Volume 49, Issue 1 e12600
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Open Access

Critical geoeconomics: A genealogy of writing politics, economy and space

Felix Mallin

Felix Mallin

Department of Geosciences, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

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James D. Sidaway

Corresponding Author

James D. Sidaway

Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Correspondence

James D. Sidaway, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Email: [email protected]

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First published: 27 January 2023
Citations: 10

Abstract

Towards the end of the Cold War, the vocabulary of global power, space and economy received a qualitative update. Amongst the terms rapidly gaining prominence since the early 1990s has been the notion of geoeconomics, the coining of which has frequently been attributed to the strategist Edward N. Luttwak. In his interpretation, it signified a transition away from Cold War ideological and military geopolitical competition towards commerce and market-based geo-power. Over the past three decades, a ‘geoeconomics boom’ set in, characterised by think tanks and a varied body of politico-economic literature making extensive use of the term. Conventionally treated as a neologism, the provenance and earlier iterations of geoeconomics, some dating back more than a century, have been largely ignored by both celebratory and critical accounts. In this paper, we trace and contextualise these earlier instances, leading us to the Geopolitik era in Germany and references to geoeconomics in the United States in the decades after WWII. We thereby offer a critical genealogy of geoeconomics, conceptualised as an object of definitional struggle. Proponents of the term sought to position it variously as a tool of national economic cohesion and competition or as a way of understanding and harnessing shifting global power relations, whilst others sought to subsume geoeconomics to geopolitics. These past struggles track forward into ongoing dialectical tensions between geoeconomics and geopolitics as competing but related geostrategic visions.

Short Abstract

The notion of geoeconomics became increasingly popular since the 1990s. Conventionally treated as a neologism, attributed to the strategist Edward N. Luttwak, earlier iterations of geoeconomics, some dating back more than a century, have been ignored by both celebratory and critical accounts. We develop a critical genealogy of geoeconomics, arguing that past debates track forward into ongoing dialectical tensions between geoeconomics and geopolitics as competing but related geostrategic visions.

Geoeconomics sits aboard a fast airship and in it continuously sails around the globe. It broadcasts back to the homeland on what happens, what lurks, what emerges as new threats and new possibilities, and what is required for the securitisation and promotion of the national economy … This is how I understand geoeconomic thinking: to scour the terrestrial environment for economic opportunities, never losing sight of human energy as a factor of utility. (Arthur Dix, 1925, pp. 13, 22)1

This neologism is the best term I can think of to describe the admixture of the logic of conflict with the methods of commerce—or, as Clausewitz would have written, the logic of war in the grammar of commerce. (Edward N. Luttwak, 1990, p. 19)

1 INTRODUCTION

Coinciding with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, references to geoeconomics in Anglophone writing began to proliferate. A landmark text was Edward Luttwak's (1990) essay ‘From geopolitics to geo-economics: logic of conflict, grammar of commerce’, which appeared in the bi-monthly The National Interest. A year earlier, the magazine had published the first incarnation of Fukuyama's (1989) ‘The end of history?’ Although he did not cite Fukuyama, Luttwak's essay reads as a rejoinder, opening with a reference to the emerging Washington Consensus (1990, p. 17):

Everyone, it appears, now agrees that the methods of commerce are displacing military methods—with disposable capital in lieu of firepower, civilian innovation in lieu of military-technical advancement, and market penetration in lieu of garrisons and bases.

In a subsequent footnote, Luttwak (1990, p. 21) expands on his claim by positing a Hegelian allegory:

In the train of history, the last wagons, such as the fragile states of sub-Saharan Africa are still prebellic: they cannot yet wage war on each other, because regimes sustained only by the direct force of their armies cannot send those armies away to remote frontiers. The wagons at the head of the train by contrast are now postbellic because their ruling elites have become convinced that they cannot usefully fight one another. Only the wagons in the middle—countries such as India, Israel, Iran, Iraq, and a few others—are still capable of war with each other. But of course the train of history can not only stop but reverse its direction …

In the winter before Luttwak's essay was published, the United States had invaded Panama. In the summer, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Within six months, ‘the first full-scale GIS war’ was underway (Smith, 1992, p. 257). In the words of a report by the United Nations, the ensuing bombardment led by the United States for 42 days straight ‘wrought near apocalyptic results on the economic infrastructure’, relegating Iraq ‘to a pre-Industrial age’ (Arthisaari, 1991, p. 5). In the Persian Gulf, commerce had not displaced military means, nor soon after in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. Notwithstanding this, Luttwak's argument acquired traction, as one of the favoured post-Cold War narratives positing what Peter J. Taylor (1990) termed ‘geopolitical transition’—a simultaneous shift in world order and narratives about it. Other critical observers designated this new order as ‘the construction of overlapping sovereignties and networks of power that are in turn associated with a new form of hegemony: what we shall call transnational liberalism’ (Agnew & Corbridge, 1995, p. 164).

According to Luttwak, the phenomenon he named was not in itself new. But it had become more legible with the decline of the Cold War: ‘World Politics is still not about to give way to World Business, that is, the free interaction of commerce governed only by its own nonterritorial logic’. Rather, he surmised, ‘what is going to happen—and what we are already witnessing—is a much less complete transformation of state action represented by the emergence of “Geo-economics”’ (Luttwak, 1990, p. 19). Luttwak's attendant proclamation that geoeconomics was a neologism has since frequently been taken at face value. A Chatham House publication, for one, states that ‘Geoeconomics entered the lexicon … with an article by Edward Luttwak’ (Schneider-Petsinger, 2016). Elsewhere we read: ‘Geoeconomics is a term first dreamt up by the mercurial American strategist Edward Luttwak, who was looking for ways to stay relevant after the end of the Cold War’ (Wesley, 2016, p. 3). Ever since, Wesley continues, ‘geoeconomics has waxed and waned in discussions of what forces are shaping the world of the 21st century’. Similar statements attributing geoeconomics to Luttwak can be found across a wide array of think tank and policy outlets, as well as social science literatures more broadly.

Examined over the course of the three decades since Luttwak's essay, geoeconomics waxing is more evident than waning. In fact, the term's popularity shows few signs of fading. The Washington DC-based Atlantic Council set up a GeoEconomics Center in 2020, under which it runs public–private initiatives that analyse ‘the use of financial, regulatory and economic tools to achieve foreign policy objectives’ (Atlantic Council, 2022). The Council on Foreign Relations in New York hosts the Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies since 2000, which analyses the nexus of geopolitical and economic forces in world affairs. Beyond the United States, the German Council for Foreign Relations in Berlin runs a Geo-Economics Program, and the Institut Choiseul for International Politics and Geoeconomics in Paris has been operating since 1997.

