Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies

Time-Space Compression If geography is the study of how human beings are stretched over the earth’s surface, a vital p...

Author: Barney Warf

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Time-Space Compression

If geography is the study of how human beings are stretched over the earth’s surface, a vital part of that process is how we know and feel about space and time. Although space and time appear as “natural” and outside of society, they are in fact social constructions; every society develops different ways of measuring, organizing, and perceiving them. Given steady increases in the volume and velocity of social transactions over space, time and space have steadily “shrunk” via the process of time-space compression. By changing the time-space prisms of daily life—how people use their times and spaces, the opportunities and constraints they face, the meanings they attach to them—time-space compression is simultaneously economic, cultural, social, political, and psychological in nature. This book explores how various social institutions and technologies historically generated enormous improvements in transportation and communications that produced transformative reductions in the time and cost of interactions among places, creating ever-changing geographies of centrality and peripherality. Warf invokes a global perspective on early modern, late modern, and postmodern capitalism. He makes use of data concerning travel times at various historical junctures, maps of distances between places at different historical moments, anecdotal analyses based on published accounts of people’s sense of place, examinations of cultural forms that represented space (e.g., paintings), and quotes about the culture of speed. Warf shows how time-space compression varies under different historical and geographical conditions, indicating that it is not one, single, homogeneous process but a complex, contingent, and contested one. This book will be useful for those studying and researching Geography, History, Sociology, and Political Science, as well as Anthropology and Philosophy. Barney Warf is Professor of Geography at Florida State University. His research and teaching interests lie within the broad domain of human geography, particularly economic and political issues, ranging from contemporary political economy and social theory to traditional quantitative, empirical approaches. He has authored, co-authored or co-edited six books, 25 book chapters, and 80 journal articles, and won teaching and research awards.

Routledge Studies in Human Geography

This series provides a forum for innovative, vibrant, and critical debate within Human Geography. Titles will reflect the wealth of research which is taking place in this diverse and ever-expanding field. Contributions will be drawn from the main sub-disciplines and from innovative areas of work which have no particular sub-disciplinary allegiances.

Published 1. A Geography of Islands Small island insularity Stephen A. Royle 2. Citizenships, Contingency and the Countryside Rights, culture, land and the environment Gavin Parker 3. The Differentiated Countryside Jonathan Murdoch, Philip Lowe, Neil Ward and Terry Marsden 4. The Human Geography of East Central Europe David Turnock 5. Imagined Regional Communities Integration and sovereignty in the Global South James D. Sidaway 6. Mapping Modernities Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe 1920–2000 Alan Dingsdale

7. Rural Poverty Marginalisation and exclusion in Britain and the United States Paul Milbourne 8. Poverty and the Third Way Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank 9. Ageing and Place Edited by Gavin J. Andrews and David R. Phillips 10. Geographies of Commodity Chains Edited by Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer 11. Queering Tourism Paradoxical performances at gay pride parades Lynda T. Johnston 12. Cross-Continental Food Chains Edited by Niels Fold and Bill Pritchard 13. Private Cities Edited by Georg Glasze, Chris Webster and Klaus Frantz

14. Global Geographies of Post-Socialist Transition Tassilo Herrschel 15. Urban Development in Post-Reform China Fulong Wu, Jiang Xu and Anthony Gar-On Yeh 16. Rural Governance International perspectives Edited by Lynda Cheshire, Vaughan Higgins and Geoffrey Lawrence 17. Global Perspectives on Rural Childhood and Youth Young rural lives Edited by Ruth Panelli, Samantha Punch, and Elsbeth Robson 18. World City Syndrome Neoliberalism and inequality in Cape Town David A. McDonald 19. Exploring Post-development Aram Ziai 20. Family Farms Harold Brookfield and Helen Parsons 21. China on the Move Migration, the state, and the household C. Cindy Fan

22. Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods Connecting people, participation and place Sara Kindon, Rachel Pain and Mike Kesby 23. Time-Space Compression Historical geographies Barney Warf

Not yet published 24. International Migration and Knowledge Allan Williams and Vladimir Balaz 25. Design Economies and the Changing World Economy Innovation, production and competitiveness John Bryson and Grete Rustin 26. Whose Urban Renaissance? An international comparison of urban regeneration policies Libby Porter and Katie Shaw 27. Tourism Geography A new synthesis, second edition Stephen Williams

Time-Space Compression Historical geographies

Barney Warf

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Barney Warf All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Warf, Barney, 1956– Time-space compression / By Barney Warf. p. cm.—(Historical geographies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Space and time. 2. Human geography. I. Title. BD632.W37 2008 304.2′3—dc22 2007037732 ISBN 0-203-93805-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–41803–8 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–93805–4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41803–4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–93805–8 (ebk)

Contents

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgments

ix xi xiii

1

Introduction: folding time and space

1

2

Theorizing time-space compression

14

3

Early modern time-space compression

40

4

Late modern time-space compression

78

5

Postmodern time-space compression

167

6

Concluding thoughts

213

Bibliography Index

219 249

Figures

1.1 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

The conventional, technologically determinant view of time-space compression The classic model of time-space convergence Global flows of silver, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries The British canal system, eighteenth century Isolines of accessibility throughout Europe and Middle East, eighteenth century Growth of the French railroad system, 1850–1890 Accessibility to London by railroad in 1845 and 1910 The U.S. railroad system in 1860 and 1890 Isochrones of travel times from New York, 1830 and 1857 Standardized world time zones as defined by the 1884 Conference Transatlantic steamship routes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Suez Canal’s impacts on absolute distances between Europe and Asia Isochrones of travel times from Central Berlin throughout Brandenburg in 1819, 1851, 1875 and 1899 Relative global trade and output levels, 1950–2005 Number of nuclear weapons held by U.S. and USSR, 1945–2005 U.S. Interstate Highway system Satellite footprints generate instantaneous time-space compression The global fiber optic network, 2005 Annual number of shares traded on NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange, 1975–2001 Growth of Internet hosts worldwide, 1981–2006 Global Internet penetration rate, 2006

7 16 47 70 72 90 93 96 99 104 106 109 119 158 160 164 177 185 186 195 200

Tables

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2

U.S. railroad and telegraph capacity, 1848–1902 Maximum attainable steamship velocities, 1798–1951 Transatlantic steamship crossing times, 1838–1900 Maximum aircraft cruising speeds and distances, 1906–1932 Inhabitants per passenger vehicle, 1905–1970 Passenger cars per 1,000 people in selected developed countries, 2003 World’s 20 largest airports, 2005 International tourism arrivals, 2005

98 105 107 147 153 155 174 175

Acknowledgments

Many people have generously shared their time, thoughts, and companionship with me and, among others, I wish to thank Paul Adams, Rob Kitchin, Martin Dodge, Bill Beyers, Stan Brunn, Don Janelle, Jan Kodras, Jonathan Leib, Dan Klooster, Mort Winsberg, Victor Mesev, Jim Elsner, Dan Sui, Nathan Stoltzfus, John Bryson, Peter Daniels, Darren Purcell, Tony Stallins, Jeff Ueland, Andy Walter, Gabriel Popescu, Joe Cox and Valerie Preston, Peter Meserve, Eric Clark, and Tom and Margaret Clark. I am grateful to the American Geographical Society for its support in the form of a Helen and John Best Fellowship at their library at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and to the wonderful staff there who patiently put up with my multiple inquiries and requests. Special thanks also to Benno Werlen and the Geography Department at the Friedrich Schiller University, in Jena, Germany, for their support and encouragement during a stay there. Shawn Lewers and Mike Sims did a great job with many of the graphics. I also appreciate the advice of Routledge editor Andrew Mould, Jennifer Page, and the other great people at that company. This volume would never have seen the light of day without the love and support of my father, James C. Warf, my brother Curren and his wife Susan Rabinowitz, as well as my sister Sandy and her partner Abe Landsberg. Gracias also to Luis, Mami, and Chino for all they have given me. I will always treasure the memories of Carmen and Linda. My love goes to my son, Derek Schwabe-Warf. Finally, there is Santa Arias, mi mejor amiga y esposa, mi vida, compañera, y mi amor, who has patiently helped me throughout, encouraged me, and given me comfort and advice. This volume is dedicated to her.

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Introduction Folding time and space

The goal of this book is to demonstrate how various societies have compressed time and space, shaped them toward their own ends, used them as sources of power, control, and resistance, experienced and gave them meaning symbolically and ideologically, and changed them historically and geographically. Different social formations gave time and space widely variable meanings, and, invariably, every set of understandings proved to be temporary and unstable, to be replaced by new forms and associations which, while always novel, were not necessarily better. Time and space are indispensable yet notoriously slippery topics. Few, if any, dimensions of social life are more important, yet few are so difficult to pin down conceptually; oceans of ink have been spilled trying to make sense of them. In part, this problem reflects the enormous diversity in the types of time and space that human beings have produced, from phenomenological time to geologic time, from the space of the body to the space of the global economy. Essentially, this work is concerned with how societies are stretched across time and space and how they interacted with each other, that is, how different relational geographies have been constructed and how they changed over time, and what these changes meant for the people who made these processes unfold. This book is concerned with the multiplicity of ways in which places have been tied together at different moments in historical time, the webs of interconnectedness within and among societies through which goods, people, ideas, technologies, and power relations flowed. Because space is not independent of time, it is therefore also the story of how time was conceived, measured, and changed. Its focus is on the shifting networks of centrality and peripherality that are integral to how humans produce, reproduce, and change their worlds. It addresses an exceptionally wide variety of topics, from calendars and clocks to trade and telecommunications, in the effort to understand the varying forms that relational space assumed, not simply in the postmodern present but also in the distant, very premodern past. The book therefore offers a capitalist, global historical geography of time and space, and by examining their changes, attempts to come to terms with how they have been differentially collapsed, or compressed, by different cultures. It draws freely from the literatures on transportation and communications,

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technological change, globalization, world systems, international trade, colonialism, and postcolonialism in an attempt to paint a comprehensive portrait of how time-space compression occurred under varying historical and geographic conditions. This project is not primarily concerned with Geography in the sense of an intellectual discipline produced by geographers, academic or otherwise; it is not a work about how geographers think, although it touches upon that issue from time to time, for geography as created and lived by people is much larger than Geography as an explicit corpus of knowledge. Time and space inevitably appear “natural” to people living within every social context, that is, as lying outside of society and beyond human control. Indeed, time and space seem so “natural” that they typically do not to need explanation. Hence Harvey (1990:418) maintains that “The social definitions of space and time operate with the full force of objective facts to which all individuals and institutions necessarily respond.” This process has important implications for the people who make space and time: as Loy (2001:263) puts it, “temporality is one of those social constructions which, once objectified, returns the compliment by objectifying us.” The same can be said about space. But recent scholarship has revealed how time and space are indeed social constructions; every society develops different ways of dealing with and perceiving them. For example, we find time, lose time, make time, invest time, kill time, borrow time, budget time, waste time, run out of time, etc. Far from being natural, time and space are socially created, plastic, mutable institutions that profoundly shape, just as they are shaped by, individual perceptions and social relations. The “meanings” of time and space (and meanings are always plural) are the subjective significance that they hold for people who experience and construct them in daily life, the daily rhythms of existence in which people engage as they construct their biographies. In making time and space, we make ourselves. Time and space are both “objective” and “subjective,” that is, they exist both as abstract entities that seem to take on lives of their own, and simultaneously, as lived experiences highly meaningful to the people who create and change them. The study of time and space is therefore much more than an abstract academic exercise, but an analysis of politics, for time and space are deeply implicated in how societies are structured and change and how people live within them. As Harvey (1990:419) puts it, “Each social formation constructs objective conceptions of space and time sufficient unto its own needs and purposes of material and social reproduction and organizes its material practices in accordance with those conceptions.”

Experiencing time and space Every individual’s experience of time and space is intimately bound up with the complex process of perception, of attaching symbolic meaning to sensations through language. If language is how we bring the world into


3

consciousness, it is central to how human beings construct and experience time and space. Psychological time is a function of our sensations and perceptions, which in turn produce a succession of mental states that we conceive as “time”; the same can be said about space. We never sense time and space directly, we can only experience phenomena located in time and space through chains of causes and effects. To view time as having an arrow, for example, is to perceive causation through time. In the same vein, spatial perception is a complex biological and cultural process that varies historically and geographically (Hatfield 1991); the significance of distance, of near and far, accessibility and inaccessibility, inside and outside, all of these are culturally specific terms for making sense of spatiality. Time and space as social constructions rely upon discursive textual, and artistic representations of people’s experiences, among other things. An adequate understanding, therefore, must take into account the psychology of spatial sensation, perception, and cognition, a topic well explored by behavioral geographers (e.g., Couclelis and Golledge 1983). Simultaneously, perceptions of time and space are intimately linked to prevailing relations of power: as Harvey (1989a) notes, the measurement of, and thus the command over, space and time are essential instruments of political control. The spaces of the earth have, of course, been viewed in widely dissimilar ways by various cultures throughout history. Thus, as Crang (2005:203) writes, “The differing sense of space of different epochs is not just a story about accuracy of measurement, it is about differing societies’ relationship to space.” Many cultures feel themselves to be living at the center of all time and space. Louis Mumford (1934:16) captured this idea well in stating that “Each culture believes that every other space and time is an approximation to or perversion of the real space and time in which it lives.” Since time and space do not exist as “objective” processes independent of how people interpret, make sense, and feel about them, it is imperative for a theory of how time and space are constructed to address issues such as the sociology and psychology of time. Individual and social perceptions of time and space are therefore heavily contingent on how they are measured, which is itself a highly fluid and culturally specific phenomenon. To note that time and space can never be divorced, however, is not to claim that they are identical. Space and time are different, and simply combining them into one space-time does not acknowledge their variations: we measure them differently, experience them differently, and give meaning to them differently. One can avoid moving in space simply by staying still; that person cannot help but move in time. The existence of a space-time notwithstanding, time exhibits properties that space never can: existence and movement in time are always irreversible, for example. As Reichenbach (1958:109) notes, “Time has generally been considered as an ordering schema similar to, but simpler than, that of space, simpler because it has only one dimension.” Unlike space, time is characterized by a single direction, an arrow that flows irreversibly from past to future; as Hawking (1988) asks, why can we

4


remember the past but not predict the future? Other differences concern their contrasting degrees of materiality: in Massey’s (2005:117) view, “Time is either past or to come or so minutely instantaneously now that it is impossible to grasp. Space, on the other hand, is there” (emphasis in original). Whereas place can be used in a variety of different ways, the same cannot be said about time: the places and spaces “consumed” by time-space compression are in fact always potentially reusable, whereas the time so invested is not (Dodgshon 1999). Yet the very concreteness of space is the product of the multiple histories embedded in the palimpsest that is each landscape: place is time made concrete, given form and meaning by the trajectories of the people who have lived in it. What, then, does it mean to say that time and space are socially constructed? To say that time and space are temporally and spatially mutable is to say that their meanings vary widely historically and geographically. The “meanings” of time and space—and there are always more than one— include, but are not limited to, how people measure and define them, write about them, feel about them and govern their daily lives with them, use and deploy them, wield them as instruments of power, resist them, celebrate and lament them, conquer them and are in turn conquered by them. Time and space are struggled over, loved, hated, and perceived in countless ways, they saturate our immediate, daily, and lifelong existence so thoroughly that we generally don’t even think about them. In denaturalizing these intertwined dimensions, we begin with the recognition that every age and every society constructs its own sense of them, measures and orders them in ways that it finds useful and meaningful. How we experience time and space is contingent upon the social interpretations that we acquire from birth: they are woven into the rhythms of everyday life, internalized as “natural” in memory and the unconscious, structured and given meaning by socially dictated systems of measurement, organized around the cycles of production and reproduction, and continually reinforced by patterns of labor, movement, ideology, family life, governance, and every other institution that requires temporal and spatial coordination. These experiences are never purely individual, but draw upon the vast reservoirs of knowledge that make us human. Thus, the social origins of time and space are hidden by standardized routines within particular envelopes of space-time, which acquire a durability and appearance of permanence to those who inhabit them. This process differs considerably within societies as well as among them, i.e., the understanding and meaning of time and space varies widely among various social groups differentiated by class, gender, ethnicity, age, and other categories of identity. Our interpretations of time and space will reflect, among other things, our sense of self, i.e., our identity of who we are, where we belong, and what is expected of us; our location within wider networks of community, the types and numbers of people with whom we have contact; educational levels; religious background; access to particular technologies; hopes, fears, and expectations of the future; our sense of the past and its significance; media portrayals of local and


5

distant events; and our exposure to otherness, whether within our own society or in other societies. Individual experiences of time and space, which are themselves never stable but highly dependent on when and where people live, work, interact, and the cultural frames of meaning they use to bring the world into consciousness, both draw upon and reproduce wider, social orders of meaning. In this way, the ways in which each person creates time and space are not purely individual affairs, for they utilize collective, irreducible social categories. Moreover, these experiences and interpretations are always heavily conditioned by social position, class and income, education, occupational experience, gender, ethnicity, age, sources of information, cognitive and ideological filters, and a host of other factors (e.g., ability to travel). Within any society, there is always a multiplicity of times and places, often radically different from one another. Thus, time-space compression never affects every social group identically; what is often represented as one process is in reality a multiplicity of processes that play out unevenly according to the prevailing dictates of power and ideology. Experiences of time and space are also heavily scale-dependent: how we give meaning to the private space of our living rooms is quite different than that which we assign to the public space of the city or global economy (although to the informed person these differences often dissolve); how we interpret the last ten minutes will be significantly different than how we view the last century. Individual perceptions of time rooted in the rhythms of everyday life are not the same as the views of historians or scientists, who often focus on processes that take much longer than a lifetime to unfold. There is, of course, a great variety of types of abstract time with greater or lesser degrees of relevance to many people’s daily experiences, such as economic time, or the length of the working day and productivity per labor hour. Similarly, historical time exhibits a multiplicity of temporal scales; Braudel (1979), for example, used three, including daily life unfolding at the “tempo of individuals,” larger scales or “conjunctures” based on seasonal or annual trends and cycles, and the largest scale, the longue durée, which he holds to be equivalent to social structures that exceed the individual lifetime. For the physicist, time may be measured in nanoseconds; for the geologist, in millions or even billions of years. Lightman’s (1993) delightful collection of fictional essays offers a dazzling array of possible time worlds, including reversible time, time with a known end-point, time without memory, time without a future, time in which humans live just a day, and time whose rate of passage varies geographically.

What is time-space compression? Time-space compression broadly conceived involves the multitude of ways in which human beings have attempted to conquer space, to cross distances more rapidly, to exchange goods and information more efficiently. The

6


analysis of time-space compression places emphasis on the connections and interactions among places (and the people who live within them, for connections are always embodied) rather than individual places per se. For example, in the simplest sense, using the maximum transportation speed at various historical moments as a measure, the world became 60 times smaller between 1500 and 1970, when we compare the speed of airplanes (say 600 mph) with that of medieval sailing vessels (10 mph) (Figure 1.1).1 By accelerating the velocities of people, goods, and information, the world is made to feel smaller even as interactions are stretched over larger physical distances. The term “compression” is therefore misleading: every round of time-space compression involves an expansion in the geographic scale of social activities. Often this idea is taken to mean that space ceases to have relevance. Despite unfortunate terms like the “death of distance” or the “annihilation of space,” the fact remains that geography is a stubbornly persistent feature of human life; Gould (1991:5) puts this notion nicely: “no matter how much geographic space is shrunk by cost, or ‘collapsed’ by time, it always forms the underlying platform, the backcloth, upon which things of the human world exist and move.” Rather than the “annihilation of space,” therefore, it is healthier to talk of how one space-time regime displaces another (Shields 1992). Moreover, the conventional view of time-space compression hides as much at the local level as it reveals at the global scale. Far from shrinking the world evenly, successive revolutions in the structure of time and space left it misshapen as some places were brought together relationally more than others. Moreover, reducing time-space compression to simple reductions in transport times fails to do justice to its deeply phenomenological dimensions and the complexity with which these two dimensions are wrapped up in social life, their political and ideological origins and associations. A satisfactory account of time-space compression therefore must address its perceptual and political dimensions. Time-space compression broadly defined is about change—rapid and slow, voluntary and involuntary, external and internal, qualitative and quantitative, evolutionary and revolutionary, continuous and discontinuous—in people’s understandings of the world and their interactions over the earth’s surface, not simply one of measuring time or conquering distance. The process is a lens through which social orders and transformations can be understood, i.e., as changing the ways in which human beings have produced and restructured time and space. Similarly, time-space compression is, among other things, a reflection of the differential mobility of people over time and space; how mobility is conceived and represented speaks volumes about a social order (Cresswell 2006). For most of human existence, mobility was highly limited, and for all but a tiny minority, perceptual horizons were strictly limited to the local. Only with the rise of modernity,

1 Figure 1.1, originally derived from McHale (1969), achieved “iconic status” (Knowles 2006:416) in the multiple editions of Dicken’s influential text Global Shift (2007).


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Figure 1.1 The conventional, technologically determinant view of time-space compression.

particularly after the Industrial Revolution, did cheap, safe, and convenient movement become the norm for most people, and then, only in industrialized societies. Mobility is invariably socially stratified and produced in tandem with immobility (Hubbard and Lilley 2004). To study how time and space are

8


perpetually folded and refolded, therefore, is to delve into the relations of power and ideology, wealth, class, gender, ethnicity, and the state, as well as the multitude of ways in which human subjects negotiate everyday life. Time-space compression necessarily entails not only the physical movement of bodies through space and time, but also how people experience these dimensions symbolically. The process of folding space and time is simultaneously conceptual and material, mental and physical, located between meaning and matter. Time-space compression tends to make places and peoples once thought of as remote and exotic closer and more familiar, although reduced spatial distance does not inevitably lead to reduced social distance or expanded intellectual horizons. Allen and Hamnett (1995:9) offer a concise encapsulation of time-space compression as “The reordering of distance, the overcoming of spatial barriers, the shortening of time-horizons, and the ability to link distant populations in a more immediate and intense manner.” Time-space compression occurs at multiple spatial and temporal scales, all of which interact with one another, including: long distance networks of trade that historically sutured cities, empires, and, later, nation-states together into interactive wholes; political formations in which the state integrated diverse peoples and places under a single authority, often through tribute, taxes, or conscription; and the ideological and psychological dimensions of how ideologies perceive and represent Others, the discursive and symbolic representations of foreign or distant places that define community, identity, and the here and now. This process, of course, depends mightily on the relative and differential abilities of social formations to link places together, or, in an older nomenclature, to conquer the “friction of distance.” Whenever the consequences of actions in one area spill over into others, time-space compression is at work. Whenever new networks of trade or migration appear, tying together places through flows of commodities, innovation, time-space compression can be detected; whenever a new medium, communications technology, or widespread ideology, whether it be the book or a religion or the Web, brings together subjects into epistemic communities bound together over vast distances, time-space compression is in the making; whenever the spatial scale of social relations expands, such as from the city to the nationstate or from states to empires, time-space compression is evident; whenever new technologies expand the conceptual horizons of people, or social institutions bind them together in a novel manner (such as “citizenship”), timespace compression occurs; whenever the division of labor collapses people into dense wads of humanity, such as the city or the factory, time-space compression can be discerned. One way to approach time-space compression is by looking at how external shocks to a society—diseases, invasions, technological innovations, wars—reverberate through local social relations of class, gender, and ethnicity to change inhabitants’ views of time and space and their fabric of daily life. Conversely, locally generated changes may scale-jump to become regional, national, or global in scope. In this way, the study of timespace compression involves the ways in which the global and the local are


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shot through with each other. This work follows Pomeranz and Topik’s (1999:xvii) view that “In moving back and forth between the local and the global, the meaning of each is enriched.” As an expression of a society’s changing ability to master space, time-space compression is a mechanism through which places are produced as nodes within increasingly wider networks of mobility and power. Such a view of space is quite at odds with the prevailing Euclidean notion so widespread in Western societies since the Renaissance. Following Smith (2003:23), this volume asserts that “geographies are the product of an intense relationality between places connected by social and cultural, economic and political processes.” Time-space compression refers to how people construct changing geographies of accessibility over time, i.e., the formation and destruction of differential patterns of centrality and peripherality that favor some groups and places more than other groups and places. Every act of time-space compression destabilizes previous power-geometries, uproots older networks and gives rise to new ones, and thus becomes entangled in the relations of class, gender, and ethnicity that run through all societies. In this sense, it is the study of how relational geographies are constructed and reconstructed as systems of interconnectedness, unevenly binding people and locations together in ever-changing manifolds of power and interaction. Time-space compression, therefore, invites us to avoid thinking of space as a passive surface and time as a linear arrow; rather, time and space loop around one another, fold in upon themselves, and twist and turn in complex, contingent ways that can best be likened to origami. Time-space compression can be approached by examining the changes in daily life that ensued as new technologies, cultures, and forms of social cohesion were introduced and older ones concomitantly annihilated. Because ideas are inevitably products of their historic and geographic circumstances, interpretations of time and space are tied to the social and material conditions in which different cultures and individuals existed. This analysis, therefore, weaves back and forth between the ontological and the epistemological, that is, between the historical circumstances that structured and restructured the temporal and spatial relations of societies on the one hand and the philosophical interpretations that were given to them on the other. Discourses of time and space, therefore, do not simply mirror historical circumstances, but construct them: ways of thinking are simultaneously reflective and constituent of social reality. By examining the histories and geographies of times and spaces, this project attempts to show how they have been steadily foreshortened—compressed, folded, and imploded—as rising productivity, accelerating transportation and communications, and extended spatial scales of social relations unfolded. Understanding time-space compression is a more pressing issue today than ever. We live in the midst of an enormous and intense wave of globalization that is reworking the world economy, sucking in and spitting out regions at an unprecedented rate, and ushering in unprecedented changes in lifestyle and

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outlook across the planet. At the center of this maelstrom is the dramatic reconfiguration of time and space, which have been splintered and reshaped at breathtaking speeds. Witness, for example, the enormous impacts of the Internet, the ability of financial funds to travel at the speed of light, the capacity of increasingly mobile corporations to wield the threat of moving against communities, or the highly accelerated product cycles that characterize most advanced forms of manufacturing. All of these phenomena testify to the changed nature of time and space in the wake of postmodern capitalism, and all are woven into the fabric of daily life for the vast majority of the world’s people. Yet an historical perspective reveals that far from being the first time in which relational geographies have been transformed, the current epoch is but the latest chapter in a long series through which the world’s cultures have given time and space a dramatically new texture.

A note on methodology The view adopted here weaves back and forth between the theoretical and the empirical, the abstract and the concrete, the objective and the subjective, the real and the imagined, the tangible and the intangible, the global and the local, between the scales of the human body—the most intimate of geographies— and the world system, the scale most removed from everyday experience (Harvey 2001b). The analysis draws upon multiple literatures, ranging from the histories of technology, time, trade, transportation, and communications, colonialism, and globalization to conceptual treatments of the social construction of vision. In doing so, it touches upon an enormously diverse group of topics. The approach adopted here is explicitly historical, open-ended, and antireductionist, emphasizing the contingent, path-dependent constellations of forces that generated changes in the historical and geographical organization and perception of time and space. This view is starkly at odds with neoclassical and rationalist approaches that begin and end with individual actors, assume interests and identities are fixed or natural, and portray social and spatial relations in terms of universal laws rather than historical processes. The work seeks to walk the line between overly theoretical accounts that suffer from a lack of historical detail on the one hand and empiricist treatments, which never manage to see the forest of generalization for the trees of data, on the other. Unfortunately, this strategy leaves little room for detail, nuance, or subtlety, all of which would, obviously, make the argument more sophisticated and persuasive. The volume of necessity operates at a high level of generality, without the luxury of delving into numerous particularities and specifics. For the sake of parsimony, no topic is given detailed consideration; for an argument this wide in scope, I hope the reader will allow this degree of simplification. Each of the topics discussed here could fill volumes, and has. The reader will forgive me then for spreading myself so thin, and I ask his or her patience as the text gleefully rampages across history and geography, ransacking


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examples, data, and quotes with cavalier abandon. The explorations of topics offered here are meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive, i.e., brief anecdotes designed to sketch the multiple forms time-space compression can and did take. The intention is to be schematic, which allows for much ground to be covered quickly. Hence this work does not aspire or attempt to offer the type of detailed analyses so aptly written by many scholars. Its strengths lie in its breadth rather than its depth, in the value of comparative analysis to draw conclusions from contrasting observations from multiple contexts. To borrow a line from Kern (1983:87), “My method involves the presentation of diverse sources that are far enough apart to justify broad generalizations about the age without being too far apart to exceed the limits of plausibility.” Whether or not the evidence offered here is sufficiently convincing to uphold the general argument I leave to the reader to decide. So diverse are the meanings that people attach to time and space that it is difficult to claim that in any given culture only one time or one space exists. Such essentialism has little currency today. To make time-space compression intelligible, therefore, we need to generalize, to simplify the enormous diversity within any social formation. Generalizations, are, of course, inherently dangerous and inevitably run the risk of oversimplification, smothering important differences and subtleties. Generalization is productive only if what we gain in understanding exceeds what we lose in the details. In this context, it is critical to emphasize that time-space compression is not inherently beneficial to all those affected, but results in uneven gains, and sometimes losses: for some, it represents a rise in efficiency and increased ability to master space; for others, it consists of a loss of control as their worlds are enveloped within wider divisions of labor controlled by powerful strangers. Because the structures of time and space are wrapped up with relations of power, domination, and subordination, the shrinking world does not shrink in the same way or equally for everyone; time-space compressions always simultaneously empower and disempower different social groups. Often the process accentuates existing social inequalities, as when, for example, the wealthy deploy new technologies that leave the poor further behind. Indeed, timespace compression for some may be time-space expansion for others.

Plan of attack Although the bulk of this work is empirically oriented, it is informed by conceptual scholarship from several disciplines. Chapter 2 reviews several theoretical lines of thought pertaining to time-space compression, including its early technocratic formulations, historical materialism, structuration theory, world systems theory, the works of Paul Virilio, and poststructuralist notions such as commodity chains and actor-network theory. Rather than retreat into any one conceptual approach, the work attempts to synthesize these diverse lines of thought, bringing them into a creative tension in the hope that each contributes to our understanding in some complementary

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manner. Theoretical rigidity comes at a steep price, and while borrowing from contradictory conceptual views opens one to allegations of conceptual inconsistency, it also allows for complex issues to be tackled from a variety of analytical perspectives. Every theory, of course, foregrounds some aspects and backgrounds others; yet given the enormous complexity of the historical and geographical record, which requires different approaches to understand different topics, the notion that one must choose only one conceptual lens from the suite of available options seems to me to be counterproductive. For reasons of convenience, the temporal trajectory of global time-space compression is segmented into three broad world-historical epochs of capitalism: the Early Modern, Late Modern, and Postmodern. In framing the volume this way, there is no assertion here that these constitute some type of serial, teleological progression; rather, each was the contingent, unintentional outcome of its predecessor. Successive chapters ascertain the broad contours and changing configurations of time and space within each era, acknowledging their differences and diversity while pointing to their commonalities and similarities. Each of these epochs, obviously, comprised vast lengths of time and great numbers of local and regional cultures, and their differentiation from one another is essentially arbitrary. Each epoch of time-space compression simultaneously drew upon older, existing forms of spatiality and temporality, incorporating some aspects and obliterating others, and ushered in new ones in a series of “creative destructions.” However, to apply the term “creative destruction” to all forms of time-space compression is to impose a distinctively capitalist logic over social formations throughout history that were often, if not typically, not capitalist at all. Early modernity—mercantile capitalism before the Industrial Revolution— is the subject of Chapter 3. Radiating outward through the maritime networks of colonialism, capitalism both constructed a planetary system of exchange and confronted Europe with its Oriental Other. A central motor of this system was Sung and Ming dynasty China and its conversion to a silverbased economy. Discursively, colonialism was closely associated with an increasingly dispassionate Western view of time and space, as exemplified in the Cartesian symbolic order. As Harvey (1984) argued, geography as a body of ideas and practices was not just descriptive of this process but constitutive as well. Cartography, for example, rationalized global space in Eurocentric terms, facilitating processes of control and administration as much as trade. Printing greatly enhanced the distanciation of social intercourse, allowing widespread contacts and diffusion of ideas without face-to-face contact. The Renaissance and Enlightenment exemplified the intellectual changes of early modern time-space compression, including the Copernican revolution and perspectival painting. These changes were important moments in the scalar jump from the city-state to the nation-state, the most important social and political unit of the modern era, homogenizing local cultures and economies by incorporating them within ever-larger units of social and political control. The late modern period, which began with industrialization and continued


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through the post-WWII economic boom, is explored in Chapter 4. The broad contours of this epoch may be traced through technological changes that greatly enhanced the mobility of people, goods, and information (i.e., the railroad, steamship, telegraph, telephone, bicycle, automobile, and airplane), many of which gave rise to the popular notion that space had effectively been annihilated. Late modernity witnessed sustained, large-scale and rapid industrialization; widespread and profoundly disorienting urbanization; mass consumption; the triumph of modern science over religious notions of time and space; and new representational forms (e.g., photography, the cinema, impressionism).2 By the end of the nineteenth century, with the entire globe colonized, the changing geopolitics of the world system gave rise to a new relational politics of imperial conflict. The bloodiest century in history, the twentieth, witnessed two major conflagrations that also generated new understandings of time and space into being. During the post-WWII boom, transnational corporations sutured together vast numbers of disparate places, generating a variety of new forms of uneven development in the worldwide spatial division of labor. Simultaneously, the threat of nuclear annihilation locked the superpowers into a deadly dance of mutual assured destruction. “Postmodernism”—an annoying vague term—refers both to the ontological reality of global capitalism that took shape in the late twentieth century and to several epistemological perspectives known for their shared distrust of totalizing narratives. In Chapter 5, the intense time-space compression unleashed by postmodern capitalism is summarized through an interrogation of the massive technological and political changes it fostered, such as the microelectronics revolution and the birth of a globalized telecommunications network. Television and the Internet symbolize the ephemeral, rapidly shifting virtual communities of the postmodern era, in which electronic communications rivals or exceeds its face-to-face counterpart. Equally significant are the processes of ever-more intense globalization, hypermobile electronic capital, the triumph of neoliberalism, and the rise of transnational forms of governance, all of which threaten to undermine the primacy of the nation-state and the Westphalian political system. In some respects, Derwent Whittlesey (1945) presaged this volume with a prescient and wide-ranging essay, “The Horizon of Geography,” in which he summarized the changing scale of spatial consciousness that accompanied humanity’s ascent from hunting and gathering to the modern age. His comments succinctly summarize the intellectual impetus of this work: “By scrutinizing successive space-horizons from the most primitive known down to the present, it should be possible to determine the character and limits of geographic space in the present world of revolutionary technology and social adaptation” (p. 3). It is in that spirit that this exploration begins.

2 Kern’s (1983) well-known volume explored many of these changes, although not with an explicit eye toward time-space compression.

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There are several ways to understand how time and space are compressed, and what that means for the people who experience it. Each perspective offers insights and suffers from weaknesses. How we theorize this issue speaks volumes to how we view time and space, their social production and malleability. I begin, however, on an historical note. One of the most famous debates in the intellectual history of time and space took place in the seventeenth century between two geniuses, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Newton, greatly influenced by the recent popularity of the clock, viewed time and space as abstract, absolute entities that existed independently of their measurement, that is, their existence was absolute, for their reality remained real regardless of whatever they contained or how they were measured. Leibniz, in contrast, held that time and space were relational, i.e., comprehensible only with reference to specific frames of interpretation: distance, for example, could only be understood through appeal to the space between two or more objects situated in space. Space and time, therefore, had no independent existence, but were derivative of how we measured them. Eventually, for reasons having little to do with inherent intellectual merit and much to do with the emergence of early capitalist modernity, Newton’s view triumphed (about which more later). As we shall see, this debate is of no small importance to how we view space today.

Early conceptualizations Theorizations of time-space compression have a longer history than is generally recognized. The notion of measuring distance using time, for example, is reflected in the work of Götz (1888), who drew isochronic maps of travel times to and from selected points at several moments of human history (several of which are used here). Similarly, Schjerning-Charlottenburg (1903) constructed maps of Berlin as its commuting distances exploded in the face of intense modernization (Figure 4.8, on pages 119–22). Boggs (1941, 1945), another unsung hero of this tradition, offered an early summary of relational space under the impacts of rapid declines in transportation costs and times, producing isotachic maps of the U.S. that exhibited the different travel speeds


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evident across the landscape of the country. His summary of the enormous impacts of the shrinking world in the face of twentieth-century modernization is earthy but apt: “It is as if a quiet game of croquet had been transformed into a stirring contest of polo, with its mounted players covering a greatly enlarged field at high speed, while the game was yet in progress” (1941:119). Within the discipline of geography, time-space compression was first theorized in terms of the friction of distance imposed by high transportation costs. Closely associated with the friction of distance was its measurement in terms of travel time and cost, which tend to be more useful in explaining travel patterns than are absolute distances. Abler (1975:36), for example, notes that “Time and cost are more powerful determinants of behavior than are absolute distances.” Early transportation geographers occasionally offered maps of isochrones to reveal the relative accessibility of places to one another (e.g., Kish 1958). Similarly, Taaffe’s (1956, 1959) pioneering analysis of air traffic patterns pointed to aviation as a space-adjusting technology. Chapman (1968), in a study of railroad travel times among European cities, examined accessibility in terms of the fluctuating hierarchy of cities. In a seminal series of papers, Don Janelle (1968, 1969) introduced the notion of time-space convergence, the rate at which places drew closer to one another over time in relative space due to rising transport speeds even as the absolute distance between them remained constant. One example concerned the changing travel times between Lansing and Detroit, Michigan, which took approximately 1,300 minutes by stagecoach in 1840. By the 1870s, with the arrival of the steam locomotive, travel time had been reduced by more than 85 percent, to 180 minutes; with the introduction of the automobile, the journey was further reduced to only 80 minutes (Figure 2.1). Thus, while the absolute distance between the cities remained the same, the relative distance was reduced by 1,220 minutes over 120 years, or roughly ten minutes per year. Similarly, between 1800 and 1965, travel times between Boston and New York declined from 4,800 to 300 minutes, or 27 minutes per year (Janelle 1991). Marchand (1973) extended this line of thought to assess the changing accessibility of cities within road networks using travel times in Venezuela, while Ward (1989) applied the same approach to an analysis of Pacific Islands and the impacts of aviation on their relative accessibility (see also Forer and Parrott 1991). Janelle (1973) also introduced the notion of time-space divergence, such as when urban infrastructures become so overloaded with traffic that significant delays occur due to congestion. In the same vein, Abler (1975) emphasized space-adjusting technologies as the primary cause of time-space compression. The logical end point of the conquest of distance was the annihilation of geography, or “Complete timespace convergence—a situation in which no differences in the time required to reach near or distant points exist—shrinks areas to points” (Abler 1975: 40). Abler claimed that complete time-space convergence had materialized in North America, in which the entire continent was effectively located “at the same place,” a view that skips over the enormous social and spatial divides in

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Figure 2.1 The classic model of time-space convergence.

access to every technology as well as their uneven impacts. Abler (1977) and Abler and Falk (1981, 1985) extended this line of thought to include communications technologies such as the telephone, which similarly reduce (or even eliminate) the time-distance among places, at least with respect to flows of information if not people or goods. In the context of late twentieth-century globalization and technological changes, falling transport times created a steadily “shrinking world” that changed the suite of opportunities and constraints faced by places, firms, and individuals. Because markets are shaped by the distances beyond which goods and information cannot circulate in a timely manner, transport and communications costs limit their geographic size. As Fields (2004:27) notes, “Transport and communications technologies shape the parameters of efficiency by recalibrating the costs of basic elements in producing, buying, and selling.” For competitive firms, the steadily declining friction of distance was a significant economic benefit. For other firms, the benefits were not so clear: as transport costs dropped and the spatial division of labor expanded


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in size, once-protected local industries lost their monopoly status and were forced to compete with other producers in neighboring, then increasingly distant regions. For individuals, the benefits of time-space compression include increasing mobility to a wider horizon of potential destinations. As the transportation literature demonstrates, mobility levels tend to rise proportionate to income; however, transport times remain essentially stable, indicating that the ability to conquer distance is purchased primarily through increasing velocities. It follows that historically, higher mobility levels have been associated with increasing standards of living (Zelinsky 1971). In the 1960s, the shrinking world was a popular theme among technocrats such as Daniel Bell and Alvin Toffler, who approached the topic from the perspective of “post-industrial” society, the decline of manufacturing, and the rise of an information-based service class. Bell (1960:22), for example, contrasted spatial accessibility in 1789, when the Constitution was signed, with 1960: “The real change of scale between 1789 and today, has to do with the number of persons each of us knows and the number each of us know of—in short, the way in which we experience the world.” Technocratic views of communications were widely promoted by Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1967), whose enormously influential works portrayed a progression from the limited spatiality of preindustrial societies and orality as the dominant form of communication to the influence of printing to the global networks of modern telecommunications. Each age, he maintained, saw a dramatic increase in the scale of human extensibility. McLuhan (1964:4) gave particular importance to the electronic media, famously arguing that “the world has become so compressed and electrically contracted, so that the globe is no more than one village.” This rosy, utopian view, with its impoverished sense of politics and inequality, nonetheless spoke to the profound time-space compression that telecommunications unleashed and decisively entered popular consciousness on the subject. Technocratic theorizations of time-space compression, informed primarily by technological determinism, tended to present space and time as lying outside of social relations, and ignored or minimized the social inequalities and power relations that the process inevitably entails. Because it is fundamentally an expression of power, time-space compression is always uneven among groups and places, or, as Adams (1995:268) argues, “One person’s (or group’s) time-space compression may depend on another person’s (or group’s) persistent inability to access distant places.” Increasingly, it became evident to many observers that absolute notions of space were inadequate to represent this process accurately, leading to tentative attempts to theorize space in relational terms. Forer’s (1978) early paper on “plastic space,” for example, stressed the role of different transportation technologies in the folding of different geographies. An empirical example of relational space is found in Muller (1984), who describes the non-Euclidean “elastic space” of Canada as it is stretched by different types of transport networks, forming differential surfaces of accessibility. Elucidating the causes and consequences of plastic/

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elastic space, however, required a whole new paradigm, one that took social relations seriously.

Marxist interventions The introduction of social theory and political economy into geography was a monumental and instrumental step in popularizing the notion of space as a social construction, something implicated in and produced by social practices under varying historical conditions. This move put the discipline at odds with neoclassical economists, who typically are concerned with how capitalism utilizes existing structures of space and time, in contrast to political economy perspectives that focus on how capitalism repeatedly creates and destroys these dimensions (Fields 2004). Marx put the issue wonderfully: “Economists explain to us the process of production under given conditions. What they do not explain is how these conditions are themselves produced” (1847:199). From the standpoint of political economy, neoclassical notions such as equilibrium are little more than mathematicized fantasies. Because economics suffers from a suffocating conceptual myopia that fails to take seriously issues of history, power, or ideology, the analysis of time-space compression has benefited marginally, at best, from neoclassical analyses. Geography’s engagement with political economy, initiated by David Harvey (1982, 1985a, 1985b, 1985c), led to a rediscovery of Marx, an important early theorist in the history of time-space compression and first to examine society (if not space) explicitly in terms of class relations. Marxism, of course, privileged the labor process as its point of departure in the analysis of social relations: through labor, people reproduce society, change nature, and materialize ideas. Drawing on the labor theory of value, Marx maintained that the capitalist labor process involved the extraction of surplus value in order to generate profits. The use value of the worker for the capitalist was thus greater than his/her exchange value as measured by wages. Therefore, the labor contract was and remains, by definition, unfair and exploitative, for if capitalists paid workers for the full value of their output, there would be no profit. The result was a fundamental contradiction between production and consumption: every attempt to minimize labor costs also minimized workers’ ability to consume; ironically, people must live on too little because they produce too much. As a result—an inescapable, inevitable outcome structurally built into the deep logic of commodity production—capitalism suffered from a chronic tendency to produce more than could be consumed, generating an overaccumulation of surplus value that led to a falling rate of profit, declining wages, class conflict, and periodic crises. Because capitalists face this endemic problem of overproduction, they must find markets in which to unload the excess social product. In short, capitalism must expand in order to survive, accumulation is inherently expansionary, which lay at the root of what Marx called its “wolf hunger.” The result was a historical process by which capitalism reached out and


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conquered new spaces, enveloping them within ever-broader spatial divisions of labor, and in the process imposing the uniquely capitalist sense of time and space over all other contending social formations. Marx (1973:539) argued in the Grundrisse that “while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse . . . it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another.” In one of most celebrated passages of the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels wrote what is arguably history’s most elegant and concise summary of capitalist time-space compression: All fixed, fast, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is sold melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. More poignant and insightful summaries of imperialism and globalization, past or present, are hard to come by. The Marxist understanding of time-space compression undertook a major step forward via David Harvey’s (1982, 1985a, 1989a) extension of Marxist analysis into geography, which initiated a simultaneous spatialization of Marxism. Harvey’s analysis of time-space compression remains unquestionably the most famous and influential, widely cited (if not understood) by numerous disciplines. If early theorists attributed the process to changes in transportation technology, Harvey relocated its causes to the system of capitalist production, driven as it is by the endless search for ever greater profits and outlets for surplus value. In offering this view, Harvey drew upon the seminal works of Lefebvre (1974/1991), who maintained that the organization of space was central to the structure and functioning of capitalism as a coherent whole.

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Harvey’s thought followed Marx’s view that endemic overaccumulation resulted in periodic economic crises manifested in declining rates of profit. His spatialization of Marxism began by observing capitalism’s numerous economic depressions—most notably, those of 1873, the 1930s, and the 1970s—and the endlessly varying forms it assumed after the recovery from each by undergoing wide-reaching rounds of restructuring, each of which witnessed new technologies, new markets, new forms of labor control, new state interventions, and new spatial configurations. Harvey observed how capitalism, despite the surface variations in its multiple historical and spatial forms, nonetheless rests upon the deep structure of commodity production and the conversion of commodities into money, and offered a model of commodity production that abstracted its essential qualities and shed light on its transformation of time and space. He began with Marx’s distinction between use and exchange values. Use values are essentially confined to absolute spaces and times, including, for examples, the activities of workers, commodities, factories, and houses. Exchange values, in contrast, exist only because of the circulation of capital, its constant state of motion through relative space (Harvey 2006:141); as every capitalist knows, money that is not in motion declines in value. Central to the production of value and its realization through exchange is the built environment, the infrastructure of transportation and communications that allows capital and labor to move through time and space. Typically, capitalists rely on the state for this purpose, for publicly constructed infrastructures socialize the costs while allowing the benefits to remain privately held. The built environment, therefore, is the spatial manifestation of the logic of commodity production at any given historical moment. To overcome the friction of distance and accelerate the turnover rate of capital, capitalists must invest in new, more rapid transport systems, which are expensive and take a long period to amortize due to their extended depreciation times. In order for capitalists as a class to expand and survive, capital must be sufficiently mobile to participate in the process of production and exchange; however, fixed capital, irretrievably sunk in the form of the built environment in the form of transport systems, does not realize surplus value, and does not directly generate profit. Under the force of competition, capitalists must maximize the rate at which the use value of labor is converted into exchange values on the market: “There is an omnipresent incentive for individual capitalists to accelerate their turnover time vis-à-vis the social average, and in so doing to promote a social trend towards faster average turnover times” (Harvey 1989a:229). Capitalists as a whole must of necessity (not choice) speed up the turnover time of capital, which is “the time of production together with the time of circulation of exchange” (Harvey 1989a:229). Reducing the friction of distance expands capital’s spatial scale of operation, which also makes it more rather than less sensitive to local variations in production costs and efficiency. Harvey (2001b:244) asserts “The opening-up of more distant markets, new


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sources of raw materials and of new opportunities for the employment of labor under the social relations of capitalism, has the effect of increasing the turnover time of capital unless there are compensating improvements in the speed of circulation.” The need to “annihilate space by time” is thus fundamental to the operation and survival of capitalism on an on-going basis, i.e., its ability to reproduce itself at ever-expanded spatial scales and to accelerate temporal rhythms of capital accumulation. Every delay in this process is an opportunity cost, and conversely, every reduction in turnover times releases resources to increase capital accumulation. The result of capitalists’ search for solutions to the tendency toward anarchical crisis is the infamous “spatial fix,” i.e., the landscape that offers a temporary window of stability, maximizing the rate of turnover, and thus profit. Harvey posits several forms of spatial fixes, including primitive accumulation or forcible dispossession through war and slavery, the creation of new labor markets through the commodification of noncapitalist social formations, the creation of new commodity markets to absorb excess investment capital, the use of land markets to generate differential land values, the deployment of communications systems to reduce uncertainty and thus speed up production, and the use of the state for particular governance structures to facilitate more profitable forms of capital accumulation (Jessop 2006; Sheppard 2006). All of these, in one way or another, externalize the essential contradiction between the extraction of surplus value, overproduction, and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The spatial fix, however, is always a tenuous, contingent, and temporary ameliorative. Because the production system changes more rapidly under the impetus of competition than does the landscape (or more technically, sunk costs must be replaced before their full economic value has been amortized), the very same landscape that offers a temporary escape from overproduction eventually comes to inhibit future capital accumulation. Spatial distributions, infrastructures, and built environments that are optimal at one phase of development metastasize into weights slowing down future capital accumulation. The spatial fix thus mutates from a resource to a barrier, and forms simultaneously a “crowning glory and a prison” of capital. As Harvey (2001a:25) puts it, “capital has to build a fixed space (or ‘landscape’) necessary for its own functioning at a certain point in its history only to have to destroy that space (and devalue much of the capital invested therein) at a later point in order to make way for a new ‘spatial fix’ (openings for fresh accumulation in new spaces and territories).” In this way, capitalism exhibits a fundamental contradiction between fixity—the need to stabilize production temporarily in order to realize surplus value—and motion, the need to annihilate old geographies in an act of creative destruction and replace them with new, more efficient landscapes amenable to more recent systems of production. Capitalists must negotiate (often unsuccessfully) the knife-edge between using up old spaces and creating new ones. The expansion of capital, its relentless search for new markets and new

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spatialities, is thus the Marxist motor of time-space compression. Time-space compression occurs when one spatial fix displaces another, typically at a larger spatial scale of interaction. Harvey (1989a:240) defines the phenomenon as: Processes that so revolutionise the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves. I use the word “compression” because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us. The result is periodic economic, social, political, and cultural upheaval as new forms of time and space replace older ones. Harvey’s (1989a) most famous explication of time-space compression, The Condition of Postmodernity (the single most important work on this topic) closely anticipated and inspired many of the topics addressed in this volume, including, inter alia, the impacts of capitalism and the Enlightenment on modern notions of time and space, the role of perspective in art, Renaissance mapping and cadastral science, chronometry, and, of course, the world of post-Fordist financial capital (what he unfortunately labels “fictitious capital”), which, traveling through telecommunications networks, has ushered in a profound and as yet unfinished round of postmodern time-space compression (see also Harvey 1990). In the context of contemporary postmodern capitalism and globalization, industrial capital has been largely supplanted by financial capital, with unprecedented spatial mobility. This transformation is more than simply a scalar change, but represents significantly enhanced levels of leverage of capital over labor. Essentially, Harvey maintains, “capital commands space, whereas workers struggle to control place” (Sheppard 2006:129). Financial capital’s ability to flow effortless across the globe—time-space compression on a global level—gives it enormous abilities to pit places against one another by offering, for example, an optimal “business environment.” As explored in Chapter 5, this process has significant implications for structures of local and national governance. The very nature of finance capital, with its tenuous ties to the landscape, redefines local dependence, revealing it as one, contingent way in which capital relates to places, not a universal necessity. Harvey’s view is not without its critics, who often point to its economic reductionism, and have supplemented his ideas in several ways. Brenner (1998) extended the spatial fix into a “scalar fix,” a multiscalar configuration of territorial organization that mediates capital flows, linking hierarchies of places in a process of constantly changing uneven development. He argues (1998:460), for example, that “Spatial scales can no longer be conceived as pre-given or natural arenas of social interaction, but are increasingly viewed as historical products—at once spatially constructed and politically contested.” Each geographical scale constitutes an arena in which the opposing forces of fixity and motion collide, and the concatenated effects of


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changes at multiple scales are telescoped into the unique contexts of local areas. Moreover, scales are never frozen, but are constantly in flux: continual scaling and rescaling are thus constitutive dimensions of the capitalist spatial dynamic (Paasi 2004). Dodgshon (1998) cautions against exaggerating the rapidity of the process of landscape devaluation, and calls attention to the enormous role of inertia in shaping social and spatial change, that is, the stubborn persistence of the past (in the form of the built environment and social institutions) in the present in a manner that may retard or deflect transformation. Moreover, he posits (1998:192) that the geographies that stabilize commodity production serve more than one purpose: “the idea of a ‘spatial fix’ needs to be seen as a potential solution to a much wider range of inner conflicts than those associated with modern crises of capital accumulation.” The spatial fix is not simply an outcome of the economic logic of commodity production, but entails widespread political dimensions as well. This notion is particularly helpful in exploring premodern time-space compressions, in which political logics were often more important that putatively economic ones. Jessop (2006) criticizes the notion of the spatial fix as mechanistic, and offers a more nuanced notion of spatio-temporal fixes in which local class alliances, including the state, stabilize the conditions of production (at least momentarily) and control the class antagonisms that capitalist production inevitably generates.

Structuration and time-space distanciation The understanding of time-space compression as a social and cultural process, rather than one simply reducible to the dynamics of the spatial division of labor, was greatly advanced by structuration theory (Giddens 1981, 1984, 1987), which became widely popular in the late twentieth century. Anthony Giddens freed time-space compression from its confines within the sphere of production, embedding it within everyday life and social reproduction. In this view, time and space, and thus their transformations, both produce and are produced by people in their normal daily routines. Structuration theory differs from the rather rigid, top-down perspective initiated by Harvey in that it allows actors room to take advantage of the differential advantages, constraints, and opportunities that time-space compression always generates. This maneuver rescued this topic from the abyss of teleological naturalism by explicitly affirming that folding time and space are always and everywhere only human products, and are thus changeable, malleable, contingent, and never pre-determined; as Thrift (1996: 46) puts it, “The socio-technical networks that have produced time-space compression are themselves made up of practices which have been sedimented over many, many years.” Structuration theory begins with the recognition that only human beings are sentient (i.e., as actors they have consciousness about themselves and their world), and draws upon the rich phenomenological and psychological traditions concerning perception, cognition, ideology, and language, all of which

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are fundamental to any serious understanding of the human subject. Moving beyond the usual elementary definitions of culture as the sum total of learned behavior or a “way of life” (e.g., religion, language, mores, traditions, roles, etc.), structuration theory portrays culture as what people take for granted in order to function as social agents, i.e., common sense, the matrix of ideologies that allow them to negotiate their way through their everyday worlds. In the form of what Giddens calls practical consciousness, these stocks of knowledge are so deeply internalized that they may not even be evident to the people who hold them. Culture defines what is normal and what is not, what is important and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, within each social context (i.e., within particular time-spaces). Culture is acquired through a lifelong process of socialization, i.e., individuals are socially produced from cradle to grave. The socialization of the individual and the reproduction of society are two sides of the same coin, i.e., the macrostructures of social relations are interlaced with the microstructures of everyday life (Thrift 1983; Pred 1984, 1990). In this view, the structural properties of social formations are synonymous with how everyday social conduct is reproduced across time and space. Social structures consist of the properties that bind societies together in time-space, and only exist in their implementation or instanciation, a move that transforms the once-strict dualism of structure and agency into a fluid duality in which each exists only by virtue of the other. Social structures are instanciated in the co-presence of people in everyday life, i.e., the degree to which the rhythms of social reproduction bring them into contact with one another to engage in co-presencing. People reproduce the world, for the most part unintentionally, in their everyday lives, and in turn, the world reproduces them through socialization. In forming their biographies every day, individuals reproduce and transform their social worlds primarily without meaning to do so. Everyday thought and behavior, the unacknowledged preconditions to action, do not simply mirror the world, they constitute it as the outcomes to action. Social structures and relations are thus reproduced, and hence simultaneously changed, by the people who make them; individuals are both produced by, and producers of, history and geography. Giddens’s theorization of how social relations are structured and change across time and space also invokes time-geography (Hagerstrand 1970; Pred 1978, 1981a, 1984a), which, in emphasizing the inseparable unity of time and space, portrayed society as consisting of a “weaving dance” of individuals through time and space in their everyday lives. Time-geography sought to uncover the dynamics of spatio-temporal behavior using time-budget studies as individuals allocated their daily allotment of travel times subject to various capability, coupling, and authority constraints (Carlstein et al. 1978a, 1978b, 1978c; Pred 1977a, 1978, 1981a, 1981b). The space-time prisms that resulted from time-geography were held to reflect, inter alia, how individuals matched the supply and demand for their time, “packing” their activities within a limited temporal duration and geographic domain. Places, in this view, are


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always and everywhere times, i.e., always coming into being, and geography can never be fruitfully portrayed as a static landscape frozen at one temporal moment. This line of work, firmly embedded in Cartesian notions of time and space, revealed cultural and regional differences in how people use time and space, but shed little light on how they perceived or gave meaning to them or how their resources and constraints were socially generated. Time-geography thus suffers from an inadequate notion of human consciousness and an impoverished sense of class, gender, power and politics, a void partially filled somewhat later by the marriage of time-geography and structuration theory (Pred 1984a, 1984b). Time geography did, however, attempt (if unsuccessfully) to force the sterile discipline of regional science to humanize its concerns (cf. Hagerstrand 1970), and greatly influenced subsequent social theories by keeping a firm focus on the spatio-temporal constitution of social systems. Under the impacts of Geographic Information Systems, it has allowed increasingly nuanced understandings of how different social groups experience differential patterns of social mobility (e.g., Kwan 1999) and negotiate time-space compression at the spatio-temporal scales of the household and daily life. Central to structuration theory is time-space distanciation, the “stretching of social systems across time-space on the basis of mechanisms of social and system integration” (Giddens 1984:377). The basis of this process, Giddens argues, is “disembedding mechanisms” such as symbolic systems and transportation technologies that lift social interactions from their local contexts and relocate them across vast time-space distances. Until recently (i.e., until the invention of telecommunications in the nineteenth century), the degree to which people monitored each other’s actions (or what Giddens calls presence-availability) relied heavily upon face-to-face interaction, which is still fundamentally important despite numerous other possible channels of communication. Over time, particularly given the profound reductions in transport and communications times and costs under capitalism, vast parts of the world have experienced a pronounced time-space convergence, with dramatic effects for human interaction, conceptions of the self, and social change. Structuration theory depicts world historical change as one of increasing cohesion, although time and space never cease to be problematic. In particular, the rise of modernity allowed co-presencing among individuals to occur at ever-greater distances, particularly through the use of telecommunications (Warf 1994). Thus, Giddens’s theory operates at two analytical levels simultaneously, one concerned with the abstract dynamics of social reproduction and the other with the concrete manifestation of social power in a variety of historical circumstances ranging from the Neolithic to the rise of the nation-state to postmodern globalization (Giddens 1984, 1987, 1990, 2000). As social relations become progressive distanciated, their ability to be controlled by the people who make them declines accordingly. Giddens writes (1984:171) that “the greater the time-space distanciation of social systems— the more their institutions bite into time and space—the more resistant they are to manipulation or change by any individual agent.” If the early literature

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on time-space convergence described the rising transport velocities that brought places together, and that centered on time-space compression spoke directly to the economic and perceptual dimensions of this process, the notion of time-space distanciation referred to the interactions among people as social relations differentially embodied these dimensions. Giddens (1987: 174) observes that “Time-space convergence provides, then, a dramatic index of the phenomenon of which it is by now barely possible to speak without relapsing into cliché—the shrinking world. But lying behind time-space convergence there is the more diffuse, but profoundly important, phenomenon of the increasingly precise coordination of the time-space sequencing of social life.” Giddens’s views have been subjected to considerable critique. His notion of regionalization, or the uneven effects of time-space distanciation, has been criticized on several grounds, including its nebulous view of spatial scale and locale (see Urry 1991). Thrift (1996b) notes four flaws in structuration theory: it overemphasizes the individual and underemphasizes his/her social context, it suffers from an inadequate account of culture and the unconscious, and it neglects questions of ethnicity and gender. Despite these shortcomings, he asserts that it offers an escape from the “opposition between grand theories and knowledges and the local, situated theories and knowledges that are now so much in vogue” (p. 61). Despite such objections, structuration theory was widely successful in portraying societies as situated social practices rather than outcomes of universal laws, that is, as contingent, path-dependent constellations of power and knowledge, embedding them in historical time rather than abstract time (Storper 1988).

