Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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 Paci
c upon its opening to ships in 1914. As the
largest engineering project in history, the Canal was both a material, eco-
nomic project and simultaneously an ideological project that represented
Yankee “know-how,” technological and racial superiority, and manifest des-
tiny, 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
fi
of boredom for the sophisticate. An advertise-
ment for a simulated ride to the moon at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition
in Bu
ff
alo, for example, complained “Where shall we go to get a new sensa-
tion? 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
ff
ff
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 pos-
tal 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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