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  1. Dartmouth Libraries
  2. Research Guides
  3. Dartmouth Libraries Guides
  4. Human Geography
  5. Economic geography

Human Geography

This guide highlights the resources for Human Geography, the study of human settlements in their places.
  • Defining human geography
  • Cultural geography
  • Economic geography
  • Feminist geography
  • Migration studies
    • Migration and detention
    • Diaporas
    • Refugees
    • Statelessness
  • Political geography
    • Feminist political geography
  • Geopolitics
  • Population studies
  • Place
  • Travel and tourism
  • Urban geography
    • The City
    • Gentrification
    • Redlining
  • Scholarly communication This link opens in a new window

Subject Librarian

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Lucinda M. Hall
Email Me
Contact:
Evans Map Room, Baker-Berry Library
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
(603) 646-0962
Website Skype Contact: d1128r8@kiewit.dartmouth.edu
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Subjects: Film and Media Studies, Geography, Polar Studies

Other library resource(s)

  • Film artCoat of many countries by Josh Freed; Tom Puchniak
    • Video
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Streaming video
    The clothes we wear today are the remarkable coming together of goods and services from all over the world. By following the evolution of a suit, we glimpse the practical application of the new global economy.
  • Resource logoEconomic geography from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Jessie P. H. Poon
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199874002
    Economic geography is a major field and specialization within human geography. It has undergone several theoretical “turns” since the 1960s, and this has influenced methodological approaches as well. ...
  • Resource logoFinancial geographies of debt and crisis from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Jayson J. Funke
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199874002
    Debt and crises have become defining features of the contemporary global economy. Geographic scholarship on debt and crises is typically subsumed within economic geography and the geography of finance. Geographers have helped increase our understanding of the spatial dynamics of finance, debt, and crises by demonstrating their network linkages and uneven geographies and by highlighting the importance of scale in understanding financial crises and systems. Much geographic work on debt and crises has drawn on the Marxist political economy framework of David Harvey. ...

Keeping up with the journal literature

Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for all facets of Geography? And you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's you can download and read the articles you want.

You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's now available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.

New books in Economic Geography

Find new books about Economic Geography in the Library's collections.

A short definition for Economic geography

A subdiscipline of geography that seeks to describe and explain the absolute and relative location of economic activities, and the flows of information, raw materials, goods, and people that connect otherwise separate local, regional, and national economies. It originated in the late 19th century but, unlike its academic cousin, economics, did not initially favour theory. In the form of commercial geography, it tended to be highly empirical, attending to the relations between a location’s natural and human resource base and the character of its economy. The geography of the production of specific commodities was thus based on observation, not deductions from first economic principles. However, this changed from the mid-1950s. Economic geography was, along with urban geography, at the leading edge of the Quantitative and Scientific Revolution in Anglophone human geography. Partly inspired by the earlier research of Alfred Weber and Walter Christaller, a new generation of economic geographers began to look for consistent patterns in the economic landscape that could be explained with reference to producers acting rationally on the basis of their existing resources, the location of their markets, the transportation costs of moving inputs and finished goods, and so on. Location theory in various forms became a major preoccupation, with economic geographers gathering and analysing quantitative data about all manner of commodity producers in order to identity spatial regularities and departures therefrom. There was an emphasis on describing and seeking to explain spatial decision-making by firms, commuters, labour migrants, and so on. This approach bled into what was called ‘*regional science’, which was linked to government planning and problem-solving.

However, from the early 1970s a new generation of economic geographers began to question quantitative economic geography. As part of the radical geography movement inspired by the worldwide political protests of 1968, these geographers offered four criticisms of the research pursued by an older generation. First, it was accused of a naive objectivism, or belief that the ‘facts’ could provide a value-free, unbiased test of a theory. Second, it was criticized for its theoretical assumptions, notably the assumption that economic actors are governed by a universal form of reason (homo economicus). Third, it was accused of focusing on phenomenal forms not underlying economic processes. Fourth, it was criticized for treating the world’s economic geography as if it should (or would) display a spatial order, such that place and regional differences were mere ‘noise’ to be filtered out in the search for general patterns.