A glance at a Google Ngram2 for ‘geoeconomics’ reveals a steep rise in the 1990s, with a peak in mentions around 1998, a modest decline for a decade, and a rapid growth since. Yet, close scrutiny of the curve and additional exploration of German language sources reveal earlier conjunctures when references to geoeconomics occurred, many decades before Luttwak's essay. For instance, in a curious parallel to the present rush for strategic minerals' association with geoeconomics (e.g., Nieto & Iannuzzi, 2012; Vekasi, 2021), the term made its first appearances in the mid-nineteenth century, in reference to the economic viability of mineral deposits, though its use in this context was later subsumed into mineral economics. From the early 1900s onwards, however, it is possible to identify several conjunctures when a discourse of geoeconomics is reformulated in a variety of institutional structures, knowledge practices, and ideologically informed policy regimes.3 We seek to investigate these conjunctures in this paper. This leads us, first to the German Geopolitik era after World War I and subsequently to the Cold War United States. Whereas scholarship in geography has both engaged with Luttwak and sought to develop a critical stance on contemporary geoeconomics as we review in Section 2, prior incarnations of geoeconomics have seldom been documented and contextualised.4 Our paper therefore offers a genealogy of geoeconomics, which simultaneously articulates critical vantage points upon which future inquiries might build.

In the next section, we reflect on the genealogical approach adopted in the paper. Section 3 then examines the intellectual foundations of geoeconomics and its first iterations in Germany after 1900. This requires us to consider its relationship with Nationalökonomie and Geopolitik, in the respective political and intellectual milieus. In particular, we shed light on the writings of Arthur Dix, whose 1925 monograph on geoeconomics comprises the first book-length account. Dix was joined by several others writing about geoeconomics in German. During the Cold War, geoeconomics reappears, across the Atlantic in training materials produced for the US armed forces, which we describe in Section 4. The moments of geoeconomics we scrutinise are distinctive, but all tend to emerge in the context of debates about national will and destiny amidst strategic opportunity or challenge. Lastly, Section 5 reflects on relationships between geopolitics and geoeconomics and the nature of the recent geoeconomics boom. Echoing the achievements of critical scholarship on geopolitics, we argue for the value of a more nuanced historiography of geoeconomics that, as in Ó Tuathail's (1996) vision for a critical geopolitics, problematises imperial, statist and military scriptings of the geo (see also Smith, 2000).

2 SITUATING GEOECONOMICS

As with any intellectual genealogy, deciding on whether the first appearance of a specific term in the literature should define the vantage point and thus the chronological parameters for a field reconstruction is a thorny question (Herb, 2008). While many, for instance, consider German geographer Friedrich Ratzel as the central figure in the emergence of political geography as a distinct discipline, various other inception points and figures have been considered (Halas, 2014). In the same vein, geopolitics, first termed in 1899 by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1899), has been the subject of a plethora of extensive reconstructions for decades (Dodds & Atkinson, 2000; Grabowsky, 1960; Murphy, 1997; Ó Tuathail, 1996; Sprengel, 1996; Wittfogel & Ulmen, 1985); including recognition of the distinctive context when geopolitics was coined as a moment of global spatial closure, rendering a theory of global political space more comprehensible (Kearns, 1984). Conversely, however, the history of geoeconomics, has been neglected. In our attempt to sketch its evolution since the early 1900s, we came across repeated deployments. In contrast to geopolitics, however, which has tended to think of itself as a tradition since the 1920s, for geoeconomics such a self-conscious consolidation of itself as an evolving field is weakly developed. This absence is what enables the mistaken claims that it is a neologism.

Others have paved the way and offer points of analytical departure. As Moisio (2019, p. 2) states, ‘Geoeconomics is a contested concept’. More than a decade earlier, Sparke (2007, p. 339) noted how geoeconomics was already being used in ‘a still wider array of developments’ than the post-Cold War narratives associated with Luttwak and others. Meanwhile, Cowen and Smith (2009, pp. 24–25) approached geoeconomics as an expression of how ‘recent shifts challenge geopolitical conceptions and may better be captured today by a “geo-economic” conception of space, power and security, which sees geopolitical forms recalibrated by market logics … suggest[ing] that geoeconomics recasts rather than simply replaces geopolitical calculation’. In a subsequent book on the art and science of logistics, Cowen (2014, p. 8) claims that logistics' origins were—earlier in the twentieth century—‘as a residual military art of the geopolitical state’, but that it ‘has come to drive geo-economic logics and authority… [that] emphasizes the recalibration of international space by globalized market logics, transnational actors (corporate, non-profit, and state), and a network geography of capital, goods and human flows’. Smith's (2003, p. xiv) earlier detailed study of the career of Isiah Bowman (1878–1950) against the backdrop of the rise of American power argues that this ‘priority of geoeconomic’ has long been evident, noting how: ‘War forces geopolitics to the fore, but it should not blind us to the wider geoeconomic aspiration for global control’. Recalling his extensive conversations with Neil Smith about ‘What precisely does it mean to speak about geoeconomics?’, Morrissey (2017, p. 96) states that for Smith, answers could be sought in ‘rejuvenating a critical Marxist perspective on contemporary forms of imperialism and geopolitics’.5 Sparke, who has been reflecting on these terminologies since the late 1990s (Sparke, 1998), maintains how ‘“Geoeconomics”, “geo-economy” and the “geoeconomic social” are just a few of the terms swirling around recent attempts to make sense of how geopolitical struggles and strategies relate to globalizing capitalism’ (Sparke, 2018a, p. 484). Sparke is equally wary of any neat historical positioning, arguing ‘that it is mistaken to offer a simple transition chronology of geoeconomics replacing geopolitics as the dominant type of strategy in the age of intensified market-led globalisation’ (Sparke, 2018b, p. 33). In parallel terms, Lee and colleagues argue that ‘while the formal distinction between the “geopolitical” and “geoeconomic” provides some methodological clarity and analytical purchase, ultimately these logics of power must be grasped dialectically—i.e. as a unity-in difference—in order to provide a full geopolitical economic explanation’ (Lee et al., 2018, p. 417).