Time-space compression and world-systems theory A fourth approach that socialized the understanding of time-space compression was world-systems theory, first articulated by Wallerstein (1974, 1979), an approach that is useful in raising the question, among many, of how Western forms of time and space came to be universalized worldwide. The origins of this perspective lay in the Annales school of historians initiated by Marc Bloch and made famous by Ferdinand Braudel (1979). In explicitly adopting a worldwide perspective on capitalism, world-systems theory is emphatic that places can only be understood through their interactions with one another (cf. Chase-Dunn 1989; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997): hence, all regions are interconnected, they never exist in isolation from one another, and it is only possible to understand one time-space context with reference to others. While this approach takes as its point of departure the historical advent of capitalism, later modifications and extensions included its application to precapitalist societies (Frank and Gills 1993; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). In all contexts, places are inevitably part of a network of places because social relations stretch across regions, so that the consequences to action invariably spiral out from one place to another. World-systems theory


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thus shifted the analytical focus of political economy from individual places (e.g., nation-states) to the entire world, ushering in scalar transformation in the way in which conceptual questions were posited, answers proposed, and theories constructed. Unlike early dependency models, which froze core and periphery into fixed, eternal states, world-systems theory acknowledges the mobility of individual places up and down the ladder of wealth and power, although it typically represents this process as a zero-sum game, i.e., one country’s gain is another’s loss. Unlike earlier world empires, where a single political structure dominated to appropriate the surplus value produced by places on the periphery (e.g., the Roman Empire), in a true world-system there is a single, worldwide economic market but multiple political centers (even if power is unevenly distributed among them). In the context of capitalism, the fundamental political structure is the interstate system (not the nation-state), meaning that there is no effective way to control global markets. The political geography of capitalism is thus not the nation-state, but the interstate system; indeed, the very flexibility and viability of capitalism hinges on capital’s ability to cross national borders and pit places against one another. Various hegemonic states succeed (to varying degrees) in imposing historically specific “rules of the game” over the world-system, but never attain complete domination. Modelski (1978) periodized the emergence of the capitalist world economy into distinct epochs, each of which was ruled by a hegemonic national power that “set the rules of the game,” the dominant ideologies and enforcement mechanisms that governed interactions among individual states (e.g., mercantilism or free trade). Changes from declining to ascending hegemons were typically accompanied by major wars, i.e., the use of violence when other mechanisms failed. World-systems theorists also frequently point up the link between the rise and fall of hegemons over time to long-term Kondratieff waves of innovation and capital investment that spin off differential effects in various parts of the globe. The unevenness of capitalist societies within the world-system generates a variety of labor relations. In the original formulation, the global spatial division of labor was viewed as a rigid, functionalist trilogy of core, semiperiphery, and periphery. Wallerstein maintained that in core countries, “free” labor predominates, that is, waged labor at relatively high prices. In the periphery, in contrast, labor is relatively unfree, with low wages and poor working conditions. Historically, unfree labor included forms of slavery on colonial plantations. The semi-periphery, which by definition exhibits a mixture of the characteristics of core and periphery, is defined by semi-free labor conditions (e.g., in the Newly Industrializing Countries of Asia). Brenner (1977), in a famous critique, maintained that this view defines capitalism on the basis of exchange, not the commodification of labor. The structure of global time and space is absolutely central to the order of world-systems (Wallerstein 1993). By theorizing interconnectedness at the global scale, world-systems theory is useful in understanding how time-space

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compression occurs globally, how the global economy differentially sutures places together in an ever-tighter skein, and how changes in one part of the planet reverberate across networks of trade and political control to affect other regions and places. As Wallerstein (1974:349) emphasizes, “the size of a world-economy is a function of the state of technology, and in particular of the possibilities of transport and communication within its bounds.” Historically, this tendency meant that places affected one another with mounting frequency and importance, but by the time of the late modern world economy in the nineteenth century, places had come to rely on one another. In this view, it is impossible, or at least unfruitful, to attempt to understand societies without some consideration of their interactions with other societies. As Leyshon (1995:21) observes “The concept of time-space distanciation helps us to avoid seeing societies as discrete and independent.” An important objection to this view was that it suffers from an inherent Eurocentrism. Blaut (1993), for example, strenuously objected to the “tunnel of time” and the “Orient express” model of space as biasing the analysis of world history and geography in terms that portray the economically developed world as rational, active, and innovative, meanwhile reducing the rest of the planet to a passive, irrational, stagnant status. Time-space compression, in Blaut’s alternative reading, was hardly the monopoly of the West: every part of the world was as equally capable of traversing the world’s spaces as was Europe, and it was only Europe’s accidental discovery of the New World that propelled it to world dominance. Thus, “The point deserves to be put very strongly. If the Western Hemisphere had been more accessible, say, to South Indian centers than to European centers, then very likely India would have become the home of capitalism, the site of the bourgeois revolution, and the rule of the world” (Blaut 1993:181). This assertion is at odds with the vast bulk of historical scholarship, which has detailed Western economic superiority and technical mastery of the seas, even on the eve of the Renaissance. (Prior to the sixteenth century, the distribution of technical and political power was considerably more complicated.) Blaut’s account resolutely ignores the internal dynamics of Western societies, the role of the rising bourgeoisie, and the numerous technological, military, and institutional advantages conferred by capitalism. The ability to generate timespace compression was not and never has been equally shared by all cultures on the planet. This stance hardly constitutes a form of Eurocentrism, but points to the power-geometries that unfolded differentially since the rise of the modern world system, i.e., the ability of the West to reconstruct the world in a way that favored it as the planetary core and the rest of the world as its periphery.

Virilio, speed, and time-space Central to understanding time-space compression is the mounting velocity of social and economic transactions over time. An important, if little understood,


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theorist in this regard is Paul Virilio—the “high priest of speed” (Redhead 2004:2), a planner, historian of technology, photographer, and philosopher of architecture, cinema, and the military—for whom the culture of speed is driven primarily by the needs of the military, whose conquest of the tyranny of distance extends repeatedly into civilian life (Bartram 2004). Virilio takes as his point of departure the intersections of military technology and the experience of speed, underscoring the machinic qualities of time and space as they are produced and conceptualized through his central concern, war. Thus, the state is essentially a machine to wage war, exhibiting a logic quite different from the Marxist emphasis on capital accumulation; in Virilio’s reading, the state is a “means of destruction” not a means of production. For him, “all human geography is ultimately a product of warfare” (Luke and Ó Tuathail 2000:365) because the preparation and engagement in military conflict, including things such as logistics, intelligence, and speeds of military machinery and rockets are the fundamental bases of territorial organization. Space here is reduced to little more than a theater of war, and the state is simply a machine for waging it. Steady improvements in the ability to wage war are thus instrumental to social abilities to bind together ever-larger units of space and time. Not capital accumulation but the dynamics of military conquest are the driving force behind the historical rounds of time-space compression. Space and time are the products of speed as it emanates from the prerequisites of warfare. Thus Virilio (1995:365) asserts: War and the preparation for it produce the space-time of human experience as a function of projectile speeds, logistical rates of transport, or intelligence insight gathering. The territorial organization of space into human settlements and political units of authority, from the earliest human village settlements to medieval city-states, modern nation-states and worldwide empires, reveals a constant tendency: they express different orders of military power, knowledge and technological organization. Telecommunications also figure centrally in Virilio’s worldview, in which digital technologies produced a world in which information is speed and duration is nonexistent. Virilio (1999:21) maintains: Speed enables you to see. It does not simply allow you to arrive at your destination more quickly, rather it enables you to see and foresee. . . . Speed changes the world vision. In the nineteenth century, with photography and cinema, world vision became “objective.” . . . It can be said that today, vision is becoming “teleobjective.” That is to say that television and multimedia are collapsing the close shots of time and space as a photograph collapses the horizon in the telephotographic lens. Virilio’s fixation on speed leads him to conclude (1986:60) that “we no longer populate stationariness; we populate the time spent changing place.” The

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tyranny of constant speed leads to alienated, stressed-out, exhausted citizens who populate the virtual geographies of the space of flows, it distorts human perception, sterilizes communications, forces a colonialism of daily life by machines, and generates a mindless automation that robs people of their humanity in a hypermotorized, digitized world. Virilio asserts that time-space compression has become sufficiently complete that the struggle for space— geopolitics—has been displaced by chronopolitics, the struggle for time. “Virilio’s dystopian vision replaces politics based around public and private spaces, local and global, with a series of intermingling and conflicting temporal modalities—a chronopolitics created by instantaneous transmission bringing formerly discrete space-times into contact” (Crang 2000:303). In short, complete time-space compression means that “distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything” (Virilio 1991:13). Despite the hyperbole, Virilio’s insights are useful in understanding that speed and velocity are not simply technical issues, but as profoundly cultural and political ones as well.

Theorizing poststructural relational space The enormous economic, technological, social, and spatial changes that accompanied, underpinned, and gave shape to the late twentieth-century transition into postmodern capitalism were addressed from numerous theoretical perspectives (including Virilio). Many views within this genre point to the greatly enhanced degree of globalization evident under contemporary capitalism and the ostensible annihilation of distance announced by technocrats (e.g., Cairncross 1997) and the concomitant alleged “end of history” announced by neoliberal intellectuals (e.g., Fukuyama 2006). Dodgshon (1999) rightly challenges notions that postmodern time-space compression has resulted in the “end of history” as ahistorical and simplistic. Rather, the “end of history” meant the end of the cold war, and the beginning of a new epoch, one filled with new historical and geographical issues, predicaments, and questions. The shape of postmodern society, including its temporal and spatial dimensions, has been the topic of considerable discussion. Foucault (1986:22) concisely summarized the postmodern condition as follows: “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.” Such changes unfold at multiple scales ranging from the global to the individual person. At the global scale, rather than connections that rely on traditional notions of distance and proximity, postmodern capitalism has substituted virtual flows of information. At the scale of the individual body, Jameson (1984) maintained that the bewildering complexity of postmodern hyperspace exceeds the individual’s capacity for cognitive representation of the world; thus he holds that under the disorienting round of


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contemporary time-space compression, the human body has lost its capacity “to map its position in a mappable external world.” Castells (1997), noting the pronounced degree to which postmodern capitalism relies on information as its primary resource, distinguished earlier information societies, in which productivity was derived from access to energy and the manipulation of materials, from later informational societies that emerged in the late twentieth century, in which productivity is derived primarily from knowledge and information. In his reading, the time-space compression of postmodernism was manifested in the global “space of flows,” including the three “layers” of transportation and communication infrastructure, the cities or nodes that occupy strategic locations within these, and the social spaces occupied by the global managerial class. He notes, for example, that while people live in places, postmodern power is manifested in the linkages among places, their interconnectedness, as personified by business executives shuttling among global cities and using the Internet to weave complex geographies of knowledge invisible to almost all ordinary citizens. This process was largely driven by the needs of the transnational class of the powerful employed in information-intensive occupations; hence, he writes (1996:415) that “Articulation of the elites, segmentation and disorganization of the masses seem to be the twin mechanisms of social domination in our societies.” In this view, the city under the space of flows increasingly left behind its former role as the center of embedded culture as it was eroded by delocalized flows of information, capital, and people. Contemporary globalization has undermined commonly held notions of Euclidean space by forming linkages among disparate producers and consumers intimately connected over vast distances through flows of capital and goods. An important step in the theorization of space under these conditions was the notion of commodity chains (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994; Dicken et al. 2001). Drawing from the earlier French tradition of filières or value chain analysis, commodity chains may be defined as networks of labor and production processes that give rise to a particular commodity from raw material to processing, delivery, and consumption. Commodity chains include flows of goods between different points or nodes, varying labor relations across the length of the chain, different constellations of production and governance at each segment. Gereffi (1996) differentiated between producerdriven and buyer-driven chains, in which the power to control transactions lay at different ends of the concatenated linkages. Such tools are useful in dissecting, for example, the spatiality of transnational corporations, the dominant producers of time-space today. In overcoming the artificial separation between production and consumption, commodity chains help to expose the widespread commodity fetishism prevalent in advanced economies, exposing commodities, à la Marx, as more than just things but as embodiments of social processes and thus helping to expose the unequal power relations among places that lie in the creation of goods. Chains are hence simultaneously geographical, economic, political, and cultural. They lie at the

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boundaries of the tangible and the intangible, incorporating sets of meanings, or as Hartwick (1998:424) elegantly puts it, they “conjoin the representational with the geomaterial.” Moreover, they are temporally situated, constantly fluctuating in location and length over time. However, like time-space compression itself, commodity chains have a history longer than that of modernity. While the temptation is to equate commodity chains with postmodern, globalized forms of production, the historical record (like that of time-space compression) indicates that they are not new. As numerous scholars have demonstrated (Abu-Lughod 1989; Frank 1998), long-distance trade pre-existed the capitalist world economy, and spatial divisions of labor that extend deep into history tied together diverse communities, however loosely. With the rise of mercantile capitalism, commodity chains became increasingly larger in scope and length, linking widespread places through an increasingly complex division of labor in which distant strangers became ever more reliant upon one another. Thus, while commodity chains are certainly longer, more complex, and change more rapidly than ever before, as a means of producing relative space their novelty is debatable. Conceptually, commodity chains helped to change many theorists’ view of space from the absolute, Cartesian notion—static, fixed, and lying outside of society, or space as a container—to relative and relational space, space as socially produced by people, not simply given, and thus fluid, folded, twisted by chains, pleated, and unstable. The rise of the poststructural view of space owed much to the work of Latour (1993), who sought to move beyond the Enlightenment focus on pure essences that created dualities such as individual and society, people and nature, human and nonhuman, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, micro and macro, local and global. Rather, this view takes as its point of departure the linkages and connections (rather than differences) among different ontological categories as actors draw upon and combine them in various forms of hybridity. Latour (1993:25), for example, notes “Space and time are not, contrary to Kant’s demonstrations, the a priori categories of our sensibility. . . . On the contrary, spaces and times are traced by reversible or irreversible displacements of many types of mobiles.” This view entailed a shift in the conception of space as a surface to one centered on networks (Murdoch 2006): unlike surfaces, which have traditionally been portrayed as containers “outside” of society and thus “holding” it, networks explicitly admit to their human construction. As Mann (1986) insists, societies are never unitary, bounded states, but multiple, overlapping, intersecting, and contingent networks of power stretched unevenly across time and space. No social formation is thus a totally unified entity, but rather forms an open-ended lattice of relations; societies do not just occupy space, they manufacture networks. Such a notion is disconcerting to those accustomed to thinking of geography in Cartesian terms, i.e., as the smooth surface of a globe. As Latour (1993:77) maintains, “How are we to gain access to networks, those beings whose topology is so odd and whose


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ontology is even more unusual, beings that possess both the capacity to produce both time and space?” This line of thought gave rise to actor-network theory (Murdoch 1995, 1997, 1998; Law and Hassard 1999). It is not simply actors in everyday life who constitute the primary focus here, but their relative positionality and powers within integrated systems of power and information that matters most. Actor-networks exist to construct and maintain power at a distance, and in the process construct time and space (Thrift and Leyshon 1994). Every actor-network selectively incorporates some members and excludes others, often on the basis of implicit codes of behavior reflecting social position and spatial location. Networks of actors mobilize rules, resources, and power, including information, in order to accomplish tasks, creating a net of intended and unintended consequences that stretch across the spatiotemporal boundaries of their network. To maintain network functionality, actors must perform by being engaged with one another recursively, interpreting and translating one another’s behavior. Because actor-network theory strives to overcome the artificial boundaries between culture and nature, actors in this sociotechnical seamless “nature-culture” nexus need not be human, but (controversially) may include inanimate objects (Bingham 1996; Murdoch 1997). As with structuration theory, actors and networks are mutually presupposing aspects of one phenomenon, simultaneously producing and being produced by time and space. Actor-network theory therefore “spends a great deal of time examining how actors are incorporated into chains and networks. In so doing, it also indicates how discrete spaces come to be relationally linked together” (Murdoch 2006:58). For example, Thrift and Leyshon (1994) employed actor-network theory to examine the dynamics of global capital markets as they are structured by firms, nation-states, the media, and telecommunications, all of which are deployed simultaneously to produce, transmit, and consume knowledge about markets and other actors. Such a perspective has helped to humanize even the most abstract of economic processes by revealing them to be the products of agents enmeshed in webs of power and meaning, not disembodied processes that operate independently of the people who create them (Law 1994). The strategy of embodiment goes a long ways toward demythologizing teleological interpretations of globalization, which present it as “natural” and inevitable, and reveal global processes to be the contingent outcomes of decisions made by human actors tied up in networks that cross multiple spatial scales. As actors operate at different scales, they realign the topography of power, strengthening some places and disempowering others. Massey’s (1993:61) well-received notion of powergeometries emphasizes that in every network, “some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.” However, critics of actor-network theory maintain that it lacks sufficient explanatory power to understand why some actors enjoy more power than do

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others (Basset 1999). Sheppard (2002) maintains that theorizations of networks tend to exaggerate their nonhierarchical nature and underplay the role of power in the creation of centrality and peripherality. Thus, the opportunities and constraints faced by local places are not simply dependent on internal conditions, but reflect how power relations play out across multiple spatial scales. This notion is particularly apropos to the geographies of globalization, characterized as they are by “wormholes,” in which relational proximity is unrelated to physical distance. Thus, “The presence and frequency of wormholes is then a measure of the degree to which positionality stretches selectively across geographic space. . . . Wormholes are a structural effect of the long historical geography of globalization, reflective of how globalization processes reshape space/time” (p. 324). Regional development—and the simultaneous lack of it—is a relational process in which local places have few, if any, fixed borders, and impulses of change travel differentially through the complex, shifting manifolds of global capital (Coe et al. 2004). One consequence of this line of thought is to challenge the notion of spatial scale itself, an idea so deeply embedded in most geographical thought as to be taken for granted. Smith (1993) argued that scale is produced through and constitutive of social relationships, and Thrift (1995: 33) went so far as to claim “There is no such thing as scale.” Likewise, Massey (1999) called attention to the intertwined scales of the global, national, and local, refusing to see these as a simple hierarchy in which the global determines the local; the distinctions among these scales are as misleading as they are enlightening. Rather than viewing scale as some naturally occurring level at which social relations unfold (e.g., the local, the national, the global), it may be discursively repositioned in nonterritorial ways as a contested function of the differential powers exerted by different locales (Marston 2000; Amin 2002; Howitt 2003). From the perspective of actor-network theory, scale does not simply reflect the shifting patterns of networks, it is constituted by them. Hence, “Size and scale are nothing more than the end product of network extension processes” (Murdoch 2006:71). Networks operate across many scales simultaneously, creating as Latour (1993:121) puts it, “an Ariadne’s thread that allows us to pass with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the nonhuman. It is the thread of networks of practices and instruments, of documents and translations.” By forcing us to rethink how time and space are produced—that is, topologically rather than in terms of conventional Cartesian and Kantian views of space that have dominated geography—actor-network theory becomes “a machine for waging war on Euclideanism” (Law, quoted in Murdoch 1998:357). In this light, geography is not simply territorial, but something altogether different, more complex, and more interesting. Postmodern, poststructural theories such as commodity chains and actor-networks greatly accelerated the rise of relational views of space. Harvey (2006:121–3) offers a useful definition of absolute, relative, and relational space:


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Absolute space is fixed and we record or plan events within its frame. This is the space of Newton and Descartes and it is usually represented as a pre-existing and immoveable grid amenable to standardized measurement and open to calculation. Geometrically it is the space of Euclid and therefore the space of all manner of cadastral mapping and engineering practices. . . . The relative notion of space is mainly associated with the name of Einstein and the non-Euclidean geometries that began to be constructed most systematically in the 19th century. Space is relative in the double sense: that there are multiple geometries from which to choose and that the spatial frame depends crucially upon what it is that is being relativized and by whom. . . . The relational concept of space is most often associated with the name of Leibniz who . . . objected vociferously to the absolute view of space and time so central to Newton’s theories. His primary objection was theological. Newton made it seem as if even God was inside of absolute space and time rather than in command of spatio-temporality. By extension, the relational view of space holds there is no such thing as space or time outside of the processes that define them. . . . Processes do not occur in space but define their own spatial frame [italics in original]. Poststructural geography, in emphasizing the embodied nature of social life as situated practices, drew attention to networks and topologies rather than surfaces and topographies, away from space as an inert container and toward interconnected sets of places as manifolds that are continuously folded and pleated, stretched, distorted, and shredded. This perspective has served to underscore how, unlike traditional chorology, with its emphasis on static places, relational geographies are always dynamic, incomplete, forever coming into being, and perpetually in flux, giving rise to ever-changing patterns of centrality and peripherality. Geography consists of the contingent networks or power-geometries generated by social interaction rather than a homogeneous plane that pre-exists coherent, well-ordered societies. Relational space “is seen as an undulating landscape in which the linkages established in networks draw some locations together while at the same time pushing others further apart” (Murdoch 2006:86). Taken to the extreme, Doel’s (1999) obfuscationist text follows Deleuze and Guattari in likening poststructuralism to the origami-like nature of space as it is repeatedly folded and refolded, fissured, cracked, and fractalized through a series of difference-producing repetitions. Massey (1993) criticizes notions that maintain place is an island of stability in the constantly shifting oceans of capitalist change, arguing that such a characterization is reactionary. Rather, she promotes a progressive sense of place that links places to other places, a view in which places constantly change, producing and receiving change through their interactions with one another. A relational politics of place calls into question easy distinctions like inside/outside, near/far, space/place, and global/local, artificial differentiations

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that are always embedded in each other and mutually constituted. She (2005) argues passionately that Cartesian conceptions of space as a passive surface inevitably deemphasize the temporal flux that are always an inherent part of geographies, and simultaneously create a false dichotomy between the local and the global. As an alternative, she suggests three maxims: (1) that space be seen as the product of interrelations, i.e., of embedded social practices in which identities and human ties are co-constituted; (2) that space be understood as the sphere of multiple possibilities, i.e., as a contingent simultaneity of heterogeneous historical trajectories; and (3) that space must be conceived as always under construction, in the process of forever being made, implying a continual openness to the future. These steps are fundamental to an appreciation of the deeply political nature of geography: “Conceptualising space as open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming, is a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite too, for the possibility of politics” (p. 59). Relational geographies should not, therefore, be considered as some bizarre invention by overly theoretical academics; rather, because human beings are always entwined in relations with others, via transportation and communication, relational space speaks directly to the issue of what it means to be human, to live in a social and spatial context. In short, space is emergent rather than existing a priori, it is composed of relations rather than structures. Because time and space are inseparable (but not identical), the relational view of space is central to understanding time-space compression: for places to be tied together relationally, the meaning and structure of time must change; conversely, if time changes in its structure and organization, the meanings of place, distance, and location must also change.

Theories of time-space compression in perspective This analysis of time-space compression selectively incorporates several aspects of the schools of thought articulated above. Rather than viewing technocratic, Marxist, structurationist, world-systems, and poststructuralist views as mutually opposing, it seeks to bring them into a creative tension with one another. Indeed, I have little patience with narrow-minded and often arrogant perspectives that uphold one view only at the expense of all others (which is not to say that all views are equally valid). This approach, therefore, happily draws from all of these literatures as necessary. From transportation geography, the analysis is informed by an understanding of the critical importance of systems for moving people, goods, and information across the Earth’s surface. Because technology plays a key role in this story, transportation and communication systems figure prominently. Such a move is not a retreat into a simplistic technological determinism, in which technological change is seen as the driving force and society is the passive receptor. The origins and impacts of technologies can only be understood within their historical and cultural context, and their consequences are always contingent:


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technologies only enable or encourage options among a suite of opportunities rather than determine which trajectory will unfold. For example, communications systems, as Deibert (1997) makes clear, greatly affect (but do not, by themselves, simply determine) the epistemological and ontological foundations of different symbolic orders. That said, many social constructivist accounts, which successfully portray how technologies come into being, are not as successful in understanding the impacts of technologies on social relations and the changing construction of time and space, and run the risk of denying any independent effect of new technologies, intended or otherwise. Likewise, from Marxism, the analysis gains a critical appreciation of the politics of time and space, of the constitutive role of class and inequality, and role that particular production systems play in the reproduction of uneven development over time. Just as Marxism offered a rich social and historical analysis of social systems, i.e., as more than the sum of their individual parts, so too has it powerfully informed our understandings of how time and space are never abstract, value-neutral categories with lives of their own, but only exist by virtue of how people organize them within hierarchical systems of power. World systems theory allows this understanding to unfold at a global scale, pointing insistently to the uneven relational geographies that have existed, in one form or another, for most or all of human existence. Structuration theory extends the understanding of time-space compression to the sphere of social reproduction and the scale of everyday life, i.e., as the unintentional product of human beings in their daily routines. Like all approaches that take the human subject seriously, structuration theory forces the understanding of time-space compression to plunge into the phenomenological world of meanings and everyday experience, calling attention to the need to delve into its discursive and representational dimensions. From Virilio, we learn that speed is not simply a technological phenomenon, but a cultural and symbolic one, often with military origins, and that the present historical moment is unique in its ability to conquer space with unparalleled ease. Finally, the analysis draws on various poststructural accounts of space by rejecting the easy Cartesian equation of geography with surfaces, noting that relational spaces are produced by actors in networks that extend across multiple spatial scales in ways that defy simply measurements such as “near” or “far.” Time and space never, therefore, exist “outside” of a society, but are always and everywhere produced by a society, changed by it, and in turn change it. In many respects, this position, ironically, marks a return to the position advanced by Leibniz in his confrontation with Newton. Relative space, it seems, has come full circle. Attributing causality is always a difficult enterprise, particularly today, given the widespread suspicion of metanarratives and essentialist reductionism. Monocausal explanations are invariably simplistic, tend to lack historical depth, and ignore the contingency inherent in human affairs. Time-space compression does not simply result from some innate human drive, technological

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determinism, or even capitalism’s relentless search for profit. There are many other forces that fold and distort time and space, including the extension of power relations over localities, various societies’ attempts at colonizing new spaces (which reflect a variety of goals and priorities), the interests of states and merchants in expanding trade networks, religious proselytization, and the inadvertent readjustment in conceptual understandings of distance periodically introduced by the sciences and arts. These causes must be kept in mind to avoid reifying time-space compression, that is, representing the process as some asocial phenomenon devoid of roots in the world of real human beings. There is an important analytical corollary to this line of thought: because changes in the structure of time and space, as well as their cultural interpretation, have many different origins and roots, it is more helpful to think in terms of context and confluence of conjunctures of forces than specific causes. In examining this topic, there are four pitfalls that have plagued earlier attempts that must be avoided. First, many accounts of the social nature of time and space, and thus of time-space compression, are implicitly elitist (Stein 2001), focusing only on the experiences of the powerful, or of intellectuals, and ignoring how the great masses of people who were neither felt their sense of time and space transformed. This observation indicates that there is never simply one time and one space being produced in any society, but always a diversity contingent on class, gender, ethnicity, and other lines of social life. Massey (1993:62) is clear that time-space compression never affects all peoples and places equally; rather, “The ways in which people are inserted into and placed within this ‘time-space compression’ are highly complicated and extremely varied.” Similarly, Knowles (2006) stresses that time-space convergence is always socially and spatially uneven in its manifestation. The process both reflects uneven spatial development and simultaneously manufactures it. For example, the shrinking of space among the world’s global cities has coincided with a steady widening of space among economically marginalized locations in the developing world (Leyshon 1995). Second, whereas time-space compression has been generally conceived as occurring in some abstract social space devoid of physical and biological characteristics, it is important to keep in mind that historically, changes in the nature of time and space inevitably entailed a reworking of “nature” (which is, admittedly, a highly problematic concept; see Castree 2005). To cross distances, to produce places, to experience time is inevitably to draw upon and be shaped by the biophysical environment: far from unfolding across a nonexistent isotropic plain, real, historical time-space compression took place within the topographies of continents and oceans, their multiple climates and ecosystems. For example, colonial and industrial maritime networks of trade, migration, and investment—all of which generated relational geographies in their own ways, and thus folded time and space—enfolded forests and deserts, grasslands and jungles, seas and oceans within changing manifolds of temporal and spatial distance.


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Third, time-space compression does not necessarily occur in short, sudden, dramatic, and sweeping changes. Although some historical moments have been truly revolutionary in terms of their impacts on time and space, often the restructuring of these two dimensions occurred more gradually. Stein (2001), for example, drawing upon guides to steamship services in nineteenthcentury Cornwall, Ontario, notes that steamboats reduced the time necessary for the trip from Montreal to Kingston from 26 to 24 hours between 1850 and 1853, a savings of only a few minutes per year. Time-space compression is frequently gradual and cumulative, evolutionary, not necessarily revolutionary, or, in the words of May and Thrift (2001:18), it “occurred less rapidly and more unevenly than is often suggested,” comments that serve to warn us against exaggerating the impacts of new technologies and social and spatial forms. Fourth and finally, time-space compression is not simply a material process, but also a symbolic and discursive one. Poststructural theory, in emphasizing the centrality of language and representation as means by which the world is made present, extends the understanding of time-space compression into the domains of the discursive and imaginative. Geographical imaginations are mechanisms by which societies and individuals construct perceived relational spaces of distance and proximity defined more by cultural rather than physical distances. The act of Othering, for example, involves the construction of cultural distances between “us” and “them” that may or may not be proportionate to spatial distances. Changes in relational distances are therefore intimately bound up with changes in individual and social identities (Pile and Thrift 1995). In this sense, the analysis of time-space compression can learn much from, and contribute to, the literatures and understandings of Orientalism and postcolonialism (Said 1978; Gregory 1995). One such example is the collisions of cultures that colonialism and imperialism entailed, including, among other things, the intersections of very different geographical imaginations. There is no single theorization that can explain time-space compression in all of its diverse historical and spatial contexts: rather, it took different forms, exhibited different patterns, reflected different causes, and implied different consequences, depending on where and when it occurred and who was involved. Rather than attempt to form one overarching theory of timespace, May and Thrift (2001) propose that we accept the multiplicity of timespaces characteristic of every society: “Thus, the picture that emerges is less that of a singular or uniform social time stretching over a uniform space, than of various (and uneven) networks of time stretching in different and divergent directions across an uneven social field” (p. 5). In the spirit of poststructuralist inquiry, therefore, this project rejects the search for an overarching, allencompassing explanatory dynamic, be it technological change or the search for a spatial fix, in favor of a more contingent, open-ended approach sensitive to the particularities that accompanied and underpinned time-space compression in all of its messy complexity.

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The global expansion of capitalism, starting in the sixteenth century ushered in a dramatically new world-historical era in which the process of time-space compression, which had distinctly premodern roots, accelerated rapidly, became permanent, and was increasingly accepted as natural by large numbers of the world’s people. At the core of this period were the trading and colonial empires that flourished across the planet (Tracy 1991), which, in creating the first Eurocentric global system, brought together vast realms of the planet under the umbrella of Western political, economic, and ideological domination. Materially, this process led directly to a transformation of Europe from a collection of impoverished feudal states to the hegemon of the world system due to the waves of surplus value flowing into the continent from its overseas possessions. Culturally and ideologically, the hegemonic configuration of ideational traits that accompanied this process—modernity—itself reflected and produced a steady series of changes over time and across space. The earliest forms of modernity, those associated most closely with colonialism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, indicate the constellation of attributes that characterize global capitalism prior to the Industrial Revolution. Modernity, of course, was not one single, unified discourse, but a multitude of interlaced discourses whose Western orientation reflected and contributed to the West’s political and economic hegemony.

Early modern colonialism and the remaking of world time and space The most explicit and enduring symbol of early modern time-space compression was colonialism, an economic, political, cultural, and geographic phenomenon that swept countless cultures into a vortex of global trade and investment, connecting far-flung cultures to an unprecedented degree. The European domination of the world widened the Western ecumene from Europe to the entire globe on a scale unprecedented in world history. Crosby (1997:ix) eloquently contrasts the sheer scalar differences between premodern and early modern empires: “Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Huayna Capac were great conquerors, but they were all confined to no more


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than one continent and at best a wedge of a second. They were homebodies compared with Queen Victoria.” During the colonial era, enormous parts of the earth’s surface were drawn into sustained contact with one another to a degree never encountered previously; far from being an exchange of equals, this process was clearly designed to facilitate European exploitation of vast swaths of the globe. As Harvey (1989a:264) puts it, “the world’s spaces were deterritorialized, stripped of their preceding significations, and then reterritorialized according to the convenience of colonial and imperial administration.” As dependency and world-systems theorists have repeatedly emphasized, the rise of the West in many ways was predicated on its conquest of the non-West. In other words, “not only did the ‘Rise of the West’ follow ‘the Decline of the East.’ The two were also otherwise structurally and cyclically dependent on each other as inextricably interrelated parts of a single global economy” (Frank 1998:276). There are innumerable attempts at explaining the origins and sources of the European success, all of which are tied to the tendency of capitalism to expand over time. More functionalist approaches to this issue represent colonialism as the spatial fix of mercantile capitalism (and, in a subsequent wave in the nineteenth century, of industrial capitalism as well) in light of the persistent need to find markets for overaccumulated surplus value at the core (cf. Harvey 1982). Such an argument, however, does not address the means by which Europeans came to dominate their colonies, i.e., the specific advantages they enjoyed, including powerful navies, the horse, superior military technologies (guns, cannons), and the widespread epidemics that decimated indigenous populations, particularly in the New World. Moreover, Europe’s very political separation into competing powers—in contrast to the Muslim world, India, or China— fostered intense rivalries and arms races that generated a self-reinforcing series of changes. In the view of world-systems theory, colonialism witnessed numerous hegemons dominate the global economy at successive historical moments, including Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Britain, and later, the U.S., a pattern that may be indicative of long wave cycles of capital accumulation in the capitalist economy (Modelski and Thompson 1988). Needless to say, colonialism entailed dramatic consequences for colonized peoples everywhere, although the impacts varied widely by time and space. The construction of the Eurocentric world order was, among other things, a violent program of enslavement, mass extermination and genocide, broken treaties, and displacement. Whole societies were turned upside down; some were extinguished altogether. Some of this violence Europeans visited upon one another as competition among different imperial states intensified, particularly in the nineteenth century. Finally, it is imperative to note that colonialism was also accompanied, indeed defined, by the imposition of commodity production on a global basis: all over the world, non-commodified social systems—hunters and gatherers, subsistence farmers, autarkic communities, feudal empires, and non-monetized exchange systems—fell prey to the onslaught of Western colonialism.

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Central to this process were the oceans. The new European relationship to the seas was forged through the navigational revolution of the fifteenth century, which allowed open ocean sailing rather than coastal voyages. The ensuing voyages of exploration and conquest brought the world’s maritime regions within the expanding circuits of European capital circulation and accumulation. Colonialism transformed the oceans from barriers into a means of accessing lands beyond, even if those were unknown or only dimly perceived. Often this process was borne of dire necessity: Portuguese and Spanish entries into the Atlantic Ocean were in many respects an attempt to circumvent the Turkish domination of the Middle East (including the seizure of Constantinople in 1453), a force that motivated Europeans to find new ways to the lucrative Asian trade. The eventual result was a series of colonial empires that bound together vast regions separated by enormous maritime spaces, constructing geographies that were “porous, discontinuous and relentlessly speculative” (Brotton 1999:88). Because they did not allow penetration of continental interiors, ship-based empires were confined to coasts, littorals, archipelagos, and islands. Oceanic discoveries and conquests also propelled a gradual restructuring of European spatiality, with a decline in the Italian city-states and the Hanseatic League and a rise of the Atlantic sea powers, shifting the primary locus of trade and balance of power from the Mediterranean and Baltic to the Atlantic, in which not one but several empires operated simultaneously. The emerging colonial world system was heavily conditioned by the preexisting European discursive and imaginative geographies. For example, the writings of Marco Polo, precapitalist history’s most famous adventurer, had a significant influence in the emerging Western conception of the Orient. Henry the Navigator of Portugal carefully read Polo’s account, The Description of the World, as did Columbus and Magellan. Colonial voyages simultaneously put to rest ancient conceptions of the earth, particularly those of Ptolemy, and opened the way for newer, more pragmatic accounts of how the earth worked. Vasco de Gama’s circumnavigation of Africa in 1498 ushered in profound changes in Europe’s view of the world, making accessible the Indies in ways that directly contradicted classical geographical imaginations. Indeed, prior to 1492 numerous European scholars believed that the shortest route to India lay across the Atlantic. In 1474, Florentine scholar Paolo Toscanelli, drawing on Ptolemy and Strabo, advised King Alfonso V of Portugal “Do not be surprised that I describe the areas from which the spices are brought as lying to the west, whereas they are usually thought of as lying to the east. But they may also be reached by sailing west” (quoted in Klemp 1976:9). The voyages of navigation, exploration, and conquest initially revealed to Europeans how large the world truly was and how small Europe was in comparison. European scholars were acutely aware that the maritime voyages were radically expanding their known world. For example, in 1512, Nuremberg scholar Johannes Cochlaeus noted that “truly the dimension of the earth as


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now inhabited is much greater than these ancient geographers described it . . . Hence we must conclude that we must now allow for wider limits, both in latitude and longitude, to the habitable earth than either Aristotle in his book or Strabo in his third book would give it” (quoted in Brotton 1999:78). In this sense, colonialism, at least in its opening phases, was as much a process of time-space expansion as compression. Under Henry the Navigator, Lisbon became the new global center of navigational and cartographic expertise. Henry’s headquarters at Sagres pioneered the European exploration of the Atlantic and West Africa, Portugal’s entry into Asia, and revolutionized cartography. Sailing ships such as the Portuguese caravel, the only ship capable of sailing anywhere on the planet (Hugill 1993), and its successor, the galleon, were able to sail into the wind and shallow waters in all weathers, cut weeks from time at sea and allowed sailors (“men of the sail”) to return home more easily, initiating a feedback loop in which geographic knowledge became cumulative and its growth self-reinforcing and continuous. Bartholomeu Dias returned from rounding southern Africa in 1488, which rendered Columbus’s original intentions superfluous and encouraged him to think about a westward voyage (Boorstin 1983). Portuguese expansion replaced the older land-and-sea trade networks with an all-ocean one, greatly lowering the costs of bringing goods from Asia to Europe and inducing cost-space convergence (Cipolla 1965; Hugill 1993). Yet it would wrong, or at least Eurocentric, to conceive of this process as simply one of reaching out across the surface of the earth; to invoke Massey (2005:4), “Conceiving of space as in the voyages of discovery, as something to be crossed and maybe conquered . . . makes space seem like a surface: continuous and given” rather than as a mutable social production, which is to say, colonial spatialities were produced by colonialism, not pre-existing. Magellan’s famous voyage across the Pacific in 1520 took three months and 20 days, and remarkably encountered no storms, thus giving the ocean its name. Since Magellan died in the Philippines, his Malayan slave Enrique, captured on an early trip to Asia and who accompanied him back to Spain and thence across the Atlantic and Pacific, became the first person to circumnavigate the world (Manchester 1992:269). Magellan’s crew’s feat was not only technically significant, but the very act of global circumnavigation gave rise for the first time to the notion that there was a closed, finite world, an early inkling of the relative spaces yet to come. Indeed, despite the fame of Columbus, the Portuguese achievements did far more to revise the archaic but enormously influential Ptolemaic perspective that lay at the core of the medieval world view. Global circumvention initiated an incipient planetary awareness among the elites of Europe, or what Pratt (1992) calls an incipient planetary consciousness, an understanding of the world as a unified entity in which localities were always enmeshed and intertwined. As Massey (2005:92) puts it, “The collapse of near and far has long been a fact for places outside the West—indeed it is intrinsic to the establishment, through ‘discover’, imperialism and colonialism, of modernity itself.” Not coincidentally, shortly

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after Magellan’s trip, globes made their appearance, devices crucial to the implementation of agreements such as the papal Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 (Brotton 1999). The European discovery of the Americas, likewise, initiated a momentous material and discursive transformation. Queen Isabel, whose advisors were well aware of the earth’s spherical shape, initially feared Columbus had miscalculated its circumference; indeed, by relying upon Ptolemaic accounts, he estimated the world to be one-third smaller than it actually was. Columbus’s narratives of the Discovery were drenched in medieval cosmological meanings, including claims that the New World represented Paradise, or heaven on earth, the site in which saved Christians would enter as promised by Genesis, or, equivalently, a newfound Jerusalem (Zamora 1993). In one of history’s most colossal misunderstandings, Columbus remained convinced to his dying day that he had found the Indies, and that Cuba was Cipangu (Japan). Ensuing colonial discursive geographies projected the European experience of time and space upon a global stage. Spanish imaginary geographies, for example, portrayed the Atlantic as an extension of the Mediterranean, and the conquest of the New World—the decisive spatial fix of the sixteenth century—as an extension of the reconquista long after the Moors had been expelled from Iberia. Such analogies are understandable as a means to comprehend the infinitely expanded domains that came to be enclosed within the European worldview. Moreover, these observations underscore how the discourses used to make sense of time-space compression are inevitably palimpsests that intertwine the contemporary and the past, folding them into each other in complex, contingent, and often unpredictable ways. The ideological impacts of the discovery of the New World as its implications reverberated across Europe are difficult to exaggerate. The so-called “shock of the primitive” not only fueled notions of racial hierarchy and European superiority, but prompted heated debates as to what constituted a human being, as exemplified in the attempts by Bartolomé de las Casas to get the Spanish court to recognize the humanity of Native Americans. O’Gorman (1961) suggests that the discovery of the New World accelerated the incipient secularization of Western society; in his account, the Americas were not simply discovered but discursively invented, a process that obliterated the medieval Christian worldview of a planet with three, and only three, continents and accentuated the division between humans and nature (cf. Mignolo 1995). Old habits die hard, however, and it took centuries for the tenacious earlier mythology to let go: only when Bering’s expedition in 1741 confirmed that North America was indeed distinct from Eurasia did the medieval worldview finally succumb. Cosgrove (2001:135) maintains that “As the true dimensions of the globe, America’s continental size, and oceanic space became recognized, Europe’s spatiotemporal centrality . . . figured Asia in term of an exotic past and the transoceanic West as an unformed future.” Kirby (1996:42) takes this line of thought even farther, arguing “The reconception of the world that allowed the newfound America to be conceived as a separate


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continent may have been a key step on the path to the modern ideology of the individual.” As the first of the European powers to infiltrate Asia and set up foreign colonies, Portugal, the world-system’s first hegemon, played a uniquely important role in the construction of the colonial world system. Portugal’s invasion of the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century pulled the plug on the centuries-old Arab-Asian trade and set the stage for the Ottoman conquest of the Arab world (Wink 1993). Portugal’s seizure of Malacca in 1511 was followed in short order by their acquisition of Timor, Macau, and Formosa. Given how far such places were from Europe—a round-trip voyage to Asia could take three years—direct control over colonial entrepots was often loose at best. Nonetheless, colonialism bound Europe and Asia into increasingly intertwined entities. For instance, the Portuguese knew well the importance of Southeast Asia to Europe: explorer Tome Pires, for example, claimed that “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice” (AbuLughod 1989:291), perhaps the clearest statement of the interdependencies that colonial time-space compression created. In the New World, Portuguese and especially Spanish colonialism quickly integrated vast domains into the European sphere of control, annihilating Native American civilizations in a process that Blaut (1993) and Frank (1998) credit with jump-starting the capitalist economy. Subsequent to the genocidal extermination of tens of millions of Native Americans, the New World was methodically transformed into a global periphery that aided greatly in the development of Europe, allowing that continent to escape domestic ecological constraints by tapping into new supplies of fish, lumber, minerals, and other resources (Marks 2007). Of course, chronic labor shortages in the Western Hemisphere were alleviated largely through the forced importation of 10 to 20 million African slaves, a phenomenon that reflects the repeated misery visited upon that highly marginalized continent by successive waves of capitalism. In keeping with early modernity’s maritime emphasis, Spanish colonialism generated a series of coastal entrepots such as Havana, Veracruz, and Cartegena. Sugar plantations, which became prototype factories of a sort, were among the first to subject their labor force to the discipline of industrial time, obliterating indigenous time conceptions in the process. One measure of the global time-space compression that ensued during the Columbian encounter was the diffusion of the chili pepper, which, within decades after 1492, had become a staple of the cuisines of China, Thailand, Vietnam, and South Asia (Wilson 1999). But by far the most important contribution of the New World to the Old was silver, of which ten times more than gold was shipped back to Spain in galleons (financing luxuries such as the palace at El Escorial). Silver became a primary medium for integrating the world’s spaces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the force that produced a series of distinctively novel geographies. For example, in addition to the lucrative mines in Mexico, the Spanish briefly transformed the silver mining city of Potosí, in Bolivia,

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into one of the largest cities in the world; in 1600, it had 160,000 inhabitants, rivaling London, Seville, or Amsterdam (Pomeranz and Topik 1999). Potosí’s global importance is instructive: half of the New World’s silver flowed from this one mine, in which two to eight million Aymara Indians perished horribly. New World silver became the primary specie integrating the mercantile world economy and essentially allowed Europe to “buy itself a ticket on the Asian train” (Frank 1998:xxv): “from 1493 to 1800, 85% of the world’s silver and 70% of its gold came from the Americas” (p. 143). TePaske (1983:425) notes “American silver was so ubiquitous that the merchants from Boston to Havana, Seville to Antwerp, Murmansk to Alexandria, Constantinople to Coromandel, Macao to Canton, Nagasaki to Manila all used the Spanish peso or piece of eight (real) as a standard medium of exchange.” Given Europe’s large trade deficits with Asia, two-thirds of European payments for Asian imports consisted of precious metals. From Spain, silver flowed to England, France, and the Netherlands to purchase manufactured goods, where much of it went to Russia to finance imports of furs (Figure 3.1). Russian silver, in turn, flowed along the Volga River to Persia. Spanish silver also found its way directly to the Ottomans and thence to the Indian Ocean. Much of the Mughal Empire in India was financed by silver, a considerable portion of which went to purchase horses from central Asia. Indian silver also flowed through Malacca to China, or at times overland via the Silk Road routes. At the easternmost end of this network, China, in which the Ming dynasty was remonetizing the economy from paper to silver, was the “sink” for ½ to ¾ of the world’s silver flows between 1500 and 1800 ad. Thus, “without China, there would have been no Potosí” (Marks 2007:80). Indeed, the seventeenth century witnessed a broad financial crisis across eastern and southern Asia associated with this restructuring (Perlin 1986; Richards 1990). When Spain established its Manila colony in the Philippines in 1571, it became possible, for the first time, for New World silver to travel back to Europe in two directions, that is, in galleons across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The effects of the silver economy included a rapid growth in financial instruments everywhere, including credit, loans, bills of exchange, paper money, bonds, and negotiable obligations, greatly increasing the liquidity and velocity of money and accelerating production. In Europe, this process saw a steady climb in prices; in Asia, the supply of countless goods rose to meet increased Western demand, inhibiting inflation. Silver also drew the economies of disparate places together like no phenomenon had before, intertwining their economic fate in a series of boom and bust cycles. For example, “The peak of the Southeast Asian trading boom from 1580 to 1630 coincided with and was also generated by the simultaneous economic expansions in and demand by Japan, China, India, and Europe” (Frank 1998:96). Conversely, the decline in silver exports from the New World simultaneously led to the erosion of the Spanish Hapsburg Empire and the Western balance of trade with China, a deficit ultimately corrected by the British injection of opium in large quantities. In short, the earliest waves of time-space compression

Figure 3.1 Global flows of silver, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

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involved not only a reworking of feudal European imaginary geographies, but also rivers of bullion that sutured the globe into an interconnected totality. Once the Mongols were driven out, tsarist Russia also played an increasingly important role in the emerging European system of empires engulfing the planet. Moscow, which grew to significance by virtue of its cooperation with the Mongol occupiers, became the new locus of power under Ivan IV (the “Terrible”) as he pushed his empire east of the Ural Mountains and south to the Caspian Sea. Similarly, the Romanov dynasty, which dominated Russia for three centuries, extended the Siberian frontier eastward to the Pacific Ocean, seizing large chunks of Chinese land from the decaying Manchu (Chi’n) dynasty. Russian expansion was therefore synonymous with Chinese contraction, and one empire’s rising actor-networks generated a decline in another’s. Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian empire-building was soon matched by that of the Dutch and British. Around 1600, the Dutch began using a new vessel, the fluytschip, for trade across the Baltic, which reduced labor costs by half in waters that had been cleared of pirates. The fluytschip, produced in large numbers, had as much an impact on European trade as did the steamship centuries later. Using this technology to dominate European ocean shipping transformed Amsterdam from a backwater of the Hapsburg Empire into one of the first great commercial and banking centers of mercantile capitalism. Similarly, the rise of Britain was enabled by the “race-built” ships that were the first to consciously emulate the streamlined design of a fish. Unlike the Venetians, Portuguese, or Spanish, who compelled all traders to travel in government-organized convoys, the Dutch and English utilized privately owned but state-chartered monopoly corporations such as the Hudson Bay Company, British East India Company, and the Dutch Vereenigde OostIndische Compagnie (VOC, or East India Company), which was active in bringing peoples and products together in South Africa and Indonesia, where it seized Java from the Portuguese (Steensgaard 1982; Nijman 1994). Such institutions were important in the establishment of plantations and the commodification of labor in many regions, which constructed vast apparatuses for linking distant strangers through long-distance systems of exchange. Trade was managed through cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London, whose success reflected their earlier ability to integrate different trade networks, including those around the Baltic, Mediterranean, West Africa, and the New World (Dodgshon 1998).

Discursive geographies of the colonial imagination Colonial time-space compression not only reorganized the world materially, it gave the planet’s varied spaces new meanings in accordance with strictly European needs, assumptions, and priorities. In imposing new spatialities (both tangible and imagined) over the innumerable societies that fell before the Western juggernaut, it also produced new subjectivities, new ideologies,


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and new geographies. As European societies were forced to locate themselves within a global map, they were increasingly confronted with “Others,” with cultural differences so profound that their very existence was bewildering. European expansions hence accentuated the West’s appreciation of difference, and inadvertently and ironically undermined the generalized acceptance of Euclidean space: “Adventurers and scholars had long sailed about the earth and dug into its crust to find out about other societies, but they always reconstructed them in the uniform space of the modern Western world, never imagining that space itself might vary from one society to another as much as did kinship patterns and puberty rites” (Kern 1983:137). The “voyages of discovery,” for example, posed severe intellectual challenges in the wake of Europe’s confrontation with people of enormously different languages, religions, and cultural practices, including the intriguing questions that gave birth to the human sciences: Was human nature everywhere the same? Why were human organizational systems so different geographically? Geographical encounters with human diversity threw up these and other questions that centered not just on human origins and social progress over time but also on distributions over space. Why were the different peoples encountered located where they were? Could social and cultural differences, and, notably, physical differences in human types (skin color, hair, beardlessness, stature, even fertility) be geographically explained? Was there a correlation among geographical location, physical difference, and moral capacity? (Withers 2007:139) Europe’s intellectual and discursive responses to these predicaments included the doctrines of Eurocentrism, Orientalism, and attendant discourses of racism. As Said (1978) famously argued, Europe’s cosmologies portrayed it as the motor of history, a model for all to follow, ascribing to the West an inherent superiority and rationality. The Western geographical imagination was, therefore, part and parcel of the Western project of organizing and conquering global space, even if Europe’s varied representations of Asia bore little resemblance to the real thing but instead revealed much about how Europeans viewed themselves. The European construction of non-Westerners as irrational Others was a necessary precondition for Europe’s discovery of itself as rational; after all, there can be no identity without difference. This conception was central to the self-identity of European modernity: in discovering their Other, Europeans discovered themselves. “East” and “West” thus emerge historically at precisely the moment in which they became mutually entangled. It is vital to stress the degree to which this division was arbitrary, politically motivated, and contingent rather than some “natural” cultural divide: as Giddens (1984:168) observes, “if the complex of societies stretching across Afro-Eurasia were to be divided into two, a cleavage between Europe as one portion (the ‘West’) and the rest as the ‘East’ would

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not make much sense. . . . India marked a greater cultural disjunction, traveling eastwards, than did the various Mid-Eastern lands with those bordering in ‘Europe’.” The discursive division between the West and the Rest largely took place through a series of simplistic dichotomous oppositions that collapsed a vast array of diverse societies on either side, portraying Europe as white, progressive, powerful, rational, democratic, and superior, and the “Orient”—a slippery term that changed in meaning over time—as nonwhite, feminine, traditional, static, mysterious, irrational, despotic, and, logically, inferior. European technological superiority was everywhere heralded as both a means and a legitimation of domination over non-Western peoples (Headrick 1981). Orientalism framed the Western encounter with other cultures by discursively marginalizing non-European cultures, depriving them of the capacity for dynamism, a notion implicit in many conservative views of the world-system even today. Wolf (1982) argued that Western culture often represented nonWesterners as “people without history,” i.e., as timeless, changeless societies. This project involved folding spatial differences into temporal ones, or as McGrane (1983:94) elegantly stated, “beyond Europe was henceforth before Europe.” Orientalism was thus not just an assertion of difference, but of superiority and inferiority, and formed an ethical cartography of power and knowledge essential in representing Europe’s Other as in dire need of being colonized. Similarly, Pratt (1992) maintains that the European conquerors, narrators, travel writers, and other producers of discourse selectively incorporated the vast variety of non-Western landscapes, many discursively naturalized as feminine, into the masculinist, Western grid of knowledge. However, if we avoid the modernist emphasis on space as a passive surface in which the active, masculine, Western colonizer “discovers” the passive non-Western Other, the colonial project becomes instead a meeting of histories, an encounter of different trajectories, a collision of positionalities (Massey 2005).

