1.A Companion to Economic Geography Edited byEric Sheppard University of Minnesota andTrevor J. Barnes University of British Columbia

2. A Companion to Economic Geography Here is an exemplary `Companion' or guide to contemporary economic geography: a set of exciting, provocative, sometimes polemical and passionate, but always informative essays on the major debates and issues of the day in Anglo-American economic geography. . . . [It] not only looks backward, to established theories and frameworks, but also forward, to the emerging global economy and the new approaches needed to understand its dynamics. The total effect is of a melange of lively, piercing, and surprising perspectives on a field that far from constituting the geographical branch of the `dismal science' seems at the centre of contemporary debates about the condition of the world and its likely directions in the years ahead. John A. Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles By taking seriously the historical methodological, and theoretical contexts of the subfields of and approaches to economic geography, the authors are freed from a need to praise or lambaste specific approaches. Rather, the reader gains appreciation for how the strengths and limitations of subfields and approaches grow from their purposes and contexts. . . . This volume is indispensable for upper-level undergraduates, entering graduate students, and those of us who try to inspire them. James W. Harrington, University of Washington A Companion to Economic Geography is a masterly canvas. . . . The editors have an eclectic view of the `economic' and engaging commitment to broad theoretical debates and continuing innovation, and its varied contributions stimulate, provoke and instruct in equal measure. Its range and the engaging and accessible style makes the Companion an ideal set of readings for students of geography and all those in related disciplines interested in the changing nature of economic processes. Linda McDowell, University College London 3. Blackwell Companions to Geography Blackwell Companions to Geography is a blue chip, comprehensive series covering each major subdiscipline of human geography in detail. Edited and contributed by the disciplines leading authorities each book provides the most up to date and authoritative syntheses available in its field. The overviews provided in each Companion will be an indispensable introduction to the field for students of all levels, while the cutting edge, critical direction will engage students, teachers and practitioners alike. Published 1. A Companion to the City Edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson 2. A Companion to Economic Geography Edited by Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes 3. A Companion to Political Geography Edited by John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal (Gearid Tuathail) 4. A Companion to Cultural Geography Edited by James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H. Schein 5. A Companion to Tourism Edited by Alan A. Lew, C. Michael Hall and Allan M. Williams Forthcoming 6. A Companion to Feminist Geography Edited by Lise Nelson and Joni Seager 8. Handbook to GIS Edited by John Wilson and Stewart Fotheringham 4. A Companion to Economic Geography Edited byEric Sheppard University of Minnesota andTrevor J. Barnes University of British Columbia 5. 2000, 2003 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization 2000, 2003 by Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes BLACKWELL PUBLISHING350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 5020, USA 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2000 First published in paperback 2003 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Reprinted 2003, 2005 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A companion to economic geography / edited by Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes. p. cm. (Blackwell companions to geography ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 631 21223 X (hbk : alk. paper) ISBN 0 631 23579 5 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Economic geography. I. Sheppard, Eric S. II. Barnes, Trevor J. III. Series. HF1025 .C66 2000 330.9 dc21 00 059898 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10 on 12 pt Sabon by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall The publishers policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid free and elementary chlorine free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com 6. Eric Sheppard would like to dedicate this book to the many undergraduates over the past twenty years in his Geography of the World Economy course, and the graduate students who took the pro-seminar The State, The Economy and Spatial Development, as well as the various research seminars in economic geography offered over the years. Trevor Barnes would like to dedicate this book to the hundreds of students at the University of British Columbia who have taken some version of his course, Introduction to Economic Geography. We have learnt much more from the students than we ever taught them. 7. ContentsContributors Figures and Tables Acknowledgments 1Introduction: The Art of Economic Geography Trevor J. Barnes and Eric Sheppardx xiv xvi 1PART I WORLDS OF ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 2 Inventing Anglo-American Economic Geography, 18891960 Trevor J. Barnes9 113The Modeling Tradition Paul S. Plummer274The Marxian Alternative: HistoricalGeographical Materialism and the Political Economy of Capitalism Erik Swyngedouw415Feminism and Economic Geography: Gendering Work and Working Gender Ann M. Oberhauser606Institutional Approaches in Economic Geography Ron Martin777Poststructural Interventions J. K. Gibson-Graham95PART II REALMS OF PRODUCTION 8 The Geography of Production Richard A. Walker111 113 8. viii 9CONTENTSPlaces of Work Jamie Peck13310Industrial Districts Ash Amin14911Competition in Space and between Places Eric Sheppard16912Urban and Regional Growth Peter Sunley18713Geography and Technological Change David L. Rigby202PART III RESOURCE WORLDS 14 Resources Dean M. Hanink225 22715Agriculture Brian Page24216Political Ecology Michael Watts25717The Production of Nature Noel Castree27518Single Industry Resource Towns Roger Hayter290PART IV SOCIAL WORLDS 19 Family, Work and Consumption: Mapping the Borderlands of Economic Geography Nicky Gregson30920Concepts of Class in Contemporary Economic Geography David Sadler32521Labor Unions and Economic Geography Andrew Herod34122State and Governance Joe Painter35923Creating the Corporate World: Strategy and Culture, Time and Space Erica Schoenberger37724Networks of Ethnicity Katharyne Mitchell392311 9. CONTENTSixPART V SPACES OF CIRCULATION 25 The Economic Geography of Global Trade Richard Grant409 41126Money and Finance Andrew Leyshon43227The Political Economy of International Labor Migration Helga Leitner45028Transportation: Hooked on Speed, Eyeing Sustainability Susan Hanson46829Telecommunications and Economic Space Barney Warf48430International Political Economy Michael Webber499Index519 10. ContributorsAsh Amin is Professor of Geography at Durham University. He has edited PostFordism: A Reader; Globalisation, Institutions and Regional Development (with Nigel Thrift); Behind the Myth of European Union (with John Tomaney); and Beyond Market and Hierarchy: Social Complexity and Interactive Governance (with Jerzy Hausner). He writes on regional development, cities, and democracy. Trevor Barnes is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Logics of Dislocation, and co-editor with Meric Gertler of The New Industrial Geography. His most recent research is on the history of geography's quantitative revolution. Noel Castree is Reader in Geography at Manchester University. Co-editor of Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium and Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics, his main interests are in social theory approaches to environment and, more specifically, the greening of political economy. J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson, Professor of Human Geography in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University, and Julie Graham, Professor of Geography at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst. JKGG is the author of The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy (Blackwell, 1996), and the co-editor of Class and its Others (Minnesota, 2000) and Re/Presenting Class (Duke, 2001). Richard Grant is an Associate Professor at the University of Miami, Florida. He is editor of The Global Crisis in Foreign Aid (with Jan Nijman), as well as numerous articles on trade and economic globalization in the periphery of the world economy. Nicky Gregson is Reader in Geography at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Servicing the Middle Classes (with Michelle Lowe) and one of the WGSG 11. CONTRIBUTORSxicollective responsible for Feminist Geographies, and has published numerous articles on both gender and consumption. Dean M. Hanink is Professor and Head of Geography at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The International Economy: A Geographical Perspective and Principles and Applications of Economic Geography. He has also written several articles on topics relating to environment and economic geography. Susan Hanson is Professor of Geography at Clark University. She is the author of Gender, Work, and Space (with Geraldine Pratt) and editor of The Geography of Urban Transportation; in addition, she has written many articles on gender and urban labor markets and on urban transportation. Roger Hayter is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Dynamics of Industrial Location: The factory, the firm and the production system, as well as numerous articles on industrial geography and British Columbia's forest economy. Andy Herod is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia. He is the editor of Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism (1998) and, with Gearoid O Tuathail and Susan Roberts, of An Unruly World? Globalization, Governance and Geography (1998). His research seeks to understand how workers and their organizations shape, and are shaped by, the geography of capitalism. Helga Leitner is Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on the politics of immigration and citizenship, immigrant incorporation, and local economic development. Her current research interests are in geographies of governance and citizenship. Andrew Leyshon is Professor of Economic and Social Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the co-author of Money/Space (with Nigel Thrift) and co-editor of The Place of Music (with David Matless and George Revill). He is currently undertaking research on competitiveness in financial services, alternative systems of exchange, and the geographies of music technology. Ron Martin is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Cambridge. He has published numerous books, including The Geography of Deindustrialization, Money, Power, and Space (with S. Corbridge and N. Thrift), Unemployment and Social Exclusion (with P. Lawless and S. Hardy), Money and the Space Economy, and The Economic Geography Reader (with J. Bryson, N. Henry, and D. Keeble). He has also published more than 130 articles on the geography of labor markets, the geography of money, and regional political economy. Katharyne Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. She has written Transnationalism and the Politics of Space (forthcoming) and numerous articles on migration, diaspora, and ethnicity. 