In the footsteps of these debates, we think it useful to consider geoeconomics simultaneously as an explicit term deployed as much by authors of statecraft as by their critics and as part of an implicit conception connecting strategic and economic discourses. Focusing on the latter, implicit sense, in her study of early twentieth century US-corporate commercial expansion, Domosh has contended that geoeconomics ‘does not refer simply to a description of economic spatial strategies but instead encompasses a way of seeing the world in which those strategies come to be seen as plausible and desirable’ (Domosh, 2013, p. 945). Similarly, Essex, by historicising competing policy agendas for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), traces the ‘intertwined but distinct, sometimes complementary, sometimes competing “geostrategic discourses” of geopolitics and geoeconomics’ (Essex, 2013, p. 2). Essex detects ‘a strengthening and maturation of a geoeconomic perspective within and through the agency … through the 1990s and into the new millennium’ (p. 14). USAID does not explicitly use the term geoeconomics, however, and whilst both Domosh and Essex offer valuable insights into implicit invocations of geoeconomics, our focus in this article instead traces its explicit use in English and German texts beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century.

In surveying past and present references to geoeconomics, we find inspiration in scholarship on the histories of ‘state capitalism’, of which Sperber (2019) describes how debates ignited by topical concerns tend to ignore the complex century-long life of the concept. Sperber notes the ‘versatility’ of the concept, which has seen it deployed in varying contexts, from dissident portrayals of the Soviet Union, or responses to the European experiences of fascism, to contemporary patterns of state capitalism identified in China. But whilst theories of state capitalism have ‘displayed a generative capacity for interrogating the fundamental macro-institutions of politicized capitalist landscapes’ (p. 119), each treatment of state capitalism has tended to evolve without due consideration of earlier ones. Similarly, a landmark genealogy of globalisation finds that despite a plethora of definitional endeavours, ‘the very quality of the efforts to define the concept adequately and achieve analytical clarity has paradoxically pushed the possibility of a deep conceptual genealogy even further into unexplored intellectual territory’ (James & Steger, 2014, p. 417). Finally, work on the history of neoliberalism offers inspiration, as Slobodian (2018, p. 3) reminds us:

In the last decade, extraordinary efforts have been made to historicise neoliberalism and its prescriptions for global governance, and to transform from the ‘political swearword’ or ‘anti-liberal slogan’ into the subject of rigourous archival research.

Such archival work might thus raise and answer questions about how geoeconomics and neoliberalism became entangled in the twentieth century.

3 GERMAN FORMULATIONS OF GEOECONOMICS

3.1 Grounding world politics and world economy

Our genealogical investigation commences in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The rapid industrial transformation of the formerly agricultural German states, combined with moves to German unification in the decades after the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) and the attendant reconfiguration in the European matrix of political power, had a profound impact not only on the socio-economic conditions but equally shook up the calcified intellectual landscape. The academic identities of politics, economics and law, hitherto aggregated under the roof of faculties of Staatswissenschaften6 (state sciences), were challenged, as the legitimacy of old traditions was put in doubt and an influx of new domains, from anthropology to psychology, began to rearrange disciplinary perimeters. Whilst Germany's economic situation called for a more instrumental attention to the nexus of world politics and world economy, to the discontent of the aspiring industrial elite in Prussia, academic debates were caught between the ideas of the British political economists, on the one hand, and the anti-bourgeois tenets of social-revolutionaries, on the other. Neither appeared to serve the legitimisation of Germany's commercial and imperial ambitions.

Hence, the German intellectual counter-reaction became one of sharp opposition to both classical and Marxist political economy. First to form was the Historical School around Gustav von Schmoller, Wilhelm Roscher and Karl Knies, which drew substantially on the pioneering work of Friedrich List and his demand for a ‘national’ as opposed to a ‘cosmopolitan’ economic system. Its proponents saw the key to understanding economic development in fine-grained historical description, refuting to varying degrees the possibility of any general or abstract law of political economy. This formed the basis for the formulation of a new social reformist economics, known as arm-chair socialism (Kathedersozialisten), that sought to weaken the appeal of radical socialism by addressing questions of poverty. Curiously, Schmoller's and colleagues' authority on the subject of economics attracted students of diverse political backgrounds, including later communist revolutionary Karl Liebknecht.

Conversely, the Austrian school around Carl Menger, and his students Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser and later also Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Mises, postulated the necessity of exact laws of economics and mechanisms to protect property that were eventually to be folded into the making of neoliberalism. Both schools and their sub-schools fought out their differences in polemical disputes. Worryingly, however, from the vantage point of the new industrial and financial elites, Marxist literature continued to circulate, shaping intellectual discourse far beyond the political fringes. This concerns especially those attempts to furnish the books on international trade and the world market that Marx (1973, p. 54) had once promised but never written. It was this gap which Marxist theorists of finance capital and imperialism, such as Bukharin, Hilferding and Luxemburg, sought to fill. Around the same time, the emigree socialist historian Max Beer (born in 1864 in majority Jewish Tarnobrzeg, then part of the Austrian Empire, but relocated to Germany in 1889 and subsequently to England) referred to geoeconomic conditions in an article for a British socialist magazine. Beer (1908, p. 7) had sensed that historical materialist taxonomy had to grapple with the effects of the world market on the consciousness of the working class:

There is, indeed, an interaction between matter and mind. In this interaction the geo-economic conditions are the legislative, the mind is the executive; the material factors precede, the mind follows, interprets, transforms external facts into logical truths and ethical maxims, and then into motives of the actions of man … Still, both sets of conditions are so closely interlaced with each other that we may call them geo-economic conditions, always, however, bearing in mind that the economic elements are the more active and fluid. The phases of geo-economic evolution furnish the mind with new sensations and stimuli. A geo-economic system in its formation and growth produces in the minds of the members of the community conceptions of religion, morality, laws, and politics which correspond to the needs and aspirations of that community.

However, Beer did not elaborate his rather vague conception in his subsequent publications—as he moved between Germany (to where he was deported from Britain in 1915), the Soviet Union (in the late 1920s) and back to Britain (from 1933). His use of the term was not picked up afterwards. Perhaps the psychoanalytical bent of this Frankfurt School associate (1929–33) and the fact that the text was never translated into German, then the key language of European Marxist debates, inhibited any further circulation at the time.

