A significant trend in global finance over the last 15 years has been the rapid growth of Islamic banking and finance (IBF), which has gathered momentum to become a significant feature of the financial landscape in the twenty‐first century. This paper explores the increasingly ‘Western’ character of IBF and has two key aims. First, we address the remarkably under‐theorized status of IBF by considering how various economic geographical and social theories might conceptualize its development. Second, and emerging from our reservations with these literatures, we argue that IBF exposes some of the limits of Western‐centred readings of economic geographies and we chart a path towards a postcolonial political‐economic geography. Postcolonial critiques are useful in two senses. First they provide a different set of lenses for understanding IBF as a self‐consciously ‘other’ set of economic and social practices and second, they push us to reconsider or ‘provincialize’ our understandings of normative, hegemonic economic practices and knowledges, including ‘conventional’ banking and finance. In essence, the growth of IBF is a stimulus for economic geographers to consider how, for what purposes and from where they theorize – a task that is long overdue.

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The debate around the 'Global City Hypothesis' (GCH), and particularly the research agenda of the 'Globalization and World Cities' network, have been preoccupied recently with the business and technological dimensions of so-called 'global cities'. This article seeks to recover the role of immigration in large urban economies. Using mainly observations from European metropolises, I argue first that the GCH requires significant revision insofar as it can be used as a tool for addressing issues of inequality, and I offer five propositions for a renewal of the existing contours of the GCH. Second, beyond these revisions, I suggest a complete reformulation of the debate by linking it with ideas emanating from the literature on transnationalism. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

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In this paper, we identify the ways in which the existing literature has examined financial technology (FinTech). Using the frame of the ‘FinTech Cube’, we examine how FinTech unfolds through the intersections of key actors, technologies and institutions. We demonstrate the relevance of FinTech for two areas of geographical enquiry: i) the reshaping of global production and financial networks, and ii) financial inclusion and poverty reduction in poorer countries. In doing so, we accord particular attention to the significance of FinTech for theoretical and empirical research in economic geography.

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