Economic geography I: Conjunctures of Big Finance/Big Tech/Big Ag

Abstract

This report centres Bigness. It samples recent work in economic geography and related fields that have developed a deeper understanding of the consolidation and concentration of capital in the economy since the 2000s, examining its drivers, power effects, and geographical manifestations. Adopting a macroeconomic geographic perspective that remains sensitive to the place-based footprints of concentrated capital, I focus particularly on contributions discussing developments in the domains of Big Finance, Big Ag, and Big Tech. These three sectors have become emblematic of particular Bigness issues. They are important not just for empirical reasons, but also because of the world-making/-destruction potential of the leading companies that shape them.

Introduction

‘Bigness’, shorthand for the consolidation and concentration of capital and its negative economic, political, social, and environmental consequences, has become a central problem of our time (Wu, 2022). It is firmly intertwined with many aspects of the multiple crises currently facing the planet (Rakowski et al., 2025: p. 164). The recent open display of eugenic, fascist and colonial desires by some leaders of major technology and venture capital firms in the USA is probably the starkest reminder of how Bigness can become economically and politically dangerous (Akbari, 2025; Durand 2024). While it is unclear whether the rise of a tech oligarchy espousing these orientations can be easily projected beyond the US (Pascal et al., 2026), the global entanglements and material-cum-ideological footprint of ‘Silicon Valley’ necessitate relational-comparative orientation (Kwet, 2019; Pollio, 2026).

The problem of big business is nothing new. During the period known as the ‘Gilded Age’, the antitrust advocate and former US Supreme Court judge Louis Brandeis coined the term in a series of writings to highlight the economic and political effects of concentrated capital at that time. In his critical tome on the San Francisco Bay Area, Walker (2018: 30) refers to that historical context, noting that ‘Americans have been wrestling with the problem of monopolistic industries for over a century’, citing Standard Oil and the Sugar Trust as examples (see also Larson, 2020: 5-8; Wu, 2022). The wider colonial experience also teaches us how state-enabled Bigness on the margins of empire, in the form of colonial corporations, helped establish control over people and nature (Stern, 2023). Scholars have also emphasized the continued intertwining of uneven and combined development and monopoly capitalism in the postcolony (Filho, 2015; Li and Semedi, 2021).

This report centres Bigness through a discussion of recent works from the ‘analytical terrain of political economy’ (Narayan, 2024: 4) ¹ in economic geography and related fields. ² Due to its polyglot nature (Dymski, 2016: 2534), economic geography is particularly well suited to engaging with Bigness across time and space, at multiple scales and through a multidimensional analysis focussing on the economic, political, social and environmental ramifications of consolidated/concentrated capital. The works sampled here enhance our understanding of the consolidation and concentration of capital in the economy since the 2000s, examining its drivers, power effects and geographical manifestations. Adopting a macroeconomic geographic perspective (Peck, 2024; Sheppard, 2022) that remains sensitive to the place-based footprints of concentrated capital, I focus particularly on contributions discussing developments in the domains of Big Finance, Big Ag and Big Tech. These three sectors have become emblematic of the ‘Curse of Bigness’ (Wu, 2022); they are important not just for empirical reasons, but also because of the world-(re)making potential of the leading companies that shape them.

Big Tech in particular has received considerable attention due to its growth in market power since the 2000s and the political influence its firms have developed in distinctive yet geographically variegated ways. The political ambition of many tech leaders elevate the social urgency of this development, as a group of ‘tech fascists are working openly to establish their own sovereign, distributed state’ (Venture Capital Status, 2025). However, the financial and agri-food sectors come with similar Bigness problems. Indeed, Big Finance is a key constitutive force in both Big Tech (Cole, 2023) and Big Ag (Ashwood et al., 2022a: 1432). Finance was particularly readily available in the post-2008 low-interest environment, when both the tech and agri-food sectors were promoted as safe investment havens (Fairbairn, 2020; Ouma, 2020; Pascal et al., 2026). Big Finance has thus also shaped the key dynamics of corporate governance, growth, investment, and value distribution within these sectors. Furthermore, incumbent firms in both the finance and agri-food domains have started to internalize Big Tech logics to remain competitive.

