Economic Geography

History

Existing in embryonic form as commercial geography, the discipline was formally defined in 1882 by the German geographer Götz. While commercial geography served immediate practical purposes, the goal of economic geography was loftier. It was to be a science, to explain how the character of different geographical areas influenced the production and movement of goods. By the 1890s, economic geography courses appeared in U.S. and British university calendars. In 1896, George Chisholm began lecturing at Birkbeck College, London, using his own economic geography text, Handbook of Commercial Geography, the first ever written in English. And in 1903, Lionel Lyde, at University College London, was appointed the first professor of economic geography. The discipline was up and running.

Chisholm's book (published in 20 editions) and J. Russell Smith's later American version, Industrial and Commercial Geography, set out an initial disciplinary agenda and intellectual style that continues to resonate. The original colonial context of the two books no longer applies, but remaining germane are their concerns with empirical detail and numbers, their predilection for geographical categorization made visible by the map, and their tracing of relations among places through economic flows, especially commodity flows.

Chisholm and Smith stressed the physical character of goods, particularly those of natural resources, with spatial relations or physical location coming second. The American geographer Ray Whitbeck argued it should be the other way around: The emphasis should be on the country, not the commodity. That increasingly became the case, at least in U.S. economic geography after World War I, when a regional approach took hold. Regions were portrayed as unique and obvious once the descriptive typologies used to pigeonhole [Page 849]different regions’ economic facts were compared. The only interesting question was which typology to deploy. Whitbeck and Finch's 1924 textbook used a typology with four categories, while Clarence Fielden Jones's 1935 economic geography primer daringly deployed eight.

Richard Hartshorne's The Nature of Geography, published in 1939, provided at least a splash of scholarly respectability to economic geography's idiographic regional approach by drawing on a set of earlier German philosophers and geographers. But it did nothing to prepare the discipline for what was about to occur after World War II, especially in the United States, as a number of social sciences, and even some humanities, began modeling themselves on the hard sciences, drawing on formal statistical methods and abstract reasoning. Economic geography initially resisted that impulse, but by the mid 1950s it too joined the others. The resulting “quantitative revolution” profoundly altered the discipline, bringing the systematic application of scientific forms of theorizing and rigorous statistical techniques of description and analysis.

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