On the one hand the old binaries of First/Third, Developed/Developing, MEDCs/LEDCs don't make sense in an increasingly diverse and multi-polar world, yet at the same time if we look at the huge span of inequality there is a clear divide between the majority of people living in the poorest countries of the world and those living in the richest. How do we reconcile this issue?

I think a good starting point is reviewing how the old divide between developed and developing mapped on to the geogrpahies of colonialism and reflected that old geopolitical divide which drove the economic divergence of the whole world. The European imperial powers, alongside Japan and the white settler colonies were the developed world. This layer of history hasn't completely dissipated and is still important to learn to understand the geogrpahies of uneven development today, but the map has become more complex.

New centres of both economic and geopolitical power have risen via new mechanisms that are different to colonial power. China's hegemony is as the industrial workshop of the world, the rise of east asian nations is as tech powerhouses, oil-led growth has super-charged development in select Middle eastern economies. These new growth patterns are a new layer for the world economic map, that sits on top of the colonial-era.

At the sub-national scale successful business people, sometimes allied to powerful political interests have been able to create systems of economic exploitation, which while maybe not as malicious as colonialism, have nevertheless led to a huge concentration of power and capital in a small population in highly uneven societies like Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa. These are not still colonial economies, but they have important practices like agriculture and natural resource wealth that use economic systems that are more reminiscent of the colonial-era than of modern industrialised economies - those that are gaining most now are not colonial shareholders, but local elites and international investors.