Respatialising Finance. Sarah Hall

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Respatialising Finance - Sarah Hall


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been applied to its international economic development aspirations (Lim 2018). However, my analysis shows that intervention from the UK government, particularly through the then Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, was also important.

      This analysis demonstrates the need for economic geographical research, and work in cognate social sciences, to place questions of the state, politics and power more centrally within work on the geographies of money and finance. Responding to this challenge forms the conceptual contribution of the book. Here, I argue that the meso scale of the international financial centre, bringing together the predominately macro-economic concerns of international political economy research on monetary transformation with the micro scale analysis of cultural economy approaches to financial market making, provides a valuable way of doing this. Before setting out the content of the subsequent chapters, I expand on this conceptual contribution made in Respatialising Finance.

      Chinese Finance and the Geographies of Money

      Narratives of monetary change and transformation, as well as work on international financial centres such as London, are by no means new within geographical research on money and finance. Respatialising Finance takes this literature as its starting point. Indeed, in many ways, processes of change and transformation have always characterised the development of the international financial system. For example, the collapse of the gold standard in the early 1970s and the associated move to floating exchange rates was a transformative moment in global finance and, as such, acted as a key development around which heterodox social scientists mobilised to create several of the key texts and seminal understandings of the contemporary international financial system (Corbridge et al. 1994; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Strange 1986). One of the most significant insights to be developed within this work was an approach to the international financial system that emphasised its networked properties from a distinctly geographical perspective. In this work, the international financial system is understood as a series of networks of people, money, expertise, policy and regulation that are choreographed through a small number of international financial centres (Cassis and Wójcik 2018; Sassen 2001). This work is reflected in work in a range of social scientific disciplines adopting networks as a metaphor, theoretical approach and methodology to the study of money and finance including in geography (Pollard and Samers 2007), political economy (Fichtner et al. 2017) and cultural economy approaches to money and finance (MacKenzie 2004).

      Whilst the power of IFCs within global finance clearly pre-dates the 2007–2008 financial crisis, these centres serve to crystallise and reveal some of the most profound changes taking place within global finance. For example, during the 2000s, a focus on the financial labour markets within IFCs revealed a growing trend for quantitatively skilled financiers capable of working on the securitised financial markets that were central to both the period of finance-led growth in the 2000s and the ensuing financial crisis (Hall 2006; Hall and Appleyard 2009). Building on this work on elite financial labour markets, the initial motivation for the research project that underpins this book came from a growing recognition that the geographical composition of these labour markets was changing quite profoundly. In particular, I was struck by the growth of Chinese nationals working in IFCs, notably in London from the early 2010s onwards. This became the subject of several national newspaper headlines as headhunters struggled to recruit the number of mandarin speaking financiers demanded in London’s financial district and Chinese state-owned banks began operating in the heart of London’s international financial district (see, for example, Stafford 2015). Previous work has clearly demonstrated how other waves of internationalisation have shaped London as an IFC and by extension the international financial system, most notably the rise of investment banking business models led by US and later European banks at the expense of British merchant banking (Kynaston 2002). However, in the mid-2010s, very little had been written about the rise of Chinese financial institutions in London.

      The case of RMB internationalisation also indicates how work on the spatial imaginaries of IFCs themselves can also be helpfully developed. In much of the work on IFCs to date, they are assumed, albeit implicitly, to be facilitators of global financial flows through the networks of advanced producer service (APS) firms that cluster within them. However, if we attend to the politics of these networks, by extension the analysis in Respatialising Finance calls for a more active understanding of IFCs beyond that of more passive containers. This approach draws attention to the ways in which IFCs themselves are changed by as well as changing global finance.

      Politics, Power and Respatialising Understandings of International Financial Centres

      In order to develop understandings of IFCs within RMB internationalisation, I locate my analysis within work on international political economy that has been centrally concerned with RMB internationalisation. Indeed, whilst the geographical literature had paid relatively little attention to the process of RMB internationalisation and Chinese financial market reform more widely, there is a growing literature led by international political economy (IPE) scholars (Eichengreen 2012; Prasad 2017). This literature draws on wider debates in international political economy that are broadly concerned with the intersection between money and state power (and interestingly, whilst recent geographical scholarship on international finance has typically focused on finance, IPE work has tended to focus on money). This work explores how currency competition contributes to the changing distribution of power internationally (Cohen 1998).


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