Due to space limitations, this report can neither discuss the methodological choices researchers have made to engage with Bigness, nor detail the regional and place-based impacts. Although I repeatedly feature work that zooms into these scales, the macroeconomic geographical framing of the paper precludes discussing work that has dealt with the concrete footprint of Big Finance/Tech/Ag in diverse spaces such as housing markets, urban development, households, labour markets, factory floors, farms, and rural communities. Moreover, Bigness studies are geographically biased towards the USA, Europe, and, to some extent, China.

From monopoly to Bigness

This report invokes Bigness to place the dynamics of capitalist development within a larger historical-geographical frame, and to problematize the political dimensions of market power beyond the traditional categories of mainstream economic and legal-economic analysis. Across the works discussed below, Bigness is conceived as consolidated/concentrated capital formations that extend beyond monopoly situations. Economists and legal scholars tend to adopt a narrow focus on monopoly as the market share a firm controls and its ability to generate superior returns through price-setting and by keeping out competitors (Howard, 2021; Suarez-Villa, 2023: 2; Loecker and Eeckhout, 2018). In contrast, Bigness is a heuristic that encompasses monopolies and oligopolies, as well as monopsonies and oligopsonies, under one umbrella term. It manifests itself when a company controls a significant share of an input, intermediary, or output market, or holds shares in other companies or other economic assets (including land and intellectual property). The company can impose its rules (in terms of contractual terms, pricing, standards, risk externalization, corporate conduct, financial payouts to shareholders) on other market participants, including investee companies, consumers, suppliers/buyers, competitors, and workers (including, in the case of platforms, platform workers). This would not be possible in a less power-saturated and more competitive market.

In this sense, Bigness helps us come to terms with consolidated/concentrated capital formations, as well as their resulting power effects and negative economic, social, political, and environmental outcomes across diverse sectors and at multiple scales.

Furthermore, this definition explicitly encompasses digitally constituted platform or infrastructural power (Narayan 2024) and ‘market network power’ (Ashwood et al., 2022a: 1422). Both phenomena necessitate a revision of conventional understandings of market power, which are particularly prevalent in the fields of competition economics (Loecker and Eeckhout, 2018; Syverson, 2019) and the legal study of (anti-)trust (Wu, 2022). For instance, Howson et al. (2022: 637) complicate our understanding of market power when they note that ‘[d]igital labour platforms self-identify as intermediaries, but they also exhibit both monopolistic (controlling production) and monopsonistic (controlling sourcing) tendencies’.

Big finance-Ag-tech: Driving and consolidating forces

We seem to be living in a ‘new gilded age’ (Hendrikse et al., 2022: 62). Income and wealth inequalities within and between countries have reached staggering levels (Feldman et al., 2021). These cannot be delinked from the mechanics of value creation and redistribution in the wider economy (Garretsen et al., 2025: 6), and require us to focus on the class that has captured this value, and often managed to translate it into political power (Christophers, 2020). Capitalists across different sectors have amassed economic, social and political power that is often considered to be without precedent. For those with a deeper historical consciousness, the situation is reminiscent of an Ancient Régime, with Wu’s (2022) invocation of Brandeis’s ‘Curse of Bigness’ being a prime example in this regard.

Contemporary Bigness, first and foremost, has been enabled by its legal political-economic framework. Christophers (2016, 2018) points to antitrust and intellectual property laws as key factors in shaping the dialectic between competition and the formation of highly concentrated market structures in the US and UK in the 20th century, citing banking and the pharmaceuticals as historical examples (see Howard, 2021 for agriculture). Thus, capital-friendly legislation and re-interpretations of existing antitrust laws across many countries since the 1970s have enabled capital consolidation/concentration that directly underpinned the formation of Big Tech, Ag, and Finance in later decades.

Secondly, there is financialization – which has fuelled mergers and (killer-)acquisitions across the sectors under scrutiny by including shareholder pressures on firms – as well as the rise of a low-corporate tax regime with loopholes for capital-flight (Aalbers, 2018; Clapp, 2025; Keenan et al., 2023; Klinge et al., 2023; Yang et al., 2025). These dynamics are both ‘artefacts of the same neoliberal deregulation agenda’ (Feldman et al., 2021: 42). Big Tech stands out as a prime example in this regard: a combination of the post-2008 low-interest environment, diverse practices of corporate financialization, the COVID-19-enforced shift to digital spaces as well as investor bets on future monopoly positions equipped tech firms with an unseen ‘financial firepower’ (Klinge et al., 2023: 345) that could be directed at financing growth through investments and mergers and aquisitions (M&A). ³

