Inter-regional and inter-metropolitan economic divergence is greater in many western developed countries than it has been in many decades. Divergence manifests itself in many ways, including per capita income, labor force participation, and the spatial the distribution of skills and returns to education. At the same time, geographical polarization of political preferences and electoral choices has increased, with gains in populism and nationalism in some regions, and broadening of socially liberal, pro-trade, and multicultural attitudes in other regions. The task of explaining these developments poses challenges to economic geography and regional and urban economics. These fields have already developed some of the building blocks of an account, but a number of important gaps persist. This article is devoted to identifying priorities for regional science and urban economics, the new economic geography, and proper economic geography to tackle the key mechanisms behind divergence as well as to integrate them in a common overall framework.

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Separate Worlds? Explaining the current wave of regional economic polarization

We review historical patterns of economic geography for the United States from the colonial period to the present day. The analysis is framed in terms of two geographic scales: regions and cities. The compelling reason for studying geographic area of two different scales is that models that explain location of economic activities at one scale may not apply to other scales. We consider the process of settling the frontier; the development of national markets in goods and factors and, more generally, the convergence (and divergence) of regional economies; the growth of cities and the relationship between urbanization and trends in aggregate economic structure, such as industrialization; and changes in the internal structure of cities.

Chapter 66 – Historical Perspectives on U.S. Economic Geography

Paradoxically, in the decades following the Revolution, slavery in Baltimore gained strength even as slaves were being freed in record numbers. The vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves with craft skills. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years of hard work. This was a practical, not a philanthropic arrangement; following the release of one group of slaves, owners would simply purchase additional ones. This practice of "term slavery" created a labor force affordable to small craftsmen and manufacturers and directly contributed to the urban development of the country's third largest city. Newly freed slaves, driven by debts contracted in purchasing freedom, remained dependent upon their former masters for employment. The freeing of blacks in rural Maryland and their migrations to Baltimore to work and save in order to aid still-enslaved kin supplied the city with even more free black workers.

The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland

Research within industrial geography has illuminated the relationship between the restructuring of manufacturing and the reshaping of urban space. Industrial geographers have paid little attention, however, to the dramatic social and economic changes occurring throughout rural America. I contend that evident sectoral and urban biases mask an underlying issue: a persistent conceptual schism between agriculture and industry, in which agriculture is comparatively undertheorized as an arena of capitalist development. As a result, a significant part of the story of economic restructuring—the transformation of farming and the creation of new forms of rural development—remains largely unexamined. This paper sets out to bridge the gap separating industry from agriculture and thereby begins to recover this lost side of industrial restructuring. I argue that the incorporation of agriculture into industrial geography involves much more than a simple mapping of industrial theory onto farm terrain; it requires...

Across the Great Divide: Agriculture and Industrial Geography

Geographers have been reticent on the role of the African diaspora in the contouring of Brazil's biological and cultural landscapes. Whereas paradigm shifts have occurred in regards to environmental stability in the tropical realm and the pristine nature of pre-Columbian landscapes, these have not translated to a rigorous reassessment of the geographical position of Africans and their descendants as active agents in landscape evolution. In this article, we briefly examine the historical development of black diaspora scholarship outside of geography. We review the contributions of geographers and others to understanding the floristic homogenization of the Atlantic world set in motion by European exploration and colonization. Finally, by highlighting recent findings on the dynamic role of forced African immigrants in the process of landscape transformation, we hope to stimulate further geographical inquiry, improve pedagogical materials and advance in a modest way a recovery of the African contribution to t...

Landscape legacies of the African diaspora in Brazil

Introduction: the practice of geographical history 1. The ecological causes of the Virginia mortality crisis, 1607-1624 2. Why the Puritans settled in New England: the problematic nature of English colonization in North America, 1580-1700 3. Why tobacco stunted the growth of towns and wheat built them into small cities: urbanization south of the Mason-Dixon line, 1650-1790 4. Boston, vanguard of the American Revolution 5. The industrial Revolution as a response to cheap labor and agricultural seasonality, 1790-1860: a reexamination of the Habakkuk thesis 6. To enslave or not to enslave: crop seasonality, labor choice, and the urgency of the Civil War 7. The myth of the southern soil miner|: macrohistory, agricultural innovation, and environmental change 8. A tale of two cities: the ecological basis of the threefold population differential in the Chicago and mobile urban systems, circa 1860 9. The split geographical personality of Americna labor: labor power and modernization in the Gilded Age 10. The last great chance for an American working class: spatial lessons of the general strike and the Haymarket riot of early May 1886 11. Spoiling the 'roast beef and apple pie' version of American exceptionalism: the agricultural-geographic origins of working-class division and the failure of American socialism 12. The periodic structure of the American past: rhythms, phases, and geograph conditions Index.

Carville Earle

Papers

Geographical inquiry and American historical problems