12. xiiCONTRIBUTORSAnn M. Oberhauser is an Associate Professor of Geography at West Virginia University. She has written numerous publications on economic restructuring and regional development in France, South Africa, and the United States. Her current research focuses on comparative analyses of gender and rural economic networks in Appalachia and southern Africa. Brian Page is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Denver. He is the author of numerous articles on US agriculture, the meat packing industry, and historical regional development in the Midwest. Joe Painter is Lecturer in Geography at the University of Durham. He is the author of Politics, Geography and ``Political Geography'': A Critical Perspective, and of numerous articles and book chapters on the geographies of regulation, governance, citizenship, and democracy. Jamie Peck is Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An editor of Antipode and Environment and Planning A, he has research interests in labor geography, urban political economy, and economic regulation. He is the author of Workfare States and Work-Place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets. Paul Plummer is senior lecturer at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. He has published research on the foundations of analytical political economy, competing theories of spatial competition, and the dynamics of regional growth and economic restructuring. David Rigby is a Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests focus on evolutionary economic models of competition, technological change, and regional growth. He is co-author, with Michael Webber, of The Golden Age Illusion: Rethinking Postwar Capitalism. David Sadler is Reader in Geography at the University of Durham. He is author of The Global Region: Production, state policies and uneven development, co-author of Approaching Human Geography: An Introduction to Contemporary Theoretical Debates and Europe at the Margins: New Mosaics of Inequality, and editor of the journal European Urban and Regional Studies. Erica Schoenberger is Professor of Geography at the Johns Hopkins University, with a joint appointment in anthropology. She is the author of The Cultural Crisis of the Firm and focuses her research on problems of industrial, technological, and social change, corporate culture and strategy, and the behavior of multinational corporations. She has an Australian Shepherd named Sasha. Eric Sheppard is Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Capitalist Space Economy (with Trevor Barnes) and A World of Difference (with Philip Porter), as well as numerous articles on regional political economy. 13. CONTRIBUTORSxiiiPeter Sunley is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Union Retreat and the Regions (with Ron Martin and Jane Wills). He has also published articles on geographies of labor and labor policy, and contributed to theoretical debates in economic geography. Dr. Erik Swyngedouw is University Reader in Economic Geography at Oxford University and Fellow of St. Peter's College. He is also Associate Fellow of the Environmental Change Unit at Oxford University. He is co-editor of, among others, The Urbanisation of Injustice (with A. Merrifield) and Towards Global Localisation (with P. Cooke and others). He published numerous articles on the political economy of space, urban and regional development, and on political ecology. Richard A. Walker is Professor of Geography, University of California, Berkeley. He is co-author of The Capitalist Imperative (with Michael Storper), The New Social Economy (with Andrew Sayer), and many articles on economic geography, urbanization, and California. Barney Warf (PhD 1985, University of Washington) is Professor and Chair of Geography at Florida State University, Tallahassee. His research and teaching interests lie within the broad domain of regional development, straddling contemporary political economy and social theory on the one hand and traditional quantitative, empirical approaches on the other, particularly concerning producer services and telecommunications. Michael Watts is the Chancellor's Professor of Geography and the Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for more than twenty years. He has written extensively on the political economy of development, on agrofood systems, and on cultural theory, and has worked in West Africa, California, and Vietnam. Michael Webber is Professor of Geography at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Golden Age Illusion (with David Rigby) and of Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience (with Bob Fagan), as well as numerous other books and articles on economic restructuring and the evolution of the global economy. 14. Figures and TablesFigure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure3.1 3.2 5.1 9.1 10.1 13.1 13.2 13.3 14.1 14.2 29.1 30.1Table 5.1 Table 6.1 Table 9.1 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 14.1 Table 14.2 Table Table Table Table22.1 22.2 22.3 25.1Monotonic convergence in a simple linear model 31 The qualitative properties of nonlinear systems 36 The top ten occupations of employed women in the USA, 1997 64 ``The Directors'' 145 Industrial districts in Italy 155 Long waves of economic activity 207 The product cycle 207 The logistic diffusion curve 209 An upward demand shift 232 A supply shift to the right 233 Internet hosts per 100,000 persons, January 1998 494 The problematic of international political economy 500 Labor force participation rates by gender and race, 19501995 Alternative approaches to institutional analysis and their application in economic geography Ideal-typical forms of work organization in Fordist and after-Fordist labor markets The regional distribution and sectoral specialization of localities (communes) with industrial districts in Italy Typology of industrial districts with respect to innovative capability World proven crude oil reserves by region, 1975, 1985, and 1995 World crude oil production, refining, and consumption by region, 1995 Roles of the qualitative state in a modern economy Four types of capitalism Welfare structures and workfare strategies Trade eras66 83 139 156 160 229 230 364 366 370 413 15. FIGURES AND TABLESTable Table Table Table Table Table25.2 25.3 25.4 25.5 25.6 26.1Composition of world trade, 196596 Growth in trade Openness ratios, 1965, 1980, and 1997 Pervasiveness of different types of NTBs A partial ranking of corruption around the world, 1998 Geographies of money and financexv 414 416 417 418 420 433 16. AcknowledgmentsEric Sheppard is deeply grateful to John Davey, who originally suggested the idea to him of a Companion to Economic Geography. Many students and colleagues have helped him understand economic geography better. It is hard to single out individuals, but he would particularly like to acknowledge (in no particular order) the influence of David, Dick, Les, Ros, Allen, Trevor, Phil, Gordon, Julie, Meric, Paul, Jim, Yu, Claire, Padraig, Byron, Bill, Dmitri, Mary, Andrea, Abdi, Lucky, Michael, Franz, Herwig, Helga, Chris, Francis, Bongman, and Yeong-ki. Trevor Barnes would like to thank the CanadaUS Fulbright Program for awarding him a fellowship for 19971998 during which period this book was begun. He would also like to thank the Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, for providing him with such a conducive physical and intellectual environment during that same year. We both would like to acknowledge the support and dedication of staff at Blackwell Publishers, particularly Jill Landeryou, Sarah Falkus, and Joanna Pyke, without whom this book would not have been finished. We would also like to thank Andrew Murphy for assiduously compiling the index. We thank Private Eye for permission to reproduce figure 9.1. 17. Chapter 1Introduction: The Art of Economic Geography Trevor J. Barnes and Eric SheppardHow do you turn economic geography into art? The Mexican painter, writer, and long-time communist Diego Rivera did it between 1932 and 1933 in painting the 25 panels of the mural ``Detroit: Man and Machine'' at the Detroit Institute of Arts (see cover). The panels tell a rich and complex economic geographical story: extracting resources from the ground, bringing together ``hands'' of workers from across the world, using various kinds of machinery furnaces, stamping machines, drills, hoists, conveyor belts in conjunction with the brawn of labor to manufacture and assemble, and finally produce, the finished product, in this case a car. The mural was paid for by Edsel Ford, son of Henry, and modeled on perhaps the most famous factory of the twentieth century the Rouge complex, the Ford automobile manufacturing plant located at Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit. The complex was first used to produce automobiles from 1913. Twenty years later, by the time Rivera came to paint it, it was already a symbol of the modern machine age, and more generally of the energy and might of industrial capitalism. Operations at the Rouge complex were vertically integrated, that is, all the different component processes of manufacture were contained within a single site, and as a result the workforce requirements were immense. At one point 75,000 employees worked there. The ``B'' building alone was a quarter of a mile long, containing the entire assembly-line operation on a single level (and much of the focus of Rivera's artistic attention). The assembly-line technique used in the ``B'' building was one of Henry Ford's most significant innovations, and was first introduced to the plant in 1927. Workers stood in place, and the work came to them on a conveyor belt. Once the work task was completed, the belt moved on, making the worker, as one Ford assembly-line employee put it, ``nothing more or less than a robot'' (quoted in Rochfort, 1987, p. 68). There is a clear sense of that in Rivera's mural. The workers do not simply tend the machines, but are fully integrated with them, their bodies synchronized with the swirling, ceaseless movement of industrial manufacture at the plant. In many ways the Ford family were an unlikely patron of Rivera. Ford senior was vehemently anti-left, and anti-union. He once said, ``people are never so likely to be 18. 