Third, technological progress and economies of scale have been instrumental to consolidating/concentrating capital formations: for agriculture, see Clapp (2025); for technology, see Cole (2023), Hendrikse et al. (2022), and Van Doorn and Badger (2020); for finance, see Martin and Pollard (2017). ‘Technology’ here is not restricted to hardware; increasingly, it also encompasses intangibles as a key source of corporate profit and growth (Cole, 2023; Klinge et al., 2023; Tups and Dannenberg, 2023). Intangible assets now extend to cloud computing software and artificial intelligence (Narayan, 2026; Rikap and Weko 2025) – technologies that have also branched out into the fields of finance and agriculture.

Fourth, the privatization and subsequent sale of formerly public entities to global investors (who often held monopolies in a given sector themselves) has laid a further foundation for Bigness in the three sectors and beyond. Prominent examples include the sale of Berlin’s municipal housing to institutional investors from the late 1990s onwards (Christophers, 2023); the semi-privatization of the Kenyan state telecom operator to create the mobile technologies giant Safaricom (Donovan and Park, 2022; Tyce, 2020); and the Norwegian firm Yara. Today’s largest fertilizer producer was listed on the stock market in 2024, having spun off from the majority-state-owned oil and gas company Norsk Hydro (Tups and Dannenberg, 2023).

Lastly, we need to consider the ideological foundations of Bigness. Central to this is the idea that consolidated/concentrated capital formations simply result from effective competition (as promoted by the influential Chicago School of Law and Economics since the 1960s) (Feldman et al., 2021: 35; Tapp and Peiser, 2023: 564-565) and the doctrine of shareholder value maximization that has driven M&A since the 1970s (Suarez-Villa, 2023). More recent additions are the Silicon Valley notion that ‘competition is for losers’ (Thiel, 2014), and techno-fascist thinking about the ‘networked state’ (Venture Capital Status, 2025). These ideas have fuelled the dynamics of corporate consolidation and concentration across geographies, and thus directly link to the production of uneven and combined development (Peck et al., 2025). Ideological musings about Bigness, of course, can also involve a stronger presence of the state as either shareholder or steward (Zheng, 2025), including cases where states promote national champions (Donovan and Park, 2022; Zhao and Rogers, 2024). Examples include tech or agricultural giants in countries such as China, India, and Kenya (Clapp, 2025; Werner, 2025; Zhang and Chen, 2022; Zhao and Rogers 2024). This illustrates that the Big Tech/Ag/Finance–state–society triangle varies geographically and depends on distinct connections between these spheres, despite common transnational links that are probably most evident in the tech sector (Pascal et al., 2026; Peck and Phillips, 2021).

In addition to these driving forces are consolidating ones which help to sustain a consolidated/concentrated economic formation once established. This includes, first, the protective effects of entry barriers, usually supported by first-mover advantages (Christophers, 2018; Clapp, 2025; Suarez-Villa, 2023). Network effects and ‘planned lock-in[s]’ (Clapp, 2025: 11) have been particularly effective in enrolling consumers/buyers and locking out competitors (Birch and Bronson, 2022; Hendrikse et al., 2022) in the tech economy – though this radiates into platformized domains of agriculture (Duncan et al., 2022; Fairbairn and Reisman, 2024), and finance (Hendrikse et al., 2018; Langley and Leyshon, 2021).

Second, big corporate actors can mobilize both instrumental and structural power to enrol either competitors (through collusion), researchers (through sponsored research), or policy-makers ⁴ (through lobbying, direct bribery, litigation, and revolving door tactics) into their schemes (Clapp, 2025; Muellerleile, 2025; Peck and Phillips, 2021; Tapp and Peiser, 2023). They might also blackmail the latter by leveraging their structural power (Braun and Christophers 2024). Taken together, the driving and consolidating factors listed here are at the core of the current trend towards Bigness.