Folding time and space in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment The expansion of capitalism on a worldwide basis inevitably entailed farreaching changes in European constructions of time and space. Broadly, Europe’s scientific and intellectual revolution occurred within the context of the rise of what is generally referred to as “modern” culture, a term that has suffered much for its popularity. Modernity means many things, but above all it reflects a comfort with constant, perpetual change (Berman 1982). Historically, modernity was intimately associated with the rise of the commodity; both reflected different facets of the rising bourgeois order. Thus, the flourishing commerce within Europe propelled to the fore the new capitalist consciousness, one in which money became the measure of all value. The invention of double-entry accounting in Florence, for example, represented the imposition of a mathematicized visual order as much as the rationalization


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of chaotic financing, and led to notions such as the discounting of future costs and benefits. Accounting was more than simply the rationalization of economic transactions, it was also a form of disciplinary power: “Accounting records provide a regular form of surveillance. . . . Not only is this form of control continuous, it is also impersonal, proceeding in the absence of face to face contact with supervisors and management” (Robson 1992:700). Central to the emergence of early modern culture were the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the later, relatively secular counterpart and extension of the former. Although there are profound differences between these two events in terms of their origins, geographies, historical timing, and consequences, both may be held to represent part of the broader transformation in Western thought that accompanied the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Moreover, there were significant variations across space and time within the Renaissance; the same holds for the Enlightenment. Thus, rather than seeing the latter as an abstract set of ideas suspended above space and time, Withers (2007) encourages us to think about the Enlightenment as a set of situated social practices, i.e., as a constellation of power/knowledges with different meanings and consequences in different time-spaces. There was not one Enlightenment, but many “Enlightenments,” each particular to its own context. Despite these caveats, it is possible to note several facets of how these two intertwined intellectual transformations played central roles in the rise of early modern thought about space and time: the Copernican revolution; linearized historical time; the Cartesian view of the subject and space; ocularcentrism, or the dominance of vision as the hegemonic means of knowing the world; the flowering of cartography; and perspectival painting. Each is examined briefly here. Not coincidentally, the voyages by which Europeans came to discover the remainder of the planet were accompanied by a wide-ranging transformation in their discourses about the role of the earth in the heavens. This change in part reflected the markedly higher levels of precise knowledge needed about astronomical observations, key to maritime navigation. Astronomy, therefore, was as much a pragmatic science as one with theological implications. As Boorstin (1983:47) puts it, “It is no wonder that astronomy became the handmaiden of the sailor, that the Age of Columbus ushered in the Age of Copernicus.” In this context, the microscope and telescope extended human vision into vast new domains, small and large, and upheld the mechanistic model of vision as objective observation guided by reason (Edney 1990). The telescope, invented by Hans Lipperhey in the Netherlands in 1608 and famously employed by Galileo to study the moons of Jupiter, revealed that the universe is much larger than that available to human senses; indeed, as the gargantuan sizes of astronomical distances became increasingly apparent, astronomy became the most humbling of disciplines. Copernicus revealed that just as Europe was no longer the center of the world, the earth was no longer center of the universe. The Copernican revolution not only suggested that the natural world operated on a clock-like basis, in contrast to magical,

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animistic feudal views, but equally important, so did the social world, i.e., it was orderly and changeable rather than random or fixed. The telescope, and the heliocentric world it implied, diffused rapidly through the early modern world, leaping from Italy to China within five years, being used to direct artillery there by 1635, and jumped to Japan by 1638, even before Galileo’s death (Boorstin 1983:335). Like space, so too did the European notion of historical time undergo a profound transformation. “Just as acceptance of the Copernican theory had shattered the tightly knit confines of the world in space, so similarly the tendency to look at things historically led to a correspondingly vast extension of the world in time” (Whitrow 1988:152). This process developed highly unevenly across the face of Europe, and was most pronounced in the leading centers of capital accumulation in Italy, where the new mercantile order drew deeply upon a mythologized past to legitimate itself. Skipping the dreary centuries of feudalism, northern Italian city-states often framed their official historiographies as successors of Roman imperial power and sophistication. “Renaissance Italy would be Europe’s first headquarters for exploring the past. What Portugal was for adventurers in geography, Italy was for history. And Florence was the Sagres” (Boorstin 1983:574). A leading example of this transformation was Petrarch (1304–1374), the first to pose history in secular, relatively scientific terms. It is precisely during this moment that the first selfconsciously modern historian, Flavio Biondo, invented the tripartite framework of ancient, medieval, and modern eras, one still widely used today, which postulated a cycle of classical greatness, feudal degeneration, and modern rebirth. History, in this light, was recast as the servant of a new order that deliberately sought to differentiate itself from the previous era, highlighting its novelty and ability to remake the world anew. Somewhat later, during the Enlightenment, this linearization of time assumed the form of progress, which went from being one of many Western views of history to being the dominant one (Nisbet 1980), imparting to time the characteristics of continuous improvement. Linear time, however, began with Christian eschatology in the medieval era, but now became steadily secularized as capitalism unleashed round upon round of social and technological innovation. Enlightenment notions of time borrowed the future-orientation of Christianity, substituting secular notions of social utopia for eschatological notions of the return of Christ, locating the “future golden age not outside of history but within it” (Loy 2001:271). A central figure of Renaissance thought was René Descartes, who may be regarded as the founder of modern ocularcentrism, i.e., the doctrine that equates perspective with the abstract subject’s mapping of space. Descartes proposed a mechanical view of the world and an explanatory alternative to Aristotle’s centered on what has come to be known as the Cartesian cogito: a disembodied, rational mind without distinct social or spatial roots or location (but implicitly male and white). Cartesian rationalism was predicated on the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of


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objects; the latter could only be brought into the former, rationally at least, through a neutral, disembodied gaze situated above space and time. Such a perspective presumes that each person is an undivided, autonomous, rational subject with clear boundaries between “inside” and “outside,” i.e., between self and other, body and mind. With Descartes’s cogito, vision and thought became funneled into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and rendered the viewer body-less and placeless. Medieval, multiple vantage points in art or literature were displaced by a single disembodied, omniscient, and panopticonic eye. However, vision, as Jay (1993) argues, is not simply a function of biology, but also an historically specific way of knowing the world. To visualize, to gain insight, to keep an eye on something, is to invoke a host of cultural and linguistic tools to make sense of reality. Illumination was conceived to be a process of rationalization, of bringing the environment into consciousness through the modality of vision, which is but one of several competing forms of gaining understanding. Cosgrove (1999:18) observes that “Modernity is distinguished by its concern with the human eye’s physical capacity to register and to visualize materiality at every scale.” The perspective had deep roots in western history: Ó Tuathail (1996:70) posits that “What was initiated in Greek philosophy was augmented by the innovations of perspectivalism and Cartesianism. Perspectivalist vision made a single sovereign eye the center of the visible world.” Gregory (1994) likewise maintains that this particular knowledge/power configuration—an historically specific scopic regime— reproduced reality as “world-as-exhibition.” Cartesianism was thus simultaneously a model of knowledge and of the “individual.” Ideologically, this process led to the mathematicization of the sciences, the search for a single set of universal laws, and an enormously powerful scientific worldview that greatly expedited Europe’s technological prowess. As Mumford (1934:20) noted, “Perspective turned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine importance, but distance.” Thus, it was no accident that the Cartesian model arose in tandem with capitalism, colonialism, and modern science (Kirby 1996). Co-catalytic with the Cartesian model of the human subject was the geometric view of space that it suggested; the ascendance of vision as a criterion for truth merged Euclidean geometry with the notion of a detached observer (Hillis 1999). This worldview had powerful social and material consequences. Cosgrove (1988:256) notes, for example, that “in late Renaissance Italy not only was geometry fundamental to practical activities like cartography, land survey, civil engineering and architecture, but it lay at the heart of a widelyaccepted neo-platonic cosmology.” Rather than the complex, convoluted visual and aural worlds central to the medieval world, Renaissance thought came to emphasize homogeneous, ordered visual fields. “It was this uniform, infinite, isotropic space that differentiated the dominant modern world view

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from its various predecessors” (Jay 1993:57). Harley (1989) stressed that these same values were replicated within cartography, with its all-seeing, invisible creator assuming the mantle of objectivity. That this view arose precisely during the birth of modern science was hardly coincidental: as Jay (1993:52) put it, like vision, space “functioned in a similar way for the new scientific order. In both cases space was robbed of substantive meaningfulness to become an ordered, uniform system of abstract linear coordinates.” Cartesian space and linear time thus co-emerged as two facets of one broader social transformation that commodified both. The ascendancy of ocularcentrism also initiated the long-standing Western practice of emphasizing the temporal over the spatial. Ó Tuathail (1996:24) argues that “the privileging of the sense of sight in systems of knowledge constructed around the idea of Cartesian perspectivalism promoted the simultaneous and synchronic over the historical and diachronic in the explanation and elaboration of knowledge.” The Cartesian/Euclidean notion of space—infinite, absolute, and homogeneous—was replicated throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, forming the basis for Newtonian physics and the theory of gravity. For example, calculus, invented by both Newton and Leibniz, portrayed time as an infinite series of small but discrete units. Newton argued in 1687 that “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external” (quoted in Kern 1983:11). Newton’s great rival Leibniz, however, disliked the primacy of geometry in Cartesian thought, the implicit priority it assigned to space over time. Despite the claims to universality made by Enlightenment thinkers, their thought in many respects reflected the emerging nationalism of the era: Newton’s scientific presuppositions, for example, including the “essential properties” of the atom in empty space, were shaped by the bourgeois ethos of contemporary England (Freudenthal 1986). Drawing upon Descartes and Newton, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) attempted to navigate between French rationalism and British empiricism. Kant framed time and space in a priori terms, arguing that they formed necessary conditions for the perception of reality but could not, by themselves, measure anything else (Petersson 2005). Kant held that time and space could be rendered void of their contents, yet still retain their identity, upholding a Cartesian view amenable to the time-space compression of early modernity. He thus enshrined Euclidean geometry as the architecture of the mind, a structure, like time, that made experience possible. However, he disavowed the Newtonian notion of absolute time and space because it did not allow room for how they are experienced by people, thus recasting the Leibnizian perspective by introducing the issue of perception. He did not, however, simply dismiss time and space as subjective illusions, maintaining that time and space are “real” only inasmuch as the mind perceives them and makes order of them. This argument shifted the focus from the world as it is in itself to the world as known by human beings, and problematized the question of sensory experience and its relations to reality. Experience is the continual synthesis of


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perception, and time and space are thus products of the mind, tools it uses to render reality meaningful. This argument not only helped to secularize time and space, but lodged their genesis within the individual mind, thus constituting a critical moment in the ascendancy of bourgeois individualism. Similarly, philosophers such as Locke, in arguing that all knowledge originates with sensation, rejected long-standing notions of a priori human nature and repositioned the human subject as a product of historical circumstances. The Renaissance rationalization of space was also manifested in the explosion of cartography, which, among other things, led to a renewed interest in Ptolemy, who, for all his errors, remained the chief classical authority to whom geographers turned in making sense of the newly unfolding world. The Ptolemaic revival thus reveals how one geographical imagination selectively incorporates elements of another. In the empiricist epistemology of the era, maps were considered accurate and scientific representations of the world that replicated their essential characteristics, allowing the far away to be brought to observers close to home. With colonialism, the need to represent distant places—to make them present for those who were not there—rose exponentially. Renaissance cartography in effect consisted of the “geo-graphing” of remote regions to facilitate their control. Indeed, Renaissance cartography was part of a much broader, thoroughgoing transformation in the spatial consciousness of the West. However, far from constituting a detached, objective viewpoint from nowhere, a view that reduces map-making to a technical process, cartography was a social process deeply wrapped up in the complex political dynamics of colonialism. After all, in order to get to, conquer, govern, and administer their colonies, the Europeans first had to know them spatially. The grid formed by latitude and longitude was one of several such systems deployed worldwide to facilitate the exchange networks of incipient capitalism, making space smooth, fungible, and comprehensible by imposing order on an otherwise chaotic environment. For European navigators, smoothing space by reducing it to distance, rendering the oceans navigable, ordering the multitude of world’s places in a comprehensible schema. The projection of Western power across the globe necessitated a Cartesian conceptualization of space as one that could be easily crossed, a function well performed by the cartographic graticule. Inserting various places in all their unique complexity into a global graticule of meridians and longitudes positioned countries, and locales within them, into a single, unified, coherent and panopticonic understanding of the world designed by Europeans, for Europeans, allowing places to be compared and normalized within an affirmation of a god-like view over Cartesian space at the global level. Colonial mapping was thus not simply a tool for administration, but equally importantly, a validation of Enlightenment science and central part of the colonial spatial order: mapping offered both symbolic and practical mastery over space. Kirby (1996:46) elegantly summarizes the symbolic and political repercussions of cartography during the European expansion, in which maps created a dividing line for explorers moving into the void:

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“Behind them, Europe; before them, an unformed and unsignifying universe.” Thus, the discourses of space—in this case maps—did far more than simply represent entities that existed before them, but were actively a part of producing that very geography. Spatial discourses, in short, are simultaneously reflective and constitutive of the reality they represent. In the wake of Magellan’s circumnavigation, the globe and atlases made their historic appearance. In 1570 Abraham Ortelius published the first atlas purporting to encompass the entire planet, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Thus, whereas previous geographical imaginations included boundaries between the known and unknown, Renaissance Europe managed to construct a perspective in which the entire planet fell under the Western purview. By 1700, pocket globes had accompanied pocket watches, and an essential knowledge of history and geography was deemed necessary for the educated elites of Europe. This secular notion of space began to undermine long-held religious ones: increasingly, by the mid-seventeenth-century, religious foundations to the structure of time and space began to lose hold, albeit gradually. Indeed, the last reference to Europe as a unified Christendom was in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 (Cosgrove 2001). After the first visit to the Cape of Good Hope, it was the measurement of distances between longitudes that mattered more than those between latitudes. Latitude, at least in the northern hemisphere, could be easily reckoned using the altitude of the North Star above the horizon. In other contexts, the declination of the sun could be used; tables for this purpose were available by the thirteenth century, and were widely published upon the invention of the printing press (Landes 1983). “The basic principle behind the observation of longitudinal differences was the conceptual equivalence of longitude and time” (Edney 1990:86), that is, the fact that the earth rotates 15 degrees every hour. Longitude on land was relatively easy to calculate by comparing the time of given celestial events in different places, a feat made possible through improvements in horology. Longitude at sea, however, where establishing identical times at two separate points was essentially impossible, was another issue altogether, and had vexed sailors for centuries. On land, features could be used in the process of triangulation, a process impossible on the open ocean. Sailors long knew that the sun moved through one degree of longitude every four minutes, but establishing identical times at two separate points was intractable. Attempts to calculate longitude accurately therefore form one of the most famous examples in history of a deliberate conquest of space. In 1598, Philip III of Spain offered a prize of 10,000 ducats; in 1626, the Dutch put up 25,000 florins, and Louis XIV of France offered 100,000 florins. But given British mastery of the world’s oceans, it is no coincidence that they took the lead in the solution of this problem; indeed, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was created specifically for this task. In 1714, the Board of Longitude offered £20,000 for a timekeeping device sufficiently accurate to allow the measurement of longitude with precision. The European rationalization of space through the imposition of latitude and longitude was paralleled by


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the mechanical clock’s depiction of time: just as the rectangular grid provided a means of positioning places within an abstract Cartesian space, so did the clock regulate time with uniform units. It was, therefore, clockmaker John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer in 1760 that proved to be the decisive breakthrough in the race to measure longitude in sufficiently accurate ways to facilitate long-distance navigation when he met the test set forth by Parliament, losing only five seconds on a nine-week trip to Jamaica. In solving the issue of how to measure longitude, he greatly facilitated the utilization of a universal coordinate system of global maps. Harrison’s chronographs were a decisive technological victory for the British in their expanding control of the world’s oceans (Landes 1983) as well as for the emerging world economy more generally, offering a solution to a long-standing problem that helped to initiate the auto-catalytic dynamics of the colonial order (Petersson 2005). However, if the graticule became the accepted conceptual norm underpinning global Cartesian space during the wave of European expansionism, its implementation was nonetheless open for debate. In contrast to the poles, for example, the choice of a prime meridian has no fixed location and is a purely political act; any line of longitude is technically as good as any other. Following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which enshrined the nation-state as the fundamental actor of international politics, different states used their own capital cities, such as Paris, Rome, Madrid, London, and Copenhagen; others relied on Rhodes, Delphi, or Jerusalem. The resolution of this dilemma, with its confounding mix of maps that were difficult to compare, awaited a new round of time-space compression in the late nineteenth century. With relatively reliable maps and ships, Europe’s domination of the world began to flood the continent with enormous volumes of data. Captain Cook’s voyages to the Pacific in the mid-eighteenth century, for example, were partly scientific expeditions (including studies of the transit of Venus and a search for the mysterious terra australis). As a result of such voyages, European scientists had access to countless samples of plants and animals from diverse environments, sparking new means of categorizing them and jump-starting contemporary “natural science.” In 1735, for example, Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae, the universal classification system designed to bring biology into the Enlightenment frame of rationality. Similarly, Enlightenment geography rendered the world comprehensible by subjecting its diverse peoples and places to the conceptual lens of Western modernist rationality. To be rational was to enfold the world within a particular Western way of understanding, one that erected reality as a picture to be gazed upon from a distance, a totalized actuality that was ordered and structured, reflecting an epistemology that Gregory (1994) calls the “world-as-exhibition.” Ó Tuathail (1996:53) notes that this process folded neatly into the ascending ocularcentrism of the age: By gathering, codifying, and disciplining the heterogeneity of the world’s geography into the categories of Western thought, a decidable, measured,

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Early modern time-space compression and homogeneous world of geographical objects, attributes, and patterns is made visible, produced. The geopolitical gaze triangulates the world political map from a Western imperial vantage point, measures it using Western conceptual systems of identity/difference, and records it in order to bring it within the scope of Western imaginings.

Several other events paralleled and reinforced the Renaissance and Enlightenment rationalization of space. The magnetic compass, for example, enabled sailors to calculate direction and distances without relying exclusively on astronomical observations. Likewise, Mercator’s projection became wildly popular due its narrative power to encapsulate the entire globe within a single view as well as the use of rhumb lines to show direct routes; in this sense, it formed part of a much broader, more ambitious project to develop a universal system for measuring time and space, including a universal chronology that would integrate the insular and fragmentary histories of the world (Boorstin 1983; Monmonier 2004). On land, surveying arose as a means of imposing the modernist vision of regularized, absolute space over emerging national territories. Thus, Jacques Cassini initiated a widespread rationalization of French territory between 1739 and 1744 using systematic triangulation “with the aim of creating across France a smooth, rational space over which circulation would be uninterrupted by ‘accidents’ of nature” (Cosgrove 2001:202). In each case, time and space—the measurement of which could not be separated—became abstracted from the natural environment, reframed under the totalizing discourses of Western colonialism as absolute, regularized, standardized, and predictable. A third European intellectual response to the early modern wave of timespace compression occurred within the visual arts, which underwent a profound transformation as bourgeois values became increasingly hegemonic (Cosgrove 1984). The key discovery of the Renaissance was the invention of linear perspective, first demonstrated by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1425, which involved the ability to represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas. Some aspects of perspective painting, like so much else in the Renaissance, may have been acquired from the Arabs, in this case Alhazen, a philosopher in Basra who wrote about the subject in 965 (Macey 1989:96). Far from simply constituting an artistic detail, the use of perspective undermined the symbolism of medieval art, which subordinated accuracy to religious dogma, and coincided with both the widespread use of oil painting as well as the translation and recovery of Ptolemy’s influential Geography and its geometric grids. In 1435, Leon Battista Alberti and fellow Florentine Toscanelli formulated the geometric rules of perspective that remained in place for the next 400 years. Thus, “Linear perspective vision was a fifteenth-century artistic invention for representing three-dimensional depth on the two-dimensional canvas. It was a geometrization of vision which began as an invention and became a convention, a cultural habit of mind” (Romanyshyn 1993:349). Notably, this process was not automatic, but conditional upon the people and places that


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created the early modern world. The scientific and artistic breakthroughs of the Renaissance were wrought by synergistic interactions among their practitioners: For example, painter Jan Vermeer was a close friend of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who developed the first microscope. Although perspectival paintings were only viewed by the elite, it was that group that constituted the key decision-makers of early modern society, and the diffusion of such paintings reflected and sustained a wider discourse of ocularcentrism. Perspective came to be a metaphor for the entire world of the Renaissance just as Florence came under the panopticonic gaze of the Medici aristocracy (Edgerton 1975). Loy (2001) likens the adoption of perspectival painting as a means of locating space to the adoption of the Anno Domini convention in marking time: both assumed a universal frame of reference in which events can be located. As Johnson (2002:118) puts it, the “replacement of aspective art by perspective art was one of the greatest steps forward in human civilization.” Indeed, Edgerton (1975) goes as far as to suggest that perspectival art and mapping played key roles in Columbus’s understanding of the world and subsequent voyages of discovery. Renaissance painting also extended into early attempts to represent movement and change. In 1646, for example, Jesuit Athanasius Kircher created the magic lantern, or phantasmagoria, a projection booth with an artificial light source cast over 360 degree cylindrical paintings, a Renaissance form of virtual reality (Hillis 1999). Similarly, Giovanni Battista della Porta invented the camera obscura, which was originally viewed as a mechanism to comprehend the external world provided by god; in the Enlightenment, the camera obscura would be reinterpreted as a model of objective visual truth. Such inventions pointed toward the role of the observer in the construction of meaning, thus forming early moments in the substitution of god’s eye by the Cartesian cogito. Later, the notion was elevated into a metaphor for vision by the Frankfurt School. Even at the most intimate level of the individual, the Renaissance reconstruction of space entered into the self-understanding of the individual as a sovereign subject. Take, for example, the mirror: although crude mirrors had been available since the Bronze Age, the Renaissance invention of the glass mirror and its widespread adoption in daily life made possible the habit of viewing oneself as others viewed him or her, thus fostering the modern sense of self-consciousness (Melchior-Bonnet 2002). The mirror literally and figuratively shed light on darkness, reflecting and distorting, allowing individuals to see themselves as others saw them, and provided a basis for pride, vanity, and insecurity. Indeed, for many in the rising bourgeoisie, the image in the mirror attained a greater sense of reality than did the interior self. The mirror moreover made possible self-portraits. Its ability to sustain and amplify Cartesian ocularcentrism is self-evident. Thus, from the global scale to that of the individual, the notion of disembodied, abstract space known to an objective observer multiplied endlessly, reshaping every facet of the early modern world.

60 Early modern time-space compression

The printing revolution and time-space compression in early modern Europe Intimately associated with the time-space compression of early modernity— indeed, inseparable from it—was the invention and popularization of printing. Few innovations have allowed people to transcend space, to experience it in such a novel way, as printing. Of course, Europeans were acquainted with printed textiles, money, and playing cards long before they encountered printed books, and there was an important history of printing before Gutenberg. Paper was imported into Europe by Arab merchants in Spain during the tenth century, who in turn acquired it from China in the eighth. From Spain, paper spread to Sicily and Italy in the eleventh, and to France in the twelfth (Manchester 1992). The first known European paper mill opened in 1276. This innovation was important to the generation of secular sites of knowledge production such as early universities, which arose by the thirteenth century, many of them linked to the emerging urban, literate, relatively secular bourgeoisie. By the fifteenth century, calendars were printed on sheets of paper, which described the relative length of the day in each month, zodiacal signs, or the right time for surgeons to let blood or lance boils. The first great publishing house was that of Venetian scholar Aldus Manutius and the Aldine Press, founded in 1450, the year Gutenberg’s Bible appeared. Within a generation, printing houses were established in cities from London to Budapest. Printing allowed large quantities of materials to be produced cheaply and distributed quickly, and the effects of this revolution, in conjunction with the numerous other massive changes criss-crossing the face of Europe, were monumental. Eisenstein (1979) demonstrated in detail the power of printing in diffusing knowledge and mass literacy, facilitating the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, European expansionism, and the rise of modern capitalism and science. The new communications environment of printing accelerated the decline of the feudal order, leading a new sense of time and space to displace the older, medieval one. Literacy and printing destabilized traditional society by bringing adults—especially males, for female literacy lagged far behind—within reach of texts. Printing was the first major step in the mechanization of communication, and accelerated the diffusion of information by packaging it conveniently, democratizing books in much the same manner that cheap clocks and maps democratized time and space, respectively, forging pathways for the literate by widening their access to people, places and events far removed from them historically or geographically. Similarly, printing undermined the centrality of the clergy in the production of knowledge, and unlike hand-written monastic copies, printed books gave their audiences identical copies to read, experience and discuss, and made censorship more difficult as well. Printing helped to break the monopoly of learning held by monasteries and universities and fomented the growth of a lay intelligentsia. The technology therefore did much to enlarge the domain of the “political” (Giddens 1987). The spread of Humanism, for example,


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would have been impossible without printing. Textbooks became affordable and necessary instruments of school learning, helping to standardize the curriculum among schools and, in some cases, entire cities. Scientific papers— adaptations of the letter—could be read at meetings even without the author’s presence. In literature, printing enhanced the ability of texts to conquer space but diminished the importance of time to their significance: as Boorstin (1983:422) observes, “In our time the printed best seller speedily reaches across space but only seldom reaches out into the generations. In the age of the manuscript the power of a single classic author was deathless.” Among several repercussions of the printing revolution were the ways in which it became entangled in religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The early Church actually encouraged printing as a means of disseminating the Bible before coming to oppose it due to the unintended consequences it unleashed: Deibert (1997:29) notes that “the same bishops and monks who actively encouraged the establishment of local printing houses never anticipated the way heresies, like the Protestant Reformation, would thrive with the widespread availability of this new technology. The full effects of printing went unforeseen by the very actors who encouraged and shaped its early development.” For example, heretical movements could spread their messages more effectively through cheap pamphlets. Understandably, therefore, printing was denounced by some of the clergy and politicians as a means to spread subversion and heresy. Through printing, one person could reach a mass audience in a short period, as witnessed by Luther’s 95 theses criticizing the Church. The power of printing to reproduce copies quickly and cheaply led many theologians to wonder whether the ancient hermeneutic debate over the one true meaning of the Bible could be settled at last. Instead, printing accentuated the rift within the Church. The Protestant Reformation called into question received religious authority and accelerated the historical shift from ecclesiastical to civil authority. Hence, places dominated by Protestantism, which encouraged a Bible in every house and direct, individual communication with god, saw literacy rates climb faster than did Catholic regions. Protestantism, with its greater emphasis on literacy, also initiated a break with the Catholic veneration of images. In Protestant lands, printing enhanced the textual authority of the Bible over the theological doctrines of the Pope. While the Catholic hierarchy held the Bible to be an allegorical document, Protestants such as Luther and Calvin argued it should be taken literally. This shift in consciousness was also important to the incipient nationalism then in the making: not surprisingly, Protestant regions, which encouraged reading, developed national identities more quickly than did Catholic ones, which often did not (Mann 1986). Printing in vernacular languages began to undermine the hegemony of Latin, establishing local tongues as the basis of emergent national identities and imagined communities and dooming the dream of a Christendom united under a single Latin tongue. Literacy soon spread from an idiosyncrasy of monks of an agrarian culture to a necessity in an urban, mercantile one, amplifying the economic and

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political transformations of the early modern era. Indeed, the rise of the capitalist class and printing were symbiotic phenomena, as the latter allowed standardized, codified contracts, licenses, deeds, and decrees, all of which greased the wheels of the new, more complex division of labor. Economically, for example, printing encouraged Europeans to adopt paper money, an innovation imported from China, which allowed this standardized abstraction of value to circulate rapidly on a wide scale. The monetization of economic relations, “including the great fairs, shipping, insurance, and financial services, further lubricated commerce and helped to create a European-wide market” (Cantor 1994:376). Politically, printing helped to erode the personal loyalties that were central to the decentralized feudal order, opening the possibility of increasingly centralized rule. For the disciplinary state, printed, standardized documents were essential: rational bureaucratic systems necessary for intergenerational rule hence both challenged the political order of feudalism and helped to spread an increasingly literate, secular culture. Widespread reading rather than writing was another powerful impact of the printing press. In literature, it led to the rise of the novel, with a defined, linear sense of plot and time. Printing and reading had significant effects on individual identity and subjectivity that made them important parts of early modern time-space compression. Ong (1982) suggests that widespread reading unleashed by printing led to a notion of personal privacy and individualism, which accompanied the steady commodification of social relations over the next half millennium. Reading encouraged self-reflection and exploration of interior psychic spaces. Moreover, this process led to the very idea of a fixed point of view, a foundational part of the Cartesian metaphysic that underpinned both modern science and modern perspectives on time and space. Ong (1982) notes how the spread of silent reading at home from the twelfth century onwards led to a greater emphasis on privatized spaces and abstract thinking, a practice that spread from monasteries to universities and, by the fifteenth century, to the aristocracy and mercantile elite. The notion of the individual “self ”—unknown in the medieval period—began to take shape under the thrust of commercialism, Protestantism, and rising literacy. Lyon (1978:67) asserts that “the invention and spread of movable type is probably the most important mechanical contributor to the idea of the unique self.” In the context of the political transformations that broke up feudal empires into autonomous sovereign states, this process was central to the modernist conception of identity: indeed, the construction of the individual and the nationstate as a community of citizens may be seen as two different but intertwined facets of one underlying process. Anderson (1983) famously linked together the disparate social cultural, economic, ideological, and political processes associated with printing to argue that nationalism co-evolved with print capitalism and the growth of print-based culture once vernacular languages became the norm of printed communications. In his view, the advent of the printing press served to connect disparate populations over wide geographical areas. This process had


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enormous effects on the social and spatial structure of language. As the market for books in Latin became gradually saturated, vernacular languages became increasingly common and popular. However, not every dialect was printed; rather, one dialect—typically that of dominant elites, whether in Tuscany, London, or Paris—became privileged over others, expanding into national languages, annihilating local differences in vocabulary and pronunciation and integrating diverse groups linguistically into a common group. These newly printed languages were fundamental for the emergence of national consciousness first because they geographically connected speakers of (for example) huge local varieties of “Englishes,” “Spanishes,” and “Germans,” and made known to them the existence of those who shared the same language group. Newly printed languages were thus fundamental to the emergence of nationalist imagined communities and, in forging together dialects into national languages, printing thus constituted a prime dimension in the time-space compression that created modern nation-states. Printing did more than simply accelerate the dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and information, it also reinforced the emerging ocularcentrism of early modernity. As Jay (1993) and Jenks (1995) noted, the rise of printing, the reliance on the written word for communication, and the use of the telescope and microscope to bring the distant and the invisibly small into view all contributed to the tendency to equate seeing with knowing. Epistemologically, far more than writing, printing suggested that words were things, situating words in space far more than did writing and embedding language in the process of manufacturing, which in turn accelerated its commodification. The printing of maps began to accustom Europeans to visual, grid-based representations of territorial order, helping to establish abstract space as the dominant model of the early modern period. Boorstin (1983:277) notes that “Just as the portable clock made the world’s time accessible to everybody, so when atlases became portable, millions could share a view of the world’s space.” Compared to writing, printing utilized the spatial organization of knowledge far more widely and effectively, generating visual surfaces with abundant and intense meanings, with enormous consequences for human perceptions of space and time: Before writing was deeply interiorized by print, people did not feel themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract computed time of any sort. It appears unlikely that most persons in medieval or even Renaissance western Europe would ordinarily have been aware of the number of the current calendar year—from the birth of Christ or any other point in the past. Why should they be? . . . What would be the point for most people in knowing the current calendar year? (Ong 1982:96) Printing also made possible the first form of mass media, the cheap daily newspaper. For example, The Times saw its first issue in England in 1785. By

64 Early modern time-space compression 1850, an inexpensive daily press and popular readership had appeared throughout Europe and North America. In France, this process occurred in 1881 as official censorship was abolished, along with the surety bond and stamp tax. Anderson (1983) emphasizes newspapers as important vehicles in the construction of nationalist identities, providing a shared national experience of “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time.” Similarly, McLuhan (1962) argued that through newspapers, peoples began to see themselves as coherent, unified collectivities for the first time. Not surprisingly, advertising agencies formed around this expanding medium as early as the 1840s. By the 1870s, popular magazines as well as newspapers were circulating among the literate middle class. “By the late nineteenth century, popular education, mechanized printing, and cheap paper had created a mass reading public accustomed to the habits of print” (Marvin 1988:112). Paradoxically, the invention of printing also threatened the viability of the public domain in that “newspapers actually created monopolies of information. The emergence of the ‘audience’ spelled danger for public life, as it transformed people into essentially private readers and listeners” (Lyon 1978:44).

The spatial fix of early modernity: the nation-state Despite popular impressions of capitalism as a social and economic system predicated on the existence of mythologized “free markets,” the nation-state was in fact a fundamental part of the emergence of capitalist society. Max Weber noted long ago that the growth of capitalism was as much predicated on the legal systems and property rights enshrined in the state as it was in the role of private property and markets. To put it bluntly, as Smith (2003:142) does, “The genesis of national states as a system for organizing the world’s political economy provided an eighteenth-century ‘spatial fix’ for specific economic dilemmas of emergent capitalism.” During the Enlightenment, as feudal bonds holding the masses to the soil gradually eroded, the state became a primary mechanism welding them together, and the nation-state gradually replaced Christianity as the fundamental unit of normative pacification. In the process, the spatial scale of interaction, mobility, communications and class relations expanded decisively over broader territories using the stabilizing mechanism of the state. Tilly (1990) points out powerful governments in emerging nation-states destroyed or absorbed most of their feudal alternatives. The result was that the nation-state came to mean “society,” to be used synonymously with it. The international system legitimated by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 underscored the centrality of the nationstate to the early modern world system, a world of absolute spaces and explicit, non-overlapping boundaries. Such a geopolitical structure was unprecedented: “The modern state system of territorially fixed and mutually exclusive sovereignties is an historically unique form of spatial organization” (Anderson 1996:140).


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The incipient modern state penetrated far more deeply into everyday life than did the feudal one. For Foucault (1972), the Enlightenment consisted of a vast, organized, and systematic attempt to calculate similarities and differences among objects, peoples, and places. Foucault stressed that under the disciplinary logic of modernity, vision became supervision: it lost the benign status of the detached observer and became a means of enforcement and surveillance. He (1984:241) argues that subtle social mechanisms of control—the police, the medical system, education, etc.—produced modern subjects, extending the power of the omnipotent sovereign to produce subjects who self-monitored their behavior, conforming with the taken-forgranted notions instilled in them from birth: “A state will be well organized when a system of policing as tight and efficient as that of the cities extends over the entire territory. . . . What was discovered at that time was the idea of society.” Like capitalism, many of the antecedents of the nation-state are to be found in the northern Italian city-states of late medieval era. For example, the Italian city-states contributed enormously to the institutions that facilitated the rise of capitalism, including contracts, partnerships, insurance loans, and bills of exchange (Mann 1986). Italian city-states also pioneered the use of impersonal salaried bureaucrats who served for limited terms. Many Italian citystates initiated the practice of land surveying and the rationalization of space that it entailed. The transformation from the city-state of the late medieval era to the nation-state under early modernity reflected, then, both an extension of older social institutions across space as well as the invention of qualitatively new ones. Given that cities were loci of innovation, it is worth stressing that from its inception, capitalism was primarily urban in nature. Indeed, the spatial divisions of labor coming into being during this period amplified the differences between urban and rural regions. Lefebvre (1991:277) noted the rising importance of the town in early modernity: Society in the sixteenth century stood at a watershed. Space and time were urbanized—in other words, the time and space of commodities and merchants gained the ascendancy, with their measures, accounts, contracts and contractors. Time—the time appropriate to the production of exchangeable goods, to their transport, delivery and sale, to payment and to the placing of capital—now served to measure space. But it was space which regulated time, because the movement of merchandise, of money and nascent capital, presupposed places of production, boats, and carts for transport, ports, storehouses, banks and money-brokers. It was now that the town recognized itself and found its image. Within cities, the agglomeration economies of the new division of labor facilitated interaction among dense, vertically disintegrated groups of artisans, and contributed to the “synekism” or self-sustaining processes of creativity

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described by Soja (2000), in which cities became centers of auto-catalytic processes of innovation. Urbanization was also central to the discursive transformations of this period: Renaissance cities, for example, were remade under the totalizing discourses of modernity. Renaissance politicians and scholars held the classical era in high esteem: the very word Renaissance, derived from Vasari’s term Rinascita, heralded the rebirth of something old rather than the creation of something new; echoes of the older cyclical view of time thus reverberated. In this context, the Renaissance city was often envisioned as the reconstituted Greek polis. Nutti (1999:98) holds that “Fascinated by suggestions from Greek geographical culture available from a rediscovered Ptolemy, fifteenthcentury Italy initiated a search for an all-embracing view, from an elevated vantage point at a distance” in order to assess the nature of urban space. Renaissance portraits of towns, therefore, strove to overcome the limited view of the solitary observer in order to represent space from the disembodied perspective of a Cartesian cogito suspended above the world. Urban space, then, did not simply reflect early modern time-space compression, it actively contributed to its making. Nonetheless, capitalism’s relentless search for new markets initiated a wide-ranging scalar transformation that decisively shifted the locus of power from the city to a broader sociospatial configuration. The shift in scale from the city-state to the “power-container” of the nationstate—the prime manifestation of late modern time-space compression— reflected a large variety of factors, including: the intensified commodification of land and labor; the centralization of law enforcement, particularly regarding property rights; printing and explicit codes of law; the diffusion of paper money as a medium of national and international exchange; apparatuses of taxation, surveillance, and documentation such as the census; the expansion of public services, such as the postal service, but also coercive ones such as the judiciary and penal system and public education; and gradual improvements in transportation. National governments increasingly standardized measures of distance and weight: Elizabeth I, for example, decreed the Roman mile of 5,200 feet was henceforth 5,280 feet, or eight furlongs (“furrow-longs”) (Boorstin 1983). Credit systems, finance, and banking were also central to the national organization of space and time, including uniform national currencies. England did not possess a uniform coinage until 1160, and France not until 1262 (Mann 1986). Within nation-states, banking systems created homogeneous financial spaces in which the cost of capital was almost totally invariant. “Deferred payment, particularly in the shape of credit, is one of the prime forms of time-space distanciation facilitated by the emergence of a money economy” (Giddens 1987:156). Financial markets spiraled outward from individual states to become transnational at a remarkably early date: European financial systems had become sufficiently integrated by the fourteenth century that when Edward III defaulted in 1339, the Italian markets were deeply shaken. The emergence of regularized banking networks in the eighteenth century was


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vital to the formation of long-distance use of credit between buyers and sellers. Communications systems such as the post were also integral to the growth of the nation-state, as they allowed more effective governance (not necessarily democratic) and monitoring of citizens, greater military potential, and the ability to mobilize the masses during emergencies. Mass literacy, newspapers, and the ideology of nationalism contributed to the homogenization of culture that turned feudal societies into nation-states. To this list Giddens (1984) also adds the emergence of bodies of knowledge concerned with human organization and change: “the social sciences have themselves been persistently implicated in the phenomena they set out to analyse” (p. 180). Also central to the rise of the nation-state was the growth in military power (McNeill 1982), including the draft and permanent, standing armies of paid infantry, which socialized young men from disparate villages into a shared national culture. The widespread adoption of firearms and cannons soon eradicated the confederations and independent towns that formed the core of feudal political geography. The rising costs of armaments, moreover, contributed heavily to the centralization of political power, as those rulers who could not afford them were annihilated. Successive wars stimulated bureaucratic and financial centralization of all parties, particularly the winners, and formed a key part of the arms race that locked in European domination abroad. Ideologically, the nation-state entailed discourses of nationalism and sovereignty, which displaced feudal notions of the divine right of kings (Anderson 1983). Nationalism sought to unify the diverse local cultures that existed within every emerging nation-state into an ostensibly homogeneous whole, a project that proved to be a difficult, contingent undertaking. Typically, this maneuver was accomplished through the mobilization of ethnicity, which can itself be seen a production of early modernity; indeed, nationalism and ethnicity are reciprocal constructs, and both are highly geographical. Nationalism effectively transformed abstract space into a territory imbued with selective interpretations of local history, a homeplace that fuses the immemorial past with the future destiny of its people. “Baptized with a proper name, space becomes national property, a sovereign patrimony fusing place, property, and heritage, whose perpetuation is secured by the state” (Alonso 1994:383). Frequently this shift meant that “ethnic” populations of core regions found their language, religion, and political outlook elevated over newly formed minorities relegated to the political margins of national space, as when dialects of powerful regions were promoted into national languages. The rise of ethnicity to a position of prominence within Europe was also closely linked to the growth of Orientalist discourses that legitimated Western expansion abroad. The formation of nation-states was therefore far more than simply an expression of the shifting geographies of power, but of deeper notions of spatiality. This homogenization was perfectly in keeping with the Cartesian view of space: as with linear perspective in painting, the nation-state in geopolitics came to be defined from a single, fixed viewpoint (Ruggie 1993). “As

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containers of a fledgling modernity, the expansionist new monarchies of the sixteenth century were slowly, unevenly, and erratically (depending on the state in question) imposing a general perspectivalist vision of space and a neutral conception of time upon the territories they incorporated and annexed” (Ó Tuathail 1996:12). In contrast to feudal empires, which often had diffuse boundaries, the nation-state was predicated upon a view of geography as Euclidean, a “horizontal order of coexistent places that could be sharply delimited and compartimentalized from each other” (Ó Tuathail 1996:4). By the early nineteenth cetury, increasingly standardized public education systems played a central role in linking individual identities to the state, that is, raising the scalar level at which people defined themselves and one another. Schools inculcated in children with the mythology about the nation as a unified entity and promoted a uniformity of belief among the population. As Horsman and Marshall (1995:xvii) put it, “In fact, it was really only with the introduction of mass education in the nineteenth century—and with it the imposition of a standard language and a credo of civic responsibility—that a sense of citizenship could be extended to every individual within the borders of a given state.” In producing the citizen, the nation-state also constructed moral geographies of similarity and difference, inclusion and exclusion, enforced by law, which underscored and sustained ideologies of nationalism. The spaces of the nation-state sharply distinguished “us” from “them,” amplifying the differences between the community of insiders and foreign outsiders. While nationalism inevitably exhibits a spatial imperative, in the form of a territory for a nation to inhabit, the imagined community of nationhood also has a temporal dimension. The time-space compression of early modern nationalism involved the naturalization of some interpretations of history at the expense of others. Nationalists typically selectively drew upon the most useful stories among large sets of competing narratives concerning the past, often mythologizing it in the form of resurrecting periods of past glory. In the process, national traditions were invented rather than discovered, fabricated rather than found. Time and space are merged in this context as particular places and landscapes are transformed into centers of collective cultural memory, such as plazas, statues, battlefields, etc. (Allan et al. 1995; Allan and Thompson 1999) through what Massey (1994:5) calls “attempts to stabilize the meaning of particular envelopes of space-time, even if precariously so.” Typically, this tactic led to the creation of allegedly “timeless traditions” reflecting an innate, unchanging national character. If the past is a foreign country, as Lowenthal (1985) famously suggested, then our views of the past are necessarily embedded in and designed to serve our understandings of the present.

Standardizing space and time in the early modern nation-state The formation of early modern capitalist economies as well as the political project of the nation-state necessarily entailed a far-reaching transformation in its internal constitution. Spatially, this project attempted diligently to


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make the messy feudal geographies resemble the idealized Cartesian spaces of modernity by revolutionizing circulation space and the means of transportation. As it had for eons, water transport was still largely preferably to land: in the seventeenth century, the cost of sea transport was only 1/15 to 1/20 of that overland (Vance 1990:429). Regions in which roads were nonexistent or poorly developed, such as Russia, relied extensively on river navigation, and places without access to rivers were marginalized in the extreme. Even access to the roads, such as they were, did little to ensure regular deliveries of goods: land transportation was not only slow, but suffered a maximum range set by the ability of horses, oxen, mules, and donkeys to carry finite loads of fodder, which they consumed within roughly 150 kilometers. Such conditions inhibited the circulation of goods, capital, and information, and presented intolerable conditions to the newly ascendant bourgeoisie. Mercantilist state policies, which protected producers from foreign competition, simultaneously sought the freest possible internal circulation. Consequently, in due order the new nation-states of early modern Europe set about revolutionizing the transportation and communications systems within their borders in what Virilio (1986) calls a “dromocratic” revolution. Similarly, Vance (1986) identifies a “transportation revolution” in the sixteenth century that centered on better wagons and coaches, improved roads, more reliable bridges, and canals. The growth of canal systems attempted to recreate the marine transport environment on land. Canals lowered the transport costs of bulky goods, initiating a cost-space compression that was central to the early development of many nation-states. Late medieval cities often relied upon canal systems to transport food and supplies, such as Milan’s Naviglio Grande, which was started in the late twelfth century by Cistercian monks and completed in 1458, or the Stecknitz Canal in Northern Germany, built in 1391–98. It was France, however, which first made canals a centerpiece of national unification efforts, canalizing rivers to encourage interprovincial trade in agricultural goods (Vance 1990). Henry IV ordered the construction of the first canal in France around 1600, the Canal de Briare which united the Loire valley and the Paris Basin. Louis XIV authorized the Canal des Deux Mers (also called the Canal Royal), which in 1681 connected Toulouse to the port of Sète, 149 miles away, to expedite traffic between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. These efforts were supplemented by a variety of other canals well into the nineteenth century, some of which are still in use today, forming an interconnected network of watersheds that steadily integrated French national space. The Dutch too, through the trekvaart system, created a canal system, albeit more for passenger use than agricultural traffic. The British canals, built by private interests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, similarly played a pivotal role in integrating local regions into a national space that made them indispensable to the Industrial Revolution (Figure 3.2). In the U.S., too, canals enjoyed a brief period of hegemony in the early nineteenth century (about which more later). In each case, canals helped to undermine local monopolies, facilitate regional specialization, reduce transport costs, and

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Figure 3.2 The British canal system, eighteenth century.

unify disparate places into integrated totalities. Canal-builders were in some respects trail-blazers for the railroads, perfecting the techniques for drilling tunnels and building embankments. Another expression of the rationalization of national space was a dramatic reworking of the road system. Horse-drawn carriages became increasingly


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popular in the sixteenth century, when merchants used them in large numbers, and persisted as the primary means of transportation for the elite until the nineteenth. However, land transportation prior to the Industrial Revolution rarely operated at more than 10 miles per hour, a pace essentially unchanged for two millennia. The needs of the early capitalist economy for a serviceable circulation space were certainly not met by the deplorable road system of seventeenth-century England. In 1639, for example, Charles I took four days to ride 300 miles. Wheeled traffic essentially ceased during the winter months, when people were marooned in their villages. In seventeenth-century Britain, following the Civil War, quasi-private interests rather than the national state dominated road construction, and the quickening economy generated intense interest in better long-distance roads capable of faster traffic. In 1663, Charles II authorized the first turnpike, which was little more than a graded dirt road extending from London to York and confined to government uses until the establishment of the General Post Office later in his reign. British turnpikes and canals were financed through a series of local trusts and joint-stock companies. Under the numerous Turnpike Acts, British roads became increasingly well drained and surfaced, reducing the journey times among towns. In Britain, toll roads or turnpikes were covered by a thicket of private haulage or coach services, which served the rapidly growing urban system, competing as much in speed as in price. The stagecoach advanced to its destination in “stages,” at which fresh horses were provided, and its savings in time were incremental but cumulative. For example, along the Edinburgh– London route, transport speeds rose from 6 miles per hour during the 1750s to 12 or more in the 1830s. Thus, from London to Bristol took 48 hours in 1754; 30 years later, it took only 16 hours (Landes 1983:240), but at the cost of driving horses to death by exhaustion. In 1830, movement by coach among Britain’s major towns was four to five times faster than in 1750 (May and Thrift 2001). As road networks expanded throughout eighteenth-century Europe, the associated accessibility surfaces became distinctly urban in nature (Figure 3.3), heavily favoring metropoles of capital accumulation that rapidly were becoming the privileged spaces of the bourgeoisie. Much of the impetus to the formation of road networks was the need for an efficient national postal system. Modern postal systems, with their ability to bind people in distant locations together, are a product of the letter-happy Renaissance and Enlightenment. The widespread use of paper transformed the postal service into an integral part of state-provided services, which were originally designed to preserve state security. In 1464, Louis XI, inspired by the Roman post (which was in turn modeled after that of Cyrus the Great in Persia in 529 bc), established a network throughout France. England followed suit in 1481. For Charles V, the post was essential to linking the centers and peripheries of the Hapsburg and Holy Roman Empires. The Hapsburgs established postal stations, fixed delivery times, intermeshed routes, and continuous transport among their provinces by 1490, most of which was organized by the Taxis family in the heritable position of imperial postmaster

Figure 3.3 Isolines of accessibility throughout Europe and Middle East, eighteenth century.


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(Dohrn-Van Rossum 1996). Delivery times from Brussels to Paris were 3 days in the summer (4 in the winter); to Granada, 15 summer days or 18 winter ones; and to Rome, 10 summer days or 12 winter ones. The fiscal crisis of the Spanish monarchy, however, eventually brought this system to an end around 1570. In England, prior to 1784, mail was carried by mounted post riders, who were eventually displaced by mail coaches. In 1784, a unified network of public coaches was introduced, the mail-coach system. Coach services began between Bath and London, and before long the country was serviced by numerous mail coaches running on strict timetables. Their speeds averaged about 10 miles (16 km) per hour, and were safe and reliable: Jane Austen could write of young ladies traveling safely by coach unaccompanied. The system popularized the idea of public passenger transportation with welldefined prices and departure and arrival times. As Cardwell (1995:229) puts it, “Although the mail coach is now an object of vicarious nostalgia, a subject for greeting cards, in its day it represented—and was widely accepted as—a thoroughly modern technical advance and a clear proof of social progress.” Britain pioneered the use of the postage stamp with the Rowland-Hill reform of 1840, named after the inventor of that innovation. Immediately thereafter, the volume of mail in Britain leapt from 76 million to 169 million pieces annually. By 1874, the U.S. followed suit. Various other national postal systems soon arose, along with postal laws and regulations, prescribed speeds for riders, and a mounting desire for punctuality. As national systems became standardized, the need to expedite international mail rose accordingly; thus, the universal Postal Union was created in 1875 in Bern under the Universal Postal Convention of 1874. The newly founded systems were remarkably efficient: in 1875, a letter from England could reach Moscow in four days, a rate that essentially remained unchanged for more than a century. The British network necessitated the adoption of a uniform time system across the country, which, naturally, would be that of London, over the objections of countryfolk. In towns and villages, the posthorn sounded the arrival of the mail coach and became a symbol of punctuality. The system also helped to facilitate the diffusion of news throughout the country, a process assisted by the abolition of the stamp tax on newspapers. The late eighteenth-century “turnpike boom” in Britain and France was thus not simply a technological change, but an important part of the consolidation of national power and identity. These changes also contributed to the emerging Victorian work ethic and expanding commodified labor markets, in which “free time” was held to be the reward for hard work. Soon foreigners observed the English mania for saving time. In addition to the rationalization of space, early modernity also saw the homogenization of calendar time. Julius Caesar’s adoption of the Egyptian calendar in 45 bc produced a year that was 11 minutes longer than the true solar cycle; the Julian calendar was established in the belief that the year is precisely 365¼ days long, when it fact it is 365.24219 days. For this reason, the Julian calendar gradually fell out of synch with the solar year. By the

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sixteenth century, the problems of the Julian calendar had become so severe that it had fallen 11 days behind the earth’s succession. Critically, in the eyes of Christians, the Julian calendar inaccurately reflected the date of Easter, defined by the Council of Nicaea in 325 ad as the first Sunday after the spring full moon, with the spring equinox fixed on March 21. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, in one bold stroke, dropped ten days out of the calendar by issuing a papal edict in which Thursday, October 4 would be followed by Friday, October 15. The Gregorian reform was immediately adopted by Catholic countries, but was strongly resisted by Protestant ones. When England finally switched two centuries later, in 1752, riots ensued over the 11 “lost days.” Worldwide, the Gregorian calendar gradually became the international standard for civil time measurement as Western culture gained hegemony over the planet, often as part of modernizing initiatives. In China, the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1912, following the nationalist revolution, although the older, traditional one is still used for religious observances. Not until 1923 did the Orthodox Church in Greece, Romania, and elsewhere adopt it. In Russia, the Julian calendar remained in place until the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Gregorian was not implemented until 1940. In Turkey, modernizer Kemal Ataturk abandoned the Muslim lunar calendar in the 1920s and adopted the Gregorian solar one. In North America, there was little intercourse among the various British colonies prior to the Revolution of 1776–1789. The early American canal system, built in the early nineteenth century and supplemented by turnpikes, relied primarily on generating ties among various rivers that ran among the colonies, and reflected intense interurban competition among centers such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Many of these were instrumental in opening the trans-Appalachian West to increased agricultural exports. By lowering transport costs, these canals generated a steady costspace convergence: for example, moving goods from Albany to the Hudson declined from $100 to $32 per ton after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 (Vance 1990:109). Similarly, the St. Lawrence waterway allowed the agricultural frontier to expand significantly in southern Canada. Canals were supplemented by a system of turnpikes built primarily by private interests, culminating in the National Turnpike or National Road, which collectively reduced transport costs over land by as much as 50 percent. American transport services were complemented by the new postal service initiated in 1764, which offers a prime example of cost-space convergence (Abler 1975): in 1792, it adopted a step function of distance; successive rate reductions in 1845, 1851, and 1855 ultimately led to a flat-rate service in 1863, generating an equality of mailing costs throughout the country.

Rationalizing time and space in revolutionary France The remaking of French time and space in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1789 offers a particularly instructive example of the new geographies


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formed by early modern time-space compression. Prior to 1789, Baroque culture, with its celebration of ornate form, constituted something of a counter-Reformation response to the Protestant emphasis on literacy. For example, the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, held at Versailles, the center of imperial France after 1682, constituted a spectacle and theater designed to impress and reaffirm the power of the ancien régime (Jay 1993). Post-revolutionary France, perhaps the world’s first true nation-state, unleashed not only a radically new social order predicated on egalitarianism but also a radically new geography designed along the lines of Cartesian space. For example, the older provinces of the feudal regime that were drawn along ancient ethnic lines of demarcation were abolished, replaced by 82 départments (more were added later) of roughly equal size. This political restructuring was complemented by a widespread rationalization of transportation space. Indeed, even prior to the Revolution of 1789, France emerged as a model of centralized transportation planning. In 1713, for example, it created the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, trained engineers charged with caring for roads and bridges. Following the defeat of Napoleon, in 1824 the French government initiated the new road system of routes nationales (the first national system since Roman times), generating unprecedented equality and rapidity of movement. The new infrastructure made Paris, already the core of French national space, even more accessible to the rest of the country, enhancing its centrality and primacy. By 1847, the system had 47,000 kilometers, and transport speeds rose from 10 kilometers per hour in 1815 to 15 in 1840 (Vance 1990:157). The construction of this system entailed detailed surveying and mapping of French territory as part of a sustained rationalization of French national space, an effort initiated by the Cassini family even prior to the Revolution. Cadastral surveys, triangulation, and geodesy were all moments within the Enlightenment rationalization of space and its esprit géométrique. The mapping of the country by the Académie royale des sciences, for example, between 1668 and 1740 provided one of history’s first systematic and rational surveys of national space. The new transportation system was complemented by a nationwide system of optical telescopes and towers, or semaphores, arranged by line-of-sight operation (Standage 1998; Hugill 1999). In the same spirit of Enlightenment rationality, in 1795 the National Assembly, seeking a standardized and scientifically exact method for the measurement of weights, measures and space, initiated the metric system, in which the basic unit of space was to be one ten-millionth of the arc between the equator and the North Pole. Although Napoleon suspended its use, it was reinstated in 1837. Pride of the French Revolution, the system spread rapidly throughout Europe, particularly following the 1875 Convention of the Meter (signed by 17 countries, including the U.S.), supplanting local traditions for measuring space. Throughout the twentieth century it effectively became a universal system for measuring weights and distances, just as its inventors had hoped. It was received with enthusiasm by communities of scientists and

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engineers, and to a lesser extent, commercial businesses, despite occasional resistance that pointed to its suspicious French origins. In time as well as space, revolutionary France proposed dramatic changes. “The calendar reform of the French Republic was essentially an extension of their concurrent metric reform” (Macey 1989:35). Central to these changes was a radically secular, decimal calendar proposed by the dramatist Fabre d’Eglantine, a poet hired by Robespierre, which was free of saints’ days and their feudal connotations, thus erasing France’s temporal connection with the past in one fell swoop (Zerubavel 1977). It began on the autumnal equinox and was based on the ancient Egyptian calendar of 12 months of 30 days each and a five-day holiday called Sanculottides (because culottes, or long pants, were aristocratic garments, those sans culottes, originally a derogatory term, were held to be populists). It began with New Year’s day on the autumn equinox, September 22, 1792. Weeks had ten days rather than seven, which entailed nine consecutive days of labor (which was one of the reasons for its downfall). Names of the months and days were changed to new ones based on agriculture and flora and fauna, including Vendémiaire (grape harvest), Brumaire (foggy), Frimaire (frosty), Nivôse (snowy), Pluviôse (rainy), Ventôse (windy), Germinal (budding plants), Floréal (flowery), Prairial (meadows), Messidor (reaping), Thermidor (hot month), and Fructidor (gathering fruit). The revolutionary calendar, however, was short-lived: 14 years later, in 1805, Napoleon reinstated the Gregorian calendar in a political deal with the Catholic church (Galison 2003). (Similarly, Stalin unsuccessfully attempted to introduce a five-day and then six-day week in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, only to abandon it in 1940.)

Early modern time-space compression in perspective The early modern period centered on the rise to hegemony of capitalism on a global basis and, accordingly, the formation of a worldwide market dominated by Europeans for Europeans. Colonial empires, stitched together by maritime routes, formed a very visible political hand that assisted and sustained the invisible hand of the market and commodity production. Early modern global expansion was overwhelmingly maritime in nature, and was manifested in the coastal littorals that played key roles in the formation of overseas colonies. While the material benefits to Europe as the core of the new global system were undeniable, the conquest of the Americas also brought with it profound ideological repercussions, including the annihilation of older, medieval imaginations. In the wake of the collapse of these feudal horizons, new forms of identity sprang up. In discovering the “Orient”—that vast complex of different societies and cultures that lay outside of Europe, the “West” discovered itself. The time-space compression of colonial modernity therefore was accompanied by a widespread discursive repositioning of Europe as the motor of history and non-Europe as its passive objects, a view that continues perniciously today (Blaut 1993).


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Within the emerging West, the intellectual accoutrements of colonialism included the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which, fueled by the influx of wealth, particularly silver, ushered in new, secular understandings of time and space. Central to this project was the rise of ocularcentrism, the privileging of the visual and its implicit equation with objectivity, as manifested in the rise of the Cartesian cogito and the corresponding reduction of space to surfaces. Cartography and the graticule of latitude, and later, longitude, were vital parts of the emerging modernist imaginary, the formation of a comprehensive grid into which various locales could be placed and thus rendered sensible. So too was the rise of perspectival art, which bolstered the ocularcentrism of the age. And just as space was subjected to the disciplinary gaze of rationality, so also did time become steadily linearized, an undertaking initiated by Christianity but now rendered in secular terms. Several forces contributed to the rise of bourgeois secularism and its manifestation as individualist ideology. The process of printing simultaneously democratized information, freed the transmission vast realms of knowledge from face-to-face contact, undermined feudal loyalties, accelerated the diffusion of news, and deepened the exploration of the inner psyche. As various languages fell before the homogenizing power of the printing press, language and nationalism became steadily fused. Early modern time-space compression reached its zenith via the formation of the nation-state and the ideologies of nationalism that suppressed internal differences, an ostensible homogeneity buttressed by a common currency, military draft, and other space-binding mechanisms. The spaces of nationality were further integrated by various canals, roads, stagecoaches, and postal systems. Far from the market, therefore, it was the state that played the lead role in this scalar transformation. Finally, this process saw the gradual universalization of the Gregorian calendar as the triumph of modernity imposed its time-keeping system upon the plethora of cultures that lay vanquished at its feet. Local cultures of time persisted, as evidenced by the multiple regional practices in colonial America. However, Enlightenment rationality of space and time, made most explicit by the metric system, eventually came to envelop most other representations of these dimensions, just as Europe had itself come to envelop most of the world in the tentacles of colonial empire.

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What may be called late modernity—the period from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century—exhibited enormous transformations in the structure and meanings given to time and space, many of which sprang from the process of industrialization and its aftermath. This chapter seeks to provide a brief sketch of how this era gave rise to a world so radically different from its predecessors that people living in, say, 1800, could never begin to imagine how much it had changed a century and a half later. For example, one hallmark of late modernity was the rise of regular, predictable, and mechanized forms of mass movement (Cresswell 2006); since the Industrial Revolution began, global per capita mobility levels in the economically advanced countries (and many developing ones) have increased roughly 3.2 percent annually, amounting to a cumulative 500-fold increase. In large part this transformation can be traced to the gargantuan technological changes in production, transportation, and communication that largely define late modernity; with inanimate energy, the limits of nature finally could be exceeded, and by vast margins. Such changes in how people moved were inevitably accompanied by changes in how they thought and experienced the world. Culturally, as countless commentators have noted, the economic and technological circuits of modernity were accompanied by a culture defined, above all, by the celebration of the new and the avant-garde (Berman 1982).

