II.

Historical Development

As a specialism within geography, economic geography has its origins in late 19th-century commercial geography, which emphasized the spatial location of commodities and raw materials and related these locations to physical geography and the development of transport networks. Commercial geography played an important role in establishing and sustaining the economic relationships of colonialism. Many 19th-century explorers were sponsored by the geographical societies that had been founded during the early decades of the century in Berlin, Paris, and London. For example, the travels of David Livingstone were sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society in London. The aim of these societies and of most explorers was to discover not only “new” places, but also new sources of raw materials that would benefit Europe’s rapidly growing industries. Trade was initiated through the opening-up of areas, such as tropical Africa, that had plentiful raw materials which could be extracted by local labour and subsequently processed into manufactured goods in Europe.

The commercial geography that dominated until the mid-20th century was mostly factually based and took place within the broader framework of regional geography. It was concerned with the description and mapping of natural resources, or commodities, and their exploitation across the globe. Since the 1950s, however, this predominantly descriptive approach has given way to one focused more on economic theory. The impetus for this change was the so-called quantitative revolution, which affected the whole of geography, and especially human geography, during the late 1950s and 1960s. Many geographers rejected the past emphasis on description generally, and specifically the idea of the uniqueness of particular areas that was the focus of regional geography at the time. Instead they began to look for ways of introducing a more scientific approach to the subject through the development of general theories that would explain the spatial structures of human occupation and use of the Earth. Initially in the newly emerging economic geography, these theories were mainly derived from Neo-Classical economics, and assumed that the market system was a rational and efficient distributor of resources and wealth; the political, social, and cultural aspects and problems associated with resource and wealth distribution were ignored. The geographical models derived from Neo-Classical economics included many theories of industrial location, agricultural land-use patterns, settlement patterns, and transport networks. These theories assumed rational, profit-maximizing actions on the part of individuals, and used theories from geometry and the physical sciences to predict geographical patterns. Some earlier models were further developed at this time, including: the model of agricultural land use developed in the 1820s by the German agriculturalist Johann Heinrich von Thünen; Alfred Weber’s industrial location model, developed at the beginning of the 20th century; and the settlement location models developed in the 1930s by the German geographer Walter Christaller and the German economist August Lösch, which provided the basis of central place theory.

These models did not, however, accurately reflect the complexities of the real world and economic geographers after the 1960s began to adopt theories that allowed them to focus upon the social consequences of economic actions. The theories of Karl Marx, which suggested that the shape of society was closely tied to the organization of production, were particularly influential not just in economic geography, but in human geography generally, where they formed the basis of what came to be called radical geography. Marxist theories, which imply that the geography of production and the geography of society are inextricably linked, remain important to studies of the relationships between social structure and economic activity at a variety of geographical scales, from local to global. One important focus of study has been uneven development, that is the fact that both in the past and today certain regions are economically favoured at the expense of others. Such uneven development occurs on a number of geographical scales: for example, on a global scale there is the concentration of wealth and technology, or economic development, in the highly industrialized economies of the West, at the expense of developing economies. Within the highly industrialized economies themselves, certain regions, such as south-eastern England, have developed economically far more rapidly than others. At even smaller scales there is the dominance of London within south-eastern England; and within London, the concentration of wealth in certain residential or industrial zones. It is these kinds of multi-layered, nested geographies that have concerned many economic geographers since the 1970s.