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Geography
knowledge begins with the basics
Human Geography: The Basics is a concise introduction

to the study of the role that humankind plays in shaping
the world around us. Whether it’s environmental
concerns, the cities we live in or the globalization of
Human Geography
the economy, these are issues which affect us all. This
book introduces these topics and more including:
Andrew Jones
• global environment issues and development
• cities, firms and regions
• migration, immigration and asylum
• landscape, culture and identity
• travel, mobility and tourism Human
• agriculture and food.
Featuring an overview of theory, end of chapter
summaries, case study boxes, further reading lists
Geography
and a glossary, this book is the ideal introduction for
anybody new to the study of human geography.
Professor Andrew Jones is Head of the School of
Geography, Environment and Development Studies at
Birkbeck, University of London. Previous publications
include Dictionary of Globalization and Globalization:
Key Thinkers.
Andrew
Jones
Cover image: © Shutterstock

cover design: Keenan
ISBN 978-0-415-57552-2
www.routledgestudents.com
9 780415 575522
H U M A N GE O G R A P H Y
THE BASICS
Human Geography: The Basics is a concise introduction to the study

of the role that humankind plays in shaping the world around us.
Whether it’s environmental concerns, the cities we live in or the
globalization of the economy, these are issues that affect us all. This
book introduces these topics and more including:
global environment issues and development

cities, firms and regions
migration, immigration and asylum
landscape, culture and identity
travel, mobility and tourism
agriculture and food.
Featuring an overview of theory, end of chapter summaries, case

study boxes, further reading lists and a glossary, this book is the ideal
introduction for anybody new to the study of human geography.
Professor Andrew Jones is Head of the School of Geography,

Environment and Development Studies at Birkbeck, University of
London. Previous publications include Dictionary of Globalization
and Globalization: Key Thinkers.
The Basics
ACTING HUMAN GENETICS
BELLA MERLIN RICKI LEWIS
ANTHROPOLOGY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

PETER METCALF PETER SUTCH AND JUANITA ELIAS
ARCHAEOLOGY (SECOND EDITION) ISLAM (SECOND EDITION)

CLIVE GAMBLE COLIN TURNER
ART HISTORY JUDAISM

GRANT POOKE AND DIANA NEWALL JACOB NEUSNER
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LANGUAGE (SECOND EDITION)

KEVIN WARWICK R.L. TRASK
THE BIBLE LAW

JOHN BARTON GARY SLAPPER AND DAVID KELLY
BUDDHISM LITERARY THEORY (SECOND EDITION)

CATHY CANTWELL HANS BERTENS
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE LOGIC

SUMAN GUPTA JC BEALL
CRIMINAL LAW MANAGEMENT

JONATHAN HERRING MORGEN WITZEL
CRIMINOLOGY (SECOND EDITION) MARKETING (SECOND EDITION)

SANDRA WALKLATE KARL MOORE AND NIKETH PAREEK
DANCE STUDIES MEDIA STUDIES

JO BUTTERWORTH JULIAN MCDOUGALL
ECONOMICS (SECOND EDITION) OLYMPIC GAMES

TONY CLEAVER ANDY MIAH & BEATRIZ GARCIA
EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY (FOURTH EDITION)

KAY WOOD NIGEL WARBURTON
EVOLUTION PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

SHERRIE LYONS JOSEPH HOLDEN
EUROPEAN UNION (SECOND EDITION) POETRY (SECOND EDITION)

ALEX WARLEIGH-LACK JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT
FILM STUDIES POLITICS (FOURTH EDITION)

AMY VILLAREJO STEPHEN TANSEY AND NIGEL JACKSON
FINANCE (SECOND EDITION) THE QUR’AN

ERIK BANKS MASSIMO CAMPANINI
RACE AND ETHNICITY SOCIOLOGY
PETER KIVISTO AND PAUL R. CROLL KEN PLUMMER
RELIGION (SECOND EDITION) SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

MALORY NYE JANICE WEARMOUTH
RELIGION AND SCIENCE TELEVISION STUDIES

PHILIP CLAYTON TOBY MILLER
RESEARCH METHODS TERRORISM

NICHOLAS WALLIMAN JAMES LUTZ AND
BRENDA LUTZ
ROMAN CATHOLICISM
MICHAEL WALSH THEATRE STUDIES
ROBERT LEACH
SEMIOTICS (SECOND EDITION)
DANIEL CHANDLER WORLD HISTORY
PETER N. STEARNS
SHAKESPEARE (THIRD EDITION)
SEAN MCEVOY
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
T H E BA S I C S
andrew jones
First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Andrew Jones
The right of Andrew Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Jones, Andrew, 1973-
Human geography: the basics / Andrew Jones.
p. cm. – (The basics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Human geography. I. Title.
GF41.J65 2012
304.2 – dc23
2011047582
ISBN: 978-0-415-57551-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-57552-2 (pbk)
(ebk)
978-1-136-3o719-5(ebk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-11800-9
Typeset in Bembo and Scala Sans

by Taylor & Francis Books
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations viii
1. Introduction 1
2. Globalization 22
3. Development and Environment 48
4. States, Nations and Culture 62
5. Cities, Regions and Industries 91
6. People, Work, and Mobility 127
7. Bodies, Practices and Identities 160
8. Concluding Overview: Human Geography Today 178
Glossary 183
References 192
Index 199
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
TABLES
1.1 Human geography and its sub-disciplines 7
1.2 Theoretical foundations to human geography 13
FIGURES
5.1 Burgess’s concentric zone model of urban land use 117
5.2 The size and spatial distribution of central places and
their hinterlands (after Christaller) 119
6.1 The demographic transition model 133
6.2 Population pyramids of a developed and a developing
country 134
INTRODUCTION
1
WHAT IS HUMAN GEOGRAPHY?

The academic subject of geography has had a mixture of fortunes
throughout its history. The ancient Greeks saw geographical
knowledge as one of the leading forms of scholarship, and the birth
of modern geography placed it at the forefront of expanding
Western empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, geo-
graphers were also at the forefront of ideas in a darker phase of
history in the 20th century and caught up in ideologies leading to
the First and Second World Wars. In the latter part of the 20th
century, the subject also lost status. After the Second World War,
some questioned the coherence of a subject that spanned the natural
science of physical geography and the social science of human
geography. Harvard University actually closed its geography depart-
ment in 1948, more or less for just this reason. Moreover, in the
English-speaking world, the later 20th century saw geography lam-
pooned in popular culture as backward-looking, all about the names
of capital cities, rivers and drawing maps. By the 1970s, comedians on
television and film gained laughs from stereotypes of ‘geography tea-
chers’, perhaps based on caricatures of teachers boring students with
facts about far-flung places. In British culture, BBC comedies such
as The Goodies and later Blackadder (now endlessly repeated on cable
2 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: THE BASICS
channels worldwide) portrayed geography teachers as objects of

ridicule. In North America, portrayals have tended more often to
be of a dull subject that just wasn’t cool.
However, in the 21st century, geography as a whole, and human
geography as a part of that, has enjoyed a far-reaching rejuvenation.
In the last 30 years, the subject has enjoyed renewed interest and
popularity, and influential people beyond the academic world have
once again started to echo the 17th century philosopher John Locke
(1632–1704) in proclaiming geography to be one of the most useful
and important of subjects. Rather than being perceived as a
weakness, being both a natural and social science is once again
increasingly seen as a strength. There are several reasons for this
renewal. In part it is to do with a significant evolution of what
human geographers study and how they now go about theorizing
the social world. It is also to do with how the world has changed,
most notably as we live in a world that in the early 21st century in
one way or another is increasingly globalized. At the time of writ-
ing this book, the current president of the Royal Geographical
Society in London is in fact the former Monty Python comedian,
now famed global traveller, Michael Palin. It is perhaps symbolic of
the reversal in the subject’s fortunes that such a high-profile figure
should invest energy in championing the subject of geography.
Undoubtedly, this reversal in geography’s fortunes reflects a wider
recognition that many of the current and ‘big’ challenges that face
the world today are well addressed by the subject: globalization,
climate change, sustainability, economic development or poverty
reduction. Yet it is also about a reinvigoration of the theoretical
ideas in the half of the discipline that this book deals with: human
geography.
In that respect – dealing with half rather than a whole subject –
this book is unique in The Basics series. To understand geography in
its entirety, you may well want to invest in the companion volume
Physical Geography: The Basics. But human and physical geography
are also inextricably linked through geography’s long interest in the
relation between the social and natural worlds and the ways that
many issues – most notably that of our environment – require
knowledge and understanding of both.
So what is human geography, and what is all about? Human
geography is concerned with all aspects of human society on Earth,
INTRODUCTION 3
but in particular adopts a spatial approach. If any one distinguishing fea-

ture marks the subject out from other social science subjects, it is this
concern to think spatially about the social world. In that respect,
human geographers share an interest in an enormous range of topics
that are also the concern of other social science disciplines. What
makes their perspective different, however, is what many thinkers
in the subject call a ‘geographical imagination’. Human geographers
think about how things exists in space, how features of the social
world change across spaces and the difference that places make to
the nature of human existence. They are also concerned with the
unevenness of human existence in space and between different places.
This rests on a basic philosophical viewpoint that everything that
happens in human life occurs in a certain space and time. Geographers
often use the clever epithet that all social life, one way or another,
‘takes place’. That is, everything in human life has to happen some-
where, and that somewhere (along with its relations to a lot of somewhere
elses) matters a lot in terms of what actually happens.
Human geography is therefore all about understanding why the
spatial nature of ‘social things’ matter. Differences between places
shape how the nature of how things develop. Economic geo-
graphers, for example, have long argued that certain industries
develop in certain cities or regions for reasons related to the specific
nature of those places as well as to their position in relation to other
places. In previous centuries, iron and steel industries grew up in
Western Europe in places that were close to natural deposits of iron
ore and in proximity to fuels for smelting like coal. By the 20th
century, being close to these raw materials was no longer important
but industries persisted in those places because by then a suitably
skilled workforce were living in them and other related activities
like shipbuilding had started near by. Examples would be north-east
England in the UK, or the northern coast of Germany around the
Rhine. In the 21st century, however, cheap labour and the demand
for steel in developing countries in Asia and elsewhere have increas-
ingly led to the relocation of these industries to new regions of the
world such as the southern provinces of China and South Korea.
Likewise, political geographers see the development of certain
governments and political institutions in a country as inseparable
from the past development of societies in those particular parts of
the world. Bolivian politics is very different from Thai politics for a
whole myriad of reasons related to the very different locations of

these nation-states on the planet’s surface, and to the long history and
relationships with other places these societies have had. In today’s
world, where there has been much debate about the globalization of
human life on Earth, the patterns of relationships across spaces and
places that human geographers have sought to analyse have become
increasingly complicated. Equally cultural geographers have long
associated the nature of different cultures with – in one way or
another – people living in certain places and in certain ways over
long periods of time, although in modern times globalization has
made this much more complex and difficult.
So human geography then is a very broad subject in terms of topics
of analysis but one characterized by a very distinctive emphasis on the
nature and significance of space and location. In writing this book
I want to try to convince you that it is one of the most useful
subjects anyone can study, and that it offers a unique and very
powerful approach for understanding the big issues that face
everyone on planet Earth in the 21st century. Not to play down
the specific strengths of other subjects, human geographers certainly
see the world differently from, say, sociologists, economists or
political scientists. The philosophical concern with space provides
an overall concern with issues that are often dealt with separately in
other subjects. This holistic approach to understanding the social
world is often seen as a major distinguishing strength. The reason is
fairly straightforward: the social world is a complicated and messy
thing that requires an understanding of many different aspects in order
to see the whole. And you can only get so far in theorizing the
world by focusing on one aspect in isolation to the exclusion of others.
Economists may focus on markets, political scientists on institutions
or sociologists on practices, but human geographers try to look at the
relationships between all of these in order to understand what happens
in the world. Human geography today is therefore a diverse subject far
from the caricatures of geography teachers from earlier decades boring
students with factual lists of peoples, places and countries. Hopefully
if you are reading this book, your experience of geography in
general, and human geography more particularly, is rather different
from these caricatures. They exist because it is true that 40 or 50 years
ago, the subject of geography was taught rather differently in
English-speaking countries, but it is also true that the subject has
INTRODUCTION 5
itself changed quite radically. Before we consider how this has

come about, and the sheer diversity of both topics and theoretical
ideas in human geography today, it is important to understand the
major goals of this book and how it is organized.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

