Conjunctural geographies of the economy in Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy

Abstract

This contribution frames Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy as an opportunity for geographers to theoretically and methodologically engage with a growing literature on the intellectual histories of economics. I draw out three key themes in the book that provide entry points for geographical theorizing. First, Weber understands economic knowledge to be shaped not solely by its original context but by the historical-geographical trajectories and mobilities of its producers and consumers; second, she traces the institutional processes through which economic ideas re-emerge across time and space, offering key intellectual resources for dealing with context-specific governance dilemmas and economic problems; and third, her granular accounts of elite-intellectual contestation offer a way to reveal complexity and contradiction on the inside of dominant economic-geographical imaginaries. The book is a conjunctural historical geography of China’s economy, which is both empirically specific and theoretically-general.