Two Centuries of European (De) Industrialisation

Without manufactures how are the towns to prosper? That was the question posed by Friedrich List in 1841, almost two centuries ago, in his famous book Das Nationale System der Politischen Oekonomie. List and his contemporaries in nineteenth-century Europe saw industrial development as the path to greater population and prosperity. Indeed, the rise of many contemporary European urban centres such as Manchester, Lodz, Düsseldorf, Bilbao, Marseille, metropolises such as the Ruhr in Germany or The Potteries in the UK, smaller towns such as St. Gallen or a number of European ports such as Le Havre, Liverpool or Rotterdam can be traced back to the technological progress and industrialisation of the time (Hohenberg, 2004; Lopez, 2022). Above all, however, technological and economic progress was followed by an institutional harmonisation that went beyond the borders of individual countries and is described by Berend (2013) as early “Europeanisation”.