This book attempts to provide a whistle-stop tour of human geography
to give you a broad overview of the subject. It has deliberately not
been organized around a list of what are often called sub-disciplines
within the subject. Not only would such an approach be tedious,
but covering every possible topic in human geography would be
impossible. Other books, such as the Dictionary of Human Geography
or the online International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, fulfil
such a role, and do a good job. Rather the goal of this book is to
give the reader an overview that shows how the many different
topics and themes in human geography today relate to each other.
With that in mind, the book is organized into six further thematic
chapters that try to illustrate the linkages between different but
often overlapping sub-disciplines in the subject. In that way, it should
give you an understanding of how both economic and political geo-
graphers are interested in governments and regulations, or how many
questions of environmental change concern not only environmental
geographers but also cultural or development geographers.
This thematic tour of the subject begins in the next chapter by
considering how human geography has been concerned with the big
questions around globalization. This debate in human geography is
very closely related to the themes considered in Chapter 3: the ques-
tion of development and debates about the global environment.
Chapter 4 then moves to look at how human geographers have
conceptualized the states and nationalism, culture and landscape. In
Chapter 5, the themes focus on issues that have been of central
interest to urban and economic geographers in considering the large
body of work within the subject concerned with cities, regions and
industries. Chapter 6 then examines themes of a more social and poli-
tical nature in considering geographical work on population and
demography, migration, mobility and labour. This is followed by an
overview in Chapter 7 of how social and cultural geographies have
sought to theorize the nature of the body and identities based
around gender, ethnicity, race and age. Finally, the book ends
with a brief concluding chapter that outlines some of the future
directions human geography is likely to develop along as a subject.
However, this thematic approach to providing an overview of
human geography still does not avoid the necessity of discussing
different sub-disciplines altogether. While the thematic chapters do
cut across different areas of the subject, these sub-disciplines have
distinctive topics of interest and have often developed around particular
theoretical and methodological approaches. The major sub-disciplines
and the kinds of topics geographers working in them are interested in
are shown in Table 1.1. As you will see, human geography is perhaps
more interdisciplinary in its nature than other social science subjects,
but it is important to realize it is not a chaotic or incoherent diversity.
Before we move on to the thematic chapters, it is therefore relevant
to consider in more depth the historical evolution of the subject which
led to the emergence of these distinct sub-disciplinary areas and also
examine the cross-cutting theoretical ideas that are often brought
together when human geographers seek to understand the world
today. The remainder of this chapter considers each of these issues
in turn.
A (VERY) SHORT HISTORY OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

While geography as an academic discipline has a very long history
dating back to the Greek civilization, the subject we know today
emerged during the 18th and particularly 19th centuries as the study of
the Earth’s physical and human features and how those varied between
countries and regions. The development of what is now human geo-
graphy is in particular bound up in the period when Western
European countries were expanding their influence across the globe
through the development of first colonies and later empires.
Geography as a subject was seen as central to understanding the
nature of the world. The first society was founded in 1821 in
Paris – the Société Géographique de Paris (SGP), with other national
geographical societies such as the Royal Geographical Society (founded
in London in 1830) following in European countries soon after.
Over the century thereafter, the establishment of geography spread
worldwide with, for example, the American National Geographic
Society being founded in 1888 and the Association of Japanese
Table 1.1 Human geography and its sub-disciplines
Sub-discipline in Examples of topics or Example journal/s where work in
human geography debates this area can be found*
Economic Regional economies Economic Geography
Industrial Journal of Economic Geography
Development Regional Studies
Clusters Environment & Planning A
Firms
Social/cultural Landscape Journal of Cultural Geography
Consumption Environment & Planning D:
Identity Society and Space
Political International System Political Geography
Nationalism/ Antipode
geopolitics
Historical Past landscapes Journal of Historical Geography
History of Cities
Urban Global urban system Urban Studies
Urban development International Journal of Urban and
Global cities Regional Research
Development Poverty alleviation Journal of Development Studies
Postcolonial Journal of Latin American Studies
Government
Post-development
Environmental Sustainable Global Environmental Change
development Annals of the Association of
Human impacts of American Geographers*
climate change Transactions of the IBG*
Food security
Population Demographic Annals of the Association of
transition American Geographers
Migration
Feminist/queer The body Journal of Cultural Geography
Gender, Place and Culture
Rural Agricultural change Rural Geography
Rural livelihoods
Transport Mobility Journal of Transport Geography
Mobilities
Children Youth identity/ Children’s Geographies
exclusion
* These are just examples, and many journals in human geography span these
fields, with some dealing explicitly with a number of areas, such as Transactions
of the IBG, Annals of AAG, Progress in Human Geography.
Geographers in 1925. During the 20th century, the legacy of

Western European imperialism led to the further spread of geography
as a discipline studied and taught in universities across the globe.
Prior to the 20th century, much of what would be described
as human geography took a regional emphasis. Human geography
in the 19th century was mostly concerned with examining, mapping
and describing the distinctive nature of different societies and cultures
of people living in different regions of the globe. It has also been
criticized for this direct link to the imperial ambitions of Western
European countries. Human geography undoubtedly played its part
in acting to support colonialism and the domination of peoples
around the world by Western European societies. Geographical
knowledge has always been used by political rulers, military leaders
and others, sometimes to ill effect. However, in the 20th century,
the problematic status of the subject in relation to the politics of the
real world is even clearer. Human geography developed beyond a
simple descriptive emphasis providing information about different
parts of the world, and began to develop theories of how human
societies related to each other in space and territory. Chapter 4 of
this book considers, for example, how human geographical theories
in the early 20th century were caught up in the world wars. The
ideas of the British geographer Halford MacKinder (1861–1947)
concerning the competition and conflict for territory between the
19th-century European nations certainly informed political ideolo-
gies that led to the First World War. Equally, the work of two
German human geographers, Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) and
Walter Christaller (1893–1969), were made use of by the Nazis in
Germany to both justify German territorial expansion and aid the
planning of new settlement in countries that had been invaded,
such as Poland. It is always hard to judge the past and the intentions
of individuals, and these human geographers were not necessarily
directly or intentionally involved in the fateful political projects
that led to the world wars, but their ideas certainly played a part
(Barnes 2011).
Perhaps for this reason the human geography that emerged in the
1950s in Europe and North America moved away from theoretical
models and returned to a very regional and descriptive approach.
The experience of human geographical theories applied to the real
world in the first half of the century had not been a positive one.
INTRODUCTION 9
However, by the 1960s, human geographers increasingly rejected

this regional and descriptive approach, once again seeking to develop
a theoretical human geography. Their inspiration was a philosophical
school of thought in the social sciences known as positivism, which
in essence argued that social theories should be developed in the
same way as natural science subject such as physics, chemistry and
biology. Human geography then took on the methodologies of
these subjects, trying to become a spatial science. This involved the
development and testing of scientific hypotheses, the aim being to
establish factual geographical knowledge about the social world and
the way it works through the collection of data. During this period
human geographers made increasing use of quantitative methods
and statistical analysis, seen to be more rigorous and scientific than past
descriptive approaches to the subject.
Yet by the mid-1970s a further wave of criticism within human
geography doubted the capacity of this so-called ‘quantitative
revolution’ to deliver the truth of the social world. In particular,
two critical strands to human geography developed. One came in
the form of Marxist human geography that argued (drawing on
wider Marxism) that attempting to turn human geography into
some kind of pure ‘spatial science’ which could construct objective
and neutral facts about the social world was fundamentally misguided.
Informed by Marxist political economy, which was concerned
with social justice, inequality and the uneven power between groups
in society, a new wave of human geography rejected the ideas of
positivism and sought to develop a human geography that was engaged
with political questions. Geographers such as David Harvey and Edward
Soja used Marxist theories to offer new insights into why the world
economy produced inequalities of wealth in different places. They
were in essence interested in the way capitalism led to uneven eco-
nomic development. Much of this analysis developed a geographical
perspective on Marxist theories of capitalism as an economic system
that had emerged in Western Europe from the 16th century onwards
and spread progressively across the globe through Western European
colonialism and subsequent empire-building. Geographers began to
argue that this capitalist system – based on money and market
relations as the main organizers of economic activity – existed differ-
ently and with different effects across and between different places.
During the 1980s, Marxist and political economic approaches to
human geography became widely adopted as geographers looked

at, for example, labour relations in different regions and countries,
or how the international production of manufactured goods relies on
cheap (and arguably exploited) labour in less developed countries.
The other critical strand was what is known as humanistic geography.
This developed from an interest in the philosophical ideas of
humanism and was critical of the way in which positivism treated
human beings as numbers or elements of numerical models. Humanistic
geographers argued that the quantitative revolution had ‘dehumanized’
human geography, and that it no longer paid attention to the context of
people in places. Humanistic geography therefore tried to incorporate
a consideration of the physical, social and emotional surroundings
of people, and moved away from thinking about space as an
abstract in the way that the quantitative models of the 1960s had done.
This critical line in human geography also saw the use of different
qualitative methodologies to research the social world which
geographers drew from other social science disciplines including
psychology, anthropology and sociology.
However, the rise of these critical approaches to human geography
soon faced a new challenge. During the later 1980s, human geography
underwent a series of further transformations. This is widely
described in general terms as the so-called ‘cultural turn’ within
the subject, and was a result of the impact of postmodern and
poststructuralist philosophies and ideas from outside the discipline.
Broadly speaking, during the 1980s, in many social science subjects
the idea that social science could produce ‘big’ generalized theories
of the world that explained every aspect of human life came under
attack. Postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers argued in various
ways that the goal of developing ‘big’ universal theories of the social
world was a mistake and impossible to achieve. In essence, this was for
two reasons. First, that knowledge is always a partial and limited
thing. You can never fully know everything about something. All
knowledge – even scientific knowledge – is a limited representation of
reality. This is the case (to differing extents) whether you are deal-
ing with a physicist’s theory of subatomic particles, or the kind of
social scientific theories found in human geography. The second
issue is about the politicized nature of knowledge. Postmodern thinkers
argue that there is no objective truth to be found out about the world.
It is not only too complex, but the creation of ‘truly objective’
INTRODUCTION 11
knowledge is impossible. All knowledge is created by people

through a process of negotiation and discussion, and in that sense it
is in part always a socially constructed thing rather than something
that exists independently. That doesn’t mean you can’t find out
some kind of truth about the world, but it will only ever be part of
the story.
There is much more that could be said about postmodern and
poststructuralist thinking and it is advisable to read around this issue
further (see Further Reading at the end of this chapter). The impor-
tant thing for our purposes here is to emphasize the substantial impact
of a broad group of ideas on human geography in recent decades.
Broadly speaking, three effects on the subject are important to
highlight. The first is the questioning that postmodern ideas brought
to ‘big’ theories in human geography, whether of the positivist gen-
eralizations made by those in the quantitative tradition or the
ambitious theories made by political economists and Marxist geo-
graphers. Human geography in the last 30 years has been more
sceptical about the use of generalized theories, and has sought to
develop new kinds of less totalizing ways of creating theory.
Second, and related to this, the kinds of concepts that human geo-
graphers have made use of have come under critical scrutiny.
Human geographers have become doubtful about the capacity of
concepts such as class, capitalism, race, gender, society or nature to
reveal some kind of general truth of human existence. They now
increasingly see these concepts in a more modest light, recognizing
the limitations of their relevance. A third aspect of the cultural turn
is the diversification in what human geographers have studied and
the kinds of theories they develop. As the name implies, the cul-
tural turn in human geography has seen an enormous increase in
interest in the cultural aspects of social life, and cultural geographies
have proliferated in human geography. It has also addressed issues
about the very nature of knowledge, most notably around whether
it is possible to ‘represent’ the world. Non-representational the-
ories in human geography challenge the very idea that knowledge
should just be a representation of the world, and argue that human
geographers need to go beyond representation and think about the
practices of knowledge creation (see Chapters 4 and 7).
It is fair to say, however, that the cultural turn has been controversial
in the subject, with some human geographers criticizing what they
see as the splintering of the subject into many different areas of

interest that use different methodologies and are based on different
philosophical positions. Others are more optimistic, arguing that
this diversification only adds to the power and strength of human
geography as a holistic social science. Either way, it seems the
cultural turn has opened up a whole range of new dimensions
compared to the human geography of 40 years ago.
The history of human geography is therefore at an exciting
moment. Distinct schools of thought and approaches in human
geography undoubtedly exist and continue to develop in different
countries, with human geography in eastern Europe or Scandinavia
still retaining differences in approach and emphasis from those in
Britain and America. However, more importantly, in the 21st cen-
tury, human geography is studied and taught across the globe, with
the Western European and Anglo-American legacy becoming
increasingly diluted. New postcolonial human geographies are
becoming much more evident as human geographers in developing
countries bring new perspectives and ideas. Latin America, Asian
and African human geographers have become more evident, and
the subject has reflected on how its past was very much grounded
in a Western viewpoint. The history of human geography is there-
fore an increasingly diverse one, and this book is intended to pro-
vide an overview and introduction of many important topics rather
than some kind of exhaustive list. Its aim is to act simply as a start-
ing point for readers interested in exploring the breadth of human
geography in today’s world.
INSIDE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: KEY CONCEPTS AND

