Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire in 2010 (photograph by author)
By David Zylberberg
Being a historian of the Industrial Revolution who lives in the 21st century involves thinking about two worlds whose economic geography has reversed. Eighteenth and early nineteenth century industrialization was concentrated on the coalfields of northern England, central Scotland, southern Belgium and to a lesser extent northern France. Manufacturing expanded in these same regions into the twentieth century and, along with the German Rhineland, these became Europe’s industrial heartland. I cannot speak to the German case, but the steel mills, coal mines and heavy industries of the other regions declined and often disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, I write about the economic ascendency of Yorkshire when for my entire lifetime it and similar regions have been associated with economic decline, unemployment and population loss.
Yorkshire, Hainaut and the Nord-pas-de-Calais are among the traditional industrial regions of England, France and Belgium. Inside those countries, all of them are associated with traditions of heavy industry, air pollution and the more recent effects of de-industrialization. All three regions suffered with the loss of heavy industry in the 1970s and 1980s, but their fates over the last twenty years have been quite different. These differing fortunes offer insights into the long-term effects of government investment and austerity in depressed economies. Continue reading
