I would argue their very success is the reason for their vulnerability. An entire ecolosystem grows around the boom industries, not just economic but social, educational, structural.

If we go back to social historian E.P. Thompson's classic work, The Making of The English Working Class, he argued that between 1780 and the 1830s a significant class consciousness emerged from early industrialisation. Here to you see dynamics of divergent development, incumbents' economic and cultural resistance to industrialisation, and challenger cities having both the freedom and the necessity to experiment. Thompson wrote:

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience: and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties" (1963 edition, p.12).

Similarly in the 1970s and 1980s, the incentives for transitioning from manufacturing driven to knowledge and services led ecosystems were negative for the industrial incumbents and powerhouses, and the cost of not adapting could be deferred, as the epicentres of previous industrial modes are also the most resilient to change, and can postpone the pain, by being the last to be existentially hit by macro-economic shifts, given their privileged position in still transitional supply chains, larger economic reserves and access to finance and support, etc.

This is not a universal rule, but I think it holds as a broad patterns or ideal type.

In contrast, regions left behind by the dominant industrial system have the most incentive to innovate, experiment and seek alternatives. When the new paradigm is still emerging, before it has fully proven itself, the early adopters are likely to come from these areas, and reap early entrant advantages. If the bet pays off, they gain the ability to set the terms of entry to their advantage, and eventually the old incumbents find themselves playing catch up, with a huge weight of economic, cultural and social inertia behind it.

You are not just modernising manufacture, or shifting to service industries: you are asking people to leave behind company provided housing, working men's clubs, training and apprenticeship pipelines; family loyalties; local choirs; political interests; established subsidies; and memories of status, identity and tradition. As the History Workshop put it

"Inner city areas, one-industry towns, and industrial suburbs were particularly hard-hit, accelerating urban decline, outmigration, employment mobility, and in some cases gentrification. This displacement is often highly gendered and/or racialized.

"In the bitter aftermath of deindustrialization, working-class communities are often enveloped in silence and contend with stigmatization. Anyone who has interviewed displaced workers, or is from a working-class family, has seen or felt some of the pain and suffering that has resulted. Working people have resisted these changes, but a discourse of inevitability has established itself."

The industrialising pioneers of yesterday, become the luddites of today.

This dynamic of incumbency, social fabric and initial resilience, vs marginality, social fluidity and initial fragility, is definitely a simplification but as an overall narrative it does have an evidence base.

There have been studies on divergent cities in post industrial Britain that like me, make the point about the impact of economic structure on the one hand, in particular the global shift from manufacturing to knowledge which we call deindustrialisation; and also of low level, individual city factors around legacies:

"it appears that larger cities, and those with high densities of economic activity, do not seem to have been the most conducive for growth, possibly reflecting the legacies of their old industrial past and the limited space for new development. This result at least raises some questions over the normal assumption that large cities necessarily enjoy positive externalities of agglomeration." (p.33).

Likewise if you look at this paper you will see in table 1 that as a broad pattern, the regions which were most heavily industrial in 1980 tended to be behind in services by 2017, whereas those that were behind in industry in 1980 tended to do better in services.

A closer look shows, like every historian knows, that there are rarely if ever universal explanations, and the pattern does not hold neatly for every cluster of cities and there are plenty of exceptions and moderating factors. Some of the industrial incumbents were also financial and services incumbents even pre-deindustrialisation, like London, and had in place the resources, mindsets and structures to (inequitably), shift their orientation to the emerging opportunities in real time.

Human factors too, around local and regional policy choices, played a major part in influencing divergent development of regions and cities with similar or overlapping traits.

So as a historian I would say that if you wanted a high level narrative, my proposed initial analysis above is a good starting point, but at a granular level the history of each city and region will display its own unique characteristics, which will often buck the general pattern I described above.

Right, so it’s important to begin with an understanding of what brought those regions wealth and influence to begin with, as a necessary precursor to talking about what changed, how much it changed, and whether this is a discrete phenomenology or just a form of observer or selection bias.

First off, each of these regions created wealth in different periods of time. Northern England mostly before the steam age. The Ruhr and Whales mostly in the mid to late industrial, and the rustbelt more in the late industrial to post-industrial periods of technological development.