THEORIES
We next need to think about some of the major theoretical debates
within these different strands to the subject that will appear at var-
ious points throughout this book. This could be an enormous task,
but the important thing is to have some sense of some of the key
theoretical schools of thought and how they relate to social science
thinking more generally. In this respect, Table 1.2 tries to provide an
introductory overview of the relationships between some of the
major sub-disciplines identified in Table 1.1 and relate them both to
some of the major theoretical debates within those sub-disciplines
Table 1.2 Theoretical foundations to human geography
Area of human Theoretical approach Historical key Examples of related Examples of recent
geography or debate thinkers thought in the social geographical thinkers in this
sciences area
Philosophy of social Critical realism Émile Durkheim, Anthony Giddens (S) Ed Soja
science Actor network theory Max Weber, Andrew Sayer (S)
Structuration theory Michel Foucault Bruno Latour (PhS)
John Law (PhS)
Economic Political economy Karl Marx, Manuel Castells (S) David Harvey, Neil Smith,
Markets/ neoclassical Adam Smith, Paul Krugman (E) Brian Berry, Ron Boschma
economic theory David Ricardo,
Thorstein Veblen
New economic geography Karl Polanyi Trevor Barnes
Finance John Maynard Keynes Gordon Clark,
Andrew Leyshon
Regional/industrial Regional economies Alfred Marshall, Michael Porter (IB) Peter Dicken, Ron Martin,
Industrial development Nikolai Kondratieff Bjorn Asheim, Allen Scott,
Clusters/innovation Michael Storper,
Firms Henry Yeung
Social/cultural Consumptive geographies Michel Foucault, Zymunt Bauman (S) Nigel Thrift, Paul Cloke,
Emotional geographies/ Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Sarah Whatmore
affect Freud, Martin Heidegger,
Gilles Deleuze, Félix
Guattari
Table 1.2 (continued)
Area of human Theoretical approach Historical key Examples of related Examples of recent
geography or debate thinkers thought in the social geographical thinkers in this
sciences area
Historical cultural Landscape and Denis Cosgrove,
representation Derek Gregory
Political World systems theory Karl Marx Immanuel Wallerstein Peter Taylor, Kevin Cox
Critical geopolitics Benedict Andersen Gerard O’Tuathail
Development Post-development Edward Said Amartya Sen (D) Rob Potter,
Arturo Escobar (P) Stuart Corbridge
Environmental Sustainable development Ulrich Beck (S) Bill Adams, Yi Fu Tuan
Michael Watts
Urban Global urban system Walter Christaller Mike Davis (S), Peter Taylor,
Global cities Ernest Burgess Saskia Sassen (Pl), Doreen Massey,
Urban development Henri Lefebvre (Ph) David Ley
Feminist/queer The body Judith Butler (Ph) Linda McDowell,
Julia Kristeva (Ph) Gill Valentine
Iris Marion Young (Ph)
INTRODUCTION 15
and with key thinkers both historically and in other social

science subjects. The table gives some examples of human geo-
graphers who have contributed to these debates in its final column.
This should assist in providing a way to think about the way in
which some of the major theoretical debates in human geography
are situated in the wider social sciences. However, across these
debates, we also need to think about some of the key concepts that
human geographers use to developing geographical theories of the
world.
Foremost are the concepts of space and place already mentioned.
With these two, it is important that the significance of time is also
highlighted. Much philosophical discussion exists about the inter-
relationship of space and time in many subjects, and it is well
established that you cannot really theorize one without the other. In
rejecting the objective ideas that human geography could become
some kind of ‘spatial science’, in the last 40 years the subject has
developed an understanding of space as something caught up in and
intrinsic to all human practices. For many human geographers,
questions about space thus become about something we might call
‘relative space’, with space defined through relationships between
human phenomena. However, there is no single definition that is
agreed upon. Rather, different strands of human geography have
developed different concepts of spaces, with some considering the
physical or material manifestations of space (think of cities or the
spatial distribution of industries) while others consider virtual, ima-
gined or symbolic spaces (the way in which we imagine areas of the
world such as the ‘West’ or ideas about the nature of cyberspace).
Human geography has thus become interested in a whole range of types
of spaces: examples include social, cultural, ‘organizational’, ‘corpo-
rate’ or the ‘embodied spaces’. Much use is also made in the subject
of different categorizations of space, the most obvious of which is the
idea of scale. Human geographers often talk about aspects of the social
world as existing or applying at a certain scale – the most common of
these being tend the ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘national’ and ‘global’.
However, the concept of scale is not unproblematic. Debates in the
subject have ranged over the usefulness or otherwise of these categories.
Where does the local end and the next scale ‘up’, so to speak, begin? On
the other side of the argument, things that are ‘global’ in the social
world are always related in one way or another to many different
localities. The global, in that sense, is always made up of things

which are local.
This leads us to the way in which human geographers’ ideas
about space and time give the concept of place a particular importance.
Places are usually understood as existing at the scale of the local, even
if the nature of that ‘localness’ is very much influenced by relationships
with other distant places and things. Much effort has been made in
human geography to think about what places are, and what that
means for how we understand the world. It is impossible to review
all of those ideas here, but in short human geographers see places as
mixture of history, spatial relations and sociality. Everything that
human beings do has to happen somewhere. Places are where social
relations come together in specific spatial arrangements that last
over time, often through what we might call the ‘materiality’ of the
world, and which in turn shape and influence the nature of future
social relations. Cities are perhaps the easiest examples of this.
Think about the nature of any large capital city in today’s world.
To understand its significance you need to appreciate a whole range
of factors including its long history, the layout and buildings, the cul-
ture of the people who live there, and those who pass through. All of
these aspects and others are situated together in place, and the nature
of many of them is a consequence of that ongoing interaction situ-
ated there.
It is important to emphasize, however, that closely related to
human geographers’ analysis of space are questions of time. Much
human geography considers how different spaces develop and
change over time, but also human geographers have been very
much concerned with the experience of space and time. The two
are seen as inseparable, with all human activity existing through
both dimensions. A very good example is the widely used idea of
time-space compression that geographers have made use of to
explore how in today’s world the world has ‘shrunk’ or become
‘smaller’ through globalization (Harvey 1989). Much Marxist
geography has been interested in how capitalism has spread across
the globe and how economic activity has evolved and changed in
different parts of the world. Understanding the unevenness of
capitalism across space is clearly impossible without appreciating
how these differences have emerged and changed over time. We
will consider these issues in more depth in the next chapter.
INTRODUCTION 17
A second set of concepts that human geography makes a lot of

use of are the ideas of systems and structures. The concept of the
system is one that has been drawn from the physical sciences – physical
geographers of course study the world’s atmospheric or climate systems.
For human geography, the use of system as an idea by which to
understand the world is more difficult. Much social science beyond
human geography has also conceived of the world economy as, for
example, a global capitalist system or international politics as an
international political system. We will consider in Chapter 4 how
economic geographers have argued that ‘regional innovation systems’
are present in some successful regional economies around the
world. However, the extent to which human relations are systemic in
nature is also the subject of debate in human geography, with some
geographical thinking questioning the coherence and qualities of
the things being labelled as systems. A similar issue exists around the
concept of (social) structures in human geography. Structure is used
by some human geographers to refer to enduring characteristics of
human societies – Marxist geographers talk about class structures
whilst feminist geographers have used the idea of patriarchal
structures to conceptualize the uneven nature of relations between
men and women. Again, the postmodern shift in human geography
has questioned whether such things as coherent and consistent
social structures exist in the social world, and whether it is useful to
think of the social world in such rigid terms when there is a great
deal of complexity and dynamism in social relationships.
This relates to a third set of concepts of much concern to human
geographers today: agency, power and practice. All of these concepts
refer to social action in one way or another. Elsewhere in the social
sciences, there is a longstanding debate about the relationship
between enduring social structures such as class and the role of
individual social actors as individual agents. The key question is the
degree to which structures influence or control individuals, or
individuals reinforce or change the nature of structures. This structure
and agency debate has also been widely discussed by human geo-
graphers. More recently, however, in the wake of the cultural turn,
geographers have reframed this discussion around questions of how
power is understood, and how that relates to what people do in the
form of practices. Human geographers have become increasingly
interested in understanding the spatialized nature of power and
agency that, in many aspects of human life, has been significantly

reshaped by globalization. Chapters 2 and 5 consider, for example,
how globalization processes have changed the agency and power of
nation-states in relation to the growing number of transnational
firms and other global actors in today’s world.
A fourth important duo of concepts that have increasingly concerned
human geographers after the cultural turn is ‘knowledge’ and the
idea of discourse. The former is easy to understand in a commonsense
way, but human geography’s engagement with postmodern ideas
has led to a widespread interest in the politics of knowledge creation.
In this context, human geography has become concerned much
more with philosophical questions concerning what are known as
‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’. Put simply, ontology is the theory of
what exists in the world. Not all that exists might be knowable,
however, and this is where epistemology comes in. Epistemologies
are frameworks for knowing what it is possible to know, and hence
offer a method for creating knowledge. An important related concept
widely used by human geographers is that of a discourse. It is parti-
cular associated with the work of the French thinker Michel
Foucault (1926–84). The concept refers to certain frameworks of
knowledge that have been constructed over time, and how the
world is represented using those frameworks (whether that is verbally,
in writing or in other ways such as maps). For example, Chapter 4
examines further the complex relationship that various past geo-
graphical discourses have with the nature of international politics
and world history. The way in which geographical knowledge repre-
sented the world in a particular way and how that is bound up with
certain sets of power relationships between countries and cultures has
been a major focus of much cultural geography. Equally, ideas of
discourse run through the discussion of identities in Chapter 7.
Fifth, human geography makes extensive use of the broad con-
cepts of society, economy, culture and nature. Again, there is much
debate within the subject as to what these mean and how effective
they are at isolating one dimension of the world we live in. Chapters 2
and 5 consider, for example, the various ways in which human
geographers have thought about the economy, and the processes
that make up economies – most notably those of producing goods
or services, and consuming them. However, it also considers how
economic geographers in particular have become dissatisfied with
INTRODUCTION 19
the idea that the economy can be understood in isolation from social
and cultural aspects of life. Much work in economic geography
examines how economic activity is embedded in cultural ideas and
social practices within given places or organizations such as firms.
Equally, there is an ongoing debate in the subject about the relation-
ship between human culture and the so-called ‘natural’ world. As
several of the chapters in this book will discuss, social, cultural and
economic geographers have argued at length that what we mean by
nature is a social construction (albeit in different ways). On the one
hand, Marxist geographers have argued that nature is produced and
that human beings’ economic needs are bound up with the physical
reality of what we called the natural world. In a different vein of
thinking, cultural geographers argue that the category of nature itself is
part of human imagination and should therefore be understood as part
of culture. No more is this more evident that in debates about what
is meant by the idea of ‘landscape’ considered in Chapter 4.
Finally, a growing body of work within human geography today
is concerned with conceptions of the subject, identity, self and
other. Again much of this work has come to the fore in the wake
of the cultural turn. Human geography in recent decades has been
very much concerned to examine what it means to be a human
being – a human subject. In this respect, the idea of this human
subjectivity has been theorized around at least four aspects: the
body, the self, the person and identity (Thrift and Pile 1995). These
concepts of subjectivity have become important as they provide a
critique of the idea that geographical knowledge can be objective,
dispassionate and nothing to do with the person creating the
knowledge. Much human geography today is therefore concerned
about the so-called positionality of the writer, researcher or
knowledge-creator and how that is bound up with the nature of
the knowledge that is created.
Related to this use of the idea of subjectivity, human geographers
in many different sub-disciplines – social, cultural, political geo-
graphy – make use of the concepts of identity, self and other in
conceptualizing how people understand who they are and how
they differ from others. Chapter 7 explores these concepts in more
depth, but regarding identity, the most important thing to know
about human geographical understandings of these ideas is that they
are multiple and complex. Human geographers argue that it is
usually better to talk about multiple identities rather than identity in

the singular and that identity is therefore not based on any ‘innate’
quality of an individual or group but rather exists in relation to how
we see similarities and differences in others. The concept of the
‘other’ is important in this respect as it tries to capture how people
or things in the abstract are represented as opposite or different to
oneself. Much geographical work on postcolonialism has used this
concept to understand how western cultures were historically under-
stood as superior to those of the East.
FURTHER READING: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY AND ITS

CENTRAL IDEAS
There are plenty of textbooks that attempt to cover the breadth of human
geography as a subject, but most are caught between the poles of trying to be
comprehensive and linking the main overlapping themes in the subject. No
single book succeeds fully on both fronts so you are advised to look at more
than one. Here are a few of the most useful (in alphabetical as opposed to any
order of preference):
Cloke, P., Crang, P. and Goodwin, M. (2012) Introducing Human Geographies

[3rd Edition]. London: Hodder Arnold.
Does a very good job on conceptual overviews but takes a more specific angle
on some of the topics within human geography. You might look at other
books to supplement its take on economic geography.
Daniels, P., Bradshaw, M., Shaw, D. and Sidaway, J. (2012) An Introduction to

Human Geography; Issues for the 21st Century. Harlow: Pearson.
Another comprehensive textbook that takes a more thematic approach to how
it covers the topics concerning human geographers with conceptual ideas
woven in. This book is stronger on economic, environmental and political
geography, and you might look for supplementary reading on cultural topics.
Gregory, D., Johnston, R., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (eds) (2009) The Dictionary
of Human Geography [5th edition]. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
This book is generally regarded as an essential resource for students of human
geography, and its latest edition is probably as close as it is possible to be to
comprehensive in covering the subject within one volume. It is better used as a
resource to ‘dip’ into since the dictionary format is less good at bringing out
the linkages between different debates (even though of course the entries are
thoroughly cross-referenced).
INTRODUCTION 21
Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R. and Valentine, G. (eds) (2004) Key Thinkers on Space
and Place. London: Sage.
An extremely useful book to give you an idea of different perspectives on the
central conceptual ideas in human geography. It does so by examining the
ideas of a range of different human geographers and other social scientists
widely used by geographers.
Nayak, A. and Jeffrey, A. (2011) Geographical Thought: An Introduction to Ideas in

Human Geography. Harlow: Pearson.
This is an excellent up-to-date and in-depth overview of the conceptual and
philosophical debates in human geography today.
Thrift, N. and Kitchin, R. (2009) International Encyclopaedia of Human

