In the preceding section each of the three chapters focused upon the internal characteristics and relations of a particular aspect of society and drew out their geographical significance. It was apparent, however, that none of the three social aspects – cultural forms, urban economic activity, and the processes of international law – could be conceived in isolation from other aspects of society. Although a series of interrelationships was lightly sketched between cultural, political and economic processes in varying degrees in the analyses, the actual links and connections between the social processes that shape and structure the different aspects of the social world were not developed. This development involves a process of synthesis, a process that takes the results of analysis, the detailed studies of particular aspects of society, and draws out the web of relationships that integrates and binds them to the wider social sphere. Sketched in this manner, the task of synthesis is to construct a more complex geography of social relations from the different geographies of culture, housing, employment, law, and so forth.

By synthesis, however, we wish to convey something more than a simple integration of the various subdivisions of the subject matter of geography. The conception of synthesis we wish to employ is not one of an exhaustive quest for each and every social relationship down to the last detail that comprises the geography of an area.