Economic Geography

Abstract

Anglophone economic geography has played a central role in the evolution of human geography. That includes economic geography's various philosophical and theoretical shifts as it moved from an imperialist commercial geography, through to regional economic geography, spatial science and location theory, Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism. The discipline is now inordinately diverse, reflecting an enormous breadth of interests and approaches including the use of various quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Such diversity is a strength not a weakness given the disciplinary spirit of engaged pluralism. The field's unifying theme now is some form of geographical political economy – the idea that capitalism is an unstable, conflict‐ridden political economic system characterized by geographical uneven development, with its spatiotemporal evolution shaped by reciprocal relations between political–economic, cultural, and biophysical processes. Major current areas of research in anglophone economic geography include geographies of production and consumption, work and the body, high‐tech and the platform economy, governance and regulation, financialization, environment and economy, globalization and development, and diverse (more‐than‐capitalist) economies.