Geography, uneven development and population density: attempting a non-ethnocentric approach to development

This chapter focuses on geography as an important context in which economic development - or the lack of it - takes place. After World War II geography departments were, generally without objections, abolished as academic subjects from the leading US universities. As with mathematics in chapter 1, here again we find that basic changes in the operation of universities have had a fundamental impact on economics. In Joseph Schumpeter's first book (1908) his advice on how to avoid arguments in economics was to first ask the question one wishes to have answered, and subsequently enter into the theoretical structure at a level of abstraction where one is likely to find an answer. Here we find - in the beginning of the Cold War - two cases where theories at lower level of abstraction are eliminated by administrative action at the best US universities, creating a much more context-free economics profession. One reason for excluding geography from university curricula was that the profession had acquired what was seen as racist and ethnocentric characteristics. In this chapter the authors attempt to re-introduce geographic factors, e.g. geographic proximity between widely diverse geographical niches as a source of early economic development, with examples both from Europe and the Americas. Attempting to counteract traditional Eurocentrism, a large part of the chapter concentrates on the importance of Chinese and Islamic foundations on which Western culture was built. In that way a much wider history of the social sciences is built. The importance of geography in determining population density is flagged as an important and often neglected subject.