This collection takes on the call issued by reviewers of The American Way for a critical application of Carville Earle's framework to more geographical examples of political and economic shifts in America's past. The essays illustrate changes in U.S. settlement, development, and political structure through the lens of the restructuring of the American economy and society over approximately fifty year cycles of crisis and recovery. They demonstrate the extension of American's sphere of influence outside of the United States as a larger scalar shift, and they underscore the utility of geography in answering very local questions concerning questions of poorly documented settlement histories. Focusing on the geographic responses to periodic cycles of crisis and recovery and the more general underlying intertwining of geography and history, Geography, History, and the American Political Economy is an incisive demonstration of how the constant restructuring of American politics and economy occurs within spatial and historical constructs.

Understanding Latin America's recent economic performance calls for a multidisciplinary analysis. This handbook looks at the interaction of economics and politics in the region and includes a number of contributions from top academic experts who have also served as key policy makers (a former president, ministers of finance, a central bank governor), reflecting upon the challenges of reform.

The book also examines the effects of early legal systems.

New York City witnessed unparalleled growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, its population rising from thirty thousand people to nearly a million in a matter of decades. Feeding Gotham looks at how America's first metropolis grappled with the challenge of provisioning its inhabitants. It tells the story of how access to food, once a public good, became a private matter left to free and unregulated markets—and of the profound consequences this had for American living standards and urban development. Taking readers from the early republic to the Civil War, Gergely Baics explores the changing dynamics of urban governance, market forces, and the built environment that defined New Yorkers’ experiences of supplying their households. He paints a vibrant portrait of the public debates that propelled New York from a tightly regulated public market to a free-market system of provisioning, and shows how deregulation had its social costs and benefits. Baics uses cutting-edge GIS mapping techniques to reconstruct New York’s changing food landscapes over half a century, following residents into neighborhood public markets, meat shops, and groceries across the city’s expanding territory. He lays bare how unequal access to adequate and healthy food supplies led to an increasingly differentiated urban environment. A masterful blend of economic, social, and geographic history, Feeding Gotham traces how this highly fragmented geography of food access became a defining and enduring feature of the American city.

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

This book addresses two questions - why some political systems have more centralized systems of interpersonal redistribution than others, and why some political unions make larger efforts to equalize resources among their constituent units than others. This book presents a new theory of the origin of fiscal structures in systems with several levels of government. The argument points to two major factors to account for the variation in redistribution: the interplay between economic geography and political representation on the one hand, and the scope of interregional economic externalities on the other. To test the empirical implications derived from the argument, the book relies on in-depth studies of the choice of fiscal structures in unions as diverse as the European Union, Canada and the United States in the aftermath of the Great Depression; Germany before and after Reunification; and Spain after the transition to democracy.

Focusing on the relationship between location and political activity, the subdiscipline of political geography offers a unique vantage point from which to examine the development of the American political system. This comprehensive text traces the theory and practice of American politics from the colonial era to the present day. The authors highlight the key role of geography in such crucial areas as the establishment of the nation's governing principles; the formation of political parties and coalitions; electoral history; the development of America's political economy; and its role in the world economy. Serving as a springboard for research and forecasting, the book also ventures into the future to discuss possible shifts in the political geography of twenty-first-century America.