In 2007, Harvey was listed as the 18th most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences in that year, as established by counting citations from academic journals in the Thomson Reuters ISI database.

Harvey's early work, beginning with his PhD (on hops production in 19th century Kent), was historical in nature, emerging from a regional-historical tradition of inquiry widely used at Cambridge and in Britain at that time.

He has never returned to embrace the arguments made in Explanation, but still he conforms to the critique of absolute space and exceptionalism in geography of the regional-historical tradition that he saw as an outcome of Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge.

[9] The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), written while a professor at Oxford, was a best-seller (the London The Independent named it as one of the fifty most important works of non-fiction to be published since 1945, and it is cited 50,000 times by 2023).

The onset of US military action since 2001 has provoked a critique – in The New Imperialism (2003) he argues that the war in Iraq allows US neo-conservatives to divert attention from the failures of capitalism 'at home'.

This work conceptualises the neoliberalised global political economy as a system that benefits few at the expense of many, and which has resulted in the (re)creation of class distinction through what Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession".

[10] A series of events linked to this book across London academic forums, such as the LSE, proved popular[quantify] and sparked a new interest in Harvey's work.

[citation needed] Harvey returned to Johns Hopkins from Oxford in 1993, but spent increasing time elsewhere as a speaker and visitor, notably as a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics in the late 1990s.

He has spent most of his academic career in Anglo-America, with brief sojourns in France and a range of foreign visiting appointments (currently as acting Advisory Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai).

Several of these, such as Neil Smith, Richard Walker, Erik Swyngedouw, Michael Johns, Maarten Hajer, Patrick Bond, Melissa Wright, and Greg Ruiters now hold or held important academic positions themselves.

In 2013 Harvey was asked by the Republic of Ecuador to help set up the National Strategic Center for the Right to the Territory (CENEDET),[12] which he directed with the urbanist Miguel Robles-Durán until its alleged forced closure in 2017.

Two constants in Harvey's life and work have been teaching a course on Marx's Capital[13] and his support for student activism and community and labour movements (notably in Baltimore).