2TREVOR J. BARNES AND ERIC SHEPPARDwrong as when they are organized.'' What Rivera and Ford shared, however, was a fascination with machines, and the idea that the combination of ``human and mechanical action'' could produce a ``creative power unparalleled in history'' (Rochfort, p. 67). To capture that power in paint, Rivera spent his first three months in Detroit meticulously preparing before even picking up a paintbrush. He toured the plant, spoke to workers and engineers, and had hundreds of photographs taken of the different parts of the production process (see Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978). What emerges, in spite of Rivera's communist sympathies, is a relatively uncritical portrait of industrial capitalism at the Rouge. True, one of the workers is carrying a partially obscured placard with the words ``We want.'' But the full placard would have read ``We want beer,'' a popular anti-prohibition slogan at the time. In contrast, Rivera's next mural commission, which was for another industrial mogul, John D. Rockefeller, was more overtly political, and included Lenin as one of the onlookers. In this case Rockefeller balked, and ordered the finished mural to be chipped off the wall of the Rockefeller Center, New York City, where it had been painted. For Rivera, the Rouge complex and its production of automobiles was an illustration of a broader phenomenon that he labeled a ``wave-like movement'' and found in ``water currents, electric waves, stratifications of different layers under the surface of the earth, and in a general way throughout the continuous development of life'' (Rivera, 1934, p. 50). Economic geography as it emerges from the contributions to this volume is a bit like this, too. The kinds of phenomena that economic geographers study natural resources, manufacturing, information, money are always on the move, continually undergoing transformation, morphing into new forms and identities. Of course, capturing that flux and movement is difficult. Diego Rivera did it by painting larger-than-life stories on walls. His 25 panels are a synchronic depiction of the economic geographical processes that produced and maintained the industrial behemoth of 1930s Detroit. But there are clearly other means to make that same depiction, some of which, we would argue, are found in the essays collected here. Of course, they are not couched in a visual idiom, relying on vivid colors or daring brush strokes, but in their own way, we contend, they are just as striking. Although economic geographers are not in the business of daubing paint, at least in their professional lives, there is an art to what they do. For economic geographers of whatever stripe face the same difficulty as Diego Rivera to represent on a flat surface economic geographical events that exist ``out there.'' Rivera's medium was paint, and his flat surface was a wall, whereas the medium of economic geographers is writing, and their flat surface is a sheet of A4 or eight-and-a-half by eleven inch paper. In both cases, there is a need for appropriate techniques, sensitive interpretation, enthusiasm, dedication, adequate preparation, and prior training. One of the primary aims of this volume is to introduce you to the art of economic geography. Our Approach Economic geography has always been a mainstay within geography. But its history as a formal university-based discipline in Anglo-America is quite short, at best a hundred years. As a discipline it grew less out of concerns by economists to generalize and theorize, than the concerns of geographers to describe and explain the 19. THE ART OF ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY3individual economics of different places, and their connections one to another. You can see this in the following quote from a very early German economic geographer, Karl Andree: I sit at a mahogany table from Honduras. The carpet on which it stands has been manufactured at Kidderminster in England from wool brought by a sailor from the River Plate or New South Wales. The tea in a Berlin porcelain cup came from China or Assam, the coffee from Java, the sugar from Lower Saxony, Brazil or Cuba. I smoke Puerto Rican tobacco in my pipe whose stem grew in Hungary, the material for its Meerschaum bowl, carved in Thuringia, was dug in Asia Minor, the amber mouth piece came from the Baltic Sea, and the silver for the rim from the silver mines of the Erzgebirge, Harz or perhaps from Potosi [Peru] . . .This passage was written in 1867, but the questions it raises still resonate. Where are things produced? Under what conditions? How is it that goods produced in one place end up at another? By what means? And who buys them? We're not claiming that economic geography is unaltered since 1867 as the first section of our volume amply demonstrates, there have been profound changes in approach even over the last twenty years but the broad kinds of questions that the discipline poses, and the interest in the ensuing answers, persists. These kinds of questions have also attracted various forms of interest from outside the discipline. The state has always been interested. The beginnings of economic geography as a discipline in the late nineteenth century were directly connected with the belief of various European governments that knowledge of economic geography both buttressed their colonial projects and provided their domestic business class with a potential competitive advantage over rivals. More recently, attention has come from other social scientists. This is new. In the past, economic geography was the great borrower, taking ideas from others. Now, it has begun to lend. One reason is the interest in globalization. By its very nature, globalization is an economic geographical phenomenon, and traditional economic geographical ideas around spaces of flows, and places of control and production, are central to its understanding. While much of economic geography's recent appeal has been to sociologists and political scientists, some economists have also discovered geography. Perhaps the best-known example is the MIT economist Paul Krugman, who, in his work on trade and growth, moved away from the ``wonderland of no dimensions'' to the greater realism of at least three-dimensional Euclidean space. As he put it in 1991, ``I realized that I spent my whole professional life . . . thinking and writing about economic geography, without being aware of it'' (Krugman, 1991, p. 1). Admittedly, some economic geographers still wonder if he is doing economic geography (Martin, 1999), but at least it is a start. We think, then, that there are some very good reasons to study economic geography, and to study it now. Undoubtedly this is the hubris of every generation of economic geographers. We believe, however, that two developments over the last twenty years one external to the discipline, the other internal make economic geography a central body of literature and knowledge for understanding the world at the turn of the millennium. The first is that since the 1970s there have been some enormous changes affecting the economy, and society more generally: deindustrialization, industrial restructuring, the rise of information technology (IT) and computerization, the feminization of 20. 4TREVOR J. BARNES AND ERIC SHEPPARDthe labor market, and globalization. Such changes beg understanding, and indeed are already subject to much scrutiny. What emerges from that work is that in many cases these changes are inextricably bound up with issues of space and place. We don't mean merely that, like many processes, they take on particular geographical forms (although there is nothing mere about that), but that space and place are integral to the evolution of the processes themselves. In this sense, economic geographers are in exactly the right time and place to practice their art. Consider again globalization. Arguably globalization has existed since the very first economic geographers were writing in the late nineteenth century, and likely well before then (certainly it is recognizable in Andree's ruminations). One aspect of globalization that has changed, though, is the means by which it is effected. Whereas in Andree's time it was bound up with Western European colonial policy and bureaucracy, now its prime bearers are multinational and transnational corporations (MNCs and TNCs). MNCs and TNCs are fundamentally economically geographical institutions. Their very definition and rationale is based on the idea of geographical differentiation: that different parts of their operations are located in different places. As such, they are ripe for economic geographical study. Others can and should study MNCs and TNCs, but the sensibility of economic geography is especially suited to the task and, given the role that they play in the globalization process, is ever more germane. To take another example, the Fordist-style manufacture that Rivera depicted in his murals was increasingly abandoned from the 1970s onwards, and replaced by what was called post-Fordism, or flexible specialization. That move was not only about transforming a particular method of production from assembly line and Taylorism to batch production and work teams but also about transforming geography. Flexible specialization implied a set of new spatial arrangements that were part of its very definition. Greater physical interaction and closer proximity between firms became necessary by comparison to the more arm's-length relationship that had characterized Fordism in order to realize the benefits of flexible specialization. Subcontractors needed to be close to the production plant in order to respond quickly to changed demands; R&D staff were brought in from their research facilities, sometimes thousands of kilometers away, to work more centrally in the factory in order to consult with production staff; and workers were no longer spatially segmented along the assembly line, but enjoyed greater interaction and collaboration in work teams. Whatever else it was, the move from Fordism to flexible specialization entailed an economically geographical shift. These are only a couple of examples, but we hope that they illustrate the broader argument. The recent changes in the economy, which have affected so many people in so many different ways, are not only economic but also fundamentally geographical. Economic geography is relevant not just as background atmospherics, to add ambience and color, but for understanding why economic change occurs at all. It enters into its very frame, its skeletal structure. And what is bred in the bone, comes out in the marrow. The second reason for the renewed attention to economic geography is that it continues to undergo potent intellectual shifts, making it an arena of discursive ferment and vibrancy. Economic geography, in fact, has long been an important forum for trying out new ideas. Much of human geography's quantitative revolution 21. THE ART OF ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY5of the 1960s, for example, was discussed within the context of economic geography. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the discipline has propeled discussions around political economy. As an approach, political economy is pervasive: it is how economic geography is now done. That said, political economy is no single, staid, monolithic tradition, but is multiple, dynamic, and differentiated. Debate is not always friendly, but through it new approaches, new theories, and new possibilities emerge, and constantly invigorate the field. Political economy as a tradition began in the eighteenth century, but it is perhaps most closely associated with Marx's nineteenth-century writings about capitalism. In both cases, there was the insistence that the political and the economic are irrevocably bound; that the economy cannot be treated as sovereign and isolated, but must be understood as part of a set of wider social processes. While sharing these views, political economists and economic geographers have continued to debate two central questions: the definition of the social, and the nature of the connection between the social and the economic. For Marx, the answers to those contentious questions were clear-cut. The social meant class relations, which under capitalism primarily consists of an antagonistic relationship between the working class and the capitalist class. Social classes, in turn, are connected to the economy by a functional relationship. This means that the form of the relationship among social classes is set by what contributes best to the development of the economy. Such a functional relationship is certainly not always smooth and unproblematic, but ultimately the economy prevails and produces those social relationships that are most appropriate for its development. If capitalism can best develop by a set of class relations consisting of workers and capitalists, that is what happens. The best, and the most well-known, economic geographical translation of Marx's views about social processes and their connection to the economy was carried out by David Harvey (1982), particularly in his writings during the 1970s and 1980s on the geography of accumulation. Subsequently, other economic geographers, drawing upon other traditions of political economy, have developed alternative approaches, ones providing quite different answers to the two questions about the definition of the social, and its relation to the economy. This is not the place to provide a full-blown review, but those alternatives include: . Doreen Massey's (1984) work on spatial divisions of labor. This is much more catholic than Harvey's in its definition of the social, and in the relationship it posits between the social and the economic. (Importantly, place itself partly determines the development of the economy.) . Regulationist theory. This partly defines the social in terms of institutional and regulatory frameworks, and also attempts to move away from crude functionalism (Tickell and Peck, 1992). . The analytical approach. This uses both mathematical reasoning and rigorous, formal statistical testing to determine logically how space and place make a difference both to the definition of social processes and to their relation to the economy (Sheppard and Barnes, 1990; Webber and Rigby, 1997). . Most recently, the umbrella approach, sometimes called the ``cultural turn.'' This brings together a variety of perspectives post-Marxism, institutionalism, 22. 6TREVOR J. BARNES AND ERIC SHEPPARDeconomic sociology, feminist theory trying both to widen radically what is included within the social, and also to move away from Marx's functionalism, and instead make use of notions like embeddedness (Martin, this volume), overdetermination (Gibson-Graham, this volume), or cultural performance (McDowell, 1997). This review is necessarily very brief. Sustained examples of such political economic approaches can be found in the ensuing chapters. Our point, like the one we made about economic change, is that contemporary discussions around political economy make economic geography stimulating and provocative. There is a Chinese saying: ``May you live in interesting times.'' Our argument is that they are here now in economic geography. Purpose and Organization Our broad purpose in commissioning the essays that make up this volume is to provide advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty colleagues both inside and outside economic geography, with a sense of the state of the art of economic geography. We chose to focus on the ideas, concepts, and theories current within the discipline, rather than on empirical findings, because a discipline is characterized primarily by the questions it asks. We identified individuals who we thought characterized both the unity and diversity of economic geography, and we asked them to provide their own accounts. We asked only geographers to contribute because, as we argue above, economic geography is quite different from geographical economics (see also Sheppard, 2000). Certainly, exchanges of views between geographers and economists about economic geography are an important part of the evolution of the identity of the discipline, but we leave that task to others (Clark et al., 2000). The book is organized into five sections. Economic geography is a philosophically diverse discipline, employing and debating a variety of approaches. The first section, Worlds of Economic Geography, provides a sense of this diversity. Following the first essay, which provides a historical context for undertanding the discipline, the ensuing chapters examine in turn the mathematical modeling tradition, Marxism, and three more recent variations on the political economy theme: feminism, institutional approaches, and poststructuralism. The essays not only convey a sense of the intellectual vitality of the field, but also show that accounts of economic geography, the questions taken to be important, and the methods used to find answers to them, depend on the broad philosophical and theoretical approach taken. In short, accounts of economic geography, as for any discipline, are situated; they depend on the point of view of the author, which in turn reflects how he/she is positioned intellectually, politically, and socially. As the volume turns to more substantive aspects of economic geography, we hope you will see how authors locate themselves on the intellectual terrain mapped in this section. As you read the essays in the other four sections, think about where the author is situated, how that affects the questions he or she asks about the topic of the chapter, and how those questions might differ if it had been authored by someone from a different perspective. We cannot include all perspectives on all topics, or the book would be five times as long, but the 23. THE ART OF ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY7possibilities, and actual existence, of those different perspectives is part of what makes the discipline rich and exciting. Because economic geography necessarily asks questions about things economic, the second section, Realms of Production, highlights classic themes in economics: production, work, agglomeration, competition and markets, economic growth, and technical change. In their own ways, each of these essays takes on the task of narrating how economic geographers have approached these topics, and how a geographical approach gives each of them a distinctive twist compared to their treatment in economics, even when economists ask questions about the geography of economic activity. One of the things that makes economic geography a part of geography is a concern for humanenvironment, or naturesociety, relations, and this is the focus of Resource Worlds, the third section. These essays include discussions about nature as an input to economic production; about agriculture, where that relationship is most stark; about political ecology, which has become the central theoretical approach for analyzing agricultural practices particularly in the Third World; about questions of the production of nature within economic geographical processes; and finally about resource towns, the non-agricultural places where production is most closely tied to nature. Geography has always been a synthetic discipline, taking seriously the relationships between things studied separately in other disciplines (such as nature, and society). In Social Worlds, the fourth section, the essays synthesize across the human sciences, treating economic processes as part of other social processes, rather than separable from, superior to, or more fundamental than the rest of society. The themes addressed include: consumption and the family, social class, labor organizations (unions), questions of political governance, organization of producers (corporations), and social and ethnic networks. Each chapter seeks to show the importance of a geographical perspective in understanding the intersection of the economic with the social. Last, but certainly not least, geography is not just about place but also about space: about how the distinctive economic characteristics of places, and the conditions of economic possibility that they face, depend on their economically geographical interdependencies with other places. In Spaces of Circulation, the final section, we turn attention to the geographical flows of commodities, money, and people, and to the transportation and communications systems produced to facilitate them. These essays suggest that even though the world is becoming smaller, one of the core metaphors for globalization, it is also an increasingly differentiated world, in part precisely because the interdependencies between places are increasing. The final essay links geographical thinking about globalization to similar work in international political economy. In sum, we hope that these essays provide useful resources for further reading in economic geography, and also that some of you will join in this endeavor. We also hope that you are provoked to be critical: that you will reflexively re-examine your current thinking, and ask new questions about the adequacy of economic geography's representations and approaches highlighted here. If so, our goals in compiling this volume will have been achieved. 24. 8TREVOR J. BARNES AND ERIC SHEPPARDBibliography Andree, Karl 186777. Geographie des Welthandels (3 vols.) Stuttgart. [The quote is from Volume 1, p. 13 (first published in 1867)]. Clark, G., Gertler, M. and Feldman, M. 2000. Handbook of Economic Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Detroit Institute of Arts 1978. The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera. Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts. Harvey, D. 1982. Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krugman, P. 1991. Geography and Trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martin, R. L. 1999. The new ``geographical turn'' in economics: Some critical reflections. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 23, 6591. Massey, D. 1984. Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structure and the Geography of Production. London: Methuen. McDowell, L. 1997. Capital Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Rivera, D. 1934. Portrait of America. London: George Allen & Unwin. Rochfort, D. 1987. The Murals of Diego Rivera. London: Journeyman Press. Sheppard, E. and Barnes, T. 1990. The Capitalist Space Economy. London: Unwin Hyman. Sheppard, E. 2000. Geography or economics? In G. Clark, M. Gertler and M. Feldman (eds), Handbook of Economic Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming). Tickell, A. and Peck, J. 1992. Accumulation, regulation and the geographies of post-Fordism: Missing links in regulationist research. Progress in Human Geography, 16, 190218. Webber, M. and Rigby, D. 1997. The Golden Age Illusion. New York: Guilford Press. 