmentation of the canal network.

The early diffusion of the steam engine in Britain, 1700–1800: a reappraisal

“…Historians advocating the adoption of a regional perspective have actually used counties to identify the regional economic systems (Pollard 1981;Hudson 1989). Further, Langton has actually argued that the origins of economic regionalism in England are actually based on the growing autonomy of a ''county society'' during the seventeenth century, so that by the eighteenth century counties represented relatively coherent geographical units characterized by well defined and specific economic concerns and also cemented by well defined common social identities and cultures (Langton 1984). Other studies focussed on specific regional dimensions of the industrialization process such as the dynamics of wages (Hunt 1986) have used county level data.…”

“…However, this concerns only the aggregate dimensions of the diffusion process. In fact, several contributions have actually argued that a proper understanding of the processes of economic change occurring during the British industrial revolution needs to be based on a regional perspective (Pollard 1981;Langton 1984;Hudson 1989;Berg and Hudson 1992). These authors claim that industries exhibiting fast rates of output growth and extensive technical and organizational changes displayed a strong tendency towards regional concentration.…”

From town to town: how commercial travel connected manufacturers and markets during the industrial revolution

“…23 However, it does not necessarily follow that regions developed 'largely separate from one another'. 24 As McKendrick has noted, 'the prosperity of Lancashire cotton manufacturers, London brewers, Sheffield cutlers, Staffordshire potters, the toy makers of Birmingham .…”

County, Nation, Ethnic Group? The Shaping of the Cornish Identity

“…4 Nonetheless, the actual work of British regional historians still tended towards an empirical description of regional structures and a vaguely economically determinist explanation of the emergence of regional identities, reflecting the work of economic historians and historical geographers on the industrial region. 5 The 'empiricists of imagination' that Marshall had called into existence did not emerge and the 'historical growth of regional consciousness within many parts of Britain remains almost unexplored'. Furthermore, there was little sustained attempt to explore whether regions had meaning for those who lived in them or analyse the process whereby the regional 'community' was imagined.…”