The next figure to invoke geoeconomics was German economist Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966). Later in his life a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society (1947) and an ideological architect of Germany's social market economy, Röpke had been trained in the Austrian school of economics and was appointed as Germany's youngest professor of national economics in 1924. In his dissertation on the nature of business cycles, he argued that economic geography was too narrow a term to fully capture the principles of spatio-economic conditionality. If business cycles represented the temporal object of political economy, he posited, there simply had to be a spatial correlate. Geoeconomics could incorporate all those phenomena that are ‘characterized by a horizontal-geographic relationality and boundedness to the physically, historically, sociological and politically conditioned variegations of space’ (Röpke, 1922, p. 13; relatedly 1925, p. 29). Similar commitments to ‘creating statistical portraits of the national and world economies or seeking to understand their cyclical rise and fall’ were set out by the evolving neoliberal movement, in which, Slobodian (2018, p. 57) reminds us, Röpke became ‘a central figure’. Beyond these tangential references, however, Röpke did not deepen his direct references to geoeconomics, which was soon developed from another ideological frame, via the work of his contemporary Arthur Dix (1875–1935). Dix's inspiration for geoeconomics points to a wholly different intellectual enterprise; one which Wittfogel, writing in 1929 (reprinted in translation as Wittfogel & Ulmen, 1985), termed Prussia's ‘modernising bourgeois statecraft’ syncretised in the scholarship of the geographer Ratzel at the end of the nineteenth century.

3.2 In the margins of geopolitics and political geography: Arthur Dix's geoeconomics

The intellectual course charted by Ratzel's path-breaking Politische Geographie (1897) had presented a novel mix of precise causal-geographical accounts (influenced by von Richthofen), social evolutionary theory (influenced by Darwinism) and progressive teleological world history (implicitly drawing on Hegel). Ratzel's fusion of space, soil and people quickly propelled the field of political geography above earlier statistical and cartographic description. Writing against the grain of the established national economic orthodoxies, Ratzel also asserted that a ‘discrete science’ of the state–space nexus had to be a geographical endeavour, for the Staatswissenschaften had been unable to adequately incorporate the conditioning element of this nexus: the soil (Ratzel, 1903, p. iv).

Ratzel's foundation paired with the immense political and economic rupture that engulfed Germany in the wake of the First World War paved the way for a more applied type of political geography. This was best captured by the concept of geopolitics, first articulated in Swedish by Kjellén in 1899, but which had remained relatively unnoticed before the First World War (Davidsen, 2021). For Kjellén and his growing German readership, the harsh ramifications of the War and post-Versailles order could only be remedied by a new type of geographical politics, which moved the scientific object from paper—where the state scientists had kept it—onto the soil (Kjellén, 1917). In Kjellén's view, states could and should transform their geographic conditions. Proposing to widen the scientific lens along new analytical categories, he inserted a division between the natural and cultural side of the state. Geopolitics and ethnopolitics, he contended, reflect the objective, natural side of the state, on which all practice predominantly hinges. Economy, society and rule, in turn, manifest the state's cultural side, which is formed by its creative and free will (Kjellén, 1917, p. 43). The significance of this distinction as well as its enabling effects on later Lebensraum politics in Nazi Germany have been thoroughly scrutinised (Sprengel, 1996). What has caught less attention though is the subtle way in which his ontological assertions further entrenched the relegation of economic life to a topic of secondary political relevance. As Wittfogel [original 1929] polemically sums up:

[Ratzel and Richthofen] certainly did not know what to make of the basic concept of the economic sphere, yet they at least took it into account in their concrete analyses. But Kjellén manages to make it a farce, not only in his dogmatic statements but also in his concrete analysis of individual cases. The reason is not that Kjellén is less intelligent than his predecessors … but that the social situation in which Kjellén formulated his geopolitical ideas had changed. (Wittfogel & Ulmen, 1985, p. 27)

In the same 1929 essay, Wittfogel describes how in Germany after 1918, ‘Geopolitical writings shot up like mushrooms after a summer rain’ (Wittfogel & Ulmen, 1985, p. 22). However, whilst Geopolitik proliferated in the Weimar Republic, Arthur Dix proposed that earthbound political thinking—Geopolitik—could not operate without earthbound economic thinking—Geoökonomie—at its side. To Dix, at the heart of Germany's misfortune was the unworldliness of German academia, a problem that, as he sweepingly alleges, spanned all disciplines: Geography was unfit to explain global economic questions; economic theory had largely ignored geography; and political science could not see beyond individual states or utopian abstractions thereof. While the other great powers had conquered the globe, the German approach was to ‘theorize imperialism and write long treatises on the meaning of the term’ (Dix, 1914, p. 1). Indeed, for Dix, defeat in the war was significantly due to an educational shortage and the ‘average German politician's lack of understanding political geographical facts and tendencies’, a claim which found broad resonance. Concretely, this implied that political geography had to be moved from ‘pipe dream utopias … onto the terra firma of reality’ (Dix, 1925, p. 23) and, albeit belatedly, put into the service of the humiliated German nation (see also Dix, 1920).

Born on a west Prussian manor, Dix had studied under Historical School founder Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917) and Lujo Brentano (1844–1931), another Historical School affiliate, who became involved in disputes with Karl Marx and Max Weber. In the late 1890s, Dix then went on to attend Ratzel's lectures on political geography in Leipzig, which left a life-long impression on his thinking. He subsequently worked as an assistant at the State Science Institute in Berlin and the admiralty, before establishing himself as a prolific political journalist, public speaker, editor and founder of several national conservative newspapers (National-Zeitung, Deutscher Bote). During World War I, he became acquainted with General Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937), who directed wartime military strategy and who spearheaded right-wing forces in the 1920s before Hitler ultimately seized leadership of the movement. Dix's wider circle included powerful figures such as later German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) and industrial magnate Alfred Hugenberg (1865–1951), all of whom were familiar with Dix's writings, to the extent that they proofread some of his manuscripts. In 1920, Dix was admitted to the Nationaler Club in Berlin (an influential anti-communist and nationalist association) under Hugenberg's patronage, where Dix is likely to have met Hitler in 1922.7

Exerting a strong appeal to the political zeitgeist, Dix's (1914) book advocating German imperialism had combined the influences of Schmoller and Ratzel, but was committed to a simultaneous iteration of world economics and politics (Dix, 1910). When invited in 1915 to reedit Ratzel's Politische Geographie, Dix declined and instead went on to write his own two volume treatise on the subject (Dix, 1921, 1922), placing the world economy as an integral component of political geography. Encouraged by the popularity of these texts at German universities, Dix went on to investigate the missing theme of the world economy in geopolitics in a subsequent book.

