Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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 cen-
tered on the Kanto Plain of southern Honshu. Externally, the transition into
capitalism saw increasingly intensi
ed 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 Paci
fi
c 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 of
fi
ect-
ively by malaria and other diseases that limited European settlers' life expect-
ancy 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 follow-
ing its defeat in the 1870 con
ff
e
ff
ict 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 di
fl
erent 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-
ff
fi
rst 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 colo-
nial economy of the nineteenth century and the spatial constitution of indus-
trial 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 commodi
fi
cation. With steam, the Atlantic
and Paci
fi
c shrank to ponds and continents to small principalities. Distant
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