Are there real world examples of a shoe event horizon? This is a famous quote from Douglas Adam's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:


  Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet – people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the number of the shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result – collapse, ruin and famine.


Are there real world examples from history where a society's economy has become so mono-industrialised that it collapses? Does this situation have an alternative (more serious) name in economics?



I'm not sure if this will be a constructive question. A potential edit could be to ask if something like Ireland's potato famine is an example of the shoe event horizon.
The dutch disease is when an economy is so dominated by a single export industry that the success of that industry drives up the currency and makes the exports of other industries un-competitive. This drives some of the firms making other goods out of business. 

Continuing this cycle can lead in the short term to even greater concentration of the economy in that industry. 

If later the export industry experiences a significant shock, the broader economy also experiences that shock. This happens for two reasons:


In a diversified economy some firms are experiencing positive shocks when others experience negative ones. In a concentrated economy it is less likely that the other industries will collectively experience an sufficient offsetting shock.
A negative shock to the primary exporting industry is likely to depreciate the currency which should help other industries but shrinking capacity from the expansion will diminish other industries' ability to generate sufficient exports to offset the shock. 


Further, if the industry responds by boosting output (like sometimes happens when oil prices fall and producers become desperate) this can make export prices fall further still, worsening the shock.