The Industrial Revolution and industrial time Perhaps no event in world history has had such significant impacts on the global economy, cities, agriculture, trade, and everyday life as the Industrial Revolution (Landes 1969), a series of intertwined technological, economic, and social changes that unfolded differentially across time and space, creating new geographies of centrality and peripherality. Industrialization involved massive technological changes, particularly the use of inanimate energy, as well as transformations in the labor process and the scale of operations, which favored large firms over traditional household forms of production. The widespread introduction of machinery led to unprecedented levels of capital intensity, productivity growth, and rising incomes, often at the expense of


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enormous human suffering. Spatially, mass industrialization and urbanization from the late eighteenth century onwards sank enormous amounts of capital into the built environment in the forms of roads, canals, railroads, water systems, electrical networks, and communications lines, much of which was concentrated in dense urban pools of capital and labor rather than dispersed agrarian locations. The factory system itself represented a centralized and standardized form of time-space compression, gathering together dozens, then hundreds of workers under one roof, forging a proletariat through the common experience of exploitation and locking together mines, agriculture, transport system, and cities into a symbiotic network. The Industrial Revolution’s enormous technical advances and the astonishing growth in the rapidity of transportation centered on Newcomen’s invention of the steam engine in 1712, later perfected by James Watt in 1769. Such material and ontological changes were inevitably accompanied by ideological ones, including rising secularism, new forms of historical consciousness, and a generalized acceptance of the increased rapidity of social and cultural change. As Berman (1982:15) argues, an important part of the experience of modernity was the mounting feelings of unity within nation-states that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. The subsequent rise of steamships and railroads played central roles in reducing the turnover time of industrial capital and giving birth to radically new geographies of economic life. From the factory system of the textile industry to the massive waves of urbanization that industrialization unleashed, the Industrial Revolution comprised one vast wave of compression that altered the nature of time and space at the global, local, and individual scales. Another important step in this process was the 1784 invention of iron puddling by Henry Cort, which converted pig iron to wrought iron using coal, a process that freed the industry from its dependence on the forest and ushered in a new Iron Age (McClellan and Dorn 1999). Bridge-building, for example, was revolutionized by cast-iron arch bridges, wrought-iron suspension bridges, and tubular bridges. The need for new networks arose because the previous transportation system, designed to move large quantities of lowcost materials between many points, had become obsolete in the face of the industrial restructuring of production, which concentrated production within a handful of urban centers. Such heavy, bulky forms of investment, however, were perpetually prone to obsolescence because the tempo of innovation exceeded their cycles of amortization and depreciation, making them inertial drags on the economy that inhibited the new spatial fix (Harvey 1985c; Dodgshon 1998). The “creative destruction” unleashed by the Industrial Revolution—its ceaseless annihilation and remaking of the present—was often justified on the grounds that such changes would lead to a better world. And indeed they did. But the price of making constant change appear routine was to obliterate the very worlds that made countless millions feel happy, safe, and secure. In accelerating the pace of technological and social change exponentially,

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industrialization fostered the growth of late modern life and modern culture. Berman’s (1982) celebrated and eloquent account distinguishes between two interrelated dimensions of modernity, modernism—the culture and dominant form of consciousness typical of the modern world—and modernization as a process of social and economic change, the continual obliteration and renewal of landscapes, communities, and ideas. Modernization entailed transformations ranging from class struggle, demographic upheaval, and technological innovation to new systems of urban growth, state bureaucracies, mass communication, and the world economy, all of which bound diverse peoples around the globe together in powerful, complex ways. Berman notes (p. 15) that modernity “pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ ” Modernism is thus simultaneously a rich, vibrant vision of limitless possibilities and a set of impersonal forces and processes that imprison people in webs of anomie, annihilating tradition and leaving them floating in oceans of alienation. In this world, stability equals entropy and decay: modernity is the repeated celebration of the new and burial of the old. The very power of capitalism as an economic and social force stems from its ceaseless pursuit of the new and the concomitant destruction of the old. As with its early modern counterpart, commodification was central to late modern time-space compression: “Time became money once it had become a tool (or a weapon?) deployed primarily in the ongoing effort of overcoming resistance of space: shortening distances, stripping the ‘remoteness’ of the meaning of an obstacle, let alone of a limit, to human ambition” (Bauman 2000:112). The onset of labor commodification was the piece-work system widely used before the Industrial Revolution; its spatial correlate was the “putting out” system in which workers worked at home, mostly in garmentmaking. Such a system, without intricate coordination of different work tasks, did not demand a strictly defined and ordered sense of time, and taskorientation still prevailed (Thompson 1967). By the late eighteenth century, the enclosure movement steadily ensured that rural labor had few choices but to work in the cities, where they became subjected to the time discipline of mercantile capitalism. With the incorporation of workers into factories, a distinctively new work ethos emerged: the commodification of labor time split the day into time owned by capitalists—work time—and time owned by the worker, or leisure. This division formed one of the primary points of class conflict over the next several centuries, and was strongly resisted, albeit unsuccessfully, especially among artisans undergoing prolonged de-skilling and standardization of their craft. In raising productivity, industrialization axiomatically increased the value of time, so that the opportunity costs of absenteeism greatly exceeded what they used to be. As E.P. Thompson (1967:90) famously wrote,


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The first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters the importance of time; the second generation formed their short-time work committees in the ten-hour movement; the third generation struck for overtime or time-and-a-half. They had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them. They had learned their lesson, that time is money, only too well. Time discipline in the workplace was enforced with a variety of measures, including time-sheets, time-keepers, whistles, bells, clocks, foremen, informers, and fines. The transformation entailed losses, such as the sacrifice of “Saint Monday,” the day often used as a weekly holiday by workers in smallscale industries and mining (Thompson 1967; Thrift 1981). Until the hegemony of the factory, for example, in many weeks “Sunday was holy, Monday was holy, and Tuesday was often needed to recover from so much holiness” (Landes 1983:241). This transformation indicates that the imposition of a new time consciousness was not a simple matter of progress, but one of domination and resistance. Only by the end of the nineteenth century was the contentious issue of work time resolved into a “normal workday,” although struggles for two-day weekends continued into the 1930s. With a public and transparent means of ordering time readily available, many workers began to demand overtime. Industrial time was therefore not simply given, but produced and struggled over, and formed an important part of the working-class struggles that erupted in periodic waves of disruption, most notably in the revolutions of 1848. Urbanization, factories, and the disciplinary power of the industrial workplace conspired to inculcate in many social groups an ever-deeper sensitivity to and appreciation of clock time and its role in regulating the rhythms of everyday life. Clock time reflected the politics of an earlier era: Dohrn-Van Rossum (1996:318) notes that “the factory of the nineteenth century adopted practical and symbolic elements of the time organization of the late medieval city, with the difference, however, that clocktime, in the minds of those affected, had become largely alienated time dominated by the powerful.” In 1863, Karl Marx wrote to Engels that “The clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes; the whole theory of production of regular motion was developed through it” (quoted in Gleick 1999:35). For Max Weber, the Protestant process of rationalization included the ethical impulse to budget time, save time, and treat time as money. Thompson (1967) maintained that the commodification of time reflected the marriage of the Puritan work ethic with industrial capitalism: with the hegemony of industrialization, orientation towards tasks was displaced by an orientation toward clock time. Thrift (1981), however, cautions against exaggerating the dominance of industrial time, noting its ascendancy was contingent and contested, and manifested differentially among different groups; he describes the new, clock-based temporal sense as “islands of timekeeping in a sea of timelessness” (p. 2).

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Spiraling out from the factory, time-keeping became embedded in domestic and family life. A key innovation that enabled this diffusion was the cheap and accurate stop-watch, which continued the tradition of time measurement initiated in the late Middle-Ages. Stop-watches became increasingly popular among the middle and working classes toward the end of the nineteenth century (Zerubavel 1981); horse-racing buffs were particularly avid customers. The unification of railroad times greatly enhanced the appeal and necessity of watches in everyday life. The first wristwatch was designed by Cartier in 1904 to allow aviators to have both hands free (Gleick 1999). Widespread adoption of this device, however, did not occur until World War I, when soldiers adopted military-issued wristwatches, which had previously been considered unmanly. The electric clock, invented in 1916, replaced the old tick-tock of mechanical clocks with the sweeping flow of the minute and hour hands, offering a representation of time as a smooth continuous flux rather than as discrete units. Self-winding watches appeared in the 1920s, and by mid-century wristwatches were the smallest machines on the planet. The popularization of mass-produced watches and clocks accentuated the tendency for the habits of everyday life to be regulated chronometrically. Observers of the period note the ever-increasing tendency of subjects to monitor themselves, and one another, on the basis of clock time. With the diffusion of stop-watches, punctuality and explicit records of hours worked became increasingly common. Every self-respecting citizen in Europe and North America was expected to know the time, and punctuality came to be equated with achievement, success, and politeness. For many people, simply knowing the time served as an accelerant in daily life, and introduced a novel concept, time-saving, a cultural response to the pressures of increasingly rapid rhythms of work, consumption, and life. Henry David Thoreau (1992:111) observed “Have not men improved in punctuality somewhat since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think somewhat faster in the depot than they did in the stage office?” Not everyone approved of the new timeconscious culture, however. Writing in 1881, George Beard, in American Nervousness, blamed the new innovation for giving rise to a culture in which even small delays produced undue psychic strain, necessitating a host of timesaving devices, and introduced the diagnosis of neurasthenia into psychology: “The perfection of clocks and the invention of watches . . . excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment” (p. 61). He noted that punctuality caused people to worry that “a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime” (quoted in Whitrow 1988:166). Dr. Webb-Johnson, writing Nerve Troubles in 1900, miffed that “The great men of the centuries past were never in a hurry, and that is why the world will never forget them in a hurry” (quoted in Gleick 1999:17). Step by step, modernity created a culture so future-oriented that many busy people, rushing to conform to the accelerated pace of life under industrial capitalism, simply forgot to live in the present. What had been previously considered “unnatural” and was highly contested became, by the end of the century, natural and taken for granted.


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Late modern colonialism and industrial time-space Late modernity, including the Industrial Revolution, was firmly situated within the context of the expanding capitalist global economy. Late modern colonialism differed from its early modern, mercantile counterpart in terms of the regions conquered (i.e., Asia and Africa), the colonial powers involved (largely British and French), and the technologies deployed (e.g., steamships, railroads). The process was filled with unanticipated consequences: “the opening up of continental interiors to rapid, cheap, and dependable transport clearly tended to dethrone western Europe from its onetime primacy in the world. The rise of American and Russian power to their contemporary dimensions would have been inconceivable without the integration of large continental areas by a network of mechanically powered land transport” (McNeill 1963:765). As ever-larger chunks of the earth’s surface fell under European domination, the expansion of one empire increasingly entailed intrusions into territories held by another. Far from being a smooth process of diffusion, therefore, colonialism was wracked by inter-colonial rivalries. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), for example, fought on three continents (Europe, Asia, and North America) could be called the first true world war, one of several that repeatedly racked the capitalist world system (others include the Napoleonic conflict and the two major twentieth-century conflagrations). The British Empire was the largest and most formidable of all colonial formations. Britain invoked first the doctrines of mercantilism and then, when it was advantageous, became the world’s major advocate of free trade, an ideology used to great effect. One element contributing to the British colonial project lay in their ability to lower the friction of distance through larger, quicker, iron-clad ships (Harley 1988). The success of the British was also facilitated by their appropriation of Dutch innovations such as centralized banking and the joint-stock company, which commodified risk and distributed it over wide numbers of individuals. Another important tool was the invention of warehousing in the eighteenth century, largely by Scottish traders who appointed agents to collect goods in advance, which reduced merchant vessels’ time at port considerably and thus lowered transatlantic shipping costs (Pomeranz and Topik 1999). In 1700, for example, the average ship sailing between England and the Chesapeake Bay spent 100 days at port, which by 1770 had fallen by a half. The reduction in piracy and introduction of warehouses generated a cost-space convergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that dramatically accelerated trade, lowered costs and prices, and raised standards of living even before the introduction of steam power. The Industrial Revolution itself was intimately tied to the colonial waves of expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The traditional flow of profits from periphery to core was reversed as European financial capital, organized through stock exchanges, poured forth to North America, where it financed the railroads, and to southern South America, where it modernized transport systems, mines, and nitrate production in Peru, Argentina, and

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Chile. Late modern colonial time-space compression actively worked against the interests of vast swaths of the planet’s inhabitants, many of whom suffered not only relative but absolute declines in their standard of living. For example, South Asia in 1700 was the planet’s largest exporter of textiles in the world and accounted for one-quarter of world manufacturing (Marks 2007); the British East India Company, prying open markets in Bengal, drove most Indian weavers out of business. By the mid-eighteenth century, after succumbing to the tsunami of British textile imports (and quotas against Indian exports), India was steadily deindustrialized to become the immiserated country that it is today. This economic transformation was accompanied by the British geographing of India on behalf of the East India Company, which serves as an excellent example of European attempts to rationalize space throughout various parts of the world (Edney 1990). Starting in 1802, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India lasted for half a century. Using triangulation based on observations of stars and a series of rods and chains, the crew painstakingly mapped the entire subcontinent in what became the largest continuous measurement of the Earth’s surface ever achieved, an effort that resembled the Township and Range system used to demarcate the space of the U.S. Trigonometric surveys as an expression of Cartesian rationalism not only led to accurate and useful (to the British) maps, but reaffirmed British cultural and scientific superiority over those they conquered (Edney 1990). In addition to facilitating British administrative control, the survey provided a discursive framework for integrating the entire subcontinent: “The geographical rhetoric of British India was so effective that India had become a real entity for both British imperialists and Indian nationalists alike. Both groups held ‘India’ to be a single, coherent, self-referential geographical entity coincident with the bounds of the South Asian subcontinent and the extent of British power” (Edney 1990:15). The surveying and mapping project, therefore, effectively constituted part of a vast effort at time-space compression in which regions that were less well known and remote from British control were brought into Eurocentric forms of understanding. Colonialism in North America witnessed multiple, profound transformations in space and time. Enlightenment America carried with it all of the ideas, inspirations, and complexities of its European counterpart, its faith in progress and its individualism, and coupled it with a home-grown sense of the New World as a redeeming land, the “city on the hill” in which the sins of the past would be swept away. Whereas the idea of progress had been confined in Europe to the elites, in America it became a form of grass-roots evangelicism (Nisbet 1980). The initial topologies of access in the New World were complex and confusing. In colonial America, the considerably lower expenses involved in transporting goods by water versus land produced startling relational geographies of cost: even in the early nineteenth century, for example, most towns on the Atlantic seaboard of the U.S. imported English coal rather than use wood from forests a few miles inland (Pomeranz and


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Topik 1999). Compounding this pattern was the confusing system of metes and bounds to measure property, inherited from England, which became increasingly out of date as the need to standardize and commodify the new environment became ever more pronounced. The rationalization of unknown spaces in the emerging nation was made explicit by the famous Township and Range system proposed by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the 1785 Land Ordinance, later to become the U.S. Public Lands Survey System. One of history’s clearest examples of Enlightenment rationalization of space, the Township and Range system “drained out all substantive content from space and replaced it with empty, exchangeable units of measurement” (Crang 2005:203). In dividing the territory west of the Mississippi into townships of six square miles, the system brought these spaces into a distinctively Enlightenment frame of consciousness and expedited the conduct of ordnance and cadastral surveys essential to the protection of property rights. Just as they had done on the oceans, the discourses of the grid simultaneously reflected and transformed the ontology of land space in early modernity: “In urban and rural America, the imposition of a grid had made the creation of transferable property easier. Space had been made a standardized commodity abstracted from ecology and topography” (Cresswell 2006:62). East Coast cities desperate to carve out hinterlands for themselves sought access over the formidable barrier posed by the Appalachians. By far the most successful of these attempts was the Erie Canal in upstate New York, completed in 1825. The waterway, 40 feet wide, four feet deep, and 363 miles long, greatly accelerated the movement of goods from the Midwest to the East and the flow of immigrants to the West, and propelled New York to hegemonic status within the American urban system. Canals were supplemented, as in Britain, by a growing network of improved roads, mostly built by turnpike companies; the largest and best known of these was the Cumberland, later National, Road that stretched from Maryland to the Ohio River in 1817. By 1820, all cities along the Atlantic coast had been linked by improved roads (Pursell 1995). Westward expansion of people and capital were manifested in the unfolding of the American “frontier,” a term loaded with ideological overtones, which generated new geographies of centrality and peripherality as the midcontinental agrarian regions were incorporated into the circuits of capital centered in the east. The frontier became the primary metaphor of progress, civilization, and national unity, albeit one purchased only at the cost of exterminating indigenous peoples by the millions. The diffusion of Europeans across the continent and the retreat of native peoples thus formed two sides of one process: one group’s time-space expansion was the other’s time-space contraction. As the “frontier” expanded westward, the human costs multiplied exponentially. The introduction of the horse—unknown prior to the European arrival—accelerated not only the movement of people, goods, and information, but also of disease, as “Smallpox raced along the network

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through the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, ricocheting among the Mandans, Hidatsas, Ojibwes, Crows, Blackfoot, and Shoshone, a helterskelter progress in which a virus leapfrogged from central Mexico to the shore of Hudson Bay in less than two years” (Mann 2005:109). By the late nineteenth century, the vast expansion of the United States made it the world’s largest economic power and, increasingly, an imperial political one abroad as well. The West Coast of North America, long relatively isolated by great distances and poor transportation, was in global cost-space closer to other places along the Pacific Rim than to the Atlantic seaboard. Clipper ships, for example, could cross from Shanghai to San Francisco in as little as 30 days. The West Coast’s perceived remoteness disappeared overnight, however, with the Gold Rush of the 1850s, one of the greatest booms in commerce in world history: as the Forty-Niners doubled the world’s gold supply between 1848 and 1860 and gold replaced silver as the currency of choice, global trade tripled (Pomeranz and Topik 1999), and California became a focus of world interest. American political power rippled across the Pacific Ocean, engulfing Hawaii in 1893, and after 1898, the Philippines too. The expansion of the U.S. into the Pacific Ocean not only made the U.S. into an Asian power, but repositioned Latin America geopolitically and discursively as the “backyard” of the U.S., a view formalized under the Monroe Doctrine. In East Asia, nineteenth-century colonial time-space compression generated two startling different trajectories. The incorporation of China into the colonial world system, now enabled by steamships and guns, bared the weaknesses of the Middle Kingdom in the face of Western technological and military superiority and reduced hundreds of millions of peasants to grinding poverty. The introduction of opium on a mass basis rectified British trade deficits, leading to the humiliations of the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1858–1860) and resulting Treaty Ports, enclaves that expedited the penetration of industrial capital into the country. The turmoil of these events, and the humiliation they imposed, played no small part in the infamous Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) against the Manchus or Qing dynasty, in which upwards of 20 million perished. A radically different path was taken by Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, in part due to Japanese observations of China’s defeat. Japan’s relations to external spaces differed from China’s by virtue of its long history of borrowing from abroad, especially from China, and the Tokugawa Shogunate’s investments in roads, civil service, and school systems. The feudal system of regulating travel was immediately abolished to facilitate intercourse among the provinces. New rail lines, starting in 1872 with one that followed the old Tokaido route, were quickly laid down, greatly amplifying the centrality of Edo, now Tokyo (Traganou 1997). Spatial changes were inevitably accompanied by new systems for measuring time: the traditional system of unequal hours was kept until 1873, when the country adopted the European calendar as part of the wave of Western reforms (Dunn 1969;


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T. Smith 1986). In the 1870s a textile industry, followed by steel, railroads, and weapons production, generated new landscapes overnight, as well as an industrial proletariat. Japan became increasingly urbanized, with growth centered on the Kanto Plain of southern Honshu. Externally, the transition into capitalism saw increasingly intensified nationalism and the steady expansion of Japanese military interests into China, including swallowing Okinawa in the 1870s, the seizure of Taiwan and Korea in 1894, the development of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1920s, the invasions of East Asia in the 1930s, and the creation of the Pacific Asian empire in the 1940s. The end product of this process was, of course, the disaster of WWII and the massive loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In short, internal transformation and external expansion were intimately intertwined, a synergy that blurs the boundaries between the inside and outside of the nation-state. As Japan adapted successfully to the demands of late modern capitalism, and alone among non-Western countries challenged the West on its own terms, it became not only an object of industrial time-space compression but also an active agent in its production on a global scale. Africa, despite the long history of European slave-raiding, had long remained relatively immune to the menace of colonialism, sealed off effectively by malaria and other diseases that limited European settlers’ life expectancy there to less than six months. Thus, “Seen from ‘the outside,’ the African continent was geographically little more than a coastline” (Withers 2007:159). However, the scramble for Africa, initiated when the steamship permitted access to the continent’s interior and motivated by French insecurities following its defeat in the 1870 conflict with Germany, saw colonial rivalries become increasingly intense and violent. The Berlin Conference of 1884, which drew the boundaries of the colonies (and thus of African states following independence), gave scant attention to the geographies of the people located there, collapsing more than 1,000 tribes into 50 political units administered by different European powers. Late modern time-space compression in Africa, therefore, was manifested in the blunt imposition of Western political geography over the width and breadth of the continent, with horrifying implications for its denizens in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Devouring distance with the railroads Arguably the central innovation of the Industrial Revolution was the steam engine, which lay at the core of two revolutions in transportation over water and land. Both steamships and railroads were central to the unfolding colonial economy of the nineteenth century and the spatial constitution of industrial capitalism, and both dramatically accelerated the movement of people, goods, and information among and within countries. As Pomeranz and Topik (1999:49) note, “railroads and steamships set into motion a conceptual revolution in time, space, and commodification. With steam, the Atlantic and Pacific shrank to ponds and continents to small principalities. Distant

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neighbors became proximate, indeed closer to others in ports or on the same rail lines than they were to people nearer in terms of miles but removed from the transportation networks.” Railroads were the most explicit symbol of the vast time-space compression unleashed throughout the nineteenth century. In addition to their ability to shuttle people, railroads could move heavy loads over long overland stretches, but not in areas with too steep a grade, reducing land transport costs by as much as 95 percent. Schivelbusch (1977:45) argues that “As the space between points—the traditional travel space—is destroyed, those points move into each other’s vicinity: one might say that they collide. They lose their old sense of local identity, which used to be determined by the spaces between them. The isolation of localities, which was created by spatial distance, was the very essence of their identity, their self-assumed and complacent individuality.” British railroads, the world’s first, began with the Penydarren Tramroad in Wales in 1804, although it did not rely upon steam power (Vance 1990). In 1814, George Stephenson unveiled the first steam locomotive, and the British system expanded rapidly, the first being the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, one of a series of famous railways. In 1830, the first interurban railroad connected Liverpool and Manchester. Early railroads achieved speeds between 20 and 30 mph, or three times that achieved by stagecoaches; later ones achieved speeds up to 70 or 80 mph. By 1838, the London to Birmingham route opened to immediate success, reducing the time needed to travel the 112 miles in between from 12.5 to 5.5 hours. Other travel times fell accordingly: from London to York, for example, took 96 hours to walk in 1754, 36 hours by stagecoach in 1776, and 20 hours by railroad (Vance 1990). The Quarterly Review offered a famous synopsis of the railroads’ impacts on the new geography of Britain in 1839: Supposing that railroads, even at our present simmering rate of travelling, were to be suddenly established all over England, the whole population of the country would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en masse, and place their chairs nearer to the fireside of their metropolis by two-thirds of the time which now separates them from it; they would also sit nearer to one another by two-thirds of the time which now respectively alienates them. If the rate were to be sufficiently accelerated, this process would be repeated; our harbours, our dock-yards, our towns, the whole of our rural population, would again not only draw nearer to each other by two-thirds, but all would proportionately approach the national hearth. As distances were thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city. (Quoted in Schivelbusch 1977:34) During a period of intense, widespread and rapid urbanization, railroads


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soon became the dominant sign of the Industrial Revolution in much the way that the Internet came to symbolize postmodern capitalism. The enormous costs of constructing and maintaining such networks, however, required high volumes of traffic to amortize expenses over numerous clients. Fortunately, the velocities of the new system were popular: British passengers increased from 5.4 million in 1838 to 170 million in 1862. Originally British railroads deployed the four-foot, eight-inch gauge of the coal mines, which was itself a vestige of the width of Roman chariots in Britain two millennia earlier (Pomeranz and Topik 1999). The integration of wider markets, however, required standardized tracks, which led other countries eventually to adopt the British standard. The standardization of different European rail gauges was finally accomplished with the International Railway Conference of 1882, a process that took more than a decade to unfold. In Russia, railroads helped to forestall a decline into Third World country status (Marks 2007). With the opening of the Moscow–St. Petersburg line in 1851, Russia’s railroads zoomed from 700 total miles in 1860 to 12,500 in 1878, to 21,000 in 1894, and 36,000 in 1900. The first leg of the TransSiberian railroad opened in 1903, stretching 6,000 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok; by reducing journey times between Europe and Asian Russia from months to days, it brought the vast resources of Siberia into the tsarist spatial division of labor. Within a decade, 2.5 million Russian settlers were living in northeast Asia. The Trans-Siberian railroad was therefore central in making Russia into a formidable land power, a point important to the geopolitics of Halford Mackinder (1904). Similarly, the Japanese rail system first linked Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, part of the rapid unification of Japanese space following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In Italy, the railroad became an instrument of national unification, a process achieved in the face of the growing economic and political ascendancy of the north at the expense of the peninsula’s southern districts. Transportation integration in Italy came late, however, with the Florence to Rome line completed only in 1933. The French railroad system, centered, naturally, upon Paris, soon made the capital accessible to people throughout the nation; equally important, it made French peripheral territories accessible to Parisian capitalists (Figure 4.1). The French rail system generated a condensed geography in which all cities approached Paris, and vice versa, deeply reinforcing the centrality of the capital that had been growing since the late Middle Ages. Lines ending at different stations in Paris reflected the dominant conception that railroads did not go through Paris, they simply ended there (Vance 1990). Schivelbusch (1978:32) notes that French observers of the early railroads saw how they led to smaller towns such as Louvres or Chartres effectively becoming “lost in some street of Paris or its suburbs.” German poet Heinrich Heine captured this spatial restructuring and the disorientation it generated while commenting on the new rail line between Paris and Orleans in 1843: What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our

Figure 4.1 Growth of the French railroad system, 1850–1890.

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Late modern time-space compression notion! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone. . . . Just imagine what will happen when the lines open to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door. (Quoted in Harvey 1990:426)

This pattern reflects the profoundly uneven national geographies of industrialization facilitated by the railroad, i.e., the rising prominence of cores of capital accumulation at the center of national transport systems. In transforming French space, the railroads also transformed French time: “Bit by bit, as lines from Paris wound deeper into the hinterland, they had chased away local times until, by 1888, Paris fixed the whole country’s railroad time” (Galison 2003:99). Similarly, the British railroad heavily favored London, and brought most of the island within ten hours’ traveling time of the capital (Figure 4.2). In addition to shortening travel times, railroads also dramatically changed the subjective experience of travel. Accelerated speeds transformed the dominant former means of travel, horse-drawn carriages, into something slow, whereas previously it had been the quickest way to go. Moreover, older, animal-driven technologies, Schivelbusch (1977) maintains, preserved a “mimetic relationship” to the space traversed, permitting travelers to perceive space intimately. With the introduction of steam power, however, animalbased transportation was rendered hopelessly anachronistic, and the close relationship between traveler and the traveled space was uncoupled. Unlike animal transportation, which was irregular and bumpy (horses’ hooves needed traction), railroads moved smoothly at a constant rate, and the mechanism of propulsion was largely invisible, incomprehensible, or misunderstood by most travelers. Many early descriptions of railroads liken them to projectiles or rockets. The sheer speed of rail travel appeared unnatural to many early riders, and prevented them from close observation of their surroundings. Railroads ushered in new perceptual landscapes, divorcing travelers’ bodies from their traditional experiential linkage to external space, forcing them to construct new forms of consciousness to interpret the landscape as it whizzed by. As Cresswell (2006:20) observes, “Just as the railway was instrumental in ordering modern life through the production of abstract time and abstract space, so it was the source of new anxieties.” Among other things, this new phenomenology of movement entailed a much greater ability to deflect irrelevant stimuli. Unable to hear sounds in the places they passed by, unable to look ahead, passengers confronted a rapidly passing blur that substituted for the foreground. Victor Hugo complained in 1837 that “The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak”

Figure 4.2 Accessibility to London by railroad in 1845 and 1910.

94 Late modern time-space compression (quoted in Schivelbusch 1977:55). Slow, careful views of nearby objects were replaced by rapid, superficial scans of distant ones in the background, making passengers feel disembodied from the places through which they flew, leaving them with a fleeting, impressionistic understanding of their surroundings. Medical doctors of the time associated the rail experience with the new health problems of eye strain and stress. As these changes became widespread, romantic writers of the nineteenth century turned to earlier forms of transportation with nostalgia; as Schivelbusch (1977:121) explains “The ‘esthetic freedom’ of the pre-industrial subject was discovered at the very moment when the pre-industrial methods of production and transportation seemed threatened by mechanization. . . . When industrialization suddenly caused these old forms to be seen from an esthetic and romanticizing viewpoint, we learn less about those forms themselves than about general attitudes toward industrialization.” Thus, despite the economic gains unleashed by industrial time-space compression, the process also entailed experiential losses: the quantitative size of spaces traveled through expanded greatly, but the qualitative appreciation of the experience declined (Harrington 2000). Railroads also fostered an outlook that emphasized precision rather than the old “inexact” habits. With the railroad, speed became an established principle of public life and a synonym for progress. Punctuality (“on the point”) became increasingly regarded as socially normative: a few minutes meant the difference between catching or missing a train. The new environment democratized access to velocity: for example, women were able to travel alone without a male escort, a rare phenomenon prior to the railroad. The psychic transformation wrought by rail travel carried over even into the simple process of embarking or disembarking. Schivelbusch (1977:174) notes, for example, that “As the departing traveler proceeded from the city . . . he experienced a process of expansion of space. . . . Conversely, the arriving traveler experienced a process of spatial reduction.” Within cities too, railroads were potent in restructuring urban land markets, initiating rounds of change in the urban rent surface that amplified some land values and eroded others. Railroads simultaneously intruded upon older cities, destroying the traditional fabric of urban space, and gave rise to new ones. As the commodification of urban space intensified, specialized districts of production and social reproduction materialized apace within divisions of labor that became spatially extended and more integrated. Outside urban areas, railroads allowed the rhythms of the city to penetrate the countryside. By making distant lands accessible, railroads dramatically extended the rent surfaces of urban areas, commodifying land in hitherto inaccessible regions, encouraging farmers, settlers, and planters to assault distant, relatively untouched ecosystems. The American rail experience paralleled that of Britain in generating a transport surface increasingly ubiquitous across national space. “In a sense, the challenge of American railroads matched that of other large-scale systems,


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like the Roman and Chinese empires, whose achievements in connecting space were similarly fundamental to their success as large-scale systems” (Dodgshon 1998:82). Beginning with the first line in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1826, Boston became the world’s first rail hub, with three radial lines. As Vance (1990) notes, it took only 43 years to move from the first rail line in 1826 to the famous transcontinental connection of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines at Promontory Point, Utah on May 10, 1869, suturing together the multitude of farms, towns, and cities stretched across North America. Thus, distances from New York that took six weeks to be traversed in 1830 could be crossed in one week by 1857. American railroads had inestimably profound impacts on the country’s social, urban, and economic geography, opening the coal-mining districts of Appalachia and the meat and grain belt of the Midwest alike. The time-space effects of the railroad system were highly uneven geographically, and integrated the Northeast and Midwest far more than they did the Northeast and the South. Just as there were significant differences in the urban and regional impacts of railroads between Britain and France, so too in the U.S. did the consequences of railroads vary yet again. Because American labor was expensive and land was cheap—the exact opposite of Europe—railroads in the U.S. tended to curve much more around hills and valleys (Schivelbusch 1977). The identical technology had significantly different consequences, depending upon the spatial context in which it was adopted, an important point in the refutation of simplistic technological determinism. American railroads were instrumental in opening up the vast wilderness of the continental interior, and train travelers across the prairies compared themselves to ships on land. In essence, this wave of time-space compression turned the Great Plains and Prairies into a giant agricultural bread basket, process that established Chicago as the premier center of capital accumulation in the continental interior. The completion of national rail networks also facilitated the specialization of individual cities, which often realized comparative advantages based on local resources, strategic locations, and contingent pools of labor skills. Chicago witnessed particularly explosive growth in the 1840s due to its location as a transportation hub (Cronon 1991). The huge wave of time-space compression that railroads unfolded across North America catapulted Chicago from a tiny backwater to become the world’s first commodity market and futures exchange. The advent of commodities futures further standardized and commodified time itself. Cronon (1991) offers a compelling account of how the accelerated velocity and improved reliability of shipments brought the Midwest steadily into the orbit of eastern capital. Shortly after the Civil War, the Rocky Mountains and West Coast were incorporated into the American space-economy, which soon thereafter became the largest in the world, surpassing Britain in the 1890s. The gulf between the East and West Coasts was finally breached by the telegraph wires in 1861 and railroads in 1869 (Table 4.1); in the late nineteenth century, the U.S. railroad network formed a dense spider web over the eastern half of the country (Figure 4.3), a

Figure 4.3 The U.S. railroad system in 1860 (A) and 1890 (B).

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Table 4.1 U.S. railroad and telegraph capacity, 1848–1902

Rail track (000s miles) Freight (millions of tons) Telegraph wire (000s miles) Messages (millions per year)

1848

1852

1860

1870

1880

1890

1902

5.9 10.6 3.4 0.5

12.9 17.6 23.3 1.4

30.6 46.5 56.0 5.0

52.9 147.6 133.6 11.5

115.6 338.9 291.2 31.7

208.2 691.4 848.8 58.4

252.5 1,200.7 1,307.0 89.7

Source: Fields (2004:65).

system that represented 40 percent of the world’s railroad capacity. The heady triumphalism of American expansionism brought on by the railroad led Andrew Carnegie to exult in 1886 that “The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail’s pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express” (quoted in Pomeranz and Topik 1999:203). Far from constituting some mythical process of “free market” expansion, the growth of the railroads was actively abetted by the state, including the land grants introduced in 1850; even at the height of laissez-faire capitalism, the reconstruction of time and space necessitated government intervention. In the U.S., the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 standardized rail gauges. Thus, rather than allowing unfettered supply and demand, the state intervened actively to facilitate the time-space compression of industrial capitalism. This process effectively allowed politically powerful commercial interests located on the East Coast to gain easy access to the resources and markets situated in the Midwest and West. Thus, national integration, industrialization and urbanization, state intervention and private capital, and geographic transformation all comprised different facets of a broader process by which industrial capitalism triumphed over North America. One of the most significant long-term impacts of the relational geographies that the railroad fostered was the rise of dramatically expanded markets on the scale of the nation-state. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, with markets highly localized and self-sufficient, long-distance trade was comparatively rare. In 1817, for example, it took 52 days to ship goods from Cincinnati to New York using wagons and rivers (Fields 2004). Between 1830 and 1857, most of the country was within a few days’ travel of New York (Figure 4.4). Interregional commerce tended to be export-oriented and controlled by merchants in large, East Coast cities. As long as production and consumption were confined to regional markets, goods retained the identity of their origin. The revolutionary wave of late nineteenth-century time-space compression, however, allowed the sphere of circulation to be harnessed by large-scale commercial providers, who lowered costs, increased productivity, and raised profits while using the new technologies to conquer space in ever-more effective ways, expanding business operations by diminishing geographic barriers (Fogel 1964). For example, Fields (2004) shows how G.F. Swift’s meatpacking company revolutionized the dressed beef industry in the 1870s and

Figure 4.4 Isochrones of travel times from New York, 1830 and 1857.

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1880s, expanding market boundaries, reinventing logistics, changing organizational structures, reshaping access to suppliers and clients within markets, and overcoming the temporal and territorial barriers to capital accumulation. In the process, Chicago and the beef industry displaced Cincinnati and pork in significance. Balancing supply and demand in this context, with numerous suppliers, slaughterhouses, warehouses, and clients dispersed over large distances, required the rapid transfer of information via the telegraph. Within the new, larger markets, prices tended to equalize quickly. As Chandler (1977) famously argued, this process generated “economies of speed” in which maximization of throughput set the stage for the emerging Fordist regime of production. All of this was central to the transition from small, isolated, localized markets to larger national ones, a new geographic formation that was highly conducive to the rise of larger, capital-intensive, vertically-integrated, multi-establishment firms and oligopolies as companies internalized their commodity chains. Thus, industrialization, time-space compression, and economic growth became intertwined, mutually reinforcing catalysts. With the transition from local to national markets that railroads encouraged, however, and the associated oligopolies that both reflected and produced this change, mass-produced, standardized goods were torn from their local contexts to travel long distances and purchased by unseen consumers. As Schivelbusch (1978:38) puts it, “When spatial distance is no longer experienced, the differences between original and reproduction diminish.” More prosaically, Walter Benjamin (1969) described this loss of the sensual properties of goods as the annihilation of their “aura,” that is, the uniqueness imparted to them by their origins and context (Savage 2000). Like the railroads, the representations of time and space found in photography and printing, which duplicated previously unique views, also stripped phenomena of their auras, placing them on display for those who neither appreciated nor cared about their origins and roots. More broadly, the loss of auras served as a metaphor for the annihilation of older worlds by mass consumption and production, for the impersonalization brought on by bureaucracies and complex divisions of labor, for the casual way in which places could be pitted against one another in the national and global division of labor. Thus, late modern time-space compression elevated exchange values over use values, homogenizing goods and places and robbing them of their unique properties. Railroads had other social impacts as well, including the media. For example, there were hardly any mass circulation magazines prior to 1850. Their emergence in the U.S., based on the economies of scale offered by large markets, was made possible by the completion of the transcontinental railroads in 1869 and the Postal Act of 1879, which allowed for cheap distribution of commercial material. By the 1880s, magazines for the first time began to earn the bulk of their profits from advertising rather than newsstand sales, and by the 1890s mass circulation magazines had become a staple among middle-class households. Mass media such as magazines and newspapers, in


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turn, reinforced the very process of time-space compression that gave birth to them, making it possible, for example, for more people to read about distant places in the world. Another consequence of railroad time-space compression was in the expanding geographies of mass tourism. Prior to the railroad, for example, high transport costs kept isolated areas far from the reach of the urban masses and were often the recreational preserves of wealthy elites. Virilio (1995:79) notes ironically “while the first socialists were dreaming of bringing down the class structure, railway companies were inaugurating a new class structure, the speed classes” (emphasis in original). Like everything else, velocity became a commodity, and the ability to consume it a marker of social status. The railroad made the Grand Tour of Europe, a de rigueur rite of passage for the educated petit-bourgeoisie on both sides of the Atlantic, obsolete as hotels, newspapers and the new technologies of transportation all made the process of mass tourism more comfortable, safe, and reliable, facilitating the mass movement of people across and within national boundaries and encouraging widespread appreciation of cultural differences. In the 1840s, Thomas Cook began to organize cheap train trips to the coasts of Britain for working-class families. Railroads in the nineteenth century and airplanes in the twentieth opened exotic spaces to the middle classes, who frequently took them over, often destroying the very uniqueness that made them attractive in the first place (robbing them of their auras). Places, like goods, became standardized and commodified, locked into an increasingly national, then global, system of production, circulation, and consumption. In the words of Schivelbusch (1978:40), “For twentieth century tourism, the world has become one big department store of landscapes and cities.” In European colonies, too, the railroad unleashed enormous time-space impacts, although in contrast to colonial countries these were generally designed to favor the broader process of exploitation and surplus value construction. Yet unlike the West, these technologies served not as instruments of industrial development but as mechanisms of colonial control designed not to integrate the populace into coherent entities, but to incorporate them selectively into the expanding global capitalist division of labor. In India, for example, British railroads began in 1853, but rose rapidly following the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 to become the largest railroad system in the colonial world, primarily to facilitate cotton and jute exports to the textile mills at home and the movement of troops to control the native population. By 1870, they had laid 4,500 miles of track, which by 1936 expanded to 43,000 miles, the fourthlargest network in the world. Investors in Indian railroads were guaranteed a 5 percent annual rate of return by the British government. Similarly, in southern Africa, rail lines were central to Cecil Rhodes’s pacification program. Jefferson (1928) noted that by the 1920s, the vast majority of the population of the economically developed world lived within 10 miles of the “civilizing rails,” blanketed by a network that suggested near-ubiquity of access. Conversely, relatively few people in Asia, Africa, or Latin America did so.

102 Late modern time-space compression One of the most explicit repercussions of railroads was the standardization of time. England, first to build railroads, was also the first to adopt a standard railroad time: in 1847, the British Railway Clearing House suggested that all rail stations adopt Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the special preserve of the Royal Observatory located there, founded in 1675. Because Greenwich time was distributed via the telegraph wires, it was long known as “railway time.” For most people, the first experience with standard time was the Great Exhibition of 1851, to which six million traveled. By 1855 GMT became the legal standard throughout the country. In the U.S., given its vastly greater size, a somewhat different set of conditions prevailed. By 1865, the U.S. National Observatory in Washington, DC sent daily signals to synchronize clocks, offering the possibility of national time (Miller 2002). However, by 1870, the U.S. still had roughly 200 local times and 80 different railroad times (O’Malley 1990; Fields 1999:66), generating great confusion among railroad passengers and companies. In that year, Charles Dowd suggested four time zones based on four standard meridians, the easternmost of which passed through the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. Uniform time was voluntarily adopted on November 18, 1883, the “day of two noons” because clocks had to be set back to generate a national railway time. In adopting Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, the U.S. and Canada provided a model for the international adoption of the same innovation. This process, however, generated heated debate: opposition to standard time flourished in marginal areas in which the discrepancy between local and standard time was greatest (Bartky 1989), such as Ohio, where Cincinnati clung tenaciously to its local time as a matter of pride and tradition (O’Malley 1990). Only in 1918 was standard time legally mandated everywhere across the country. The accelerating tempo of global industrial capitalism necessitated the synchronization of multiple national times. The major disagreement was where to locate the Prime Meridian. Since, unlike the Equator, there is no “natural” Prime Meridian, the choice was essentially arbitrary, that is to say, political; after all, any meridian could serve equally well. Prime Meridians proliferated among many national cities: for the French, Paris; for Spain, Cadiz; for Russia, Pulkovo, near St. Petersburg; for the Italians, Naples; for Brazilians, Rio de Janeiro. China used Shanghai time, Russia used a variety of local times often demarcated from St. Petersburg, and India used hundreds if not thousands of local times announced by gongs and bells (Mill 1892). The search for a Prime Meridian reflected the Enlightenment concern with universal knowledge and standardized frames of reference (Schulten 2001:20). In October, 1884, 25 countries sent representatives to the Prime Meridian Conference hosted by the U.S. State Department in Washington, DC. The showdown over the Prime Meridian pitted British and American supporters of Greenwich against French representatives who insisted on Paris, or failing that, any place but Greenwich. Eventually, Anglo-American interests prevailed and the conference set Greenwich as the Prime Meridian


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and divided the earth into 24 zones spaced 15 degrees or one hour apart (Figure 4.5). By the time it was adopted, Greenwich time was already used by two-third’s of world shipping (Howse 1980). Universal time did not unfold instantaneously across the world, however. In 1888, Japan adopted it, followed by Belgium and the Netherlands in 1892, and, in 1893, Italy and Austria-Hungary. Also in 1893, Germany passed the Reichs Law, which mandated a uniform GMT throughout the country, part of the effort to unify the unwieldy collection of localities that formed the new nation-state. The French, resentful over British success with the Prime Meridian, made Paris time the legal time of France and Algeria until they could host the International Conference on Time in 1912. As Kern (1983:33) notes, the reconfiguration of public time and the reinterpretation of private time were very much linked: “The introduction of World Standard Time created greater uniformity of shared public time and in so doing triggered theorizing about a multiplicity of private times that may vary from moment to moment in the individual.”

Shrinking waters with the steamship Prior to the steamship’s conquest of the world’s seas, sail-based ships enjoyed a brief window of hegemony in which it became the dominant means for crossing the oceans. New designs in hulls and sails led to ever more rapid and efficient means of traveling over water. Ship owners could schedule their vessels with greater assurance than previously; indeed, prior to this moment there had been no regularly scheduled service across the Atlantic (Vance 1990). Sailing reached its apex with the clipper ships of the 1840s and early 1850s, which, with large crews and enormous sails, could travel long distances quickly, such as around South America to California during the Gold Rush. The ultimate sailing ships came in the mid-nineteenth century, when some could cover 436 miles in 24 hours, an average of 18.5 knots. Simultaneously, between 1842 and 1861 Matthew Maury, working in the U.S. Observatory, produced a series of nautical charts that revolutionized ocean travel by offering detailed understanding of winds and currents, cutting days off sailing times that reduced transit periods along major shipping routes from 27 to 58 percent (Knowles 2006). One beneficiary of this innovation was the China Trade so instrumental to the development of New England. However, sailing technology proved to be increasingly inadequate to the accelerated tempos of late modernity. In 1815, for example, 2,000 people died in the Battle of New Orleans, two weeks after the peace treaty ending the war had been signed in London but before the news had arrived. The era of sailing ships, effective as it was in serving the needs of mercantile capitalism, drew to a close with the rise of industrial capital and its substantially greater need to conquer maritime space. Among other things, steamships uncoupled the movement of people, goods, and information from currents and wind. Steamships could go upstream as easily as downstream, and could set forth

Figure 4.5 Standardized world time zones as defined by the 1884 Conference.


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on the ocean at any time of the year. Early eyewitnesses of the steamboat were surprised that it traveled in a straight line. The first steamships operated entirely on inland bodies of water and had paddle wheels. Because early steam engines required a continuous supply of fresh water, the technology was amenable to North America, with its large rivers and lakes (Cardwell 1995). In 1798, initial efforts to develop steam navigation began on the Hudson River, resulting in a whopping three miles per hour (Vance 1990). In 1807, Robert Fulton deployed the first steamship on the Hudson River, and in 1811 did so again on the Mississippi, going from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati and initiating the process by which that river would become the continent’s major commercial arterial. By 1818, steamboats had begun to ply the Great Lakes, laying the foundations for the later growth of urban centers in the region. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, steamboats were instrumental in the development of the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys (Mark and Walton 1972), where they halved transport costs and times, placing much of the continental interior within easy access of New Orleans, which emerged as the nation’s largest port. Major beneficiaries of this change included St. Louis. The inability to use salt water made ocean-going steamships an impossibility until the reliable surface condenser was developed for marine engines, an innovation that revolutionized the transatlantic trade as freshwater steamboats metamorphosed into ocean-going steamships (Figure 4.6). Transatlantic service began with the Savannah’s crossing in 1819 from Charleston to Liverpool, which took 29 days, much of the time using sails to complement steam. The first true steamship to cross the Atlantic, the Sirius, left Ireland in 1838 to enter the port of New York. The following year, bimonthly service became the norm. Steamships attained steadily higher maximum speeds, which increased further with the introduction of diesel engines (Table 4.2). By the 1850s, the normal duration of the trip from Britain to New York had fallen to 14 days, half of what it was 30 years earlier. Fierce competition between British, French, and American carriers fueled this time-space and cost-space compression, and shifted the market from low-income passengers to cruise ships in the late nineteenth century. In addition to attempting to lure as many passengers as possible across the Atlantic (typically 2,500 each), many steamships served the express mail service. As with the railroad, far from simply reflecting the turnover of private capital, therefore, maritime time-space compression also was driven by imperatives of the state. Table 4.2 Maximum attainable steamship velocities (mph), 1798–1951 1798

1819

1843

1858

1897

1907

1914

1938

1951

3

8

11

13

22

27

28

31

34

Source: Vance 1990.

Figure 4.6 Transatlantic steamship routes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


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Between 1838 and 1912, the average speed of steamships rose by 350 percent, a feat made possible by engines that were 200 times more powerful, given the great increase in the size of the vessels and the exponential increases needed in fuel to attain higher velocities (Talbot 1912). German ships of the late nineteenth century, for example, which were designed to demonstrate that country’s technical proficiency, had 16 boilers fired by 112 furnaces, devouring a ton of coal every three minutes. Ships such as the Lusitania used 93,600,000 gallons of water every 24 hours. Intense competition among steamship lines, fueled not only by the lure of profit but by personal rivalries of their owners, led to steady increases in speed across the Atlantic. By 1881, the Inman Line brought out the City of Rome, which made the trip—which ranged between 2,700 and 2,813 miles, depending on the precise route—in six days, 21 hours. The Guion Line countered with the Alaska, the “Greyhound of the Atlantic,” which made the journey in 6¾ days; the Cunard’s Oregon further reduced it to six days, ten hours (Talbot 1912). By 1900, the Kaiser Wilhelm made the crossing in five days, seven hours. By the 1890s, the screw propeller replaced the paddle wheel and the period of crossing dropped to a mere five days. Heimann, in an oft-cited passage, argued in 1839: We have seen the power of steam suddenly dry up the great Atlantic ocean to less than half its breadth. . . . Our communication with India has received the same blessing. The Indian Ocean is not only infinitely smaller than it used to be, but the Indian mail, under the guidance of steam, has been granted almost a miraculous passage through the waters of the Red Sea. The Mediterranean, which is now only a week from us, has before our eyes shrunk into a lake; our British and Irish channels are scarcely broader than the old Firth of Forth; the Rhine, the Danube, the Thames, the Medway, the Ganges etc., have contracted their streams to infinitely less than half their lengths and breadths, and the great lakes of the world are rapidly drying into ponds! (Quoted in Talbot 1912:166) Table 4.3 Transatlantic steamship times, 1838–1900 Year

Ship

1838 1852 1873 1877 1881 1882 1892 1900

Sirius Russia City of Rome Britannia City of Rome Oregon Umbria Kaiser Wilhelm

Source: Talbot 1912.

crossing

Days, hours 17,0 8,12 7,18 7,10 6,21 6,10 5,22 5,7

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With incomes rising and travel times falling, the industry came to rely on tourism as its principal source of revenue. Steamships came to monopolize maritime travel and to be viewed in the popular imagination as majestic and stately rather than cramped and uncomfortable. Higher speeds, however, also involved greater risks of collision with debris, other ships, or icebergs. Some ships, such as the City of Glasgow, which left Liverpool in 1854 with 500 passengers, simply disappeared, swallowed up by the ocean. The calamitous sinking of the Titanic in 1912 likewise raised questions about the value or necessity of speed and the virtues of slow, safe travel. Steamships reduced shipping costs as well as times dramatically, producing a huge cost-space convergence: freight rates across the Atlantic dropped by 80 percent between 1815 and 1850, then by another 70 percent between 1870 and 1900 (Pomeranz and Topik 1999:49). These price declines were not evenly distributed, however; North American steamships were 25 to 50 percent more expensive to operate than their European counterparts. In the face of such cost reductions, trade was no longer dominated by luxuries, and the world economy bound supplier and client regions together through the trade of low-priced commodities such as grains and wood, allowing Europe once again to escape its domestic ecological constraints. As the cost of moving goods across the oceans declined, Europe, led by Britain, became steadily more dependent upon imported foods, lumber, and other commodities. Refrigerator ships and canning introduced in the 1870s opened up the world periphery to meat production, allowing mutton and veal to be shipped to Europe from Australia, New Zealand, and the Argentina pampas, giving rise to the culture of the gaucho. Outside of the Atlantic, steamships had similar effects. Steamer service from London to Calcutta began in 1825, a voyage of 113 days; the first British steamships sailed up the Ganges in 1834. European service to South America began in 1857, and to West Africa three years later. In the colonies, steamships allowed not only quicker and more reliable movement of goods and people, but the penetration of river systems. Indeed, steamers penetrating dangerous equatorial rivers became the embodiment of colonialism’s quest to domesticate the wild savage, an image made famous by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, much as locomotives and the “civilizing rails” tamed grasslands and prairies. Coal-fired steamships’ need for periodic refueling also propelled a series of ports into new nodes of significance, such as Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, and Singapore (Knowles 1986), a need that also formed part of Admiral Perry’s forced entry into Yokohama harbor in 1853. After the completion of the Suez Canal in 1859, steamship visits to Southeast Asia and China were regularized, and became instrumental parts of the governance of colonial empires. The cost-space compression that followed the opening of Suez had worldwide implications, greatly shortening the absolute as well as relative shipping distances between Europe and Asia (Figure 4.7). Within three months of opening, the Suez cut 47 percent off of the travel distance between London and Bombay, and 29 percent between


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Figure 4.7 Suez Canal’s impacts on absolute distances between Europe and Asia.

London and Singapore (Knowles 2006). The Suez Canal both greatly extended Britain’s reach into Asia and restored the Middle East to its historic role as a crossroads of the Old World. Marseilles, suddenly closer to the Orient than ever before, mushroomed into France’s largest port. With rising trade levels and lower transportation costs, Europe was able to pay for Asian imports with goods rather than New World silver, a factor that accelerated the late nineteenth-century switch to the gold standard. Steamships and the Suez Canal allowed Asia to flood European markets with cheap rice, which in turn brought down the price of wheat, contributing to the generalized global crisis of agrarian overproduction that bankrupted farmers by the score in the late nineteenth century. Likewise, the demand for Southeast Asian goods expanded to include tin, palm oil, copper, lumber, and, after 1903, rubber (Dixon 1991). As the Asia trade boomed in the wake of this cost-space convergence, huge numbers of Chinese coolies were imported by the French and British to work the rubber and cotton plantations and drain the Mekong and Irrawaddy deltas. Similarly, the Panama Canal, at first unsuccessfully attempted by the

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French in the 1880s under Ferdinand de Lesseps in order to provide a direct link to their Indochinese colonies, had dramatic consequences for shipping in the Americas and across the Pacific upon its opening to ships in 1914. As the largest engineering project in history, the Canal was both a material, economic project and simultaneously an ideological project that represented Yankee “know-how,” technological and racial superiority, and manifest destiny, thus symbolizing the emergence of the U.S. as the major power in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. would succeed where the French failed in the 1880s. The Suez and Panama Canals demonstrate that absolute and relative space cannot be easily separated from one another, for they are in most cases hopelessly entangled. Not surprisingly, the steamship ushered forth a variety of cultural and ideological discourses centered on how small the world was becoming. Before the railroad and the steamship, the unknown had always been synonymous with the far-away. Increasingly, however, distant places were discursively repositioned as not that far away after all. For example, in 1871, the Cunard Britannia reduced the travel time around the world to 75 days (Talbot 1912). Shortly thereafter, in 1873, Jules Verne celebrated the new wave of time-space compression in Around the World in Eighty Days, a feat that had moved from the impossibly ridiculous to the possible and then to the ordinary; in this novel Phileas Fogg circumnavigated the globe in 80 days (which would have required 11 months in 1848) by traveling eastward, thinking he has taken more than 80 days, only to discover that he had saved a day crossing the International Date Line, which allowed him to complete the journey in time. Indeed, for the growing legions of middle-class tourists, global travel had even begun to acquire a whiff of boredom for the sophisticate. An advertisement for a simulated ride to the moon at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, for example, complained “Where shall we go to get a new sensation? Not to the heart of the Dark Continent; Darkest Africa is at the Pan American. Not to the frozen North; we have met the little slant-eyed Eskimos behind their papier-mache glacier . . . Not to Japan; tea garden geisha girls, and trotting, jin-riksha men have rubbed the bloom off that experience” (quoted in Cosgrove 2001:229).

Telegraphy and the first telecommunications revolution The telegraph—the Internet of the nineteenth century (Standage 1998)— unleashed history’s greatest communications revolution since the invention of the printing press. The letter remained the most important form of non-face-to-face communication until the late nineteenth century; yet postal systems were inadequate to the pressing needs of increasingly global, industrial capitalism, in which the circuits of people, goods, and information moved with ever greater speed. In the 1860s, for example, it took a month for mail to reach London from India, and over two months to do so from Australia and New Zealand (Leyshon 1995).


