Taylor, Peter (1944–)

Peter J. Taylor is one of the most prominent contemporary human geographers. Born in England in 1944, he earned his BA (1966) and PhD (1970) from the University of Liverpool. His record of scholarship spans more than 40 years and currently includes more than 300 publications, some of which have been translated into as many as 23 different languages. Taylor has contributed to a range of subdisciplines within human geography, most notably in political and urban geography. Indeed, Taylor is recognized as a key figure in the development of political geography as a thriving subdiscipline and is a founding editor of the journal Political Geography.

While his contributions to political geography are myriad (indeed, the limited space afforded here cannot adequately do justice to them), he is perhaps best known for integrating world-systems analysis with political geography. His interest in world-systems analysis began as he sought to incorporate political economy into political geography, a subdiscipline he once critiqued as ironically being the most “apolitical” component of human geography. Taylor's emphasis on world systems opened new spaces for critically assessing and modeling global interstate relations within the context of global cores and peripheries. This project in many ways demystified the development of the modern nation-state as a “container” of social, economic, and cultural forces, on the one hand, and the global liberalization of trade in recent decades known as globalization, on the other. Most recently, Taylor has further used a world-systems approach to investigate global structures of capital flows, contributing to understandings of the rise, and functioning, of “world cities” as command centers of global capital.

These two-tiered thrusts of research—global interstate relations and world cities—coincide with an earlier call by Taylor to reconsider prevailing notions of scale. Taylor proposed that scale be reconceptualized as encompassing three interlocking or interconnected realms: (1) a realm of everyday experience occurring at the level of the “urban,” (2) a realm of ideology encompassing the nation-state, and (3) a universal level of the capitalist world economy in which the previous two are situated. While this scalar hierarchy of realms has come under critical reassessment in recent years, Taylor is credited with launching an important and ongoing debate that has deepened and nuanced a concept of scale that was often akin to cartographic scale and was otherwise taken for granted among human geographers.