The birth and development of Anglophone financial geography: A historical analysis of geographical studies of money and finance

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The past decade has yielded an unprecedented surge in geographical research on money and finance. Amidst this apparent financial turn, the paper aims to provide an institutional sociology of the rapidly growing subdiscipline of Anglophone financial geography, using Web of Science bibliometric data and oral histories of key figures in the field. Employing a two-track methodology involving an analysis of 440 financial geography articles published since 1986 and 23 interviews conducted with self-identified financial geographers and scholars allied with the financial geography project, the paper aims to deconstruct how financial geography emerged as a field by examining the people present at the birth, the intellectual histories that shaped it, and the conditions that have influenced its wider reception. The paper presents three main findings. First, it shows how the political economic conditions of financialization in the UK coupled with the patterns of institutionalization and the subfield’s origins resulted in an enduring British dominance. Second, citation patterns reveal that during the three decades of its existence, financial geography evolved into a poly-centric and pluralist subfield with four main intellectual traditions represented. Finally, the paper exposes the extent to which the 2008 global financial crisis was the major force behind the consolidation of financial geography as a subfield, giving momentum to studies of financialization and amplifying the visibility of financial geography’s scholarship within the broader social sciences.