10 - Susan Strange: Trading Zones

Summary

Introduction

Susan Strange is perhaps best known across the social sciences for her work in international relations, and particularly the development of the subfield of international political economy. Strange saw this approach as critical to understanding the (il)logics of the global economy and financial markets in particular. Throughout her work, Strange emphasized the importance of a heterodox approach to the global economy. As a result, her work has several shared underpinning assumptions with economic geography. For example, Strange was critical of orthodox economics and the limitations she saw in its emphasis on understanding the global economy through abstract models. She was also critical of the ability of political scientists to analyse the operation of the global economy because of their focus on institutions and power, particularly within nation states. Indeed, given that these concerns have also been expressed by economic geographers (Pollard et al, 2009) in many ways it is surprising that Strange's work has not been picked up more widely within economic geography. In short, there appears to be a clear ‘trading zone’ (Peck, 2012) between her work and that of economic geographers given their shared commitment to look beyond mainstream economics and politics in order to understand the global economy.

In this chapter, I examine the trading zone between Strange's work in international political economy and that of economic geography through a focus on research into the geographies of money and finance. In the first part of the chapter, I examine how her seminal work on the emergence of cross-border financial markets in Casino Capitalism (Strange, 1986) and States and Markets (Strange, 1988) was most fully taken up by the vibrant research field of the geographies of money and finance within economic geography.

Next, I draw on recent work that documents the changing nature of financial geography itself (Gibadullina, 2021), to examine how, despite the considerable shared epistemologies between Strange's approach and that of economic geography, the trading zone that this has resulted in is best understood as being episodic in nature. In particular, I suggest that while economic geographical scholarship in the 1980s and early 1990s opened up a dialogue with Strange's work, grounded in critical international political economy, this dialogue became much more limited as economic geography turned to focus increasingly on the cultural and social dimensions of economies.