ILTID: Historical Context

Industrial Location Theory is Dead

Premise

There has been a huge wave of technological development recently and it might well herald a new Technological Revolution that will have rewrite all of the theories of where the best site to locate a particular industry might be. In might even herald the dawn of a new class structure between those who are control the machines and those who are controlled. 

Historical Context …

I visited Ironbridge during the Easter holidays with my family and was explaining to my children the importance of this structure. It was a pivotal point in our history, not just in Britain, but as a species. Abraham Derby III’s refinement of smelting methods that coal could be converted into coke and burnt at much higher temperatures meaning that iron could be forged on a much larger scale and the bridge itself is the evidence. Standing there, built in 1779 at the forge a hundred or so yards upstream, spanning the river Severn as a monument to the exciting industrial and increasingly mechanical future. Nothing was going to be the same. It marks a GPT (General Purpose Technology) or a point at which a new technological step occurs which alters future developments. The smelting of copper could be seen as one such GPT. Everything was going to be driven by the new technology and true enough within ten years of the bridge being built entrepreneurs and inventors had found all sorts of clever ways of using iron and the subsequent development of steam power to create all sorts of structures and machines that could do work more efficiently and on a much greater scale. Bigger tools could be made that could do bigger jobs more quickly and more accurately.
The first major amelioration was to the transport infrastructure: railways began to snake their way across the British countryside linking the major cities and ports. The new, steam-powered iron horses increased the speed with which people and products could be transported.

Print showing the Mottram Viaduct on the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway (1861)

The canals were still useful for moving truly bulky items, but the advent of steam marked the start of their slow march towards obsolescence. Mountain ranges were tunnelled through and valleys spanned by bridges as trains began to whizz goods around the nation and the rest of the world … in vast quantities.