Regional Identities:
Shifting Boundaries and Contested Meanings

Dr Andrew Popp: Manchester Metropolitan University

"The True Potter": Identity and Entrepreneurship in the North Staffordshire Potteries in the Later Nineteenth Century

Within the considerable literature on Industrial Districts or clusters, there has emerged a marked emphasis on the cohesion and advantages bestowed on local economies by socially embedded regional business networks. This paper will explore these claims in the context of the North Staffordshire Potteries in the second half of the nineteenth century. Having explored the links between spatial factors, social structure and enterprise traced by writers from Alfred Marshall to Sabel, Piore and Zeitlin, the paper will first examine the extent, strength and function of network formation in the Potteries. It will be suggested that the fragile, fragmented and marginal characteristics of networks in the Potteries cannot be fully accounted for by appeal to either external economic conditions or the business structure of the district and industry, though these issues undoubtedly were important. Instead, it will be argued that on to the top of a differentiated business structure were mapped issues of representativeness, of who could claim to be ‘true potters’. Potters, facing increasing competition from abroad, failed to build a strong and inclusive notion of ‘the trade’. This failure had important economic consequences as local firms fought one another in bitter price wars. In order to explore this failure, the paper will invoke Massey’s approach to the construction of place, revealing some of the dimensions along which potters’ identities diverged and conflicted. These findings will suggest implications both for the Industrial Districts and for the study of regions and regionalization within business history.

a.popp@mmu.ac.uk