25. Part IWorlds of Economic GeographyChapter 2Inventing Anglo-American Economic Geography, 18891960 Trevor J. Barnes11Chapter 3The Modeling Tradition Paul S. Plummer27Chapter 4The Marxian Alternative: HistoricalGeographical Materialism and the Political Economy of Capitalism Erik Swyngedouw41Chapter 5Feminism and Economic Geography: Gendering Work and Working Gender Ann M. Oberhauser60Chapter 6Institutional Approaches in Economic Geography Ron Martin77Chapter 7Poststructural Interventions J. K. Gibson-Graham95 26. Chapter 2Inventing Anglo-American Economic Geography, 18891960 Trevor J. BarnesThe American inventor Thomas Edison (18471931) said that his genius consisted of ``1 per cent inspiration, and 99 per cent perspiration.'' In this chapter I make a similar argument about the invention of economic geography. While there were inspirational moments during its history, mostly the story of economic geography is about hard work, about the large number of specific concrete practical activities required to define and maintain an economic geographical order. Such organization was not instant, but occurred hesitantly, a consequence of particular human practices and accomplishments within specific geographical and historical settings. That is why ``inventing'' is in the chapter title. It signals that economic geography is contingent upon conscious acts of human creativity and effort rather than existing since time immemorial. The idea that academic disciplines are human inventions, and in some cases very recent human inventions economic geography, for example, was invented somewhere between the time of the first telegraph and the first radio might seem disconcerting. This is because one connotation of the word invent is to make something up, to fictionalize, or, at worse, to lie. Under this interpretation to invent is to tell stories about a world that doesn't exist. In contrast, from its inception economic geography was (and is) about something real and substantial. However, there is another connotation to inventing that better fits the aim of the chapter, and takes us back to Thomas Edison. Edison's inventions, such as the ticker tape machine (1870), the phonograph (1878), and the incandescent light bulb (1879), were ``made up'' in that they did not exist before he had them as ideas. But once they existed they produced definitive material effects, altering human practices and beliefs. Humans could do things that they could never do before: react to Wall Street's surges and slumps as they occurred, hear music originally played sometimes half a world away, and light up whole cities. Inventions in Edison's sense change the world, and give humans a different relationship to it. My argument is that this second interpretation of inventing is useful in understanding the history of economic geography. Once economic geography was invented, and later reinvented, the world was altered. After economic geography 27. 12TREVOR J. BARNESexisted, peoples' beliefs and actions were different: not only those of geographers, but of a variety of people. There is one more parallel to draw. Inventing economic geography and the light bulb are context-dependent; that is, there is something about the peculiar combination of circumstances in which those inventions occurred that made them possible. For example, for Edison to invent the incandescent light bulb required knowledge about electricity and its properties, machines and specialized equipment that could generate electricity and transmit it across long distances, and a research laboratory containing instruments, materials, and trained technicians and scientists capable of undertaking such a project. These contextual factors made the incandescent light bulb possible, entering into its very construction, and shaping its form and capacities. The same holds for economic geography. The discipline arose because of a set of contextual factors, and as those factors changed so did economic geography. Further, those factors, like the relationship between electricity and the light bulb, entered into economic geography's very constitution, shaping the questions it asked, the methods and tools it used, and the range of answers it deemed acceptable. For sure the discipline had its own geniuses, people who were brilliant in thinking up new ideas, but their creativity was always, like Edison's, informed and tempered by a wider context. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first describes the beginnings of the institutionalization of Anglo-American economic geography as a discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critical here was the presence of colonialism and the growth of global commercial trade. The second discusses the interval between the first and second world wars (19181939/41) when a regional approach to the discipline emerged. The final section focuses on the immediate postwar period which was the setting for the so-called ``quantitative revolution'' and ``spatial science.'' In a chapter as short as this it is not possible to cover everything. Instead, the chapter is organized around a set of vignettes marking distinct periods in economic geography's invention and reinvention. It is a history, and not the history. I should especially stress that the essay is limited to English-speaking, Anglo-North American economic geography, and to the voices of men. This is partly because of limitations of space, partly because of my own circumscribed abilities and biases, partly because of the kind of written sources that are available, and partly because of the very nature of economic geography itself. For good or bad, economic geography was historically a masculinist discipline, and linked to the European intellectual sensibility of the Enlightenment tradition (on both characteristics see Gibson-Graham's chapter in this volume). But to define the history of economic geography thus is not to argue for continuation in its old form. Indeed, the chapters that follow envisage something quite different. Invention, Institutionalization, and Imperialism It is very difficult to provide an exact date for the invention of economic geography. Possible contenders include: 1925, when the journal Economic Geography was first published; 1893, when economic geography courses were first taught at Cornell 28. INVENTING ANGLO-AMERICAN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY13University and the University of Pennsylvania; 1882, when the German geographer Gotz distinguished between commercial and economic geography; and 1826, when The isolated state, for some the first classic treatise in economic geography, was written and privately published by the German landowner and farmer Johann von Thunen (17831850). These dates at least narrow the origins of economic geo graphy to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This period was important for the emergence of economic geography for two reasons. The first is that this was an era when a number of academic disciplines, especially in the social sciences, were institutionalized within Western European and North American universities. Economic geography was one of those new disciplines (for other examples see Ross, 1991). These disciplines, such as sociology, or psychology, or economic geography, were defined by novel forms of representation which I will term ``discourses.'' Discourse is a difficult word to define, but I use it to mean a network of concepts, statements, and practices that produce a distinct body of knowledge. A disciplinary discourse, for example, would include specialized vocabularies, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, diagrams, variables, and even tables of figures. The important point is that such discourses are crucial to creating inventing the world that is represented; that is, rather than simply mirroring a world that is out there, disciplinary discourses help to construct it. For example, up until at least the seventeenth century, if not later, the idea of the economy did not exist as such. Of course, humans have performed what we now call economic acts since Adam and Eve labored in the Garden of Eden. But it was only about 300 years ago that the economic was recognized as conceptually distinct. Partly allowing the economy to become visible to be invented were a novel set of practices derived from the emerging academic disciplinary discourse of economics (which I will call ``discursive practices''), and composed of, for example, striking metaphors (Adam Smith's ``invisible hand''), new concepts (Ricardo's comparative advantage), persuasive diagrams (Quesnay's Tableau economique), compelling equations (Say's Law), and meticulously calculated figures (William Petty's political arithmetic). Note that using the term discourse is not to deny the seriousness or materiality of the economic. The new economic world that was invented quickly affected people's most heartfelt beliefs and their most material actions. In a similar fashion, albeit slightly later, economic geography was invented. Its discourse was composed of: new terms like ``regions of production'' (Chisholm, 1889) or ``northsouth axis'' (Smith, 1913); new typologies and schemes of categorization that ordered the world, for example, linking global climate regimes and agricultural crops (Chisholm, 1889, pp. 57153); and new maps and diagrams that made visible economic geographical connections, for example, between trade routes and modes of transportation (Smith, 1913). The result was the creation of new bits of reality that previously did not exist, like ``commercial space'' or ``transactional centers,'' which, in turn, affected how people saw their position within the world, producing new beliefs and behaviors. The second reason for the particular timing of economic geography is bound up with its relationship to colonialism, and especially commercial expansion. There is now much written about the relation between the emergence of academic geography and the rise of especially nineteenth-century Western European imperialism (Hudson, 1977; Peet, 1985; Livingstone, 1992). In particular, a link is often made 29. 