Industrial Revolution
Belgium

Belgium was the second country in which the Industrial Revolution took place and the first in continental Europe: Wallonia (French-speaking southern Belgium) took the lead. Starting in the middle of the 1820s, and especially after Belgium became an independent nation in 1830, numerous works comprising coke blast furnaces as well as puddling and rolling mills were built in the coal mining areas around Liège and Charleroi. The leader was John Cockerill, a transplanted Englishman. His factories at Seraing integrated all stages of production, from engineering to the supply of raw materials, as early as 1825.

Wallonia exemplified the radical evolution of industrial expansion. Thanks to coal (the French word "houille" was coined in Wallonia), the region geared up to become the 2nd industrial power in the world after Britain. But it is also pointed out by many researchers, with its Sillon industriel, "Especially in the Haine, Sambre and Meuse valleys, between the Borinage and Liège...there was a huge industrial development based on coal-mining and iron-making...". Philippe Raxhon wrote about the period after 1830: "It was not propaganda but a reality the Walloon regions were becoming the second industrial power all over the world after Britain." "The sole industrial centre outside the collieries and blast furnaces of Walloon was the old cloth-making town of Ghent." Professor Michel De Coster stated: "The historians and the economists say that Belgium was the second industrial power of the world, in proportion to its population and its territory But this rank is the one of Wallonia where the coal-mines, the blast furnaces, the iron and zinc factories, the wool industry, the glass industry, the weapons industry... were concentrated." Many of the 19th-century coal mines in Wallonia are now protected as World Heritage Sites.

Wallonia was also the birthplace of a strong socialist party and strong trade unions in a particular sociological landscape. At the left, the Sillon industriel, which runs from Mons in the west, to Verviers in the east (except part of North Flanders, in another period of the industrial revolution, after 1920). Even if Belgium is the second industrial country after Britain, the effect of the industrial revolution there was very different. In 'Breaking stereotypes', Muriel Neven and Isabelle Devious say:

The Industrial Revolution changed a mainly rural society into an urban one, but with a strong contrast between northern and southern Belgium. During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, Flanders was characterised by the presence of large urban centres at the beginning of the nineteenth century this region (Flanders), with an urbanisation degree of more than 30 percent, remained one of the most urbanised in the world. By comparison, this proportion reached only 17 percent in Wallonia, barely 10 percent in most West European countries, 16 percent in France, and 25 percent in Britain. Nineteenth-century industrialisation did not affect the traditional urban infrastructure, except in Ghent... Also, in Wallonia, the traditional urban network was largely unaffected by the industrialisation process, even though the proportion of city-dwellers rose from 17 to 45 percent between 1831 and 1910. Especially in the Haine, Sambre and Meuse valleys, between the Borinage and Liège, where there was a huge industrial development based on coal-mining and iron-making, urbanisation was fast. During these eighty years, the number of municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants increased from only 21 to more than one hundred, concentrating nearly half of the Walloon population in this region. Nevertheless, industrialisation remained quite traditional in the sense that it did not lead to the growth of modern and large urban centres, but to a conurbation of industrial villages and towns developed around a coal mine or a factory. Communication routes between these small centres only became populated later and created a much less dense urban morphology than, for instance, the area around Liège where the old town was there to direct migratory flows.
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