Where’s the capital? A geographical essay Gareth A. Jones Abstract This paper is inspired by Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty does a wonderful job of tracing income and wealth over time, and relating changes to trends of economic and population growth, and drawing out the implications for inequality, inheritance and even democracy. But, he says relatively little about where capital is located, how capital accumulation in one place relies on activities elsewhere, how capital is urbanized with advanced capi- talism and what life is like in spaces without capital. This paper asks ‘where is the geography in Capital’ or ‘where is the geography of capital in Capital’? Following Piketty’s lead, the paper develops its analysis through a number of important novels. It examines, first, the debate that Jane Austen ignored colonialism and slavery in her treatment of nineteenth century Britain, second, how Balzac and then Zola provide insight to the urban political economy of capital later in the century, and third, how Katherine Boo attends to inequality as the everyday suffering of the poor. Keywords: Cities; inequality; novels; Piketty; social justice; suffering Introduction Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a rare thing. Its 600 pages offer a descriptive, occasionally technical, account on the dry subject of economic change and inequality.Yet, it has received widespread academic and popular interest, provoking debate in university classrooms, in the media and across a few dinner tables. The author has done a fantastic job of pulling out ‘Capital’s’ key messages and communicating them to a wide audience. In the UK at least, the release of Capital is well timed. As this essay is being written the most hyped television programme in the Autumn schedule is series five of ‘Downton Abbey’, my local cinema is showing the film ‘Riot Club’ that Jones (Department of Geography and Environment, LondonSchool of Economics and Political Science) (Corresponding author email: g.a.jones@lse.ac.uk) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2014 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12112 The British Journal of Sociology 2014 Volume 65 Issue 4