Written in 1924 and published as a short monograph in the same year as Hitler's Mein Kampf, Dix's (1925) Geoökonomie: Einführung in die erdhafte wirtschaftsbetrachtung (Geoeconomics: introduction to earthbound economic contemplation) became the first bid to establish geoeconomics as an independent subject. In tune with both his national economist teachers and his contemporary geopolitical colleagues, Dix set out from the assertion that the discipline of political economy was thoroughly infected by Marxism, and, regardless of its political bent, ridden by a style of theorising that was disjointed from practical reality; resembling a ‘recreating form of inquiry that can paint the yesterday, not however point into the future’ (p. 9). Conversely, geoeconomics was predestined to dispel Adam Smith's and David Ricardo's abstract political economy as well as the ‘rootles anti-capitalist theories’, and to ‘replace them with a down-to-earth and deeply rooted economics’. From this new vantage point, Dix asserted, we were to deduce that not ‘capital and labour’ but ‘coal and oil, metals and rubber’ were the world's major objects of contention. Instead of ‘dwelling on theories of class struggle’, economic analysis ought to focus on ‘soil and inhabitants, utility of the soil and suitability of inhabitants to use it’ (p. 12). This way of conceiving order would make us apprehend that ‘every little cog in the national economic machinery stands in the midst of a broad frame of unified national interests’ (pp. 18–19). Geoeconomics was envisaged by Dix as an applied and instrumental combination of spatial-economic analysis and future-oriented policy that would become a ‘cure for the global economy’ and enable ‘the most purposeful utilization of the earth's wealth’ (p. 97). By leveraging German geoeconomic influence, Dix postulated that (in the tradition of Friedrich List), ‘a counterpart to the long-term predominance of politico-economic thinking around the globe’ could be created, that would no longer be ‘based on a scientific system that was attuned to promote British interests’ (pp. 98–99).

While preparing his monograph for the established publishing house Oldenbourg, Dix was approached by its owner in the spring of 1924, and invited to edit a journal on geopolitics that would analyse the state of the world economy.8 Oldenbourg, clearly taking notice of the quick success that newcomer publisher Kurt Vowinckel had with the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (ZfG), urgently wanted to enter the market. With General Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) as editor, the first issue of ZfG was published in January 1924, and while primarily intended for an academic audience, was prominently displayed in Berlin's station bookstalls. Dix, sceptical of Oldenbourg's idea, insisted that another academic geopolitics-focused journal would have a hard time competing for market share. Instead, he posited a popular monthly, catering especially to German industrial and financial elites. It should, Dix suggested, encompass dedicated briefings on the German industrial potential, which would make the publication attractive to industry advertisers. Oldenbourg recognised the potential of pairing geopolitics with geoeconomics even more when he was approached in December 1924 by the Leipzig based geology professor Erich Krenkel (1880–1964) who also wanted to co-edit a journal on geoeconomics. Oldenbourg then inquired with Dix whether they should enter into discussions with Krenkel. Dix, who was seeking to promote his vision for geoeconomics with the political elites in Berlin at the time (for instance at the newly founded Deutscher Herrenclub, a conservative club, modelled on similar private clubs in London) however sought sole authority on editorship.

After lengthy discussions, Oldenbourg, Dix and his associate Alfred Ball finally agreed to publish the monthly Weltpolitik und Weltwirtschaft—W&W (World Politics and World Economy), on the basis of a contract that made them co-owners and solely responsible for content. Dix and Ball sourced articles through their jointly run Berlin-based news agency called ‘Transantlantic’, which facilitated an international elite network of contract publishing. The stated aim of W&W was to ‘promote geopolitical and geoeconomic thinking’. For a total of 24 issues, Dix and colleagues managed to contract an array of contributors, across a wide political spectrum (the labour movement through liberals and conservatives to nationalist-right), to debate the pressing economic, financial and territorial questions of the time. The list of contributors encompasses influential bankers, aristocrats and political figures. For one, the British Home Secretary, Arthur Henderson, proposed the abandonment of all secret diplomacy for the preservation of peace, while Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England (and brother of geographer Dudley Stamp, who also published in the journal), debated the problems of the Gold Standard in the context of European trade. Then Secretary of Commerce and later US President Herbert Hoover outlined the problems exerted on world trade by America's trade balance. It is reasonable to assume that many of the contributors and readers would have become familiar with the existence of Dix's book on geoeconomics in this period, for it was prominently advertised by Oldenbourg across the issues and all authors were sent a copy of the issue of the journal they contributed to (see Figure 1).9

Details are in the caption following the image
Advertisement for Dix's geoeconomics monograph in the Zeitschrift für Weltpolitik und Weltwirtschaft, 1926, published by R. Oldenbourg.

Yet, from the outset, the joint enterprise was troubled by differences about financing, content and distribution. Dix imagined a minimum print run of 3000 monthly issues, whilst in a letter to his cousin, Oldenbourg considered this to be reflective of a ‘typical Berlin megalomania … the gentlemen believe it would be possible to wallow in money from the first day of their business’.10 With nearly a thousand subscriptions during its first quarter, W&W initially fared well in terms of circulation vis-à-vis ZfG, but still ran with a loss of 17,000 Reichsmarks in 1925 (roughly equivalent of 12 average annual salaries). For Dix, this was due to insufficient efforts at promotion, whereas Oldenbourg blamed it on the economic downturn in 1925. After ongoing quarrels about the paper's finances, Oldenbourg unilaterally terminated the contract, with the last issue to be published in December 1926. His competitor Vowinckel, in turn, agreed to purchase the rights to W&W and merged it with ZfG from 1927, where it appeared for a few years as a separate section, co-edited by the brother of Dix's deceased associate Ball. Dix, however, withdrew, likely because of his personal antipathy towards Haushofer,11 and no longer sought any editorial roles. A legal dispute about outstanding debts with Oldenbourg only ended in January 1928 when Dix and Ball settled with Oldenbourg at the considerable sum of 1600 Reichsmarks.