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The communications technology central to the new spatial fix was the telegraph, which opened vast new possibilities in the on-going conquest of space. For the first time, communication without face-to-face contact was possible, and space and time no longer restricted the flow of information. Giddens (1987:176) maintains that “The separation of communication from transportation which the telegraph established is as significant as any prior invention in human history.” Indeed, the ability to maintain widespread and reliable contact among distant peoples is central to the essence of modernity as a set of societies in which people live within complex technological, economic, and political systems that unevenly extend their actions over time and space (Giddens 1990). As Thompson (1990:15) notes, “what constitutes modern societies as ‘modern’ is the fact that the exchange of symbolic forms is no longer restricted primarily to the contexts of face-to-face interaction.” The telegraph in this sense was the critical predecessor to all other telecommunications systems: “In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work” (Marvin 1988:3). The first telegraph, ironically, was not electric at all. In 1791 the French Chappe brothers demonstrated an optical semaphore telegraph system which utilized wooden arms corresponding to different letters placed in boxes on top of towers, initiating a network that soon came to envelop the whole of French national space. The Chappe brothers envisioned the optical telegraph as a vast extension of the Greek agora, facilitating easy communication among the far-flung departments of the new Republic. “The preelectric telegraph aided the French state, as it emerged from the Revolution of 1789, in its project of mastering space” (Standage 1998:4). The Paris–Lille line, which started in 1794, was used to report news from the war front within an hour’s time. Napoleon, a great believer in the technology, extended the system considerably, and by the 1830s it was “forming a sort of mechanical Internet of whirling arms and blinking shutters” (Standage 1998:16) that stretched throughout Western Europe. However, unable to operate in the dark or bad weather, this system soon reached its limits of usefulness. In another moment of creative destruction, the discovery that electricity could be transmitted great distances, including around corners, rendered communications systems based on line of sight irrelevant overnight. Britons Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke invented the first electric telegraph in 1837, but it was American Samuel Morse who first patented his system, also in 1837, and field tested it in 1844 using his renowned system of dots and dashes, making him into the technology’s celebrated godfather. On May 24, 1844, Morse sent his famous line “What hath god wrought?” from the Supreme Court chamber in Washington to Alfred Vail, then at the Whig national convention in Baltimore, 40 miles away. Despite its implications, skeptics remained, well, skeptical: As the Boston Post mused in 1865, “Wellinformed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and

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that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value” (quoted in Pinker 1997:82). Newly formed telegraph companies immediately coalesced around the new technology on both sides of the Atlantic. The network spread with fervor across the face of Europe, although France was reluctant to abandon its old optical system. By 1868 there were 22,000 miles of cable in Britain alone. In Europe, such systems were operated as a public utility, in contrast to the U.S. model, based on private capital and ownership. In the U.S., by 1850 20 companies operated 12,000 miles of telegraph wire, with 10,000 more miles under construction. The American Civil War was a powerful impetus to the growth of the telegraph, for during the four years of its duration (1861–1865) more than 15,100 miles of wire were erected. The telegraph melted the distances between soldiers on the front and readers back home, helping to convey the true horror of war and deromanticize it. In 1861, the transcontinental line connected the U.S. with California. Pony Express riders, who took ten days to cover the 1,800 miles between them, were instantly made obsolete. By the 1870s, duplex telegraphy allowed a single line to carry information in both directions simultaneously, a technique perfected by subsequent multiplexing. Rapid growth in the industry was accompanied by industrial restructuring and, inevitably, waves of mergers and acquisitions. Western Union rose to a near-monopoly position in this context, handling 80 percent of the nation’s telegraph traffic in 1880. The railroads adopted the new technology enthusiastically, to send news of construction, accidents, and changes in schedule. Railroads were particularly enthused because the telegraph allowed for information about train position to be relayed accurately, thus improving safety and omitting the need for double tracks. Thus, the temporal and geographical expansion of telegraph systems closely paralleled that of the railroads; indeed, the two systems were, spatially, almost indistinguishable. The relationship was symbiotic: telegraph companies needed railroad rights-of-way, and in turn telegraphy formed the nervous system of the railroads, allowing trains to pass on single-rail systems. By 1870, two-thirds of Western Union’s 12,000 offices were funded and managed by railroads, fusing the two technologies into one integrated system (Fields 1999). In these ways, telegraphy greatly facilitated the American conquest of its western domains in the late nineteenth century, expediting the rationalization of agribusiness and allowing Midwest farmers and East Coast markets to stay in close contact with one another. After 1861, New York and San Francisco were linked in a dense network of lines that offered steadily mounting efficiency and declining costs. Telegraphy became vital to stock markets, warehousing, shipping, and wholesaling. Pred’s (1973, 1977b) analysis of the American city-system pointed to the role of telegraphy in the differential growth of cities, which he theorized in terms of circular and cumulative feedback loops. Telegraphy allowed suppliers to reduce inventories as levels of uncertainty decreased, and they accelerated the penetration of Midwestern regions by East Coast capitalists, initiating a


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self-reinforcing, autocatalytic loop that sustained and enhanced the advantages of large urban centers on the East Coast. The fact that the U.S. played a central role in the emergence of modern telecommunications was hardly coincidental or the benign outcome of “Yankee ingenuity.” Beniger (1986) emphasizes that the development of long-distance means of communications in the U.S. such as the telegraph and telephone reflected a “crisis of control” within far-flung systems of production and consumption, in which the coordination and management of distribution systems and acquisition of upto-date information arose as pressing social predicaments far more than they did in Europe. The first line across the English Channel, laid in 1852, initiated a boom in underwater telegraphy. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed on August 18, 1868, connecting Ireland with Newfoundland (although it soon failed), leading the London Times to claim that “Since the discovery of Columbus, nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity” (quoted in Standage 1998:83). This process, incidentally, led to the first maps of the ocean floor. The new technology was expensive, at $10 per word in 1858, although prices quickly dropped, to $5 in 1872, to 50 cents in 1884, and 25 cents in 1888 (Hugill 1999), generating a cost-space compression that multiplied the number of users exponentially. Telegraphy was also deeply entwined with national political aspirations. Hugill (1999:36) notes that “Telegraphy’s ability to control space for economic and military purposes in the interests of the state made it as pure a form of geopolitics as any.” Britain, flush with investment capital from the Industrial Revolution and its exploitation of one-quarter of the world, came to play the lead role in international telegraphy by securing the construction of the world’s first global telecommunications infrastructure, including dominant ownership in the shares of most leading international telegraph providers and in cable-laying companies. Telegraph lines formed the nervous system of the British Empire, starting with the Indo-European Telegraph that linked London to India in 1865. The British government sponsored the “all red” telegraph system, so named because it made landfall only in red-colored places on maps that were part of the empire (Kennedy 1979). By 1874, the system was global in scope, with 650,000 miles of terrestrial wire, 30,000 miles of submarine wire, and “messages could be telegraphed from London to Bombay and back in as little as four minutes” (Standage 1998:102), forming history’s first true global communications network. In 1910, the British controlled 260,000 miles of international telegraph lines, or half of the world total, as well as the vital copper and gutta-percha markets necessary for their production. The British monopoly over submarine telegraphy played a major role in determining the outcome of World War I (Hugill 1999). Soon telegraphy became a normal part of everyday life for millions, at least for those living in the world’s core countries. By bridging space effortlessly, by

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bringing ever-larger audiences into reach, telecommunications changed the scale of the community in which people imagined themselves. Once-isolated farmers came to rely on distant markets for their revenues. Among and within firms, the telegraph was widely used to allow managers to communicate with one another, a vital process in the development of the multi-establishment corporation and the spatial differentiation of the office from the factory. In world cities, the telegraph was central to the transmission of vast quantities of data that coordinated the increasingly complex world economy. For example, the introduction of ticker-tape machines in 1867 played a central role in the national organization of financial markets and international flows of capital. The price of goods and speed with which they could be conveyed elsewhere became more important than their physical location. The telegraph dramatically restructured the news, disembedding it from its local context and accentuating the quest for “objective” reporting (Carey 1983). By 1851, Reuters was using the telegraph to transmit stock prices between Paris and London, and in 1866, between London and New York (Thrift and Leyshon 1994). The first use of the telegraph to report U.S. presidential election returns was in 1892. By the 1890s, baseball games were being transmitted by telegraph, and yachting races in New York were transmitted to the Chicago Times in 75 seconds. In 1902, photographs were transmitted by telegraph for the first time by German inventor Arthur Korn, allowing visual as well as textual information to be sent electronically and transforming the look of newspapers. In these and many other ways, electronic communications became deeply embedded in daily life, helping to produce subjects who, for the first time in human history, did not depend exclusively on face-to-face contact to receive information. In the burgeoning services sector, telegraphy was central to the new spatial division of labor taking place within and among information workers during a period of pronounced technological and organizational change. Typewriters greatly enhanced the capacity to put words rapidly on paper, creating an effect comparable in scope to that of moveable type itself and facilitating the introduction of female secretaries. For business executives, the pace of life accelerated dramatically, and information overload became a common complaint. In many cities, as banks, law firms, accountancy, and other such corporations flourished, urban telegraph networks were often overloaded by the tsunami of data and information flooding in from all quarters. One technique common in the 1860s to route messages among local offices was the use of pneumatic tubes, which appeared widely in the downtowns of London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Berlin, and Paris, and shortly thereafter in Vienna, Prague, Munich, Rome, Dublin, Naples, Milan, and Marseilles (Standage 1998). Some observers got carried away in the hyperbole surrounding the potential of telegraphy, predicting that it would lead to the end of prejudice and a new era of world peace; one newspaper exulted “it seems as if this seanymph, rising out of the waves, was born to be the herald of peace” (quoted


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in Standage 1998:104). Telegraphy led many observers to fantasize that expanding circles of experience could be obtained within increasingly narrow windows of time and space. Early analyses were typically utopian in nature, arguing the telegraph and telephone would end jealous nationalisms and usher in an era of universal peace free of xenophobia. Scientific American, for example, concluded in 1881 that the telegraph fostered the “kinship of humanity” (in Marvin 1988:199). Long before television, Edward Bellamy foresaw the possibilities that electrical communications held in his novel Equality (1897:347), when he argued “You stay at home and send your eyes and ears abroad for you. . . . It is possible in slippers and dressing gown for the dweller to take his choice of the public entertainments given that day in every city of the earth.” In 1865, problems in the coordination of international telegraph traffic had grown to the point where the principal national actors of the time formed the International Telegraph Union, which later evolved into the International Telecommunications Union. In 1872, the International Telegraph Conference, held in Rome, brought representatives of 22 countries together to regulate the emerging global telegraphic infrastructure. As with the railroads, this process helped to standardize time on a worldwide basis. Stanford Fleming, a Canadian engineer who promoted uniform time, argued that the telegraph “subjects the whole surface of the globe to the observation of civilized communities and leaves no interval of time between widely separated places proportionate to their distances apart” (quoted in Kern 1983:11). Telegraphy also initiated an historical geography of wireless telecommunications. Drawing upon Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism, Guglielmo Marconi developed a device in 1894 to receive and transmit radio waves. Marconi demonstrated that signals could be propagated across the Atlantic in 1901 using high-frequency, short-wave beam antennas, managing to bend the waves around the curvature of the earth, a “mountain” of sea water roughly 400 km high (Cardwell 1995). The technology was understandably highly popular in civilian and military shipping circles. In 1908, the New York Times pioneered the use of wireless telegraphy for news reporting, and within a decade it had become the staple of news services. When the Titanic met its famous end in 1912 and broadcast calls for help by means of its wireless, the entire world knew of the disaster the next morning; as the London Times put in on April 16, “The wounded monster’s distress sounded through the latitudes and longitudes of the Atlantic” (quoted in Kern 1983:67). Nonetheless, many lives were saved. Eventually, vacuum tube technology enhanced the power of wireless radio and allowed costs to decline to the point where it could compete effectively with submarine cables, a process that occurred during the gradual decline of British hegemony in the early twentieth century and no doubt contributed to it. Hugill (1999) notes that the British reluctance, particularly the Navy’s alarm that the new technology might undermine Britain’s monopoly over

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submarine cables, allowed Marconi’s company to achieve near-total dominance over wireless radio in its early years, and encouraged leadership in the industry to pass to the U.S. By 1910, Federal Telegraph offered wireless telephony between Stockton and Sacramento, California, and soon thereafter the U.S. Navy became the firm’s largest customer. The Navy, seeking to exploit wireless technology and circumvent the British monopoly, also facilitated the rise in 1920 of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which was created from General Electric’s takeover of the American branch of Marconi’s firm. Between 1893 and World War I, many nation-states began to create national radio broadcasting systems carrying news and entertainment, welding national audiences together through the shared experience of listening to programs. Radio became a medium of entertainment in its own right, the first electronic medium to create shared experiences of news and entertainment among mass audiences. Immediately, corporate capital moved to exploit the new market; thus RCA, formed initially to provide transatlantic telegraphy, plunged into the lucrative industry. Programs hosted by soap companies, later known as “soap operas,” generated an early form of virtual community much as television would do after WWII. By the 1930s, almost every home in the industrialized world possessed a radio. In 1954, the first transistor radios made the device even more cheap and portable, facilitating the diffusion of news and entertainment to millions, then billions, of people. As with telephony, the state played a significant role in the formation and governance of wireless radio networks. As wireless technologies became widespread, the first International Conference on Wireless Telegraphy was held in Berlin in 1903 to regulate the medium. By World War I, wireless telegraphy had become an integral part of every political party’s military apparatus. After the war, broadcast radio adopted the medium and commercialized a large part of the available electromagnetic spectrum. In the 1920s, Vatican Radio became the first international broadcasting network. In short, like the telegraph and telephone, the development of wireless technology, and its associated time-space impacts, is inseparable from the political dynamics of the world-system. What began as a tool used primarily by railroads diffused to become a popular household good. Moreover, wireless telegraphy laid the groundwork for radar in the 1930s and 1940s. Thus, the implications of the nineteenth-century round of time-space compression reverberated well into the twentieth, forming complex palimpsests in which multiple historical realities became sedimented into one another.

City life in the transition to late modernity Explosive urbanization was a key feature of rapidly industrializing societies, and represented a wave of time-space compression that catapulted hundreds of millions of people from the quiet, staid backwaters of country life into the hustle and bustle of crowded metropolises. Driven by the throbbing engines of the Industrial Revolution, most societies in Western Europe, North America,


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and Japan were transformed from predominantly rural to primarily urban cultures. Within the industrializing metropolis, as with cities since the Neolithic, time and space were dramatically folded and refolded in twisting networks of power, wealth, and knowledge. For example, the enormous amounts of capital sunk into the built environments of industrial cities generated complex patterns of Ricardian rents based on the differential locations of various properties, creating a relative scarcity of accessibility where none existed before (Harvey 1985a). Several forces reflecting the political economy of industrial capitalism made large, dense, and diverse cities simultaneously possible and necessary. The industrialization of urban space proved highly problematic for the new, accelerated form of capitalism, for which the old spatial fix of medieval streets was insufficient to meet the challenge of larger and more rapid volumes of flows of people and goods; the new, industrialized production system necessitated a reworking of the urban spaces of circulation. The spatial structure of cities has long been governed by transportation systems, which shape the opportunities, speed, and efficiency of travel. Early modern cities were limited in population size by their extent of their agricultural hinterlands: a team of horses, for example, would eat a sufficiently large portion of the grain they hauled to make trips more than 20 miles unprofitable (Pomeranz and Topik 1999). In the context of the newly formed nationstates, however, capital cities, with a monopoly over government services, could afford to pay higher prices, and thus began to surge ahead of those lower in their respective national urban hierarchies. Modern street systems were standardized, paved, unified into a coherent network, and publicly managed to maximize the efficiency of traffic for households and firms, creating accessibility surfaces of historically unprecedented smoothness. In the early nineteenth century, John Loudon McAdam introduced the new method of road-building using cut stones and the cement named after him, macadam (now asphalt), lowering the cost of road building and ensuring the availability of smooth surfaces for transport. In most Western cities, these roads assumed a rectilinear grid and came to symbolize the orderly metropolis. In the face of an increasingly extended and specialized spatial division of labor and facing increasing predicaments as to how shuttle workers to and from their jobs, many large cities in Europe and North America during the 1840s and 1850s adopted networks of horse-drawn omnibuses, including both wagons and railroad cars, which enabled a widening separation between work and home. Horse-drawn vehicles were instrumental in allowing the burgeoning middle class to commute from the early suburbs of the late nineteenth century; walking to work, once the norm, became a rarity. As Walker (1981) notes, the fundamental spatial schism of the capitalist city, between home and work (i.e., spaces of production and reproduction, respectively), reflects not simply the impacts of transportation systems but the division of labor as it differentially enfolded local communities and neighborhoods within a wider penumbra of class relations. The first omnibus

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began in Paris in 1662; the system fell into disuse following the Revolution, then reappeared in 1812 in Bordeaux and in 1827 in Paris. By the late nineteenth century, extensive urban electrification led to the electric tram, first operated for the Berlin Exhibition in 1879, and the first streetcar, in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. Streetcars offered lower levels of friction between the wheel and rail, allowing heavier loads to be pulled with less power. Within a decade of their introduction, the average radius of American cities rose from 2.5 to six miles (Schaeffer and Sclar 1975). Other mass transit systems included the London Underground, starting in 1890, the famed subways of New York that began in 1904, and the elevated train system in Chicago. Such systems led to greater accessibility across the urban landscape for labor, capital, and consumers alike and greatly expanded the size of commuting sheds. Without them, corporate employers would never have been able to move large numbers of workers to the dense urban cores dominated by complexes of skyscrapers. Within the variegated spaces of social reproduction that emerged in the wake of such networks arose dense working-class communities, typically deeply segregated by race and ethnicity. The expansion of urban space in the wake of this process of reworking is illustrated in Figure 4.8, which reveals how various parts of Berlin were made ever more accessible to the urban core by the growth of the urban transport network. The formation of the modern city in the late nineteenth century was also predicated upon the development of ubiquitous street, water, sewer, postal, gas, railway, telegraph, telephone, and electrical systems that are generally invisible until they fail. These infrastructures reflected the pervasive Enlightenment tendency to rationalize space and time, and formed fundamental prerequisites for the emergence of mass production and consumption. Graham and Marvin (2001:40) argue that “Standardised, compartmentalized notions of space and time, were, in a sense, constructed through the rolling out of networks across wider and wider spaces.” Modernity itself came to be defined by the unfolding of the industrial infrastructure, a process that played out in countless different local contexts. The formation of urban infrastructures as spaces of mobility for some and not others generally entailed the exclusion of substantial populations of the poor and politically dispossessed. The topologies that welded together the modern city were thus deeply biased socially as well as spatially, a theme evident from Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris to Robert Moses’s innumerable projects in the New York region to the formation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System (Tarr and Dupuy 1988). Haussmann’s famous renovation of Paris is perhaps the best-known example of state-led restructuring during the epoch of industrial time-space compression. Jay (1993) maintains that during the nineteenth century, in cities such as Paris, “City of Lights,” an ocularcentrism arose that paralleled the hegemony of industrial capitalism and commodity fetishism. The wide boulevards, based on the linearity of railroads, sliced through the heart of the medieval districts, implemented in an authoritarian, militaristic style, soon

(a)

Figure 4.8 Isochrones of travel times from Central Berlin throughout Brandenburg in 1819, 1851, 1875 and 1899. (a) 1819. (Continued overleaf )

(b)

Figure 4.8b 1851.

(c)

Figure 4.8c 1875.

(Continued overleaf )

(d )

Figure 4.8d 1899.


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became the model of urban renovation throughout the Western world. Caught in the collision of two time-space structures, medieval and modern, Paris’s inhabitants negotiated the transformation in a variety of ways contingent on their class and gender. Berman (1982), drawing on Baudelaire, captures the sense during this period in which the old medieval quarters were being obliterated and the new Paris—the city of lovers, of boulevards on which to promenade, of streetlights and department stores and electric lighting— was coming into being. The street, for example, became a scene of theatre as the social disruptions brought on by this wave of time-space compression manifested themselves. Thus, as two lovers in a café “sit gazing happily into each other’s eyes, suddenly they are confronted by other people’s eyes. A poor family dressed in rags—a graybearded father, a young son, and a baby— come to a stop directly in front of them and gaze raptly at the bright new world that is just inside” (p. 149). Both the joys and pains of modernism and modernization are evident here in highly poignant human terms. In unifying Parisian space through a comprehensive system of planning, Haussmann transformed the city into the prototype of modernist urban planning duplicated in dozens of other locales, including Vienna, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. Similarly, Harvey (1985a) and Pred (1990b) portray “two nineteenth-century European cities (Paris and Stockholm) torn apart by the convulsions of modernity” (Gregory 1994:217) as their restless geographies and the everyday lives of their inhabitants were subsumed by the disciplinary logics of commodity production and consumption. From the structural Marxist perspective, all of these changes are reflective of a broader imperative to speed up the production and flow of goods and people, to monetize and commodify time and space, to escape one spatial fix in exchange for another, often at horrendous human costs. The crisis of modernity during the collapse of the Victorian social order, with all of its numerous ambiguities and contradictions, was also exemplified by fin-de-siècle Vienna during the waning days of the Habsburg Empire (Schorske 1961; Janik and Toulmin 1973). In Vienna, the rising bourgeoisie confronted the very last of feudal social relations, and the resulting collision set off massive cultural sparks. Vienna, like Paris, had undergone a massive reconstruction giving birth to the modern city, as exemplified in the celebrated Ringstrasse as well as the city’s new boulevards and apartment buildings. With the empire breaking up around the city, the broadly based social and political crisis gave rise to an exceptionally fecund intellectual environment comparable to fifth-century-bc Athens or Paris in the 1960s, in which arose, to name a few, both Zionism (i.e., Theodor Herzl) and proto-fascism (i.e., Karl Lueger and Georg von Schönerer, who inspired Hitler); Freudian psychology; the Secession movement art of Gustav Klimt, which “confronted the culture of scientific progress with an alien and shocking vision” (Schorske 1961:240); the disconcerting music of Arnold Schoenberg; the positivism of the Vienna Circle; and, understandably, given the numerous tongues spoken throughout the Austro-Hungarian realm, Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy. Indeed,

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in a multicultural empire under severe stress, “language was the basis of social as well as political identity in the bitter struggles for civil rights which marked the final years of Habsburg rule before the cataclysm of 1914” (Janik and Toulmin 1973:65). Urbanization carried deep cultural and psychological implications that extended well beyond the realm of the material. City life, as Raymond Williams (1975). insists, initiated the separation between working the land and knowing it intimately from the bourgeois view from afar. Walter Benjamin’s observations of cities centered on how memory, history, and the built environment became intertwined, in which the urban centers of the money economy gave rise to new frames of mind. Urban writing, in this view, could shatter the conventional linear narrative, with its assumption of linear progress, in favor of a “spatialized time” that subverted meanings by juxtaposing them in novel ways (Savage 2000). Benjamin saw the world of the Paris arcades—of glitzy store windows, mirrors, boulevards, museums, art galleries, monuments, and showcases—seducing the modern consumer, fetishizing commodities, and seducing the masses into a narcoleptic dream state. Far more than asserting the centrality of symbolic values (rather than use or exchange values), these panoramas provided “sweeping views that unrolled before the spectators, giving them the illusion of moving through the world at an accelerated rate” (Buck-Morss 1993:311). Mass urbanization represented a qualitative intensification in the frequency and intensity of human interaction, an explosion of varied subcultures, the chance to rub shoulders with strangers, try new experiences, meet new people, see new sights, and be subject to an infinite variety of stimuli. The pace and density of urban life, in contrast to traditional rural time, exhibited a frenzied tempo of constant change, full of unplanned encounters; in short, it embodied the very essence of modernity. In Gellner’s (1983) view, urbanization transformed the orderly, stratified pre-industrial world into one in which disorder and randomness were pervasive, giving rise to mass anomie for the first time in history, a theme commonly found in the works of nineteenth-century sociologists and later urban social ecologists. Of course, cities were not simple sites of singular temporalities, but of multiple, complex, often contradictory temporalities that varied greatly among the various social groups that came to co-inhabit urban spaces (Crang and Travlou 2000). New urban environments inevitably involved a redefinition of interpersonal relations, a renegotiation of individual identity as people adapted to the new spaces where neighbors were located right next door. A long, vast literature in urban sociology points to the psychological and emotional impacts of cities. Georg Simmel (1950) noted that cities, commodity markets, exchange relations, and standardized time reworked the sense of self, of people’s obligations to one another, and led urban dwellers to have many more stimuli to deal with than did those in rural areas. Urbanization inevitably was accompanied by a feeling of accelerated life, of “time pressure” and “fast-moving time.” Few cultures adapted to the hectic pace of urbanization more readily than did the


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U.S. Michel Chevalier, a French observer akin to Tocqueville, observed of the American that “He always has something to do, he is always in a terrible hurry. He is fit for all sorts of work except those which require a careful slowness” (quoted in Schivelbusch 1977:112). Similarly, the 1920s Chicago School of sociology, geography, and urban analysis, ensconced within that prototypical example of modern American urbanism, theorized the time-space compression of urbanization in elegant and insightful terms that reflected the poignant realities of everyday life for millions of immigrants, both those from abroad and rural residents thrown into the maelstrom of urbanity. Theorists such as Robert Park drew on the urban sociology of Frederick Toennies and notions such as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to examine the phenomenology of urbanization in light of the massive rural-to-urban migration then characteristic of most U.S. and European cities (Park et al. 1925/1984). In this reading, urbanization represented the annihilation of mythologized rural communities in which everyone knew everyone else. In contrast to small towns in which everyone ostensibly was intimately connected to everyone else, and presented the same sense of self under all contexts, urbanization was held to decompose these traditional bonds and erode the foundations of mutual trust. Cities, it was held, were not conducive to the formation of a sense of community. Louis Wirth (1938), in particular, advocated a desolate but compelling view of city life as structured around three major axes, size, density, and heterogeneity. Size or total population, he held, created a climate that was inherently predatory, utilitarian, uncaring, and commodified: strangers were rare in small towns, but the norm in large cities. Density, he argued, led people to be close physically but not emotionally; indeed, alienation was the norm. Finally, social and cultural heterogeneity, manifested in the diverse lifestyles found in large cities, generated few of the common values necessary to the success of healthy communities. The result was allegedly the widespread presence of crime and other social pathologies ranging from suicide to psychoses, a conclusion that mirrored similar Freudian concerns about the stability of the bourgeois subject in an era of convulsive change. In cities, consumption too became an expression of late modern time-space compression. Department stores, for example, played a role in fostering the new bourgeois panoramic vision: having moved to new high-rise buildings, they were models of technological modernity, with elevators, escalators, electric lighting, and central heating. These new, highly commodified environments stripped goods of their once-sensuous qualities and engendering a new way of relating to objects (Benjamin 1969). Department stores thus celebrated the bourgeois spectacle of the commodity much as the railroad opened up new vistas on the countryside (Schivelbusch 1977). The rise of mass advertising made the far-away appear familiar and the familiar appear exotic, commodifying the cultural distances between “here” and “there.” The growth of the credit system in the early twentieth century is another example of timespace compression, for it accelerated the ability of the middle and working

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class to consume products, or in the lingo of Keynesian economics, it enhanced aggregate demand. Credit systems essentially “colonize” future time as a stream of obligations (Giddens 1984), thus acting to conjoin present and future. Additionally, cities both expressed and contributed to late modern timespace compression by playing host to critical international festivals and conferences. World’s fairs had long played a central role in the demonstration of technological and cultural superiority, including the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held at the Crystal Palace in London, the 1867 Paris Exposition, that in Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), which unveiled the telephone, and Chicago in 1893, which opened with the first telephone link between that city and New York. Similarly, the revival of the Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896, drew attention to cooperation and competition as motifs found throughout the planet. The vitality of cities, therefore, their continued ability to generate innovations, inspire and entertain, and to attract creative people, has long been a consistent theme in the literature on urbanization (e.g., Jacobs 1961; Florida 2002).

Modern science and the explosion of time-space Much as the Copernican revolution fueled a theological crisis in the sixteenth century, so too did the Darwinian revolution transform the Western sense of geological and scientific time in the nineteenth. The Church had, of course, long grappled with the challenge posed by secular time, and responded with a flurry of attempts to date Creation: Eusebius figured it to be 5198 bc; Bede estimated it to be 3952 bc; and by the sixteenth century, no less than 50 dates competed for the honor. James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, famously calculated that it began precisely on Sunday, October 26, 4004 bc at 9:00 a.m. In the nineteenth-century battle to secularize time, it was geology and biology rather than astronomy that played the key roles (Rudwick 2005). Escaping the conservative straitjacket of religious dogma was no easy task: one set of time-space understandings does not replace another unproblematically. The upshot in many ways expanded intellectual notions of time and space even as they were being compacted economically and socially. As Dodgshon (1998:117) notes, “Modernization may have produced a time-space compression in terms of the movement of people, goods and ideas, but it has also produced an equally significant time-space expansion in that, culturally, we are now more aware of time and space, as dimensions that have extension.” Modernity greatly expanded the understanding of the history of the planet, a process that repositions the here and now as only one moment in a long series of moments and places within a much broader universe. Geology emerged as the site of an intense confrontation in the nineteenthcentury culture wars. Steadily the field’s appreciation of the depth of geologic time lengthened: in the 1770s, the Comte de Buffon determined the earth was


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168,000 years old; Montesquieu, Diderot, and Kant suggested that it may be hundreds of millions of years old. In 1788, James Hutton rejected biblical notions of catastrophism, concluding that even more enormous stretches of time were necessary for erosional and depositional processes to sculpt the planet. Darwin himself guessed the age at 300 million years. Eventually, geology and evolutionary theory stretched the concept of terrestrial time from a biblical few thousands of years to a stratigraphic measure of millions, and ultimately to a cosmological frame of billions. The rise of stratigraphical paleontology confirmed this view and extended it into the domain of biology. Not surprisingly, Darwin began as a geologist. In publishing The Origin of Species in 1869, Darwin set off a firestorm of opposition from religious conservatives. The first empirical evidence for Darwinism’s application of evolutionary theory to human beings came a generation later: the first Homo erectus fossil was unearthed in 1895, and the first Australopithecus surfaced in South Africa in 1925. The theory of natural selection not only brought into question the ostensible differences between humans and animals, but eroded the foundations of Christian time as endless and god-given. Many debates about age of the earth centered on Lord Kelvin’s calculations of the planet’s thermal conductivity: in 1862, Kelvin calculated the rate at which the earth cooled and argued for an age between 20 million and 100 million years, although he was later forced to revise this figure upon the discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s. Subsequent geological and biological interpretations were complemented by the nascent field of thermodynamics, which wove together electricity and magnetism. In the 1850s, German physicist Rudolf Clausius formulated the second law of thermodynamics, theorizing a natural tendency toward entropy maximization that powerfully informed other sciences. Entropy was cast into probabilistic terms by Ludwig Boltzmann, who argued that since the initial amount of disorder in the universe was relatively small, it was statistically bound to grow over time. Besides being instrumental in the discovery of radioactivity, thermodynamics had important implications for the scientific understanding of time; in introducing the “arrow of time,” it annihilated classical notions of temporal reversibility. “Western science in the nineteenth century proposed interpretations of the past of the planet in terms of development in a single direction from a finite starting-point or towards a final end . . . [and] suggested that the universe was heading for entropic immolation and that its entire history could be described as a single process of energy loss” (Fernandez-Arnesto 1999:248). There was, therefore, no intrinsic direction of time, except in the direction of mounting entropy. As Petersson (2005:215) observes, “The thermodynamic revolution proves that the universe is historical, with a temporal beginning and a future end towards which we are inevitably heading. This is quite the opposite of the fixed, static universe described by Newton’s reversible equations.” In the same vein, the discovery of X rays in 1895 had important cultural as well as medical effects. X rays “seemed to render inside and outside ambiguous, the opaque became transparent” (Miller 2002:3).

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This technique implied that there was more to the world than met the senses, an idea shocking to the dominant empiricism and positivism of the time. Electrification in various forms lay at the core of the late nineteenthcentury reconstitution of space-time. For example, Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric light bulb in 1879 provided a cheap and reliable form of illumination with revolutionary implications (O’Dea 1958). Electric lighting, like other industrial technologies, further emancipated people from the rhythms of nature, turning night into day and accentuating the rationalization of time. The electric light formed a central part of the culture of the optical spectacle, dazzling audiences with its power to banish darkness and project images. Among other things, it opened up urban space at night to more intensive usage. In 1890, for example, the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced in his address to the organization that “With this spark, thanks to science, the whole world is now aflame. Time and space are practically annihilated: night is turned into day; social life is almost revolutionized, and scores of things which only a few years ago would have been pronounced impossible are being accomplished daily” (quoted in Marvin 1988:206). Wabash, Indiana, boasted of being the first U.S. city to adopt the electric light for general illumination in 1880. By 1885, 21 American towns were supplying electricity, and its domestic consumption was a sign of status for the well-to-do. Public spaces became illuminated with searchlights, lighted fountains, theater lights, and illuminated statues. Vessels sailing the coast could determine the locations of towns with ease, sometimes using the reflections of their lights from overhanging clouds. The Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 inspired more than 27 million visitors with the wonders of electricity. As the new technology became accepted as mundane and unremarkable, large outdoor gatherings became increasingly transformed into smaller, private ones. The new medium also had important economic effects. Electrical transmission of power was far superior than mechanical transmission, which had been greatly constrained by friction to small, concentrated locations (e.g., windmills). One result was the gradual dispersal of manufacturing into single-story buildings in the urban periphery, a process that began by the 1880s and accelerated markedly over the next century. The scientific revolution in the understanding of time and space also included the social sciences, particularly the new disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of archaeological discoveries in the Middle East, initiated after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, extended the European concept of history backwards in time. In this context, the word “classical” came to signify the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, and was open to scientific analysis, e.g., with Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in Mycenae and Troy. The historical record was repeatedly modified and remodified with the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822–1824 shortly after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, and the languages Akkadian (1849–1857), Sumerian (1905–1923),


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Ugaritic (1930–1931), and Hittite (1915–1942) (Smith 1991). Israel and Greece were, not seemed, the original founders of civilization after all, and Europe owed a great debt to the very peoples it was conquering. With these developments, it became increasingly clear that the human experience stretched for thousands or even tens of thousands of years into the past. The time horizons of history were, accordingly, lengthened to include prehistory, as formulated in Danish archaeologist Christian Thomsen’s (1788–1865) invention of the famous Three Age System, i.e., Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages, which periodized the past based on the dominant tools and technologies of each time and implied that the sequence of stages in Europe could be universalized everywhere. In 1865, John Lubbock coined the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic to capture the transition from hunting-and-gathering to agriculturally based societies. As Fabian (1983) persuasively argued, anthropology (at least in its dominant historical form) utilized time as a way to deny the coexistence of “primitive” peoples with “advanced” societies in the present, distancing such peoples from Europeans by treating non-capitalist societies as a form of timemachine, thereby reducing spatial differences to stages in a temporal queue of progress (see Massey 2005). As the technological triumphs of the steamship and railroad relegated space to the background, the social sciences came to emphasize historicist approaches in which time was synonymous with growth, progress, change, and novelty. Intellectual thought thus viewed late modern time-space compression through the lens of historicism, a despatialized consciousness in which geography figured weakly or not at all (Soja 1993). A central part of this process involved the birth of modern history as an account framed in linear, not cyclical, time. Hence, according to Bauman (2000:110), “The history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps even more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history.” Typically, historicist thought linearized time and marginalized space by positing the existence of temporal “stages” of development, anticipating modernization theory by more than a century. Historicism tended to portray the past as the progressive ascent from savagery to civilization, a trend made most explicit in Whiggish accounts of history. This maneuver robbed the understanding of social change of any sense of contingency, framing the past as a train of events leading inevitably to the present. Thus, for Condorcet, there were ten distinct periods ranging from savagery to rule by science; the Three Stages model in archaeology offered another such example. Reading progress into the past led historians such as Herbert Spencer to portray history as an inexorable linear movement from simplicity to complexity, from primitiveness to civilization, from darkness to light. In the same vein, historicists such as Hegel, Marx, and Toynbee offered sweeping teleological accounts that paid little attention to space, human consciousness, or the contingency of social life. In offering a universal world history, for example, Hegel transformed the ancient observation of perpetual

130 Late modern time-space compression change into a doctrine of the development of rational consciousness (Sherover 1975). Time in this view is not simply the measure of change, but synonymous with change, a view that became widely popular in nineteenth-century historical scholarship. Hegel’s work turned attention from eternal Platonic ideals to the concrete specifics of historical circumstances, even if the causal motor he attributed to this, the transcendent World Spirit of Reason, was itself profoundly Platonic in inspiration. Hegel specified three phases to history: despotisms, in which very few were free (when the world geist was centered on the Middle East), oligarchies, in which some were free (when the geist centered on Asia), and democracies, in which most were free (when the geist had shifted to Europe). His work valorized the nation-state as the embodiment of the world spirit, culminating in the apex of Prussia. Marx, too, engaged in this practice by categorizing the historical record in a series of modes of production (Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism) that unfolded in strict, unyielding course of history. Like other Enlightenment intellectuals, Marx too stressed the progressive character of history. Social theory of the nineteenth century also drew heavily upon Darwinian evolution for inspiration and legitimation, biologizing social relations and thus denying their contingency. The original theory of evolution as contingent and open-ended was usurped as legitimating the notion of “progress” in the history of life, a simplistic, linear view of phyletic gradualism that was challenged in the twentieth century. Spencer’s corruption of Darwinian selection—“survival of the fittest”—drew heavily upon modernist notions of progress and dressed historicism in a veil of pseudo-science. In nineteenthcentury social theory, no distinction was made between “evolution” and “progress” (Nisbet 1980). This line of thought persisted until the structuralism of the early twentieth century jettisoned the synchronic in pursuit of universally ascribed atemporal structures (Baert 2000). Likewise, Enlightenment geographic thought, Orientalist to the core, imagined a new, ostensibly universal geography with Europe recentered in the middle, a project central to the works of Kant, Toynbee, and others. This task was accomplished by the deployment of linear stages representing universal historical time, in which Europe, naturally, represented the most advanced stage and distance from Europe testified to the nature of earlier, more primitive stages. Nineteenth-century textbook portrayals of the globe framed the Western geographical imagination around a series of continents, typically conflated with simplistic notions of race, that were hierarchically organized in terms of their degree or alleged degree of temporal progress and, thus, similarity to European and North American whites, a schema that gained respectability through appeal to various forms of social Darwinism and environmental determinism. In this way did historicism eclipse space in the service of imperial thought. Beyond Europe was before Europe (McGrane 1983:94), a theme articulated over and over again in modernization theory and its current neoliberal variants. All of these intellectual and cultural changes were wrapped up in the


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constant pace of innovation under capitalism—its most distinctive feature— which led to a continual process of creative destruction in the late nineteenth century with momentous repercussions for the structures of space and time. Numerous intellectual trends, technologies, and political processes combined to usher in an exceptionally fecund and fertile era. Hence, Kern (1983) opens his celebrated account of late modern time-space compression with the following passage: From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream-ofconsciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly.

Bicycling through late nineteenth-century time-space Any account of the cultural experience of space and time in the late nineteenth century must necessarily include the bicycle, a device generally underappreciated by observers of historical and spatial change. The bicycle was the first form of private transportation available to urban dwellers of modest means. In Hugill’s (1993:189) words, “Bicycle technology introduced humanity to the advantages of individual mobility at a speed level much higher than the unaided organism could achieve.” The origins of the bicycle extend to 1784, when Edmund Cartwright, who invented the first power loom, devised a pedal-operated quadricycle (Vance 1990). The draisine or velocipede was introduced in Germany by Karl von Drais in 1817, and diffused thereafter to France and Britain. Subsequent changes in the 1860s by French engineers reduced the wheels of the velocipede to two, initiating a rage for mobility that swept through Paris (Calif 1983). In England in the 1870s, a new style of bicycle, with very high front wheels (up to five feet) and very low back ones made the machine the exclusive preserve of athletic young men. Gradually, however, new developments such as ball bearings, lighter frames, and pneumatic tires made the machine easier and more efficient. The present form, the “safety bicycle” with equal sized wheels, generated improvements in stability and speed of movement, became standard in the 1880s, and allowed bicycling to be extended to women and children and greatly enhanced the device’s popularity. It could reach a speed up to 12 miles per hour, and became a primary form of amusement for the youth of Europe. The New York Times noted it could achieve “great economy of time as well as money” and foster “immense development of muscle and lung” as well as “independence of character” (quoted in Herlihy 2005). The bicycling craze of the late nineteenth century in Europe and the

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U.S. witnessed the birth of numerous bicycle clubs and races, and the device became integral to courtship as couples sought to out-pedal chaperones. Women could venture farther from home, and, shockingly, unchaperoned, and children were freed from their spatial constraints close to home. Urbanites began to infest rural areas on weekend outings. Equally novel was the way in which the cycling craze brought people from different social classes into contact with one another. For many who could not afford a horse carriage, the bicycle was the “great leveler,” diminishing the value of physical distance as a means of preserving social hierarchies. Like so many innovations of the period, the new machine brought forth new perceptions of time and space. Many early riders on railroads likened the experience to the ultimate in speed, the flight of birds, and spoke of landscapes “flying by.” Kern (1983:111) evokes this notion with a description of a group of Parisian friends: “On the road the couples feel a new rhythm of movement, a unique sense of penetrating the surrounding world as their senses open to new parts of the terrain. They experience a new sense of time, as if they were moving through a dream rather than the French countryside.” The bicycle soon became much more than a toy, however, and gave birth to numerous impacts on the urban fabric and the world economy. Legions of riders in the working class used it as a cheap transportation to work; four times faster than walking, it widened commuting fields by substantial margins and gave large numbers of people an unprecedented degree of mobility. Indeed, the bicycle is still widely used throughout much of the developing world. Bicyclemounted police officers became widespread in large cities. The late nineteenthcentury bicycle craze also ushered in, among other things, a surge in the world demand for rubber, which Brazil rode to become the world’s leading producer, for a while. Growing legions of bicycle users in Europe and North America led to demands that roads and signs be improved (Vance 1990). In many respects, the bicycle paved the way, socially and psychologically, for the automobile.

The telephone defeats distance Alexander Bell’s discovery in 1876 that sound vibrations striking a diaphragm generated a variable resistance that could be transmitted electrically led to another of history’s most transformative technologies, greatly expanding the possibilities of contact but enabling people to live at ever-wider distances from one another. In effect, the telephone made all places equidistant from one another, or at least almost so. Like the telegraph, the early historical geography of the telephone was almost exclusively American (Brooks 1975; de Sola Pool 1977; Fischer 1992). The bandwidth of telegraph lines was too low to allow voice traffic, necessitating the construction of a new infrastructure. Western Union relinquished its telephone interests in 1879 under the threat of a patent-infringement lawsuit by Bell, who then bought Western Union’s equipment manufacturer, Western Electric, and pioneered the way for a vertically integrated giant.


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Telephones allowed not only point-to-point contact but also served as a medium to mass audiences at public gatherings, theaters, and political rallies. With party lines, phones rang along the entire network between caller and receiver, and any intermediary could listen in. Switching and transmission technologies freed users from this limitation. Automated switching, first installed in La Porte, Indiana in 1892, made the telephone significantly more user-friendly. Vacuum tube amplifiers, developed as part of the effort during World War I, generated higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths, which allowed for much longer telephone lines; by 1915, these connected New York with San Francisco and united the continental United States into one integrated telephonic space (Abler 1977). Hugill (1999) argues that the telephone played three roles in the rise of U.S. hegemony, including linking the urban system together, fostering commercial networks, and expanding access to international markets. As with the globe and stop-watch, the telephone was originally the sole preserve of the rich, only to become steadily democratized over time. Aside from a few wealthy households, businesses and corporations formed the first major market. The instrument facilitated the centralized control of headquarters in multi-establishment firms, themselves a product of the massive time-space compression that generated a national economy, the detachment of white-collar office work from blue-collar factory floors, and the coordination of production and delivery schedules, greatly reducing the levels of uncertainty. Banks developed coast-to-coast networks, and retailers utilized it to place and accept orders and reservations. As prices fell, the popularity of telephones rose exponentially: the number of telephones in the U.S. exploded from 2,593 in 1870 to 1,109,073 in 1900 to 12,601,935 in 1920. The rise of American telephony in large part is the story of AT&T, which arose in 1899 to become one of history’s only true monopolies. In 1909, AT&T acquired a dominant share of Western Union, and although it was forced to sell this in 1913, by 1925 it enjoyed a “natural monopoly” by virtue of its extensive and expensive infrastructure. As always when profit governs the allocation of resources, core regions acquired the new technology and put it to effective use long before the periphery. Although most households had acquired a telephone by 1930, providers were generally reluctant to offer service to low-density, high-cost, and thus low-profit, rural areas. Indeed, parts of the South did not acquire telephony until the 1970s. The time-space compression of telephony thus mirrored the uneven development of the American space-economy in general, even as it ultimately played a major role in transforming it. In Europe, a series of incompatible nationalized systems effectively thwarted international integration until the 1970s (Hugill 1999). In Britain, for example, the Post Office achieved an early monopoly over the technology. The first international telephone calls were exchanged between Paris and Brussels in 1887. The first telephone cable to cross the English Channel, linking Paris and London, was laid in 1891. Affordable and dependable long-distance

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telephony became viable only with the invention of devices to amplify the flow of electrons in the early twentieth century and the rise of wireless telegraph services in the 1920s. By the 1930s, the capacity of international wireless circuits rivaled that of submarine cables. The cost, however, was frightful: in 1927, a three-minute call between the U.S. and Britain cost $75 (Hugill 1999:137), a cost-distance so prohibitively exorbitant that only a fraction of large corporations could use it. Submarine telephony cables crossed the Atlantic only in 1956, when the TAT-1 line linked New York and Britain in a pattern identical to that of the first trans-oceanic telegraph cables a century earlier. The capacity of transatlantic lines exploded in exponential fashion from 36 circuits in 1956 to 11,173 in 1983; however, because these were copper-cable systems, all of them were dwarfed by the massive capacity of transoceanic fiber optics lines that began in 1988. Trans-Pacific telephony was later to take off, starting with a line connecting Vancouver, Canada, and Hawaii in 1962. International telephony was greatly facilitated by direct international dialing, begun by the Bell System using operators in 1963 and allowing customers to do so in 1970. Until the 1920s, the telephone was almost exclusively the preserve of the wealthy and businesses. Declines in the costs of production, installation, and utilization, however, allowed the telephone to become the first electric medium to enter the home. “The introduction of the telephone did more than enable people to communicate over long distances: it threatened existing class relations by extending the boundary of who may speak with whom; it also altered modes of courtship and possibilities of romance” (Poster 1990:5). Telephones provided a sense of privacy in communications, deepening the long-standing bourgeois tendency to locate everyday life into the interior of the home out of public view. The telephone enormously expanded the spatial range of the present, and accelerated the tempos of urban life. One historian noted in 1910 that “with the use of the telephone has come a new habit of mind. The slow and sluggish mood has been sloughed off . . . life has become more tense, alert, vivid” (quoted in Kern 1983:91). Telephone calls were, and are, more immediate and intrusive than, say, written letters, and demand rapid responses. From the beginning, the technology was deeply gendered: popular stereotypes contrasted frivolous, talkative women with somber, taskoriented men. The sexism of such a view equated the dynamism of electricity with virility and masculinity, relegating the feminine to intimate, orally based cultures (Marvin 1988). In widening social access from face-to-face contact, the telephone expanded the public sphere (Habermas 1989), undermining the Victorian boundary between public and private space, allowing secrets to be transmitted to friends and neighbors, escapes from parental scrutiny, possibilities of inappropriate courtship or marital infidelity, and contacts with unacceptable persons outside of one’s proper class or even race. Remote presence by phone lacked the reliable cues of face-to-face contact necessary to preserve social trust and tended to erode the insulation of pre-telephonic communities. “We shall soon


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be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other” fretted a London writer in 1897 (quoted in Marvin 1988:68). For many, the telephone represented the self-sufficient bourgeois family under attack. Although Meyrowitz (1985) famously argued that electronic communications leveled social hierarchies, a politically more realistic view of this process indicates that simply expanding the opportunities for interaction rarely achieves this outcome. Rather, telephones unleashed complex and contradictory social impacts, summarized in the “delocalization debate,” in which one view held that, like the automobile, the telephone accelerated the individualism, social withdrawal, and disengagement from public life so widespread in American society, while the opposing view maintained that telephones allowed additional convenient contacts, especially for the isolated and lonely (e.g., in rural areas), furthering the formation of “communities without propinquity,” that is, telephones complemented, not substituted for, face-to-face interaction.

Capturing relative space in flux through the arts and music Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, music, and literature all acted as registers of the multiple, enormous changes in the social construction of time and space then rapidly unfolding. For example, the invention of photography, or “light writing,” in the form of daguerreotypes in 1839 ushered in a new age of representation and visual experience. In 1888, George Eastman’s mass-produced Kodak camera made its appearance, and large numbers of people took to the art with gusto. The photograph became almost universally accepted as an accurate, unbiased, straightforward mirror of the world, one with the power to capture the fidelity of visual experience, to represent the past faithfully (Sontag 1977). Few technologies would validate the ocularcentrism of Enlightenment modernity so completely, producing “a frozen, disincarnated gaze on a scene completely external to itself” (Jay 1993:127). Schivelbusch (1977:63) writes that in contrast to the railroad, which annihilated intimate observation, “The intensive experience of the sensuous world, terminated by the Industrial Revolution, underwent a resurrection in the new institution of photography.” Modernist interpretations assumed photography to be unproblematic; as Lutz and Collins (1993:28) wrote, “The photographer’s intent, the photographic product, and the reader’s experience were assumed to be one. For this reason, photographs, unlike other cultural texts, were held to be readable by even the simplest among us.” Thus photography was viewed as being a direct, unmediated reflection of objective reality, and the photographer’s intent was held to be nonexistent or unimportant. While the content of the photograph appeared self-evident, its context and meaning required interpretation. Almost immediately, the capacity of photographers to manipulate and retouch images began to undermine the taken-for-granted capacity of the camera to reflect reality objectively. Snyder (1980:505) points out that “our vision is not formed within a rectangular

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boundary. . . . The photograph shows everything in sharp delineation from edge to edge, while our vision, because our eyes are foveate, is sharp only at its ‘center.’ ” Berger (1977:18) goes further, suggesting “The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless. . . . What you saw depended upon where you were when. What you saw was relative to your position in time and space. It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as the vanishing point of reality.” Cameras soon found a host of new applications, ranging from family portraits to police work. In 1856, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon ascended into the skies over Paris to view it from above, initiating a process of aerial photography that extended to the space age. In freezing the world of fast motion, photography also expanded vision to include the past. In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge recorded a galloping horse using a series of cameras triggered by trip wires as it ran by, and in 1882 French physician E. Marey invented “chronophotography” to study the aerodynamics of flight in birds and running bodies. Such images of moving subjects and objects divorced the temporal and spatial dimensions: “Their effect was to shatter the postRenaissance idea of the frame as representing a unity of space and time” (Cresswell 2006:78). By the 1890s, photographic advertisements had become a staple in newspapers, magazines, and, shortly thereafter, in the nickelodeons. In advertising, color photography served to highlight the opulence and availability of what was displayed. Photography was increasingly used to identify prisoners, immigrants, and mental patients, delineating “deviance” in starkly black-and-white terms (Tagg 1988). Photography also formed an integral part of colonial regimes of administration: to photograph was not simply to record, but to control. Nineteenth-century innovations widened the social distance between the technologically initiated and the uninitiated, much as the Internet does today. Tagg (1988) likens photographs to Foucault’s panopticon, operating at the nexus of knowledge and power to control subjects by representing them in some ways and not others. With photography, the popularity of magazines concerned with travel and exploration rose rapidly. Travelers and explorers could easily record distant sites with unprecedented accuracy and detail, offering a means of remote visualization. As Ryan (2005:203) puts it, “Like steamships, railways, and telegraphs, photography seemed to dissolve the distance separating ‘there’ from ‘here,’ bringing new audiences face to face with distant realities.” Photography allowed the subject to roam wherever the camera went, inviting the viewer to identify with the camera lens, and thus was critical to the creation of late modern geographical imaginations. For explorers and anthropologists, the camera offered a means of bringing the world into Western eyes, extending the “world-as-exhibition” (Mitchell 1991) to new heights. Photography enhanced the power of intellectual and academic theories drenched in Orientalism to do more than simply mirror the cultural divisions of the world, but participate in their creation. For example, the middle classes


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of late nineteenth-century North America and Europe frequently came to know the world through popular travel and exploration magazines such as National Geographic, which brought the planet’s diverse cultures into their living rooms in an ahistorical and uncritical manner, making the distant seem near (Lutz and Collins 1993). Its photographs “translated distant lands and complicated scientific phenomena into easily discoverable realities” (Schulten 2001:171). Such exoticism simultaneously constructed and demystified the Other, typically native peoples in colorful clothes situated in impoverished countries, subjecting people to the Western gaze and rendering them passive objects of curiosity. In juxtaposing the foreign and the familiar, such outlets structured the geographical imaginations of the petit-bourgeoisie, unofficially serving the political agenda of imperialism by celebrating the progressive triumph of Western rationality even as they justified inequalities of race, class, gender. For example, after the Spanish-American war in 1898, National Geographic became an unofficial voice of U.S. foreign policy, a place where goals could be safely articulated. For example, Cuba and the Philippines were often depicted as in dire need of U.S. intervention in order to be developed. The aural equivalent of the photograph was the phonograph. Edison’s invention in 1877 provided direct access to sounds of the past just as the camera offered a record of its sights. Photography captured space at the expense of time, offering a frozen snapshot; the phonograph did the reverse, capturing the temporality of sound but without any concomitant sense of space. The innovation served to expand markets for commodified music: for the first time, millions could hear concert pianists and opera singers. Later, the magnetic tape recorder, invented in 1899, extended the process of capturing sound, not simply recorded music, democratizing the ability to recreate the recent aural past. Freed by the camera from its obligation to render reality faithfully, painting now explored new, more radical, aesthetic means of representing the world. Late modern art steadily displaced the uniform, linear perspective that had governed painting since the Renaissance, asserting instead that the possibilities of space were as numerous as the views of the artists. Impressionism, for example, registered the disruption of urban life generated by the massive restructurings of the nineteenth century. Impressionists sought to reproduce the patterns that saturated their retinas, de-emphasizing dimensionality in favor of flattened or fore-shortened spaces that appear sensuous and almost tactile in nature. Impressionism sought to freeze the fleeting moment of the ephemeral now, to capture the sense of immediacy that pervades every phenomenological moment with the play of light on the canvas, to change the purpose of art from rendering a perspective on the world to revealing a state of mind, overcoming the chasm between observer and observed. The subject of their paintings was thus often less important than the technique. Impressionists often painted the same subject at different times, such as Monet’s haystacks in Normandy, or from multiple viewpoints, such as Cézanne, who sought to represent the flux of the world in ways parallel to

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those of non-Euclidean mathematicians (Jay 1993). With levels of spare time rising and railroads allowing urban workers to engage in day trips to the countryside, leisure was celebrated through a series of quick impressions, such as Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings of the French bourgeoisie strolling through the parks. Van Gogh filled his painting with whirling eddies and colorful energy fields. Cubism went even further than the sense-dependence of Impressionism and attempted to portray multiple perspectives simultaneously, abandoning linear perspective in the attempt to demonstrate temporal duration on the canvas by fragmenting the orderly spaces of the canvas. Cubism drew upon numerous intellectual currents of the time, including non-Euclidean geometry, X-rays, multiple exposure photography, and the nascent theory of relativity to attack traditional modes of representation through art that presented numerous views of the subject simultaneously in one painting (Miller 2002). These notions were most famously to be found in Picasso’s portraits, such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). By 1910, Kandinsky produced the first completely nonfigurative, nonrepresentational painting, which could not, by definition, be put into language; after all, if it could be said in words, there would be no need for art. Likewise, Surrealism, personified by Dali’s famous melting watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931) became an iconic emblem of deformed time. Painting could never adequately capture the new temporal sensibility, however: Kern (1983:22) notes that “No matter how many successive views of an object are combined, the canvas is experienced in a single instant. . . . Their inventions presented time in art in a new way.” These schools and works accentuated the emerging antipositivist notion that space was as plural and malleable as the perspectives of the viewer. As Miller (2002:131) observes, “Geometrical space is an abstract entity that is infinite in content, its properties are the same everywhere, and it has three dimensions. . . . Representative space, on the other hand, has none of the above properties.” Jay (1993) theorizes that the late nineteenth century witnessed a concerted challenge to the “ancien régime” of Cartesian perspectivalism that questioned the traditional sensuous hierarchy in which sight reigned supreme. This challenge to ocularcentrism was evident in the dissolution of the perpectival grid in painting, the movement away from authorial point of views in literature, and the birth of perspectivism or relativism in philosophy, including authors such as Nietzsche, who argued that if god were dead, so was the idea that there was only one way to know the world. Innovations in art representing time as a flux were paralleled by a new body of work in psychology, philosophy and literature that represented consciousness as a continuous stream (Kern 1983:24). Bergson adopted the Heraclitian emphasis on process over stasis, on becoming rather than being, stressing the continual process of change that he called la durée and in so doing launched the first frontal attack on the hidden epistemology of ocularcentrism (Jay 1993). Bergson saw time as the central question of philosophical inquiry, and regarded the past as meaningless, a subjective product of memory, which only


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took place in the present. Thus, he argued that the present is not simply “that which is, but simply what is being made. . . . When we think this present is going to be, it exists not yet, and we think of it as existing, it is already past” (1991:149). Bergson protested against the reading of time in terms of space, as if the two dimensions could be separated in experience. In his view, spatializing time via representations (e.g., the clock) inevitably posits the existence of static slices of infinity. In literature, the interior monologue became popular, as seen in James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the reader is led on lengthy voyages through the narrator’s memory that have little similarity to the “real time” experienced by the character in his interactions with others. Simultaneously, in music, experiments in multiple tonalities and syncopated rhythms, as found in the compositions of Debussy, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky, captured the spirit of the age by giving the impression of unpredictability. Maurice Ravel’s La Valse arose as a frantic recasting of the Viennese waltz and was denounced as scandalous before it became popular. Ragtime sprang forth from African-American culture in the South in the 1890s, offering a great variety of rhythmic variations that both attracted the young and irritated the elderly. Scott Joplin’s immortal Maple Leaf Rag (1899), for example, was full of unexpected accents, halts and delays, and rapid accelerations. Throughout the early twentieth century, various forms of jazz, with its rhythmic base and syncopated, improvised, often intentionally jarring melodies, changed how people listened to music, and their sense of time, in subtle and interesting ways. The Western tradition of ocularcentrism that began with the phantasmagora reached its apex with the merger of photography and the phonograph in the cinema, which represents one of the most powerful extensions of visual experience in the history and geography of modernity. By capturing temporality and spatiality simultaneously, films began to uncouple vision from its historical association with static form. If photographs interrupted the flow of temporal experience, movies celebrated it. Film brought the world qualitatively closer to the viewer, and brought viewers closer to each other, literally and cognitively. Cinema allowed people to “get a sense of the world without moving very far at all” (Allen and Hamnett 1995:3). Indeed, it was now possible for viewers to feel as if they were in two places simultaneously, i.e., the cinema itself and the locale depicted on the screen. Film demonstrated the potential of integrating societies consisting of large pools of poor urban immigrants, many illiterate, drawing them together around shared experiences in a manner that preceded the similar role played by television a half century later. No technology could claim a more perfect representation of time and space. Yet time in the movies was not real time but a simulacrum, moving at an accelerated pace as scenes were edited to omit the boring, mundane details of everyday life in favor of the glamorous and exceptional. Jay (1993:474) sums this notion up perfectly, noting movies “stitch together the dispersed and contradictory subjectivities of the actual spectator into a falsely harmonious whole.” The cinema made it possible to reorder the

140 Late modern time-space compression temporality of life on the screen, representing time and space as discontinuous. Montages, for example, could juxtapose disparate images. The first public shows, in the 1890s, showed their audiences how the universality and irreversibility of time could be distorted, expanded, or reversed, how intervals could be omitted: time in the silver screen, it seemed, could be refashioned at will according to the intent of the director and editor. In the 1890s, movies were taken at 16 frames per second and projected at 24, making movement seem jerky and overly rapid. Audiences, unused to the new medium, often took the screen’s representations to be literal, ducking in their seats at the sight of an oncoming train. Spatially, too, cinema could lie, despite its ostensible promise of objective representation. The close-up, for example, first used in 1916, mimicked the way in which the mind focused on important objects, simulating intimacy. In short, far more than photography, the cinema challenged the ostensible objectivity of mechanical representations of the past. Kern (1983:130) states that “of all the technology that affected the pace of life, the early cinema most heightened public consciousness of differential speeds.” The new medium gained instant mass appeal: by 1910, the U.S. had more than 10,000 nickelodeons. Within the decade the first major internationalization of mass culture began with film screenings in Paris and Berlin in 1895, followed the next year by New York and Brussels. Hollywood started life as a series of independent studios between 1909 and 1913. Soon news programs became a staple of theater shows, allowing cinema to represent the real world as well as cinematic fantasy. The invention of “talkies,” or movies with sound, in the 1920s gave films ever greater realism and authenticity but also raised production costs, in turn requiring large audiences for the requisite economies of scale, but deepened and accelerated the role of this medium in the reconstitution of everyday notions of time and space. Zweig (1964:25) captures the cultural transition that accompanied the destruction of the Victorian era, in which “Speed was not only thought to be unrefined, but indeed was considered unnecessary, for in that stabilized bourgeois world with its countless little securities, well palisaded on all sides, nothing unexpected ever occurred . . . The rhythm of the new speed had not yet carried over from the machines, the automobile, the telephone, the radio, and airplane, to mankind; time and age had another measure.” In this reading, the taken-for-granted world of the nineteenth century was repositioned in twentieth-century memory as slow and inefficient, the object of nostalgia, a world lived in slow motion. Similarly, Kern’s (1983) famous analysis explores how the numerous innovations of the period blurred conventional meanings of near and far, bringing into mutual contact peoples and societies that had long been isolated. He (1983:34) argues that the time-space compression of the Industrial Revolution led inexorably to a greater appreciation of cultural difference: “As human consciousness expanded across space people could not help noticing that in different places there were vastly different customs, even different ways of keeping time.” Rapid transportation and


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communications greatly extended the spatiality of the present moment, making the “now” something that stretched worldwide. It is no coincidence that much of the art, literature and science of the era was concerned with simultaneity. In Kirby’s (1996:71) words, “The distinctions between widely separated geographical entities lose their meaning as disparate sites themselves come together in a plastic network making proximity and separation relative and mutable.” Location, in short, became increasingly a matter of production and negotiation rather than being given a priori.

