46 2. Geography, uneven development and population density: attempting a non-ethnocentric approach to development Erik S. Reinert, Salah Chafik and Xuan Zhao In every inquiry concerning the operations of men when united together in society, the first object of attention should be their mode of subsistence. Accordingly as that YDULHV WKHLU ODZV DQG SROLFLHV PXVW EH GLIIHUHQW :LOOLDP 5REHUWVRQ ௅ The History of America, 1777) At the very start of his bestselling book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Landes 1998), Harvard economic historian David Landes laments the loss of geography as an academic discipline: ‘When Harvard simply abolished the geography department after World War II, hardly a voice protested … Subsequently a string of leading universities – Michigan, Northwestern, Chicago, Columbia – followed suit, again without serious objection. These repudiations have no parallel in the history of American higher education’. One general explanation for this would be that ‘the hardening of the para- digm’ of development economics (Jomo and Reinert 2005: xxii) increasingly left out qualitative issues, much as happened to history – the so-called his- torical schools virtually died out – giving way to mathematics. However, as regards geography, Landes has a more specific explanation, one that hits much harder today than it did when the book was written in the 1990s: ‘Geography had been tainted with a racist brush and no one wanted to be contaminated’ (Landes 1998: 4). Landes emphasizes the role of Yale University professor Ellsworth +XQWLQJWRQ ௅ ZKR µLQ VSLWH RI PXFK XVHIXO DQG UHYHDOLQJ UHVHDUFK¶ (Landes 1998: 3), went too far in connecting the physical environment and human activity (Huntington 1925). It became a defence of Eurocentrism and, in the end, racism. This was, in the words of James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World (Blaut 1993; see also Blaut 2000; Krugman 1991). We certainly agree with Blaut that the model of geographic diffusionism is essentially based not on the facts of history and geography, but on the ideology of colonialism. As indicated in the initial quotation in this chapter, we believe