A review of: “The Limits to Capital (new and fully updated edition); The New Imperialism; A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Spaces of Global Capitalism”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. All references to The Limits to Capital are to the 2006 edition.

2. Klein also argues that nature can produce such a shock that facilitates economic restructuring, as with tourist development on the former fishing beaches of Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

3. See http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/man/con79.htm#five (last accessed February 2008).

4. To carry the contingency argument further, many political commentators believed that if James Callaghan had, as anticipated, called a general election in the fall of 1978, before the “shock” of the “winter of discontent,” Labour would have been reelected, Mrs. Thatcher would have been replaced as Conservative leader, and the timing and nature of a full adoption of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom would have been very different from that actually experienced.

5. The book was first published as Spaces of Neoliberalization by Franz Steiner Verlag (Stuttgart).

6. Harvey also claims that Mrs Thatcher's reelection in 1983 “owed far more to the rising tide of nationalism she cultivated around the Falklands/Malvinas war than to any real success down the neo-liberal road” (SGC, p. 30), but this is contradicted by most political science research, which reverses the two vote-winning sources (see Sanders, Ward, and Marsh 1987; Sanders, Marsh, and Ward 1990, 1992).

7. This chapter is also published in Harvey's concluding essay in Castree and Gregory (2006).