1 Chapter 1 The Rise of Cultural Economic Geography Al James, Ron Martin and Peter Sunley Introductory chapter in Martin, R.L. and Sunley, P. (eds.) 2006. Critical Concepts in Economic Geography: Volume IV, Cultural Economy London: Routledge. Final draft – 12 February 2007 (4875 words plus references) Introduction The rise of cultural economic geography over the last two decades is one of the most significant, exciting, and contentious developments in the sub-discipline’s recent history. Received wisdom has long held ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ as self-determining entities; each with its own discrete set of institutions, rationalities and conditions of existence; indeed each defined by what the other is not: ‘economy’ as irreducibly instrumental, materialistic, vulgar, tangible and devoid of morality; ‘culture’ as non-instrumental, intrinsic, aesthetic, normative and intangible (see Jackson, 2002). However, since the early 1990s economic geographers increasingly have embraced a range of more fluid and hybrid conceptions of ‘the economic’ that emphasize its mutual constitution by, and hence fundamental inseparability from, ‘the cultural’ (see for example Lee, 1989; Thrift and Olds, 1996; Barnett, 1998; P. Crang, 1997; Lee and Wills, 1997; Massey, 1997; Peet, 1997; Sayer, 1997). Under the broad banner of ‘cultural economy’ geographers have – on the one hand – examined how ‘traditional’ economic concerns of capital, production, exchange, valuation and consumption, operate within, and impact on, the spatially variable sets of socio-cultural conventions, norms, attitudes, values and beliefs of the societies within which economic decisions and practices take place; and – on the other hand – how these economic categories are themselves discursively as well as materially constructed, practised, and performed at different spatial scales. In so doing, scholars have sought to put back into economic geographical analysis that which should never have been taken out (see Amin and Thrift, 2004, p. xiv).