Geography Reference
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through the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, ricocheting among the
Mandans, Hidatsas, Ojibwes, Crows, Blackfoot, and Shoshone, a helter-
skelter 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 nine-
teenth 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 dis-
tances and poor transportation, was in global cost-space closer to other
places along the Paci
c 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 Paci
fi
ng
Hawaii in 1893, and after 1898, the Philippines too. The expansion of the
U.S. into the Paci
fi
c Ocean, engul
fi
c 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 gener-
ated two startling di
fi
erent trajectories. The incorporation of China into the
colonial world system, now enabled by steamships and guns, bared the weak-
nesses of the Middle Kingdom in the face of Western technological and
military superiority and reduced hundreds of millions of peasants to grind-
ing poverty. The introduction of opium on a mass basis recti
ff
fi
ed British trade
de
cits, leading to the humiliations of the Opium Wars (1839-1842 and
1858-1860) and resulting Treaty Ports, enclaves that expedited the penetra-
tion 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 di
fi
erent path was taken by Japan following the Meiji Restor-
ation of 1868, in part due to Japanese observations of China's defeat.
Japan's relations to external spaces di
ff
ered 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 feu-
dal system of regulating travel was immediately abolished to facilitate inter-
course 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;
ff
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