The Dictionary of Human Geography (18 page)

of merchants' cap ital? Was this early mercantile capitalism actu ally in the business of inventing new systems of capitalism production (e.g. the plantation)? What was or is the relation between forms of unfree labour (some of which still exist, although not as organized mass slavery) and the development of industrial capitalism? To what extent were the accumulations associated with differing phases of the development of the world system sLavery, informal empire, and the first age of empire integral to the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain or elsewhere in Europe? These questions have produced a vast body of scholarship and theorizing. What can be said, with some trepidation, is that while the trajectories of capitalism in europe and elsewhere have some substantive diversity, there is some agreement that the rise of indus trial manufacture in Britain in the eighteenth century, the growing concentration of capitals (and the linking of industrial and bank capital) at the end of the nineteenth century, the insti tutionalization of a sort of Keynesian capital ism in the wake of the First World War, and the genesis of a resurrected ?liberal capitalism? (dubbed neo liberalism, echoing the late nine teenth century) as a force driving the post 1945 globalization of transnational capitalism are key moments or watersheds in the long march of modern capitalism. The national and local forms in which the great arch of capitalist development has been institutionalized sometimes theorized as systems of regulation or social accumulation (see regulation theory), sometimes as national capitalisms, sometimes as models or cultures of capitalism has generated a very substantial and sophis ticated body of work over the past three to four decades, including an important dialogue over the differences between the first and ?late' developers (e.g. the so called asian tigers). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographers, particularly since the 1970s, have been especially concerned to address the relations between space, environment and the reproduction of the capitalist system. The most elaborated account in the English lan guage is the body of work of David Harvey (1999 [1982]) but one might easily point to an equally expansive and synoptic account in the work of Henri Lefebvre (2003 [1970]). Harvey's work began as a critical account of the city in the advanced capitalist states, but quickly developed into a magisterial re reading of capital in which the friction of space and what he termed the ?spatial fix? provided a key theoretical ground on which to understand the circuits of capital (see figure) and the built environment, the changing geography of capitalist accumulation and the environmental costs of and, more recently, the relations (NEW PARAGRAPH) between american empire and primitive (NEW PARAGRAPH) accumulation (what he calls accumulation by dispossession). Other geographers have natur ally contributed to the space nature capital ism triumvirate: Doreen Massey on spatial divisions of labour, Neil Smith on uneven deveLopment, Richard Walker on regional and agrarian capitalism, Ash Amin on indus triaL districts, Gillian Hart on trajectories of capitalism, Stuart Corbridge and Richard Peet on neo liberalism and deveLopment, and so on. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Since the 1990s, the spectacular rise of neo LiberaLism as a specific form of capitalist development and its relation to questions of empire, development and environment has drawn much critical attention. David Harvey?s A brief history of neoliberalism (2005) attempts to map the dismantling of the social democratic world, with a special focus on the British form of national Keynesianism, inflected by the command economy of the Second World War, but whose roots lay earlier in the response of the managers of North Atlantic capitalism to the Depression, and which came in the form of welfare safety nets, income redistribution, domestic industry protection, state financed public works and capital controls ?embedded liberalism? of the Polanyian sort. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The rise of neo liberal capitalism was in a sense the victory of Friedrich von Hayek?s The road to serfdom. It was Margaret Thatcher, after all, who pronounced, at a Tory Cabinet meeting, ?This is what we believe?, slamming a copy of Hayek?s The constitution of liberty onto the table at 10 Downing Street. His critique of collectivism that it destroys morals, personal freedom and responsibility, impedes the pro duction of wealth, and sooner or later leads to totalitarianism is the ur text for market utopians. Collectivism was by definition a made rather than a grown order; that is, a ?taxis? rather than a ?cosmos?. Collectivism was, Hayek said, constructivist rather than evo lutionary, organized not spontaneous, an economy rather than a ?catallaxy?, coerced and concrete rather than free and abstract. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As Antonio Gramsci might have put it, there has been a Hayekian ?passive revolution? from above, in which we have witnessed what Perry Anderson has dubbed a ?neoliberal grand slam? (2000c). The vision of the Right has no equivalent on the Left; it rules undivided across the globe and is the most successful ideology in world history. