w The primary result of these enquiriesas to show that (a) capitalism could not survive without being geographically expansionary (and perpetually seeking out “spatial fixes” for its problems), (b) that major innovations in transport and communication technologies were necessary conditions for that expansion to occur (hence the emphasis in capitalism’s evolution on technologies that facilitated speed up and the progressive diminution of spatial barriers to movement of commodities, people, information and ideas over space) and (c) its modes of geographical expansion depended crucially upon whether it was the search for markets, fresh labor powers, resources (raw materials) or fresh opportunities to invest in new production facilities that was chiefly at stake. On this latter point there is a strong connection between how the overaccumulation of capital (the central indicator of crisis in Marx’s theory) is manifest and how the spatial fix gets pursued. Overaccumulation, in its most virulent form (as occurred in the 1930s, for example) is registered as surpluses of labor and capital side by side with seemingly no way to put them together in productive, i.e. “profitable” as opposed to socially useful ways. If the crisis cannot be resolved, then the result is massive devaluation of both capital and labor (bankruptcies, idle factories and machines, unsold commodities, and unemployed laborers). Devaluation can sometimes lead to physical destruction (surplus commodities get burned and laborers die of starvation) and even war (the whole sequence of events that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s came close to such a scenario). But there are ways to stave off such an outcome. In practice, most crisis phases combine selective devaluations with strategies to alleviate the difficulties. One such strategy is to seek out some “spatial fix” to the problem. If, for example, a crisis of localized overaccumulation occurs within a particular region or territory then the export of capital and labor surpluses to some new territory to start up new production would make most sense (as, for example, in the migration of both labor and capital across the Atlantic from Britain to North America in the crisis years of the nineteenth century).