Geography. London: Elsevier.
With 12 volumes and a price tag of more than US$3,000, you won’t be picking
this up yourself off Amazon, but it is undoubtedly the most comprehensive and
detailed resource on the subject. You will need to have access to a library that
holds it, though.
2
GLOBALIZATION
This chapter examines how human geography addresses the major

issue facing the contemporary world – the concept of globalization.
It explores how in contrast to other social science subjects, human
geography offers a distinctive approach, with its primary concern for
the nature of space and place.
GLOBALIZATION
The history of the last 50 years or so has been a period during which
human societies on planet Earth have become more interconnected
than ever before. This is what the word ‘globalization’ means at its
broadest level, and the concept is often described as being a ‘catch-all’
or an ‘umbrella’ idea because it is used with reference to the
increasing interconnectedness across the globe of almost every aspect
of human life. Globalization is not just about economic activity
(although many people do use it exclusively in that way), but also
about all kinds of changes to our existence. That means changes to
society, cultures, politics, technologies, the environment and so on.
Globalization is therefore about more than the growth of global
corporations such as McDonald’s or the fact that you can buy iPods
everywhere. It is also about the effect of many new aspects to life in
today’s world – for example, the effect of the emergence of the
GLOBALIZATION 23
internet, the massive growth in cheap air travel, the international pol-
itics of addressing climate change or the rise of ‘global’ TV shows
you can watch wherever you are on the planet. Globalization is about
the emergence (or not) of an integrated human society on Earth.
The word ‘globalization’ itself is, however, only a recent term for
this integration. Its origins go back the 1950s and 1960s with ideas
like ‘the global village’ and ‘spaceship Earth’ adding to the sense
of a ‘shrinking world’. But it is only since the late 1980s that the
concept has been propelled into widespread usage by social scientists
in several subjects from management studies to sociology. These
days the term is ever present in popular discussion among politicians
and in the media, but often it is only used in that narrower sense, to
refer to the economic aspects of life.
In contrast to the popular uses of the word, and in common with
other social scientists, human geographers have tried to develop a more
sophisticated understanding of globalization. They often therefore
imagine globalization to be some kind of general process of change, or
a set of processes, which are dramatically altering the relationships
between people and places, and generating new networks of activity
and flows of people, ideas and things across regions and continents.
This increasing interconnectedness has of course been going on for
a long time historically speaking, as the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago
or the Chinese empire (often called the ‘Celestial’ Empire) in the
Middle Ages, both corresponded to earlier but more limited forms
of this kind of integration. The important difference, however, is the
increasing range, speed and intensity of interconnections that have
developed in the last couple of centuries broadly, and the last 50 years
most particularly. Since the end of the Second World War, the so-called
‘shrinking world’ has been shrinking like never before, and the pace of
interconnectedness dramatically increased. Geographers and others have
come up with several ideas to encapsulate this – the ‘annihilation of
space by time’, ‘time-space convergence’ and ‘time-space
compression’. All see globalization as a change in the way in which
we experience space and time. This makes globalization an idea very
much at home with the heart of human geographers’ interests, since in
many ways places are where these changes to our experience of time
and space come together.
As a subject, human geography is sometimes said to have been
late to join the so-called globalization debate. Much of this debate
is dominated either by journalists or commentators writing from a

policy viewpoint, or by political scientists from the theoretical side.
This may be in part because human geographers found early glo-
balization theories rather simplistic, particularly those that famously
argued that globalization represented an ‘end of geography’ because
everywhere was increasingly becoming ‘the same’. Whatever the
reason, in truth the popular globalization debate probably found
the more complex approach to globalization from geography hard to
grasp. Geographical thinking has often tended to focus on the
complexity of the changes brought about by globalization, rather
than presenting simpler stories of how the world is becoming
interlinked (like the journalist Thomas Friedman’s argument that
the world is now ‘flat’) (Friedman 2007). It has also interrogated the
uneven and complex way an integrated free market capitalist global
economy has emerged over time, and contributed to under-
standings of how the ongoing development of markets for goods
and services in the global economy does not necessarily conform to
the idealized models of economists (see box).
ADAM SMITH, THE MARKET AND FREE TRADE

Since the mid-20th century, the logic of economic globalization has
been widely associated with the benefits of free market capitalism. In
the last 60 years, countries have increasingly organized their econo-
mies around markets for goods and services rather than adopting
the planned approach towards producing goods and services taken
by communist countries. In the early 21st century, almost every
country on the planet now has some kind of free market economy
(with a few remaining exceptions, such as Cuba and North Korea).
A significant body of social scientific theory (including human
geography) argues that free market capitalism leads to maximum
benefit in the global economy in terms of both the most efficient allo-
cation of resources and the greatest amount of production. An
important basis to these arguments is the thought of the 18th-century
political economist Adam Smith (1723–90). Smith famously argued
in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of
Nations that, in contrast to the highly regulated systems of produc-
tion and trade at that existed at that time, markets were the best
way for people and countries to allocate economic resources. Where
GLOBALIZATION 25
markets for goods or services exist, the process of markets operating

(people offering things for sale and others buying them) meant that
the optimum use of resources was achieved. Smith called this ‘the
invisible hand of the market’. Importantly, he argued that this applied
not only to individuals and groups at a local level but to entire
countries and the whole world economy. Smith’s ideas remain the
underpinning for modern neoclassical economics and the argument
that the global economy should have free trade between countries
rather than nation-states protecting their economies with restrictions
on what can be imported into their territories.
For example, economic geographers focus on the complexity of

how manufactured goods are made through complex global pro-
duction networks that are shaped by many national and regional
political contexts and factors. Equally, political geographers have
examined the complex politics of global environmental change that
involve many actors at different scales from individuals to city
governments to transnational organizations such as the UN. This
appreciation of complexity certainly gives the subject the advantage
of a more sophisticated understanding of globalization, but it has
probably hindered the profile of geographers as significant contributors
to the wider globalization debate.
THE WORLD SYSTEM
Prior to the recent debate, human geographers had been making

use of an earlier idea that in many ways is a forerunner to the
concept of globalization. This is the idea that human society on
Earth is part of some kind of world system. This approach to the-
orizing world society has its roots in the classical social theories
of 19th-century thinkers including those of Karl Marx and Max
Weber, which respectively examined the historical emergence of a
capitalist system for organizing economic activity (see box on p. 26),
and the rise of institutions and organizations in the modern era (roughly
since the 17th century). Capitalism is probably the most important
concept of a social system used by human geographers. It refers to a
form of both economic and social organization where the activities of
producing goods and services are separated from both the people
who own the means to produce things (capitalists) and those who
do the work of production (labour).
MARX’S THEORY OF CAPITALISM

Karl Marx’s arguments about the nature of the economic system we
know as capitalism remain highly influential theories even well over a
century after his death in 1883. Marx was a 19th-century philosopher
and political economist who is probably most famous for his political
pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (1848) written with Friedrich
Engels. However, this short book is only really what we would see as
a policy document drawn from the substantial body of his scholarly
three-volume work on economy and society, Das Kapital. We have
already met another early key thinker about capitalism – Adam
Smith – but Marx’s thought represents another important and con-
trasting set of ideas.
Marx adopted an historical approach to understanding the nature
of economic activity, and his work examines how the medieval feudal
system in Western Europe based on agriculture and the rule of
monarchs evolved into an industrial economic system based on
money and private property. Marx argues that the key issue is the
way that those with money (capitalists) invest in the production of
goods and services by buying land, machines and (importantly)
labour. The aim of capitalists is to make a profit by selling goods for
more than the total cost of the inputs into their production.
Especially significant is that one of the major ways capitalists do this
is by paying labour as little as possible.
A further stage in his work theorizes the impact of this economic
change on societies. Central is the emergence of different social classes
based on those who accumulate wealth (the capitalists) and those
offering labour (the working class). For Marx, this capitalist eco-
nomic system contains a series of problems and contradictions.
The major one is that the whole system depends on people buying the
goods being made by capitalist industry but, in seeking to increase
profits, capitalists have an incentive to pay lower and lower wages. Over
time, this means that demand for goods collapses and production is
no longer profitable. Capitalists make a loss and sack their workers,
making the problem yet worse. This represents a Marxist basis for
GLOBALIZATION 27
understanding what we these days call the ‘business cycle’ of periods

of economic growth (boom) and recession (bust).
Geographers have made much use of a whole range of updated
Marxist approaches, not all sticking to the historically specific argu-
ments of Marx in the 19th century (which have been widely criticized).
One of the uses to which geographers have put Marxist under-
standings of capitalism is to explain uneven economic development,
and the geography of economic growth and crisis. For example,
David Harvey has argued that the capitalist system’s response to
crisis is inherently geographical: when a crisis affects one region of
the world’s economy, capital investment looks to new places to
restore profitability in what he terms ‘a spatial fix’ (Harvey 2007).
The concept of a system is itself actually a metaphor taken from the

natural sciences, where for example the Earth’s climate and living
organisms are understood as being systems. The degree to which
human social life is also composed of things that look like systems
is, however, the subject of continued debate. Nevertheless, in
human geography the concept of the system is most widely asso-
ciated with the way it was developed by a social historian called
Immanuel Wallerstein (born 1930) who proposed what is known as
‘world systems theory’ in the 1970s. This is in essence an early kind
of globalization theory. It argues that capitalism has become the
dominant form of economic organization, spreading across the
globe since the 16th century, and that this forms the basis for
the modern world system we live in today. Wallerstein suggests that
other forms of world system did exist in the past (the Roman and
Chinese empires are examples of this), but that they were not as
geographically extensive as capitalism has become. Looking at the
world map of the late 20th century, Wallerstein argued that the world
could be divided into core and peripheral areas. The core corre-
sponded to the wealthier countries (Western Europe, North America,
Australia and Japan), and the periphery of the less-developed world
(Africa, Latin America and much of Asia). The Marxist aspect to
this approach comes from the argument in world system’s theory that
the core areas derived surplus value (i.e. profits) from peripheral
ones. Now, while Wallerstein was not a geographer, political
geographers have made much use of this theoretical approach

and developed ideas of the world system. However, since the rise of
globalization as a concept, the idea of the world system has been more
broadly used to include, for example, the nature of the relationships
between states at the level of international politics. In the ongoing
debates within human geography regarding the nature of any world
system, an important issue continues to be the degree to which the
metaphor of a system is suitable. Much political geography points to
the complex and diverse relations between states, regions and dif-
ferent actors in today’s world, and it is not altogether clear that
these interactions resemble the systems that natural scientists discuss
(and in that sense whether society is systemic in nature).
GLOBAL SOCIETY
Linked to debates about globalization and the nature of any world

system is the idea that a global society has emerged in the last 50 years
or so. Social sciences of the 19th and early 20th centuries – including
geography – saw societies as largely contained within specific
countries, nation-states or regions of the world. The basic assumption
was that people lived in geographically restricted communities that
marked the boundaries of many different societies across the planet.
Since the latter part of the 20th century the argument that has
arisen is that these boundaries have broken down or been eroded,
and that the wider integration of states, institutions and other activities
has produced an integration of state societies into three distinctive
blocs. Geographers characterized world society in the second half of
the 20th century around a three-way division: a ‘First World’
composed of the advanced industrial countries (North America,
Western Europe, Australia and Japan); a communist ‘Second World’
(USSR, Eastern Europe, China); and the developing ‘Third World’
(Central And South America, Africa, non-communist Asia).
Subsequently, integration has become much more pronounced with
the globalization of recent decades. It is now hard to talk about
American or Chinese society as being in any complete way isolated
from the rest of human society elsewhere on earth because of various
globalization processes.
It is important to remember, however, that this idea of global
society does not mean that all human societies have become the
GLOBALIZATION 29
same (sometimes termed ‘homogeneity’). People across the globe

still live in very different social environments in terms of the organi-
zations they experience, the laws they are governed by and the
customs and practices of everyday life. The issue is more the degree
to which these differences have been diluted everywhere on Earth
by increasing levels of similarity. Human geographers are interested
in a range of aspects of this process – for example, analysing how
flows of people through migration and travel affect the nature of
society and lead to the development of common features across
the globe. Geographical thinking has also been concerned with the
emergence of what is known as a ‘global civil society’. Civil society
here is used to refer to the organizations that exist beyond govern-
ments, legal institutions and other official bodies. This generally means
voluntary and community organizations, charities and other kinds
of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Again, until the last
couple of decades, civil society was understood to be part of the
wider society existing within individual states. However, globaliza-
tion processes have led to the internationalization of these groups
and activities, hence the idea that civil society has also become
global. Famous examples include many campaign groups, such as
Greenpeace and Amnesty International or charities such as Oxfam.
Much of global civil society is thus formal inasmuch as it exists around
various organizations, but the concept also covers other activities
(often termed as occurring at the ‘grass roots’), which are informal
practices and do not have anything to do with a specific organization.
GEOPOLITICS
The concept of geopolitics has had a long and mixed history over
the last century or so, and it is notoriously difficult to define since
its meaning has changed between periods of history. Nevertheless,
it is very much central to human geography and in particular to the
sub-discipline of ‘political geography’. In fact the origins of geo-
graphy as a subject have much to do with this concept and with what
is also known more broadly as a ‘geopolitical tradition’ of thought.
In order to understand the importance of this concept it is useful
to distinguish between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ geopolitics. The word
‘geopolitics’ was supposedly coined by a right-wing Swedish politi-
cian, Rudolf Kjellén, in 1899, but it only entered wider circulation
after the First World War. What emerged were various forms of tradi-
tional geopolitical thinking that sought to develop theories of the
power struggles over territory between nation-states. Geopolitics in this
traditional sense refers to the way that geographical factors and other
‘spatial’ relationships shape international politics – this includes things
like the rise and fall of nations and why they engage in conflict and war.
In other words, geography shapes the nature of politics at the interna-
tional scale (albeit in terms of a rather simplistic definition of geography
in terms of land, rivers, mountains, oceans and natural resources).
While there were many variants to traditional geopolitics, in rela-
tion to the history of and current thinking within human geography,
at least three aspects are worth highlighting. The first is the influential
ideas of the famous British geographer Halford Mackinder (1861–
1947). Although Mackinder never actually used the word itself
(Sidaway 2008), he sought to develop geography as a subject that
would be useful to politicians and others for governing nation-states.
He was particularly concerned with a state’s security and with threats
from one state to another (known as external ‘Powers’). In trying to
understand how geography affected international politics, his famous
contribution was what is known as his ‘Heartland thesis’ of 1919.
This argued that Central Asia was a crucial region in the unfolding
political history of the world. Whichever state controlled this territory
would, argued Mackinder, have the potential for world domination.
Whether this happened or not would be determined by whichever state
controlled Eastern Europe (a pivot area), and also whether the state or
states on the edge of the Heartland (known as the outer rim) took
preventative action. At that point in time, the implication was that
Britain needed to support the creation of a ‘buffer zone’ around the
Heartland to protect the then globally extensive British Empire.
A second key element to traditional geopolitics is ‘the organic
theory of the state’. The idea here is that any nation-state or country
can be understood as being like a living organism. The theory was
first laid out by a German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, and was then
later elaborated by another German geographer, Karl Haushofer, in
the early years of the 20th century. One of the most important
outcomes of this metaphorical link between the idea of a state and
an organism was the notion that, like plants and animals, states need
space to grow. This ‘living space’ (or lebensraum in German) became
notoriously linked to ideas in Nazi (Fascist) Germany in the 1930s.
GLOBALIZATION 31
It formed part of the intellectual argument at the time as to why