Relative space and relativity Among the innumerous scientific and artistic discoveries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the theory of relativity holds special significance. This set of ideas, which both echoed and facilitated the transition into postmodernity, had deep roots in Western intellectual history. As early as 1676, for example, Danish astronomer Ole Rømer offered the first estimate of the speed of light. The theory of relativity drew heavily upon a nineteenthcentury invention, non-Euclidean geometry; in the 1850s, German mathematician Bernhard Riemann opened the door to fantastically complex topologies in which space took flight from the simple world of the isotropic plane to become a doughnut, tunnel, or even more bizarre configurations. Similarly, Hermann Minkowski offered great insights into the mathematics of a unified space-time. The theory of relativity, and all that it implied for the analysis of space-time, was also prefigured by the great French mathematician of nonEuclidean geometry and head of the French Bureau of Longitude, Henri Poincaré, in the 1890s (Galison 2003), who dismissed absolute time as a social convention, a pragmatic representation chosen not because it is inherently, objectively “correct” but because it is convenient in simplifying complex problems. Likewise, he argued against the inherent necessity of Euclidean geometry, asserting its popularity stemmed not from innate superiority but only from its utility in everyday life (Miller 2002). In the late nineteenth century the measurement of time and space was both a philosophical and pragmatic undertaking. The issue of simultaneity in particular was much more than just an abstract intellectual or technical problem, but a pressing social and economic one, i.e., a pragmatic as well as philosophical concern. For purposes that require precise definitions of space and time (e.g., surveying, cartography, navigation, engineering), the measurement of distance and thus location is possible only because a signal is sent from one place to another. Yet this inference itself relies on knowledge of the velocity of the signal. “Thus we are faced with a circular argument. To determine the simultaneity of distant events we need to know a velocity, and to measure a velocity we require knowledge of the simultaneity of distant events” (Reichenbach 1958:126). Simultaneity was critical for navigators and cartographers in the exact determination of longitude, train and omnibus companies, telegraph and telephone services, military commanders, surveyors,

142 Late modern time-space compression astronomers, meteorologists, lighthouse operators, postal services, warehouses and delivery companies, electricity producers, bankers, and industrialists. In short, simultaneity was central to the earth-spanning networks of late colonialism and industrial capitalism, for the efficient regulation of production and urban life. These factors all represented different moments of the enormous wave of late nineteenth-century time-space compression: Galison (2003:175) observes that “Longitude, train tracks, telegraphy, and timesynchronization reinforced each other. Each showed a different facet of a new global grid.” Albert Einstein, surrounded by applications for licenses for new technologies in the Bern patent office, in a country with a long tradition of making accurate timepieces, worked at the heart of the theoretical and applied networks concerned with simultaneity. He extended Poincaré’s analysis by showing, mathematically, that the results of experiments with time and motion inevitably depended on the viewer’s choice of space-time coordinate definitions. With the special theory of relativity that he articulated in 1905, Einstein showed how time in one moving reference system appeared to slow down when viewed by another reference system at rest, and in the general theory of relativity, espoused in 1916, he extended this argument to the time changes experienced by two or more accelerating bodies. Relativity views energy and matter as curving four-dimensional space-time so that it wraps around itself, forming a warped surface over which light rays glide. The measurement of time was predicated on the observer’s location in space, his or her relative velocity to other places, and the gravitational mass that shaped the local universe. Thus, gravitational fields slowed down the speed of light by warping space and time. “The discovery that the speed of light appeared the same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity—and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time. . . . Thus time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it” (Hawking 1988:143). Relativity repositioned time and space, suturing them to the materiality of the physical world by emphasizing how mass warped and stretched these dimensions around itself. Gravity therefore was not an independent force but the effect of warped space and time. Moreover, rather than existing independently of their contents, and thus extending equally throughout the universe, time and space were organized by the specifics of local matter and motion; with Einstein, the “now” became confined to the “here.” Time, in effect, became pinned down by gravity and inseparable from space, ever-changing and variable in its flow. Einstein essentially replaced the notion of a universal “time” with multiple “times,” each of which was just as true as any other. If the distance to an event is known, an observer can correlate it with his own experience; this calculation, of course, is different for each observer. Thus events no longer were embedded in a fixed time frame; instead, the time of each was relative to the observer. It was the difference in the relative velocities between observer and observed that led to the perception of time and space, not the distance between


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them. Thus, length and duration became consequences of the act of measuring, not objective standards in and of themselves. Einstein argued that the dilation of time was generated by the relative motion between an observer and what he or she observed, a view that soundly rejected absolute time and space because absolutes could only exist when they were being measured objectively. Such a view challenged Newton’s view of time and space and harked back to Leibniz’s relational space that was so “resoundingly defeated in the Enlightenment” (Smith 2003:12). Relativity thus implied a return from objective time and space to a vision that took the individual observer as its point of departure. “According to Einstein, there is no privileged position from which these can be measured with the assurance that the results represent the invariant truth. Space, time and mass vary with the relative motion of the measurer, or the observer” (Cardwell 1995:396). Like Cubism, relativity showed that space was not simply what it appeared to be: “Cubism and relativity both require one to pick out from nature particular aspects of it. Einstein’s temporal simultaneity matches Picasso’s spatial one. Both amounted to representing nature from several viewpoints at once” (Miller 2002:208). Few fields would be as revolutionized by this notion as astronomy. In the 1920s, Hubble discovered that the universe consisted of innumerable galaxies (“island universes”) rapidly flying away from one another in all directions (as ascertained by red shifts in their spectral signatures), a discovery redolent of the Copernican revolution in its significance. Hubble’s notion of a rapidly expanding universe led to a widespread reassessment of just how big the universe really was (and how ordinary and insignificant our own planet was in comparison), and indicated that it clearly had a beginning as well as an end. If space now seemed infinite in extent, time seemed limited: far from being endless, astronomical time had become finite (if enormous). Time, too, was revolutionized: modernist science, particularly physics, long assumed the existence of reversible time, in which the distinction between past and future was irrelevant, in contrast to later views more sensitive to path-dependency and irreversibility. Einstein’s ideas became the dominant model for twentiethcentury science, and helped to open the door to relativist thought in many other fields as well, including, ultimately postmodernism and various versions of complexity theory.

Geopolitics, World War I, and modern time-space At the end of the nineteenth century, the exploration of uncharted realms (at least, by Westerners) drew to a close with Peary’s trip to the North Pole in 1909 and, two years later, Amundsen’s arrival at the South Pole, and new spaces for exploration were exhausted. Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that the American frontier, that endless fount of individualism, had reached its end. By the early twentieth century, it became increasingly apparent that the total colonization of the earth had transformed imperialism into a zero-sum game. Smith (2003) argues that the end of the colonial era was marked by the

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need to view space in relative rather than absolute terms. At this historical juncture, the scale of capital accumulation exceeded the boundaries of the nation-state, creating a problem whose “solution lay in expansion of national sovereignty over imperial possessions” (Smith 2003:15). For the first time, the expansion of one state was only possible through its incursion into the territories held by another. The imperial ambitions of the U.S., for example, could no longer be confined to North America but found expression in the 1898 Spanish-American war. As a result of this state of affairs, no longer was it possible to conceptualize political problems and predicaments in isolation of one another at that time, a period that coincides precisely with the rise of modern geopolitics. Famed British geopolitical theorist Sir Halford Mackinder aptly captured this transformation in his analysis of the geopolitics of imperial rivalry, in which the seafaring hegemony of Britain would be challenged by the growing land-based power of Russia and its conquest of space through the railroad. In putting forth this view, he became perhaps the first theorist of the world as an integrated entity. Mackinder (1904:421) predicted that “Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.” According to Ó Tuathail (1996), this juncture also lent support to a thoroughly Cartesian view of space in which the detached, value-free observer could make the world intelligible via the rational application of political theory, theory that was inescapably Western and patriarchal in nature; he suggests (1996:34–5) Mackinder’s struggle to establish a fixed point of view was not only a struggle against other imperialist states but against an intensifying modernity and fin de siecle time-space compression that was the eroding the possibility of establishing a fixed point of view. . . . The geopolitical gaze, born in conditions of time-space compression and fin de siecle turmoil, had a future among those elites who required the spinning world to be disciplined by a fixed imperial perspective. Likewise, around the same time Vladimir Lenin, arguing contra Trotsky for socialism in one country, was well aware of the relative spaces generated and annihilated by imperialism. Lenin argued that with the success of colonialism in conquering the world, capitalism had mutated into a new stage, imperialism, which required a unified global proletariat to combat it. Among the European states, Germany, prodded to unity and expansionism by Bismarck, embraced the new technological order of late modernity with enthusiasm, developing competence in steel, chemicals, and electronics. The Prussian bureaucracy became a model of efficiency, and the German education system one of the world’s most rigorous. Friedrich Ratzel married Social Darwinism and geopolitics, establishing a new rationale for German expan-


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sionism as part of an inevitable struggle for space undertaken by every nation; in this reading, encircled Germany was morally obligated to break through the ring of hostile neighbors if it was to survive. (It was, of course, precisely this marriage of nostalgia for the ancient German tribes with a modernist sense that the future was open and contingent that ultimately fueled the rise of the Nazi furor teutonicus.) As hostilities mounted, Kern (1983) notes that the traditional diplomacy proved to be hopelessly inadequate to cope with the accelerated rhythms of late modernity (e.g., communications via telegraphy). World War I, history’s first modern war and its first all-consuming industrial conflict, was characterized by slaughter so enormous and horrendous that it permanently transformed the face of Europe, and indeed, much of the rest of the world. The sheer scale of the conflict brought violence to a new level of extremes of ruthless efficiency. The numbers of deaths, including battles such as Verdun and Ypres, as well as the profound and prolonged misery of the trenches, were elevated to new levels of mechanical efficiency by new innovations such as the tank, airplane, submarine, zeppelin raids, flame thrower, camouflage, and asphyxiating mustard and phosgene gas. The decisive weapon of WWI, the machine gun, caused roughly 80 percent of the casualties. The introduction of the tank in 1916 by the British, one of the few innovations deployed by the Allies, markedly increased the speed and maneuverability of forces over land. Mechanized war escalated casualties to unprecedented levels: roughly 10 million died in that conflagration. Germany lost one million men in the first five months alone, and on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British suffered 60,000 casualties, of which 21,000 were fatalities. The distinction between soldiers and civilians was rejected in the face of total war. Vast numbers of soldiers came home shell-shocked. Aviation also flourished during WWI, the first war to use flying machines, and played a key role in changing military conceptions of geography. As Virilio (1986) has long argued, warfare was often a prime motor of timespace compression. The airplane allowed war to be conducted at a distance, a trend later greatly accelerated by supersonic bombers and remotely controlled missiles. Airplanes destroyed the strategic significance of fixed fortifications and made the conflict much more fluid and dynamic. Their utility against the Germans, however, was limited, as most strategic British bombing strikes were confined to cities in France or the states in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg under German control. Like the contours of space, the war also altered the shape of time. Most shocking and traumatizing was the chaos and horror at the war front, where “The normal bourgeois approach to time and the clock was reversed. As darkness fell, armies of troglodytes emerged from their holes” (Eksteins 1989:150). At home, the unexpectedly long duration of the war forced rationing and improvements in efficiency. Daylight savings time, adopted during World War I, aimed to conserve fuel by leaving more sunlight during long summer evenings (Downing 2006; Prerau 2006). The notion actually has a long history;

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Benjamin Franklin proposed in 1784 that by rising earlier, people could light their homes with more sunlight than with candles. The idea of changing clocks was first proposed by the British architect William Willett in 1905, who came up with the idea of moving the clock forward to make better use of daylight hours. New York passed a local daylight ordinance in 1919 to allow department stores to turn their lights on as early as possible, tempting commuters on their way home, and in the process generating a longer overlap with the London stock exchange. Pressure in favor of daylight savings came from the petroleum, retail trade, barbeque, and golfing industries, all of which saw an opportunity for extended sales. In 1966, the U.S. Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, giving the country six months of Standard Time and six months of daylight saving. President Nixon famously mandated year-round daylight saving in 1974 in the face of the OPEC oil embargo. Today 70 nations with more than one billion inhabitants observe daylight savings time. Proponents argue that it saves energy, reduces car accidents, and promotes outdoor activities; detractors, however, maintain that it generates difficulties with children’s trips to school and complicates the early morning schedules of farmers. Politically and intellectually, WWI toppled the old hierarchies of Europe and marked the final death of the Victorian social order. The moral basis of the Pax Britannica collapsed as conservative virtues emphasizing national duty, not rights, came into question: if Germany had come to symbolize the new, bold and modern, Britain embodied the old, conservative, and passé. The last remnants of feudalism, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were eliminated, and the Bolshevik Revolution heralded what looked to be a new socialist world system. In this context of massive change, the Paris Peace Conference that formally ended the war “was about fixing the global geography of modernity” (Smith 2003:143).

Early aviation and the conquest of the air With aviation, the atmosphere ceased to be an invisible and trivial part of human movement but was transformed into a mode of transportation, a new domain of social relations, an arena of conflict, and a resource that promised (and delivered) new geographies of accessibility. Aviation marked a definitive moment when twentieth-century time-space compression entered a new phase of rapidity and intensity. The history of aviation includes the early experiments of the Montgolfier brothers in France, who launched a high-altitude balloon in 1783, laying the technical foundations for lighter-than-air flight. Two years later, a balloon carried J.P. Blanchard and John Jeffries across the English Channel. In 1856, the first aerial photographs were taken, of Paris. Gradual improvements in the design and sturdiness of balloons led to zeppelins and dirigibles, some of which reached speeds of 40 mph by the 1890s. World War I turned the zeppelin into a military vehicle, albeit not a very effective one. The German


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commercial dirigible industry carried a total of 42,000 passengers before 1914 without a single fatality (Cardwell 1995). By the 1920s, the Germans designed zeppelins with cruising speeds of 78 mph, as well as passenger ships (e.g., the Hindenburg) capable of carrying 1,000 people across the Atlantic. The rise of modern aviation, of course, owes its origins to the Wright brothers and their famous flight of December 17, 1903, which covered 120 feet; by 1905, they expanded this distance to 24 miles. Since air travel offered greater advantages over the oceans than it did compared to railroads, early expectations centered on aviation’s maritime applications. In the 1920s, barnstormers made flight over land a popular culture phenomenon, introducing the novelty to masses as yet largely unacquainted with it. Central to industrial modernity was the quest for speed, indicative of a culture that sought to push the limits of machine-based transportation. The glorification of speed—in the railroad, steamboat, automobile, and then airplane—reflected much more than just a practical need to conquer distance, it included a constellation of cultural and ideological issues that equated rising speed with power, progress, status, and wealth. From its invention through WWI, the airplane became the world’s dominant symbol of speed. The average cruising speeds of airplanes rose steadily, from 45 mph in 1910 to 75 in 1920, 145 in 1930, 220 in 1940, and 500 in 1950 (Ogburn 1946; Sealy 1957). In addition to mounting speed, airplanes exhibited a steady rise in stage, or distance traveled without stopping (Table 4.4). In the 1930s, it took a plane between 15 and 17 hours to fly the United States from coast to coast; modern jets now cross the continent in about five hours. Yet air accessibility was as much a political as technological achievement. For example, the International Table 4.4 Maximum aircraft cruising speeds and distances, 1906–1932

1906 1908 1910 1912 1914 1916 1918 1920 1922 1924 1926 1928 1930 1932

Cruising speed (mph)

Flight distance (miles)

23 40 67 67 108 126 142 205 223 234 278 297 319 358

50 100 362 627 880 1,890 1,890 2,734 2,734 2,734 3,313 3,911 4,900 5,100

Source: Navy League Sea and Air Map. 1932. London Geographical Institute.

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Air Navigation Convention of 1919 established freedom of civilian air transport among the 32 countries that ratified it. After WWI, a steady series of aviation pioneers opened the skies to flight for the masses: Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett were first to fly over the North Pole, in 1926. Flights across the Atlantic using a series of stops began as early as 1919. Charles Lindbergh’s celebrated transatlantic flight in 1927 captured the popular imagination, driving home how close the two continents had become. Lindbergh’s flight took distinctly national forms, i.e., as the embodiment of American courage and derring-do, and thus became a symbol that the light of modernism had passed decisively from the Old World to the New. Charles Smith and Charles Ulm endured the first trans-Pacific flight in 1928; Richard Byrd and Bernt Balchen flew to the South Pole in 1929; Amy Johnson was pilot of the solo flight from England to South Africa in 1932. Amelia Earhart, the first woman to cross the Atlantic in 1932, later disappeared in the Pacific. Wiley Post was first to fly solo around the world, in 1933; James Gallagher, the first to fly nonstop around the world, in 1949. Originally, like almost all novel forms of transportation, flying was restricted to a small number of wealthy people. Civil aviation could exist economically only if it were publicly subsidized, a fact that led to the introduction of air mail services in the 1920s, much as carriage coaches had done in the eighteenth century. The postal service played a key role in stimulating the growth of aviation, offering contracts to private carriers between selected cities. Like the railroad and steamship, aviation’s early impacts therefore can only be comprehended by including the state as a mechanism of time-space compression. Banks were greatly interested in aviation’s application to the postal service to reduce the float of idle money in the mails; airplanes thus accelerated the velocity of money, with numerous indirect economic impacts. Other producers of high-valued goods, in which transport costs were relatively insignificant but time to market was vital, took to the medium enthusiastically (Solberg 1979). Commercial aviation, like the automobile, underwent explosive rates of growth. The rapid growth of passenger traffic allowed airlines to escape their initial dependence on the mail service to generate a profit. It also gave rise to complex and rapidly changing geographies of global accessibility. Aviation localizes fixed capital, transferring the risk of production onto private producers rather than through the fixed networks of rail lines and highways (Hugill 1993). In many sparsely inhabited regions, air connections were often the only means of accessing the rest of the world. Scheduled passenger service began in 1914 with 22-mile flights by air boat between Tampa and St. Petersburg, Florida. By the 1930s interurban flights regularly exceeded 500 miles (Vance 1990), and airline connections gradually expanded across the world in an increasingly dense spider-web of linkages. Gradually, stronger, multiple engines, greater fuel-carrying capacity, and better airframes allowed more all-weather flights. The 1920s witnessed the birth of numerous national airlines (e.g., Sabena, Lufthansa) and regularized passenger flights between


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large numbers of city pairs. In Europe, such networks tended to be publicly planned and subsidized, whereas in the U.S., the logic of the market was given relatively free rein. Intra-European flights and those within the U.S. were gradually supplemented by flights to northern Africa, Latin America, and selected parts of the British Empire (Warner 1938). In the 1930s, Pan Am deployed four-engine flying boats with ranges of 2,000 miles, which extended its network into Latin America and across the Pacific Ocean, opening up new passenger and cargo routes and accelerating U.S. influence in East Asia (Allen 2000). By 1939 Pan Am offered the first scheduled flights from New York to Lisbon via the Azores (Beaty 1976). While widespread civilian air travel certainly made the world seem smaller, that new perspective did not mean “uniform” (Zook and Brunn 2006), for air travel reflected and reinforced the uneven urban hierarchies of power and wealth. As with all other modes of travel, the airplane brought with it profound changes in the phenomenological worlds of its passengers. With the airplane, distance became increasingly trivialized, and, like the railroad, telegraph, and telephone, the experience of flying was regularly described as “annihilating space.” Most people flying for the first time compared air travel to the only other modes of rapid transportation that they knew, i.e., railroads and steamships. Flying, however, offered a panopticonic vision unmatched by rival forms of transportation. Balloons, telescopes, cameras, and other such devices all represented mechanisms for achieving panoramic visions that supersede that of the body, but unlike its terrestrial counterparts, the airplane offered passengers and pilots a “bird’s eye view,” an all-encompassing perspective that could purport to be objective and all-knowing. The airplane more than any other technology allowed millions to view the world’s surface from afar and appreciate its vast horizontality. As airplanes folded spaces together, “Perhaps most notable a loss was the decline of intervening experience in travel” (Vance 1990:570). Early accounts of air travel offered the same exaggerated expectations of universal accessibility as were found in similar studies of railroads. Generally, the more rapid the form of transportation or communication, the more intervening spaces disappear. Rapid time-space compression thus disembeds places in between, favoring origins and destinations at the expense of intermediate locales. Hence, “Personally experienced, flying from one place to another different location brings on a cognitive form of space/ time compression that is similar to culture shock” (Gottdiener 2001:141). Airplanes in this sense formed “wormholes” through global time-space, paths in which locations en route ceased to exist or matter. Airplanes were celebrated therefore not only for their ability to defy gravity but also for the continuously changing panoramas they generated (Simonson 2005). Air travel became the leading motif of technological sophistication, military advantage, economic competitiveness, fostering a holistic notion of the earth as a single, integrated entity. Simonsen (2005:100) argues this perspective created “discontinuous geography of collected rather than connected points.” Modernist movements such as the Futurists celebrated the machine

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as an emancipatory device to manufacture a new plastic, ever-changing world forever on the move. Likewise, the great Modernist architect Le Corbusier heralded the airplane as an “embodied vision machine” that “casts a geometric grid over the world,” thereby abolishing the curves that he held to be indicative of an earlier, bygone, anarchic, and less efficient world (Simonson 2005:111). Air travel could ignore the traditional physical and social barriers among places, rendering old divisions between land and water meaningless: even islands such as Britain were effectively islands no longer (Gollin 1985). Airplanes, among other things, allowed Western power to penetrate the interiors of continents largely inaccessible to maritime transportation. The rise of airplanes, moreover, triggered enormous debates about the nature of aerial national sovereignty: was air space open to all, or did it belong to the nation-state beneath it (Butler 2001)? Rand McNally (1943) captured the perspectival change unleashed by airplane time-space compression in the rapturous prose introducing its world map to American readers: With aviation, man discovered a new world—a smaller world, contrary in many respects to our established conceptions. As long as the steamship, dependent upon navigable waters, was our chief means of transportation, our location relative to the rest of the world was East toward Europe, West toward the Orient. Today, however, we live in an Air Age! The airplane follows the shortest routes, spanning land and sea, mountains, deserts, and Arctic wastes. With the Polar obstruction overcome, it was necessary to revise our conception of distance and the relative positions of land and seas areas . . . We see the continents, not in the long, slow East-and-West world of the steamship era, but as they really are, virtually one land mass, clustered about the North Pole, linked by the Arctic Ocean, and bound together by the swift wings of a new air-borne commerce. This new conception of the world as a polar community can help us to build an enduring post-war peace.

Driving and the making of automobile space While the airplane symbolized late modernity’s conquest of the skies, the era’s time-space compression was felt with equal intensity on the ground. From its modest roots as “horseless carriages,” playthings for affluent Europeans, the automobile emerged to become arguably the defining technology of the twentieth century. Automobiles encapsulated the era’s infatuation with speed and power, epitomized mass mobility, reworked cities and rural areas alike, transformed the lives of millions, if not billions, and dramatically reconfigured the structure and meanings of individual and social time and space. The origins of the automobile lay in Europe, particularly France (hence the numerous French terms, e.g., chassis, chauffeur). In 1884, Karl Benz built the first self-propelled vehicle in Germany. Early autos were fitted with solid


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rubber tires, which made transport slow and uncomfortable, until 1888, when John Dunlop invented the air-filled pneumatic tire, which absorbed shocks. The mass production and mass consumption of cars, however, was a distinctively American phenomenon. Henry Ford’s introduction of the moving assembly line at the Highland Park factory near Detroit in 1913 initiated a vast revolution in the world of work and production, taking mass production to new heights of productivity and profitability. By pioneering a form of production centered on vertically integrated firms and enormous economies of scale, Ford developed an entire ensemble that became the model for most forms of manufacturing throughout much of the twentieth century. (A similar system was adopted by Alfred Sloan of General Motors, who also introduced planned obsolescence.) The process worked spectacularly, generating millions of jobs, relatively high wages (and unions), and raising standards of living. Fordism was part of the “virtuous linkage of mass production techniques, mass consumption and advertising based on the nuclear family household, Taylorist work organization, collective wage bargaining, the hegemony of the large corporation, Keynesian demand management, the welfare state and the mass production of standardized housing” (Graham and Marvin 2001:67). An integral part of this dynamic was Frederick Taylor’s time-and-motion studies, which reduced workers’ control over their work time, applying his “scientific system” of labor organization by using the stop-watch to break tasks into elementary operations, rendering them passive to the tempo of the machine and accelerating the alienation that underpinned much of the labor unrest and class conflicts of the early twentieth century. Taylor’s agenda involved the separation of manual and mental labor (i.e., blue collar assembly and white collar office work, respectively) and the elimination of ostensibly superfluous motions, thus enacting a strict time discipline over the bodies of laborers (Cresswell 2006). Taylor himself was well aware of how his approach inculcated the calculus of productivity in the labor force, writing that “After the men acquiesce in the new order of things, it will take time for them to change from their old easy-going ways to a higher rate of speed, and to learn to stay steadily at their work, think ahead, and make every minute count” (quoted in Gleick 1999:214). Taylorism greatly elevated the importance of clock time as the regulator not only of working hours, but of public life in general. It was in the U.S. that the automobile, like the bicycle, first came into widespread use, democratizing access to transportation to an unprecedented degree. In 1895, only four automobiles were registered in the entire country, although this number grew to 8,000 by 1900 and to 458,000 by 1910 (Flink 1988). Autos soon displaced rail as the dominant intercity carrier of goods and people. What Ford called the “family horse” evolved into the Model T, the first automobile to gain mass acceptance, whose price dropped by half between 1913 and 1916, initiating a privatization of transportation unparalleled in history. The acceptance of the automobile was hardly automatic,

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however. In 1899, for example, the New York Times sniffed “There is something uncanny about these newfangled vehicles. They are unutterably ugly and never a one of them has been provided with a good or even endurable name. The French, who are usually orthodox in their etymology, if in nothing else, have evolved ‘automobile,’ which being half Greek and half Latin is so near indecent that we print it with hesitation” (quoted in Jackson 1985:158). Like the railroad, the auto had widespread social and perceptual effects. The generation that first learned to drive on a mass basis—in the 1920s—may be the only one to appreciate these changes fully, for their predecessors never mastered the art of driving and their successors took it for granted. Learned doctors warned that the human body was not designed to withstand speeds of 60 mph, and young men boasted if they had traveled at such velocities. Sharp gender differences characterized early automobile ownership: driving was an exclusively male phenomenon, and women took to the road in large numbers only after WWII (Scharff 1991). The invention of the electric starter in 1912 helped to bring a few women into the automobile market, but they remained the exception. Cresswell (2006:196) aptly sums up the gendered mobility of this technology: “The early history of the automobile was thoroughly entwined with the construction and defense of particular visions of masculinity. Mechanical prowess, the control of space, ideas of sexual conquest, and the feeling of power that comes from being in control of one’s destiny were all wrapped up in the automobile.” Early automobile time-space compression was thus essentially for males only, often at the relative expense of women. Although most urbanites still used light rail transit in the 1920s, it was not long before the private car was no longer a luxury but a necessity for the middle class. Spurred by Henry Ford’s Model T, mass ownership of automobiles in the U.S. grew stupendously. Whereas the Model T cruised at 30 kilometers per hour, by the 1930s improvements in engines, chassis, and the introduction of leaded gasoline doubled this speed (Hugill 1993). Farmers turned to cars because of their ability to negotiate unpaved roads, and urbanites because of the convenience they offered. Within two generations, almost universal availability of motor transportation became the norm. In the U.S., the number of registered automobile owners rose from one million in 1912 to 10 million in 1921, 30 million in 1937, and 60 million in 1955 (Vance 1990:499). The American experience was quickly emulated by Canada and several Western European countries. As Table 4.5 indicates, however, no European country attained the high levels of U.S. auto ownership, in part due to lower incomes, better mass transit systems, and higher gasoline taxes. European cities, in consequence, assumed a very different form from the sprawling, lowdensity, multinucleated model prevalent in North America. Even the identical technology had different impacts in varying cultural contexts. With the internal combustion engine, it was the infrastructure rather than the vehicle that presented the greatest constraint to continued reductions in travel time. The internal combustion engine allowed investments to be


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Table 4.5 Inhabitants per passenger vehicle, 1905–1970 Year

U.S.

U.K.

Germany

France

Sweden

Italy

1905 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970

1,078 13 5 5 4 3 2

2,312 228 42 32 22 9 5

983 1,017 135 54 116 15 4

1,850 247 37 22 24 8 4

n.a. 277 59 n.a. 28 6 4

n.a. 1,206 225 163 139 25 5

Source: Jackson 1985: 163.

spread out among users rather than be concentrated on producers, as with railroads (Hugill 1993). The result was far more flexible geographies that emerged along the interstices of fixed rail lines. Trucks, for example, offered unprecedented flexibility in the spatial decisions of firms, and allowed perishable and low-valued goods to be distributed quickly and efficiently. Yet the building of roads and highways is fraught with political as well as economic predicaments. In the U.S., political pressures from the burgeoning middle class for improved roads accompanied the widespread adoption of cars, leading to rounds of parkways in the 1890s on the outskirts of numerous metropolitan areas (Hugill 1982). By 1908, cross-country trips across the U.S. lasting 60 to 90 days had become feasible. With the middle class demanding greater accessibility, the 1920s witnessed the construction of numerous parkways, which were typically curved and allowed for only limited velocity. New York pioneered much of this effort; as Berman notes (1982:307): Moses’ great construction in and around New York in the 1920s and 30s served as a rehearsal for the infinitely greater reconstruction of the whole fabric of America after World War Two. . . . This new order integrated the whole nation into a unified flow whose lifeblood was the automobile. It conceived of cities principally as obstructions to the flow of traffic, and as junkyards of substandard housing and decaying neighborhoods from which Americans should be given every chance to escape. Within cities, streets changed from places of pedestrian travel and public life to ones whose primary function was to serve as open space to arterials for vehicles. Hugill (1993) notes that in 1930s Europe, only dictators such as Hitler or Mussolini possessed the necessary powers to force highway systems through the landscapes of private land ownership and impose a centralized transportation network. Mass automobile ownership triggered an enormous wave of time-space compression in the form of suburbanization, the quintessential spatial fix of late modern capitalism and reversal of the long-standing drift of people from

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rural areas to cities. On the urban periphery, automobiles allowed the radial trunk lines extending from urban cores to be supplemented by networks of circumferential trips. Early conceptions of suburbanization, such as Burgess’s concentric ring model, ignored the prevailing star-shaped form of timespace compression induced along rail and streetcar lines (Knowles 2006). Suburbanization for the middle class became synonymous with upward social mobility, home ownership, and mass consumption. The low residential densities of suburban areas in American cities were typically one-quarter of those found in European ones (Newman and Kenworthy 1999). However, the freedom of choice offered by the automobile came at the price of depriving others: the decentralization of people and economic activities rendered public transportation systems, and those who depend on them, significantly disadvantaged, a cleavage marked by race/ethnicity as much as class. The result was that even the poor became heavily automobile-dependent. Janelle (1986) offers an explicit theorization of suburbanization as timespace compression, representing the growth of the metropolitan periphery in terms of the longer absolute distances involved in the journey-to-work but shorter relative ones as the highway network allowed large numbers of commuters to shuttle to and from urban cores. In this view, centered upon utilitymaximizing commuters attempting to make the most out of their limited time budgets, the growth of the urban periphery arises from the multitude of choices in which suburbanites, blessed with steadily rising incomes, substitute longer commuting distances (but not travel times) for increased quantities of residential space at relatively affordable prices. Such behavioralist explanations of urban structure and change are not necessarily wrong, for they speak to the complex subjective processes involved, but do so at the expense of neglecting broader issues of class, power, and conflict, as well as the social forces that generate individual preferences and choices. Time-space compression, therefore, is neither reducible to individual behavior nor independent of it. Concomitantly, the automobile led to numerous cultural, perceptual, and psychological changes. Driving combined Western notions of freedom, mobility, privacy, and effortless mastery of enormous power, immersing drivers and passengers into a series of ever-changing spaces that rushed by rapidly. Ensconced within their private bubbles, the auto reaffirmed and deepened the deeply individualistic character of bourgeois life. Indeed, automobile driving spawned a cottage industry concerned with the feeling, perception, and culture of driving the car, its kinesthetic engagements with the landscape, and how all of these are enmeshed in racialized, gendered, and national feelings of movement, mobility, identity, and embodiment (Brodsly 1981). Many of the skills and practices of driving became so deeply internalized as to be unconscious. For many people, driving a car merged human and machine into a cyborg (Haraway 1991). Indeed, the rise of the single family home and all that it represents in many ways can be attributed to the shift to an autooriented culture (Flink 1988). Some observers attribute the decline of dense,


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tightly knit urban neighborhoods in the 1920s and parallel increase in alienation to the rise of the automobile and associated suburbanization. Much later, i.e., well into the latest, postmodern round of time-space compression, the automobile continues to be a decisive force in the structure and restructuring of urban space. In many economically advanced countries, ownership among the middle class approaches near-universal levels. Featherstone (2004:2) writes that “Automobility makes possible the division of the home from the workplace, of business and industrial districts from homes, of retail outlets from city centres. It encourages and demands an intense flexibility as people seek to juggle and schedule their daily set of work, family and leisure journeys.” The popularity of—and necessity for—cars remains highest in the U.S., which, with its underfunded mass transit system, has the world’s highest rate of automobile ownership (Table 4.6). Even in Europe and Japan, however, with extensive rail and bus networks, the bulk of the population relies on automobiles to navigate space. Convenient, cheap, rapid, and safe automobile transit in the twentieth century was tied to the availability of cheap petroleum, of which impending shortages may reverse long-standing historical patterns of time-space convergence.

How World War II shrank the world Like WWI, World War II (essentially an extension of the first) epitomized the convulsions that racked the planet in the throes of late modern time-space compression. The war was, thus, both an outcome and a generator of the ongoing global political, economic, and technological reconstruction of space and time. To attempt to encapsulate a conflict as enormous, complex, and horrific as World War II in a few short paragraphs would be an act of hubris; conversely, to ignore this critical conflict would be a serious omission. From a world-systems perspective, the conflict witnessed the Germans initiate the last serious attack on the capitalist world economy, attempting to impose a world empire in its place (Wallerstein 1979). Table 4.6 Passenger cars per 1,000 people in selected developed countries, 2003 United States New Zealand Canada Germany Italy Switzerland Austria France Spain United Kingdom Japan

770 633 631 545 545 511 501 495 455 439 433

Source: World Development Indicators 2006.

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WWII, even more than its predecessor, took the Fordist machinery of mass production and applied it to death as efficiently as it had been used for the making of cars and other objects. In total, an estimated 50 million people perished, including 20 million in the USSR and 10 million in China. The Nazi onslaught against Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, communists, the handicapped and retarded, union members, and others exemplified the horrific capacity of modernity to destroy as efficiently as it could construct. The Holocaust demonstrated that advanced technology could be put to the most horrific of uses, and undermined the teleological notion of inevitable progress that had long accompanied linear views of history. As Bauman (1989) shows, the Holocaust was not some aberration of modernity, but, because it was methodically planned and bureaucratically executed in as rational a fashion as the Nazis could muster, it was the very embodiment of modernity. One of the conflict’s major repercussions concerned numerous improvements in aviation, including lighter and stronger alloys, more powerful and efficient engines, and long-range bombers and troop transport planes, which allowed soldiers to be rushed to critical areas within days rather than weeks. Airplanes extended the spatial scale of battle, and with the capacity to raze cities, obliterated the traditional distinction between combatants and noncombatants. World War II therefore enshrined air power as the dominant form of military muscle. The psychological distance between pilots and their victims played an important role in normalizing aerial hyperviolence: “Methods that would be condemned out of hand if carried out by armies on the ground were becoming routine from the air” (Carroll 2006:81). Air-borne death invited a widespread reassessment of European geopolitical space in light of the devastation these new weapons of mass destruction brought with them. The primary impacts, however, were psychological, i.e., mass terror. No longer was the English Channel guarantee against invasion. The improvements in aviation design initiated during the war set the stage for mass air passenger travel in the post-war boom World War II gave an enormous boost to other technologies of time-space compression, including radar, computers, jet engines, and the atomic bomb. Prior to the war, military research was typically subordinate to civilian needs; the war reversed that relation, and in the process greatly facilitated the deployment of space-defying tactics and machinery. Echolocation was an important moment in the conflict’s reconstruction of space and time, including radar for the assessment of bombers and sonar for the detection of submarines. Similarly, Long Range Aid to Navigation (LORAN) systems guided Allied ships across the Pacific, while German U-boats made Britain’s maritime isolation irrelevant. The blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) was the prototype of the new, flexible style of warfare, which turned older fortifications such as the Maginot Line into archaic relics (Hugill 1993). Germany’s use of V-1 and V-2 rockets against Britain initiated a new epoch of strategic missiles, rising to a height of 60 miles and velocities of 3,200 mph; between September 1944 and March 1945, more than 500 V2s targeted on London killed 3,000 people,


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and twice as many in Antwerp (Cardwell 1995). Of course, the ultimate weapon of mass death was the atomic bomb, used to great military effect against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, annihilating 200,000 people in the process, which foreshadowed the impending cold war. Far from being used to force defanged Japan to surrender, the use of these weapons was done with an eye toward the Soviet Union: the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not “a last shot against the Axis but a first shot against the Kremlin” (Carroll 2006:57). The rise of air battles as a significant component of the conflict encouraged a dramatic geopolitical reorientation of American and European notions of space and distance. George Renner (1944), for example, argued that geopolitical relations had so changed that the Mercator projection, which allowed Americans to visualize themselves as protected by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, was outdated and even dangerous. In a world in which “distances are measured in hours instead of days, he argued for polar projections that emphasized the interconnectedness of the world’s continents” (Schulten 2001:139). Distant lands such as China were now discovered to be neighbors in the struggle against the Japanese and the Axis. Aviation eroded the last notion of hemispheric isolation that remained in the U.S. As Malin (1944:107) noted in this context, “space alone has no significance . . . it is mobility in space that gives it meaning.” Cartographer Richard Harrison caused a public sensation with maps that showed how “aviation had transformed the North Pole from a barren wasteland into an arena for communication and conflict” (Schulten 2001:215), making it a “new Mediterranean.” This view “transformed the Pacific from a massive body of water protecting the United States into a smallish lake” (ibid.: 218). Virilio’s (1999) analysis of the war’s long-term impacts focused on the architecture of “Fortress Europe”—rocket-launching sites, air defense systems, radar stations, coastal bunkers—that infused the continent’s geography with a thoroughly military overlay that persisted long after the conflict ended (cf. Redhead 2004). The dramatic technological changes generated by the war, such as computers and atomic bombs, represent the culmination of a century of “hyper-violence” in which military and civilian information flows become effectively indistinguishable. Thus, “the war of 1939–1945 was a war of radio and cinema. . . . On the one hand, Hitler commanded his generals and his troops by radio-telephone, while on the other he led his people with radio and newsreels” (Virilio 1999:109). Moreover, WWII represented the climax of the accelerated culture of late modernity, a “dromocratic society” dominated by the military-industrial complex in which ever-increasing speed of information became normalized for vast swaths of the world’s population.

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Integrating the globe during the post-war boom The rapid economic growth of Europe, Japan, and North America from 1946 to the 1970s marked an enormous integration of the various spaces of the world economy. The post-WWII boom was one of two great waves of creative destruction to sweep the world in the twentieth century (the other being the rise of postmodern capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s). Politically, this era marks the apex of the Pax Americana, when the U.S. remained unquestionably the leading economic and political superpower of the planet, making it virtually synonymous with neocolonialism. Economically, the post-war boom witnessed the climax of Fordist production systems and the culmination of late modern capitalism. The post-war global division of labor was characterized by the steady dispersal of routine production facilities such as assembly and processing operations to parts of the developing world (Hymer 1979; Cohen 1981). Several factors fueled this round of time-space compression, including the economic dynamism of the U.S. (which produced up to half of the world’s industrial output), the stable exchange rates offered by the BrettonWoods Agreement, and the steady, worldwide reduction in tariffs made possible by multiple rounds of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The result was that throughout the late twentieth century, world trade grew more quickly than did world output, indicating a steady deepening of the economic interrelations among nation-states (Figure 4.9). The cold war, which defined the geopolitics of the post-war boom, prevented the complete integration of the globe under the umbrella of commodity production and consumption; the existence of the Soviet bloc sealed off large chunks of the Earth’s surface from Western capital, indicating that American hegemony was always contested. Ostensibly socialist states in the

Figure 4.9 Relative global trade and output levels, 1950–2005.


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world-system formed both an alternative to capitalism as well as a major obstacle to its ambitions (Chase-Dunn 1982). As Smith (2003:21) observes, “The binary geographies of the cold war frustrated U.S. global ambitions. The ideology of the American Century survived by ignoring the fact that a good half of the world was distinctively un-American or at least strove to be uncapitalist.” The cold war assumed several simultaneous rhetorical and ideological dimensions, i.e., as a conflict between capitalism and communism, democracy and totalitarianism, and religious freedom and atheism. Geopolitically, the bifurcation that lay at the heart of the Truman Doctrine of Containment was manifested spatially in a ring of bases and localized conflicts through which the U.S. attempted to “contain” its Soviet counterpart (Nijman 1992). In demonizing the Other, the cold war imported colonial notions of Orientalism into the twentieth century, adapting the concept to the highly compressed times and spaces of nuclear Armaggedon. Central to superpower rivalry, and to the acute reorientation of time and space to be found within it, was the nuclear arms race. The introduction of nuclear weapons radically transformed the geopolitics of world order, threatening death in the tens of millions, if not billions, to societies that dared to use them. Strategically, the atomic, then hydrogen, bomb obliterated traditional distinctions between the front line and rear echelons much as it wiped out the difference between military defeat and mass annihilation. While bombers were the only effective delivery mechanism in the 1950s, by the 1960s intercontinental ballistic missiles fundamentally undermined the secure borders that were an essential part of the Westphalian state system. “The nuclear age in this sense removed one of the key aspects of the territorial state: its ability, under any circumstances, to defend itself alone. Distance was not just shrunk but eroded forever as an overriding factor in strategic defense” (Horsman and Marshall 1995:48). Although several powers developed nuclear weapons during this era, the overwhelming majority—98 percent or more— of nuclear missiles were controlled by the two superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which were locked together by the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), or deterrence generated by fears of shared instantaneous annihilation. By the early 1990s, the two states combined held more than 24,000 thermonuclear bombs (Figure 4.10), although this number declined somewhat following arms limitations treaties. Many missiles were equipped with multiple, independently targeted re-entry vehicles, or MIRVed, greatly multiplying their destructive potential. Whereas most Soviet weapons were land-based, American ones tended to reside at sea: the first nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, was launched in 1957, and became famous for its historic voyage under the polar ice cap in 1958, an event that markedly changed the world’s strategic map. By extending the ability to project mass death anywhere, ICBMs ended the prospect of prolonged military campaigns as a means of resolving superpower disputes. This state of affairs lent weight to Virilio’s (1986) pessimistic vision that time-space compression is, at its core, driven by the military, leaving little time

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Figure 4.10 Number of nuclear weapons held by U.S. and USSR, 1945–2005.

for reflection or debate. Similarly, what Janelle (1973) calls the “30-minute world” refers to the maximum time needed for missiles to reach their destinations. Luke and Ó Tuathail (2000:368) conclude “As nuclear war becomes an increasingly electronic decision, there has been a loss in the duration of politics. Politics is reduced to the instance of launch code authentication.” During the cold war, the speed with which ICBMs could be launched minimized the ability to detect false alarms, for policy makers to change their minds, or to stop the accidental launch of weapons. Thus, Virilio (1986) argues that when the temporal distance from total annihilation is measured in seconds, and the time for diplomacy shrinks to zero, geopolitics, or power over space, is eclipsed by chronopolitics, the power over time. Superpower rivalry extended national politics into outer space as the U.S. and USSR sought to develop military capacities there, including space-based satellites, espionage, and, of course, the race to the moon. As Cosgrove (1994, 2001) points out, the real impacts of the Apollo space missions were not a new understanding of the Moon as much as a new understanding of the Earth, generating a vision of the world that lacked a clear center or periphery. Far from comprising politically neutral representations, space photography legitimated and sustained a discourse of “one earth” effectively embraced and encompassed by one nation, the U.S. The Apollo images of the earth offered a perspective of humanity from the “outside,” a view that reflected the globalization and worldwide ecumene that late modern capitalism had constructed. This view enhanced the long-standing Western ocularcentrism, for global perspectives are visual rather than experiential. Within the global spaces secured by the Pax Americana, the growth of transnational corporations (TNCs) after World War II represented a significant scalar jump in the spatial organization of capitalism, as many companies invested heavily in several continents simultaneously. Central to the emergence


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of modern TNCs was the use of technologies to generate new forms of timespace compression, particularly cheap and reliable air travel, which allowed large firms to move managers around quickly, encouraging the centralization of corporate decision making so that bureaucratic costs can be spread out over large number of production facilities and greatly improving the efficiency of managerial labor (Hugill 1993). By the 1970s, i.e., at the height and near the end of the post-war boom, roughly 30,000 TNCs controlled two-thirds of world trade and employed 100 million people (Dicken 2007). Some of the largest TNCs had annual revenues larger than the GNP of certain countries. Given the unsurpassed size and importance of the U.S. during this period, American TNCs were disproportionately represented among the world’s largest firms. TNCs simultaneously rely upon nation-states and undermine their centrality to global political space. Commonly, they locate their headquarters in their country of origin, generally in a large metropolitan area in which high wage, white-collar administrative, managerial, and research functions have access to the agglomeration economies such regions offer. In contrast, TNCs often relocate less skilled, low-wage, blue collar assembly functions in lowerincome countries via branch plants. However, despite the stereotype that TNCs are all global behemoths with operations in every continent, the reality is that most such institutions invest in only two or three countries (Dicken 2007). Firms with plants throughout the world are the exception, not the norm. Moreover, contrary to the stereotype that TNCs always seek out lowwage pools of Third World labor, most TNCs, which originate in capital-rich, developed countries, invest in other capital-rich, developed countries. The costs and benefits of TNC presence, especially in developing countries, have been hotly debated. Advocates of neoclassical economics stress the benefits of TNCs, including the generation of jobs, improved exports, foreign revenues terms of trade, technology transfer, rising skills, and higher productivity. Critics generally hold that such capital-intensive firms generate relatively few jobs; that skilled managerial, technical, and executive positions are often filled by residents of the home country; that TNCs may drive local producers into bankruptcy, i.e., job displacement is greater than job creation; that the profits of foreign operations are often repatriated to the TNCs’ home countries; that non-local subcontracts yield very low local employment or output multipliers, minimizing the potential for long-term development; that government subsidies and concessions to TNCs inhibit the state’s ability to provide public services; and that TNCs have a long history of political interference, including bribery, corruption, and invoking foreign powers, particularly the U.S., in coups d’état against unfriendly regimes. Such criticisms amount to an argument that TNCs perpetuate a state of neocolonialism. The impacts of TNCs are contingent, temporally and geographically specific mixtures of both costs and benefits that reflect the relative bargaining power of both the TNC and the host country involved. Acknowledging this complexity means situating them conceptually between the extremes of stereotypes that

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portray them, on the one hand, as harmless, apolitical investors facilitating a comparative advantage, and as brutally exploitative parasites on the other. The post-war boom, and the TNCs that it propelled it, were sustained by revolutions in transportation in air, land, and sea that greatly reduced transport costs and intensified international competition. The containerization of freight transport dramatically lowered shipping, rail, and trucking costs and accelerated the circuits of capital accumulation. Containerization, which began in Port Newark, New Jersey in 1956, permits the mechanized handling of diverse cargoes as they are loaded into standardized boxes, greatly expediting the process of loading and unloading ships and trucks, reducing labor inputs significantly (Herod 1998) and seamlessly integrating land and water transportation through roll-on roll-off ferries. Containerships could be loaded and unloaded rapidly—in as little as eight hours—using gantry cranes. This reduction in time, with associated savings in operating costs, generated a wave of capital intensification in ports, reducing the need for stevedores. In its reliance on economies of scale, containerization favored the growth of large ports over smaller ones, encouraging a centralization of shipping services in a few key selected cities (Robinson 2002). Similarly, air transportation underwent a parallel revolution in the wake of jet propulsion. Transatlantic flights, which required roughly 17 hours in the 1930s, saw that time reduced to ten hours by 1947 with the introduction of the DC-6. In increasing average flight speeds, jets facilitated a market first for corporate elites and then in mass aviation-based tourism. The first jet planes crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1959 and significantly decreased the cost of air travel. Within one year, the volume of air passengers across the Atlantic surpassed that by ship. Planes such as the DC-3 were capable of staying in the air for sustained periods and thus reaching areas that were cost-ineffective for less efficient planes. Travel times between New York and Los Angeles declined from 15 to seven hours between 1946 and 1973. The rise of a global airline network in the 1960s placed almost any location within 36 hours’ travel time of New York or London. By the 1970s, jumbo jets, such as the Boeing 747, elevated the number of passengers significantly, fueling the long-distance market for tourists and business travelers employed by the international economy’s growing number of producer services. By 1970, supersonic planes had been developed, exceeding 760 mph at sea level or 650 mph in the stratosphere, although most jets fly just below the speed of sound, Mach 1. Increases in the speed of aircraft were complemented by incremental changes in airport design, weather detection, and ground access. Mass air travel began in earnest in the 1960s, fueled by rising disposable incomes and vacation times as well as a division of labor in which corporate networks became increasingly dispersed over long distances. In the process, time-space compression became an increasingly ordinary experience for large numbers of people. As flying became increasingly accepted among the public, distances between pairs of cities were conceptualized with increasing frequency in terms of hours rather than absolute distances. As travel times and


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costs declined, global air passenger volumes exploded ten-fold between 1956 and 1972. These improvements generated cognitive and bodily effects, such as jet lag, or “time zone change syndrome,” the fatigue and disorientation that reflect the mismatch between the body’s circadian rhythms and those of a destination arrived at suddenly, or, more poetically, “That disconcerting sensation of time travelers that their organs are strewn across a dozen time zones while their empty skins still forge boldly into the future” (Winfree, quoted in Gleick 1999:103). The improved ability of aircraft to traverse ever-longer distances (their cruising radius) was a significant part of the changing geographies of accessibility unleashed by the airplane. Prior to WWII, when this radius was generally less than 300 miles, air networks were largely confined to continents or narrow seas. Trans-oceanic voyages involved a series of hops from island to island; thus, to cross the Atlantic, planes relied on Greenland, Iceland, or the Azores, or across the Pacific, Midway, Wake, Guam, and Hawaii. However, by the 1950s, four-engine planes expanded this radius to more than 700 miles, which allowed companies and governments to skip such intermediary steps with non-stop flights, often spelling commercial oblivion for locales passed over. Despite the initial promise of ubiquitous accessibility, the changing geographies of air transportation reveal a series of networks that mirrored and reinforced terrestrial relations of power and wealth. An extensive early literature on air routes, for example, demonstrated that the easiest, cheapest, most frequent and often most rapid routes typically converged on cities of significant economic and political importance (Taaffe 1956; Sealy 1957), while rural and low-income areas are typically poorly served. Far from annihilating previous geographies of inequality, therefore, airline routes tended to amplify them, magnifying the inaccessibility of places already marginalized during prior rounds of time-space compression. On land, too, the post-war boom accelerated the movements of people, goods, and information. As the automobile became the defining symbol of twentieth-century mobility, roads displaced rail as the primary object of state intervention in transportation. As Berman (1982) notes, if the distinctive symbol of nineteenth-century urbanism was the boulevard, its twentiethcentury equivalent was the highway. The highway system, like the Roman roads and the railroads, represented a major round of investment in the infrastructure, a spatial fix that both facilitated and imprisoned subsequent rounds of capital accumulation. European highway systems paved the way for the post-war explosion in automobile traffic. Italy under Mussolini initiated the autostrada network in 1924, the world’s first roads exclusively designed for high-speed motor traffic. In 1930, the Germans undertook the Autobahn system connecting the country’s major cities, an effort militarized by the Nazis (Flink 1990). But it was the U.S. Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in history (Moon 1994), which epitomized this modality of movement. In invoking national defense to obtain legislative authorization, the interstates also exemplified cold war politics. Automobile

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companies, construction companies, earth-moving equipment manufacturers, real estate firms, labor unions, and assorted other business interests supported the project enthusiastically. The system that eventually materialized over four decades (mid-1950s to mid-1990s) included even-numbered routes that ran east–west and odd-numbered ones that ran north–south (Figure 4.11). The impacts of the Interstate Highway System are difficult to exaggerate. Its very construction displaced countless numbers of people in largely minority, impoverished inner-city communities. Together with the millions of cars that made use of it daily, it gave birth to a new landscape of industrial parks, office complexes, shopping malls, motels, fast food, and gasoline stations. Average inter-urban travel times declined by 10 percent within the first decade. The new road networks accelerated the flight of manufacturing from the Manufacturing Belt to the emerging Sunbelt, the suburbanization of people and firms, and the “filtering down” of industry to nonmetropolitan areas. With the option of both enhanced access to downtowns and life in low-density peripheries, commuting distances, but not times, for many suburbanites increased. Highway interchanges became intensive sites of commercial development in their own right. The evacuation of the middle class rose to new heights, with attendant crises for the governments and neighborhoods of the urban core. The highway system thus completed the long-running transition of the American city into a completely auto-dependent spatial formation,

Figure 4.11 U.S. Interstate Highway system.


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including suburbanization. Politically, the integration of U.S. national economic space helped to shift political power from the individual states to the federal government (Moon 1994).

Late modern time-space compression in perspective The changes in world space and time unleashed since the Industrial Revolution, the widespread use of cheap inanimate energy, the factory system, and its accompanying effects on productivity are so large and numerous as to defy the imagination. The nineteenth century saw a second wave of colonialism— predominantly British and French—extend to every corner of the globe, so that by the turn of the century absolute space gave way to relative space, a notion well understood by geopolitical theorists at the time. North America succumbed to the onslaught of Enlightenment rationality, and in turn fueled this expansion through its own incorporation into the world economy. Railroads, the decisive technology of late modernity, linked cities together in intricate webs of interconnectivity, extended urban rent gradients into the countryside, forged national markets that gave birth to oligopolies, and forced into being new ways of thinking about space and time. Steamships similarly turned oceans into lakes. Simultaneously, the telegraph uncoupled transportation from communications, allowing information to circulate rapidly and effortlessly, reducing uncertainty and generating round upon round of selfsustaining growth. Cities, as dense nodes of urbanity caught within this wave of intense time-space compression, were transformed physically and socially into machines for the production of modern goods and modern subjects. These ontological changes were accompanied by equally dramatic shifts in ideologies and ways of thinking. Modern science stretched geological, biological, and historical time to great lengths, while the theory of relativity shook the doctrine of objectivism at its roots, substituting multiple times for the singular view of time. In the arts, photography, cinema, and new ways of painting challenged the ocularcentrism dominant since the Renaissance, substituting new representations of diverse, fragmented realities and reordering the meanings of time and space. The telephone extended the long-distance transmission of information from text to voice, facilitating a gradual substitution for face-to-face communication and personal co-presence that extended personal and business ties over ever-wider distances. Aviation opened up the skies to human occupation, accelerating the tempos and rhythms of social and economic change and producing new experiences of speed. Likewise, the automobile reworked time and space, both through its production and consumption, giving rise to highly flexible rounds of low-density suburban expansion and accompanying cultures of individualism. Following the horrors of German expansionism during WWII—the last gasp of world empire in the face of an omniscient world system—the post-war boom produced both the apex of industrial production and an unprecedented degree of global economic and political integration. Economically, Fordism

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formed the dominant face of this epoch. Politically, the post-war boom witnessed the life-or-death struggle between the Pax Americana and its Soviet counterpart through the threat of instant mutual nuclear annihilation. Western transnational corporations extended their tentacles through the developing world, differentially incorporating places into a neocolonial world economy with mixed economic and social effects. Containerization and other improvements reduced transportation costs to a small fraction of the cost of most goods, making this dimension increasingly irrelevant to the location decisions of firms. Rapid travel through the skies or over the highways became the norm for the vast middle classes. The result of this concatenated series of transformations was a world of unprecedented wealth, mobility, and scientific acumen utterly different from the one that gave birth to it a century and half earlier.

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As numerous observers have pointed out, global capitalism in the late twentieth century underwent yet another sea-change with widespread economic, political, and cultural repercussions for the structure of space and time. In the words of Harvey (1989a:293), “We have, in short, witnessed another fierce round in that process of annihilation of space through time that has always lain at the center of capitalism’s dynamic.” The profound global crisis in Fordism that ended the post-war boom in the 1970s was accompanied by numerous birth pangs of the new order, including: the petroshocks that witnessed a hefty rise in the price of oil; pronounced and prolonged deindustrialization in the West manifested in worldwide recessions; the rise of the Newly Industrializing Countries, particularly in East Asia; the end of the Bretton-Woods era in 1973 and subsequent shift to floating exchange rates; the explosive growth of Third World debt, largely driven by recycled petrodollars; the emergence of “flexible” specialization, the microelectronics revolution, and computerized production technologies; the rapid, sustained growth of financial and producer services (Coffey and Bailly 1991; Peck and Tickell 1994). Simultaneously, international finance and producer services grew rapidly (Dicken 2007). By the 1990s, these changes included the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cessation of the cold war. This round of restructuring, therefore, was not simply economic or technological in origin: Agnew (2001) is certainly correct in arguing that contemporary globalization has geopolitical roots reflecting the strenuous assertion of American liberalism (and neoliberalism) worldwide. In Smith’s (2003:22) words, globalization “after 1989 can be seen as a contemporary remapping strategy and as a fervent attempt to redress the geographical divisions established after 1945.” The end of Fordism, therefore, entailed a new geopolitical order, including the global wave of neoliberal deregulation, privatization, and the lifting of state controls in many industries; new trade regimes such as NAFTA, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization, which freed capital to move across national boundaries with ever greater ease; and the integration of world financial markets through telecommunications systems (Thrift 1986; Lash and Urry 1987). Concomitantly, globalization has steadily eroded the sovereignty of states in some matters through supranational organizations

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such as United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, which have effectively assumed some governance functions. This collection of events may be viewed as moments in the transition into postmodern “flexible” and “disorganized” capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987). Similarly, Bauman (2000) differentiates “heavy” modernity, a period lasting from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century, from the “light modernity” of contemporary capitalism, one centered on mobile rather than fixed capital, lightness and speed rather than power, instantaneity rather than duration, software rather than hardware, individual rather than collective struggle, consumption rather production. The origins of postmodern capitalism lay firmly within the post-war boom—in the networks of multinational corporations that succeeded in uniting much of the globe in dense webs of capital, in the terror of instantaneous death through nuclear war, in the rapid globalization of culture and the resistance it inspired—and postmodern capitalism assuredly incorporated and was prefigured by many aspects of its late modern predecessor. Indeed, this point may be taken as a caveat that new forms of production and consumption, new representations of time and space, never emerge de novo, but always arise from and are shaped by earlier ones. The simple dichotomy between “modern” and “postmodern,” therefore, fails to do justice to the complexity of both categories and the extent to which they are commingled. Numerous observers sought to describe contemporary time-space compression. Alvin Toffler’s (1970) famously influential book Future Shock painted a world in which time passed too quickly, in which the speed of cultural and technological change were overwhelming, and one in which geographies melted away before the hot fires of advanced modernity: “Never in history has distance meant less. . . . Figuratively, we ‘use up’ places and dispose of them in much the same way that we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans” (p. 75). In the same vein, David Harvey (1989a:240), perhaps the most famous theorist of this issue, argues in The Condition of Postmodernity that an enormous round of time-space compression is underway: As space appears to shrink to a “global village” of telecommunications and a “spaceship earth” of economic and ecological interdependencies— to use just two familiar and everyday images—and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds. He (1989:240) suggests that in the face of massive contemporary changes, contemporary inhabitants of the world have “learned to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds.” Similarly, Jameson (1984) holds that in the postmodern era, space has abolished time, but simultaneously, space has become so warped and distorted as to defy conventional interpretation. Thus, his famous essay concerning the disorienting


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effects he feels in the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles posits that “this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world” (pp. 82–3). As Kirby (1996) notes, if early explorers in the New World were mystified because of their geographic ignorance and poor cartography, Jameson represents an explorer of sorts in the uncharted realms of postmodern hyperspace. For Castells (1996:470), this transformation is mirrored in the space of flows and the new geometries that accompany it, a process best understood through the metaphor of rhizomatic networks: “Networks are appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy based on innovation, globalisation, and decentralised concentration; for work, workers and firms based on flexibility; for a culture of endless deconstruction and reconstruction; for a polity geared towards the instant processing of new values and public moods; for a social organisation aiming at the supersession of space and the annihilation of time.” The space of flows wraps places into highly unevenly connected networks, typically benefiting the wealthy at the expense of marginalized social groups. Ruggie (1993:141) likens such networks to the “economic equivalent of relativity theory” and compares their impacts to those of the medieval trading fairs in terms of how they inculcate new ways of viewing the world. Lipschutz (1992) paints the postmodern world as something akin to the medieval geography of Europe, in which corporations replace the Christian church as the primary source of aerial integration. Even more radically, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offered a schizophrenic reconceptualization of postmodern space, one centered on rapidity, movement, and constant flux without the usual coordinates of distance and direction. However, the global space of flows is far from randomly distributed over the earth’s surface: rather, it reflects and reinforces existing geographies of power concentrated within specific nodes and places, such as global cities, trade centers, financial hubs, and headquarter complexes. Thus, far from being abstract networks divorced from history, such systems are only made comprehensible by embedding them in history (Cresswell 2006). Associated with and integral to this economic and political transformation is the loosely collected set of theories, approaches, and standpoints often labeled “postmodernism,” which points to concomitant changes in the interpretive systems of culture and epistemology that arose in the late twentieth century. A vast literature has pointed to the ways in which identity and subjectivity have become steadily reconfigured under the intense heat of postmodern time-space compression (e.g., Featherstone 1991; Jones et al. 1993; Gubrium and Holstein 2000). Rather than a fixed, unified identity that lies at the core of the modern self, for example, there are grounds for arguing that many people, hooked into different locales via the Internet, consist of multiple, shifting, even contradictory “selves” who lie at the changing intersections of different language games. Jameson (1984:63), for example, argues

170 Postmodern time-space compression that “the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject.” Such a fluid view of subjectivity mirrors the world of hypertext media and its predisposition to those with the ability to navigate complex databases via nonlinear jumps in thought, a mode of navigation conducive to thinking of the world as an intertextual pastiche of contending interpretations. In this context, increasingly, the notion of the autonomous subject standing apart from the world he/she observes has come under question, and in its place lies a greater pluralistic affirmation of cultural difference based on numerous axes (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.). In contrast to national forms of identity, which take the nation-state as their point of departure, postmodern forms are often explicitly internationalist in orientation. Robertson (1992:23) theorizes that hypermedia environments reinforce “the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.” Thus, the postmodern reconstruction of identity is inescapably spatial, albeit not in terms familiar to those for whom the nation-state is the only realistic source of authority. As Deibert (1997:201) suggests, “the emerging architecture of world order is moving away from territorially distinct, mutually exclusive, linear orderings of space toward nonlinear, multiperspectival, overlapping layers of political authority.”

