Geoeconomic Imaginations and Economic Geography in the Early Twentieth Century

The geoeconomic discourses that underpinned the commercial expansion of the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century drew on and produced an imagined geography that positioned the United States in the center of a world in which commerce and trade moved freely around a globe comprised of nations whose economic growth potentials were just being realized. Drawing on two case studies of large corporations that expanded outside the United States, and in response to scholarly interrogations of the historicization of geoeconomics and geopolitics, I argue that geoeconomic imaginations fueled and legitimized economic expansion in the early decades of the twentieth century, thus refiguring the narrative that positions geoeconomics as a more recent phenomenon and reconceptualizing the term geoeconomics as a discursive field. In addition, by analyzing the intersections of the discourses of civilization, geoeconomics, and commercial geography, I provide an important new chapter in critical examinations of the histories of geography.