Historically, the Anglo-American economies have been driven by the forces of capitalism and the role of economic geographers has been to follow, research and report the mechanisms and adaptations of the capitalist economy. In the UK the years immediately following the Second World War were a time of rebuilding a crippled economy. British public debt, as a share of GDP, stood at 250% in 1945 (Pettifor, 2009). Following a period of austerity the 1950s and 1960s saw a period often referred to as the 'golden era' of capitalism (Burke & Puty, 2004). In the UK, during 1955, unemployment fell to a reported "post-war low of just over 215,000 - barely 1% of the workforce" (BBC News, 1999). The Anglo-American economies were dominated by Fordist mass-production in the fifties and sixties in which identical products were manufactured to meet the demands of wealthier consumers. During this period economic geography was concerned with industry and the spatial and regional aspects of industrial economic development (Bryson, et al., 1999). For example large industrial firms, such as Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), Rover Company and the British Motor Corporation, became the focus of economic geographers' attention. By 1960 the Longbridge plant in Birmingham had become the largest car manufacturing site in the world employing over 250 000 people. The factory fuelled migration to the area and resulted in the city's population peaking at over one million. The focus therefore for economic geographers was firstly of a descriptive nature, describing the spread of industries, whilst also attempting to explain "why and in what ways regions" differed from each other (Bryson, et al., 1999, p. 8). These descriptive and theoretical explanations were accompanied by efforts to make geography as a whole more analytical (Scott, 2000). As a consequence, economic geographers undertook spatial analysis and sought a "commitment to rationalism" (Wood & Roberts, 2011, p.