ABSTRACT
We argued in Chapter 1 that changes in the ways in which we think about economic life and its geographies are intimately tied to changes in the context in which those ideas emerge and develop. In this chapter we sketch out the historical origins of a number of key ideas that have proved extremely influential in describing and explaining the geographies of economic life. The chapter is about ideas and the men who developed them. That they are men is not incidental and their position in society had an important bearing on the concepts and theories that they helped to develop.
