Economic Geography

7
Economic geography and
political economy
Ann Markusen
Economic geography: a synthetic, normative 
and policy-relevant field
The great strength of economic geography is its ability to study place by 
synthesizing insights from social science and natural science fields. As a trained 
economist, I have always envied this conceptual breadth and was drawn, like
many others, to economic geography because of it. Although some economic
geographers have tried to construct abstract theories that are uniquely economic
geographic, as in notions such as spatiality and spatial scale, I have always found
this impulse puzzling. Narrow, if elegant, reasoning plagues the social sciences
and limits the usefulness of many of its branches (above all, economics), just as
the disciplinary divisions in the natural sciences thwarted ecological analysis for
many decades. When confronted with annoying anomalies like imperfect compe-
tition or less than full employment, economics dismisses them into peripheral
fields (industrial organization, macro-economics) to protect its maximizing
mechanics of scarce resources and unlimited wants, its theory of the firm and
celebration of markets. Geography, unencumbered by such orthodoxies, offers
scholars and policymakers a remarkable arena for harnessing the best of the
sciences in service of understanding and shepherding change.
Because it is not as subject to limiting normative underpinnings, economic
geography offers its students greater leeway to question institutions and ideologies
than many of the fields upon which it draws. Natural science, even some social
sciences, are constrained by methodological norms. Economics is dreadfully
limited by its explicit individualism and its emphasis on efficiency as a single-
minded social welfare goal. Thirty years ago, economists were taught that equity
and stability were also key normative goals, but in the intervening years, these
have shrunk in significance – equity is now chiefly ceded to sociologists.
For these reasons, economic geography has attracted thinkers and practition-
ers who want to work more synthetically and without the conceptual, method-
ological and normative confinement of its contributing sciences. In this chapter, 
I examine the intersection between political economy and economic geography
in the second half of the twentieth century, showing how the two together 
have created room for work that was powerful, complex and at times successfully
oppositional to the worst of capitalist spatial practices.

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I first briefly review the rise, fall and resurgence of Marxist political economy in
the past century. I then look at the seminal work of a number of geographers, econ-
omists and sociologists strongly influenced by Marxist thought – David Harvey
(1973, 1985), Stuart Holland (1976), Manuel Castells (1977), Doreen Massey
and Richard Meegan (1978, 1982), Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison (1982),
Gordon Clark (1989), Michael Storper and Richard Walker (1989), among others
– and show what they brought from it to economic geography in the 1970s
through the early 1980s. These include an emphasis on working class/race/gender
analysis, an understanding of the corrosive and uneven impact of capitalist devel-
opment on cities and regions, the case for meso-economic analysis, acknowledge-
ment of the role of contestation and struggle, an appreciation for institutions,
especially the role of the state, and a commitment to research and advocacy in the
interests of the exploited. I then illustrate the elements of a political economy-
informed economic geography by reviewing 20 years of work on the military indus-
trial complex. In closing, I address the continued synergy between the two fields.