Problematizing Bigness

The rise of Big Finance, Big Tech, and Big Ag has been a key topic of discussion on corporate consolidation, concentration and power in economic geography and related fields. The growth of tech giants in particular is well documented in several key papers; a few tech companies have captured substantial market and revenue shares worldwide since the 2000s (Hendrikse et al., 2022; Cole 2023; Sadowski, 2020). These firms even replaced industrial-age titans to top the list of the largest companies in terms of market capitalization (Klinge et al., 2023). While scholarship has traditionally focused on prominent US tech firms, there is an increasing focus on companies in other regions where tech-mediated Bigness occurs (Donovan and Park, 2022; Tyce, 2020; Yeşilbağ, 2022), or has been curtailed by state intervention, as in the case of China (Zhang and Chen, 2022) or India (Jain and Gabor, 2020).

Consolidated/concentrated ownership in Big Tech extends to the means of communication, operating systems, app platforms, and cloud computing capabilities (Narayan, 2026; Rikap and Weko, 2025; Sauvagerd et al., 2024; van der Vlist et al., 2024). Tech companies that operate platforms, cloud/data centres and AI models now possess a degree of power far exceeding that of 19th- and early 20th-century industrialists such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. The latter’s ownership of transportation, steel and energy infrastructure gave them considerable economic and political leverage (Wu, 2022). But platform, cloud computing, and AI companies are embedding themselves in everyday life, and so (projected) winner-takes-all dynamics entrench their positions, enabling these firms to generate considerable income from actual or perceived market positions (Feldman et al., 2021). That said, Narayan (2023) shows that centralization in computing capacity might ‘enable the growth of globally distributed and organizationally decentralized corporate ecosystems’ (p. 287), using the Indian software industry as an example.

Even though the agri-food sector builds on a much longer history of structural change and corporate consolidation and concentration, and is partially driven by different factors than tech, it has also undergone a more recent shift towards Bigness (Clapp, 2025). Calculating the market shares of the top two to top 10 companies in different agricultural subsectors ⁵ , the ETG Group (2022) provides striking evidence of horizontal concentration in the global food system. Paired with the concurrent dynamics of vertical integration (Howard, 2021; Tups and Dannenberg, 2023), whereby companies exert control over various nodes in the commodity chain (Selwyn and Bernhold, 2025: 28, 62), this trend has endowed a select few ‘titans of industrial agriculture’ (Clapp, 2025) with substantial bargaining, structural, and instrumental power in areas such as farm inputs (e.g. pesticides, fertilisers, and seeds), farm machinery, food processing, commodity trading, and retailing. This has been theorized through notions such as the ‘hourglass-shaped system’ (Howard, 2021: 14) and the ‘global pesticide complex’ (Shattuck, 2021; Werner 2025) – a domain particularly renowned for its Bigness problem.

Yet standard measures of market concentration and power cannot easily be transferred to all nodes of the agricultural commodity chain. Farmland is the prime example of where corporate concentration has taken root across the globe through both corporate and institutional investments over the past two decades (Anseeuw and Baldinelli, 2020; Bailey et al., 2021; IPES-Food, 2024; Magnan et al., 2022; Minkoff‐Zern and Fairbairn, 2025; Wegerif and Guereña, 2020). Still, other ways of measuring Bigness are needed to account for consolidation/concentration in land markets. These are often naturally concentrated due to the spatial unevenness of land quality, and it can be challenging to define system boundaries of local land markets in which ownership concentration is to be measured (Jänicke and Müller, 2025). Data opacity (hard-to-access data; non-existing-data; non-digital data) related to both land ownership and the investment structures lurking in the background furthermore complicates any such undertaking (Ashwood et al., 2022b; Magnan and Sunley, 2017; Ouma, 2024; Pritchard et al., 2023).

The explanatory power of conventional measures of market power has also been called into question beyond the domain of land. Clapp (2025: 7) argues that Bigness needs to be problematized beyond a narrow analytical focus on market share, or complimentary measurements such as markups (the gap between the price of a product and the marginal costs of its production) ⁶ (Loecker and Eeckhout, 2018; Syverson, 2019). For both, data is often not readily available. Rethinking our problematizations of Bigness is particularly pertinent given the increasingly visible political fist of concentrated capital. Indeed, one might lose sight of the bigger picture when caught up in solving statistical puzzles.

