SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter integrates the theory and history of localized economic development by summarizing the experiences of three iconic industrial districts: a) the Lancashire cotton textile district which in the last half of the nineteenth century enabled Britain to become the ‘workshop of the world’; b) the globally competitive towns and cities specializing in a variety of light industries, especially in the Emilia Romagna regional district, that, as the ‘Third Italy’, brought economic modernity to that nation in the decades after World War II; and 3) the area in California south of San Francisco, centred on Stanford University, that, as ‘Silicon Valley’, made the United States the world leader in the microelectronics and Internet revolutions of the last decades of the twentieth century. Using the ‘social conditions of innovative enterprise’ as a common conceptual approach, the chapter highlights key lessons from history of the nexus between firms and their local ecosystems.