Out of these criticisms emerged a new kind of economic geography indebted to political economy, especially Marxism. This research focused on how economic actors had their spatial decision-making structured by the logics of capitalism, a historically specific system that created its own signature geographies. According to David Harvey in The Limits to Capital (1982), capitalism rests on a geographical tension between fixity and motion, concentration and dispersal, producing inter-place competition and the compulsion for firms and investors to seek out new opportunities in other regions. Like his spatial science predecessors, Harvey believed economic activity had a certain spatial order to it, but unlike them, saw this order as fluid and unstable.

Political economic geographers like Harvey saw spatial decision-making by economic actors as structured by definite ‘rules’ and pressures specific to capitalism, and they also saw economic decision-making as not purely ‘rational’, but the result of a combination of imperfect reasoning, guess work, and other distinctively human characteristics. They also focused on large firms in order to highlight their considerable importance for jobs, income, taxation, and wider local and national economies. Doreen Massey’s Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984) and Peter Dicken’s Global Shift (1986) were two important contributions here during the 1980s. Dicken’s book was among several works that analysed the decline of old industrial regions in North America and Europe and the rise of ‘newly industrializing economies’ in the Far East and elsewhere. Much of this work was inspired by the neo-Marxist Regulation Theory of political economy. Aside from examining firm behaviour within a wider capitalist context, there were also important early attempts to understand the geographical concentrations and flows of money, notably loans by Western banks to developing countries that ended with a debt crisis by the mid-1980s. Stuart Corbridge’s Debt and Development (1993) is an exemplar of this work. Still other political economic research analysed the connections between national states and economic activity, with a particular focus on the attempt of hegemonic countries to maintain their relative economic prowess. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge’s Mastering Space (1995) is an exemplar of this attempt to link economic and political geography together. Agnew has gone on to explore the economic underpinnings of America’s waning political hegemony (in Hegemony 2005).

Much of this research was theoretically innovative and sophisticated, but it tended to avoid quantitative approaches, favouring more qualitative ones. One justification for this was that it is important to understand how and why economic actors do what they do on their own terms. However, quantitative approaches to describing and explaining the changing patterns of economic growth remain important, with certain university geography departments making this a signature of their research (such as the London School of Economics). In California, Michael Storper and Allen Scott have used secondary quantitative data sets in their explorations of the roots of sustained regional economic growth. These approaches rarely extend to forecasting economic geographies, remaining focused on current and past patterns of investment and production. Economic geography’s relation to mainstream economics has grown closer since the creation of the Journal of Economic Geography in 2000. However, the subdiscipline is far more politically left-wing than fifty years ago and today it draws much intellectual inspiration from the critical wings of economic sociology, business studies, the sociology of work, and management studies. The effects of the 1970s critique of location theory endure. Leading economic geographers have been critics of neoliberalism and have analysed capitalism from the perspective of ordinary working people (see labour geography), in the process highlighting the key links between production and social reproduction. Many have also explored how economic geographies are implicated in culture in various complex ways, thus challenging economists’ belief that ‘the economy’ is something separate in kind. In sum, economic geography today is plural and dominated by no one approach. This makes it a rich environment for practitioners but threatens to weaken the field’s external visibility and impact in academia and the wider society.

Rogers, A., Castree, N., & Kitchin, R. (2013). "Economic geography." In A Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 Jan. 2022

In the Library's collection

Economic geography can be found in different areas of the library's collections. The main 2 areas include the call number range HF 1021 through HF 1027 (general information) and HC 94 through HC 1085.2 (specific countries and regions). These ranges can be found on Berry Level 3.

  • economic geography
  • international economic integration
  • commercial geography

Introductory reading(s)

