Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—War, Capitalism, and the Making and Unmaking of Economic Geographies

War is both incredibly destructive and strangely productive. Its impacts depend on how wars are fought (e.g., sieges, mechanized ground wars, drones) and how warriors are equipped. Cities are built, destroyed, and rebuilt under the impetus of war. New industries are created. The kinds of resources required at one time are devalued and replaced by others at a later date. Here I will develop an argument about how and why warfare has been central to capitalism from its very origins to the present day, and how, along the way, whole landscapes, cities, and regional economies have been transformed in the process. I have two goals in making this argument. One is to demonstrate how instrumental warfare—and by extension the ruling classes who wage it—has been in creating the system we call capitalism and, although the ruling classes have changed, maintaining it. We commonly acknowledge that military industries play a major role in constructing and altering an economic landscape. My argument pushes further to propose that war itself played a foundational role in creating our economic system and our economic geography. My second goal is to urge economic geographers to engage more deeply and substantively with history. Economic geography is very (and reasonably) concerned with the present and the near future; history tends to be a backdrop sketched in to set the stage. I hope to show that a deeper understanding of how we got to the present may influence where we set our analytical sights, in order to better understand where we are now and where we are going.