Germany needed to expand in the Second World War. Rather
more horrifically, German geopolitics of the 1920s and 1930s
combined arguments about lebensraum with a geographical under-
standing of racial/territorial ‘purity’. In that sense, traditional geopolitics
also contributed important intellectual foundations for the Holocaust,
in which millions of Jewish people and those of other minority groups
were murdered. What is less well known, however, is the wider impact
of this kind of traditional geopolitics on other states even after the
Second World War. For example, the organic theory of the state is
also significant in South American history, where the metaphor of
the state as organism was also extended in the 1970s and 1980s.
Military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina drew on these kinds
of theories to suggest that resistance to their regimes corresponded to
subversive ‘cancers’ that needed to be eliminated (Sidaway 2008).
Finally, no consideration of traditional geopolitics would be
complete without mention of ‘Cold War era’ geopolitics (see box).
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the world map was
redrawn for more than 40 years along a new political division:
superpower rivalry and conflict between the capitalist US-led West
and the communist Soviet-led East. In the era of nuclear weapons,
fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD) shifted international
conflict away from direct military confrontation towards other
means. Geopolitical thinking proliferated in this world, with for
example US foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s being based on
‘containment theory’. This involved a strategy whereby the US
tried to contain the influence of the USSR by encircling it with
governments sympathetic to US interests. The worry was that com-
munism would spread like a disease from one country to its neighbours
much like a line of dominoes. Fear of this ‘domino effect’ produced
the policies that led to US involvement in the Korean and Vietnam
Wars as well as its treatment of communist Cuba.
THE COLD WAR (1946–1991)

The Cold War began very soon after the end of the Second World
War, and was a conflict between the two superpower nation-states
that emerged – the capitalist US and the communist USSR. It was so
named because the two main states did not engage in direct military
conflict (underpinned by a fear of the use of nuclear weapons on

each other and their allies). Rather, it was a period of hostile rela-
tions between these states, where each feared any increase in the
territorial influence of the other. Through the Cold War international
security was largely maintained by the superpowers’ huge military
strength and their dominance in their regions of influence. However,
that did not mean that wars did not occur but that they occurred ‘by
proxy’ as each superpower sponsored different sides in various civil
wars in regions outside of their territory. Examples include the war
on the Korean peninsula during the 1950s, where the USSR and
communist China backed the Korean communists and ended up
controlling North Korea while the US and its allies held the South.
The Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 1970s is another
example. During the later Cold War period, aside from these proxy
wars and the kind of espionage that forms the plot of so many
James Bond films, the superpowers engaged in ongoing competitive
weapons proliferation with both states building up huge arsenals of
nuclear weapons and conventional armies. By the 1980s, the effect
on the USSR’s economy of this expenditure was substantial and the
overstretching of resources to fund the military build-up is widely
considered to be a factor leading to the eventual collapse of the
USSR in 1991. With the transition to capitalism of Russia and other
post-Soviet states from the early 1990s, the Cold War came to an end.
However, human geography today has increasingly rejected this

politically neutral view of geographical factors, arguing that the
influence of geography is neither invariable nor timeless. Rather,
the nature of geographical influences on politics is specific to his-
torical and cultural circumstances. Such a perspective underpins
what is known as the (new) critical geopolitics and has emerged largely
in response to the postmodern- and poststructuralist-inspired ‘cul-
tural turn’ within the subject since the 1980s. Several strands to this
critical geopolitics have been influential in the last couple of decades.
First, drawing on postmodern ideas, critical geopolitics has been
concerned with the language of geopolitics. The key idea here is that of
geopolitical discourse. As discussed in the Introduction, the French
philosopher and social historian Michel Foucault used the concept of
GLOBALIZATION 33
discourse in the 1980s to demonstrate how language does not capture

any kind of timeless universal truth about the world, but is more
like a framework of meaning that is subjective and politicized.
Applying this idea to geopolitics means – in contrast to Mackinder’s
view – that geopolitics is not simply about describing truths and facts
about world society. Rather it is the study of the power relation-
ships and political motivations that produce certain specific under-
standings of the world political map. These understandings have
emerged from very specific cultural contexts and motivations – the
Cold War view of the US about the world map and its fight against
communism is a good example. Political geographers today are
therefore more concerned with how global space is ‘written’ with
meaning, and this kind of critical approach can be applied to any
political description of the world.
A second element of critical geopolitics examines how geopolitical
practices in the wider world – that is, what politicians, states and
other actors ‘do’ – are important in creating senses of identity that
are the basis for modern nation-states. Geographers have argued
that national identity is not something that happens naturally but is
in fact remade and reshaped as nation-states define who is ‘us’ and
who is ‘them’. This activity does not therefore simply reflect differ-
ences that already exist between groups of people in places across
the world, it also creates them.
Finally, a third important feature of the new critical geopolitics is
an interest in popular culture and how the world political map is
represented in wider society. Critical geopolitics argues that it is not
just the views of presidents and prime ministers that matter in
international politics, but the way in which the citizens of states
across the planet understand the rest of the world. This varies, and
popular culture, like television and film, is a major way in which
societies come to imagine the world. The key thing is the interaction
between popular geopolitical ideas and the way politicians use these
images and narratives that resonate with their citizens. For example,
human geographers have pointed to the way that sport metaphors
have been an instrumental element in US geopolitical discourses
around 20th-century conflict. In the American popular imagina-
tion, foreign conflict is justified because the US has to compete ‘to
stay on top’, much as you might talk about a baseball or other kind
of sports team trying to get to the top of its league.
GOVERNANCE
In general terms, governance refers to the framework of governing

practices that political bodies, organizations or other institutions
undertake (such as national parliaments or supranational organiza-
tions like the United Nations). The word is a little ambiguous,
though, and human geographers tend to use it in more ways than is
found in political science. The problem is that it tends to be used in
terms of the nature of these organizations themselves and also to
describe the relationships between them. Governance then is both
about the activity of governing and the collection of actors who go
about doing it. What is more, although most commonly used with
reference to an everyday understanding of ‘politics’, human geo-
graphy also make use of more specific types of governance which
are sometimes less obviously about what you might associate with
‘politics’. The distinction rests between what you might call capital
‘P’ Politics – elections, national governments, the dealings of pro-
fessional politicians and so on – and ‘politics’ without the capital,
which refers to the multitude of everyday political interactions
involved in every aspect of human life (within families, workplaces
or indeed any organization). Economic geographers, for example,
have also become interested in the more specific issue of economic
governance at all scales down to individual firms, not just at the
level of national economies (which is more like the usage of this
concept in economics, management and regional science). The
important thing to emphasize, therefore, is that governance means
much more than just the activity of elected governments in nation-
states. In this respect, we need to consider these different aspects to
this idea in human geography more closely.
Concerning ‘political governance’, the distinction between a
geographical and political science interest centres on the issue of
spatiality. Human geographers are particularly concerned with the
spatial nature of the activities of governing and have been critical of
the overemphasis on nation-states as ‘containers’ of governance in
other subjects (such as political science and international relations).
As mentioned earlier, globalization has had a dramatic impact on
the capacity of nation-states to govern their own territories in all
kinds of ways. Examples would be the lack of power national
governments have over global corporations who make decisions
GLOBALIZATION 35
about where to locate factories and hence where jobs are created.
Equally, the growth in the number and increasing power of supra-
national institutions such as the European Union, the
International Criminal Court and the United Nations means
that national governments now have to share governing activity
with an ever-growing number of actors that are ‘bigger’ than states.
Equally, in cultural terms, national governments no longer have the
capacity to tightly govern national newspapers, television and other
media. In this way, the cultural aspects of life are also escaping
national level governance. Geography is therefore also interested in
the question of how globalization is changing governance in today’s
world and in the many different kinds of actors that produce ‘global
governance’. An important idea here is that there is increasingly global
governance without were being single world government – that is,
the world is still effectively governed but, unlike in past eras, there
is no one state or governing power that has oversight over every-
thing. One of the big debates (political) geographers are involved in
here is the degree to which this new era of global governance is
adequate for tackling the many problems that face global society. For
example, geographical thinking has much to say on climate change
and whether new attempts at global governance – such as the 1997
Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions – can tackle the pro-
blem of global warming. Another example would be the global
financial crisis of 2007–9, with geographers again seeking to under-
stand what kinds of new governance are needed to prevent a financial
crisis in one region from spreading across the global economy.
Following on from this, economic geographers have also been
interested in governance in more specific ways. Three things that
need governing in today’s global world are becoming the focus of
more and more attention: firms, economies and markets. While the
2007 financial crisis has prompted more work on the last of these,
geographers are also grappling with how, for example, ever larger
transnational firms such as Microsoft or Nestlé in many ways escape
the governing powers of national governments There is also a
growing interest in how large global firms govern themselves
(known as corporate governance), which is no longer so
straightforward as it once was, with companies having operations in
dozens of countries and employing tens of thousands of people
across the globe.
GEO-ECONOMIES
Most people understand an economy to mean the economic activ-

ity taking place within a nation-state, but globalization has dramati-
cally changed this. One of the leading economic geographers, Peter
Dicken, coined the idea of a ‘geo-economy’ to describe the geo-
graphically uneven nature of economic activity (Dicken 2011). The
term could of course be applied to economic activity within
nation-states, but Dicken has long been concerned with ‘economic
globalization’, and has, since the early 1980s, mapped the develop-
ment of globalized production and the internationalization of manu-
facturing and other industries. Dicken argues that the world economy
today should be understood as a complex set of globalized geo-
economies. This argument stands in contrast to the traditional view
that nation-states each have an economy based and largely contained
in the territory they govern. Dicken’s point is that globalization has
opened up serious questions about what we mean when we refer,
for example, to the US, German or Australian economies. He argues
that globalization has produced ‘a new geo-economy’ that is different
from previous eras in terms of how the processes of production, con-
sumption and distribution are organized. All three of these processes
no longer just happen in a small number of specific places within
states, but exist as connections of many activities between places
that are linked through flows of material objects (manufactured
goods, components) and non-material elements (ideas, knowledge,
services). The new global geo-economy is made up of many networks
that span the whole globe, with different actors (individual workers,
firms, consumers, nation-states) linked into these networks as
‘nodes’ in different ways.
TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS (TNCS)
Economic geographers have argued that the major actors in the

new globalized geo-economy are ‘transnational corporations’
(TNCs). Unfortunately, this is another ambiguous term because the
idea of a TNC is the successor to earlier (and similar) concepts – the
multinational corporation (MNC) or multinational enterprise (MNE).
These acronyms are all, however, often still used interchangeably
elsewhere in social science writing, and care needs to be taken.
Essentially, the ‘trans-’ prefix in TNC intends to imply that large
GLOBALIZATION 37
international firms now exist ‘across’ national economic borders

rather than just operating in multiple countries (as the prefix ‘multi-’
denotes). Economic geographers have charted and mapped the rise
of such corporations since the 1980s, but it was really in the 1990s
that the term TNC came to be used for some of the largest, most glo-
balized firms. Occasionally, TNCs may also be referred to as ‘global
corporations’ but this concept is used lazily, and any differences between
this and the more technical terms ‘TNC’ or ‘MNC’ are unclear.
The theoretical basis for distinguishing between a ‘multinational’,
a ‘transnational’ or even a ‘global’ firm rests on the degree to which
these economic actors are globalized in three dimensions: how they
produce goods or services, where they sell them (markets) and how
the firm is set up as an organization. Some business commentators
started talking about ‘global corporations’ as early as the 1970s, but
in reality these companies only operated in a handful of countries at
that time and in many ways just repeated their operations in each
country separately. Car-makers such as Ford of General Motors, for
example, bought foreign firms like Vauxhall in the UK or Opel in
Germany, which made cars in their respective national markets. In
other words, multinational firms became multinational either by
setting up new, wholly separate operations in another country or by
buying up existing foreign firms that already made the same pro-
ducts in another country. Since the 1980s, however, this has chan-
ged in several ways. First, there are far more firms operating in many
countries and many different industries. While early multinationals
tended to be in mineral extraction or manufacturing, service
industries such as banking, hospitality (hotel chains), retail and
software are all increasingly dominated by transnational firms (see
box below). Second, today’s transnational firms are not just com-
panies from the rich global North but from many economies.
Several of the biggest transnational shipping companies originate
from Singapore, for example, and large oil and mineral companies
have emerged from Latin America and Australia. Nine of the top
ten steel firms in 2010 were Asian. Third, transnational firms these
days are set up very differently, with companies organizing many
parts of their business at a global rather than a national scale. New
product research, finance and advertising are all run at the global level
where once each national operation had its own research or finance
department. That is what the idea of a shift to a transnational or
global corporate organization form is about. However, economic

geographers point to the highly variable and uneven way in which
this shift has taken place. Some companies now are very much
transnational whereas others, despite being very large, are much less
so. It varies between firms of different sizes, from different countries
of origin and in different industries.
WALMART, CARREFOUR AND TESCO: THE BATTLE