These placements in time help explain their origins. The north or England or north of France were once a prime places to acquire two important things: cheap labor (in the form of a large and poor peasantry dispossessed from their former lands by the enclosure movement, or the end of feudalism), and an energy gradient, in the form of more extreme changes in weather that created the conditions for industrialism’s first source of cheap energy: wind and water power captured by mills.

New food imports like potatoes created larger peasantries, and larger peasantries could be put to work in mills. Colonialism also provided the necessary cash crops to take advantage of the suddenly large and relatively poor labor force: wood, flax, linens, and above all cotton.

So you had poor regions with growing populations and access to cheap energy. Makes sense. Economic booms followed. Now to some degree in the pre-steam age, cities more local to these areas such as Lille, Manchester, etc, gained some advantage from the increase in the local economies, however early industrial societies were not necessarily great at spreading a lot of wealth, particularly when most of that wealth was being had at the expense of cheap labor and abundant resources from abroad. It would not be until the later half of the 19th century that living conditions began to improve in these places, and by then, the intense expansion of industrial wealth had already slowed and begun to congeal, as it were, as poorer areas of the world in turn industrialized and experienced their own booms.

By the time the working class of Great Britain gained any sort of political power, the age of industry was mostly over. Most of the great changes in fortune had already been experienced, and the money did not remain in those local economies when the jobs disappeared. In the case of England and France, we must also consider that labor organization and the spread of general social welfare policies were in their infancy when the First World War crushed these economies and destroyed at least a generation of economic progress. They never fully recovered from this, and were plagued by dependence on their national government’s welfare programs for generations to come.

In the case of Whales and the Ruhr, similar processes occurred but for slightly different reasons. These areas were found to be rich in the necessary resources of late stage industrial expansion, namely: iron, and coal. Combined again with a cheap workforce driven by the population expansion experienced after the introduction of new crops and farming methods in the early industrial period created conditions where labor was cheap and resources plenty.

Again, we see a slightly different fate for these regions, so it’s not really appropriate for us to say that they all fit one stereotypical pattern. Each have remained somewhat relevant up to the current day, if only because of their wealth of energy resources, and have only been lately displaced by the abundance of cheap manufacturing labor and resources from abroad.

With the Rustbelt, here again we are not really talking about the same conditions or the same ends. The fact is that while certain communities have been ravaged by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs due to globalism, the region itself remains relatively (in comparison with most of the world) wealthy to this day, and continues to benefit from its rich store of resources and industrious and skilled population.

So, in the end, I suppose I would rather ask whether this trend which you are observing is really one thing, and whether that one thing is a “western” thing, or merely the observation that each area which experiences industrialization eventually also experiences de-industrialization.

It’s true that you until now, Asian governments seem to have directed their economies in such a way that they have not been as severely affected by post-industrial globalism as have western countries… but I would not necessarily characterize that as the default case. It may be that a high level of economic intervention has kept Asian economies from the worst consequences of industrial decline… but it may also be that their eventual decline will be even more precipitous and politically consequential than was that of the west.

Rather, it may be more beneficial to view this question through the lens of geo-politics. The east and west are still a part of one world system, and so what happens in one hemisphere impacts the other. Western countries have de-industrialized largely because the east has industrialized. But an existing large consumer market was not descriptive of the conditions that early industrial economies experienced in the west. They industrialized partly as a means to further their empires, and to process and extract wealth from the resources they got control of. The East does not do this, at least not to the same degree, and certainly not at anything like the same scale since the fall of the Japanese empire.

Perhaps Japan today would be economically devastated by its own irrelevance if it had been allowed to gain its territorial ambitions and reach the extent of its possible influence a century ago. If it were not for strong consumer markets in the west, Japan’s only path forward would have looked very similar to that of Britain 3 centuries earlier. The only difference is that today, Japan has a base of customers and markets that it does not need to colonize or control trade to create economic benefit for itself. Its industries are enough to bring wealth to the country. That set of conditions, notably, may not last forever.

So, I suppose in summation, the basis of the question is somewhat flawed. Not all of these regions are “incredibly poor,” but industrialization and de-industrialization do have meaningful economic consequences. Add onto this, the basis of the implicit comparison with the global east is also flawed. The global east has industrialized in the context of strong global consumer markets for their goods; conditions which were not found when Europe was industrializing.

See also: Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth Thomas Childers, Europe and Western Civilization in the modern age (lecture series) Tony Judt: Postwar Patrick Allit; the Industrial Revolution (lecture series)