Where's the capital? A geographical essay

Abstract

This paper is inspired by Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty does a wonderful job of tracing income and wealth over time, and relating changes to trends of economic and population growth, and drawing out the implications for inequality, inheritance and even democracy. But, he says relatively little about where capital is located, how capital accumulation in one place relies on activities elsewhere, how capital is urbanized with advanced capitalism and what life is like in spaces without capital. This paper asks 'where is the geography in Capital' or 'where is the geography of capital in Capital'? Following Piketty's lead, the paper develops its analysis through a number of important novels. It examines, first, the debate that Jane Austen ignored colonialism and slavery in her treatment of nineteenth century Britain, second, how Balzac and then Zola provide insight to the urban political economy of capital later in the century, and third, how Katherine Boo attends to inequality as the everyday suffering of the poor.

Elite Formation, Power and Space in Contemporary London

“…His analysis of the contemporary re-emergence of the ‘über-wealthy’ has been crucial in shifting debates away from abstract distributional concerns relating to income and wealth towards a realization that a better understanding of the ‘tiny, stratospheric apex that owns most of the world’ (Hay and Muller, 2012: 75) 1 is a necessary prerequisite for something approaching an adequate social science (Sayer, 2014). However, Piketty’s analysis might be further developed by thinking-through the kind of geography of capital or elite formation that follows from his analysis (Jones, 2014; Savage, 2014a; Webber and Burrows, 2015). In particular, we suggest that financialization and globalization, while important in terms of explaining London’s particular attraction to global wealth-elites, need to be combined with analyses of other political and socio-cultural factors in order to distinguish London’s reconfiguration as the pre-eminent plutocratic city of recent decades.…”

All the world’s a school

“…Schools do little to educate students about inequality in the world (Flanagan, 2014: 423), and doing so may go some way to reducing the social and class divisions which these schools are perceived to create. Inequality is more than the lack of income or capital; it is about how people suffer because of their lack of power, and is ultimately about social injustice (Jones, 2014: 731). A strong democratic civic education program, which comes from the leadership and is rooted in social justice, social trust, tolerance and the common good is important work in an increasingly self-segregated society, with a widening gap between the rich and the poor (Flanagan, 2014: 424).…”

Life in an Alpha Territory: Discontinuity and conflict in an elite London ‘village’

“…Savage (2014) and Jones (2014) are correct; a renewed focus on the geography of capital and elites is likely to offer up additional analytic insights to understanding growing inequalities, class and the role of urban space in the constitution of both . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 …”