This volume, which is comprised of eleven chapters written by twenty-one authors, has three main sections—“Regional Industrialization in Europe,” “Regional Industrialization in Asia,” and “Theories of Regional Industrialization.” The theoretical chapters, which focus on economics but with a nod to political and social dimensions, bookend the volume. Coherence would have improved if all the theory-focused chapters were consolidated at the beginning to offer a fuller theoretical prism to make better sense of the country case studies that follow.
Building on the insights of recent theoretical innovations in location theory and empirical techniques that utilize much richer historical databases than were available in the past, the chapters dwell on the much-neglected spatial dimension of industrial development. The central message of the volume is that industrial (manufacturing) development is spatially uneven within countries. In almost every case, except Japan and perhaps the Netherlands, the evidence suggests that industrialization is essentially a regional...