OF THE TRANSNATIONAL GROCERY FIRMS
A few years ago a cartoon in a UK newspaper pictured two scientists
in NASA. One is asking the other: ‘What is our twenty-year strategy?’
His colleague replies: ‘To get to Mars before Tesco does … ’
Now the British food retailer Tesco may be some way from inter-
planetary expansion, but as the cartoon suggests, like the other largest
transnational food retail firms, its global reach is enormous. In fact,
Tesco is only the fourth largest food transnational in the world, the
largest being the US firm Walmart and the second largest the French
company Carrefour. Both of these companies also operate in at least
15 different countries. However, the transnational nature of their
business far exceeds merely the number of countries in which these
firms have stores, and the cartoon mentioned above hints at greater
power, influence and global capacities. Probably more significant
than the tally of countries that these firms operate in is how they
organize, manage and exert considerable power over global production
networks. Supermarket chains now exert enormous influence over
food production and distribution across the globe. If you go into a
supermarket in most western countries (and increasingly many less
developed countries), you will find a vast array of different products
that have been sourced planet-wide. Fresh produce such as fruit and
vegetables are often grown specifically to supply supermarket chains
with chilled distribution networks ensuring shelves are always
stocked. Fresh blueberries bought in Britain or Germany may have
been grown by one supplier firm in Guatemala one week and by
another in Morocco the next. Companies like Tesco source their
thousands of goods worldwide through different buying relationships
and sometimes through collaborations with supplier firms.
Transnational food retailing firms are thus in themselves major
actors in globalization, shaping economic activity, employment and
GLOBALIZATION 39
flows of goods and people between numerous parts of the world.

Increasingly more and more of the global population are consuming
food produced and distributed through these complex global
production and distribution systems that food retailers manage and
control. Harder to measure, but equally significant, these transnational
food retailers are changing cultural attitudes and food consumption
practices worldwide.
An important debate within human geography beyond a narrow eco-

nomic emphasis concerns the growing power and influence of TNCs
(and whether or not that is a good thing). As their numbers and size
continue to increase, these very large firms dominate global markets in
all sectors of goods and services and they account for an increasing
proportion of total global output. This has significant impacts on
people’s lives across the globe. Social and political geographers have, for
example, examined the role TNCs have played in deindustrialization
(see Chapter 4) and the effect that has had on communities in the older
industrial economies as traditional manufacturing jobs have dis-
appeared. Think of the decline of cities like Detroit in the US, or the
north-east of England and its steel industry (the remnants of which are
now owned by an Asian TNC). Equally, there is the consequence of
manufacturing being located by firms in new places where wages are
low: many of the clothes and shoes sold by Western high-street
retailers are manufactured in factories located in China, Vietnam or
Indonesia that have often been criticized for their ‘sweatshop’
working conditions. Political geographers have also added to debates
concerning the eroding ability of nation-states to control economic
activity within national territories as investment decisions about where
to site production now fall to these corporations. The ability of TNCs
to open and close productive operations, along with their ability to
avoid regulation and taxes by shifting production to cheaper, less highly
taxed and regulated locations, has led critical commentators to argue
that they have become too powerful in the context of contemporary
globalization. In recent years, they have certainly also become the target
for campaigns, boycotts and protests by anti-globalization groups who
see them as negative influences on democracy and the distribution of
wealth (see the box on ‘No Logo’ in Chapter 3). Furthermore, such
debates have a strong cultural dimension insofar as the goods manu-

factured and services provided by TNCs shape cultural practices across
the globe in complex ways. A burgeoning Chinese and Indian middle
class are consuming the same global brands and products as Americans
and Europeans, and this is undoubtedly a transformative experience
shifting social norms and cultural ideas in those regions of the world.
Overall, excessively positive or negative claims about TNCs should
be treated with caution since the term now refers to an increasingly
large and diverse number of often very different firms. Human geo-
graphers have been critical of how much thinking about globalization
is often simplistic and sweeping in its criticism or praise of TNCs and
the institutions that are seen to govern their activities in the global
economy. Equally, they see the impact on politics and culture of these
firms as complex. In reality, there is a growing body of research that
points to the complex relationship between TNCs as the key eco-
nomic actors in the global economy and a range of other actors such as
governments, workers, regulatory bodies, institutions and consumers.
GLOBAL PRODUCTION NETWORKS
Related to these arguments about the way in which TNCs organize

globalized production is the concept of the global production network
(GPN). This is a distinctive concept within economic geography that
has sought to overcome some of the rather simplistic ways other
social science subjects (and economics in particular) understand
production in today’s complex global geo-economy. The key issue is
that national economies ‘can no longer be said to contain production’
inasmuch as many manufactured goods ‘get made’ in multiple places.
A product such as a car or even a laptop computer, for example, is
likely to have many different components made by different firms
at production facilities in many different countries around the
globe. Components get shipped from one factory to another, and
to make matters even more complicated, other aspects of production –
such as design – might take place in yet another set of locations. This
makes the labels ‘Made in the US’ and ‘Made in China’ both mis-
leading and quite often inaccurate. It also means that it is increasingly
difficult to see production as a process that occurs in one given
place at a given time. The concept of the GPN therefore aims to
provide a better way of understanding the multiple relationships
GLOBALIZATION 41
between different firms that are involved in making something. It

