ABSTRACT
In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of regional industrialization and deindustrialization during 1800–2020 on the Eurasian continent. In this period, world production increasingly started to concentrate in small regional clusters from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. From this process, the northwest corner of the first industrializer, Britain, benefitted first, with its combination of high market potential and a favourable factor prices regime, especially cheap coal prices. Soon, it was followed by several industry clusters across Northwestern Europe which increasingly outcompeted the periphery, although public policy and import-substitution offered opportunities to diminish the gap for peripheral regions. Yet, as transport and transaction costs started to decline and productivity levels started to converge, gradually a shift from the core back to the periphery commenced in the course of the twentieth century. Whereas this offered challenges to the Northwestern European core, especially to the declining industrial heartlands that were unable to develop new economic activities, other regions in Europe and Asia experienced substantial growth in the manufacturing sector, most notably in low-skill industries.
