Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1880s, expanding market boundaries, reinventing logistics, changing organiza-
tional 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
signi
cance. Balancing supply and demand in this context, with numerous
suppliers, slaughterhouses, warehouses, and clients dispersed over large dis-
tances, 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, local-
ized markets to larger national ones, a new geographic formation that was
highly conducive to the rise of larger, capital-intensive, vertically-integrated,
multi-establishment
fi
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 encour-
aged, however, and the associated oligopolies that both re
fi
ected and pro-
duced 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 di
fl
erences 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 rail-
roads, the representations of time and space found in photography and print-
ing, 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 consump-
tion 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 of
ff
ered by large
markets, was made possible by the completion of the transcontinental rail-
roads in 1869 and the Postal Act of 1879, which allowed for cheap distribu-
tion of commercial material. By the 1880s, magazines for the
ff
fi
first time began
to earn the bulk of their pro
ts 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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