Resources: Wool and Wood

A widely discussed but seldom resolved puzzle concerns whether natural resources or enterprise determine industrial locations. The commonest assumption is that physical resources are key. The matter is examined via the economy of Gloucestershire, where surprising shifts of location can be found over several centuries. When the medieval cloth making industry shrank into the Stroud valley other areas often went out of business. Successful survivors adopted wool-stapling and traded in wool from distant counties. Other ‘successor industries’ arose when craftsmen found new outlets for their technical skills. When cloth manufacturing collapsed in Stroud itself about 1830, an unexpected successor appeared, capitalising on timber from the Cotswold beech woods. Beech was used in making gun-stocks for Birmingham’s trade in cheap weapons for the African slave trade. Steam engines were employed at early dates. Miscellaneous alternatives occupied redundant cloth mills in the Stroud valley. No unique solution to the resources-enterprise conundrum appears. Ingenious displays of enterprise found substitutes that did not necessarily rely on local resources but resource-based location cannot be wholly dismissed.