Historian Fernand Braudel started associating the history of economy-world to that of its capitals in his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. He attributed to the discretion of the empire’s logic the act of transferring summarily the capital to Madrid, the weight of the Habsburg Empire’s decadence, pointing out the importance of capitals. Capitals are seen by Braudel as political-territorial strategies of long-term economic development. In this project, theoretical issues on political-territorial debates, which led to the choice of the capitals’ locations,are seen as important facts of mankind’s epistemological and historical conquest of space. Do geographical theories also move worlds? This research has three main objectives. Firstly, it aims to analyze based on primary sources the controversies generated in the process of choosing the location of three capitals, Madrid (decision stamped in 1561), Washington (1791), and Brasília (1955), and go through specific geographical theories that were in conflict with each other and that made definitive choices possible. This is an epistemological step. From these controversies and cartographic sources, this research aims to associate these epistemological logical reasonings to the process of material colonization and national territory development and cartographic typology of different forms of territorial conquest in political-economic regions and structures of the capitalist economy-world: the empires, capitalism, and peripheries. This step takes place in the sphere of historical geography. Finally, the third objective is to test the hypothesis that these epistemological and material logical reasonings can refer to three different theoretical standards which correspond to three key moments of the capitalist economy-world.
Mots clés : geographical theories|national capitals|way of development|territorial planning|controversies
A103027LA