The Political Economy of Uneven and Combined Development
The Case of North East England#
Professor Ray Hudson MAE, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK, and member of the Human Mobility, Governance, Environment and Space section of Academia Europaea, published his latest book "The political economy of uneven and combined development: the case of North East England" where he focuses on the processes through which industries and regions grow and decline in capitalist economies via an investigation of the trajectory of change in the North East of England.
Year of publication: 2025
ISBN: 9781032536156
Publisher: Routledge
About the book#
The focus of this book is the processes through which industries and regions grow and decline in capitalist economies via an investigation of the trajectory of change in the North East of England.
How and why did its economy grow from the sixteenth century to be a "Workshop of the World" by the outbreak of the First World War, only to collapse a decade later? How and why did the region then become a laboratory for experiments in state policies to reverse economic decline, policies that have largely failed? How did the region become transformed from one with indigenous innovative firms, to one of foreign branch plants focused on routine component production and assembly, to a deindustrialised region which became the destination for call centres and Amazon distribution centres? What were the economic, labour market, and social consequences of these changes? The account of regional change is framed in terms of uneven and combined development, temporally, spatially, and between and within the broad classes of Capital and Labour. The core message of this book is that the growth and decline of the region, and of the changing map of regional development, are most appropriately understood within a conceptual framework of uneven and combined development grounded in Marxian political economy.
This book will be of interest to academic researchers and students of political economy, regional development, geography, sociology, planning and policy studies, as well as policymakers in central, regional, and local government.
About the author#
Professor Ray Hudson MAE is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University, United Kingdom. He was elected as member of the Human Mobility, Governance, Environment and Space section of Academia Europaea in 2007.
His research interest are within the fields of political economies of uneven and combined development, economic geographies, economic & social regeneration in 'old' industrial regions, relationships between capitalist economies and the earth system as well as relationships between legal and illegal economies and spaces.