Following Dix's death in 1935, geoeconomics, it appears, fell into relative oblivion. No single factor was decisive, but several points may be put forward in explanation. Firstly, as a result of the dispute, the publisher Oldenbourg ceased advertising and re-printing Geoökonomie. Secondly, there was the well documented ambivalence regarding the type of national-conservative Geopolitik advocated by Dix in various departments of the Nazi leadership, where it was disapproved of for foregrounding space over racial doctrines (Bassin, 1987). Clearly, the technocratic and commerce-focused ideas proposed in Geoökonomie (1925) ran contrary to Hitler's racial-agrarian colonisation endeavours.12 Thirdly, the socio-economic content of Dix's proposal remained theoretically incoherent (as noted in a review by Mettler, 1926), and unable to shape the economic or political theories that became salient after the 1920s. Röpke (1927, p.78), still insistent that he had coined geoeconomics earlier, for one, strongly disapproved of Dix's take on geoeconomics for ‘consist[ing] to a good degree of romanticism and social mysticism’. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Dix had expended his efforts in promoting geoeconomics in political and military circles, representing forerunners of today's think tank industry. Conversely, he did not have academic networks and had repeatedly voiced his disdain for some of his academic contemporaries. While the influential politicians he associated with were soon ousted by the Nazis, the academic geopoliticians around Haushofer did not make an effort to promote Dix's work.13 On the overall merit of his approach, the influential geopolitician Otto Maull for one disdainfully remarked that ‘… building blocks lie around, in parts even quite poorly carved ones, for even here the skilled geographer's hand was lacking’ (1925, p. 30). Haushofer (1928, p. 267) had acknowledged Dix's writings on geoeconomics, but like Sieger (1925) recognised that the term was difficult to pronounce and wondered if a suitable Germanic word might be found; a problem already feared by Dix (1925, p. 98)—and to which we return in our conclusions.

Dix's early associate Adolf Grabowsky (1880–1969), founder of the oldest German political science journal (Zeitschrift für Politik), was one of the few political scientists who remained a principal voice in an overwhelmingly geographer-dominated field. Mirroring the definitional struggle for legitimacy fought between political geography and geopolitics, Grabowsky (1933, p. 774) sought to delineate the role of geoeconomics vis-à-vis economic geography:

[The political geographer] is a natural scientist who starts out from the physical appearance of the earth's surface, even if he approaches the domains of political and humanist thought. The same goes very obviously for economic geography as opposed to geoeconomics: the economic geographer contemplates the permanent natural qualities of space, in the way in which they are exploitable on the basis of economic production; though the mutual repercussions of the economy on physical space should not be overlooked … [And], it is the geoeconomist, who takes the economy as his vantage point, that is the moving economy, which makes use of space for its purposes and pulls it into its movements. Hence economic geography belongs to geography, geoeconomics to national economics …

Only weeks after writing this, Grabowsky was removed from his position due to his Jewish ancestry. In 1934, he emigrated to Basel, where he set up the Rockefeller and Carnegie-funded Weltpolitisches Archiv (Worldpolitical Archive). When he returned to West Germany in the 1950s, defending the intellectual importance of geopolitics, the resonance was meagre, if not hostile (e.g., Schöller, 1961). For one, this was owed to his conservative stance which found limited resonances in early post-war Germany. More importantly, though, geopolitics had been discredited by its complex relation to Nazism and hence conceptual or theoretical debate picking up on earlier strands of thought ran aground after 1945 (Michel, 2016).

4 UNITED STATES FORMULATIONS OF GEOECONOMICS

4.1 1920s–1940s

Across the Atlantic, Ratzel's American student Ellen Churchill Semple had managed to introduce her teacher's novel approach, familiarised her colleagues with the German political geographical debates, and contributed to a growing interest in geopolitical approaches to space (Keighren, 2010; Klinke, 2022). On a personal level, Semple made a considerable impact on Ray H. Whitbeck (1871–1939), her successor to the presidency of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). It was Whitbeck who first articulated geoeconomics in the Anglophone sphere at the AAG meeting in 1919, although he preferred the contracted term of ‘geonomics’: ‘We have geochemistry and geophysics—why not geo-economics? Mainly because the latter word is awkward, and when analyzed, would fit the need no better than geonomics’ (Whitbeck, 1926, p.119). To Whitbeck, the new field would represent a nomothetic expansion of the descriptive, fact-aggregating, task of economic geography: ‘The geographical material is a body of descriptive matter, while the geonomic material is organized primarily as a body of principles or laws operating under the influence of geographic conditions’ (p. 121). Whitbeck's argument, however, was only published in 1926. Afterwards, it seems that he neither pursued his initial foray, nor, to the best of our knowledge, entered into a conversation with his colleagues in Germany.

From the early 1940s, geoeconomics crops up in speeches, educational curricula as well as policy planning and the business press in the United States. In his addresses to the Annual Congress of the Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in April 1941, its President Richard Field states that the ostensibly peaceful Anglophone idea of the geosciences as a partner of geoeconomics and geopolitics had to be pitched against the ‘geowar’ of the Axis powers: ‘Following the treaty of Versailles, it was predicted by geoscientists that the treaty would fail; that it was indefensible chiefly because its geoeconomics and geopolitics were not founded on geoscience’ (1941, p. 233). Two years later, the economic planner, co-drafter of the Marshall Plan and co-architect of the United Nations, Lewis Lorwin (1943), picked up on Field's plea and published an essay in the short-lived journal World Economics with the instructive title ‘Geo-economics versus geo-politics: a basis for United Nations policy’, defining the former, like Dix, as ‘the study of the methods for the most effective use of natural and economic resources, in relation to population growth and social needs’ as opposed to the latter revolving more around narrow national interests. Four years later, a US-based business magazine published by the chemical, mining and shipping tycoon Peter Grace (1913–95) who was subsequently a supporter of right wing coups in Latin America and member of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, noted that ‘if the dictionaries do not yet include the term “geo-economics” it should be taken in as geo-politics was some time back’ (The Grace Log, 1947). It would be another decade however before the term found an institutional promoter in the United States.

4.2 Instruction in geoeconomics (1950s–)

As a subject for study, geoeconomics was referenced in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the form of classes at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington, DC, and texts produced for these classes. Established in 1924 (as Dix was writing his codification of geoeconomics) to educate officers for the procurement division in the War Department, the College (renamed the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy in 2012) brands itself today as the ‘first school of its kind with study focused completely on issues of industrial mobilization for military purposes’ (Eisenhower School, 2022). Reconstituted in 1943 after the United States entered the war and expanded again in the Cold War, Bauer notes how in 1948, the College ‘was placed at the same level in the military educational system as … the National War College’ (1983, p. IV-3). Nevertheless, its curriculum differed from the latter's traditional politico-military approach, in stressing ‘the economic and industrial aspects of national security’. Bauer elaborates how an amendment to the Charter in 1960 stipulated that the College's agenda ‘should emphasize the interrelationship of economic and industrial factors in the formulation of national policy’ (p. IV-6). Hence, geoeconomics is placed on the College's curriculum at a point when Chinese, Soviet and Eastern European aid and assistance to the Third World was stepped up and after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, riding the Sputnik achievement of 1957, began to position the Soviet Union as an economic and scientific prototype for development and progress.