  • Cover artEconomic geography: places, networks and flows by Andrew Wood; Susan Roberts
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780415401821
    The turbulence of the current times has dramatically transformed the world's economic geographies. The scale and scope of such changes require urgent attention.
  • Cover ArtThe new Oxford handbook of economic geography by Gordon L. Clark; Maryann P. Feldman; Meric S. Gertler; Dariusz Wojcik, eds.
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780198755609
    The first fifteen years of the 21st century have thrown into sharp relief the challenges of growth, equity, stability, and sustainability facing the world economy. In addition, they have exposed the inadequacies of mainstream economics in providing answers to these challenges.This volume gathers over 50 leading scholars from around the world to offer a forward-looking perspective of economic geography to understanding the various building blocks, relationships, and trajectories in the world economy. The perspective is at the same time grounded in theory and in the experiences of particular places. Reviewing state-of-the-art of economic geography, setting agendas, and with illustrations and empirical evidence from all over the world, the book should be an essential reference for students, researchers, as well as strategists and policy makers. ...
  • Cover ArtThe SAGE handbook of economic geography by Linda McDowell; Peter Sunley; Andrew Leyshon; Roger Lee, eds.
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry HF 1025 .S24 2011
    ISBN: 9781848601147
    What difference does it make to think about the economy in geographical terms? The SAGE Handbook of Economic Geography illustrates the significance of thinking the 'economy' and the 'economic' geographically. It identifies significant stages in the discipline's development, and focuses on the key themes and ideas that inform present thinking in economic geography. ...

Selected book titles

  • Cover artLimits to globalization: the disruptive geographies of capitalist development by Eric Sheppard
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780199681167
    This book summarizes how globalizing capitalism - the economic system now presumed to dominate the global economy - can be understood from a geographical perspective. This is in contrast to mainstream economic analysis, which theorizes globalizing capitalism as a system that is capable of enabling everyone to prosper and every place to achieve economic development. ...
  • Cover ArtThe Wiley-Blackwell companion to economic geography by Trevor J. Barnes; Jamie Peck; Eric Sheppard, eds.
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9781444362398
    The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography presents students and researchers with a comprehensive overview of the field, put together by a prestigious editorial team, with contributions from an international cast of prominent scholars. ...
  • Cover artA world made for money: economy, geography, and the way we live today by Bret Wallach
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780803298910
    A spirited and incisive survey of economic geography, A World Made for Money begins with the author stopped at a red light in Norman, Oklahoma. Observing the landscape of drugstores and banks, and for that matter the stoplight and roads themselves, Bret Wallach observes, "Everything I see has been built to make money" or, at the very least, to facilitate making money.

Finding journal titles & articles

Articles and other writings about economic geography can be found in many publications. Our collection includes several journals which look exclusively at economic geography. Below is a short list of economic geography journals. Or you can begin your research using the search box at the top of the page.

  • Issue cover artEconomic geography by Clark University
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic journal
    Economic Geography is an internationally peer-reviewed journal, committed to publishing cutting-edge research that makes theoretical advances to the discipline. Their long-standing specialization is to publish the best theoretically-based empirical articles that deepen the understanding of significant economic geography issues around the world. ...
  • Issue cover artSpatial economic analysis by The Regional Studies Association [and] the Regional Science Association International, British and Irish Section.
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic journal
    Spatial Economic Analysis publishes research in spatial and geographic economics covering spatial data analysis and economic phenomena at city, regional and global levels.
  • Issue cover artJournal of economic geography by Oxford University Press
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic journal
    Journal of Economic Geography publishes original academic research and discussion of the highest scholarly standard in the field of 'economic geography' broadly defined.
  • Issue cover artTijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie = Journal of economic and social geography by Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic journal
    ... the journal aims to provide a platform for the spatial social sciences. As such, it offers space for discussions, conceptual renewal and original research within the fields of economic, urban, cultural, political, developmental and population geography. ...
  • Resource logoEconlit by American Economic Association
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    This index is a searchable database containing citations and abstracts from 400 journal titles to the world's economic literature.
  • Resource logoThe web of science citation databases by ISI (Institute for Scientific Information)
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    The online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.

Internet resource(s)

  • Sourcemap logo
    Sourcemap
    • Link
    Sourcemap is the first crowd-sourced directory of supply chains and environmental footprints. There are free and paid versions.
  • Economic Geography Specialty Group of the AAG
    • Link
    The purpose of the AAG Economic Geography Specialty Group (EGSG) is to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas among its members and other specialists; to stimulate research, teaching, and applications in industrial and economic geography; ...
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  • Last Updated: May 12, 2025 10:16 AM
  • URL: https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/human_geography
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Subjects: Geography
Tags: border studies, boundaries, cultural geography, demography, detention, economic geography, feminist geography, gentrification, GEOG.02.01-fa24, geopolitics, migration studies, physical sciences, place, political geography, Social Sciences, tourism

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