Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
by a downswing, which is characterized by high prices for resources and a lack of
innovation in the economy.
The first of these waves is thought to have occupied the period 1780-1840,
although a case could be made that movement towards it was started many
decades earlier in such embryonic industrial regions as Birmingham and
Manchester. The expansive or upswing phase, from 1780 to 1820, saw the
introduction of new technology for textile processing, and the first of what we
would recognize as modern factories. Power use moved from water power to
steam, and transport, after 1820, from canals to railways. In this period, the
concentration of industry began on the coalfields of Lancashire in England and
Lanarkshire in Scotland, as well as in the metropolis of London. In this way,
manufacturing industry changed from what it had always been, a dispersed
activity in mostly rural surroundings, scattered across many parts of the country,
to a concentrated activity which brought wealth and also many environmental
and social problems to particular cities and urban regions. From 1820 to 1840,
there was a period of high prices for farm goods and raw materials generally, and
the apparent progress of industrialization was slower.
From the time of this first growth period, there was the emergence of a sectoral
concentration of industry. For the textiles industry, a leader in the period, the
Lancashire cotton industry, demonstrates this spatial-sectoral concentration. As
Stamp & Beaver (1954) showed in their classic geography of Britain, this grew
up in the eighteenth century, pushed ahead when American cotton began to be
used, and over the nineteenth century evolved into a spatially structured industry.
Spinning was carried out mostly in the towns around Manchester, weaving in the
spread of towns from Preston in the west to Nelson Colne in the east, and
finishing and marketing concentrated in Manchester itself. The many hundreds
of firms in the early industry constituted a flexible structure where all sorts of
special cloths could be made by individual firms to order, and large orders shared
amongst many. This was a first industrial district. It might be noted, however
(see also Ch. 3), that this flexible specialization would not save the industry in
the long run, for it has almost disappeared in the post-war period.
In the second Kondratiev wave, from about 1840 to 1895, a further set of
technological innovations were introduced, including processes for large-scale
steelmaking and the many downstream applications of steel in engineering
industries such as shipbuilding, as well as development of the steam engine
especially for use with railways, which themselves incorporated a stream of
innovations. The period came to an end with recession, a financial and business
crisis, and high prices for farm goods and minerals.
Regional concentration of industry continued, and continued to favour all the
major coalfields, including the Staffordshire fields linked to pottery and
engineering, the South Wales area linked to iron-making and coal export, and the
coalfields of Northumberland and Durham linked to shipbuilding. All
these attracted the most able people of their time into the rapidly progressing
industries. They also attracted many other migrants, surplus to needs in the