For finance, Christophers (2018) provides useful data on consolidation and concentration processes in the US banking sector, highlighting common ownership (banks being owned by the same investor) and cross-ownership (banks holding shares in other banks) as issues that traditional measures of market power overlook (see also Feldman et al., 2021: 29). More recent work shifts in focus from banks to asset managers, who act as passive and active fiduciaries of substantial pools of capital beyond traditional credit intermediation. Christophers (2023: 296) notes that in 2020 asset managers oversaw ‘more than 40% of global wealth of all kinds, which stood at $250 trillion’. This state of affairs gives asset managers unseen structural power, even when they do not hold a majority stake in companies. Instead, they act as horizontally diversified owners of stock through passive investment strategies, also known as ‘universal owners’. They shape the conditions of existence for other firms, private households, and the wider environment (Isakson, 2025; Prodani et al., 2025). The asset management industry has therefore been hailed as a key ‘shaper […] of other capitalists’ (Braun and Christophers, 2024: 551). As the ‘the central nervous system of contemporary capitalist society’ (ibid.: 553), it connects all three sectors under scrutiny in crucial ways, including regimes of value creation and distribution that often gravitate around rent-seeking (Birch and Bronson 2022: 6; Christophers 2020; Selwyn and Bernhold, 2025: 28).

Further work on Big Finance substantiates the call for alternative measures of Bigness. Several authors (e.g. Ashwood et al., 2022a; Haberly and Wojcik, 2022; Keenan et al., 2023; Vitali et al., 2011) have argued that one must focus on networked forms of market power constituted through financial ownership and control ties to understand capital concentration realities in ‘asset-manager society’ ⁷ (Christophers, 2023: 34). Addressing these issues, Gibadullina (2024) provides unparalleled quantitative analyses in the field of economic geography, revealing that US finance owns around 60% of all US-listed companies (compared to 3% in 1945) and 28% of all firms listed globally. Furthermore, asset managers are increasingly targeting the infrastructures that support life (e.g. land, water, roads, housing, and care homes) by acquiring substantial ownership stakes in the underlying ‘real assets’ (Christophers, 2023).

Lastly, consolidation/concentration, its power effects and geographical footprint in all three domains might be thought about in a more diffusionist, Foucauldian way, as a logic that spreads and becomes concentrated across geographical spaces within particular organizations. Although the term was coined in the context of agriculture, notions such as ‘every farm a factory’ (Fitzgerald, 2003) and ‘the plantation’ (Davis et al., 2019; Wolford, 2021) more generally remind us that that the expansion of specific production models is carried by ‘monocultures of the mind’ (Shiva, 1993; cited in Araya, 2023: 798). These are rooted in an ideology of modernization, progress, improvement, and solutionism. As I will show in my next report, this ‘Promethean’ ideology (Moore, 2022), which spans multiple economic fields, is closely intertwined with ‘racial-colonial projects of control and extraction’ (Williams, 2025: 414).

Capital convergence and the end of sectors

Many of the works sampled for the report invite us to look at capital convergences between the three sectors. In fact, developments connecting Big Finance/Ag/Tech shatter the very idea of neatly delineated economic sectors. Thinking of these three fields as being interconnected is not just necessitated by empirical convergences but is also embraced by critical activist work, which considers the three sectors as key battlegrounds for antitrust pushes and alternative economy-making (Teachout, 2020).

For pedagogical reasons, I present each sectors in pairs, but in reality, finance as a return-hungry topholder is a key driving force in the dynamics of corporate reconfiguration described below.

Big Finance ↔ Big Ag

Granular data on the ‘Big Three’ asset managers (Black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street) and mutual funds shows their holdings in information and agricultural equities increased considerably from 2000 to 2020, with the percentage of agricultural sector companies which have the Big Three or mutual funds as equity shareholders increasing from 40/56% to 60%/60% (Gibadullina, 2024: 584). Building on a global M&A data set, Keenan et al. (2023: 6) find that between ‘2001 and 2020 financial firms acquired US$19bn worth of firms from the agricultural sector’ – reaffirming the early insight of Clapp (2020) that M&A are key vectors for creating Bigness in the global agri-food system (see also Yang et al., 2025). Asset managers also directly affect land/agricultural firm ownership patterns, communities and political ecologies in concrete places around the world, as several studies have shown (Fairbairn, 2020; Magnan et al., 2022; Ouma, 2020; Pritchard et al., 2023; Prodani et al., 2025). By 2024, there were 950 agricultural investment funds globally, managing a whopping $150 bn (up from 107 funds in 2007), with 67% of funds invested in farmland and agricultural private equity (Valoral Advisors, 2024). This has direct ramifications for regional agrarian economies – effects, which are best understood through multi-scalar perspectives. Indeed, an institutional investor might not be very large in its market space in global or even national terms yet still contribute to a ‘Bigness problem’ at local/regional scale through its (aggregated) investment in a concrete place/region (Christophers, 2022; Klinge, 2021; Magnan et al., 2022; Tapp and Peiser, 2023).

