framework of regional administration tends to conceal the ways in which
a region’s inhabitants embed specificity through habitual practice.
Administrative mechanisms promote tourism and local commercial
interests by reinforcing the perceived characteristics of regions in an
oversimplified way—through typical culinary specialities, or the trad-
itional forms of architecture. The language of regional promotion can
mask the very processes of cultural production, presenting regional
identity under a homogenized template of definitive forms, creating a
sense of timeless cultural continuity, when the realities are more dynamic
and more varied.
The notion of‘regional economies’represents a different approach to
conceptualizing a‘region’than what can be achieved by looking at
geographical or cultural perspectives alone. Grounded as they are in
specific physical environments, regional economies exist by virtue of
the people who created them. Contemporary regional studies, whether
of present or past landscapes, do integrate the ethnic and political
dimensions of regions alongside geographic ones, whilst the links
between geography and economic behaviour are theraison d’êtreof
economic geography.^4 So geography is by no means irrelevant to the
study of regional economies. Many modern niche industries arose
because of specific synergies between a region and its inhabitants, and
between the social drivers within that region and the demand for specific
products. In terms of medieval and early modern industries, the textile
producers of Prato, west of Florence, or the merchant traders around the
Golden Horn at Istanbul, or the marble quarrymen of Thasos, all consti-
tute examples of local skilled specialists whose expertise evolved as a
result of synergies between social demand and local resources, and which
developed over a long period of time.^5
Regional studies of contemporary cultures offer other insights that can
usefully be applied to economic questions about past societies. We might,
for example, consider supply chains as indicators of economic networks.
Another obvious case study might be the relationship between procure-
ment zones for the exploitation of minerals, the specialists who extracted
(^4) Elton and Reger 2007, 11–15; Reger 2011, 371–8; Reger 2013a and 2013b; Oliver
2006a; Constantakopoulou 2007, 245–52; see above Ch.1,‘The geography of north Aegean
economies’.
(^5) Prato: Horden and Purcell 2000, 94, 148; Golden Horn: Matschke 2002, 467, 471– 2
(streets with dedicated crafts, including boot-makers, belt-makers, and furriers; the hunters’
district [ôHí ŒıíŪHí] near St John’s Gate, money-changers, warehouses, craftsmen, and
vegetable sellers); Thasian marble: there are nine contributions (covering different periods)
in Part I ofThasos, Matières Premières,‘la Pierre’,15–126; cf. also Vavelidis et al. 2006;
more generally on geography and innovation, see Archibald 2012a.
196 Regionalism and regional economies