We review the emergence of the West Line hub that has processed most of Israel’s e-waste for over two decades against the background of the global phenomena of e-waste policies and hubs often characterised as simply dumping grounds at the receiving end of flows of contaminating processes and materials to less regulated settings (the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, PHH). Its emergence was facilitated by factors common to the occupied West Bank as a whole (de-development, lower labor costs, dominance of the informal sector, a porous border and spatial fragmentation), and others especially important in the West Line area. These include the disruption of work opportunities in Israel alongside a rise in the amounts and value of e-waste; proximity to Israeli urban centers and distance from Palestinian ones; the historical presence of a scrap trade; a population comprised of a handful of extended families facilitating trust-based economies, on the one hand, while overcoming stigma and opposition on the other; and availability of areas of governance vacuum allowing dumping and burning. The PHH’s crudely global account of e-waste hub emergence must be refined to include the context-specific presence and operation of hubs as forceful economic agents, not simply passive recipients of waste dumping.

This chapter situates this book’s conceptual and theoretical approach with respect to earlier work on ethnicity and region in African countries and beyond. Earlier work has looked away from regional economic inequality as a political force in Africa, defaulting to theories centered on ethnicity, understood as a force orthogonal to programmatic policy interests and devoid of economic ideology. This work inverts these arguments, showing that regional economic inequalities and differentiation give rise to political cleavage and divergent policy interests. In Africa, the sources of subnational (regional) economic difference and inequality lie in unevenness of natural endowment, regionally specific patterns of state intervention in the economy that date to the colonial period, spatial–sectoral differentiation, and administrative structure. This chapter follows Lipset and Rokkan (1967) in theorizing the sources and nature of regional cleavages that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. It identifies institutions that contribute to the “regionalization” of national economies and politics in African countries. Section 2.5 of this chapter lays out the main elements of an approach to the analysis of regionalism that is fit for African contexts.

Does regional inequality give rise to political cleavages in African countries? If so, why and how? At what scale of politics? How do regional difference and inequality shape national politics and policy? The theory of regional politics advanced here is drawn from comparative politics theories of regional tensions that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. These are accentuated when socioeconomic inequality and territorial institutions align. This book argues that regional economic differentiation and spatial inequalities, in interaction with strongly territorial state institutions, shape politics and policy in African countries as they do in countries in other parts of the world. National economic integration and state-building activate subnational interests and fuel political tensions over the integration of subnational regions into the national polity and the national market. Regional economic and political heterogeneity and cross-regional inequalities shape both preferences and the relative bargaining power of subnational collectivities. These forces combine to produce persistent regional cleavage structures in national politics. Empirical support is drawn from electoral data from 44 elections across 12 countries, historical maps, and nighttime luminosity, household survey, and crop production data.

This chapter identifies the colonial origins of the institutional structures and patterns of uneven economic development that create the template for political regionalism in African countries. Functional economic regions and administrative regions tended to align in African colonies, defining patterns of regional difference and inequality that are often strongly visible today. This process established frameworks within which politically salient ethnic identities developed, and defined political constituencies in territorial terms. With the 1940s emergence of colony-wide politics, existing administrative and political structures channeled regional interests and ideologies of regional consciousness into the national arena. A boundary persistence analysis underscores the large extent to which colonial territorial grids have been reproduced over time. I explain this persistence in terms of how African political leaders, social elites, farmers, and members of rural communities found advantage in territorial institutions forged under colonialism. These regional cleavages and the territorial institutions that help to reproduce them have structured patterns of national-level political competition in many African countries for many decades.

This chapter collects the historical threads about the economic growth of the two Iberian nations. From a disappointing nineteenth century, during which they fell behind the rest of Europe, and the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, the two nations quickly caught up from the 1950s. Growth was mostly extensive and pulled by physical capital accumulation, with small contributions from human capital or productivity. The Iberian divergence from its European peers has often been blamed on natural endowments, modest domestic markets and savings, as well as on second-nature geography (market access). However, this volume shows that all of these were endogenous to the growth itself, which requires looking for deeper explanations. Institutions and the political equilibria that underpin them loom large here. After a century of fragile liberal monarchies and radical republican regimes, the two nations stood out for their long authoritarian regimes. Inward-looking economic policies promoted by the dictators favoured domestic incumbents but harmed the growth potential of the two countries. Only their gradual reopening from the 1950s unleashed this potential. Nevertheless, the gains from growth have not been equally distributed and convergence stalled in the new millennium, with the adoption of the Euro.