Postmodern capitalism and post-Fordism Central to the emergence of postmodern capitalism was the phase change from Fordism to the post-Fordist regime of flexible production that arose in the restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s (Amin and Thrift 1992; Peck and Tickell 1994). If Fordism was characterized by national markets, large firms, unionized, relatively unskilled labor, mass consumption, and a social contract in which the state provided for collective consumption (public services) via taxes, post-Fordism entails many of the opposite features, although one should be careful of simplistic dichotomies that disguise the similarities among these systems. Broadly speaking, however, as Fordist production has dispersed to the global periphery, post-Fordism has taken its place within the previously industrialized cores of Europe, Japan, and North America. The regime appeared, not accidentally, at the particular historical moment when the microelectronics revolution began to revolutionize manufacturing; indeed, the changes associated with the computerization of production in some respects may be seen as capitalists’ response to the crisis of profitability that accompanied the petrocrises and deindustrialization. Flexible production also reflected the imperative of firms to increase their productivity in the face of rapidly accelerating, intense international competition, particularly from East Asia. This transformation included structures of organization and management within firms and greater flexibility of relationships among customers, supplier firms, and assembly plants. In contrast to Fordism, flexible production allows goods to be manufactured cheaply, but in relatively small volumes as


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well as large ones, circumventing the critical role of economies of scale that favored large firms and oligopolies. In contrast to the large, vertically integrated firms typical of the Fordist economy, under flexible production firms tend to be relatively small, vertically disintegrated, relying on highly computerized production techniques to generate small batches of goods sold in relatively specialized markets. Microelectronics, in essence, obviated the need for economies of scale. Emphasis in the production system is placed on high quality, premium prices, and low error rates rather than large quantities of output and low prices. The classic technologies of post-Fordism include robots and just-in-time inventory systems (Linge 1991). The latter, developed by the Japanese shortly after World War II and pioneered by the Toyota Corporation (and hence sometimes called “Toyotaism”), obviated the need for large, expensive warehouses of parts (the “just-in-case” inventory system). Just-in-time refers to a method of organizing immediate manufacturing and supply relationships among companies to reduce inefficiency. Stages of the manufacturing process are completed exactly when needed, according to the market, not before and not later, and parts required in the manufacturing process are supplied with little storage or warehousing time. This system reduces idle capital and allows minimal investment so that capital can be used elsewhere. The manufacturing run proceeds only as far as the market demands, and inventories are very small and are only replenished to replace parts used downstream. Post-Fordist approaches to production came to dominate much of the electronics industry, automobiles, and the minimills of the steel industry. Flexible production is also closely associated with vertical disintegration and increased externalized subcontracting rather than “in-house” production. Under the relatively stable system afforded by Fordism, many vertically integrated firms produced their own parts, justifying the cost with economies of scale, which lowered their long-run average cost curves. Under postFordism, however, this strategy is no longer optimal: given the uncertainty generated by the rapid technological and political changes of the late twentieth century, many firms opted to “buy” rather than “make,” i.e., to purchase inputs from specialized companies. A large number of companies abandoned hierarchical, bureaucratic assembly-line (Fordist) processes and switched to customized, flexible, consumer-focused processes that can deliver personal service through niche markets at lower costs and faster speeds. In the process of widespread vertical disintegration, the use of subcontracts accelerated rapidly. This strategy reduces risk for the buyer by pushing it onto the subcontractor, who must invest in the capital and hire the necessary labor. As inter-firm linkages grew rapidly, many corporations found it useful to enter into cooperative agreements with one another (e.g., joint ventures). All of these changes reflect postmodern capitalism’s accelerated time-cycles of production, in which the duration from product development to sale on the market has been steadily reduced: in software, automobile parts, and mortgage approvals, for example. The rush is exemplified by the enormous popularity of overnight mail services such as Federal Express and UPS.

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The locational dynamics of production in post-Fordism are fundamentally different in many respects from those of large, Fordist oligopolies— specifically, economies of scale diminish and are replaced by an accentuated emphasis on co-location, trust, and agglomeration economies. In essence, the enhanced sets of linkages among firms characteristic of vertically disintegrated production systems propelled them to cluster near one another, creating pools of firms in which positive external economies may be generated. This transition led to the rise of dense urban networks of interactions, including many face-to-face linkages, ties that emphasized “non-economic” factors such as tacit knowledge, learning, reflexivity, conventions, expectations, trust, uncertainty, and reputation in the interactions of economic actors. Geographically, therefore, flexible production is closely associated with the dense concentrations of “high technology” firms in “learning regions” that emerged in the late twentieth century, including the stereotypical examples of California’s Silicon Valley, Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, Germany’s Baden-Württemberg, the Danish Jutland, and the British electronics complex centered on Cambridge (Storper 1992, 1997). Such complexes originate from and in turn are geographically constituted by dense webs of interfirm interactions, agglomeration economies, shared specialized information, and the pools of skilled talent critical to their production processes. Post-Fordist production systems, therefore, tend to take the form both of regional complexes of activity as well as dispersed transnational corporations. This point serves as a reminder that even within the most footloose and hypermobile of global economies, place still remains critical for many forms of production.

Moving people and goods through postmodern space The dramatically enhanced levels of mobility—for people, goods, and information—are not only central to the postmodern era but also define it. While place remains an enduring feature of contemporary social life, to an everincreasing extent the geographies of postmodernity are defined by mobilities, flows, and networks (Crang 2002; Larsen et al. 2006). For all the hyperbole about the end of geography and the death of distance, even in the most postmodern of worlds the stubborn need remains to shuttle commodities and people over vast stretches of the earth. However, like so many other sectors, transportation was thoroughly reworked by postmodern capitalism, which greatly improved the speed and efficiency of movement. For example, highspeed trains form a key part of inter-urban transit systems in densely populated, economically advanced countries with strong state backing (but not the U.S.), including the Japanese Shinkansen (“bullet trains”); France’s Trains à Grande Vitesse (TGV), which cover the 275 miles from Paris to Lyon in just two hours, operating at roughly 180 miles per hour; Germany’s Neubaustrecke (NBS); Spain’s Alta Velocidad Española (AVE); and the British Inter-City 125, which brought all of England within a few hours of London. With speeds up to 300 kph, such systems are competitive with air


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travel for distances up to 500 km. The driving force behind these systems has been primarily economic, particularly the need to shuttle well-paid executives among corporate offices (Hugill 1993). Not surprisingly, the heavy European emphasis on such systems was tied to the creation of a single internal market under the EU. High-speed trains invariably shrank the relative spaces between large cities by skipping over smaller intermediate nodes (Knowles 2006). Concomitantly, changes in air transportation unleashed geographies of centrality and peripherality, awarding significant competitive advantages to locations with optimal air accessibility (Cooke and Morgan 1998). As numerous observers have demonstrated, the structure and function of the world system’s urban hierarchy is intimately associated with global patterns of aviation, including the differential times and costs of flying among cities (Smith 2001). Improvements in maximum air velocities reached an apex with the Anglo-French Concorde, which, traveling at twice the speed of sound, made much of the world accessible to London within eight hours’ flight (Hugill 1993), but suffered economic and environmental costs that rendered it unprofitable. Air travel did not simply conquer distance by the improved speed of planes: rather, an entire social and technical infrastructure was deployed that facilitated movement, including international agreements on air space and air traffic control systems (Cresswell 2006). The geographies of aviation, and the associated relative patterns of accessibility they represent, were significantly reshaped by the wave of neoliberal deregulation, starting with the American market in 1978. As governments worldwide withdrew from the sector, airlines responded by resorting to huband-spoke patterns domestically and the use of partnerships internationally. Hubs owe their importance more to their strategic location within airline markets wherein customers must undertake circuitous journeys than they do to the size of their local market (Fleming and Hayuth 1994; Knowles 2006; Derudder et al. 2007). Such changes improved air service in many large, already well-connected hubs, but simultaneously generated “pockets of pain” in places that were marginalized or underserved by this process (Goetz 2002; Zook and Brunn 2006). Cresswell (2006) points out that airports both produce and are produced by global time-space compression, forming nodes that simultaneously regulate and facilitate the movement of bodies, and that within them move not only nomadic business elites who dominate the international economy but also vast numbers of others, such as workers, academics, tourists, immigrants, and refugees. As regulators of movement among countries that differentially codify ideologies of mobility, airports are a form of dispersed border in the postmodern age. While most large airports are in the U.S., given its huge domestic market (Table 5.1), internationally they connect commercial and financial centers; in contrast, most of the developing world is effectively absent from this pattern, testimony to its relatively marginal position within circuits of high value-added production. Improved long-distance flights were also important to the growth of global

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Table 5.1 World’s 20 largest airports, 2005 Airport

City

Country

Passengers (millions)

Hartsfield O’Hare Heathrow Haneda Dallas/Ft.Worth Charles de Gaulle Frankfurt McCarran Schiphol Denver Int’l Barajas Sky Harbor Capital JFK Check Lap Kok George Bush Bangkok Int’l Minneapolis/ St. Paul Wayne Co.

Atlanta Chicago London Tokyo Dallas Paris Frankfurt Las Vegas Amsterdam Denver Madrid Phoenix Beijing New York Hong Kong Houston Bangkok

U.S.A. U.S.A. U.K. Japan U.S.A. France Germany U.S.A. Netherlands U.S.A. Spain U.S.A. China U.S.A. China U.S.A. Thailand

85.9 76.8 67.9 63.3 59.1 53.6 52.2 44.3 44.2 43.3 41.9 41.2 41.0 40.6 40.3 39.7 39.0

Minneapolis Detroit

U.S.A. U.S.A.

37.6 36.4

Source: Airline Business 2006.

tourism and the ability of people to consume far-away places. Global tourism arrivals rose by 83 percent between 1990 and 2005—to 808 million people, or 15 percent of the planet—and receipts rose by 119 percent, making it the world’s largest industry in terms of employment. Easy access to far-away places inevitably commodified and homogenized them; as travel writer Pico Iyer (1995: 51) notes, “Mass travel has made L.A. contiguous to Seoul and adjacent to Sao Paulo, and has made all of them feel a little like bedroom communities for Tokyo.” The largest tourist market, Europe, greatly exceeded other regions (Table 5.2); however, growth in the less developed world was generally higher. Despite advances in land and air travel, maritime transportation remains unequaled in its capacity to carry freight cheaply over long distances. Maritime shipping, like virtually every other industry, has become firmly internationalized. Kumar and Huffmann (2002:36), for example, note that “A Greek owned vessel, built in Korea, may be chartered to a Danish operator, who employs Philippine seafarers via a Cypriot crewing agent, is registered in Panama, insured in the U.K., and transports German-made cargo in the name of a Swiss freight forwarder from a Dutch port to Argentina, through terminals that are concessioned to port operators from Hong Kong and Australia.” As shipping companies strove to realize ever-larger economies of scale, many ships exceed the capacities of the Panama and Suez canals, resulting in post-Panamax and post-Suezmax vessels, respectively. Because


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Table 5.2 International tourism arrivals, 2005 Millions Europe East Asia South Asia Oceania North America Central America Caribbean South America North Africa/Middle East Sub-Saharan Africa Total

441.6 128.2 8.0 10.1 90.1 6.5 18.1 16.2 49.1 20.7 808.0

Source: World Tourism Organization 2006.

they are unable to utilize these strategic waterways, the geography of maritime shipping has witnessed the growth of pendulum services over the Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans (Fleming and Hayuth 1994). The maximum speed of large ships, however, has remained relatively unchanged at 25 knots. Given the continued salience of shipping even in the age of digital capital, ports remain important interfaces between land- and water-based transportation, vital interfaces within global commodity chains that seamlessly integrate production, trade, and services (Robinson 2002; Panayides 2006). More recently, the industry has seen the introduction of just-in-time and door-to-door services, further expediting the velocity of shipment (Slack and Fremont 2005).

Obliterating earth space from outer space through satellites Satellites have long been a major means by which national sovereignty has been both extended and contested above the earth’s atmosphere, and at times they blur national borders by facilitating the international communication of information. While they are often depicted in technocratic terms, satellites are deeply embedded in terrestrial political relations: although satellites circulate in outer space, their origins and impacts occur very much on the ground. Access to satellite technology, for example, both mimics and reinforces terrestrial relations of wealth and power, and the regulation of international satellite traffic mirrors the changing power-geometries of states in the contemporary world-system. Starting with the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, satellites played a key role in the militarization of space during the cold war (DeVorkin 1992; Edwards 1996; Cloud 2001; Richelson 2001). The first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, was put into orbit one year later. In 1960, the CIA established the National Reconnaissance Office to operate an emerging satellite espionage

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capacity (Monmonier 2002). Perched high above the earth, satellites constitute what Poster (1990:121) calls a superpanopticon, “a system of surveillance without walls, windows, towers, or guards.” Throughout the cold war, satellites were instrumental in the discursive scripting of geographic space (Ó Tuathail 1996), its ideological construction within hegemonic modes of understanding shared by politicians, military planners, and the media that were typically infused with the indiscriminate “othering” of the communist foe. Gradually, civilian applications assumed an increasingly more important role in the satellite industry’s development. The major difference between military and civilian purposes involved the shift in emphasis from surveillance to communications; although the technology remains important in both respects for military purposes, in the civilian domain communications remains the dominant application. Large satellites capable of handling international traffic sit 35,700 km (22,300 miles) high in geostationary orbits, which are by far the most valuable orbital slots because only in that narrow sliver of space do satellites and the Earth travel at the same speed relative to each other, making the satellite a stable target for signals transmitted upward from earth stations (Frieden 1996). Because such orbital arcs are a scarce resource, their distribution is strictly controlled through international organizations (Hudson 1990; Hart 1991). From its vantage point, a broad-beam geostationary satellite can transmit to (i.e., leave a “footprint” over) roughly 40 percent of the earth’s surface, creating instantaneous time-space convergence, so that only three or four are sufficient to provide global coverage (Figure 5.1). Because the cost of satellite transmission is not related to distance, it is commercially competitive in rural or low-density areas (e.g., remote islands), where high marginal costs dissuade other types of providers such as fiber optics firms (Giget 1994; Goldstein 1998; Warf 2006). Postmodern capitalism, which relies on a series of telecommunications systems to bind spaces together, has led the industry to undergo sustained transformations as its economic and political prerogatives have shifted over time. For example, satellites allowed television companies to initiate satellite transmission of programs, ultimately leading to an explosion of satellite television at home in the 1990s (Inglis 1991). Today, satellites are deployed by telecommunications companies, multinational corporations, financial institutions, and the global media to link far-flung operations, including international data transmissions, telephone networks, teleconferencing, and sales of television and radio programs. Because the producers of satellite technology, and most of the industry’s users, are concentrated in Europe and North America, the production, transmission, and consumption of electronic discourses are inescapably intertwined with the Western domination of the global information infrastructure. For example, the world’s largest media companies rely heavily on communications satellites to provide a largely homogeneous diet of television and video programs around the world. This process of standardization has important repercussions for local and national forms of consciousness and subjectivity, valorizing some forms of identity


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Figure 5.1 Satellite footprints generate instantaneous time-space compression.

(predominantly Western ones) and devalorizing others. Appadurai (1996) views such phenomena as part of a global “mediascape” that interacts with other “scapes” to redefine the cultural geographies of global postmodernism. The unhampered flow of satellite traffic across national borders wreaks havoc with traditional notions of national sovereignty, an inevitable conflict that arises when signal footprints exceed the borders of a target country. As Achilleas (2002:37) notes, “Television by satellite involves high political and legal stakes because of two underlying principles long considered to be antinomic: freedom of information and sovereignty.” Similarly, Morley and Robins (1995:43) argue “satellite broadcasting threatens to undermine the very basis of present policies for the policing of national space.” States that seek to restrict imports of foreign media have typically found it impossible to assert national controls over global flows of information beamed from above. Such “externalities” point to the bleeding of the distinctions between foreign and domestic policy that communications technology has accelerated in a period of rapid globalization, and illustrate Agnew and Corbridge’s (1995) observation that the “power container” of the nation-state exhibits mounting “leakages” to and from the world-system. During the late twentieth century, the satellite industry underwent enormous changes, including: worldwide deregulation; mounting competition within the industry as well as with other information providers using different technologies; and rising numbers of corporate providers and applications as

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market-driven imperatives came to dominate. The stable regime of regulation governing the satellite industry during the post-war boom, dominated by the International Satellite Organization (Intelsat), gave way to a radically different one in the late twentieth century. Long the world’s premier provider of global satellite services, enjoying almost monopoly status, Intelsat has been faced with growing competition from national satellite systems erected by individual nations (e.g., Indonesia, India, Mexico, China, France, Turkey, and Thailand). A second source of competition came from private satellite companies. Given the high fixed costs and barriers to entry into the satellite industry, particularly launch costs, few private firms took early advantage of the openings provided by deregulation. However, as entry costs declined, the industry has become steadily commercialized (Achilleas 2002). The rise of private satellite carriers represents the intrusion of market imperatives in what had once been a sector aligned purely along the prerogatives of national security. Finally, the satellite industry as a whole has been besieged by mounting competition from fiber optics carriers (Giget 1994; Graham 1999; Warf 2006); due to the higher levels of security they offer, fiber optics are the mode of choice for large corporations for data and voice transmissions, and by financial institutions for electronic funds transfer systems. In light of these observations of how satellites and postmodern terrestrial political economy are shot through with one another, popular notions that telecommunications annihilate distance and render all places equally accessible may be dismissed immediately; despite claims that satellites provide equal levels of service over vast parts of the world’s surface, in practice access to this technology is highly unevenly distributed among and within countries. In short, satellites, whether military or corporate, do not simply reflect the world’s geopolitics, they are simultaneously constitutive of it, blurring the boundaries between earth and space, the global and the local, the public and the private.

The snowstorm of pixels: television With cinema and television, the phenomenon of the mass audience—first created with the printing press—reached its apex. Television became the first medium to stitch together the world as a collage of simultaneous sites and sounds divorced from their historical or geographical context. In most industrialized countries, the expansion of free time during the post-war boom was generally used to watch additional hours of television: by the 1960s, television had become the dominant use of leisure time in the industrialized West, and, increasingly, large parts of the developing world. Rising exponentially in numbers of viewers, television became near-universal, penetrating 98 percent or more of households in Europe, Japan, and North America. As Adams (1992:118) observes, “once people are able to acquire a television set, they use it with similar alacrity whether they live in Des Moines, Iowa or Kragujevac, Yugoslavia.” As Esslin (1982:54) put it, “Television is the one factor that


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practically all the individuals in this society have in common. It is the unifying substratum of experience.” In the U.S., for example, the average television is on more than six hours per day. Television proved to be more than up to the challenge of providing viewers with massive amounts of rapid, discontinuous information, with conveniences ranging from the remote control, introduced in the 1950s, to MTV and the VCR in the 1980s, to cable and satellite TV with hundreds of channels and digitized DVDs in the 1990s. By privatizing and individualizing entertainment, the rise of home-delivery media played an important role in the decline of public space (Oldenburg 1989; Postman 1992). In drawing the multitudes indoors, television helped to eclipse the public agora, deepening the bourgeois process of individualization and commodification. In privatizing leisure time, television offered “a ringside seat at the grand but impersonal spectacles of the world stage” (Marvin 1988:157), bringing mass audiences indoors and accelerating the long-standing trend toward the privatization of experience. As television became ubiquitous, the medium played an ever-larger role in daily life. Television news, religious services, and its role in covering elections, promoting celebrities, and entertaining children gave the technology enormous ideological power. As an enormous body of work has demonstrated, television powerfully structures everyday understandings by providing unrealistic role models, gender and ethnic stereotypes, promoting immediate gratification, short attention spans, and a “sound bite” mentality that encourages passive, not active learning, detracting from reading, schoolwork, and exercise (Esslin 1982; Kellner 1990; Elasmar 2002). The most vulnerable viewers are young children, for whom it is often difficult to distinguish fantasy and reality. The average U.S. child sees 18,000 murders by age 18, promoting a desensitization to violence, and 20,000 advertisements per year, which shape the social construction of wants and desires, facilitating the deep penetration of commodity relations into consciousness, and reproducing mass consumer culture in a manner no other medium can rival. For heavy viewers, television resembles a state of hypnosis. In short, television affects not just what people know, but equally important, how they know. The medium has spawned a large, often contradictory set of interpretations. For optimists such as McLuhan (1962), television, like other electronic media, formed the basis of uniting the “global village,” uniting disparate peoples through the power of the electronic message and destroying geographically based power imbalances. For others, it formed a “vast wasteland” (Esslin 1982:103), a banal, anti-intellectual, and mentally debilitating world that robbed viewers of their critical powers of intellect and cultivated values of ephemerality and superficiality. Williams (1974) maintains that this relationship is not one-way, pointing to how television and mass culture shaped one another in a recursive, dialectical relationship. For Gould et al. (1984), international exports of television shows were an important means of procuring and legitimating American cultural hegemony. And for yet others, television is the compelling model that other forms of social discourse must

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emulate; religion, politics, and education, for example, all were forced to become entertaining in order to draw adherents (Postman 1985). Meyrowitz (1985) cautions that the presence of television tends to blur social roles that formerly remained distinct, in particular as the masses glimpse the lifestyles of the elite. Similarly, Shields (1992) asserts that electronic media eliminate the illusion of nearness or distance, dissolving subjects’ sense of social and spatial proximity. Despite its origins during late modernity, television may be regarded as a distinctively postmodern medium by virtue of how it challenges modern emphases on linear rationality, contextual coherence, continuity of narrative, detached comprehensiveness, and objectivity (Romanyshyn 1993). In its place, television offers a surreal postliterate orality/aurality that floods the viewer with massive volumes of unstructured information, one in which local context is trivialized, the continuity of narratives is broken into incoherent, even random segments (e.g., a murder, then a fast-food advertisement), and the boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred to the point of nonexistence. Far from the unified Cartesian cogito, the television watcher lives in a waking dream of endless stimulation and distraction. Television serves as a narcotic to facilitate the ever-deeper penetration of the commodity into the passive mass of viewers, for whom sustained, critical, independent thought becomes ever more difficult. Harvey (1989a:61) notes that “Television is itself a product of late capitalism and, as such, has to be seen in the promotion of a culture of consumerism.” Geographically, television functions as an intangible “place” of shared experiences that entertains, informs, and motivates its viewers (Adams 1992), a community without propinquity in which the social and physical dimensions of life are detached from one another. Television’s instantaneous depiction of distant events often generated, albeit unintentionally, sympathetic bonds of responsibility, a role first evident during the Vietnam War, which injected the conflict directly into the living rooms of middle-class America. The first Gulf War in 1991 was covered live from both sides of the conflict, largely due to the role played by CNN, the Cable News Network (Virilio 1995, 1999). Thus, television is not simply a spectator in the creation of postmodern geographies, but an active participant, shaping the values and behaviors of billions of people worldwide. As Lyotard (1984) emphasized, the proliferation of electronic information forms an integral part of the disintegration of centralized political and philosophical perspectives, the death of grand sweeping metanarratives. Baudrillard (1994) suggests that this process coincides with the emergence of postmodern capitalism, in which images displace proximity as the source of discursive authority.

The seductive worlds of postmodern consumption As an integral part of capitalism, consumption of course has a long and important history. Indeed, the bourgeois ethic, with its emphasis on acquisition and


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profit, lies at the heart of the cultural and ideological hegemony of capitalism (Stearns 2001). Historically, the rise of mass production, particularly during incipient Fordism in the late nineteenth century, was accompanied by advertising and mass consumption as well as the broader notion of the consumerist society. Thorsten Veblen, for example, analyzed the “conspicuous consumption” of the leisure class as a display of wealth and status within the context of the profligate spending by the rich during the Golden Age of robber barons. Walter Benjamin (1969) initiated an insightful tradition concerned with the semiotics of the commodity and its potential to narcotize consumers (Buck-Morss 1993). Similarly, the Frankfurt School of critical theorists focused on how consumption legitimated or smoothed over the inequalities and contradictions of capitalism, integrating a working class into a society fundamentally structured against its best interests. Such lines of thought demonstrate the powerful ideological and cultural impacts of consumption, its relations to identity and status, which are far greater than simply the Marxist realization of use values or the simplistic neoclassical economic maximization of utility. Under postmodern capitalism, insatiable consumerism plays a central important role in binding time and space together (Featherstone 1991). The power of consumption as an economic and cultural process has been greatly fueled by an ever-more aggressive advertising industry and credit card companies which have penetrated demographic markets previously considered uncreditworthy (Manning 2000). In a world in which the most precious commodity is individual time (Nowotny 1994), no opportunity to grab the attention of the consumer can be wasted. Increased levels of consumption may not purchase happiness (De Graaf et al. 2001), but for many, shopping carries the perpetual promise of entertainment, funneling non-material needs into the commodity and collapsing the field of social obligations into the self. Armed with the Internet, and with efficient chains of franchises to choose from, consumption has become for many people the most important activity in life. Yet as Baudrillard (1994) and others have pointed out, postmodern consumption is not simply motivated by advertising, aesthetics, and images, but consists of the consumption of images themselves. The result is a ubiquitous postmodern identity as consumers, in which the self is defined primarily through the commodity, which typically takes precedence over that as producers, rendering mobilization around issues of class and labor deeply problematic. Globally, of course, consumer culture lies at the cutting edge of commodity relations as they penetrate ever-more deeply into various social formations around the world, appealing to the young with promises of status, fun, sex, and power (Ritzer 2000), forming the leading edge of Western globalization. Consumerism’s triumph is contingent and spatially uneven, but almost no society today successfully resists its allure. Often equated with American culture, consumerism in the form of television and movies, fashion, and fast

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food (Schlosser 2001) has united vast swaths of the world under the common umbrella of materialism, homogenizing once-diverse tastes and preferences to an unprecedented degree. Far more than politics, consumption in most economically advanced societies (and, increasingly, in the developing world) provides an escape, a sense of fulfillment, and a source of identity for billions of earth’s inhabitants. Like all processes, consumption and consumerism are spatialized at multiple scales, ranging from the body (Valentine 1999) to the actor-network chains that unite consumers and producers over vast distances in the global economy (Hartwick 1998). Central to the rise of postmodern consumption is its geography, in which shoppers share the physical spaces of consumption (stores, malls, resorts, etc.) without significant social interaction with one another. Spaces of consumption thus tend to reinforce the long-standing bourgeois trend toward individualism and thwart the possibilities for collective action. Perhaps no locale more powerfully exemplifies the power of postmodern consumption than does the shopping mall (Goss 1993). In societies with considerable free time and disposable incomes, shopping malls are a significant form of participation in public life, the postmodern equivalent to the agora. The mall is a powerful semiotic system of signification that effectively severs the commodity from its social origins. Shopping malls are carefully engineered spaces strategically designed to seduce the consumer by various means (e.g., the use of previously noncommodified environments such as historic districts or nature). This logic reaches its apex in enormous megamalls such as the West Edmonton mall (Hopkins 1990) or Minnesota’s famous Mall of America (Goss 1999). Like Disneyland, the landscapes of postmodern consumption are a pastiche or simulacrum that on the surface project an aura of innocence and authenticity but insidiously invite or sustain a faith that consumption is a panacea that will impart status, happiness, and sexual appeal. In collapsing the world’s spaces and times, postmodern retail places form the endpoint for vast commodity chains that extend across the planet, suturing producers and consumers into seamless wholes, and hiding the social relations of production within the glossy spaces of the commodity.

Telecommunications and the hypermobility of financial capital A common perspective on postmodern geographies is that telecommunications entails “the end of geography,” a popular claim asserted by writers such as O’Brien (1992) and Cairncross (1997). For Virilio (1995:35), telecommunications represent the latest and ultimate chapter of the long history of velocity: “With acceleration there is no more here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal—a mix of history, stories, and the hallucinatory utopia of communication technologies.” Such views hinge upon a simplistic, utopian technological determinism that ignores the complex, mutually transformative relations between telecommunications and local economic, social, and political circumstances. For


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example, repeated predictions that telecommunications would allow everyone to work at home via telecommuting, dispersing all functions and spelling the obsolescence of cities, fell flat in the face of the persistent growth in densely inhabited urbanized places and global cities, in which face-to-face contact is essential. Urry (2002) maintains that telecommunications can never effectively substitute for the co-presence offered by face-to-face contact, a prerequisite for intimate social ties. He asserts that “networked relationships are conducted at a distance, so encountering, visiting and seeing network members face-to-face is crucial” (2003:162). Indeed, the rise of a global telecommunications-based services economy may have actually increased rather than decreased the need for face-to-face contact: as oceans of ceaselessly circulating data wash over global cities, the interpretive ability to extract meaning from them becomes ever more pressing (Thrift and Leyshon 1994). Thus, popular notions that telecommunications will render geography meaningless are naïve. While the costs of communications have decreased dramatically, as they did with transportation, other factors have risen in importance, including local regulations, the cost and skills of the local labor force, government policies, and infrastructural investments. Telecommunications constitute an integral part of global post-Fordism. The ability to transmit vast quantities of information in real time over the planet is crucial to what Schiller (1999) calls digital capitalism. No large corporation could operate today in multiple national markets simultaneously, coordinating the activities of thousands of employees within highly specialized corporate divisions of labor, without access to sophisticated channels of communications. In the postmodern era, the exploding demand for high bandwidth communications has been a major force behind the growth of the international communications infrastructure. The rapid escalation in the supply and demand of telecommunications was propelled by a convergence of several factors, including: dramatic cost declines in information-processing technologies induced by the microelectronics revolution; the increasingly information-intensive nature of commodity production in general (necessitating ever-larger volumes of technical data and related inputs on financing, design and engineering, marketing and so forth); the spatial separation of production activities in different nations through globalized subcontracting networks; decreases in price and the high and income-elasticities of demand for communications; the birth of new electronic information services (e.g., on-line databases and electronic mail); the high levels of uncertainty that accompanied the international markets of the late twentieth century and still do today, to which the analysis of large volumes of data is a strategic response; national and worldwide deregulation; and the persistent vertical disintegration that constitutes a fundamental part of post-Fordist production regimes around the world (Warf 1995). The core of the global telecommunications infrastructure is a seamless network of fiber optics lines (Graham 1999). While satellites are ideal for point-to-area distribution networks common in the mass media, fiber optic

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lines are preferable for point-to-point communications, especially when security is of great concern, due to the great redundancy they offer. Because the implementation of fiber lines reflects the powerful vested interests of international capital, these systems may be seen quite literally as “powergeometries” (Massey 1993) that ground the space of flows within concrete material and spatial contexts. The geography of global fiber networks centers primarily upon two distinct telecommunications markets crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, connecting the three major engines of the world economy, Europe, North America, and East Asia (Figure 5.2). In 1988, a consortium of firms initiated the world’s first trans-oceanic fiber optic cable across the Atlantic, a pattern identical to that of the early telegraph and telephone (Hugill 1999). Similarly, starting in 1989, a growing web of transPacific lines mirrored the growing East Asian trade with North America. In 1997, several firms opened the self-healing Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe (FLAG), a 27,300 kilometer cable connecting Asia and Europe, the world’s longest submarine telecommunications network. The industry also constructed regional systems in Asia, such as the 12,000 kilometer Asia-Pacific Cable Network, and the Caribbean Fiber System. No industry was more affected by these changes than finance. Of course, the mounting mobility of financial capital did not spring up overnight, but reflects deep historical roots that go back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In the context of post-Fordism, Harvey (1989a:164) notes that Flexible accumulation evidently looks more to finance capital as its coordinating power than did Fordism. This means that the potentiality for the formation of independent and autonomous monetary and financial crises is much greater than before, even though the financial system is better able to spread risks over a broader front and shift funds rapidly from failing to profitable enterprises, regions, and sectors. Much of the flux, instability, and gyrating can be directly attributed to this enhanced capacity to switch capital flows around in ways that seem almost oblivious of the constraints of time and space that normally pin down material activities of production and consumption. Financial and producer services firms were at the forefront of the construction of fiber networks in large part because they allowed the deployment of electronic funds transfer systems, which comprise the nervous system of the international financial economy, allowing banks to move capital around at a moment’s notice, arbitrage interest rate differentials, take advantage of favorable exchange rates, and avoid political unrest (Langdale 1991; Warf 1995). Such networks give banks an ability to move money around the globe at stupendous rates: subject to the process of digitization, information and capital become two sides of the same coin. Liberated from gold, traveling at the speed of light, as nothing but digital assemblages of zeros and ones, global money performs a syncopated electronic dance around the world’s neural

Figure 5.2 The global fiber optic network, 2005.

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networks in astonishing volumes. In this context, finance capital is not simply mobile, it is hypermobile. The hypermobile world is one in which capital moves in a continual surge of speculative investment that never materializes in physical, tangible goods. The world’s currency markets, for example, trade more than $1 trillion every day, dwarfing the $25 billion that changes hands daily to cover global trade in goods and services. Disembedded from place, financial capital operates with an agility and speed that defies even the most quick-footed of state institutions. National borders mean little in this context: it is far easier to move $1 billion from New York to Tokyo than a truckload of grapes from California to Arizona (Kurtzman 1993). In the securities markets, global telecommunications systems facilitated the emergence of 24 hour/day trading, linking stock markets through computerized trading programs. As Gregory (1994:381) puts it, “the hypermobility of finance capital has set in motion waves of time-space compression of unprecedented intensity.” Telecommunications also threaten the agglomerative advantages of large, dense urban regions, particularly the cost and uncertainty reductions accomplished through face-to-face communications. The National Association of Security Dealers Automated Quotation system (NASDAQ), for example, has emerged as the world’s largest stock market; unlike the New York, London, or Tokyo exchanges, NASDAQ lacks a trading floor, connecting millions of traders worldwide electronically (Figure 5.3). Similarly, Paris, Belgium, Spain, Vancouver, and Toronto all recently abolished their trading floors in favor of screen-based trading. Such events point to the relatively short— and decreasing—time horizons within which places may enjoy comparative advantages. The changing industrial structure of telecommunications is central to understanding the politics of postmodern time-space compression. Across the planet, deregulation, privatization, and new communications technologies

Figure 5.3 Annual number of shares traded on NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange, 1975–2001.


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generated a worldwide market for media services in which a few giants have established powerful distribution and production networks (Schiller 1999). As the process of oligopolization has transformed telecommunications, a cartel of very large providers has come to dominate the globe’s media and information sectors. Today, a handful of giants such as AOL Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, and Vivendi dominate global media and telecommunications. As ownership in many countries has become concentrated in a handful of powerful media barons, the content of mass media has been affected significantly, with important consequences for consumers and society at large. Because the leading giants originate disproportionately in the U.S., corporate commercialism of the media is likely to enhance the hegemony of American culture around the world, already a key feature of the global economy. The political implications of this process are disturbing: the maintenance of an independent, critical perspective among the media may well be threatened by the steady oligopolization and associated globalization of the industry. Barber (1995:123) notes that “A free and democratic society depends on competition of ideas and heterogeneity of outlets,” yet the number of such outlets has declined as the industry has become concentrated in the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of media moguls. McChesney (1999:14) points out that under such circumstances, “Consumerism, class inequality and individualism tend to be taken as natural and even benevolent, whereas political activity, civic values and anti-market activities are marginalized.” In societies in which a diversity of voices is critical to the political process, consolidation of the media is no friend to participatory democracy (McChesney 2001). Habermas (1979, 1989) argued persuasively that communications are central to the social process of consensus and truth construction, through which individuals and communities of interest partake in the public, discursive interpretation of reality. Habermas’s “ideal speech situation” consisting of unfettered discourse is central to the “public sphere” in which social life is constructed and reproduced and through which truth is constructed in the absence of barriers to communication. In this reading, all participants in a debate would theoretically have equal rights and abilities to make their views known and to challenge any other view; when all power relations have been removed from the freedom to engage in discourse, the only criteria for resolving contesting claims is their truth-value. And, importantly, “the participants in an ideal speech situation [must] be motivated solely by the desire to reach a consensus about the truth of statements and the validity of norms” (Bernstein 1995:50). Habermas theorized that the bourgeois public sphere, the space between the state and everyday life in civil society that arose with the growth of industrial capitalism and the Enlightenment, has become dominated by large corporations, while citizens were largely reduced to spectators and consumers of goods (see Kellner 1979, 1990). To the extent that democratic discourse requires a diversity of voices, as indicated by Habermas’s notion of an ideal speech situation, media oligopolization is inherently and

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inescapably anti-democratic. The maintenance of an independent, critical perspective among the media, particularly regarding corporate power, is threatened by the steady oligopolization of the industry. Worse, corporate media giants are highly unlikely to espouse any critical political views that offer meaningful challenges to the established social order. Far from constituting some utopian domain of free speech, therefore, as early technocrats predicted, corporate concentration of telecommunications, the media, and the Internet may well reinforce and deepen social polarities (Warf 2007).

Global cities as motors of postmodern time-space compression In defiance of predictions that digital technologies would render urban areas obsolete, postmodern globalization also witnessed a resurgence of “global cities” at different levels of the international urban hierarchy (Sassen 1991). Such places are tied through vast tentacles of investment, trade, migration, and telecommunications to clients and markets, suppliers and competitors, consumers and producers around the world. Global cities serve as the home to massive complexes of financial firms, producer services, and corporate headquarters, or “command and control” centers in the world system. Typically, the trio of London, New York, and Tokyo is positioned at the top, with cascading layers demarcated by successively smaller roles in the world economy, including cities such as Paris, Frankfurt, Toronto, Los Angeles, Osaka, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Beaverstock et al. 2000). The core of such conglomerations allow for dense networks of interaction necessary to the performance of headquarters functions, including: monitoring frequent changes in niche product markets; negotiating with labor unions; keeping abreast of new technologies and government regulations; keeping an eye on the competition; staying tuned to an increasingly complex financial environment; initiating or resisting leveraged buy-outs and hostile takeovers; seeking new investment opportunities, and so forth. Because their raison d’être cannot be reduced to the “economic,” but includes a vast variety of formal and informal cultural and political interactions such as tourism, the media, and fashion industries, global cities are more than simply poles for the production of corporate knowledge (Knox 1995). The crux of global cities’ role in the post-Fordist world economy is to serve as arenas of interaction, allowing face-to-face contact, political connections, artistic and cultural activities, and the easy mingling of elites (Thrift 1994b; Budd 1999). At their core, global cities allow the generation of specialized expertise upon which so much of the world economy depends (Howells 1990). Rather than simple structural outcomes of the worldwide division of labor, global cities are contingent social constructs constructed and maintained by actors (Smith 1998). The functionality of global cities can be understood by invoking the well-known distinction between explicit (or standardized) and tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1967). Explicit knowledge refers to standardized forms of


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information that are easily transmitted from one person to another, including quantitative data, publicly known rules and standards, and orderly records. Explicit knowledge is designed to be as free as possible from its context and easy to transmit over time and space, and involves operating rules to make it applicable to a wide array of environments, such as blueprints and operating manuals. As such, explicit knowledge is relatively easy to obtain and generates comparatively little in terms of value-added. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, includes information that is unstandardized, changes rapidly, and is often not written down (Gertler 1995, 2003). Tacit knowledge is heavily context-dependent and subject to informal rules of organization that make it difficult to transmit from one situation to another, including gossip, oral histories, and invisible corporate cultures. Much tacit knowledge involves the symbolic manipulation of information in ways that lead to corporate learning and innovation, a feature that makes it of great value to firms. It tends to circulate only within narrow social and geographical channels with a limited spatial range, and to have a small degree of fungibility, i.e., substitutability in different contexts. Expertise of this type takes years to develop and involves the acquisition of highly specialized knowledge from diverse sources. Often such information is collected informally, over lunches, drinks, and dinners, in the locker rooms of sports clubs, on golf courses, and through a variety of social and cultural events. Face-to-face contact and tacit knowledge is thus essential to the performance of actors in non-routine functions. Allen (2000), however, warns against this simple dichotomy in favor of a more subtle gradation between the two poles. Despite the ability of telecommunications to transmit information instantaneously over vast distances, face-to-face contact remains the most efficient and effective means of obtaining and conveying irregular forms of information, particularly when it is highly sensitive in nature. The early literature on office contact patterns (Kutay 1986), for example, revealed how difficult it is to substitute electronic contacts for personal ones. In the context of face-toface meetings, actors monitor one another’s intentions and behavior through observations of body language and include handshakes and eye contact, which are essential to establishing relations of trust and mutual understanding. Such interactions are simply not viable via telecommunications. As a sizable body of literature concerned with New York and London has demonstrated (Mollenkopf and Castells 1991; Budd and Whimster 1992; Longcore and Rees 1996), the elites of global cities rely heavily on interpersonal contacts saturated with trust and reciprocity to “get things done” (see Maskell 1999; Maskell and Malmberg 1999). Assets such as thick networks of interpersonal ties, with all of the issues of trust and external economies of scale that they embody, are very difficult to reproduce in other contexts, an observation that goes far to explain why the primacy of global cities such as Amsterdam, London, and New York has changed little over the last 500 years. In fact, telecommunications are a notoriously poor substitute for faceto-face meetings, the medium through which sensitive corporate interactions

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occur, particularly when the information involved is irregular, proprietary, and unstandardized in nature. Most managers spend the bulk of their working time engaged in face-to-face contact, such as in meetings, and no electronic technology can yet allow for the subtlety and nuances critical to such encounters (Storper and Venables 2004). Indeed, financial and business services firms not only pay high rents to be near city centers, and endure the severe congestion such locations often entail, but spend lavishly to fly their executives around the world to meet with their counterparts in person. Even electronic conferencing has been unable to substitute for direct personal contact. In this vein, McDowell and Court (1994a, 1994b) showed that gender is important to the performativity of actors engaged in the provision of financial services in London, which largely hinge on the networks of trust among white businessmen, a process in which the appearance and behavior of actors is critical to the reproduction both of global banking systems and the City’s premier position within them. Gender roles thus cemented relations among male actors and worked to marginalize the attempts of women to “break into the club.” Such a line of thought does not collapse the importance of regional production systems to the socio-psychology of individuals; on the other hand, as the literatures on flexible production and actor-network theory demonstrate, neither can the functionality of large agglomerative complexes exist without precisely those types of interactions. For this reason, a century of technological change, from the telephone to fiber optics, has left most high-wage, white collar, administrative command and control functions clustered in downtown areas. In contrast, telecommunications are ideally suited for the transmission of routinized, standardized forms of data, facilitating the dispersal of functions involved with their processing (i.e., back offices) to low-wage regions. Global cities thus “fold” space and time around the world to their advantage; they are simultaneously global and local, as actor-network theory suggests. Murdoch (1998: 362) notes that this view “directs our attention to the means by which scale becomes defined within particular networks. Spatial scales are marked out and distinguished in line with the priorities for action which prevail within networks.” Jones (2002) offers an insightful critique of the global cities thesis, noting that it tends to oversimplify the nature of corporate command and control functions by privileging physical location over networks, i.e., by focusing on the concentration of head offices. Rather, he argues (p. 343), corporate power is wielded throughout the networks of international firms: “to use physical locations as an epistemological framework for theorizing command and control is to a large extent arbitrary and obfuscates the socially constituted complexity of managerial power within the transnational firm.” The corporate decision-making process is deeply embedded in various layers of the firm, including localized forms of knowledge not available at headquarters, and is often a negotiated outcome of groups involved in constant interaction with one another. Thus, by refocusing attention on the social practices that constitute multinational firms,


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actor-network theory has led the global cities literature to become more sensitive to issues of power and scale. In this light, all cities are global cities in that they are all enveloped in worldwide networks of goods, people, capital, and information.

The globalization of low value added services One feature of postmodern geographies is the persistent decentralization of low wage, low value added services to the world’s periphery, which may be demonstrated through three sectoral studies of back offices, call centers, and offshore banks, all of which comprise different facets of one underlying process. Despite the differences among these industries, they all are essentially concerned with the processing of standardized information; they all rely heavily on telecommunications networks, particularly fiber optic lines; all use unskilled labor, particularly women; and all of them have decentralized to low wage, less regulated parts of the planet. Because they necessitate both human actors (e.g., data entry operators) and nonhuman ones (e.g., extensive computer equipment), these systems also exemplify actor-networks, albeit a very different kind than that found in global cities. In contrast to the enduring geographies of high value added services, in which global cities retain their hegemony for decades or centuries, the geographies of standardized services change at warp speed as global capital pits places against one another in a neoliberal world economy. Far from resembling the skilled headquarters functions typically clustered in global cities, back offices involve a variety of routine clerical jobs that revolve largely around data entry, including payroll and billing records, bank checks, insurance claims, hospital records, airline tickets, and magazine subscriptions. These types of data exemplify standardized information par excellence, with geographic and social context mattering little or not at all. Back office tasks utilize unskilled or semi-skilled labor, primarily women, and typically operate on a 24-hour-per-day basis. Because the inputs are sent directly by the client, often by airplane, back offices have few of the interfirm linkages associated with headquarters activities. The primary locational requirements are reliable electricity, computer facilities, and high capacity telecommunications networks. Historically, back offices are located adjacent to headquarters activities in downtown areas, often in the same building, a proximity necessary to ensure close management supervision and rapid turnaround of information. However, increasingly freed from this constraint by the introduction of digital communications systems, large service firms—particularly those facing acute competitive pressures under deregulations, such as banks and airlines— began to uncouple their back offices by relocating them to lower-cost locations on the urban periphery, often to avail themselves of pliable suburban female labor forces. At a broader scale, many American firms began to relocate their back offices out of large metropolitan areas (Warf 1993),

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leaving New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles for small towns in the South and Midwest. On an even broader stage, by using satellites and the rapidly expanding network of transoceanic fiber optic lines, back offices have “gone global” as banks, airlines, and insurance companies seek to minimize their production costs by relocating to the developing world. Ireland, for example, has benefited considerably from the relocation of New York-based firms there. Airplanes containing documents to be entered into computers are unloaded at Shannon Airport and transported by Federal Express to back offices in small towns employing young, female workers. In the Caribbean, likewise, back offices sprouted up as American Airlines established dataprocessing centers in Barbados, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic (Warf 1995; Mullings 1999). In each case, the operations involve hybrid mixtures of local and global elements that are so thoroughly intertwined that separating them is impossible. Back offices are “glocalized,” and the actor-networks that comprise them cross spatial scales with abandon (cf. Latham 2002). A second form of low wage, low value added services involves call centers (Belt et al. 2000), offices that place or receive high volumes of calls for commercial purposes such as sales, marketing, customer service, telemarketing, technical support, or other specialized business activities. Call centers range greatly in size, from as few as five to as many as several thousand employees. Like back offices, call centers do not require proximity to clients. The major cost consideration is labor, although the workforce consists primarily of lowskilled women, and high turnover rates are common. They are thus the epitome of a footloose industry, disembedded from their local milieu and highly mobile. Like back offices, call centers have become increasingly globalized. India, for example, has attracted a significant number of customer service centers near its software capital of Bangalore, where workers are trained to speak with the U.S. dialect of English and are able to gossip with customers about pop culture (Waldman 2003). Wages there are higher than average Indian salaries but are only 10 percent of what equivalent jobs pay in the U.S. Call centers form nodes in actor-networks that include First World firms, Third World workers, telephone networks, clients, and information flows that are simultaneously global and local. The Indian example illustrates this multi-scalar nature: a Bangalore operator speaking to a British customer calling for help with an American software program all comprise parts of one integrated topology that erases the convenient closures afforded by conventional geographies of the nation-state. A third instance of the peripheralization of relatively capital-intensive, routinized services is offshore banking (Cobb 1998; Warf 2002). Roberts (1994) identified five major world clusters of offshore finance, including the Caribbean (e.g., the Cayman Islands, Bahamas, Panama); Europe (the Isle of Man, Jersey, and microstates on the Continent); the Middle East (Cyprus, Lebanon, and particularly Bahrain); Southeast Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore); and the south Pacific (Vanuatu, Nauru). Such places provide commercial investment services (i.e., loans and advice), foreign currency trades, asset


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protection (insurance), investment consulting, international tax planning, and trade finance (e.g., letters of credit). Employment in offshore banking is relatively capital-intensive when compared to the labor-intensive headquarters in global cities: for example, in the Cayman Islands, the world’s largest center of offshore finance, Roberts (1995) notes that 1,000 foreign banks employ only 538 people; most are “brass plate” or shell banks. The high degree of capital intensity in this case speaks to the hybrid nature of offshore banks, which combine computers, software, buildings, and an occasional worker to form actor-networks that vary from place to place. Conventional geographic preoccupations with proximity mean little in this case, for the topologies of global offshore finance are formed and deformed in ways that the language of location theory cannot capture. Due to globalization and the Internet, distant countries are now just a mouse-click away. Rather, it is the political economy of actor-networks in question that is central to the evolving spatial distribution of the low value-added segment of the global service economy. Offshore centers are the “black holes” in the global topography of financial regulation, a status that emanates directly from the enhanced ability of large financial institutions to shift funds electronically to take advantage of lax regulations, freedom from taxes and currency controls, and other restrictions to be found on the periphery of the global financial system. As the technological barriers to moving money have fallen, allowing digital money to circulate at will, legal and regulatory ones have increased in importance. As Harvey (2001a) emphasizes, globalization does not eliminate local differences, it accentuates them. Even relatively minor differences in regulations concerning corporate taxes or repatriated profits may attract or repel large quantities of capital, causing it to enter, or exit, particular places. Hudson (2000) argues that offshore banking is redefining national sovereignty, uncoupling political and financial control from the territories that long held sway over financial institutions. Offshore banking centers have long suffered from the cloud of suspicion that they constitute little more than havens for tax evasion and moneylaundering of illicitly obtained funds. As electronic money has come to dominate global finance, the use of offshore banking centers for illegitimate purposes has grown apace. Indeed, just as large corporations can use the Internet and fiber optics to move funds from place to place, so can actors in the “dark side” of the global economy, including tax evaders, drug cartels, arms traffickers, terrorists, and corrupt government officials. Given that they often occupy the boundary between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” financial activity, a key issue in the success or failure of offshore banking centers is the degree of confidentiality that investors feel they can obtain. Indeed, the investment reliability of offshore banking centers is often judged by the quality of laws protecting the privacy. The use of shell companies, including holding corporations and increasingly, foundations, blurs legal lines of liability, keeping insurance rates low, and protecting assets (both legal and otherwise) from public scrutiny through deliberately impenetrable webs of

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cross-ownership that typically deflect even the most dogged of auditors. Thus, despite the putatively aspatial nature of electronic money and the extreme fungibility of electronic financial capital, place still matters in the geography of offshore banking in the forms of locally embedded local policies. What do back offices, call centers, and offshore banks have in common? Information and services in these activities is also embodied in actor-networks, but in a very different manner and to a very different degree than that found in global cities. Precisely because such functions rely on standardized, highly fungible sorts of information, or Polanyi’s (1967) explicit knowledge, they can be disembedded from local cultures. Such low-wage, unskilled tasks can be switched easily from one locale to another, leaving these places vulnerable to the demands of firms. The labor force of such operations utilizes docile women who are never engaged in contacts with clients or suppliers. Thus, standardized services tend to be vertically integrated. As world-systems advocates have long maintained (Wallerstein 1979; Chase-Dunn 1989; Shannon 1996), one of the key differences between the world’s core and its periphery is the presence of free versus unfree labor, the former characterized by relatively high wages and better working conditions. In this respect, back offices and call centers represent the plantations of the global service economy.

The Internet, or, the network of networks that annihilated space Among the various networks that comprise the nation’s and world’s telecommunications infrastructure, the largest, most famous, and most influential is undoubtedly the Internet, an unregulated electronic network connecting an estimated one billion people in more than 150 countries in 2005 (Warf 2006). The Internet allows users to transcend distance almost instantaneously, generating total time-space compression. It is, perhaps, the quintessential symbol of postmodern capitalism: electronic, globalized, and rapidly evolving. From its military origins in the U.S. in the 1960s, the Internet emerged upon a global scale through the integration of existing telephone, fiber optic, and satellite systems (Rosenzweig 1998). The ability to send and receive files from different networks was made possible by the technological innovation of packet switching and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) technology, in which individual messages may be decomposed, the constituent parts transmitted by various channels, and then reassembled, virtually instantaneously, at the destination. Spurred by declining prices of services and equipment, the Internet grew worldwide at stupendous rates, the number of users doubling roughly every year, making it the most rapidly diffusing technology in history (Figure 5.4). The growth of the Internet was fueled in part by graphical interfaces such as the World Wide Web, which permits the integration of multimedia with hypertext links in a single platform, generating a global, interactive web of webs. Popular access systems such as America On-Line allow any individual with a microcomputer and modem to “plug in” to cyberspace.


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Figure 5.4 Growth of Internet hosts worldwide, 1981–2006.

