Economic Geography

18 The new imperial geography
John Lovering
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A geographical–economic question? Not sure we can help
Imagine you are a community representative, a businessperson, or just curious, 
and you want to ask questions like: ‘How does this place (region, city, small 
country) work? Why can my daughter get a job here when my son can’t? What can
be done to make things better?’ You might think the best person to ask is an
economic geographer.
Economic geographers tend to fall into two distinct camps. Members of 
the first would typically respond with a species of dazzling poetry about how
fascinating diversity is, how everything is all mixed up, how it looks different
depending on who you are, and how there is no last word (as if you didn’t know
that already). Members of the second would scrub out your questions, replace
them with one about ‘competitiveness’, then answer it by declaring that public
resources should be diverted to give special help to this or that set of special
interests.
Of course, most economic geographers are decent folk and wouldn’t do either
of these so crudely. But many would feel it professionally prudent to make at
least a nod towards one or both. For these two pole positions in Post-Cultural-
Turn Economic Geography (henceforth PCTEG) preoccupy the attention of
publishers, university appointment committees, and funding bodies. Yet neither
constitutes progress in any familiar sense of the word because they do not answer
questions any better than in the past. They are about asking different questions 
altogether. This is not, despite pop interpretations of Kuhn, how sciences get
better. For example, in their recent survey Barnes et al. (2004) note that the story
of recent change in economic geography is not one that everyone agrees signifies
progress, and ask how we should interpret it. This chapter offers one interpreta-
tion: that it reveals geography’s excessive embrace of the Empire of Capital.
This has nothing to do with the wonderfully widened range of topics (there’s
nothing inherently Imperialist about studying gardening). The complicity arises
from the cognitive and normative frameworks within which these are all too
often set, which smuggle in Empire as the un-named, unconscious, horizon of
authorised thought and practice. Since this is an Empire characterised by denial,
this is achieved through ideas presented as inherently anti-foundational, critical,

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John Lovering
destabilising, engaged, inclusive, and other labels giving the impression that they
are definitely not part of a conservative orthodoxy, like rebel clothing in designer
shops.