Essentially, geography was atheoretical. It was descriptive. You became an expert on a particular region of the world or a particular place. You became an expert on Southeast Asia, and you didn’t speculate too much on what connected Southeast Asia with anything else. I worked on the hop industry in Kent in the nineteenth century, which is a very obscure topic, but one of the things I learned during it is that there were major transformations going on in the global economy that were very significant to what happened in this part of the world. For instance, there were cycles of hop cultivation and a lot of that had to do with the availability of funds in credit markets in London. So I had to deal with credit cycles in London, and then global credit cycles. If you look at what I’m doing now, I was discovering the connectivity between something like the hop growers in Kent and the financial conditions globally.

I also was interested in the fruit industry. There was a great deal of political agitation in Kent in the middle of the nineteenth century against the sugar duties, which connected to West Indies plantations, which were also militating. So there was an alliance between the Kent fruit growers because they wanted cheap sugar to make preserves to feed to the working class in the north of England. If you’ve read Sid Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, which came out after I’d done all of this, he says you can’t understand what was going on in West Indian sugar plantations without understanding the connectivity of providing stimulants to the working class. Sugar, tea, preserves, bread with a bit of jam on it was the standard breakfast thing, and the jam had a lot of sugar in it, which is instant energy. So even when I was doing my dissertation, even though it seemed it was this remote and very peculiar little area of agriculture in Britain, I could see these connectivities…

FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID HARVEY HERE