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The process by which neo liberal capitalist hegemony was established, and its relation to forms and modes and sites of resistance, remains a story for which, even with Harvey?s synoptic survey at hand, we still have no full genealogy. Neo liberalism was a class reaction to the crisis of the 1970s (Harvey talks of a ?restoration of class power?); on that much, Milton Friedman and David Harvey are agreed. But we are still left with many para doxes and puzzles. Why, for example, did the LSE and Chicago once the respective centres of Fabianism and a certain version of (American) liberalism under Robert Hutchins become the forcing houses of neo liberalism? What were the facilitating conditions that fostered the arrival of the maverick Ronald Coase in Chicago, marking a neo liberal turn ing point? How did the World Bank a bastion of post war development economics and, it must be said, of statism become the voice of laissez faire? How can we grasp the fact that ?shock therapy' in eastern Europe was more the product of the enthusiastic Hungarian reformers than of the more reticent American neo liberal apparatchiks? It is sometimes noted that the 1991 World Development Report (shaped by former US Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers) marked a neo liberal watershed in its refiguring of the role of the state. But it was africa (not latin america or eastern Europe) that proved to be the first testing ground of neo liberalism's assault on the over extended public sector, on physical capital formation and on the pro liferation of market distortions by government. There is much that remains unclear in the rise of neo liberal hegemony as a particular force of capitalism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As Polanyi might have anticipated, three dec ades of radical neo liberalism culminated in the autumn of 2008 with a spectacular and massive implosion of the US financial sector, turning quickly into a deeper and systemic crisis of cap italism itself. The catastrophic collapse of US investment banks which ramified globally producing de facto bank nationalizations in much of western Europe was triggered by a classic housing bubble. During the 1990s,how ever, this bubble was, unlike the past, driven by new and dubious financial and mortgage instru ments, and by the utter failure of the financial regulatory institutions (the credit rating agencies and the Securities and Exchange Commission in particular). By late 2008, in spite of a massive $700 billion bailout by the US Treasury, credit and the banking sector remained in effect frozen and the prospect of a massive global recession loomed. The great experiment in free market utopianism the so called ?neo liberal grand slam' had put Keynesianism back on the political agenda. In the US and much of Europe, a Polanyian counter revolution in the US there is talk of a new New Deal is now in the offing. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
capture-recapture methods
A sampling technique that was developed in ecology to estimate population size and vital rates (including survival, movement and growth). A search is made in a defined area and identi fied animals are captured and marked or recorded in some way. Visits are made on subsequent occasions and the proportion of unmarked animals is recorded; this allows, given assumptions, the estimation of the total population. Model based approaches (NEW PARAGRAPH) (Cormack, 1989) have been developed that use categorical data analysis to provide confidence intervals for the estimates. With human populations, the method uses the extent to which the same individuals are to be found in different data sources; thus Hickman, Higgins, Hope et al. (2004) esti mated the total number of drug users by using five data sources community recruited survey, specialist drug treatment, arrest refer ral, syringe exchange, and accident and emergency kj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
carceral geographies
Spaces in which indi viduals are confined, subjected to surveil lance or otherwise deprived of essential freedoms can be termed ?carceral'. The most obvious examples of these are jails and prisons, which are state sponsored spaces of detention, typically used to punish criminal offenders. Prisons are relatively young, in his torical terms, first appearing in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. These spaces were designed to maximize surveil lance, and to encourage self monitoring and possible rehabilitation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In geography, much interest in carceral institutions flows from Michel Foucault's influential study, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (1995 [1975]). There, Foucault traced the logics that underlay early prison designs, and sought to illustrate how these logics were deployed by other social institu tions, such as schools and military organiza tions. Foucault?s description of power as diffuse and capillary has influenced consider able work across human geography, much of which demonstrates how social control is mobilized through the construction and regu lation of space. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Such geographies of control are widespread. From its birth in europe, the use of incarcer ation as a punishment practice diffused widely and quickly. Indeed, in some former colonial states, prisons built decades ago by the colo nial powers are still in use (Stern, 1998). Today, there is evidence that the harsh pun ishment practices common in the USA are diffusing through much of the rest of the world. Although prisons and their operative conditions vary across the globe, certain char acteristics are common: their populations are dominated by members of lower economic classes and ostracized social groups; their environments are commonly overcrowded, dirty, disease ridden and violent; and their everyday realities make elusive personal secu rity, privacy and dignity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Just as prisons restrict the mobility of individ uals inside their walls, they are central to the regulation of movement of people across boundaries, particularly given concerns about security in this age of panic about