At the same time, big agricultural actors have made forays into finance. For instance, agricultural traders have branched out into agricultural asset management, including farmland and storage investing, to capitalize on the post-2008 financial and food prices crisis environment (Salerno, 2017: 212; Bowman and Robb, 2025). Keenan et al. (2023: 6) further note that between 2001 and 2020, agricultural firms acquired US$7bn worth of financial firms globally. Large agribusiness companies have tried to maintain market dominance by investing in start-ups through their corporate venture capital arms (Fairbairn and Reisman, 2024; Hackfort, 2025; Sauvagerd et al., 2024).

Big Tech ↔ Big Ag

Until recently, the tech and the agri-food sector were usually presented as distant others, even though the actual history of technological advancement in agriculture cautions against such simple characterizations (Clapp, 2025). Today, Big Tech logics increasingly fuse the agri-food space through venture capital-propped Ag-tech start-ups in fields such as farm automation, agricultural data platforms, robotics and sensors (Sippel and Dolinga, 2023), while incumbent firms in the agricultural sector become techified by investing in or acquiring agri-tech companies, aiming at what Sauvagerd et al. (2024) call ‘oligopolistic platformisation’. For instance, Bayer’s $63bn acquisition of Monsanto in 2018 did not just give the former access to the latter’s (notorious) seed and pesticide business, but also to the intellectual property of The Climate Corporation – an agricultural and weather data-centred firm owned by Monsanto. These and other key acquisitions helped the German corporate giant rebrand itself as data-centred agricultural services and solutions company (Hackfort, 2025) – a move that Tups and Dannenberg (2023) also document for the case of the fertilizer giant Yara. Mega acquisitions such as these demonstrate how financialization, network effects, the assetization of agricultural data, and speculation on future Bigness in and beyond agriculture have become entangled with each other, transcending sectoral boundaries.

The techification of the agri-food sector also opens up the realm of agricultural production to larger corporate investors, including institutional ones, as tech is promising to overcome some of the key barriers to the large-scale capitalist penetration of agriculture (e.g. labour and farm monitoring issues, the limited legibility of land from an investor’s perspective, and weather-related risks) (Duncan et al., 2022; Frederico et al., 2025; Reisman et al., 2025; Rotz et al., 2019). While Big Ag already exerts infrastructural power along the agri-food chain through its control of input, trade, warehousing and retailing nodes, this power is now projected into new domains through Silicon Valley-style techification.

Big Finance ↔ Big Tech

Historically, technological revolutions have been closely linked to the dynamics of finance capital accumulation (Cole, 2023; Liu, 2025). The rise of Big Tech must be understood in light of this (Klinge et al., 2023). While Big Tech appears to have surpassed Big Finance in terms of economic and political power, ‘technologization should not be understood as an independent hegemonic force but as a process conditioned by financial structures’ (Liu, 2025: 5). Although public markets, banks issuing debt and sovereign wealth funds play a key role in shaping Big Tech dynamics (Klinge et al., 2025), venture capital, as a variant of private equity, often has a more direct grip on the governance and development trajectory of a firm (Cooiman, 2024). The Japanese investment firm Softbank is notorious in this regard (Qiu and Chan, 2025). Through its venture capital funds, it has been a key force behind the hypergrowth model aimed at building ‘meta-platforms’ based on fast scaling up and crowding out competitors to reap monopoly rents (van Doorn and Badger, 2020: 1490). The logic of rapid scaling now also extends to the domain of fin-tech (Langley and Leyshon, 2021) and parts of ‘ag-tech’ (Fairbairn and Reisman, 2024; Kumar and Perepu, 2023), where companies and investors hope to reap super-profits from monopoly positions. ⁸

In general, the ‘tech tag’ attracts capital, which helps inflate company valuations (see Klinge et al., 2025 for the case of Tesla). Tech’s capital needs and signalling power on the one hand, and finance’s search for high rents on the other, co-produce distinct geographies. Feldman et al. (2021) demonstrate that monopoly tendencies in regional tech clusters may exert a gravitational pull on monopoly-finance in search for extraordinary profits. Importantly, this funding is not simply attracted by tech clusters, but by distinct sociodemographic groups within these clusters. Research into the gendered and racialized flows of venture capital in ‘Silicon Savannah’, Kenya (Mkalama and Ouma, 2024; Pollio, 2026), underlines this.

