Macroeconomic geographies

In dialogue with Ray Hudson's paper on 'rising powers' in globalizing capitalism, this review article reflects on the position and priority of these macroscopic questions in the field of economic geography, focusing in particular on the prospects for a reanimated political economy of uneven spatial development. Two themes are explored. First, the paper asks what it means to confront the problematic of rising (and falling) capitalisms, and why it is that the vocabulary for this discussion has to be imported, if not improvised. Second, it explores what it might mean not just to revisit and re(in)state, but to reconstruct notions of uneven spatial development, which despite their virtually uncontestable status in the field of economic geography have in practice often been allowed recede into the explanatory background, either as an implicit ontological precondition or as little more than an ambient sensibility.