-----Original Message-----

Neil Smith.  Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production
of Space.  Third edition, with a new afterword. Foreword by David
Harvey. Athens  University of Georgia Press, 2008.  xvii + 323 pp.
$22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-3099-0.

Reviewed by Thomas Rogers (UNC Charlotte)
Published on H-LatAm (October, 2012)
Commissioned by Dennis R. Hidalgo

The Geography of Capitalism in Crisis

Early in his introduction to _Uneven Development_, Neil Smith argues
that the book's title phrase refers to "the hallmark of the geography
of capitalism" (p. 4). He sets himself the ambitious task to explain
this geography at multiple scales, from the urban to the national to
the global. Writing in the early 1980s, Smith noted a widespread
interest in uneven development, which he attributed to a resurgent
interest in Marxism inspired by social tumult in the 1960s, but he
found treatments of uneven development lacking in specificity and
grounding in political economy. He situates his contribution in the
context of dependency theory and world-systems analysis, arguing that
his explanation of inequality stands apart through its integration of
multiple spatial scales rather than focusing solely on the global
scale. Capitalism, he argues, fosters inequality at all scales in an
expanding pattern.

It is impossible to read Smith's book now without thinking about the
recent economic maelstrom, and Latin America's comparatively
successful weathering of the crisis. Fortunately, the new afterword
(the book's second) touches on this issue, though Smith devotes more
space to the Asian economic collapse of 1997. He affirms an intuitive
truth, that "periods of crisis are also periods of dramatic
restructuring," and points to the geographically uneven effects and
influences of the recent economic crises as confirmation of the
general soundness of his original theory (p. 208). In the main text,
from 1983, Smith describes the impending inclusion of the Third World
into international capitalism. In contrast to Marx's prediction,
Smith observes that "Capital, rather than using the underdeveloped
world as a source of markets, has instead used the Third World as a
source of cheap labor, thus preventing its full integration into the
world market." He goes on to ask, "Could a massive migration of
capital to the Third World act as even a partial spatial fix?" (p.
209). The "spatial fix" is here seen as capitalism's attempt to
resolve its contradictions spatially, through geographic movement.

Of course this question was (mostly) rhetorical and the 1997 and
ongoing crises give their own answers. Readers will need to do their
own work to systematically connect these processes and earlier ones
with Smith's theory. He acknowledges that his book "can in no way
claim to be a precise historical account of the complexity of uneven
development" and he expresses hope that his theoretical analysis will
be rendered obsolete by empirical studies that go beyond treating
uneven development as a gap and treat it instead as a systemic
feature of the logic of capitalism. He also notes that the
"articulation of modes of production" is a historically prior process
to the moment of uneven development under capitalism (p. 207). So the
processes he describes pertain to the twentieth century and beyond.
These are important caveats to keep in mind, since they provide a
framework for reading the book, and they tell the reader of what
Smith does _not_ intend to cover. We get more detail in the new
afterword, dated 2007, and the one from the second edition (1990).
Together, these reflections amount to almost a fifth of the 2008
edition's text and they are in some ways the most immediately
engaging parts of the book, since they provide concrete examples of
the theories that appear in the body of the book in almost wholly
abstract terms.

_Uneven Development_ builds on the work of Marxist geographer David
Harvey (Smith's doctoral advisor) and engages, as Smith puts it, both
"the geography of politics and the politics of geography," in an
attempt to spatialize Marxist theory (pp. 1, 133). History and
geography have intertwined intellectual histories and Smith hopes to
suture the separated lines of inquiry back together, to undo the
split between chronology and chorology that began with Immanuel Kant.
Simultaneously, Smith advocates for the importance of spatial
knowledge as a counterweight to what he and other geographers see as
a more generalized preoccupation with temporal analysis. He argues
that if the end of the twentieth century brought the end of history
(a reference to Francis Fukuyama's much-parodied declaration), it
also brought the beginning of geography.

Because he thinks we have a better understanding of the dynamics of
capitalism than we do of the nature of space, Smith provides three
long chapters exhaustively describing the ideology of nature, the
production of nature, and the production of space. He casts these
detailed explanations as necessary to understanding uneven
development, but even apart from this connection, these enlightening
geographical exegeses offer keen insight into the dynamics of
societies' characterizations of and engagements with their material
surroundings (though the overwhelming focus is the United States).
Capitalism's rise, Smith writes, fostered a perception of nature as
an external field, something separate from society, but another view
exists at the same time of "universal nature," encompassing humans.
These dual views persist, he argues, and both serve the interests of
capital. The view of nature as external facilitates the ideology of
the domination of nature; the view of nature as universal facilitates
a discourse that depoliticizes social forces--such as exploitation in
class relations--as "natural." Our contradictory understandings of
space prevent us from recognizing that capitalist production actually
"produces" space, through environmental transformation.

A key contribution of Smith's book lies in his explanation of the
tension in capitalist production between equalization and
differentiation, a contradiction that manifests itself spatially as
uneven development. While neoliberal theorists trumpet the equalizing
force of capitalism, the pull of differentiation exerts greater
power. This insight, and the lesson that we should look at multiple
geographical scales to track these forces, resonates with some
work--Greg Grandin's and Aviva Chomsky's recent books come to
mind--that indicate a sense among some Latin Americanist historians
of the centrality of geographical analysis to understanding
capitalism, especially in the twentieth century[1] Interestingly,
"spatialized" historical analysis, or environmental history, has
developed "unevenly" between the North Atlantic and Latin America. To
generalize, Latin American environmental history (i.e., produced in
the region) has been more integrated with social and economic
analysis than scholarship from the North Atlantic. Latin Americans
have shown a great deal of recent interest in the field and draw
energy from the Sociedad Latinoamericana e Caribeña de Historia
Ambiental (SOLCHA), active since 2003.

Given the dissatisfaction some have felt with the application of
world systems analysis, for instance, to Latin American history
(addressed by Steve Stern in 1988), Smith's book could be seen as one
more sweeping theory with limited purchase for our region of
study.[2] Since all of his examples come from the North Atlantic
(except in the afterwords), one could predict problems with detaching
it from that region. His modesty about the lack of historical
narrative balances, on this count, with his claim that uneven
development structures the context for production in places that do
not yet have industrial capitalism, meaning the theory's relevance
extends to areas that have yet to experience later stages of
development. Claims like these raise the question of the model's
falsifiability. Though Smith argues that development takes place
unevenly at all geographic scales, an example of "even," or
distributed development at a regional scale, for instance, could be
attributed to the power of equalization under capitalism.

Smith's book could join Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Falletto's and
Immanuel Wallerstein's on a graduate syllabus that grapples with
theories of regional disequilibrium, underdevelopment, and
twentieth-century economic history. It could also be assigned
alongside selections from the burgeoning Latin American environmental
historical literature. Undergraduates would struggle with the density
of Smith's writing and with his assumption that readers are well
versed in Marxist theory. Pieces of the book could also be used
productively; the initial chapters on the production of nature and
the more empirical afterwords could complement other readings from a
unit in a graduate course.

Notes

[1]. Greg Grandin, _Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's
Forgotten Jungle City_ (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and
Co., 2009); and Aviva Chomsky, _Linked Labor Histories: New England,
Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class _(Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008).

[2]. Steve Stern, "Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the
Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean," _American Historical
Review_ 93, no. 4 (1988): 829-872.

Citation: Thomas Rogers. Review of Smith, Neil, _Uneven Development:
Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space._. H-LatAm, H-Net
Reviews. October, 2012.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31937

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