represents a development of the older idea of a ‘global commodity
or value chain’, which aimed to capture the way a good or service
was made in a sequence with value being added at each stage of the
process. GPNs are bigger, more complex networks of many global
value chains, and have at least three dimensions that concern geo-
graphers: their governance (see above), their spatiality (i.e. how they
are geographically distributed) and what is called their territorial
embeddedness (the way they are grounded in political and other
institutions in specific places).
All GPNs have to operate across a range of scales – the local
places where factories are situated, nation-states that have govern-
ments, and global markets where they eventually have to sell products
across a world with much social and cultural diversity. The important
thing to realize, therefore, is that although these are production
networks, the consumption of their products is also a key factor
because GPNs are ultimately driven by ‘the necessity, willingness
and ability of customers to acquire and consume products, and to
continue doing so’ (after Dicken 2011).
GLOBAL TRADE
Trade in the world economy refers simply to the buying and selling
of goods and services between actors (individuals, firms, organizations)
in different places. As the world economy has become globalized,
total trade has grown enormously but trade benefits some localities
and not others depending on the nature of their economies. Whilst
growth in total world trade stalled during the 2007–9 economic
downturn, the long-term trend has been one of enormous expan-
sion. To get some idea of this, in 2008, total world trade measured
in terms of goods exported from one country to another amounted
to US$15.8 trillion. In the same year, exports of commercial ser-
vices was worth US$3.7 trillion. Human geographers have long
pointed to the unevenness of patterns of trade. Much international
trade is concentrated between the wealthier countries in the global
economy. However, in today’s world this is changing fairly rapidly.
In the last decade, developing countries such as China and India
have experienced huge trade growth, with China’s trade surplus
becoming an increasing source of tension in international politics.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
“That’ll have to do,” he thought. “It doesn’t really matter it being a
bit short.”
He poured himself out a cupful of hot water for shaving. It was
one of the advantages of living alone that he could shave in the
kitchen if he liked.
Curiously enough he paused after pouring out the water.
“Shall I or shall I not?” he pondered. He examined his chin in the
mirror. “I suppose I’ll do,” he decided, “it won’t be noticed in the gas-
light.”
Then he saw the water he had poured out.
“Oh, well,” he thought, “perhaps I will, after all....”
He took out his razor, one of the old-fashioned kind, stropped it
carefully and lathered himself.
While he was shaving he thought: “I wish I hadn’t told that boy
Jones I’d send him to Clotters on Monday morning. Clotters won’t
like it much....”
Suddenly, and seemingly without any premeditation, he thrust the
soapy razor into his throat, just above the windpipe....
§7
At the Duke Street Methodist Schoolroom a select audience of
eleven waited until half-past eight for Mr. Weston to deliver his paper
on “Shakespeare.”
“Perhaps he’s ill,” suggested Miss Picksley.
“No, he’s not, because he was at school this afternoon. My
brother’s in his class,” said one of the Gunter girls.
“Where does he live?”
“Kitchener Road ... 24 or 25 ... I forget which.”
“Well, it’s not far away. Somebody might go round and see. He
may have forgotten all about it.”
“I’ll go,” said Mr. Sly, the treasurer.
“I’ll come too,” said Miss Picksley, who had designs on Mr. Sly.
“We’ll all come,” chorused the Gunter girls.
“No, don’t,” said Miss Picksley. “We don’t want a crowd. It doesn’t
look nice.”
Through the refuse of a Friday evening’s marketing Mr. Sly and
Miss Picksley walked to Kitchener Road. They did not mind the walk
They did not even go the quickest way.
At No. 26 old father Jopson was standing at the front gate with
his monstrous goitre hanging down.
“It must be 24,” said Mr. Sly, “because this is 26.”
“Yes,” agreed Miss Picksley. She walked up to the porch of No.
24 and knocked.
“Does Mr. Weston live here?” enquired Mr. Sly.
Jopson nodded profoundly.
“He must be out,” said Miss Picksley.
“Do you know if he’s out?” enquired Mr. Sly.
Jopson raised his eyes sagaciously.
“’E’s in, ’cos I seed ’im come in couple ’v ars ago, an’ I bin ’ere or
in the fron’-rum ever since.”
“Perhaps he’s in the garden.”
“’E don’t go in the gawden nardays.”
“Lives by himself, doesn’t he?”
“Yus, lives by ’imself.”
“I’m sure he must be out,” said Miss Picksley. As unostentatiously
as possible she peeped through the letter-box. (She was not quite
certain whether this was really a ladylike proceeding.)
“’E ain’t aout, ’relse I should ’a seen ’im go aout.”
“His hat and coat are on the hall-stand, too.... Perhaps he’s ill.”
“Try again. Maybe he was in the garden and didn’t hear the first
knocks.”
They tried again, but to no purpose. Eventually they went away in
the direction of Cubitt Lane.
“Nine o’clock,” said Miss Picksley. “Surely nobody’ll be waiting in
the schoolroom. I don’t think it’s much good going back.”
“Nor do I,” said Mr. Sly. “In fact, we might go for a walk....”
Miss Picksley did not object, so they strolled past the King’s Arms
into the Forest and forgot all about Mr. Weston and his promised
paper on William Shakespeare....
§8
On Saturday morning at half-past nine the rent-man came to No.
24, Kitchener Road to collect his weekly seven-and-sixpence. His
customary treble knock begat no reply. Simultaneously he noticed
the milk-can on the step. It was full, and the conclusion was that Mr.
Weston was still in bed.
Never as long as the rent-man could remember (and that was a
very long time) had the household at No. 24 been asleep at 9.30 on
a Saturday morning.
He went his rounds and returned to No. 24 on his way home
about ten past one. The milk-can was still there on the step. Its
solitude was now shared by a loaf of bread which the baker had left.
Receiving no answer to his knocks, the rent-man went to No. 26.
There the garrulous Mrs. Jopson recounted the visit of the two
callers on the previous evening.
“They knocked an’ knocked an’ knocked, but couldn’t git no anser
... an’ my ’usband swears ’e ’adn’t seen ’im go aout.”
Eventually it was decided that the rent-man should climb over the
fence in Jopson’s back garden and effect an entrance into No. 24 by
the back way. Jopson, morbidly curious, was to go with him.
You picture this strange couple standing in the tiny back scullery
of No. 24, Jopson with his huge face-monstrosity all mottled and pink
and shining with sweat, and the rent-man sleek and dapper,
fountain-pen behind his ear, receipt-book stuffed in his side pocket.
“Gow on strite through,” said Jopson thickly, “it leads inter the
kitchin.”
Slowly and almost apprehensively the rent-man turned the
handle....
CHAPTER VIII
POST-MORTEM
§1
IT seemed to Catherine the most curious thing in the world that she
should be sitting with George Trant inside a taxi. There was no light
inside, and only the distant glimmer of London came in through the
window. All was dim and dark and shadowy. Yet somewhere
amongst these shadows sat George Trant. Perhaps he was thinking
that somewhere amongst those shadows sat she, Catherine Weston.
A voice said out of the shadows: “We shan’t be long now.”
Catherine said: “How far are we going?”
“You’re going home ... to your lodgings, that is.... You fainted, I
suppose you know....”
“Did I?” And she thought: “He killed himself out of loneliness. He
couldn’t live without me. I am the cause, I am the reason.”
“Feeling all right now?”
“Oh yes ... must have been the excitement.”
“Probably.” His voice was cold, unsympathetic. She felt that he
was deliberately looking away from where he thought she was.
“You needn’t take me all the way, you know. I can walk from the
Ridgeway corner.”
“I shall take you all the way,” he said crisply.
With strange instinct she sensed his antagonism.
“I believe you’re angry with me,” she said. Yet all the while she
was thinking: “I suppose there’ll be an inquest and a big fuss and all
that. And the furniture and stuff will have to be sold.”
No answer.
“You are,” she repeated, and was surprised by her own
persistence. After all, she didn’t care twopence whether he was
angry with her or not. Only she would have been gratified if he were
angry with her. It was something to come into a man’s life enough to
make him angry. And it was rather an amusing pastime, this flirting
with George Trant.
“Perhaps I am,” he said coldly.
“Why?” It would interest her to know why. At any rate she might
as well know why.
“You’ve disappointed me.”
That was all. It satisfied her. He had evidently been building
ideals around her. He had dreamed dreams in which she had been
epic and splendid and magnificent. He had thought of her sufficiently
for her to have the power of disappointing him. She was gratified.
After all, she did not like him, so there was no reason why she
should mind disappointing him. And he had paid her the subtle
compliment of being disappointed with her.
She did not particularly want to know how she had disappointed
him. Yet the conversation seemed incomplete without the question:
“In what way?”
She could feel him turning round to face her.
“Various ways,” he said vaguely, but his tone seemed to invite her
to pursue the subject. For that very reason she kept silent. It was not
a matter of sufficient importance for her to ask the same question
twice over. And if he did want her to repeat her question, that was all
the more reason for her not doing so.
After a moment’s silence he said: “You’ve changed a good deal
since I last knew you.”
“Yes, haven’t I?” There was an almost triumphant jauntiness in
her voice.
“And you haven’t changed for the better, either,” he went on.
“That’s what you say.”
“Precisely. That’s what I say.” He was trying to be sarcastic, yet
she knew that he was feeling acutely miserable. There was
something in his voice that told her he was feeling acutely miserable.
And she had no pity. She was even exhilarated. He was miserable
about her. In some way she was invested with the power of making
him miserable.
“Oh, I can’t tell you——” he began bitterly, and stopped.
A queer thrill went down her spine. For the first time in her life
she was conscious of the presence of passion in another person. It
was quite a novel experience, yet it called to mind that scene in the
Duke Street Methodist Schoolroom when she and Freddie McKellar
had come to blows.... A flash of realization swept over her. He was in
love with her. He was really in love with her. She had so often
wondered and thought and speculated, and now she knew. His voice
had become transfigured, so to speak, out of passion for her. What a
pity he could not see her hair! She did not care for him one little bit.
She knew that now. She had not been quite certain before, but now,
in the very moment of realizing his love of her, she thought: “How
funny, I believe I really dislike him.... I don’t even want to flirt with him
again.”
Yet she was immensely gratified that he had paid her the terrific
compliment of falling in love with her.
A sort of instinct warned her that she should deflect the
conversation into other channels. She was immensely interested in
this curious phenomenon, yet she feared anti-climax. He might try to
kiss her and grope round in the dark searching for her. That would
be anti-climax. And also (this came as a sudden shaft of realization)
she did not want him to kiss her. Many a time of late she had
thought: “What shall I do if he kisses me?” She had resigned herself
to the possibility that one day he might kiss her. She had been
annoyed at his dalliance. “I wish to goodness he’d do it, if he’s going
to,” had been her frequent thought, and she had provoked him
subtly, cunningly, deliberately.... Now it came to her as an
unwelcome possibility. She did not in the least desire him to kiss her.
She knew she would actively dislike it if he did.
“Getting chilly,” she remarked nonchalantly, and she knew how
such an observation would grate upon him. She was fascinated by
this new miraculous power of hers to help or to hurt or to torture.
Every word she said was full of meaning to him: talking to him was
infinitely more subtle than ordinary conversation. It was this subtlety
that partly fascinated her. For instance, when she said, “Getting
chilly,” she meant, “We’ll change the subject. I know what you’re
driving at, and I don’t like it. It doesn’t please me a bit.” And what
was more, she knew that he would interpret it like that, and that he
would feel all those feelings which the expansion of her remark
would have aroused.
“I’ll shut the window,” he said, and did so.
It was so subtle, this business, that his remarks, too, could be
interpreted. For instance, his words, “I’ll shut the window,” meant
really, “Is that so? Well, I guessed as much. You’re utterly heartless. I
shall have to resign myself to it, anyway. So, as you suggest, we’ll
change the subject.”
The taxi turned into the Bockley High Street.
Catherine was like a child with a new toy. And this toy was the
most intricate, complicated, and absorbingly interesting toy that had
ever brought ecstasy to its possessor. How strange that he should
be in love with her! How marvellous that there should be something
strange and indefinable in her that had attracted something strange
and indefinable in him!
And she thought, in spasms amidst her exhilaration: “Probably
Ransomes will sell the furniture for me.... He killed himself for me.
I’m the reason....”
It tickled her egoism that he should have done so. He must have
done so. It could only have been that.
Here was George Trant, head over heels in love with her. And
here was her father, stupid, narrow-minded, uncompromising bigot,
yet committing suicide because she had run away from home. She
preferred to regard herself as a runaway rather than as a castaway.
Truly she was developing into a very marvellous and remarkable
personage!...
§2
As she entered the side door of No. 14, Gifford Road at the
improper hour of three a.m., the thin voice of Mrs. Carbass called
down the stairs: “That you, Miss Weston?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a telegraph for you on the table....”
“Righto!” How jaunty! How delightfully nonchalant! As if one were
used to receiving telegrams! As if one were even used to arriving
home at three a.m.!
Catherine turned the tap of the gas, which had been left burning
at a pin-point in the basement sitting-room. Her hand must have
been unsteady, for she turned it out. That necessitated fumbling for
matches....
The telegram was addressed to the Upton Rising Cinema, and
had been handed in at Bockley Post Office some twelve hours
before. It ran:
Father had accident. Come at once.—may.
Now who was May?
After much cogitation Catherine remembered an Aunt May, her
mother’s sister, who lived at Muswell Hill. Catherine had seen her but
once, and that was on the occasion of her mother’s funeral. She had
a vague recollection of a prim little woman about fifty, with a high-
necked blouse and hair done up in a knob at the back.
Catherine decided to go as soon as possible the following day.
She went quietly to bed, but found it impossible to sleep. She was
strangely exhilarated. She felt like a public-school boy on the eve of
the breaking-up morning. New emotions were in store for her, and
she, the epicure, delighted in new and subtle emotions. Yet even
with her exhilaration there was a feeling of doubt, of misgiving, of
uneasiness as to the nature of her own soul. Was she really
heartless? How was it she had never grieved at her mother’s death?
Try as she would, she could not detect in her feelings for her father
anything much more than excitement, curiosity, amazement, even in
a kind of way admiration, at what he had done. She felt he had done
something infinitely bigger than himself. For the first time in her life
she felt towards him impersonally, as she might have done towards
any stranger: “I should like to have known that man.”
The exact significance of her attitude towards George Trant came
upon her. She was playing with him. She knew that. It was not so
much in revenge for what had happened long before; it was from
sheer uncontrollable ecstasy at wielding a new and
incomprehensible power. She would have played ruthlessly with any
man who had been so weak and misguided as to fall in love with her.
She knew that perfectly well. Therefore it was a good thing the man
was George Trant, for at least in his case she might conceivably
justify herself. And yet she knew that justifying herself had really
nothing at all to do with the matter; she knew that there was in her
some mysterious impulse that prompted her to do and to say things
quite apart from any considerations of justice or justification. Cruel?
Yes, possibly.
She pondered.
No. She was not cruel. If she heard a cat mewing in the street
she would scarcely ever pass it by. A child crying filled her with
vague depression. She was not cruel. But she was immensely,
voraciously curious, a frantic explorer of her own and other people’s
emotions, a ruthless exploiter of dramatic possibilities. She had not
developed these traits by reading novels or seeing plays or any such
exterior means. They were inherent in herself.
Suddenly she remembered the note that had been given her that
evening. By the light of a candle she sat up in bed and tore open the
thin, purple-lined envelope.
She read:
dear madam,
Will you come and see me to-morrow (Sunday) at three p.m.,
“Claremont,” the Ridgeway, Upton Rising?—Yrs., etc.,
emil razounov.
Razounov!
She actually laughed, a little silver ripple which she immediately
stifled on reflecting that Mrs. Carbass slept in the room below.
Razounov!
Truly she was developing into a very marvellous and remarkable
personage! ...
§3
The door of No. 24, Kitchener Road was opened by Mrs. Jopson.
“Do come in,” she began effusively. “I’ve jest bin clearin’ up a
bit....” Then she added mysteriously: “Of course, they’ve took ’im
away....”
Nothing had seemingly changed in the interior aspect of the
house. Her father’s overcoat and bowler hat hung sedately as ever
upon the bamboo hall-stand. The Collard and Collard piano
presented its usual yellow grin as she looked in through the parlour
door. Catherine could not explain this yellow grin: there had been
something in the instrument’s fretwork front with the faded yellow silk
behind that had always suggested to her a demoniac leer. Now it
seemed to be leering worse than ever.... The morning sunlight struck
in through the drawn Venetian blinds and threw oblique shadows
over the grin. Every article in that room Catherine knew almost
personally. Even the unhorticultural flowers on the carpet were
something more to her than a mere pattern: they were geographical,
they held memories, they marked the topography of her earliest
days. And the mantelpiece was full of memories of seaside holidays.
A present from Southend, from Margate, from Felixstowe, a
photograph of Blackpool Tower framed in red plush, an ash-tray with
the Folkestone coat-of-arms upon it....
Mrs. Jopson related the story of the tragedy in careful detail. She
revelled in it as a boy may revel in a blood-and-thunder story. She
emphasized the mystery that surrounded the motives of the tragedy.
He had been getting livelier again. Everybody was noticing that. He
had been seen smoking his pipe in the Forest on a Sunday morning
with the complacency of one to whom life is an everlasting richness.
He had started taking out library books from the Carnegie library. He
had even had friends in his house—presumably colleagues from the
Downsland Road Council School. And he had bought a
gramophone. That was the strangest thing of all, perhaps. What on
earth did he want with a gramophone? At one time the gramophone
had been his pet aversion. All music bored him, but the sound of a
gramophone used to call forth diatribes against the degeneracy of
the modern world.... And yet it was there, in the tiny front parlour,
with its absurdly painted tin horn sticking up in the air and a record
lying flat on the circular platform. The record was one of a recent and
not particularly brilliant ragtime. Catherine, accustomed
professionally to such things, knew it well. And Mrs. Jopson said
they had heard that ragtime night after night since he had bought the
gramophone. Sometimes it was played over and over again. Really,
Mr. Jopson had thought of complaining, only he did not wish to
interfere with Mr. Weston’s efforts to liven himself up....
When Mrs. Jopson departed and left Catherine alone in the
familiar house, the atmosphere changed. The very furniture seemed
charged with secrets—secrets concerning the manner in which Mr.
Weston had spent his evenings. Whether he had gone out much, or
read books or merely moped about. Only the gramophone seemed
anxious to betray its information, and the tin horn, cocked up at an
absurdly self-confident angle, had the appearance of declaring:
“Judge from me what sort of a man he was. I was nearly the last
thing he troubled about. I am the answer to one at least of his
cravings.” From the gramophone Catherine turned to the writing-
desk. That at any rate guarded what it knew with some show of
modesty. It was full of papers belonging to Mr. Weston, but they all
seemed to emphasize the perfect normality of his life. Algebra
papers marked and unmarked, catalogues of educational book
publishers, odd cuttings from newspapers, notes from parents asking
that children should be allowed to go home early, printed lists of
scholarship candidates, and so forth. Everything to show that Mr.
Weston had gone on living pretty much as he had been accustomed.
Everything to make it more mysterious than ever why he should
suddenly cut his throat while shaving. Catherine was puzzled. She
had been constructing a grand tragedy round this pitifully
insignificant man; under the stimulating influence of her own
imagination she had already begun to sympathize; doubtless if her
imagination had discovered anything substantial to feed on she
might have ended by passionate affection for her own dead father.
Several times recently she had been on the verge of tears, not for
him personally, but out of vague sympathy with the victim of a
poignant tragedy. For to her it did indeed seem a poignant tragedy
that a man so weak, so fatuous as he was should be left entirely
alone at a time when he most needed the companionship of
someone stronger. She did not in the least regret leaving him. That
was inevitable. He wanted to boss the show. He was so pitifully
weak, so conscious of weakness that he manufactured a crisis rather
than yield on what he regarded as a crucial point. Afterwards, no
doubt, he had regretted his hastiness. Yet that strange interview on
the train to Liverpool Street seemed incapable of being fitted in....
Catherine had often thought of him sorrowing, regretting, mourning.
She had regarded his suicide as a tragic confirmation of his misery.
And now the interior of his writing-desk seemed to say: “Oh, he was
much the same—you’d scarcely have noticed any difference in him.”
And the gramophone chuckled and declared: “As a matter of fact the
old chap was beginning to have rather a good time....”
In a drawer beneath the desk she discovered his pocket diaries.
Every night before retiring it had been his custom to fill a space an
inch deep and two inches across with a closely written pencilled
commentary on the day’s events. For ten, twelve, fifteen—perhaps
twenty years he had done this. Catherine turned over the pages of
one of them at random. They contained such items as: “Sweet peas
coming up well. Shall buy some more wire-netting for them....
Clotters away at a funeral. Did his registers for him.... Gave paper on
‘Tennyson’ to Mutual Impr. Soc. Have been asked to speak at Annual
Temperance Social....” Nearly all the entries were domestic, or
connected with Mr. Weston’s labours in the school, the chapel or the
garden. Catherine searched anxiously for any mention of herself.
There were not many. Sometimes a chance remark such as: “C.
came with me to chapel ...” or “C. out to tea.” And once the strange
entry: “C. been misbehaving. But I think L. knows the right way to
manage her.” (L. was, of course, Laura, his wife.) ...
Catherine looked up the entry for November 17th, the day on
which she had left Kitchener Road. It ran: “Clotters away again this
morning. Had to take IVa in mensuration. Feel very tired. Cold wind.
Did not go to night-school.”
That was all! No mention of her!
And on the day he met her in the train to Liverpool Street he
wrote: “Warm spring sort of day. Went to Ealing to see Rogers.
Rogers got a job under the L.C.C. Two boys and a girl. Mrs. R. rather
theatrical....” And in the corner, all cramped up, as if he had stuck it
in as a doubtful after-thought: “Met C. in train to L’pool St. Seems
well enough.”
Grudging, diffident, self-reproachful, sardonic, that remark
—“Seems well enough.” With the emphasis no doubt on the
“seems.”
Lately the entries had been getting more sprightly.
“Met Miss Picksley to-day. Promised her a paper on W.
Shakespeare for the Mut. Impr. Soc....” “Walked to High Wood after
chapel. Beautiful moonlight. Saw motor-bus collision in B. High St.
coming back....” “Bought gramophone sec. hand off Clayton. £2 10.
Like a bit of music. No piano now, of course....”
“Of course.”
Catherine was immensely puzzled by that entry. She realized its
pathos, its tragic reticence, its wealth of innuendo, yet she could not
conceive his feelings when setting it down. For he had never taken
any pleasure in her “strumming,” as he called it. He had accused her
of interrupting his work. He had said: “Not quite so much noise,
please. Shut both doors....” And sometimes he had hinted darkly: “I
don’t know whether it’s you or the piano, but——” And yet he had
missed those piano noises. Vaguely, perhaps almost unconsciously,
yet sufficiently to make him conquer a carefully nurtured hatred of
the gramophone. The gramophone, viewed in the light of this new
discovery, was the tangible, incontrovertible evidence of his sense of
loss. He had missed her. He had been lonely. He had wanted her to
come back. And because of that he had bought a gramophone.
Catherine felt the presence of tragedy. Yet the ingredients were
all wrong. Gramophone buying, even in the most extravagant
circumstances, does not lend itself to sophistication. And yet, that
gramophone—absurd, insignificant, farcical though its presence was
—was the evidence of tragedy. Once more Catherine’s melodramatic
ideals crumbled. Her artistic sense was hurt by the deep significance
of that gramophone. She felt a gramophone had no right to be the
only clue she had to the tragedy of her own father. She felt
humiliated. And then for a swift moment a passion swept over her.
The false ideals collapsed into ruins, the sham sentiment, no less a
sham because it was not the sham sentiment of other people, the
morbid seeking after emotional effect, the glittering pursuit of
dramatic situations, tumbled into dust and were no longer worth
while. Nothing was left in her save a sympathy that was different
from anything she had previously called sympathy, something that
overwhelmed her like a flood. It was a pleasurable sensation, this
sympathy, and afterwards she tried to analyse the sweet agony it
had wrought in her. But at the time she did not realize either its
pleasure or its pain, and that is the truest testimony that it was
something more real and sincere than she had felt before. Tears
welled up in her eyes—tears that she did not strive either to summon
or to repress, tears that were the natural, spontaneous outpouring of
something in her that she knew nothing about. She did not think in
her egoistical, self-analysing way: “What a strange emotion I am
experiencing!” She thought kaleidoscopically of her childhood and
girlhood, and of one particular evening when her father had crept
into her room at night and asked her to kiss him. It was terrible to
remember that she had replied: “Oh, go away! ...” Terrible! All her life
it seemed to her that her attitude towards him had been—“Oh, go
away! ...” And now he had gone away out of her reach for ever. She
sat down in front of the writing-desk with the diary in front of her and
cried. She cried passionately, as a child who is crying because by his
own irrevocable act something has been denied him. She bowed her
head in her hands and gave herself up to an orgy of remorse. She
was truly heartbroken.
For a little while.
The transience of her brokenheartedness may be gauged by the
fact that on her way home she was strangely elated by a single
thought. That thought—occurring to her some half-way down the
Ridgeway—was begotten of her old ruthless habit of self-analysis.
“I’m not heartless,” she told herself. “I can’t be. Nobody could have
acted as I did who hadn’t got a heart. I believe I’ve got as much heart
as anybody, really....”
She was rather proud of the tears she had shed.... Delicious to
have such proof that she was a human being! Reassuring to find in
herself the essential humanities she had at times doubted.
Comforting to think that tragedy could move her to sympathy that
was more than merely æsthetic.... Splendid to know that deep down
in her somewhere there was a fount of feeling which she could not
turn off and on at will like a water-main....
CHAPTER IX
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
§1
“CLAREMONT,” the Ridgeway, was a corner detached house well
set back from the road. A high evergreen hedge impeded the view
from the footpath, and a curving carriage drive overhung with
rhododendron bushes hid all suggestion of a house until the last
possible moment. Then all that you saw was a tiny porch and a
panorama of low-hanging eaves, diamond window-panes and
russet-brown roofs of immense steepness. A telephone bracket
affixed to one of the rafters and an electric bell in the porch
convinced you that all this parade of antiquarianism was really the
most aggressive modernity. A motor-garage, suitably disguised,
stood at one side of the house. Behind was a vista of tennis-courts,
conservatories, and an Italian pergola.
Beneath the tiny porch in the middle of a hot Sunday afternoon
Catherine paused and pressed the button of the bell. She was
excited. Her visit savoured of the miraculous. This was the house of
the famous Emil Razounov The famous Emil Razounov had
arranged this appointment to meet her. She was actually ringing the
bell of Emil Razounov’s house. In another minute she and Emil
Razounov would be face to face.
A maid opened the door. “What name, please?” she asked pertly,
and Catherine replied.
Catherine passed into a wide hall, furnished with all sorts of
queer furniture that she contrasted mentally with the bamboo hall-
stand and the circular barometer that had graced the hall of No. 24,
Kitchener Road. At one side a door was half open, and through this
Catherine was ushered into what was apparently the front room of
the house.
It was a long, low-roofed apartment, with dark panelling along the
walls and rafters across the ceiling. The furniture was sparse, but
bore signs of opulence: there were several huge leather armchairs
and a couple of settees. Apart from these there was nothing in the
room save a small table littered with music in manuscript, and a full-
size grand piano. At first Catherine thought the room was
unoccupied, but two winding coils of smoke rising upwards from two
of the armchairs—the backs of which were towards her—seemed to
proclaim the presence of men.
“Miss Weston,” announced the maid, and closed the door behind
her.
One of the coils of smoke gyrated from the perpendicular. This
was the preliminary to a slow creaking of one of the armchairs. A
figure rose from the depths, and its back view was the first that
Catherine saw of it. It was tall, attired in a light tweed jacket, grey
flannel trousers, and carpet slippers of a self-congratulatory hue.
Altogether, it was most disreputable for a Sabbath afternoon. It was
difficult to recognize in this the spruce, well-groomed man of the
world who had pushed his way into the Forest Hotel on the previous
night. Yet Catherine did recognize him, and was rather astonished at
her own perception in so doing. He faced her with the graceless
langour of one who has just got out of bed at an early hour. Yet in his
extreme ungainliness perhaps there was a certain charm. And as for
his face—Catherine decided that it was not only lacking in positive
good looks, but was also well endowed with extremely negative
characteristics. To begin with, the lie of his features was not
symmetrical. His hair was black and wiry, lustreless and devoid of
interest. The whole plan and elevation of his face was so
unconventional that he would probably have passed for being
intellectual....
He bowed to her slightly. There was no doubt of his ability to bow.
Whether he were ungainly or not, his bowing was so elegant as to
savour of the professional. It was consciously a performance of
exquisite artistry, as if he were thinking: “I know I’m ugly, but I’ve
mastered the art of bowing, anyway. Put me in evening clothes, and
I’ll pass for an ambassador or a head-waiter.”
He did not offer his hand.
“Ah,” he said, “M’sieur Razounov will be ready in a moment.
Please take a seat.”
Catherine sat down in one of the easy chairs. From this position
she could see that another chair contained the recumbent form of
Emil Razounov. He was reading a Sunday paper and taking
occasional puffs at a large cigar. Catherine had heard much gossip
about Razounov’s eccentricities, yet compared with his companion
he seemed to her to be disappointingly ordinary. For several
moments the two men sat in silence, while Catherine made ruthless
mental criticisms. She was piqued at the lack of enthusiasm
accorded her.
Suddenly Emil Razounov spoke. The voice came from the depths
of the chair like a female voice out of a gramophone horn. It was
almost uncanny.
“I say, Verreker, hass not the young lady come?”
The man addressed as Verreker replied somewhat curtly: “Oh
yes, she’s here.”
“Zhen perhaps she weel go to the piano and play.”
Catherine left her chair and went to the instrument. Before sitting
down she took off her hat—which was a species of tam-o’-shanter—
and placed it on the table beside the piano. She did this from two
reasons: first, she did not feel comfortable with it on; and second,
she was proud of her hair, and conscious that it was the most
impressive thing about her.
“What shall I play?” she asked nonchalantly. She could not help
betraying her annoyance at her unceremonious reception.
There was a pause. It seemed almost as if both men were struck
dumb with astonishment at her amazing question. Then Verreker
said carelessly, as if it were a matter of no consequence at all: “Oh,
whatever you like.” She took several moments to adjust the music-
stool to her final satisfaction and prepare for playing. The time was
useful to decide what she should play. Strange that she should not
have decided before! She had decided before, as a matter of fact:
she had decided to play some Debussy. But since entering the room
she had changed her mind. She would play Chopin.
She played “Poland is Lost.” She played it well, because she was
feeling defiant. She played with the same complete disrespect for
her audience as had won her the first prize at the musical eisteddfod.
Where she wanted to bang, she banged. She did not care that she
was in a low-roofed dining-room and not a concert hall. She did not
care if she pleased or displeased them. They were contemptuous of
her: she would be contemptuous of them. The result was that she
was not in the least nervous. Yet when she had struck the last note
she could not help remarking to herself: “I did play that well. They
must have been rather impressed.”
An awkward pause ensued. Then Verreker said very weakly:
“Thank you.” His “thank you” was almost ruder than if he had said
nothing at all.
“Well?” said Razounov.
Catherine thought he was speaking to her. She was meditating
something in reply when Verreker spoke, showing that the word had
been addressed to him. A feeling of exquisite relief that she had not
spoken came over her.
“She oughtn’t to play Chopin,” remarked Verreker.
“No,” agreed Razounov.
Catherine’s face reddened. It was the subtle innuendo of their
remarks that hurt her. Also, by all the standards she had learnt at the
Bockley High School for Girls there was something impolite in their
criticizing her coolly in the third person as if she were not present.
She resented it. She was not a stickler for etiquette, but she would
not be insulted. “I don’t care who they are,” she thought rebelliously,
“they’ve no right to treat me like that. I’m as good as they are, every
bit!”