terrorism. The most obvious example here is the USA, which operates a separate set of prisons for those accused of immigration violations. These detention centres are run by the execu tive branch of the federal government, and thus lie largely outside judicial review. Detentions can be indefinite, and detainees left bereft of legal representation. Such detention centres reportedly house many suspected of plotting terrorist acts (Dow, 2004). Beyond its own ter ritory, the USA operates camps and so called ?black sites?, part of a global war prison where practices of torture and otherwise inhumane detention take place outside the constraints of international law (Gregory, 2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Incarceration thus becomes implicated in wider processes of citizenship, migration and national security. Borders become hea vily policed (Nevins, 2002) and those arrested crossing illicitly are subject to indefinite deten tion and possible deportation. Those who do manage to cross illegally come to inhabit ?spaces of non existence' (Coutin, 2003), invisible to legal and other authorities, and thus deprived of the benefits of formal recog nition. Full citizenship, however, hardly leaves one outside of places that are heavily moni tored and tightly controlled: in a world of increasing surveillance and security con sciousness, the scope of carceral geographies promises to widen. skh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault (1995 [1975]); Nevins (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
carrying capacity
A concept developed mainly in population biology and ecology that commonly refers to the maximum number of a given species that a given environment can support indefinitely. Developed with respect to animal populations that grow quickly and then crash precipitously when they exceed their environment's carrying capacity, it has been widely but controversially applied to human environment relations (e.g. efforts to quantify the maximum number of park visitors compat ible with conservation, or the maximum human population that the Earth can support). Such applications frequently neglect more rele vant questions regarding the complex social dynamics of resource use, particularly issues of distributive justice and technological change. jm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Harvey (1974a); Meadows, Meadows and Rand ers (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Cartesianism
In order to provide a firm and permanent structure for the sciences, the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 1650) out lined a method of enquiry based on certain and indubitable knowledge. The kind of knowing learned from hearsay, teachers and parents was seen to be suspect, marked by the uncer tainties of opinion (doxa). Only knowledge derived from reason and method (episteme) provided adequate foundations for scientific knowledge, and clear and explicit criteria for demarcating scientific from non scientific claims (Bernstein, 1983, p. 23). For LogicaL empiricism and LogicaL positivism, such methods were seen to offer the possibility of developing a universal science that would share common foundations and principles. Such Cartesian science was to be disinterested, objective, value free, universal and abstract, and it was based on a firm belief that science represented nature in a direct manner, serving as Rorty (1979) suggested as ?the mirror of nature? (cf. mimesis). Bernstein (1983) referred to this history of scientific efforts to found basic statements in direct observation of an external reality as the Cartesian Anxiety, a term that Gregory (1994, pp. 71 3) extended to the cartographical and geographical project (see cartographic reason). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the 1960s, the growing power and reach of universal science, hypothetico deductive meth odologies and mathematical abstraction in the natural and social sciences led to a series of disciplinary methodenstreiten (?struggles over method?). The ?Positivist dispute in German sociology' (see Adorno, 1976) was particularly influential in this struggle, bringing together the views of a broad group of philo sophers of science, including Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno, on the limits ofdisinterested, value free and universal ist understandings of science. In human geog raphy, a critique of Cartesianism, and the clearest reflection of this broader methodenstreit, was provided by Gregory (1978a), who argued against positivism and spatial analytic claims to a privileged form of knowledge production. Instead, geographical science was never disinterested or innocent, but always a social activity framed by determinate interests. Habermas (1987a [1968]) had argued that knowledge claims must be understood in terms of such interests (see also phenomenoLogy), and Gregory elaborated these claims for geo graphy. In the place of a single privileged scien tific method, Gregory outlined a plurality of scientific epistemologies, each one determined by the specific knowledge constitutive interests that give rise to them (he identified three: technical, interpretative and emancipatory). Corresponding to each knowledge constitutive interest was a particular form of science: empir ical, hermeneutic and critical (see criticaL theory). Since then, it has become common place to treat geographical enquiry, like all forms of intellectual enquiry, as an irredeem ably social practice, although this has been understood in ways that often differ signifi cantly from Habermas? original theses, and the rise of a criticaL human geography has been accompanied by a series of searching enquiries into the effects produced through representa tion and other modes of apprehending the world (seenon representationaL theory). jpi (NEW PARAGRAPH)