Beyond the Leading Regions: Agricultural Modernization and Rural Industrialization in North-Western Germany

Abstract

Historians of the process of European industrialization nowadays depart from the idea that the 19th-century modernization of economy and society was a phenomenon of a particular national state, stressing instead both its transnational (European) and regional character.¹ From the late 18th century until the First World War, capital, labor and know-how migrated into regions that are now labeled leading regions of indus-trialization, while boundaries between national states barely restricted this interaction. Consequently, writing about the ‘industrial revolution’ has to focus on limited regional rather than large-area developments. Although this article fully agrees with the notion of industrialization as a temporal and regional asynchronous process, it takes the periphery of the leading regions into account. On the one hand they functioned as a resource reserve for the industrializing core, but on the other they often stabilized their own process of industrialization in terms of their economy and experience, albeit after a time lag. This was, of course, dependent on the leading region, but helped to close the initially widened gap of income distribution between the core and the periphery.