Inconspicuous geography of retail trade: reaching the Global South consumers

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By analysing the inconspicuous geography of retail trade, this paper aims to reveal the largely unknown routes and people that play a crucial role in the globalised economy. For the last thirty years, transnational routes of exchange have connected the world’s workshop, mainly in China, with the so-called market of the poor.This paper is based on long-term fieldwork that attempts to investigate globalisation in the most “discrete” spaces of the global world. This other view of globalisation focuses, from a geographical perspective, on its less visible but essential forms in interstitial spaces. In order to understand these other “Silk Roads”, we propose to take and follow these thousand and one roads in order to analyse a globalisation from below and from the point of view of the different actors that underpin it.In the first section, we propose to map this “other” globalisation, examining geopolitical reconfigurations, the nature of the goods traded, the growing role of economic actors such as entrepreneurial migrants and diasporas, and the changing hierarchy of spaces, including rural centres and small towns. The links go beyond the North-South divide and reflect the growth of trade between the BRICs, including China, and regions of the world that have been marginalised in world trade. Secondly, we propose to look at the Mediterranean area, which has renewed its multiple networks and commercial hubs. In the last section, the analysis focuses on globalisation in West Africa, a region that for too long has been considered peripheral and “late” in its integration into the world (and thus despite centuries of slave trade). We demonstrate that discrete spaces serve as strategic places for the circulation and marketing of products that are massively consumed by millions of “poor” people.