ABSTRACT
The process of accumulation within capitalism continually engenders the desertion of some areas, and the creation there of new reserves of labour-power, the opening up of other areas to new branches of production, and the restructuring of the territorial division of labour and class relations overall. The geographical distribution of population is typically far more than a general tendency to agglomeration superimposed on a "territorial division of labour, which confines special branches of production to special districts of a country" (Capital 1, p.353), as occasionally implied by Marx. Even in those few areas where particular branches of production have entirely dominated the economy, it is not possible simply to assume that such areas will be the same as others equally so dominated. It is more than the branch of production which determines the characteristics of a region. Thus Gervais, Servolin and Weil (1965) distinguish three types
of agricultural region in France, a distinction based primarily on the nature and stage of articulation of capitalism with peasant production, and on the dominant form of class relations (quoted in Lipietz, 1977, pp.48-52). Such differences in the economies and class structures of particular areas may also be associated with significant differences in political relations. The resulting picture of 'regions' and of 'inter-regional relationships' is thus enormously complicated. The purpose of work within regionalism is to understand the formation, nature and effects of this spatial differentiation.
