ABSTRACT

The central concerns of economic geography revolve around the ways in which space – in its various manifestations as distance, separation, proximity, location, place etc. – dictates the shape and form of economic outcomes. In more concrete terms, we can say that the task of modern economic geography is to provide a reasoned description of the spatial organization of the economy and, in particular, to elucidate the ways in which geography influences the economic performance of capitalism. Obviously, these rather laconic formulations still leave open considerable room for debate about precisely how economic geographers practise – or should practise – their work, and as we shall see in this chapter, there have been many different advocacies in this regard over the developmental course of the sub-discipline. The conceptual roots of economic geography as we now know it can be traced back,

definitely if indistinctly, over at least the last three centuries. The first stirrings of economic inquiry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries already pointed to matters of geographic interest, though whatever spatial or locational content these early writings on the economy may have contained, it almost always functioned as background to more fundamental questions focused on the origins of national wealth and the causes of trade. In the second half of the eighteenth century and again in the early twentieth century, brief flowerings of a strong geographic sensibility can be detected in the work of certain economic writers, but even then economic geography, as such, remained very much a subsidiary concern. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, the wider discipline of geography itself was not much more accommodating in regard to anything that might be identified as a bona fide economic geography. Even as geography began to assume a modern disciplinary identity in the early twentieth century, it was not inclined to put undue emphasis on economic issues, except in so far as they could be subsumed within a burgeoning commitment to regional synthesis and the notion of geographic milieu. Economic geography made its appearance as a fully recognizable branch of the

discipline as a whole only in the period between the two world wars, and it was not until the 1950s that it started to evince really strong signs of self-assertiveness as a

systematic-analytic approach and self-consciously to identify itself as a theory-building and hypothesis-testing enterprise. This break with the classical idiographic tradition in geography marked the beginning of a developmental trajectory over the rest of the twentieth century that has been driven forward by enormous intellectual energies, but that has been attended also by frequent and controversy-laden shifts of direction. As we shall argue here, this trajectory reflects a double dynamic. On the one hand, the historical course of economic geography can be understood partly in terms of an internal evolutionary logic that grows out of the elaboration, empirical testing and reelaboration of particular theoretical concepts. On the other hand, the same historical course can also be seen as being notably responsive to external social and economic conditions and, above all, to the shifting practical problems and predicaments thrown up by capitalism in its ever accelerating development.