The Marshallian Theory of Industrial Districts and Its Italian Variant: The case of a pottery industry agglomerate in West Bengal

Abstract

Rightly from the days of Alfred Marshall the concept of industrial district has been assuming importance in the economic literature. Various theoretical aspects of this concept have been discussed under the genre of ‘the theory of industrial districts’.1 The theory has also been put into empirical tests in various countries, which have enriched the facets of the theory. In this background, the present article seeks to analyse an industrial agglomerate in West Bengal, in the neighbourhood of the Siliguri town, which has a more recent origin, the post-Partition period of Bengal. It is an agglomerate of the pottery industry, which belongs to the cottage sector,. It gives an opportunity to verify whether this cottage-industry agglomerate exhibits the traits of the theory of industrial district, which has largely been developed on the experiences of modern industries in developed countries. The organisation of this article is this. Section I defines the term ‘industrial districts’, and then describes their features and seeks to identity the reasons for their emergence. It also cites examples of such districts in various countries along with their characteristics, along with the government interventions in those countries in this respect. The remaining sections deal with our case study. Section II describes the locational features of the study area; and Sections III discusses the status of the industry in a nutshell. Finally, in Section IV, we argue that Pal Para represents an industrial district, which belongs to the genre of Marshallian industrial districts. Section V concludes. I