Exceeding the Anglophone economic geographical imaginary

Abstract

Economic geography, both mainstream and critical, has been dominated by Anglophone scholarship produced by scholars located in institutions on either side of the North Atlantic, and to a lesser extent in those of Britain’s other white settler colonies. This tends to reproduce the view of the world, and of the functioning of space-economies, from those countries deemed to be ‘developed’. Considering the future of the field, progress in economic geography should involve creating space where scholarship produced from beyond this imaginary is taken seriously. Capitalism, the focus of Anglophone economic geography, was not a European invention; it took a particular form in Europe facilitated by colonialism, slavery and white nationalism. Anglophone economic geography has yet to engage properly with critical development studies and the possibility of southern/postcolonial theory. Considering the forcefield of the overlapping crises constituting the present global conjuncture, the discipline’s future should prioritize scholarship that: engages with the rest of the world, examines the ongoing debilitating effects of colonialism and US/UK-centered European capitalism, documents the multifarious connectivities and logistics shaping local economic dynamics, takes seriously more-than-capitalist economic practices, integrates more-than-human agency and cultural processes into the field, attends to the emergent conjuncture of ethno-nationalism and reshoring, and radically diversifies the economic geography community of scholars.