Chapter 11
Diffusion from the United Kingdom
 Britain’s Crystal Palace became the
most visible symbol of the
Industrial Revolution, built to
house the 1851 “Great Exhibition of
the Works of Industry of All
Nations.”
 When Queen Victoria opened the
Crystal Palace, the United Kingdom
was the world’s dominant industrial
power.
 From the United Kingdom, the
Industrial Revolution diffused
eastward through Europe and
westward across the Atlantic Ocean
to North America.
 From these places, industrial
development continued diffusing to
other parts of the world.
Diffusion of Railways
 Europeans developed many early inventions of
the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s.
 The Belgians led the way in new coal-mining
techniques, the French had the first coal- fired
blast furnace for making iron, and the
Germans made the first industrial cotton mill.
 Political instability delayed the diffusion of the
Industrial Revolution in Europe.
 Europe’s political problems retarded
development of modern transportation
systems, especially the railway.
 Railways in some parts of Europe were delayed
50 years after their debut in Britain.
 The Industrial Revolution reached Italy, the
Netherlands, Russia, and Sweden in the late
1800s.
 Other Southern and Eastern European
countries joined the Industrial Revolution
during the twentieth century.
Fig. 11-2: The year by which the first railway opened shows the diffusion of railways
and the Industrial Revolution from Britain.
Diffusion to the United States
 Industry arrived a bit later in the United States than
in Western European countries like France and
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Belgium, but it grew much faster.
The first U.S. textile mill was built in Pawtucket,
Rhode Island, in 1791, by Samuel S later, a former
worker at Arkwright’s factory in England.
The textile industry grew rapidly after 1808, when the
U.S. government imposed an embargo on European
trade to avoid entanglement in the Napoleonic Wars.
The United States had become a major industrial
nation by 1860, second only to the United Kingdom.
However, except for textiles, leading U.S. industries
did not widely use the new industrial processes until
the final third of the nineteenth century.
Although industrial development has diffused across
Earth’s surface, much of the world’s industry is
concentrated in four regions.
World Industrial Regions
 North America
 Industrialized areas in North America
 Changing distribution of U.S. manufacturing
 Europe
 Western Europe
 Eastern Europe
 East Asia
Manufacturing Regions
Fig. 11-3: The world’s major manufacturing regions are found in North America,
Europe, and East Asia. Other manufacturing centers are also found
elsewhere.
North America
 Manufacturing in North America is concentrated in the northeastern quadrant
of the United States and in southeastern Canada.
 Only 5 percent of the land area of these countries.., contains one-third of the
population and nearly two-thirds of the manufacturing output.
 This manufacturing belt has achieved its dominance through a combination of
historical and environmental factors.
 Early. . . settlement gave eastern cities an advantage. . . to become the country’s
dominant industrial center.
 The Northeast also had essential raw materials. . . and good transportation.
 The Great Lakes and major rivers. . . were supplemented in the 1 800s by canals,
railways, and highways.
Industrial Regions of North America
Fig. 11-4: The major industrial regions of North America are clustered in the northeast
U.S. and southeastern Canada, although there are other important centers.
Manufacturing Value Change
Fig. 11-5: The value and growth of manufacturing in major metropolitan areas in the
U.S. between 1972 and 1997.
Europe and Manufacturing
 The Western European
industrial region appears as one
region on a world map.
 In reality, four distinct districts
have emerged, primarily because
European countries competed
with one another to develop
their own industrial areas.
 Eastern Europe has six major
industrial regions.
 Four are entirely in Russia, one is
in Ukraine, and one is southern
Poland and northern Czech
Republic.
Manufacturing
Centers in
Western Europe
Fig. 11-6: The major manufacturing
centers in Western Europe
extend in a north-south
band from Britain to Italy.
Rhine—Ruhr Valley
 Western Europe’s most important industrial area is
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the Rhine—Ruhr Valley... in northwestern
Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.
Within the region, industry is dispersed rather
than concentrated in one or two cities.
No individual city has more than one million
inhabitants.
The Rhine divides into multiple branches as it
passes through the Netherlands.
The city of Rotterdam is near to where several
major branches flow into the North Sea.
This location at the mouth of Europe’s most
important river has made Rotterdam the world’s
largest port.
Iron and steel manufacturing has concentrated in
the Rhine—Ruhr Valley because of proximity to
large coalfields.
Access to iron and steel production stimulated the
location of other heavy-metal industries, such as
locomotives, machinery, and armaments.
Mid-Rhine
 The second most important industrial area in Western Europe includes
southwestern Germany, northeastern France, and the small country of
Luxembourg.
 In contrast to the Rhine—Ruhr Valley, the German portion of the Mid-Rhine
region lacks abundant raw materials, but it is at the center of Europe’s most
important consumer market.
 The French portion of the Mid-Rhine region—Alsace and Lorraine—contains
Europe’s largest iron- ore field and is the production center for two-thirds of
France’s steel.
 Tiny Luxembourg is also one of the world’s leading steel producers, because the
Lorraine iron-ore field extends into the southern part of the country.
United Kingdom
 The Industrial Revolution originated in the Midlands
and northern England and southern Scotland, in part
because those areas contained a remarkable
concentration of innovative engineers and mechanics
during the late eighteenth century.
 The United Kingdom lost its international industrial
leadership in the twentieth century.
 Britain was saddled with outmoded and deteriorating
factories and their “misfortune” of winning World War
II.
 The losers, Germany and Japan, received American
financial assistance to build modern factories,
replacing those destroyed during the war.
 The United Kingdom expanded industrial production
in the late twentieth century by attracting new hightech industries that serve the European market.
 Japanese companies have built more factories in the
United Kingdom than has any other European country.
 Today British industries are more likely to locate in
southeastern England near the country’s largest
concentrations of population and wealth and the
Channel Tunnel.
Northern Italy
 A fourth European industrial region of some importance
lies in the Po River Basin of northern Italy.
 Modern industrial development in the Po Basin began with
establishment of textile manufacturing during the
nineteenth century because of two key assets: numerous
workers and inexpensive hydroelectricity.
Manufacturing Centers in Eastern
Europe and Russia
Fig. 11-7: Major manufacturing centers are clustered in European Russia and
the Ukraine. Other centers were developed east of the Urals.
Manufacturing Centers in East Asia
Fig. 11-8: Many industries in China are clustered in three centers near the east coast.
In Japan, production is clustered along the southeast coast.