14TREVOR J. BARNESbetween the environmental determinism that a number of early geographers espoused at the time, and the justification of imperialism. Environmental determinism is the idea that the natural environment determines everything about a given people, for example, that those living in tropical climates will be less energetic than those living in temperate ones (Livingstone, 1992, ch. 7). Such a thesis, in turn, was used as a justification for colonialism. If a people could not fully develop economically because of, say, the prevailing climatic regime in which they lived, it was then legitimate for Europeans to intervene and show them how: indeed, this was ``the White man's burden.'' While an important line of argument, these links between geography and environmental determinism are couched at the level of geography as a whole, and seem a bit too neat and mechanical (Livingstone's 1992 work, with its emphasis on ``situated messiness,'' is an exception): if imperialism, then environmental determinism. In contrast, I will concentrate on only economic geography, and move away from such a tidy relationship. As we know even from Edison and his light bulb, inventing is messy and difficult. The same goes, I will argue, for economic geography. In focusing only on economic geography, and its unkempt beginning, I start with two figures: George Chisholm (18501930) in Britain, and J. Russell Smith (1874 1966) in the United States. Before their writing there were odd facts about commerce and geography, dribs and drabs that didn't quite fit; afterwards there was a new discipline. George G. Chisholm The intellectual life of George G. Chisholm, author of the first English-language economic geography textbook, Handbook of commercial geography (1889), personifies those unkempt beginnings. Born in Scotland and attending Edinburgh University, he later moved to London, making his living primarily from writing and editing geographical textbooks, gazetteers, and atlases (Wise, 1975; MacLean, 1988). Chisholm's Handbook contains everything anyone might want to know about world commodity production and the geographical conditions for trade. While Chisholm (1889, pp. iiiiv) claims in the Preface ``to import an intellectual interest [to his inquiry] . . . and not to encumber the book with a multitude of minute facts,'' that interest is difficult to find, whereas minute facts litter every page. The Handbook contains neither an explicit theoretical statement nor organizational justification. His focus is the facts (especially evident in his very long statistical appendix). As he once said, ``If . . . there is some drudgery in the learning of geography, I see no harm in it'' (quoted in MacLean, 1988, p. 25). In 1908 Chisholm left London to become a lecturer in geography at Edinburgh (the first such position in Scotland), and it was there that he first wrote programmatic statements for the new discipline of economic geography: I would say then that it is the function of geography with respect to any class of phenomena that have a local distribution to explain that distribution in so far as it can be explained by variations connected with place in the operation of causes whose operation varies according to locality or according to the relation of one locality to another (Chisholm, 1908, pp. 5689). 30. INVENTING ANGLO-AMERICAN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY15In so far as this statement is understandable it points to the importance of local, place-based factors and their interrelationship in determining the geography of economic activities. There is certainly no indication here that Chisholm is some lackey to imperialism mouthing environmental determinism. That said, the context of imperialism in which Chisholm did his inventing clearly influenced his work, and his conception of economic geography. Those connections were complex, however. First, and most directly, the Handbook was a celebration of imperial commerce, the technology that made it possible, and a global trading system with Britain at its center. The late nineteenth century when Chisholm wrote the Handbook was a period in which Britain was the workshop of the world, ``heavily dependent upon international trade and at the hub of a world-wide empire'' (MacLean, 1988, p. 21). In part this was made possible by ``improvements in the means of transport and communication'' (Chisholm, 1889, p. 47), but also in part because of free trade and Britain's military might. Chisholm was not only extolling the economic benefits of trade in his volume, though, but also economic geography. For him, trade is primarily geographical. Chapter 1 begins: ``The great geographical fact on which commerce depends is that different parts of the world yield different products, or furnish products under unequally favorable conditions'' (Chisholm, 1889, p. 1). In this sense, to acclaim trade is simultaneously to acclaim ``the great geographical fact'' of commercial or economic geography. A second connection is that Chisholm's book, through its use of maps, figures, and tables of numbers, made visible, and therefore knowable, the complex filaments of the imperial project. In this sense, Chisholm's book constructed imperialism as well as representing it. This might seem a strange claim to make. I am not suggesting that Chisholm made up imperialism, but I am saying that without his work and other similar works people could not have known imperialism as such. Imperialism is so large and complex that it only becomes knowable when it is reduced to the printed page, which is precisely what Chisholm's maps, figures, and tables accomplish. This also speaks to the hard work and mundane quality of the effort required to invent (and celebrated by Edison's aphorism). One can hardly imagine a more tedious and time-consuming task than Chisholm assembling massive amounts of data in tabular form, searching down every last fact, and constructing detailed maps. But these mundane and meticulous acts contributed to the reproduction of imperialism, and helped to invent the new discipline of economic geography. A final connection between imperialism and Chisholm's work is found in education. Chisholm begins his Preface by saying that he wants to teach ``those entering on commercial life'' (p. iii); that is, to make them better prepared and competitive in their business activities by furnishing them with the right knowledge. In carrying out that task, Chisholm was prompted and guided by two contextual factors. The first was that during the late nineteenth century Britain was facing stiff commercial competition from Germany and its empire. Chisholm believed Germany's competitiveness stemmed directly from the superior educational prowess of its business class who among other things were steeped in economic geography. The second was a report published in 1885 by a British Royal Commission headed by Scott Keltie documenting the poor state of geographical education in Britain (a response in part to the 1870 Education Acts). As an academic field, however, geography lacked 31. 16TREVOR J. BARNESqualified teachers, suitable textbooks, and even a curriculum (MacLean, 1988, p. 23). Chisholm's book met both needs. It provided the British business class with commercial geographical information, and British schools with a curricular template, a source of classroom information, and something to be displayed both to students and to school governors and inspectors. Chisholm, however, was also speaking to an emerging community of academic geographers. His work became part of the broader process of institutionalizing geography as a discipline, especially after his appointment at Edinburgh University. Through Chisholm's role as an educator, economic geography as a newly invented discipline diffused, taking on efficacy: economic geography began changing the world. Chisholm's book was intimately connected to his life and times. The colonial project was certainly helped on its way by Chisholm's writings, but it wasn't there working behind his back ensuring that he wrote only the right words or drew only the right maps. In fact, later in his life Chisholm (1921, p. 186) made a plea against the exploitation of colonial labor, which indicates again the untidy character of invention. Imperialism could not simply call forth actors such as Chisholm to provide instant legitimation. It was always more complicated. By the time Chisholm died in 1930, the legitimacy of economic geographical discourse, and the object it constituted, were established. His work in part set the economic geographical die, stamped, as we've seen, by such characteristics as a wariness of theory, a concern with empirical detail, a celebration of numbers, a predilection for geographical categorization made visible by the map, and a tracing of relations among places through the media of various kinds of economic flows, especially that of the commodity. If none of this seems exceptional it is because we are the heirs of Chisholm's more than century old legacy. At the time, though, he was making things up inventing as he went along. J. Russell Smith On the other side of the Atlantic, the process of invention was slightly different. The main impetus came from economics, and in particular the dissatisfaction of American economists with the discipline's abstractness (Fellmann, 1986). As a reaction, some turned to the German Historical School which emphasized context and concrete detail. As the economist Edward Van Dyke Robinson explained at the time (1909, p. 249, and quoted in Fellmann, 1986, p. 316): ``After the [German] Historical School of economists had introduced the idea of relativity as to time and place, the necessity was apparent not only for a historical but also for a regional treatment for economic phenomena in other words for economic history and economic geography.'' Consequently, in the United States economic geography was initially taught by economists or those in business schools. An early site was the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1903 it hired one of its doctoral students, a transportation economist, J. Russell Smith, who three years later founded within the School the Department of Geography and Industry. In 1913 Smith cemented both his own reputation and that of US economic geography by publishing Industrial and commercial geography. It was both a new and improved as well as an American version of Chisholm's Handbook (Starkey, 1967, p. 200) 32. INVENTING ANGLO-AMERICAN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY17Divided into two sections which correspond to the terms of its title, the first (and longest) part of Industrial and commercial geography discusses the production of particular resources and manufactured goods, and the second part discusses world trade. Throughout there is a dynamism and movement that is absent in Chisholm's work, and which is a product of Smith's focus on technological changes around transportation and communications. In particular, such changes for Smith facilitated a ``world [commodity] market'' (Smith, 1913, p. 16) defined by a distinct geography of control and production. Control is located in one ``mere corner of the world'' (Smith, p. 874), i.e. NW Europe and the NE seaboard of the US, because it ``has capital to spare'' (Smith, p. 874), and because of its ``transactional'' role as a ``place where bargains are made'' (Smith, p. 867). In contrast, the rest of the world is defined by its role as a producer. The discourse that emerges from Smith's book is similar to that of Chisholm's. Again there is a focus on empirical detail, the shunning of theory (although environmental determinism appears in the introductory chapter to Smith's book, it was dropped in later editions), and a penchant for geographical categorization. Smith is perhaps even more emphatic than Chisholm in emphasizing exchange and trade. For J. Russell Smith exchange and trade are