de Blij, Harm. The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny and Globalization's Rough Landscape.

• Author: Broad, David B.
• Position: Book review

de Blij, Harm. The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny and Globalization's Rough Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 280 pages. Hardcover, $27.95.

As the subtitle of this book suggests, this volume is largely conceived and structured as a response to the widely read and acclaimed 2005 book by Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. Harm de Blij argues that the socio-economic topography of the earth remains "rough" and, in many respects, is getting rougher. The geographic contexts in which the author makes these arguments are breath-taking in breadth of scope. He anchors this wide analysis of the geo-everything of the present in some uniquely geographic conceptual tools. For those of us who were educated in the dark days before de Blij and the renaissance of geography of which he is a major exponent, this book is an eye-opener.

Though trained as a geographer, de Blij is a sociologist in the sense that he is keenly aware that class structures individual human experience and therefore the large majority of people in the world are localites, not global villagers who stay in Hiltons and fly business class. The typology that he uses throughout this volume to identify the ways that various groups inhabit the rough topography of the earth includes the globals of whom Friedman made the case for flatness, the locals who are the vast majority of the earth's inhabitants (most of whom live and die within a few miles of their birthplaces), and the mobals who may be trained and even educated but most of whom are unskilled and semi-skilled workers who reside wherever there is work. Marxian sociologists might call these categories ruling class (globals), variable capital (mobals), and Lumpenproletariat (locals). But de Blij is probably better thought of as the Max Weber of the new geography. He grounds his analysis in class and economic relations, but he elaborates through an examination of language, religion, health issues, and the many dynamic situations that derive from the mixture of the forces of globalization and roughness of human geographic topography.

The roughness of the global terrain is largely structured by the existence of a global core and a global periphery. The core consists of the industrialized, economically diverse states once referred to as the 'First World.' There are barriers, both physical and cultural, between the core and periphery. The borders of the United States, for example...