Geoeconomics, it appears, was part of the curriculum by the mid-1950s, when it was described as ‘an analysis of the position of American economy in relation to the economies of other nations’ (cited in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, 1959, p. 9). Quoting Khrushchev's provocative 1957 remarks towards Washington: ‘We declare war upon you in the field of peaceful production’ (Cited in Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 1959, p. 27), subsequent references to geoeconomics, for instance, in the curriculum for 1960 highlight:

The world economic situation, with emphasis on the position and role of the United States. Problems of less developed areas. Institutions for the promotion of Free World trade and development. An analysis of the Sino-Soviet ‘economic offensive’, together with recommended Free World policies to counter this threat. (Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 1960, p. 230)

We can find no direct references to geoeconomics in the College's curriculum after the mid-1960s, although the College offered courses on ‘international economics’ and ‘comparative economic resources’.

In the following years, there are occasional references to geoeconomics in US policy, for instance, in a 1971 Hearings of the Subcommittee on International Trade of the Committee on Finance of the United State Senate (1971b, p. 123) where it is invoked in the context of US trade debates, currency instability, UK accession negotiations with the European Economic Community and the prospects of growing US–Soviet trade. A claim is made in the Hearings (1971a, p. 981) that geoeconomics is replacing geopolitics, though the term seems to have acquired relatively little purchase until the same bold proposition would be prominently reiterated by Luttwak nearly 20 years later.

As we noted at the outset of this paper, the last three decades have seen a proliferation of direct references to geoeconomics, on a scale that far exceeds prior references. It is hard to avoid the figure of Luttwak, even though the frequent claims that he coined the term are clearly wrong. In fact, just before Luttwak's (1990) article, geoeconomics cropped up with reference to trade disputes and Japanese economic competition. In February 1987, Lewis Lapham (1987, p. A7) wrote, citing high level trade and currency talks with Europe and Japan that: ‘It is the balance of trade, not the balance of weapons, that keeps the peace of nations. Geoeconomics has replaced geopolitics as the science of Armageddon’. And as Ó Tuathail dissected, related domestic debates in 1989 about plans for General Dynamics and Mitsubishi Heavy Industry to cooperate in developing a new fighter aircraft confronted the question: ‘could the USA continue to conceptualize national security in geopolitical terms when its leading ally was also its leading competitor in world markets?’ (Ó Tuathail, 1992, p. 975). This became, he then suggested, ‘a window into a larger struggle within the USA between an emergent geo-economic definition of national security and an increasingly materially unsustainable geopolitical vision of the US role in the world’. These interpretations neatly connect with Luttwak and the more recent think tank publications cited in the introduction, who attribute the commonality of references to geoeconomics to global trade and financial connectivity, ‘the revival of state capitalism’ and ‘the rise of China’ (Schneider-Petsinger, 2016); and who consider ‘a sense of geoeconomic purpose’ as ‘a preeminent issue of American grand strategy in our era’ (Blackwill & Harris, 2016, p. 257). Geoeconomics, is clearly advancing as a conceptual antidote to China's ambition and the precariousness of American hegemony.

5 CONCLUSIONS

An intellectual moment does not usually know itself by its own consciousness. With ample historical hindsight, however, a genealogy may reveal conditions of possibility that assisted in its emergence and its relation to contiguous moments. Our paper has made visible some of the less known geoeconomic perspectives of the past. This tenacity of geoeconomics sees the term reformulated and redeployed across various temporal, geographical and political junctures. Our survey highlights a thread of consciousness that runs through the past century. This thread neither attaches to a single political project, nor is it always marked by an elaborate scientific or philosophical agenda, but by a desire to express an idea, that its various crafters felt, could not be captured by the existing political and economic vocabulary. Perhaps the question that looms largest is therefore why geoeconomics would not nearly attain the same level of circulation as geopolitics? While no singular causal explanation suffices, further critical reflection is warranted. Why was it that various figures proposed geoeconomics, but with relatively limited impacts? Were its early proponents like Dix and Whitbeck too unversed in selling concepts to an already saturated academic market? Was the purchase of the geo- prefix exhausted after the proliferation of Kjellén's Geopolitik? Was it merely a matter of awkward phonetics? To what extent did the two-decades-lasting rise and demise of German geopolitik relegate Geoökonomie to a subordinate rank? Haushofer (1928, p. 267) had acknowledged that alternative terms like ‘Weltwirtschaftskunde’ (world economic inquiry) concealed how economic phenomena were necessarily ‘erdbestimmt’ (earth-determined), though he considered the term Geoökonomie to be ‘unhandlich’ (unwieldy). As we documented in Section 3.2, German geoeconomics found itself folded into and largely overwritten by geopolitics by the 1930s, which in turn was buried after World War II.

Overall, it seems to us that the clearest common denominator for both the 1920s–30s German and 1950s–60s American invocations of the geoeconomic rests on propositions for an economic technocratisation of government and a spatial politics that is oriented around resource inventories, the aggregation of national economic facts and consideration of their relationships to strategy. The German geoeconomics texts of the 1920s onwards are part of the wider explosion of spatialised political and economic thought after the defeat of the Central Powers and the collapse of German and Austro-Hungarian imperial projects. This moment would also yield early neoliberal notions of harnessing the state to protect capitalism (see Slobodian, 2018) and moves to project global governance in the context of imperial retrenchment (see Martin, 2022). Underlying the German literatures are unmistakably some of the original aversions to political-economic and especially Marxist thinking characteristic of both the Historical and Austrian schools of economics.

The explicit presence of geoeconomics in US military curricula also reflected the sense of growing challenge to the American imperium from the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military-technical superpower and the spread of Soviet influence in the Third World in the wake of decolonisation and revolution. Subsequent challenges to American power, in the form of economic competition from Europe and Japan, would see further American references to geoeconomics later in the 1970s and 1980s. Nonetheless, it was the post-Cold War sense of transition to new and uncertain orders that afforded the conditions of possibility for a much wider circulation. Thereafter, geoeconomics transcended the brief unipolar moment of the early 1990s, to find new points of reference and interpretation, for example in the US technological offensive against China and policy debates about energy, sanctions and responses to Putin's Russia.

