Abstract
Any historian who attempted to look back into Ancient Times to find the forerunners of spatial economic analysis would be setting out on a dangerous venture and would be laying himself open to two risks. Firstly that of betraying certain doctrines and arbitrarily uncovering a significance which had remained oblivious to the authors. Secondly, of undermining the concept of economic space to the point of depriving it of its abstract nature. This in turn could lead to people wrongly attributing to spatial economics certain well-founded concrete notions of economic or political geography.
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References
This idea was first defended in the original French edition of this book. Cf. Ponsard (C.): Histoire des theories economiques spatiales. Paris, Librairie A.Colin, 1958.
On this matter, see Popescu (O.) [223]. It seems that this Argentinian economist was the first to see Cantillon as a precursor of space economics. See also Spengler (J.J.) [233] and Hebert (R.F.)[727]
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© 1983 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Ponsard, C. (1983). Before Thunen. In: History of Spatial Economic Theory. Texts and Monographs in Economics and Mathematical Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82125-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82125-7_2
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