The Dictionary of Human Geography

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that turned Africans into commodities, for

example, can hardly be held up as an unmiti-

gated good (see Wolf, 1982). And the recent

for-profit trade in blood plasma from Haiti

to the USA and Europe reveals how despite

historic victories over slavery, its legacies

still provide a vampiric verso of economists’

unending odes to free trade in the present

(Farmer, 2006). But even putting such odious

examples aside, studies of the political and

economic geographies in which trade takes

place make universal claims about the good-

ness of trade seem absurd (Sheppard and

Barnes, 1990; Merrett, 1996; Porter and

Sheppard, 1998; Gilbert, 2005). One of the

major weaknesses of mainstream macroeco-

nomics is that it continually abstracts from

these geographies, mirroring but ignoring the

ways in which capitalist trading relations affix

prices to commodities that crystallize out their

abstract value (but see Fireside and Miller,

2005). All the focus is on the economic bene-

fits – never on the social, political and envir-

onmental ills that commodity production and

trade so often entails.

Going back to David Ricardo’s nineteenth-

century account ofcomparative advantage–

which abstracted from the political–economic

imperatives that were driving British manufac-

turers to seek new foreign markets for their prod-

ucts – abstractions such as ‘opportunity costs’

have continually led economists to obscure the

uneven international and personal power

relations in which trade takes place. Yet notwith-

standing endless economicmodellingdemon-

strating the supposed efficiencies of trade, and

notwithstanding the repeated emphasis on the

gains from trade in economics textbooks, the

geographical context of trade still matters – and

often reveals the losses from trade. This has

becomeespeciallyclearincontemporarydebates

over free trade and fair trade.

When the novelist Margaret Atwood joined

other Canadians in contesting the Canada–

USA Free Trade Agreement, she pointed

to the discursive power of free trade by under-

lining how it hinges on the positive association

of the word ‘free’, ‘as in free gift, free lunch, free

world and free speech’ (Atwood, 1993, p. 93).

Against this, Atwood argued that free trade in

fact represented the systematic straitjacketing

of Canada’s democratic autonomy and policy-

setting freedom. Many other critics in Canada

repeated the argument that free trade threa-

tened everything from public health services

to national development initiatives to food

safety to cultural creativity. Subsequent pro-

tests from Seattle to Singapore have made simi-

lar arguments against the world trade

organisation, underlining the many areas

of social, political and environmental policy-

making that are straitjacketed by trade laws

(Peet, 2003; Wallach and Woodall, 2004). At

the heart of these criticisms is a concern with

the ways in which free trade agreements create

systems of rule or state effects that, while grant-

ing TNCs quasi-constitutional rights, simul-

taneously undermine any sort of democratic

rights for the subject populations who want to

question and reform the new rules (Gill, 2003;

El Fisgo ́n, 2004; Sparke, Brown, Corva et al.,

2005). Based on these concerns and critiques,

diverse transnational groupings from the

world social forumto the Intercontinental

Caravan are converging to deliberate and de-

lineate diverse alternatives, including diverse

forms of fair trade (Featherstone, 2003; Rou-

tledge, 2003; Sparke, Brown, Corva et al.,

2005; Routledge, Nativel and Cumbers,

2006). Meanwhile, new work by feminist eco-

nomic geographers points hopefully (and des-

pite its capitalist government funding) towards

non-capitalist, extra-capitalist and, most ideal-

istically, post-capitalist forms of trade that is

‘free’ – frompoverty,patriarchyand corpor-

ate control (Gibson-Graham, 2006c: see also

feminist geographies). ms

tragedy of the commons A short-hand

for the popular assumption thatcollectivere-

source management– as opposed to private

or state-control ofresources- will inevitably

fail. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ was first

elaborated by Hardin (1968) as an extended

metaphorfor thinking about the need for so-

cial and institutional solutions to population

growth. Hardin sought to highlight how de-

cisions that are rational at the level of the indi-

vidual (about family size) can yield outcomes

that are far from optimal for society (what he

called the ‘population problem’). His aim was

to ‘exorcise the spirit of Adam Smith’ in demo-

graphy – that the pursuit of individual gain

would promote the public interest – and to

make the case for restrictions on ‘the freedom

to breed’. To make his point, Hardin asked

readers to ‘picture a pasture open to all’ upon

which herdsmen could stock as many cattle as

they saw fit. Each herder, he argued, would

further his or her self-interest by adding ani-

mals to the pasture, yet if all herders pursued

this strategy, the collective result would be

overgrazing: thus would ‘freedom in the com-

mons bring ruin to all’.

Hardin’s model has travelled widely within

academic and policy circles over the past four

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 766 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS