SETTING THE SCENE

The late 1960s/early 1970s was a turbulent time. Although it may seem hard for those who weren’t around at the time to believe it now, there was then quite a lively debate in geography about how best to understand uneven development and which theoretical positions gave most traction on this issue. The theories developed in geography and regional science in the 1960s effectively assumed away issues of uneven development in the real world; economic life was seen as conducted on a featureless isotropic plain. While initially seen as an exciting and important development in a discipline that had been – to say the least – theory-light, it soon became clear that such an approach to theory was more concerned with models of how the geometry of the economic landscape “ought to be” given a set of precise and restrictive assumptions (see Chorley & Haggett 1967) than with understanding the social processes that created uneven development registered in empirically observable differences between places in the real material world. The change was exemplified in the contrast between David Harvey’s Explanation in Geography (1969) and his later books Social Justice and the City (1973) and more powerfully in The Limits to Capital (1982).

But this was not simply a debate within the narrow disciplinary confines of geography. The changes in geography also have to be situated in the context of broader changes that were then sweeping through the social sciences more generally, and in particular the rediscovery of Marxism and other strands of heterodox political economy. There had long been a recognition of the importance of uneven development at the global scale within Marxian political economy. Mandel’s work beginning in the 1960s in Belgium (1963, 1968, 1970, 1975) was seminal in drawing attention to the significance of intranational as well as international uneven development to the accumulation process. For Mandel, the unevenness of development between different parts of a single country was an essential precondition for capital accumulation, the significance of which had been greatly underestimated in previous Marxian analyses.