Geographical political economy

Abstract

The line of scholarship dominating Anglophone geographers’ approaches to studying economic geography since 1980 can be characterized as geographical political economy; an approach prioritizing commodity production over market exchange. Here the spatialities of capitalism co-evolve with its economic processes and economic, political, cultural and biophysical processes are co-implicated with one another. Disequilibrium is normal and space/time an emergent feature. This approach is very different from geographical economics. Mutual engagement is desirable and most easily approached via the geographical sub-field of regional political economy. Regional political economy demonstrates that capitalism’s spatialities increase agents’ uncertainty and the likelihood of unintended consequences, that microfoundations are inadequate, and that capitalism is generative of economic inequality and uneven geographical development. The scope of geographical political economy is illustrated by the geography of commodity production.