Regional industrialization

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The concept of regional industrialization (developed by Sidney Pollard ) assumes that in the 18th and 19th centuries it was not entire nation states that industrialized, but rather economic regions . Because the region was the essential operational territorial unit for industrialization , the industrial revolution was a regional phenomenon.

A region is an area of ​​medium size, the individual parts of which are regarded as belonging together. An economic region is independent of any kind of political border , since economic developments such as industrialization are not oriented towards national borders and the economy is still only slightly oriented towards political borders.

Between 1800 and 1914, the number of inhabitants in Germany roughly tripled. However, this increase was not evenly distributed across all parts of the country. There were some regions in Germany with very strong dynamic economic growth , while others remained almost untouched by industrialization.

For the historian , this requirement gives rise to the problem of mobilizing suitable data that is detached from political boundaries for the analysis of historical processes. Data that are completely independent of political boundaries are usually not available. This is because the data that can be used to describe the economic development of a region came and still comes mainly from the censuses of state institutions ( statistical offices and offices), and these censuses, in turn, were usually carried out on the basis of state administrative units whose boundaries are defined by the Policies were established.

See also

literature

  • Wolfgang Wüst / Tobias Riedl (eds.), Industrial Revolution. Regions in transition: Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria (Franconia 6th supplements to the yearbook for Franconian regional research) Erlangen 2013. ISBN 978-3-940049-16-2 .
  • Hubert Kiesewetter, Region and Industry in Europe 1815-1995 . Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000.
  • Toni Pierenkemper, Commerce and Industry in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Encyclopedia of German History Vol. 29) Munich 1995. ISBN 3-486-55015-2 , pp. 100–112.
  • Sidney Pollard, Region and Industrialization: Studies of the Role of the Region in Economic History over the Last Two Centuries . Göttingen 1980.