This brings us back to the figure of Luttwak. Contrary to Kissinger or Brzezinski, Luttwak himself has never held offices of state. Instead, his role resembles more that of a consultant for hire. Yet as much as he rose to become a globally sought-after prompter of geoeconomics, the amplification of his defiant categorical prophecies ultimately owes something to a certain Washington-rooted provincialism:

… only in America was the career of Edward Luttwak possible. The perpetually renewable reservoir of naivety at the highest levels of the US government has been good for business. During the cold war, Luttwak was often identified as a peculiar American species known as the ‘defence intellectual’. These were academics who served power, who were often impatient with democratic procedure, and who enraptured audiences—from think tanks to military academies … (Meaney, 2015).

Beyond the superficial categorisations that might transpire from his 1990 essay, however, Luttwak has advocated a much plainer realist world view than either Fukuyama, the Neocons or the Friedmanites. Taken to its logical end, therefore, Luttwak (1993, pp. 323–24) anticipated today's conjuncture, when he concluded that ‘it is wildly optimistic to believe that a commercial war between rival trading blocs cannot break out merely because it would impoverish all concerned’. Only a broad recognition of geoeconomic thinking could adequately prepare America for this eventuality; the same mindset that had motivated Dix after the German war defeat to publish Geoökonomie, and which today has resurfaced in German foreign policy circles (Mair, 2018) and amongst countless other policy and think tank advocates.

The entanglements we have excavated between competing but also connected geoeconomic and geopolitical visions in the twentieth century track forward into ongoing dialectical tensions between them as competing geostrategic visions. Our paper thereby offers a century-long historical perspective on what Sparke (2018a, p. 485) sees as a key ‘pitfall’ in contemporary critical work on geoeconomics, namely:

The tendency of narrating an epochal historical transition from geopolitics to geoeconomics based on arguments about the transformative impact of globalizing capitalism on Westphalian norms of national-state territory and sovereignty.

As Beckert diagnosed a few years ago, in a study that overlaps with some of the historical moments we have charted here, ‘The relationship between economic and political spaces continues to shift in unforeseen and uncharted ways’ (Beckert, 2017, p. 1170). In light of this, the emergence, submergence and re-articulations of geoeconomics through the development of German geographic, political and economic thought, and particularly its leap into American debates and practices, will reward further critical scrutiny. This becomes especially salient as the post-Cold War moment in which Luttwak (1990, p. 19) reclaimed geoeconomics as ‘the logic of war in the grammar of commerce’ recedes, amidst fraught new scenarios.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the German state archive in Berlin-Lichterfelde, and in particular Ralf Engel, for support with accessing the literary estate of Arthur Dix. We also thank Eva Moser at the Bavarian economic archive in Munich for helping to locate and making accessible files from the Oldenbourg publishing house. Generous feedback provided by Peter Davidsen, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Peter Nedergaard, Marlene Wind and the Politics, Economies and Space (PEAS) Research Group at the Department of Geography, NUS, on earlier drafts of the paper helped to sharpen our arguments. In addition, James would like to thank the organisers and audience at the 10th East Asian Regional Conference in Alternative Geography (EARCAG) hosted by National Taiwan University in December 2022 when an earlier version of the paper was presented as a keynote lecture and received valuable feedback; in particular, Jamie Peck encouraged us to dig deeper into the historical connections between geoeconomics and neoliberalism. Felix would further like to thank the Max Weber Foundation for the purchase of literature under its ‘Knowledge Unbound’ research project (2019–22), which was financially enabled by the German Ministry of Education and Research. Finally, we are very grateful to the editor, Matt Sparke, and four anonymous referees for their detailed and helpful comments. However, we remain responsible for the interpretations in the paper and any errors.

    Endnotes

  1. 1 This and subsequent translations from German language texts are by the authors.
  2. 2 The Google Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts the frequencies of a term using a yearly count found in sources printed between 1500 and 2019 in Google's text corpora in English or a selection of other languages.
  3. 3 We are grateful to an anonymous referee for this formulation.
  4. 4 To our knowledge, a recent doctoral thesis (Pfeiffer, 2022) contains the only other substantial account of some of the key figures and writings that we examine here.
  5. 5 Smith's doctoral thesis adviser David Harvey had earlier published an essay ‘to consider the geopolitical consequences of living under a capitalist mode of production’ (Harvey, 1985, p. 128), though without any explicit reference to geoeconomics. We are not aware of explicit references to geoeconomics elsewhere in Harvey's work, notwithstanding the implicit considerations in The new imperialism (Harvey, 2003) and Mercille (2008, p. 575) comments that whilst it negotiates the ‘twin concepts of the territorial and capitalist logics of power. In particular, the former logic has remained underdeveloped in Harvey's work’.
  6. 6 On the emergence of Staatsswissenschaften as a discourse of practical thinking about politics, economy and society in nineteenth century Germany, see Lindenfeld (1997), and specifically for political science, see Davidsen (2021).
  7. 7 Our account here draws both on reading Dix's work and archival material held in the following file: Dix, Arthur (1875–1935). Nachlass. N2050. Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde.
  8. 8 Information here is reconstructed from the incomplete files on Weltpolitik & Weltwirtschaft retained by the publishing house Oldenbourg and held at the Bayrisches Wirtschaftsarchiv (BWA) in Munich, BWA F5/264.
  9. 9 Dix's notion appears to have circulated in Britain in the 1920s as we glean from a note in a London-based University Geography book series edited by Dudley Stamp—a contributing author of W&W and correspondence partner of Dix—in which the author remarks that: ‘the mass of official statistics of production and trade find its rational interpretation on a geographical basis, a science which has been called geo-economics’ (Anstey, 1929, p. vii).
  10. 10 Letter from Oldenbourg to Bierotte, 5 September 1924, in BWA F5/264, Munich.
  11. 11 Dix (1934, p. 26) laments that Haushofer and his generation did not fully appreciate the value of Dix's ideas.
  12. 12 Though Dix's last published works (e.g., 1934) seek to strike a balance between ‘race’ and economy, they no longer foreground geoeconomics. However, they starkly illuminate the mix of geopolitical naturalism about land and regional/racial nature with geoeconomic imperialism and globalism. The work of racialisation in the dialectics of geopolitics/geoeconomics awaits further critical scrutiny.
  13. 13 Maurer (1943) was one of the few who later picked up on Dix's idea.
  14. DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

    Archival materials that inform the findings of this study are available in the archives specified in the paper's endnotes numbers 7, 8 & 10.