A World of Difference, Second Edition

Widely regarded as the authoritative text on development geography, this volume examines the nature and causes of global inequality and critically analyzes contemporary approaches to economic development across the third world. Students gain a deeper understanding of the interacting dynamics of culture, gender, race, and class; biophysical factors, such as climate, population, and natural resources; and economic and political processesall of which have led to the present-day disparities between the first and third worlds. Numerous examples, sidebars, and figures illustrate how people in the Global South are experiencing and contesting the forces of globalization.

Widely regarded as the authoritative text on development geography, this volume examines the nature and causes of global inequality and critically analyzes contemporary approaches to economic development across the third world. Students gain a deeper understanding of the interacting dynamics of culture, gender, race, and class; biophysical factors, such as climate, population, and natural resources; and economic and political processes—all of which have led to the present-day disparities between the first and third worlds. Numerous examples, sidebars, and figures illustrate how people in the Global South are experiencing and contesting the forces of globalization.

I. Differentiated Ways of Knowing1. Introduction2. Measuring, Describing, and Mapping Difference and Development3. Knowing the Third World: Colonial Encounters4. Knowing the Third World: The Development Decades5. The Third World and Neoliberal GlobalizationII. Differentiated Livelihoods and the Nonhuman World6. Geographies of Population: Discourse and Politics7. Contested Environments: The Entanglements of Environment, Development, and Globalization8. Disease and Health9. Uncertain Rains: The Atmospheric Energy Cycle and the Hydrologic Cycle10. Other Challenges to Rural Livelihood: Soils, Vegetation, and Pests11. Nature as Latitudinal Trickster: The Carbon Cycle and Plant Growth12. The Management of Tropical and Subtropical Ecosystems: The Pokot of West Central Kenya—An Indigenous Knowledge SystemIII. Differentiated Social Relations Encountering Global Strategies13. The Historical Geography of Colonialism and the Slave Trade14. Colonialism as Spatial and Labor Control System15. The End of Colonialism and the Promise of Free Trade16. Trading Primary Commodities17. Peripheral Industrialization: Paths and Strategies18. The Earth's Crust as Resource19. Urbanization, Migration, and Spatial Polarization20. Transnational Production21. Foreign Branch Plants and Economic Growth22. Money and Global Finance Markets, with Bongman Seo23. Borrowing Money: Aid, Debt, and Dependence, with Bongman Seo24. Toward Different Worlds