Economic geography is a relatively young modern science, but its development has a long history. It has gone through three stages from the accumulation of ancient economic geography data, the formation and evolution of modern disciplines to modern economic geography. As early as 2000 years ago, due to the need of developing production and improving life, human beings began to observe and record the geographical environment, production activities and the distribution of various related phenomena from all aspects, and gradually accumulated economic geography knowledge. The early accounts of economic geography are mostly found in the works of historians, such as:
Strappo, an ancient Greek historian, wrote Geography with a volume of 17, describing the natural features, products, residents and customs of all parts of the world known to Europeans at that time, which can be said to be the earliest humanistic and economic geography in the West.
Biography of Historical Records of Huo Zhi compiled by Sima Qian, a historian of the Western Han Dynasty in China, describes the population, economy, products, trade and cities in the Yellow River basin and the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.
Han Shu, edited by Ban Gu, a historian of the Eastern Han Dynasty, includes Geography and Food, which describes the mountains and rivers, products, household registration, cities, farmland system, taxation, warehousing, water transport, agriculture and animal husbandry, handicrafts, mining and markets all over the country.
Since then, the compilation of official history has inherited this style and accumulated rich historical, economic and geographical data. By the ninth century, regional geography appeared in the Arab world, describing the products, commerce and transportation in West Asia and the Mediterranean coast. Almost at the same time, China local chronicles became popular. It is estimated that in the next thousand years, more than 10,000 kinds of local chronicles will be published all over the country. Its contents include administrative evolution, mountains and rivers, household registration, farming, products, water conservancy facilities, roads, transportation, tributes, cities, customs, disasters, folk customs and so on. , with a geographical map.
From A.D. 14 to A.D. 17, the seeds of capitalism appeared in Europe. With the great geographical discovery, new navigation channels were opened, the new continent was discovered, a large number of people emigrated overseas, plundered colonial resources and expanded the world market. Therefore, the geographical environment, resource distribution, economic production, transportation, commercial centers and import cities around the world have been extensively investigated and studied, which has promoted the development of commercial geography, the predecessor of economic geography.
During this period, because most of the feudal governments in Ming and Qing Dynasties after the early Ming Dynasty implemented the sea ban, China was basically unaffected by the great geographical discovery and was not open to the outside world, so that economic geography works stayed in local chronicles.
1760, Russian scientist lomonosov first put forward the name "economic geography", pointing out that the study of national economy must be combined with geographical conditions. 1882, German geographer Gotz published The Task of Economic Geography, and discussed the nature and composition of economic geography.
Compared with the previous commercial geography, the research scope of economic geography is wider and the content is more systematic, which indicates that economic geography has been separated from geography and become an independent discipline. Around this time, German economist Tu Neng put forward the theory of agricultural location in 1826, Weber put forward industrial location theory in 1909, geographer Christalle put forward the theory of center in 1933, and economist Liao Shi 1940 published "Location Economics", which was gradually enriched.
China began to accept western economic geography in the 1920s, mainly by giving lectures and sending overseas students to Europe and America. By the end of 1940s, 10 many university geography departments had systematically taught economic geography, among which the school of statistical narration represented by Staples in Britain had a wide influence. During this period, China's economic geography work was mainly about population distribution, land use, agricultural division, frontier investigation and regional investigation.
The second world war obviously promoted the popularization of geographical knowledge. The economic recovery and construction of countries after the war promoted the development of economic geography. Before World War II, the central theory of economic geography was distribution theory, which paid attention to regional differences. After the war, it entered the stage of modern location theory and landscape type theory research.
Since the 1960s, with the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, the increasing application of computers, the strength of social productive forces and the application of new technologies, and the improvement of people's living standards in most countries in the world, the original socio-economic structure and living environment have been rapidly changed, and a series of new global or regional problems have emerged in the regional layout created by economic activities and the relationship between human activities and geographical environment. This new situation puts forward a new topic for economic geography, which requires discussing the formation process and development direction of the regional system of social and economic activities.