Stalinist repressions, epitomized by the Gulag, and grand industrialization projects warrant exploration of their implications for the social fabric of a place. I find social reproduction not only despite of but in some ways because of the communist industrial strategy. Whether inside or outside of the Gulag, Soviet industry appropriated both the hardware – the infrastructures of modernity – and the software – the human resources in pedagogy, medicine, research, public enlightenment, and engineering. In turn, social mechanisms of relationships of status and closure converged with the state’s developmentalist and survivalist imperatives. Unpacking these channels of resilience even when set against the most coercive aspect of Soviet planning provides additional credence to the argument that Russia had not been the purported melting pot that annihilated the society of estates. I first perform cross-regional statistical analysis to demonstrate that Soviet industries built on the tsarist industrial heritage. Next, I provide illustrative vignettes of appropriations in Samara’s consumer services, strategic armaments, and petrochemicals. I also discuss an aspect of development that has invited the naïve observer to assume a de novo approach to the Soviet project, namely the establishment of “brand-new” cities like Tolyatti. I then explore how even large-scale population movements followed the logic of social closure.

Chapter 1 considers theatre as a form of industry that confronts a central problem: how to produce a performance – in the general sense of manufacturing a product rather than in the specialist sense of financing a show – and then reproduce it over time and space. This chapter explores the centrality of blocking in addressing this problem, through an analysis of the practice’s historical and contemporary significance, and of two productions by London’s National Theatre: Noises Off (2000) and Frankenstein (2011). On the one hand, blocking demonstrates the extent to which virtues commonly attributed to the theatre – its artistry, its ephemerality, its uniqueness, and so on – are inextricable from the routines, systems, and technologies upon which any production process depends. At the same time, it abstracts the work from the worker, with all the potential for both ingenuity and exploitation that can entail, and is a precondition for forms of theatrical production – from touring shows to “McTheatre” – that have taken theatrical production firmly into the realm of the (sometimes global) market for centuries.

This chapter starts with a look at empirical evidence on economic growth and development as summarized in four stylized facts: (i) rising income levels, (ii) lasting differences in growth rates, (iii) periods of stagnation followed by rapid growth, and (iv) leap-frogging. We argue that the endogenous growth literature can help us understand the first two facts, while geographical economics can help us understand the last two facts. To this end, we introduce a model that is a merger of the geographical economics model with an endogenous growth model. This model gives us new insights, for example on the importance of international knowledge spillovers. But, as is to be expected from any model, this model also has its shortcomings. We zoom in on the argument that models like this still focus only on the proximate causes of growth at the neglect of the so-called deep determinants of economic development: institutions and geography. Finally, using the case of China’s economic geography as example, we illustrate how the class of geographical economics models can be used to answer what-if questions pertaining to the possible impact of structural changes on a country’s economic growth and development.

This chapter starts with a look at empirical evidence on economic growth and development as summarized in four stylized facts: (i) rising income levels, (ii) lasting differences in growth rates, (iii) periods of stagnation followed by rapid growth, and (iv) leap-frogging. We argue that the endogenous growth literature can help us understand the first two facts, while geographical economics can help us understand the last two facts. To this end, we introduce a model that is a merger of the geographical economics model with an endogenous growth model. This model gives us new insights, for example on the importance of international knowledge spillovers. But, as is to be expected from any model, this model also has its shortcomings. We zoom in on the argument that models like this still focus only on the proximate causes of growth at the neglect of the so-called deep determinants of economic development: institutions and geography. Finally, using the case of China’s economic geography as example, we illustrate how the class of geographical economics models can be used to answer what-if questions pertaining to the possible impact of structural changes on a country’s economic growth and development.