The Dictionary of Human Geography

Comp. by: LElumalai Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_T Date:31/3/09
Time:21:40:50 Filepath://ppdys1108/BlackwellCup/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-
9781405132879/appln/3B2/revises/9781405132879_4_T.3d

relationships within successive modes of

production, and unification occurred not

within individual minds but very much outside

in the world of people’s material lives and prac-

tices. Marx argued that history’s teleology was

marked by distinct stages of completion, with

capitalism, the epoch in which Marx lived,

merely the penultimate one. History’s ultimate

purpose, the negation of all negation, would

manifest in what necessarily came next, the

final stage, the end of history,communism.

Teleologicalargumentsarecriticizedonmany

grounds,including:theyarenotempiricallytest-

able and are thus unfalsifiable; they reverse the

temporal sequence of cause and effect (effects

determinecauses);causalmechanismsareeither

absent or not well specified; and they deny

human beings free will, confining them within

an iron cage of historical inevitability. Neverthe-

less, teleological arguments can be found in two

distinct bodies of work in modernhuman geog-

raphy. The first was in studies ofmoderniza-

tionin the 1960s that were (mis)informed by

Rostow’s (1960)stages of growthmodel to

depict – and predict – the inevitable spatialdif-

fusionofmodernization across the landscape of

adevelopingeconomy(Gould,1969b).Thesec-

ond was in the early writings of some Marxist

geographers who saw capitalism’scrisesas in-

evitableway-stationstowardstheendpointofits

final destruction and overthrow (Smith, 2008

[1984]). tb

terms of trade A name in economics for

the ratio between a price index of a country’s

exports and a price index of its imports.

Amongst advocates of export-led develop-

ment, ‘improving the terms of trade’ tradition-

ally meant increasing the ratio of profits from

exportsvis-a`-visthe costs of imports. As such,

it was part of the Washington consensus

amongst development economists that export

surpluses were better than import substitution

for developing countries. But now, in the con-

text of increasing dissensus over such axioms,

a second, more literal, meaning of ‘terms of

trade’ has come to the fore as critics ofneo-

liberalismhave sought to decode the ways in

which the terminology of recent global and

regionaltradeagreements obscures how they

entrench neo-liberal norms of government

across wide swathes of social, political and

even ecological as well as economic life (Peet,

Borne, Davis et al., 2003; McCarthy, 2004).

Terms-of-trade legalese such as TRIPs (which

in the world trade organization (wto)

stands for agreements on Trade Related

Intellectual Property) and TRIMs (Trade

Related Investment Measures) have thereby

been debunked as elements of a narrow neo-

liberal, free-market fundamentalist agenda

that sets constraints on democratic govern-

ance over everything from food safety to

developmentpolicy by giving private corpor-

ations quasi-constitutional rights to sue gov-

ernments (Sparke, 2005). ‘Because its terms

are so broad,’ argue two critics of the WTO’s

terms of trade, ‘the WTO has managed to

intervene in domestic policies all over the

planet’ (Wallach and Woodall, 2004, p. 2).

Countering this takeover, Wallach and

Woodall point out that the neo-liberal project

therefore involves repeatedly expanding what

were originally meant to be simple agreements

on free trade into neo-liberal legal rules gov-

erning practically everything. This terms-

of-trade overreach, they note, is ironically

marked in the terms themselves such that

‘you can identify which WTO agreements

have least connection to trade by which have

the ‘‘Trade Related’’ label slapped on them’

(ibid., p. 2). It remains a credit to the critical

wisdom of Marx and Engels that they foresaw

precisely this terms-of-trade takeover in the

Communist manifesto, when they described the

wholesale transformation of medieval life

through the free trade fetish of the capitalist

business class. ‘The bourgeoisie,’ they

thereby argued, ‘has drowned the most heav-

enly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous

enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,

in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

It has resolved personal worth into exchange

value, and in place of the numberless

indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up

that single, unconscionable freedom – Free

Trade’ (Marx and Engels, 2002 [1848]). ms

terra nullius A legal doctrine enshrined in

eighteenth-century Europeanlawthat legitim-

ized the annexation of ‘uninhabited lands’ by

settlement as an acknowledged means, alongside

conquest and secession, for the proper conduct of

colonization by ‘civilized’ nations. Such lands

were not literally uninhabited; rather, the colon-

izers cast their existing inhabitants as too

‘primitive’tomeritpoliticalrecognition(cf.primi-

tivism).Terra nulliuswas instrumental in the

European dispossession of indigenous peoples in

so-called settler colonies, such as Australia, which

has been the subject of politicalcolonialism;

struggle and legal redress ever since. (See also

colonialism; settler society.) sw

Suggested reading

Simpson (1993).

TERRA NULLIUS

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 743 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju