Difusion of Industrial Revolution
I
Andrea Horcasitas
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n the 1800s, the same set of locational criteria for industrial
zones applied: proximity to coal fields and connection via water to a port remained crucial to industrial development.
A belt of major coal fields extended from west to east through mainland Europe, roughly along the southern margins of the North European Lowland.
Once the railroads were well established, some manufacturing moved to or expanded inside of existing urban areas with large markets, such as London and Paris. These two cities became, and remain, important industrial complexes not because of their coal fields (Paris had none) but because of their commercial and political connectivity to the rest of the world.
By the early twentieth century, industry began to diffuse far from the original European hearth to such places as northern Italy (now one of Europe's major industrial regions), Catalonia and northern Spain, southern Sweden, and
southern Finland.
Western Europe's early industrialization gave it a huge economic head start and put the region in the center of a developing world economy in the nineteenth century. But, it was not long before industrialization began to diffuse beyond Europe's western fringe. The primary industrial regions that stood out by the 1950s were western Europe, eastern North America, western Russia and Ukraine, and East Asia.
By the beginning of the tweentieth century, the only serious rival to Europe was North America.
Russia convinced skilled artisans to move to St. Petersburg and linked Ukraine to make itself an industrial power.
In less than a century after the Industrial Revolution began, Japan became one of the world's leading industrial countries.