irresistible impulses. Whenever one place has a surplus of one good, and another place a surplus of a different good, trade naturally unfolds between them. In addition, Smith joins an emphasis on trade with a stress on technology. With such innovations as the steamboat, railway, telegraph, and telephone, trade need no longer be locally constrained but becomes global. In this sense Smith's book reads as a primer on globalization, albeit written at the beginning of the twentieth century and not at its end. As with Chisholm's Handbook, the sources of success of Smith's Industrial and commercial geography are multiple. There is the role of the Historical School which gives rise to the very idea of economic geography, and, in turn, to economic and commercial geography courses that had never existed before. Moreover, by a happy coincidence, this development occurred just as geography itself was becoming institutionalized. When the influence of the Historical School began to wane by the 1910s as economics became more analytical and less empirical, and as a result economic geography courses were dropped by departments of economics, they were picked up by newly-formed geography departments such as Smith's (Fellmann, 1986, p. 319). There is also the peculiar conjuncture of Smith's own interests. By focusing on transportation and communications technology Smith could simultaneously celebrate human creativity, the power of the machine, trade and exchange, and the importance of geography, while at the same time not giving the discipline away to physical geography (which was the inclination of perhaps the most famous US geographer at the time, William Morris Davies at Harvard). Smith could sustain such a position in part because of the compelling narrative he used to structure his book which joined the benefits of exchange with the benefits of technological innovation. It was a story that resonated perfectly with the free-enterprise and machine-age sentiments of an early twentieth-century America beginning to engage in global trade. Finally, as with Chisholm, there is Smith's role as an educator. His influence was not confined to the students he taught while at Wharton (and at Columbia 33. 18TREVOR J. BARNESUniversity in New York from 1919 onwards). He was, like Chisholm, a dry lecturer, his poor delivery exacerbated by ``a slight lisp and a low, monotonous way of speaking'' (Rowley, 1964, p. 87). But he shone as a writer. His book was enormously successful, garnering compliments by geographers, and, perhaps even more importantly, by university administrators who decided the fate of geography departments (Rowley, pp. 501). Like Chisholm's Handbook, Smith's volume was more than just a student text to be read to pass final exams. It became an active component in the very invention of economic geography as a discipline. By focusing on Chisholm and Smith I've delineated some of the elements of the newly invented discipline of economic geography and its world. The discipline was concerned with empirical detail, global geographical categorization based upon commodity specialization, and the spatial patterns and conditions of commercial trade. Economic geography did not have to turn out in the way it did, for example, it could have taken on an abstract theoretical bent (which was the trajectory of economics). That it did not do so goes to the importance of historical and geographical context. That context was not mere background atmospherics, but entered in the very body of the discipline's knowledge. The context of commercial expansionism and imperial control made a difference. But as I've also stressed, early economic geographers were not the mere dupes of that context: there was individual inspiration, along with perspiration. Regions, Differentiation, and Richard Hartshorne Within fifteen years or so of Smith's book being published, economic geography began to change. There are again parallels with what happens to inventions. Often they undergo further alteration, sometimes taking forms that are barely recognizable compared to their original incarnation. Contrast, for example, early computers that took up the space of many rooms with the present lap-top. These kinds of developments or reinventions, whether it be computers or economic geography, require much labor and reorganization. In the case of economic geography it became noticeably different by the 1930s as focus shifted from the general commercial relations of a global system to the geography of narrowly bounded, unique regions, especially those close to home. In part, this move to the region stemmed from a long-standing debate in the economic geographical literature. Smith's book was structured for the most part thematically, around commodities, trade, and transportation, and not regionally. For some American economic geographers, such as Ray Whitbeck, this was a mistake. As he argued in his critical review of Smith's book, there is ``a distinction between a text book of commerce and industry and one on commercial and industrial geography'' (Whitbeck, 1914, p. 540). For Whitbeck (191516, p. 197) the emphasis should be geographical: ``the unit should be the country and not the commodity.'' From the end of World War I in 1918, Whitbeck's position became increasingly popular, particularly in US economic geography (which is the focus of this section). The result was a regional perspective that made the region, and its unique features, the focus of inquiry. That perspective is readily disclosed in the various textbooks that were published from the mid-1920s onwards. Ray Whitbeck's own Economic geography, co-written with his University of Wisconsin colleague Vernor Finch, is 34. INVENTING ANGLO-AMERICAN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY19typical (and first published in 1924). Justifying economic geography on the grounds that it provides ``a kind of knowledge that educated people need and use,'' the key organizing idea is ``areal differences,'' the interpretation of which ``requires the reasoned association of facts of many kinds'' (Whitbeck and Finch, 1935, p. v). Those facts are then neatly ordered under an identical fourfold typology for each of the regions investigated: agriculture, minerals, manufacture, and commercial trade, transportation and communications. Another example is Clarence Fielden Jones's (1935) textbook Economic Geography which begins: ``Everyone likes to travel. Most of us wish to visit distant lands'' (quoted in Berry, Conkling and Ray, 1987, p. 27). The eightfold typology used by Fielden Jones to organize the facts taken from his travels is more finely variegated than Whitbeck's and Finch's, but it performs the same role: a typological grid for sorting observations that can then be photographed, mapped, tabulated, or, most likely, merely listed under the appropriate classificatory heading. By comparing the facts of the different regions by using the same typological grid, geographical differences are immediately seen, and areal differentiation shines by its own light. More broadly, this regionalist perspective represented a shift in the economic geographical discourse, changing the object of enquiry. Let me explore that discourse by briefly discussing the work of Richard Hartshorne (18991992), an American geographer who perhaps more than any other geographer is associated with the regionalist perspective. Not that Hartshorne was the first to conceive of regionalism, but he systematically codified it, and provided an intellectually rigorous justification. In so doing he gave economic geography a critical role. In the 1920s Hartshorne carried out work in economic geography, but he is best known for his writings on the history and philosophy of the discipline, and, in particular, the book, The Nature of Geography (1939), which drew upon the German geographer Alfred Hettner (18591941). One purpose of that book was to define a geographical unit that could be used as a basis to organize and integrate the often scattered and multifarious pieces of information collected by geographers. Hartshorne's answer: the region. It allowed geographers to integrate otherwise disparate geographical facts, rendering the complexity of the world comprehensible. But how should the region be defined? Regions based on watersheds, for example, would be quite different from regions based upon economic specialty. For Hartshorne the economic ruled supreme. He thought the activities of keeping ``body and soul together'' (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 334) are the most central to human life, and should be used to delineate the region. More specifically, within the wider set of economic activities that occurs he thought those around agriculture, and the family farm in particular, are especially important for regional delimitation. Hartshorne, therefore, justifies his regionalist perspective on the basis of economic geography: ``there is no boundary between economic and regional geography'' (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 408). For him the world is made up of a patchwork quilt of economically defined regions, where each region is a closely defined complex of interconnected elements including, for example, land and plants, buildings and livestock, tools and production methods, as well as various invisible components like prices and markets, and practical and abstract knowledge. Examples might include: the American corn belt, the Po plain in Italy, or the Vale of Evesham in 35. 