Industrial village

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In historical research, industrial villages are defined as locations that, due to increased and accelerated growth ( urbanization ) during the industrialization process, have undergone rapid socio-cultural and socio-economic change, and a few decades earlier they had existed as pure farming villages for centuries. It is a phenomenon of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

character

Industrial villages emerged during the economic consolidation of European regions of early and proto-industrialization, for example in Saxony, Upper Silesia, on the Rhine and Ruhr, in the Bergisches Land or in the German southwest, but also in England and Wales, in Flanders and Brabant. They were characterized by the recording of large parts of the population through a certain type of production of a certain mass and consumer product, such as in the publishing system of the weavers, the spinners and yarn manufacturers, the metal processing industry or the mining industry.

Decisive were the pasts and historical starting positions of the respective production locations, which only one or two generations previously were exclusively or predominantly determined by agricultural production for the local or regional customer market, but whose inhabitants now mainly produced on an industrial or proto-industrial basis for a supra-regional market. The demographic development was explosive in parallel due to internal migration or immigration; from a few hundred inhabitants, the population increased to several 10,000 people. In addition, there were the necessary connections to the infrastructure (railroad, ports, highways), the investment of participating consortia or stock corporations as well as the expansion of the means of production. This overall process can only partially be described as successful "modernization" or "urbanization", since conventional urban structures only developed more slowly (or not at all) and there was hardly any lack of social tension. Another characteristic is the long-lasting coexistence of industrial production, emissions, noise, traffic and hectic on the one hand, and the "village" atmosphere, old buildings in the town center and remnants of a premodern "cosiness" on the other.

Detlef Vonde defines the industrial village with the following characteristics: "In terms of quality, the urbanization process was expressed in places where indiscriminate labor and production facilities were concentrated

  • fragmentary infrastructure,
  • chronic undersupply of the population,
  • ecological devastation,
  • urban deficits. "

For this definition it is not relevant whether the industrial villages previously had city rights or not. The decisive factor is the former rural-agrarian character of the place, which disappeared or was completely marginalized as a result of the urbanization process. Vonde goes on to say that the "huge villages on the Emscher such as Altenessen, Borbeck, Bottrop, Hamborn, Meiderich, Osterfeld, Schalke, Sterkrade, Wanne or Eickel, to name just the more well-known," "are" agglomerations of industrial plants that have expanded into city-like structures, Mixtures of workers' settlements, dumps, fallow land, railways with more or less provisional train stations and unpaved roads ".

The former agricultural villages were characterized by:

  • historically low significance (no imperial city or sovereign prominent position, no supra-regional central authority of the premodern manorial rule, no administrative center);
  • low population with traditional social structure;
  • relatively homogeneous population structure, hardly any migration;
  • Main economic branches: agriculture and forestry, business for personal use;
  • low economic innovation capacity;
  • traditional village structure (scattered settlement or similar); traditional architecture and home decor;
  • missing or deficient connection to traffic routes or infrastructure;
  • lack of urbanity or "urban" culture.

The new industrial villages, however:

  • were extensively industrialized; goods were produced for supra-regional markets;
  • were connected to railway lines;
  • became nationally important in economic terms;
  • were characterized by rapid population growth;
  • were sprawled or shaped by new architectural forms (workers' housing estate, factories);
  • had a heterogeneous population characterized by labor migration with new social milieus ( labor movement ).

reception

Local bourgeois history, tradition and homeland associations have long denied the existence of the industrial villages and concentrated solely on the tradition of the "old", agrarian village culture. Chimneys, winding towers or factories, for example, were retouched from photographs because it was difficult to unite social and economic realities with one's own image of home and history. The formerly village "folk culture" and modern technologies apparently did not go together.

