Economic geography is a sub-discipline within human geography concerned with describing and explaining the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of goods and services within an explicitly spatial economy. Economic geography was first institutionalized in the late nineteenth century, and arose in large part because of its potential contribution to European colonialism. Early economic geographers attempted to provide, first, a global inventory of tradeable resources and their conditions of production (Chisholm 1889), and, second, an intellectual justification for the marked differences in levels of economic development between colonized and colonizing countries based upon environmental determinism (Huntington 1915).
From the 1920s onwards, however, economic geographers increasingly looked inwards, and practised a regional approach that involved delineating the unique character of the economy of a given place. Employing a standardized typology, one based upon such categories as production, transportation, markets, and so on, facts were carefully compiled and organized for a particular region and then compared to those of another. By so doing, the uniqueness of place was proven.
Following the post-war enthusiasm for things scientific, economic geography’s young Turks mounted a quantitative and theoretical revolution in the mid-1950s, transforming the discipline into spatial science. Initially this movement was defined by the use of a set of sophisticated parametric inferential statistical techniques, but increasingly it involved the importation of rigorous abstract theories and models drawn from at least four different sources. First, from neo-classical economics came general models of competition and rational behaviour. Second, from physics came gravity, potential and entropy models that, in turn, were used to explain patterns of spatial interaction. Third, from the recouping of a hitherto forgotten nineteenth-century German location school came a series of locational models: von Thunen’s theory of agricultural location, Weber’s theory of industrial location, and later, Loesch’s and Christaller’s central place theory. Finally, from geometry came a slew of axioms, lemmas and theorems that could be used to underpin a set of explanatory spatial morphological laws (Bunge 1962). More generally, economic geographers who prosecuted spatial science believed that an autonomous set of spatial forces regulated the geography of the economy, and that they were identifiable only by applying the scientific method.
From the mid-1970s onwards spatial science was increasingly criticized. Spatial science’s main mistake was in assuming that the spatial was independent of the social. Rather, as the Marxist geographer David Harvey (1982) argued, the spatial must be conceived as thoroughly socialized by the dominant mode of production, capitalism. Under Harvey’s approach, if economic geographers were to understand capitalism’s changing economic landscape they needed to grasp the basic tensions within the non-spatial core of the capitalist system itself. For Harvey this was possible only by returning to Marx; in particular, by making use of Marx’s idea of the ‘annihilation of space by time’ Harvey (1982) provided a brilliant reconstruction of capitalism’s geography of accumulation.
The political economy approach that Harvey introduced into economic geography in the mid-1970s still remains the dominant paradigm. Subsequently, it has been elaborated and constructively criticized in at least five different ways, thereby defining the current agenda of the discipline.
First, in the mid-1980s Doreen Massey (1984) embellished Harvey’s argument by suggesting that just as the spatial is socialized, so the social is spatialized. ‘Geography matters’, as she crisply put it. To show that it mattered, Massey (1984) argued that the character of a place is a result of the specific combination of past layers of investment made there. That character, however, reacts back and recursively influences the nature of yet future rounds of investment. As such, place is not passive, but an active component in the determination of the spatial division of labour. More generally, Massey’s conception of the relationship between place and economy became the basis of the British ‘localities project’ that subsequently generated an enormous amount of research and debate within economic geography (Cooke 1989).
Second, there has been an attempt to flesh out the institutional structure that comprised Harvey’s social relations. Of particular importance has been the French Regulationist school, and their twin concepts of a regime of accumulation and a mode of regulation, along with the historical instantiation of the two as Fordism and post-Fordism. These last two terms have become central to the work of economic geographers interested in contemporary industrial restructuring. The works of Allen Scott and Michael Storper (Storper and Scott 1992) are especially important, combining as they do theories of the French regulationists with detailed research on flexible production systems and industrial districts. Their post-Weberian theory, as they term it, has been especially useful in understanding the rise of both new high-tech industrial spaces, such as Silicon valley, and the renaissance of older craft centres, such as the Veneto region in Italy.
Third, following hints by Harvey, there emerged a burgeoning literature on financial services, and, more broadly, on the quaternary service sector of which they are part. Such work is often centred around corporate decision making within a broader context of globalization. The argument is that higher echelon business services (producer services), including financial ones, are concentrated in a few very large world cities, for example, London. Those centres, in turn, are linked by complex flows of information made possible by recent innovations in telecommunications. Furthermore, while such world cities are the loci of power and control within the global economy, they are also world consumption centres, spawning an urban underclass that provides many of the services necessary for that consumption to be maintained.
Fourth, stemming from Harvey’s concern with the geography of accumulation, there continues work on economic development both at the regional and the international scales. At the international level, much of the emphasis has been on analysing the strategies and effects of transnational corporations, and the emergence of both a new international division of labour, and new growth complexes, particularly those in South-east and East Asia (Dicken 1992).
Finally, as a reaction to Harvey’s implicit conception of the social as equivalent only to class, there have been a number of attempts to widen the discussion so as to include gender and race. Feminist economic geographers have sought both to criticize what they see as the phallocentric basis of the discipline, as well as to offer a series of case studies that demonstrate that gender matters (MacDowell 1991). Works that explicate racialization within economic geography are less numerous, but a cluster of studies exist on ethnic entrepreneurs and enclaves.
In sum, economic geography has been the great borrower, taking ideas conceived in one discipline, and refashioning them so that they are useful in understanding the economics of a geographical world. Such a task seems especially pertinent as that world is becoming, if not everyone’s oyster, at least the oyster of capital.
Trevor Barnes
University of British Columbia
References
Bunge, W. (1962) Theoretical Geography, Lund.
Chisholm, G. (1889) Handbook of Commercial Geography, London.
Cooke, P. (1989) Localities: The Changing Face of Urban Britain, London.
Dicken, P. (1992) Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activities, 2nd edn, London.
Harvey, D. (1982) Limits to Capital,Chicago.
Huntington, E. (1915) Civilization and Climate, New Haven, CT.
MacDowell, L. (1991) ‘Life without father Ford: the new gender order of post-Fordism’, Transactions: Institute of British Geographers 16.
Massey, D. (1984) Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, London.
Storper, M. and Scott, A.J. (eds) (1992) Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development, London.
Further reading
Dicken, P. and Lloyd, P. (1990) Location in Space: Theoretical Perspectives in Economic Geography, 3rd edn, New York.