Tech has similarly been gravitating towards finance. The finding that ‘Apple is a Hedge Fund that Makes phones’ (Gilbert and Hrdlicka, 1018; cited in Suarez-Villa, 2023: 14) serves as a reminder that Big Tech firms have become ‘corporate-financial hybrids’ (Liu, 2025: 5). These firms’ accumulation strategies combine both productive and speculative, financial market-centred activities (see also Klinge et al., 2023). As well as having become managers of a diverse range of financial assets in their own right, the financial activities of these firms (e.g. stock buy-backs or corporate venture capital investments) highlight the importance of speculative behaviour in their value creation mix.

However, while tech can use finance to create value, it can also disrupt it. For decades, the financial sector has adopted technology to increase scale, speed up communication and transactions, create new products and generate more profit. However, the disruptive technologies associated with Silicon Valley and other hot spots of tech innovation (e.g. Mpesa in Kenya or WeChat in China) threaten the business models of established companies, particularly in the banking sector. While Big Tech firms such as Meta and X have also tried to expand into financial services, the smaller, easy-to-swallow disrupters and their fintech business models have often been incorporated by incumbent financial firms (Hendrikse et al., 2022; Langley and Leyshon, 2021). As in the realm of digital agriculture (Sauvagerd et al., 2024), disruption has often not led to a decentralization of big economic formations, but rather to their reinforcement (Liu 2025; Lai and Samers, 2021). This generally requires a dynamic understanding of the interplay between the emergence of big economic formations and competition, as several economic geographers have noted (Christophers, 2016, 2018; Narayan, 2023; Werner, 2025).

Conclusion

This report has shown how Bigness has been problematized in economic geography and related fields. While this report’s macroeconomic geographic focus allows us to highlight the larger process and driving forces behind the rise of Big Finance-Ag-Tech and their relationship with dynamics of uneven and combined development (Peck, 2024), the place-based impacts of Bigness could only be touched upon. These include the diverse spatial footprints of consolidated/concentrated capital, which geographers have grappled with, including how Big Tech ‘disrupts’ urban development (McNeill, 2021; Moisio and Rossi, 2024) and labour markets in concrete places (Anwar and Graham, 2022; Fuchs et al., 2022; Gebrial, 2024); how Big Finance reshapes both urban and rural property markets (Christophers, 2022; 2023; van Sant et al., 2023); and how Big Ag recalibrates the development trajectory of places and regions (Eayrs, 2024; Li and Semedi, 2021; Werner 2025). While Big Finance needs to be problematized in its own right – as a topholder of other financial and nonfinancial firms (Gibadullina, 2024; Vitali et al., 2011) – it is nevertheless intertwined with key dynamics in the other two sectors under scrutiny. Ultimately, this paper’s conjunctural perspective urges us to transcend a narrow sectoral gaze and to come to terms with capital convergences across all three sectors.

It follows that future work on Bigness in economic geography must address at least two conundrums. First, radicalizing the spirit of Brandeis (Tapp and Peiser, 2023; Wu, 2022), it needs to confront Bigness through an engagement with questions of antitrust (Teachout, 2020), coupled with an ambition to engage with various forms of resistance against mutating corporate power more generally. This is more pertinent than ever at a time when parts of Big Capital are openly siding with techno-fascist futures. Secondly, the focus on corporate consolidation, concentration, and power must escape its current territorial trap and move beyond its heavy focus on the US, parts of Europe, and China. As in other research fields, the literature tends to theorize the world based on Anglo-Saxon experiences (Werner, 2012; Yeung, 2025). My next report on capital and coloniality will offer a partial remedy to this problem, engaging with southern perspectives and experiences that provide new insights into the study of the world-making/destruction power of concentrated capital, and the resistance to it, in both historical and contemporary terms.