20TREVOR J. BARNESSouthwest England. In each case the complex interaction among the different elements within a region is critical, producing a unique regional entity. Let me note some of the principal differences between this regionalist economic geographical discourse and the older one of Chisholm and Smith. It will help clarify the nature of the economic geographical reinvention that occurred. First, regionalism emphasizes the geographically unique. While the same type of elements are found in different economic regions, how they are combined together and relate one to another ``occurs but once on the earth'' (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 393). For Hartshorne two related implications follow. That no law-like statements can be made about regions, implying that economic geography cannot be a predictive science (this is especially important given that from the mid-1950s onwards economic geography makes strenuous bids to become exactly a predictive science). And that a regional approach, or what amounts to the same thing, an economic geographical approach, must be descriptive. If economic geographers cannot invoke explanatory laws, they must be ``concerned with the description and interpretation of unique cases . . .'' (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 449). In contrast, Chisholm and Smith, while recognizing the importance of geographical difference, and relying heavily on description, are at pains to emphasize the wider geographical and economic system that revolves around world production and trade, and that connects places and regions together. This is missing in much of the regionalist economic geography. The region is interesting in and of itself. Second, the regional uniqueness emphasized by Hartshorne provides justification for the rapid spread of regional typologies that typified economic geography. If a region is defined by its combination of different economic elements, then to show its uniqueness we must classify those elements, and then, using the typologies constructed, demonstrate that those elements appear in different mixtures in different places. In contrast, in Chisholm's and Smith's works, there is less concern with typologies as such. Places are categorized, but only by the commodities they produce and trade, with the purpose of emphasizing geographical connectivity: the global system comes first, its constituent regions defined by commodity production came second. Lastly, for Hartshorne the complexity of the region requires sustained, on-theground field research. Geographers must muddy their boots if they are to understand the world. Again, in contrast, neither Chisholm's nor Smith's work required them to be physically present: in fact, given the global ambitions of their project, it would have been impossible for them to do so. Collecting and organizing numbers, and drawing maps based upon them, was sufficient. Of course, they still went into the field Chisholm was an especially ardent field tripper but it was not an integral component of their enterprise. The exact reasons for economic geography's regionalist reinvention are difficult to locate. A number of causes seem plausible. There is a changing historical and geographical context. Both the slowing of colonialism, and the effects of the 1930s Depression on world trade and commerce, rendered Chisholm's and Smith's projects less pressing. There is Hartshorne's intellectual engagement with German geography and in particular with Hettner's. (In 19389 Hartshorne spent a sabbatical year in Austria writing The Nature of Geography; Hartshorne, 1979.) There are also internal sociological reasons, of which the most cited is the embarrassment caused 36. INVENTING ANGLO-AMERICAN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY21by the discipline's earlier affair with environmental determinism. A focus on regional study represented if not ``greener pastures'' at least ``smaller safer pastures'' (Mikesell, 1974, p. 1). But also the discipline of geography itself was becoming much more professionalized and institutionalized within a university setting. As it did so the stakes became higher, with individual academic reputations hinging on the successful promulgation of new ideas and discourses such as the regional one. Whatever the reasons, external or internal, the upshot was quite a different economic geography from what went before, with such emphases as fieldwork and regional boundary making, the construction of new typologies, and a distinctive view of the purpose of geography. Furthermore, regionalist economic geography remained intact for at least twenty years after The Nature of Geography was published. Partly this was because of Hartshorne's status and power within American geography, but it was also a legacy of his wartime activities in US military intelligence in the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) which involved him supervising a large number of geographers. According to Butzer (1989, p. 50), the close-knit relationships forged during that period ``crystallized into a coherent paradigm, reinforced by close proximity and strong personal ties, and that endured for many years as an elite club.'' From the mid-1950s onwards, however, that club began to be criticized in large part from a younger generation who were never members. The Quantitative Revolution and Spatial Science That younger generation, at least in the United States, initially gathered at two principal sites: the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and the University of Washington, Seattle. It was from Iowa that the first voice openly opposed to Hartshorne was heard. In 1953 Fred K. Schaefer (1953), a political refugee from Nazi Germany and an inaugural member of the Department of Geography at Iowa, published in the flagship periodical, Annals, Association of American Geographers, ``Exceptionalism in geography.'' It was both a repudiation of Hartshorne's position, and a call for a scientific approach to geography based upon the search for geographical laws (the ultimate form of a scientific generalization). Unfortunately, Schaefer died in June 1953, before his article even appeared in print, and so he was never able to elaborate his argument, nor defend himself from Hartshorne's (1955) subsequent attack. But the article became a rallying point for the younger generation of economic geographers who were intent on reinventing the discipline as a science, or ``spatial science'' as it was later dubbed. To do so required the techniques, logic, and vocabulary of scientific practice: that is, a new disciplinary discourse was needed, and consequently a new object of inquiry. Here a colleague of Schaefer's at Iowa, his boss, Harold McCarty, played a critical role. While suspicious of Schaefer's grand philosophizing, and rankled by his combativeness, McCarty concurred with Schaefer that economic geography should move away from regionalism and become more scientific. In 1940 McCarty had published The geographic basis of American economic life, on the surface a conventional regional account of US economic geography. Its intellectual point of departure was fundamentally different from Hartshorne's, however. Regions were McCarty's unit of analysis neither because of the authority of Hettner, nor because 37. 22TREVOR J. BARNESthey were convenient integrative units, but because market forces made economic geographical reality that way (McCarty, 1940, p. 19). There is a hard economic conceptual logic driving McCarty's analysis based upon market forces, which was new to the discipline, and represented by economic theory. As he put it: ``Economic geography derives its concepts largely from the field of economics and its method largely from the field of geography'' (McCarty, 1940, p. xiii). McCarty's use of that word method is very broad because the specific technical methods he later employed came not from geography per se, but from statistics. In particular, he pioneered within economic geography the use of the statistical techniques of regression and correlation analysis (McCarty et al., 1956), conceiving the very discipline in their image (Barnes, 1998b). Such practices marked Iowa as one of the first quantitative economic geography departments in the US. At the other ``center of calculation'' in US economic geography, the University of Washington, the two pivotal faculty members were Edward Ullman, and, perhaps more importantly, William Garrison. Garrison had joined the department in 1950, following a PhD at Northwestern University, and before that wartime service in the US Airforce where he took courses in statistics and mathematics as part of his training as a meteorologist (an experience common to other pioneering quantifiers). Statistics and mathematics were to define the program at Washington. Garrison gave the first advanced course in statistics in a US geography department in 1954. It was not only numbers but also machines that were important. There were the large, cumbersome electrical mechanized Friden calculators, but more significant was the even larger, more cumbersome, computer. In an early advertisement for the department, Donald Hudson (1955) boasted about the departmental use of an IBM 604 digital computer, also a national first. The programming technique of so-called ``plug wiring'' involving plugging wires into a circuit board was crude and inefficient, but it helped define and consolidate the new vision of the discipline as based on science and the latest technology. Even at this point we begin to see the shape of a different kind of economic geography emerging. It was radically different from Hartshorne's field-based, typological, descriptive one centered on the region, and sometimes only on the farm. Instead, the new economic geography was primarily undertaken at a desk and involved calculators, computers, graphs, numbers, and spread sheets; it employed an increasingly abstract, theoretical vocabulary taken primarily from economics; it concerned itself with finding causes and explanations, and not simply with classification; and it was not content with written descriptions of the unique, but focused also on the conceptual and numerical analysis of the general. Economic geography was becoming a fully fledged social science stressing the social over the natural, and scientific analysis over ``mere'' description. More generally, as economic geographical discourse was reinvented an entirely different economic geographical world was emerging defined by abstract space, geometrical axioms, Greek symbols, and regression lines. But it was hard work, and often contested. This can be seen in Britain where a similar process unfolded, albeit slightly later. There ``the revolution'' was associated especially with Peter Haggett, who was at Cambridge and later Bristol University, and Richard Chorley, a physical geographer at Cambridge. They were given the moniker the ``terrible twins'' because of their role in introducing a scientific 38. INVENTING ANGLO-AMERICAN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY23approach to the discipline. In Haggett's (1965) case that approach was partly worked out within the context of economic geography. He argued that through a process of abstraction economic geographers should construct an ideal simplification of reality a model and then using statistical methods test it against the real world. Examples of modeling are found in Paul Plummer's chapter, which follows this one, and it is now a well-known strategy. But at the time it was seriously opposed by those holding on to regionalism. No wonder. It presaged an entirely different kind of economic geographical practices (see Chorley's hilarious 1995 account of Haggett being told off by his Head for showing a regression coefficient). Another movement that reinforced economic geography's trajectory towards spatial science during the 1950s was regional science. Child of the energetic and ambitious American economist Walter Isard, regional science was born in Detroit in December 1954, when the first meeting of the Regional Science Association was convened. Isard's wider purpose (1956, p. 25) was to add spatial relationships to the hitherto ``wonderland of no dimensions'' that constituted the economist's world. The strength of his theoretical treatise, Location and space economy (1956) (immediately used by Garrison at Washington for his economic geography seminar), was such that by 1958 Isard had established the first Department of Regional Science, perhaps appropriately at the University of Pennsylvania, Russell Smith's alma mater. Certainly, during these early years there was theoretical, personnel, and institutional cross-pollenization between regional science and the new economic geography which benefited both. But it was always a r