It was not until the more recent history movement ( history from below ) of the 1980s that the development into an industrial village was thematized, new questions to be addressed to local history and topics such as eyewitness memories, work, everyday practice, workers' movement, social and denominational milieus, fascism, festival and living culture, etc. opened up. Since the 1990s, exhibitions, (bicycle) routes on industrial culture, specialist publications and TV reports have presented the history of the industrial villages to the public ("When the red grandfather tells").

Examples

  • Essen (Rhine Province / Ruhr Area) had around 6,000 inhabitants around 1840, at the time of the founding of the empire already more than 50,000 and in 1907 already 250,000 inhabitants. Up until the 19th century it was more of a village-small town (especially in the districts that were later incorporated), but the population of Essen began to grow explosively due to strong influxes in the course of industrial development in the Ruhr area. The factories of the Krupp works, the coal mines and coking plants required tens of thousands of workers. The city of Essen, which was important even before industrialization, is not considered an actual industrial village, but the numerous Essen districts such as Borbeck , Steele or Kray .
  • The same applies to Hamborn , which has belonged to Duisburg since 1929. Here, too, the individual districts were industrial villages, which together formed the Hamborn mayor's office since 1900 and whose population increased from 2,710 (1871) to over 110,000 (1919). The places that made up Hamborn around 1900 had only been pure farming villages a generation earlier.
  • Moers (Lower Rhine). The beginning of the 20th century in Moers was all about mining. In 1900 there were 6,000 people living in the city and a further 6,000 in the rural mayor's office, but the numbers multiplied in the following years. From 1904 to 1913, the mine and workers' settlement Meerbeck-Hochstraß was built for around 10,000 immigrants, which is still a sought-after residential area after extensive renovation.
  • Bocholt (Province of Westphalia) had increased the population from 4,000 (1830) to 21,278 (1900). Industrialization, which began in Bocholt in 1852 with the installation of the first steam engine for a spinning mill, brought a strong economic boom, especially from 1871 onwards. At least 114 textile companies had been founded up until the outbreak of the First World War. The rise of the textile industry was accompanied by an equally strong increase in population.
  • Laichingen (Württemberg), a central location for linen weaving since the 17th century, from which large parts of the population lived.
  • Lintorf
  • Mössingen (Swabian Alb), known from the Mössingen general strike of 1933.
  • Wallbach (Bad Saeckingen)
  • Böhrigen (Central Saxony district) had only 93 inhabitants in 1834; in 1871 there were over 1,000, who were largely employed in mining.
  • Bytom (German: Beuthen) in Upper Silesia, where mining (hard coal, zinc and lead ore deposits) has been practiced since the end of the 19th century,
  • As a small town, Hagen (southeastern Ruhr area) only had 2,050 inhabitants in 1804; in 1900 there were already more than 50,000. It was connected to the Bergisch-Märkische Eisenbahngesellschaft network in 1848 and developed into an important railway junction with blast furnace and steel mills.
  • Salzgitter
  • Schwenningen
  • Eisenhüttenstadt
  • Wylam (England, Northumberland).

Web links

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Detlef Vonde: About "misshapen giants" and "barbaric heaps of stones" - industrial villages and the "inability to develop cities" in the Ruhr area. On the Rheinische Geschichte portal. Accessed December 30, 2016.
  2. ^ Hermann Bausinger : Folk culture in the technical world. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1961.
  3. ↑ hpk: When the red grandfather tells. In: seemoz , from August 29, 2011.
  4. ↑ When the red grandfather talks about the past. In: NRZ , 9 September 2008.
  5. ^ Hans Medick : Weaving and Survival in Laichingen 1650-1900. Local history as general history (= publications by the Max Planck Institute for History. Vol. 126). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1996, ISBN 3-525-35443-6 (At the same time: Göttingen, Universität, habilitation paper, 1992/1993).
  6. ^ Eberhard Keil: Lehmann's village. 1830-1869. An industrial story from Hainichen and Böhrigen near Roßwein in the Kingdom of Saxony (= historical series. 4). BIK Keil, Marbach a. N. 2001, ISBN 3-934136-03-6 .