Policy makers, such as those in the British Treasury (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk, Productivity in the UK: 3 The Regional Dimension), commonly believe that “industrial clusters” are a key to regional development. The evidence provided by the present study of clusters and industrial districts in England over two and a half centuries is therefore very welcome support for sounder policies, as well as for understanding history.

At the outset the editors define a district as a concentration of firms in an industry, in a single town or in a zone of a city, a cluster as a wider agglomeration of industries connected by common products or technologies or markets or institutions, and a region as consisting of interlinked urban areas. Networks are more contentious and so the editors do not tie themselves down. Their engagement with theoretical developments has created much more than a collection of local industrial histories. The coherence of their project is further increased by Mark Casson's contribution on regional business networks, interweaving warranted mutual trust, information, metropolitan links, leadership, and institutional sclerosis.

In her study of a warranted mutual trust network, Gillian Cookson's chapter on Darlington, shows how in 1776 a mere 160 Quakers in a population of 3,500, with suspect entrepreneurial vision, opened up the mineral resources of the Tees valley and transformed the region. No less constructive behavior is identified in the Birmingham jewelry trade of the 1880s. Francesca Carnevali describes how morally confident trade leaders organized to reduce price volatility from dumping of bankrupt stock and overtrading in this cyclically sensitive industry, while maintaining competition. Similarly, spontaneous order breaks out in West Yorkshire between 1800 and 1830, where Steven Caunce's examination of the finance of woollen textiles reveals effective country bankers providing media of exchange and assessing credit-worthiness. As in Darlington, extra-regional, metropolitan, links mattered for raising very large amounts of capital in Lucy Newton's analysis of shareholders in new limited liability Sheffield companies between 1855 and 1885.

Mark Casson's claim that networks create path dependence because they cannot be costlessly reconfigured when conditions change, is supported in other chapters; they identify a persistence in industrial location that is hard to explain other than by path dependence. The glove industry (Richard Coopey) for instance was centered in Worcester and Taunton for a number of centuries, with no privileged access to markets or raw materials. Path-dependent technological experience also contributes to the changing pattern of industry in a given location; Coventry engineers from the nineteenth century to the 1930s shifted out of ribbon-making machinery, into bicycles, machine tools, and cars, with changing demand (Roger Lloyd-Jones and Myrddin Lewis).

A number of authors find that networks constrained, rather than boosted, economic development, all in the north-west; Andrew Popp notes how changed market conditions led entrepreneurs to co-operate in the formation of the huge monopolistic United Alkali Company in 1890. In the British industrial district par excellence, Steve Toms and Igor Filatotchev conclude that the interlocking directorates of interwar Lancashire textiles undermined accountability and prevented restructuring. Trust and cooperation disappeared in the vertically specialized cotton industry because the depressed economic environment pitted entrepreneurs against each other, and precluded productivity-enhancing changes in work practice (Sue Bowden and David Higgins). Also in the North West from the 1930s, Till Geiger points out shortcomings of centralized procurement for establishing local networks—the uncertainty of government demand. Yet he also notes English Electric (Preston) in the Manchester industrial district sold the Canberra bomber to the United States and produced the Lightning (the only exclusively British Mach 2 jet fighter). John Wilson and John Singleton similarly condemn the clusters and networks of the Manchester industrial district in the twentieth century, despite offering counterexamples to inertia such as the Manchester Ship Canal and Trafford Park Estate; there were “too few firms like MetroVicks, Ferranti and Avro.” But they do not buttress their case with regional performance measures, such as population, income tax payments, or rateable value.

It is at least arguable that the North West was the best performer outside the largest region, the South East (which is unrepresented by any case studies here), and that relative success needs explaining, rather than failure. The claim that “In 1850 the industrial north dominated the British Economy” is contestable because twice the proportion of U.K. population (24 percent) lived in the South East region as in the North West, even in 1861 (p. 77). Income measures convey a similar impression. London was dominant in 1859/60, with 50 percent more adult males than the Lancashire boroughs, and almost three times the proportion of higher rate (D and E) income taxpayers. Bearing in mind the agglomeration economies of the dominant South East, it is striking that the formation rate of firms (relative to employment) was higher in North West during 1930s than in any other region outside London and the South East. Moreover in the 1920s the number of new firm registrations was above that of the South East, excluding London. This type of aggregate data is essential for a correct interpretation of the valuable local studies in John Wilson and Andrew Popp's volume. For those without a detailed knowledge of English geography, so also is an atlas.