A Note on Research into the Diffusion of Development

Extract

Political, social, and economic development take place in space as well as time, but all too often they are written about and studied as though they existed at a point, which, it will be recalled, has position and no magnitude. In a sense, all social scientists are historians, and use the temporal dimension as a framework within which to examine the political, social, and economic behaviour of men. But few feel comfortable trying on the geographer's spatial shoes, and, beyond an occasional location map, hesitate to examine the developments in the dimension that is his particular concern. Part of the trouble, of course, is that the map imposes a stricter discipline upon us than we care to admit: to map anything beyond the merely trivial we have to measure it, while fuzzy but intuitively valid ideas such as economic development, political power, and social integration make us coy, or evoke surprisingly emotional responses that such things are incapable of being measured in any meaningful fashion. But, whether we like it or not, developments of all kinds do take place in space; what, then, can the geographer, with his spatial perspective, contribute to our knowledge of these things?