ABSTRACT
In these letters Mand provided a near-text book description of the industrial district; the clustered matrix of small, interdependent partial process firms, the ferment provided by the spur such an environment gave to entrepreneurship. And yet, less than twenty years later, this vibrant business structure was apparently swept away by the formation in 1890 of the United Alkali Company. The UAC, combining virtually all of that part of the British soda industry committed to the old Leblanc process, was a behemoth, for a time perhaps the largest industrial concern in the world, the very antithesis of that which it had supplanted.