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Urban Geography 3RD ED Routledge Contemporary Human

Human Geography of the UK 1st Edition Dr Danny Dorling

Sports Biomechanics The Basics Optimising Human

Human Cognitive Neuropsychology 1st Edition Andrew W.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography Twelve

Yellow Music Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the

A History of Spaces Cartographic Reason Mapping and the

Disappearing Destinations Climate Change and the Future

knowledge begins with the basics

Human Geography: The Basics is a concise introduction

Cover image: © Shutterstock

Human Geography: The Basics is a concise introduction to the study

 global environment issues and development

Featuring an overview of theory, end of chapter summaries, case

Professor Andrew Jones is Head of the School of Geography,

ANTHROPOLOGY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

ARCHAEOLOGY (SECOND EDITION) ISLAM (SECOND EDITION)

ART HISTORY JUDAISM

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LANGUAGE (SECOND EDITION)

THE BIBLE LAW

BUDDHISM LITERARY THEORY (SECOND EDITION)

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE LOGIC

CRIMINAL LAW MANAGEMENT

CRIMINOLOGY (SECOND EDITION) MARKETING (SECOND EDITION)

DANCE STUDIES MEDIA STUDIES

ECONOMICS (SECOND EDITION) OLYMPIC GAMES

EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY (FOURTH EDITION)

EVOLUTION PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

EUROPEAN UNION (SECOND EDITION) POETRY (SECOND EDITION)

FILM STUDIES POLITICS (FOURTH EDITION)

FINANCE (SECOND EDITION) THE QUR’AN

RELIGION (SECOND EDITION) SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

RELIGION AND SCIENCE TELEVISION STUDIES

RESEARCH METHODS TERRORISM

ISBN: 978-0-415-57551-5 (hbk)

Typeset in Bembo and Scala Sans

List of Illustrations viii

WHAT IS HUMAN GEOGRAPHY?

channels worldwide) portrayed geography teachers as objects of

but in particular adopts a spatial approach. If any one distinguishing fea-

whole myriad of reasons related to the very diﬀerent locations of

itself changed quite radically. Before we consider how this has

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

A (VERY) SHORT HISTORY OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Geographers in 1925. During the 20th century, the legacy of

However, by the 1960s, human geographers increasingly rejected

human geography became widely adopted as geographers looked

knowledge is impossible. All knowledge is created by people

see as the splintering of the subject into many diﬀerent areas of

INSIDE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY: KEY CONCEPTS AND

and with key thinkers both historically and in other social

localities. The global, in that sense, is always made up of things

A second set of concepts that human geography makes a lot of

agency that, in many aspects of human life, has been signiﬁcantly

usually better to talk about multiple identities rather than identity in

global environment issues and development