The social and economic impacts of cyberspace include a varieties of corporate activities often lumped together under the term e-commerce, which includes both business-to-business transactions as well as those linking firms to their customers (Brunn and Leinbach 2001; Freund and Weinhold 2002). For many corporations, information technology lowered transaction costs, accelerating information flows within and among firms. One important version of ecommerce concerns electronic data interchange (EDI) systems, which are generally used in business-to-business contacts. Common uses of EDI include up-to-date advertising, online product catalogues, the sharing of sales and inventory data, submissions of purchase orders, contracts, invoices, payments, delivery schedules, product updates, and labor recruitment. Within a decade of its birth, the Internet and Web threatened every type of traditional information and media provider, from bookstores to television companies, from newspapers to film producers. Electronic publishing has been extended to e-books and e-magazines, which unlike printed text can be complemented with sound and graphics. Other services offer Internet searches of databases and classified advertisements. E-commerce transformed the Internet from a communications to a commercial system, widening commodity chains and accelerating the pace of customer orders, procurement, production, and product delivery. For consumers, shopping by the Internet requires only electronic access and a credit card, and allows effortless comparison shopping. On-line retail shopping, or “e-tailing,” has grown exponentially, particularly for large firms (e.g., WalMart) and given birth to entirely virtual stores such as Amazon.com. The higher levels of competition that the Internet facilitated have reduced costs significantly. Shoppers using the Internet tend to be above-average in income and relatively well educated. A particularly successful application has been in the travel reservation and ticketing business, where Web-based purchases of hotel rooms and airline seats have caused a steady decline in the number of travel agents. However, Internet advertising has proven to be difficult, in part because the Internet reaches numerous specialized markets

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rather than mass audiences. Web-based banking experienced slow growth (even though it is considerably cheaper for banks than automatic teller machines), as have Internet-based bill payments, mortgages, and insurance. Internet-based sales of stocks comprise 15 percent of all trades. Indeed, despite predictions that “click and order” shopping would eliminate “brick and mortar” stores, e-tailing has been slow to catch on, however, comprising only a fraction of total U.S. retail sales, perhaps because it lacks the emotional content of shopping. Another version of e-commerce concerns universities, many of which have invested heavily in Web-based distance learning courses. Although such programs are designed to attract nonlocal and nontraditional students, many of whom may not be able to take lecture-based courses in the traditional manner, they also reflect the mounting financial constraints and declining public subsidies that many educational institutions face, which may see distance learning as a means of attracting additional students, and tuition at relatively low marginal costs. Distance learning has provoked fears that it accelerates the corporatization of academia, while others have questioned whether the chat rooms upon which it relies heavily as part of its delivery system are an effective substitute for the face-to-face teaching and learning that classrooms offer. Many of the Internet’s uses revolve around entertainment, personal communications, research, downloading files, and online video games (Wark 1995; Shields 1996; Crang et al. 1999). Webcasting, or broadcasts over the Internet (typically of sports or entertainment events), demands high-bandwidth capacity but comprises a significant share of Internet traffic today. Downloading of music files and films has become a big business, raising corporate concerns over intellectual property rights. Internet-based telephony (VOIP, e.g., Skype) has grown rapidly. The widespread popularity of e-mail indicates that asynchronous communication is often preferable to the constant mutual monitoring involved in synchronous dialogue. The extremely low cost of e-mail has generated copious quantities of “spam” e-mail (unwanted commercial messages), which constitute an ever-larger, and increasingly annoying, share of e-mail traffic (by some estimates as high as 75 percent). In the age in which social life is increasingly mediated through computer networks, including extensive use of e-mail and the World Wide Web, the reconstruction of interpersonal relations around the digitized spaces of cyberspace is of the utmost significance. However, the fact that cybercontacts differ qualitatively from face-to-face ones serves as a useful reminder that telecommunications change not only what we know about the world, but also how we know and experience it. The Internet is also a political arena in which numerous, diverse positions are articulated and contend with one another. Cyberpolitics mirrors those of its nonelectronic counterparts, although the boundaries between the two realms are increasingly fuzzy. Web-logs, or “blogs,” for example, have become increasingly important sources of personal, social, and political commentary,


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alternatives to the mainstream media and a voice for independent views that widened the domain of popular political participation. While hegemonic powers utilize this medium to its full extent, it can also be used to challenge established systems of domination and to legitimate and publicize the political claims of the relatively powerless and marginalized (Warf and Grimes 1997). The Internet has given voice to countless groups with a multiplicity of political interests and agendas, including civil and human rights advocates, sustainable development activists, antiracist and antisexist organizations, gay and lesbian rights groups, religious movements, those espousing ethnic identities and causes, youth organizations, peace and disarmament parties, nonviolent action and pacifists, and animal rights groups. Cyberspace can be an important tool for local activists in that it allows access to resources beyond the local scale: local struggles can access the international media through the Internet to clarify and disseminate their position, as well as mobilize global public opinion to apply pressure to the opposing interests (Adams 1996). By facilitating the expression of political positions that otherwise may be difficult or impossible, the Internet allows for a dramatic expansion in the range of voices heard about many issues. In this sense, it permits the local to become global. There also exists what may be called the “dark side” of the Internet, in which it is deployed for illegal or immoral purposes. Hackers, for example, have often wreaked havoc with computer security systems. Such individuals are typically young men playing pranks, although others may unleash dangerous computer viruses and worms. Most hacks—by some estimates as much as 95 percent—go unreported, but their presence has driven up the cost of computer firewalls. The dark side also includes unsavory activities such as considerable quantities of pornography, counterfeit drivers’ licenses and passports, securities swindles, and adoption scams. The growth of Internet fraud and identity theft raises serious concerns about privacy. Electronic surveillance systems are used to monitor everyday life, including credit cards, visas and passports, tax records, medical data, police reports, telephone calls, utility records, automobile registration, crime statistics, and sales receipts. Thus, telecommunications can be used against people as well as for them; the unfortunate tendency in the popular media to engage in technocratic utopianism largely obscures these power relations. Although their potential impacts are often exaggerated, digital networks clearly have substantial, if largely unanticipated, effects upon the social fabric over time (Kitchin 1998). Gregory (1994:98) maintains that “ever-extending areas of social life are being wired into a vast postmodern hyperspace, an electronic inscription of the cultural logic of late capitalism.” As virtual reality and “real” reality have become tightly interwoven, the digital world has exerted a rapidly increasing influence over the social fabric, to the point where distinguishing between these two domains no longer seems helpful. Software, for example, through the mutually constitutive relationship it enjoys with territory, enables space to unfold in multiple ways, such as when it is used to

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monitor and control automobile and airline traffic and retail trade, and to monitor spaces through closed-circuit television (Dodge and Kitchin 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2007). Cyberspace may even rework the nature of urban space itself: whereas the modern city was characterized by stationary architecture and moving masses, the virtual city is one in which the masses sit still while the cinematic space of flows swirls around them (Crang 2000). Indeed, in a sociopsychological sense, cyberspace may allow for the reconstruction of “communities without propinquity,” groups of users who share common interests but not physical proximity, although the ability of virtual communities to substitute for face-to-face ones is debatable. The implications of this process are sobering. As Graham and Aurigi (1997:26) note, “Large cities, based, in the past, largely on face-to-face exchange in public spaces, are dissolving and fragmenting into webs of indirect, specialized relationships.” Despite the rhetoric of ubiquity, significant discrepancies exist in terms of access to the Internet, largely along the lines of wealth, gender, and race. Access to the Internet, either at home or at work, is highly correlated with income, giving rise to fears of a “digital divide” (Warf 2001). Internet use at work is difficult for many employees in poorly paying service jobs (the most rapidly growing category of employment) that do not offer access to the Internet at their place of work. Because telecommunications infrastructures always incur dauntingly high marginal costs in low-density regions, in an age of privatized providers drawn to the enormous scale economies in metropolitan areas, low-income rural regions have replaced low-income inner cities as the least connected places. Discrepancies in Internet access thus mirror prevailing patterns of income and access to educational and labor market opportunities. Inequalities in Internet access have also been accentuated by deregulation, which shifted the provision of telecommunications services worldwide from the public to the private sector. As a result, access to digital systems is less frequently provided as part of national efforts to serve the public interest and increasingly allocated on an ability-to-pay basis (the socalled “pay-per” revolution), in which users must bear the full costs of their calls, and fewer cross-subsidies among different groups of users (e.g., between commercial and residential ones), a trend that will likely make access to cyberspace even less affordable to low-income, often minority users (Graham and Marvin 1996). As a result of social and spatial differential abilities to gain access to cyberspace, Internet users throughout the world tend to be overwhelmingly middle class, relatively well educated, urbanized, younger than average, and employed in professional service occupations often demanding college degrees. In many countries, inability to acquire the skills, equipment, and software necessary to get onto the electronic highway threaten to create a large, predominantly minority underclass deprived of the benefits of cyberspace (Wresch 1996). Many societies are increasingly divided between those who are comfortable and proficient with digital technology and those who neither understand nor trust it, disenfranchising the latter group from the possibility of citizenship in


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cyberspace. Despite the falling prices for hardware and software, basic entrylevel machines are often unaffordable for low-income households. Even within the most digitized of cities there remain large pockets of “off-line” poverty (Thrift 1995). Those who need the Internet the least, already living in information-rich environments with access through many non-Internet channels (e.g., newspapers and cable TV), may have the most access to it, while those who may benefit the most (e.g., through electronic job banks) may have the smallest chance to log on. In short, the social categories of wealth and power and geographical categories of core and periphery are reinscribed in cyberspace. Rather than annihilate social inequalities, information systems such as the Internet therefore may reinforce existing disparities in wealth, connecting elites in different nations who may be increasingly disconnected from the local environments of their own cities and countries. This phenomenon must be viewed in light of the growing inequalities throughout industrialized nations generated by labor market polarization (i.e., deindustrialization and growth of low-income, contingent service jobs). These intra-national discrepancies in access are replicated at the international level, where, inequalities in access to the Internet internationally, measured in terms of hosts per 100,000 people, reflect the long-standing bifurcation between the First and Third Worlds (Figure 5.5). The best-connected nations are in Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and Singapore, where more than 70 percent of the population is online. In the U.S., the Internet penetration rate was 55 percent in 2005 (with substantial internal variations); however, due to the enormous size of the American economy, 80 percent of all international Internet traffic is either to or from the U.S. Outside of North America and Europe, the vast bulk of the world’s people, particularly the Third World, have little to no access to the Internet. Low incomes, inadequate infrastructures, and unhelpful or oppressive governments play major roles in this context. Access to the Internet across the world is also deeply conditioned by the density, reliability, and affordability of national telephone systems. Most Internet communications occurs along lines leased from telephone companies, many of which are state-regulated (in contrast to the largely unregulated state of the Internet itself). Prices for access vary by length of the phone call, distance, and the degree of monopoly: in nations with telecommunications monopolies, prices are higher than in those with deregulated systems. These economic discrepancies are mirrored in the increasingly uneven politics of the postmodern digital world; Luke and Ó Tuathail (2000:377), for example, in analyzing the political chaos that erupted in the aftermath of the cold war, assert that “Politics is eclipsed by technology as citizens separate out into either caches of netizens networking in the fast lanes of the global economy or the trashbins of lumpen techno-proletarians stuck at the dead ends of networks.” The Internet is thus both symbolic and constitutive of postmodern capitalism, and of the enormous changes in time and space that it has generated. Simplistic descriptions such as the death of distance or the annihilation of space fail to do justice to the complexities involved in this process.

Figure 5.5 Global Internet penetration rate, 2006.


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The state, public policy, and space in the age of capital hypermobility As late twentieth-century capitalism entered its postmodern phase, it witnessed a renewed aggressiveness of corporate elites against the working classes of the industrialized (and industrializing) world. One phenomenon that motivated and enabled this sea-change was capital’s acquisition of a spatial freedom qualitatively greater than that characteristic of manufacturing. This fluidity was generated in part by widespread deregulation, for the lack of regulation at the global level greatly facilitates such flexibility. The mobility of capital was also accentuated by the generalized reduction in protectionism, including the World Trade Organization, the primary mechanism used worldwide to minimize national threats of protectionism, as well as a series of regional trading blocks such as the European Union and NAFTA (Gibb and Michalak 1994; Michalak and Gibb 1997). Another source of capital’s newfound mobility was the introduction of telecommunication networks and the digitization of information, which give many firms markedly greater freedom over their locational choices. Transnational corporations—the networks’ primary users and beneficiaries—rely heavily upon such networks to coordinate and monitor international transactions, which can be monitored across the globe as easily as if they were in the same building. In dramatically reducing the circulation time of capital, telecommunications linked far-flung places together through networks in which billions of dollars move instantaneously across the globe, creating a geography without transport costs. The effectiveness of national controls was markedly reduced by the ease with which hypermobile financial capital moves through global markets. Thus, as large sums of funds flowed with mounting rapidity across national borders, Keynesian monetary policies became increasingly ineffective. In a Fordist world system, national monetary control over exchange, interest, and inflation rates is essential; in the post-Fordist system, however, those same national regulations appear as a drag on competitiveness, or so they were represented by conservatives. For example, “As private capital began increasingly to circuit globally on a deregulated basis, Keynesian nation-states progressively lost control of one of the most important macroeconomic levers—the setting of interest rates” (Peck and Tickell 1994:291). Essentially, as capital began to circulate on an increasingly global scale, and with drastically shorter time horizons, the Fordist–Keynesian production/ regulation regime collapsed, with profound political effects. The relations between Fordism–Keynesianism and the global economy in the waning years of late modernity were always problematic. Essentially, the global economy under Fordism consisted of a series of linked national economies, not a seamless world devoid of barriers to the flow of capital. “One of the fundamental tensions of the Fordist regime was the uneasy interface between national forms of regulation and the globalizing dynamic of accumulation”

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(Peck and Tickell 1994:289, italics in original). Deindustrialization, recession, slowing productivity growth, and a deteriorating trade balance set the stage for the rise of increasingly powerful, politically conservative coalitions. Unable to tame the lions of inflation, unemployment, and interest rates in the 1970s, Keynesian interventionism became increasingly discredited, and with it, numerous liberal political parties and programs. Ideologically, the conservative factions and parties that took advantage of these circumstances preached an interlocking web of notions centered on the faith in the free market and a distrust in state intervention, including supply-side economics and the “trickle down” of the benefits of economic growth from rich to poor. In the U.K., monetarism took precedence during the Thatcher administration in the 1980s; similarly, in the U.S., monetarism jostled with Keynesian fiscal policy. In the name of restoring national competitiveness, considerations of equity quickly gave way to those favoring efficiency in national political discourse. By the 1990s, throughout the West, orthodox welfarist prescriptions had been thoroughly discredited. The much-proclaimed, ostensible need to substitute an enterprise culture for the debilitating dependence of welfarism was linked to a determination to deflate the swollen, fiscally profligate public bureaucracy (Jessop 1997, 2006). Conservative laissez-faire dogma also led to widespread efforts to sell government assets and privatize public services. By selling off inefficiently operated publicly owned and operated assets and services (e.g., through contracting out), privatization allowed governments to provide services without producing them. Efficient economic management of industry was to be entrusted to the business acumen of the entrepreneur, not public bureaucrats. Thus, Harvey (1989b) and Leitner (1990) tie the rise and fall of the Keynesian state to the coterminous disappearance of Fordism. The Keynesian state was largely legitimated by the benefits of Fordist production, particularly the provision of collective goods that depended upon a continuously rising productivity of labor: as productivity growth declined, political agendas for restructuring the economy by cutting state funds for collective consumption achieve popularity under the aegis of restoring competitiveness, and transfer social surplus from the sphere of production to reproduction. This leads to right-wing attacks on the familiar litany of victims including the poor, women, minorities, immigrants, and the elderly. In this context, social programs initiated in the 1960s, when expectations of continued growth made their fiscal burden seem small, were portrayed as intolerably expensive in the face of intense international competition. Around the world, therefore, the rapid, postmodern time-space compression was accompanied by a transition into a post-Fordist economic order, central to which was the steady neoliberal peeling back of Keynesian social and economic policy through deregulation, reductions in welfare spending, and the removal of trade barriers. In this sense, neoliberalism constitutes a form of creative destruction (Harvey 2006). The welfare state, long the bedrock of Fordist national economic policy, has been under assault worldwide,


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and the social contract between labor and capital was firmly rewoven. Led by the U.S. and Great Britain, national governments repealed numerous social programs, including even the bastions of state welfarism in Scandinavia. Throughout the European Union, neoliberalism induced attempts to reduce social spending, even in Italy and France, where social programs have long been regarded as sacrosanct. Internationally, this agenda was advanced by the International Monetary Fund, which tied debt-restructuring to the acceptance of the neoliberal agenda. This political transformation, often buttressed by right-wing governments, accentuated the onslaught against the poor and working classes by corporate elites, often using the neoclassical argument that the global economy is necessarily Pareto-optimal. Jessop (1997) asserts that the restructuring of the state induced by globalization led to an effective “hollowing out” of its core functions. Thus, rather than a simplistic contradiction that views global capital in opposition to the nation-state, the emergence of a global, post-Fordist economic system and a system of postKeynesian states should be seen as mutually presupposing. Greatly enhanced capital mobility had enormous implications for localities. In the deregulated, volatile, hypermobile environment of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, capital’s new relation to space sharply accentuated its power to pit communities against one another. Of course, threats to leave localities are not new in the history of capitalism, but never have firms been able to carry them out with such effectiveness as today. Giddens (1981:121) argues that “The vast extension of time-space mediations made structurally possible by the prevalence of money capital, by the commodification of labour and by the transformability of one into the other, undercuts the segregated and autonomous character of the local community of producers.” Swyngedouw (1989) notes the precarious positionality of regions in a volatile, postmodern “hyperspace.” Similarly, Logan and Molotch (1987:252) note that “Capital becomes difficult to trap because it dissolves, moves, redefines its internal relations, transforms itself into something else. Unlike the experience for people, ‘homelessness’ serves capital well. Homeless money is liquidity, and liquidity is an advantage, not a tragedy.” Given this context, places and people are always at a decisive disadvantage when confronting capital. Workers’ movements, for example, often struggle to control individual places, while capitalists, working increasingly at the global scale, exert control over the global spaces of production in which individual locales are embedded (Harvey 2001b). As the global economy generates heightened competition among places for capital, localities typically respond through attempts to create a “good business climate,” i.e., deregulation, privatization, tax concessions, subsidies, relaxations of environmental controls, and reductions in social expenditures. Desperate for jobs, many localities vie for one another with ever greater concessions to attract firms, including foreign ones, in an auction resembling a zero-sum game. The effects of such a competition are hardly beneficial to those with the least purchasing power and political clout, lowering wages and

204 Postmodern time-space compression inhibiting union organization. Sympathy for the poor, the homeless, and the handicapped melts away under discourses that emphasize self-reliance and “individual initiative.” Unions, beleaguered by decades of deindustrialization, offer little alternative. Left to auction themselves to the highest corporate bidder, localities find themselves in a “race to the bottom” in which entrepreneurial governments promote growth—but do not regulate its aftermath—via tax breaks, subsidies, training programs, low-interest loans, infrastructure grants, and zoning exemptions. As Peck and Tickell (1994:281) write: Workforce training, the erosion of social protection, the construction of science and business parks, the vigorous marketing of place and the ritual incantation of the virtues of international competitiveness and public-private partnership seem now to have become almost universal features of so-called “local” strategies. In this sense, the local really has gone global. Governments, national and local, have become increasingly less concerned with issues of social redistribution, compensation for negative externalities, provision of public services, and so forth, and more enthralled with questions of economic competitiveness, attracting investment capital, and the production of a favorable “business climate.” Fainstein (1991) maintains that as planners have come to involve themselves more directly in economic development, market rationality and local competitiveness replaced comprehensiveness and equity as the primary criteria by which planning projects are judged. In public policy terms, the transition to a post-Fordist, hypermobile regime of accumulation induced a switch from “managerial” to “entrepreneurial” planning. Thus, long-term capital budgeting, master planning, and a concern for the environment gradually gave way to short-term concerns of job generation, looser regulations, and tax relief. Planning is hence concerned more with promoting development and less with regulating its aftermath. Such a devaluation of the power of places leads ultimately to the negation of even the strongest places. Thus, the more capital cooperates, the more places compete, and, as Peck and Tickell (1994:304) argue, “the more vigorously localities compete with one another, the more pronounced their subordination to supralocal forces becomes.” In short, in place of nationally based Fordist-Keynesian regimes, capitalism has become increasingly structured around a series of subnational localities unfettered by national bureaucracies, in which each place was free to auction itself to the highest bidder. In climbing out of the crisis of Fordism, capital replaced the Keynesian national “spatial fix” (Harvey 1989a) with a highly fluid, globalized counterpart consisting of numerous localities vying with one another. (Although the spatial fix argument reeks of crude functionalism, it does capture the deeply geographical level at which social and political processes are constructed and play out.) The emergence of a globalized, post-Fordist production regime has accompanied, and been simultaneously


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underpinned by, the collapse of the national Keynesian state and its replacement by a series of localities intent on auctioning themselves off regardless of the costs.

Globalization as postmodern time-space compression Globalization, the broadest label for postmodern time-space compression, reflects the efforts of capital in the form of transnational corporations to render the world increasingly seamless and frictionless. Globalization is typically defined as the expansion in the scope, velocity, and impacts of international transactions such as trade, investment, migration, and communications. Typically, this process entails the increased integration of different societies so that the consequences to action in one place spiral out to shape others around the world. While globalization is obviously not new, the term today is generally used to refer to the enormous round of postmodern timespace compression that began in the late twentieth century. Virilio (1999), ever-mindful of the role of war in unleashing time-space compression, points to postmodern war as the culprit in the late twentieth-century annihilation of space and time, including cruise missiles, unpiloted drones, and television (e.g., CNN), which allows conflicts such as the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars to be viewed in real time over the entire planet (Redhead 2004). In his view, postmodern capitalism has reached the limits of time-space compression, in which the ability to generate ever-continual increases in the speed of transportation and communications suffers enormous diminishing returns. The process of integrating the world is hardly the monopoly of corporations. In addition to corporations and transnational regulatory regimes, large numbers of social movements cross national borders to engage in numerous, complex, and sometimes contradictory efforts, including some 15,000 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), many of which are various forms of human rights and environmental watchdog groups. Such institutions often sidestep national political authorities to engage in “interstitial” domains of action, offering decentralizing, rhizomic, polynucleated systems of power instead of the centralized bureaucracies of the nation-state. In many cases, such groups may use the Internet to “jump scale,” turning local issues into national or international ones. Their very existence as the core of an emergent global civil society testifies to the degree to which the centrality of the nation-state as the only legitimate vehicle of political action has been undermined. To claim that globalization is exclusively economic in nature ignores the profound manner in which contemporary capitalism operates simultaneously as a political, cultural, and ideological force. For example, immigration is clearly a facet of globalization, with many ostensibly “non-economic” aspects associated with it. Equally, one could point to the globalization of education, disease, or terrorism. Some aspects of globalization that are resisted most vehemently in parts of the world are its cultural dimensions,

206 Postmodern time-space compression including, for example, the globalization of fast food, dress, or cinema, all of which are bound up with people’s world views and daily lives (Barber 1995). Often contemporary globalization is equated with cultural homogenization, as if the world economy stamped a monoculture (typically American in nature) throughout the world (Friedman 2005), i.e., for much of the world, globalization is synonymous with Americanization. As the world’s largest economic, military, and political power, the U.S. is simultaneously envied, imitated, and despised across the globe. Admiration for American culture is typically strongest among the young, so that globalization creates a generation gap in terms of outlook and preferences. While there can be no denying that cultural homogenization often takes place in the wake of globalization, generally at the expense of old, deeply held traditions, it is equally true that globalization has meant different things in different places, i.e., it is geographically specific. To one degree or another, all forms of capital are embedded in local territorial relations, a process continually filled with tensions and undergoing revision (Yeung 1998). Moreover, global trends are mediated through national policies in different ways, and local regions do not just passively absorb changes imparted to them by the global economy, but in turn shape that world system, influencing it in ways that originate from diverse circumstances. The dualities and complexities brought into being by postmodern globalization are well expressed by Graham and Marvin (2001:4), who argue “Airports, freight zones, retail malls, sports stadia and university, research, hospital, media and technology campuses are similarly emerging as zones of intense regional and global interchange whilst at the same time walls, ramparts and CCTV systems are constructed which actively filter their relationships with the local urban fabric.” Worldwide connections are thus paradoxically accompanied by reinforced local boundaries within communities. The global and local are therefore intimately intertwined, or “glocalized” (Swyngedouw 1997). Globalization is often portrayed as some unstoppable, teleological force independent of human intervention. In this reading, globalization is inevitable, and countries can do little to stop it but accommodate to its needs and requirements. Such a view denies the historical origins of globalization and the fact that people create it. In fact, globalization has historically undergone occasional reversals, such as during the trade wars of the 1930s. Moreover, globalization is often resisted, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, often by those who feel that it presents a secular, amoral threat to established local traditions, who view the market as a mechanism for reducing everyone to a consumer, annihilating all forms of identity except those that have to do with the commodity. For populations with values that lie largely outside of the market, globalization can be deeply offensive morally. Thus, the more globalization has disrupted local value systems around the world, the greater has been the backlash against it. One of the most common forms of resistance to hypermobility is the withdrawal into locality. Castells (1984:331) writes that “When people find themselves unable to control the world, they


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simply shrink the world to the size of their community.” Similarly, Harvey (1990:427) notes that globalization often provokes a retreat into the local: The more global interrelations become, the more internationalised our dinner ingredients and our money flows, and the more spatial barriers disintegrate, so more rather than less of the world’s population clings to place and neighbourhood or to national, region, ethnic grouping, or religious belief as specific marks of identity. Such a quest for visible and tangible marks of identity is readily understandable in the midst of fierce time-space compression. Among those who bear the costs but do not enjoy the benefits, globalization understandably breeds envy and resentment. This process indicates that postmodern time-space compression does not compress the world equally for everyone; in the words of Bhabha (1992:88), “The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced or dispossessed, the migrant or the refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.” The spatial scale at which globalization operates suggests that national institutions and processes, which dominated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, may have reached the limits of their effectiveness. The steady reduction in the significance of borders leads inexorably, if unevenly, to a seamlessly integrated world, a process that is as much political in its construction (e.g., via trade agreements) as it is economic. The bluntest summary of this view is that globalization is boundary-transcending and that localization is boundary-heightening. However, it is simplistic to assume that globalization leads inevitably to the end of nation-states as they are currently constituted, replacing them with some mythical, seamlessly integrated market that embraces the entire planet. Globalization is always refracted through national policies (e.g., concerning labor, the environment), which is one reason it has spatially uneven impacts across the world. Capitalism involves both markets and states, and the political geography of globalization is the interstate system, the existence of which is necessary in order for capital to play states and localities off against one another. Although the argument that the nation-state is disappearing has been advanced in occasionally exaggerated and simplistic terms (e.g., Ohmae 1990; Gergen 1991), the enormous tsunami of postmodern time-space compression has fundamentally undermined the territorial order of distinct, mutually exclusive, sovereign states that has underpinned the international order since the Westphalian Peace of 1648. The decline of the nation-state—much exaggerated by many observers—has been fueled by, among other things, the rising significance of global problems (e.g., global warming), the threat posed by sub-national tribal conflicts and transnational ideologies (e.g., Muslim fundamentalism), and mounting international trade and integrated financial markets: in short, increasingly well-integrated economic systems and disintegrating social ones. In this light, the nation-state is being eroded

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simultaneously “from above,” i.e., by the growing power of transnational public and private institutions, as well as those working “from below,” that is, regional authorities and local movements seeking to attract foreign capital or participate in global processes by bypassing their respective national states (Anderson 1996). This transformation makes the simple difference between “inside” and “outside” increasingly problematic, rendering borders ever more porous. Numerous observers have suggested that the postmodern world order is becoming “unbundled” or “plurilateral” (e.g., Gilpin 1987; Krasner 1991; Cerny 1993; Ruggie 1993; Elkins 1995), that is to say, it is being displaced by a new territorial configuration that does not take the nation-state as its point of departure. In some respects, the unbundling of territorial sovereignty induced by postmodern time-space compression represents a return to medieval structures of territoriality, in which the boundaries between the internal and external were messy and ill-defined. While globalization clearly undermines the ahistorical reification of nation-states as fixed, eternal entities, it does not automatically spell the death of this institution either. Many functions and institutions (e.g., control of immigration, political parties), for example, remain resolutely entrenched at the national scale.

Everyday life under postmodern time-space compression For billions of people, contending with postmodern time-space compression has been a difficult and challenging process. With globalization, “the local fabric of everyday life is everywhere shot through with the implications of distant events” (Gregory 1994:121). Everyday life—the domain in which multiple spatial scales and networks converge around the mundane experiences and routines of the individual—varies so much among different social groups that any attempt to generalize about this phenomenon is hazardous to the point of inevitable failure. That said, for large numbers of people living in economically developed countries, and even many in the developing world, postmodern time-space compression takes on distinct contours. Under postmodern capitalism, everyday life has acquired a global level of extensibility that is historically unprecedented: In conditions of late modernity, we live “in the world” in a different sense from previous eras of history. Everyone still continues to lead a local life, and the constraints of the body ensure that all individuals, at every moment, are contextually situated in time and space. Yet the transformations of place, and the intrusion of distance into local activities, combined with the centrality of mediated experience, radically change what “the world” actually is. This is so both on the level of the “phenomenal world” of the individual and the general universe of social activity within which collective social life is enacted. Although everyone lives a local life, phenomenal worlds for the most part are truly global. (Giddens 1991:187)


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Telecommunications and the Internet, for example, allow individuals to exist in more than one place at the same time, acquiring an extensibility that allows them to live at multiple spatial scales simultaneously (Adams 1995). Similarly, Virilio (1986) argues that information technologies allow people to be at many places at once, a transformation he considers to be as radical in the experience of time and space as that ushered in by early modern capitalism. “In sum the solid institutional routines that have characterized modern society for some two hundred years are being shaken by the earthquake of electronically mediated communication and recomposed into new routines whose outlines are as yet by no means clear” (Poster 1990:14). As the spatial scale at which co-presencing operates has increased steadily, so too have the rhythms and tempos of production and reproduction accelerated. The impacts of cable television, the blogosphere, and the Internet on the media are important in understanding compressed news cycles that operate on a 24/7 basis, requiring continual refreshment and leaving little time for sustained, serious thought: postmodern media, it seems, is ideally adapted to the superficial politics of the soundbite. Everyday life for denizens comfortable with the postmodern world—and not all of them are—includes multitasking, fast-forwarding, channel-surfing in the pursuit of instant intimacy and instant gratification, leading to Type A workaholics who feel guilty about relaxing, for whom waiting is synonymous with torture, who eat on the run, measure time in seconds, are addicted to novelty, and suffer from a timesickness that leads them to shout at the microwave oven to hurry up (Gleick 1999). Other forces include massive technological change, the blurring of traditional social roles, and the economic uncertainties brought about by intense international competition. One of the more important innovations of post-Fordism is wireless telephony, including cellular or mobile telephones, which generate contacts among people rather than among places, offering unprecedented degrees of mobility and deepening the process of the digitization of daily existence. By connecting mobile phones to grids of antennae and towers, typically located near busy streets, and by using the radio spectrum more efficiently than do analog systems, cell phones have made telephony not only mobile, but ubiquitous. Today, the number of cell phones in the world greatly exceeds landlines, which have been declining in number. Not surprisingly, given the relatively low infrastructural costs involved, cell phone adoption has been especially rapid in developing countries. Even regions long marginalized by the global telecommunications economy, such as Africa, have witnessed the widespread use of cellular telephony. The wireless revolution’s countless impacts, still unfolding, are difficult to predict. For example, whereas conventional transportation policy conceived of transit time as wasted, mobile telephony allows people to communicate and be transported simultaneously (although the perils of dialing while driving remain). Cell phones blur the boundaries between public and private spaces, and allow work and leisure times to interpenetrate; for women, this typically means that home invades work, while for

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men, work invades the home. Clearly, cell phones allow multi-tasking, the more efficient use of time and more efficient coordination of physical meeting times and places (Pain et al. 2005). Other uses, such as text-messaging, have grown quickly, while location-based services remain in their infancy. In the same vein, digital technology allowed for a far-reaching rescripting of the body (Shields 1992; Featherstone and Burrows 1995; Crang et al. 1999), so that simple dichotomies such as “off-line” and “on-line” fail to do justice to the depth to which they are shot through with one another (Warf 2000). Like identity, the social construction of the body is part of the contemporary wave of time-space compression. Haraway (1991) persuasively argued that in the postmodern age, the simple boundaries between bodies and machines, the natural and the artificial, have become progressively blurred, a notion manifested in her famous use of the term “cyborgs” (cybernetic organisms), in which people become complex articulations of tissue and technologies and their bodies rely heavily on, and even incorporate as prosthetics, machines in many forms. Such a trope problematizes dominant conceptions of “nature” as non-mechanical. The human/machine threshold has shifted over time, and never more so than in the aftermath of the microelectronics revolution of the late twentieth century. Virilio concludes that accelerated modernity or postmodern culture results in people living in the continual present, a time dominated by perpetual instability, immediacy, simultaneity, and instantaneity (Redhead 2004). Speed, in this reading, infuses contemporary life in every possible way, altering the body’s experience of space, generating an ever-fluctuating environment in which the self is continually destabilized, and extending hegemonic power relations into ever-larger domains of social life until the condition of “telepresence” becomes ubiquitous: everything is everywhere at the same time. Thus the Concorde collapsed the Atlantic into a two-hour trip, the TGV reduced France to an isotropic plane, and billions of people watched the horrifying events of September 11, 2001 unfold in real time or moments after they occurred. Relational geographies, in Virilio’s perspective, disappear in the face of white-hot postmodern time-space compression, and the “here no longer exists, everything is now” (quoted in Redhead 2004:87).

Postmodern time-space compression in perspective In the late twentieth century, and continuing with unconstrained rapidity in the present, postmodern capitalism unleashed a vast series of economic, political, technological, ideological, and geographic changes that compressed time and space to an historically unprecedented degree. The microelectronics revolution, computerization, and flexible production thoroughly revolutionized both production and consumption, generating new products and processes, altering the division of labor, and reconfiguring labor markets. The birth of widespread, high-speed telecommunications networks, including satellites, fiber optics, and the Internet gave birth to cyberspace as a defining


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feature of postmodern society, one in which a significant share of the planet’s population spends a considerable proportion of its time. Cheap, instantaneous, and ubiquitous communications have increasingly made the notion of place increasingly problematic, allowing many people to be in several places simultaneously. So deeply have e-mail, the World Wide Web, and e-commerce penetrated various domains of social life that the virtual and real worlds are inescapably interpenetrated. Consumers, seduced by the magic of the commodity, experience this process as the ever-deeper penetration of commodity relations into everyday life, a process fueled at maximum speed by television and related technologies. In this context, Baudrillard’s (1994) claim that the contemporary world has become a simulacrum, in which social reality and commodified image have become inseparably fused, deserves considerable attention. The prime economic manifestations of postmodern capitalism are intense globalization and extreme rapidity of transactions: today, few commodity chains are confined to national boundaries. The primary spatial expression of this process include the centralization of skilled, high-value-added functions in global cities—that is, in locales in which face-to-face contact allows for the exchange of tacit, unstandardized information—and the decentralization of unskilled, low-value-added functions such as back offices and call centers, which rely on standardized forms of information, to the global periphery. As capital has become increasingly hypermobile, its ability to pit places against one another has risen proportionately. Such events form the context in which neoliberalism arose as the political face of postmodern capitalism, ushering in widespread state withdrawals from the domain of reproduction and the deregulation of various economic sectors, all of which have served global elites well at the expense of the poor and disempowered. The globalization of capital and information, as well as the transfer of various forms of governance to supranational entities (e.g., the European Union, World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund) are all gradually undermining the viability of the nation-state system, the linchpin of the global economic and political network since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Postmodern capitalism, it would appear, is in the process of giving rise to new, as yet poorly defined, forms of spatiality characterized by multiple localities engaged in intense competition with one another. If the surfaces that characterized the geographies of modernity have slipped away, the spatial form that has taken their place may be likened to rhizomic networks. Unlike the surfaces of modernity (e.g., the nation-state, urban commuting fields), postmodern society exhibits a “fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structures, or systems” (Paasi 2004:541). In Sheppard’s (2002) view, these global power-geometries cut across spatial scales to create “wormholes” that defy the traditional logic of physical distance (i.e., transport costs have declined markedly in significance). Temporally, the rise of networked capitalism has been accompanied by

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accelerated rhythms of production and interaction, with important consequences for the meaning of spatiality, or as Luke and Ó Tuathail (1998:72) put it, “the power of pace is outstripping the power of place.” Nonetheless, simply noting the acceleration of acceleration, so to speak, ignores deeper, more meaningful issues as to who benefits (and why) and who loses out (and why). “The really serious question which is raised by speed-up, by ‘the communications revolution’ and by cyberspace, is not whether space will be annihilated but what kinds of multiplicities (patternings of uniqueness) and relations will be co-constructed with these new kinds of spatial configurations” (Massey 2005:91).

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Concluding thoughts

This volume has attempted to demonstrate the hugely variable and culturally specific ways in which different societies construct, mold, reshape, deform, adjust, and annihilate space and time as they were reworked by global capitalism. If there is one theme that snakes its way through these pages, it is the profound plasticity of these dimensions, their infinite forms and variations, and the diverse ways in which people have created, folded, recalibrated, distorted, and reconfigured them. The purpose of a conclusion is to summarize an argument at a higher level of abstraction and to carry it forward to new horizons. Fundamentally, the goal and purpose of this work have been to denaturalize time and space. These dimensions acquire a deeply internalized sense of being “natural” in every society, for they are intimately wrapped up with the rhythms of everyday life. Yet as this project has shown, there is not and never has been a single, “objective” time or space, no one “correct” way to organize or experience them, only a vast array of very different ones. Hence, there are no stable meanings that we can assign to time and space, only temporary and arbitrary ones, because human life is itself so variegated spatially and temporally. Geography and history, as the study of space and time, respectively, cannot be conveniently reduced to broad generalizations, grandiose theories, overarching models, or facile explanations. Because all social processes unfold contingently in different ways in different spatio-temporal contexts, timespace compression itself cannot be easily understood in terms of convenient abstractions, for as a process of social change, the ways in which time and space have been folded and refolded have been unique to the societies, places, and times in which it occurred. Suffice it to say that the analysis of time-space compression forces us to consider how and why time and space are constructed in the ways they are, why they become “natural” in the lives and minds of those who create them, and the politics of who gains and who benefits from particular spatio-temporal configurations. This project has approached the diverse ways in which time and space have been constituted historically by lodging them within three broad (and admittedly artificial) temporal eras, the early modern, late modern, and postmodern worlds. There are, of course, large variations within each of these, temporally,

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geographically, and socially, but they serve as analytical conveniences to draw out similarities and differences in how time and space were reconstituted throughout world history. Each round of time-space compression brought with it not only profound social, political, and economic transformations, but new ways of conquering space and time, of giving meaning to these dimensions, measuring them, altering their significance in the structures of political authority. Each round or era was significantly shaped by its predecessors, often retaining numerous elements within itself, and each in turn set the preconditions within which its successors unfolded. The rise of capitalism, which began well before the sixteenth century but did not become hegemonic until that time, initiated a major round of time-space compression. The various European colonial empires that began to take shape at this moment were one reflection of decisive spatial fix of early modernity, extending the bourgeois order and market interactions on a worldwide basis. The discovery and conquest of the New World, in addition to the genocide it unleashed on Native Americans, marked the first of a series of encounters through which the West came to discover itself, as well as the rise of discourses that legitimized and sustained Western notions of superiority. Europe became master of the world’s oceans, and the colonial, mercantile world system was overwhelmingly maritime in orientation. As a planetary system of surplus value extraction funneled untold wealth into Europe, the ideological and intellectual dramas of the Renaissance, and later, the Enlightenment, accentuated the long tradition of ocularcentrism, a process manifested most explicitly in Cartesian notions of space and the objective, disembodied observer. Cartography played a central role in this process, simultaneously rendering the earth intelligible through the construction of a grid in which places could be positioned (literally and figuratively) and naturalizing the role of the invisible, allknowing, panopticonic view from nowhere. This epistemological standpoint was reproduced and reinforced in perspectival painting. Intimately associated with these transfigurations was the rise of the bourgeoisie and commodity production. Simultaneously, the impacts of printing transformed the circulation of knowledge, binding together ever-larger populations through communities of shared belief and knowledge. As capital, goods, people, and information circulated on increasingly large spatial scales, the time-space compression of early modernity generated a new scalar form, the nation-state, legitimating and naturalizing it via the geographies of inclusion and exclusion demarcated by citizenship. Led by the state rather than the market, the diverse, variegated spaces of nationality were brought together via a transportation revolution that made it increasingly easier to move across the earth’s surface, such as canals and stagecoaches. The spectacular technological and imperial achievements of Europe were naturalized in a doctrine of progress that tended to linearize time and minimize spatial differences as authentic and on-going, reducing geography to stages in a teleological sequence that legitimated the current order. Early modernity was displaced in the eighteenth century by late modernity,

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in which capitalism’s relentless quest to minimize the turnover time of capital and maximize output and profits found new expression in the Industrial Revolution, which, over a century or more, initiated ever-larger and more complex changes in the global division of labor. Railroads and steamships reduced the friction of distance exponentially, facilitating the penetration of the last as-yet unconquered corners of the globe and giving rise to new forms of spatio-temporal experience. Urbanization increased until, in many countries, the majority of the population lived in cities, many of whom were drawn from rural areas and were bewildered by the complex, hectic, and rapidly changing worlds they faced. Old, medieval urban quarters were swept aside by the tsunami of modernity, including the boulevards and infrastructure that lent industrial cities their functional and spatial coherence. The earliest forms of telecommunications—the telegraph, then telephone—allowed, for the first time, co-presencing over vast distances by multitudes of people. By the late nineteenth century, Fordist production systems, particularly capitalintensive oligopolies, arose as national markets displaced local ones. Rising incomes allowed ever-more people to engage in mass consumption, worshipping at the altar of the commodity. Gradually, religious conceptions of time and space gave way in the face of growing secular understandings, those fostered by geology, biology, and astronomy. By the end of the century, the flux in culture, the loss of the certainties associated with absolute space and linear time, were manifested in a variety of cultural forms, including Impressionism and Cubism, photography, the cinema, and the theory of relativity. Like the railroad before them, the bicycle, the automobile, and aviation led to unprecedented levels of mobility as well as new experiences of movement and the celebration of speed. With the entire world colonized, imperial rivalries erupted in the form of World Wars I and II, which industrialized the process of mass death and led to bewildering changes in the global and local structures of time and space. By the mid-twentieth century, at least in the economically developed worlds, cheap, rapid, and convenient mobility had become the norm for vast numbers of people, a phenomenon made possible only by the continued flow of cheap fossil fuels. Increasingly low-density suburban environments were one manifestation of this round. Globalization, an on-going process from at least the fourteenth century, if not before, was another, particularly through transnational corporations that dwarfed their predecessors in size and spatial scope. The time-spaces of modernity, so intimately associated with colonialism, industrialization, and commodification, may broadly be summarized as a set of surfaces over which social relations played. The term “surface” in this context connotes a relatively flat and stable world easily amenable to rational comprehension, that is, to the ocularcentric ways of knowing that emerged in classical Greece but reached their highest expression in the Enlightenment. Surfaces are, therefore, the epistemological and ontological embodiment of Newtonian absolute space, in which proximity reigns in its importance for how people interact. For example, the graticule homogenized space much the

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same way as modernity linearized time; similarly, railroads, steamships, and automobiles, inter alia, generated transport surfaces that were remarkably ubiquitous. At scales ranging from the local to the global, the surfaces of modernity unfolded with predictable regularity. This notion found its way into the discourses of social science, particularly geography and urban planning, during the post-WWII boom, in which spatial relations tended to be portrayed in static, geometric terms (e.g., isotropic planes). Postmodern capitalism, that unplanned child of the 1970s crisis of Fordism, was marked by many things, but above all by the digitization of information made possible by the computer. High-technology post-Fordist regions sprang up to facilitate networks of creativity and innovation, redefining the industrial geography of production. Overnight, in historical terms, a vast network of telecommunications arose, linking millions, then billions, of people instantaneously, most explicitly through the Internet. For many, the virtual and the real have become so shot through with one another as to be difficult to distinguish. Similarly, television, whose universal appeal is undeniable, sedated and homogenized billions with its bland diet of pabulum, generating a global simulacrum in which fantasy and reality blur to the point of becoming essentially synonymous. With a seamless network of fiber optic lines in place, the globalization of finance, which concerns the most mobile of commodities— money—deepened and accelerated. Functions that continued to require faceto-face “buzz” (Storper and Venables 2004) centralized in global cities, while low-wage services (e.g., back offices) began a series of decentralizing spirals much as branch plants in manufacturing had done a generation earlier. With capital achieving unprecedented hypermobility, class war on a global basis, the crux of neoliberalism, pitted people of different communities against one another in an unending race to the bottom that annihilated the Keynesian state. Flows of capital and information across national borders—but not labor—as well as the gradual emergence of transnational mechanisms of governance gradually eroded the Westphalian system of nation-states and, in the process, give rise to new, as yet not well understood, geographies of power. In contrast with the surfaces of modernity, postmodern capitalism gave birth to complex geographies in which proximity and transport costs played relatively marginal or even insignificant roles. The airplane, satellites, television, and telecommunications, including the Internet, for example, steadily led to forms of social interaction in which physical distance was rendered irrelevant. The result has been a series of convoluted landscapes marked by wormholes, tunnels, and other omens of enormous time-space compression, complicated spatialities of which globalization is the dominant but by no means only indication. Postmodernism, it would appear, has elevated Leibnizian relative space to an historically unprecedented level of significance. Such a transition in no way indicates that “geography has become obsolete,” only that the meanings of space (and time) have changed, as they have done so many times in the past.

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Over great lengths of historical time, it is evident that time-space compression increased dramatically in intensity. The process assumes widely divergent expressions under the various forms of capitalism at different historical conditions. Thus, early modern mercantilist capitalism prior to the Industrial Revolution initiated a global wave of colonialism in which commodity relations penetrated vast numbers of nonwestern societies and brought them into the world on terms favorable to Europe; late modern capitalism, fueled by the Industrial Revolution, conquered land, sea, and air with ever-more effective means of transportation (steamships, railroads, airplanes) and telecommunications (telegraph, telephone) to form a well-connected system of nationstates; and postmodern capitalism stitched together the world’s places through a vast web of fiber optics and satellites, moving money and information at the speed of light to create a seamlessly integrated network that may undermine the Westphalian system of nation-states. Optimists typically exaggerate the positive impacts of new transportation and communication technologies. Thus the telegraph was supposed to lead to world peace; the airplane would make armies obsolete, since they could be attacked from above; the television would educate viewers and enhance democracy; nuclear power would lead to an age in which energy was “too cheap to meter.” None of these things happened, of course, testimony to the need for constant criticality and sobering realism. In the developing world, where time-space compression has been the least pronounced, mass poverty and inadequate infrastructures continue to trap billions in essentially premodern, pre-industrial lives. What does the historical geography of time-space compression imply for our theoretical understanding of social relations? Several analytical lines of thought were offered in Chapter 2, including early (largely empiricist) works, Marxist accounts that lodge time-space compression within the production dynamics of capital accumulation, world-systems theory, structuration theory, and various poststructural perspectives that seek to make sense of the network-like character of postmodern territoriality. While we may safely jettison certain views as unrealistic or unhelpful (e.g., technological determinism and neoclassical economics), the very complexity of the process of time-space compression indicates that we need multiple tools, different languages, and diverse conceptual lenses to understand its causes, manifestations, and consequences under widely varying historical and geographic circumstances. Obviously certain transportation and communications technologies did have widespread impacts, even if unanticipated ones, in facilitating increases in the scale and rapidity of human interaction. Obviously the quest to extract surplus labor did fuel round upon round of capitalist expansion and searches for new markets, in the process unleashing a firestorm of technological and social change. Obviously everyday life and the unintended reproduction of social relations did reshape time and space as people both generated and adjusted to changes in their worlds, through language, ideology, and political action. And obviously the networks so central to the nonEuclidean spaces of poststructuralism did exist both alongside and within the

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fluctuating surfaces of modernity and postmodernity, forming complex topologies of wealth and power that expanded and contracted over the earth’s surface in mind-numbingly complicated chains of cause and effect. Selectively incorporating aspects of all of these perspectives—and refusing to privilege one over another—is not theoretical opportunism, it is being realistic and flexible in the deployment of analytical tools to make sense of the world. This account of the historical geographies of time-space compression constitutes but one short step in a much longer process by which various domains of knowledge have been subject to the lens of social constructivism. What are often perceived to be “natural” and thus outside of society—the body, gender, poverty, even nature itself—have been systematically denaturalized by exposing their social origins, historical roots, their mutability and plasticity, their deeply political character. Time and space are no different in this regard. When we accept that histories and geographies are infinitely variable in their possibilities, that they have been repeatedly folded, distorted, remade, reconstituted, and reinterpreted, that there is no one single “objective” form in which spatio-temporal reality presents itself, and that there never will be, our discovery of ourselves will have made a significant step forward.

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Index

accounting 50–51 actor-networks 33–34, 48, 191–193 advertising 64, 100, 125, 136, 151, 181, 195 Africa 42–43, 45, 48, 83, 87, 101, 109–110, 127, 148, 209 annihilation of space by time 6, 167, 199, 205 anthropology 128–129 Arabs 58 archaeology 128 Asia 42, 43, 44, 45–46, 49, 83, 84, 86–87, 89, 101, 108–109, 149, 167, 170, 184, 192 astronomy 51, 126, 143, 215 Australia 108, 110, 174, 200 automobile 13, 15, 131, 132, 135, 140, 147, 150–155, 163–165, 198, 215 aviation 15, 145, 146–150, 156–157, 162–163, 165, 173–174 back offices 190–192, 211 banking 48, 66–67, 83, 190, 192–194, 196 Bell, Daniel 17 Benjamin, Walter 100, 124–125, 181 Bergson, Henri 138–139 Berlin 14, 114, 116, 118–122, 140 bodies 8, 92, 136, 151, 173, 210 calendar 60, 63, 73–74, 76, 77, 86 call centers 191–194 camera 59, 135–137, 149 canals 69–71, 74, 77 capitalism 10, 12, 18–22, 26–32, 40–41, 48, 50–53, 60, 62, 64–66, 76, 80–82, 87, 98, 102–103, 110, 117, 131, 142, 144, 153, 158–160, 167–168, 170–172, 176, 180–183, 194, 199, 201, 204–207, 211, 214–217

cartography 12, 43, 53–55, 77, 141, 214 Castells, Manuel 31, 169, 206 cell phones 209–210 Chicago 95, 100, 118, 126, 128, 174 Chicago School 125 China 12, 41, 45, 46, 52, 60, 62, 74, 86–87, 102, 108, 156, 157, 178 Christianity 52, 64, 77 cinema 13, 29, 131, 139–140, 165, 178, 198, 206, 215 colonialism 12, 30, 39–45, 55, 58, 77, 83–84, 108, 142, 144 Columbus, Christopher 42–44, 51, 59 commodification 21, 27, 48, 62, 66, 80–81, 87, 94, 203, 215 commodity chains 11, 31–32, 34, 100, 175, 182, 195, 211 compass 58 co-presence 24, 165, 183 creative destruction 12, 21, 79, 111, 131, 158, 202 Cubism 131, 138, 143, 215 Darwinism 126–127, 130, 144 death of distance 6, 172, 199 Descartes, Rene 35, 52–53, 54 diffusion 12, 45, 59, 60, 66, 73, 77, 82, 83, 85, 116 digital divide 198 e-commerce 195–196, 211 ecumene 40, 160 education system 64, 65, 66, 68, 144, 180, 196, 198 Egypt 73, 128 Einstein, Albert 35, 142–143 electricity 111, 127–128, 134, 142, 191 Enlightenment 12, 22, 32, 40, 50–52, 55, 57, 58, 64, 65, 71, 75, 77, 84, 85, 102,

250

Index

118, 130, 135, 143, 165, 184, 187, 214, 215 everyday life 4, 5, 8, 23, 24, 33, 37, 65, 78, 81, 82, 113, 125, 134, 139, 187, 197, 208–210, 213, 217

Janelle, Donald 15, 154, 160 Japan 44, 46, 52, 86–87, 89, 103, 157, 171, 172 jet lag 163 just-in-time inventory 171, 175

face-to-face contact 12, 13, 25, 77, 110, 111, 114, 134, 135, 165, 172, 183, 186, 188–190, 196, 198, 211 factory 8, 79, 81, 82, 114, 133, 151, 165 feudalism 51, 52, 62, 146 fiber optics 134, 176, 178, 183–185, 191, 192, 193, 194, 210, 216, 217 finance 22, 66, 167, 184–186, 193, 216 Ford, Henry 151, 152 Foucault, Michel 30, 65, 136 French Revolution 74–75 friction of distance 15, 16, 20, 83, 215 frontier 48, 74, 85, 143

Kant, Immanuel 32, 54–55 Keynesian state 126, 151, 201, 202–205

gender 134, 152, 190 geographical imaginations 39, 42, 49, 55, 56, 130, 136, 137 geometry 53, 54, 138, 141 Giddens, Anthony 23–26, 49, 60, 66, 67, 111, 126, 203, 208 global cities 31, 38, 169, 183, 188–191, 194, 211, 216 globalization 2, 9, 13, 16, 19, 22, 30, 31, 33–34, 160, 167, 177, 181, 187, 191, 193, 205–208, 211, 215, 216 Habermas, Jurgen 134, 187 Harvey, David 2, 3, 10, 12, 18, 19–22, 34–35, 41, 79, 92, 117, 123, 167, 168, 180, 184, 193, 202, 203, 204, 207 Haussmann, Baron 118, 123 Hegel, Friedrich 129–130 highways 118, 148, 153, 163–165 historicism 129–130 hypermobility 182–186, 201–205, 206, 216 India 28, 41, 42, 46, 50, 84, 101, 102, 110, 113, 192 Indonesia 48, 178 Industrial Revolution 7, 12, 69, 78–82, 83, 87, 89, 113, 116, 140, 165, 215 infrastructure 15, 20–21, 31, 75, 118, 152, 163, 173, 215 Internet 10, 13, 31, 110, 169, 181, 193, 194–200, 205, 209, 216 isochrones 15, 99, 119

Latour, Bruno 32, 34 Lefebvre, Henri 19, 65 Leibniz, Gottfried 14, 35, 37, 54, 143, 216 London 46, 48, 71, 73, 88, 92, 93, 108–110, 113, 114, 118, 126, 133, 146, 156, 162, 172, 173, 186, 188–189, 190 longitude 55–57, 77, 141 Los Angeles 162, 169, 188, 192 Mackinder, Halford 89, 144 Magellan 42, 43–44 Marx, Karl 18–19, 20, 31, 80, 81, 129, 130, 181 mass transit 118, 152, 155 Massey, Doreen 4, 33, 34, 35, 38, 43, 50, 68, 129, 184, 212 McLuhan, Marshall 17, 64, 179 meanings of time and space 2, 4, 165 Mediterranean 42, 44, 48, 69, 107, 157 merchants 38, 46, 60, 65, 71, 98 metric system 75, 77 mirror 59 mobility 6–7, 13, 17, 22, 25, 64, 78, 118, 131, 150–152, 154, 157, 163, 172–173, 215 modernity 6, 12–14, 25, 32, 40, 43, 49–50, 53–54, 60, 63–68, 73, 76–78, 80, 83, 85, 103, 111, 116, 118, 123–126, 129, 135, 144–146, 147, 156, 165, 168, 201, 211, 214–216 National Geographic 137 nation-state 8, 12, 13, 27, 57, 63, 64–69, 75, 77, 79, 87, 98, 103, 116, 117, 130, 144, 150, 158, 161, 170, 177, 192, 201, 203, 205, 207–208, 211, 214, 216–217 neoliberalism 13, 167, 202–3, 211 networks: aviation 149, 163, 168–169, 172; banking 66, 133; corporate 162, 168, 187, 190; electrical 79; face-toface 188–190; fiber 184; maritime 12, 38, 43; as power-geometries 9, 35; radio 116; rail 95; rhizomatic 169, 211, 217; road 15, 71; transport 17, 88–89, 117, 148, 154–155, 164, 172; and scale

Index 33, 34, 35; sociotechnical 23, 39; surfaces and 32, 34, 37, 39; telecommunications 22, 183, 191, 197, 201, 210; telegraph 114; trade 8, 28, 38, 48; urban 117, 118, 172 New World 28, 41, 44–46, 84, 109, 214 New York 15, 74, 85, 95, 98, 99, 105, 112, 114, 118, 126, 133, 134, 140, 146, 149, 153, 162, 186, 188, 189, 192 newspapers 64, 67, 73, 100, 101, 114, 136, 195, 199 Newton, Isaac 14, 35, 37, 54, 127, 143 NGOs 205 nuclear weapons 159–160 ocularcentrism 51, 52, 54, 59, 63, 77, 118, 135, 138–139, 160, 165, 214 offshore banking 192–194 Orientalism 12, 39, 49–50, 136, 159 Other, Othering 5, 8, 12, 137, 159 overaccumulation 18, 20 Panama Canal 109–110 paper money 46, 62, 66 Paris 63, 69, 73, 75, 89, 92, 102, 103, 111, 114, 118, 123, 124, 126, 131, 133, 136, 140, 146, 172, 186, 188 Pax Americana 158 160, 166 perspective painting 22, 52–53, 58–59, 66, 67, 137–138, 160 petroleum 146, 155, 167 phenomenology 92, 125 photography 13, 29, 100, 114, 135–137, 139, 140, 146, 160, 165, 215 Portugal 41, 42, 43, 45 postal service 66, 71, 73, 74, 77, 100, 110, 118, 142, 148 post-industrial society 17 postmodernism 13, 31, 143, 169, 177, 216 poststructuralism 11, 30, 32, 34–37, 39, 217 power-geometries 9, 28, 35, 175, 211 Prime Meridian 57, 102–103 printing 12, 17, 60–64, 66, 77, 100, 178, 214 Ptolemy 42, 55, 58, 66 railroads 70, 79, 83, 87–102, 112, 115–116, 118, 132, 138, 147, 149, 153, 163, 165, 172, 215, 216, 217 Ratzel, Friedrich 144 reading 61–62, 64, 179 relational spaces 1, 14, 17, 30–39, 143

251

relativity 131, 138, 141–143, 165, 215 Renaissance 9, 12, 22, 40, 50–60, 63, 66, 71, 77, 136, 137, 165, 168, 214 rockets 29, 92, 156–157 Russia 46, 48, 69, 74, 83, 89, 102, 144 scale denaturalizing scale 34; scaledependence 5, 10; scale expansion 6, 8, 9; scale-jumping or crossing 8, 33, 37, 192, 197, 205, 211; scale and aviation 156; scale and capital accumulation 20–23, 201, 203; scale and Cartesianism 59; scale and consumption 182; scale and knowledge 6, 13, 30, 190; scale and modernity 13, 17, 40, 53, 62, 64, 66, 78, 144; scale and railroad 94, 98; scale and telecommunications 114, 191, 194, 205, 209; scale and world-systems 27, 37, 207; temporal scale 5, 25 science 13, 22, 51, 53–55, 57, 60, 62, 126–130, 143, 165 ships 42, 43, 48, 57, 62, 83, 86, 95, 103, 105 shrinking world 11, 15–17, 26 silver 12, 45–47, 77, 86, 109 simultaneity 30, 36, 141–142, 143, 210 Soja, Edward 66, 129 Soviet Union 76, 157, 159, 167, 175 space of flows 30–31, 169, 184, 198 Spain 41, 43, 45, 46, 56, 60, 102, 172 spatial fix 21–23, 39, 41, 44, 64, 79, 111, 117, 123, 153, 163, 204, 214 spatial perception 3 speed airplanes 147, 162, 165, 173; automobile 150–152, 163; bicycles 131–132; celebration of 215; cinema 140; coaches and 71, 73; of finance 10, 184, 186; economies of speed 100, 114; of light 141–142; postal 110; postmodernism and 168, 205; postFordism 171–172; railroads 88, 92, 94, 101, 172–173; ships 175; steamships 105, 107–108; of transportation 3, 6, 14, 15, 75; Victorian culture of 140; Virilio and 28–30, 37, 210; and war 145, 157, 160; zeppelins 146–147 steamship 13, 39, 79, 83, 86, 87, 103–110, 129, 136, 148, 149, 150, 165, 215, 216, 217 structuration 23–26, 33, 37, 217 suburbs 117, 153–155, 164, 165, 191, 215 Suez Canal 108–109, 174

252

Index

surfaces and accessibility 71, 117, 216; and Cartesianism 37, 53, 77; v. networks 32, 35, 211, 218; and ocularcentrism 63, 215; rent surfaces 94 surplus value 18, 19, 20, 21, 27, 40, 41, 101, 214 surveying 53, 58, 65, 75, 84, 85, 141 tacit knowledge 172, 188–189 Taylor, Frederick 151 technological determinism 17, 36, 95, 182, 217 telegraph 13, 95, 98, 100, 102, 110–116, 118, 131, 132, 134, 136, 141, 145, 149, 165, 184, 215, 217 telephone 13, 16, 113, 115, 118, 126, 131, 132–135, 140, 141, 157, 165, 176, 184, 190, 194, 197, 199, 209–210, 215, 217 telescope 51–52, 63, 75, 149 television 13, 29, 115, 116, 139, 176, 178–180, 181, 195, 198, 205, 209, 211, 216, 217 time-geography 24–25 time-space expansion 11, 43, 85, 126 Toffler, Alvin 17, 168 tourism 101, 108, 162, 174–175, 188 Township and Range system 84–85 trade 8, 28, 32, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 69, 83, 86, 98, 103, 108–109, 158, 161, 167, 175, 184, 186, 201, 202, 206 trains: see railroads

trans-national corporations 13, 31, 160, 166, 172, 201, 205, 215 transport costs 16, 69, 74, 88, 101, 105, 148, 162, 201, 211, 216 turnover rate of capital 20, 192 United States 86, 133, 147, 157 urbanization 13, 66, 79, 81, 88, 98, 116–126, 215 Virilio, Paul 28–30, 37, 69, 101, 145, 157, 159, 160, 180, 182, 205, 209, 210 vision 29, 51, 53–54, 58, 59, 65, 68, 125, 135–136, 139, 143, 149–150, 160 warehouses 83, 100, 142, 171 watches 56, 82 Westphalian system 13, 159, 207, 216, 217 wireless communications 115–116, 131, 134, 209–210 World Trade Organization 167, 201, 211 World War I 82, 113, 116, 131, 133, 143–146 World War II 155–157, 160 World Wide Web 194, 196, 211 world-systems theory 26–28, 41, 217 writing 62, 63, 124 X rays 127, 131, 138 zeppelins 145, 146–147

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