History, Space and Nature: Building Theory from the Exception

Abstract

Uneven Development endeavours to derive a theory of uneven geographical development by putting in motion a ‘historical dialogue’ between Marx's critical theorisation of capitalism and the geograhical reality of capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, and by theorising the relations between material nature and the spatial dynamics of capitalist accumulation. The result, however, is a theory of uneven development predicated on a logical rather than a historical conception of capitalism, which furthermore supersedes the question of the production of nature in conceptualising the spatial dynamics of (contemporary) capitalism. This article argues for a re-theorisation of uneven geographical development that considers the production of nature, namely extractive industry, as a point of departure in theorising the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalist accumulation, focusing briefly on the concentration and centralisation of capital.

Keywords:

• production of space
• production of nature
• concentration and centralisation of capital
• uneven geographical development

Notes

Henri Lefebvre (1991), to whom we owe the notion of the production of space, and Ernest Mandel (1975), who treated unequal geographical development as a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism, are notable exceptions. Neither, however, brought space into the analysis by way of geography. The late Giovanni Arrighi (2005), who jointly taught a seminar with geographer David Harvey at Johns Hopkins, has recently turned to Harvey's interpretation of ‘the spatial and temporal unevenness of capitalist development’ to explain the relations between capitalism and imperialism. Only two years earlier, however, Arrighi (2003: 8) could embark on his analysis of postwar capitalist development deploying Robert Brenner's non-geographical notion of uneven development, despite acknowledging ‘the more common contemporary deployment designating the tendency of capitalist development to polarize and diversify geographical space’.

This partly explains the abstract discussion of the conception of absolute and relative space that ensues, drawn primarily from a ‘history of the concept of space in physical science’, and why the science of physics is privileged in providing the conceptual foundation for the theory of the production of space. Nature gives way to matter and geography gives way to geometry, ‘the glue that sticks space to matter’ and in the process the Newtonian separation of space from nature, which provided the basis for the abstraction of social space from physical space, is reproduced.

Only one differentiation is made within capitalism, between ‘twentieth century capitalism’ and the capitalism that preceded it, marked by the development of modern imperialism. But the distinction stops there, hence Smith's (2008: 190–91) remark about the similarity between the map of 1980 and that of 1900 being greater than the similarity between the map of 1900 and any in the 80 years before. This is quite problematic if we consider the political transformations of the space of capitalism over the course of the twentieth century beyond the physical space defined by the territories of nation-states.