Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 129

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 develop-
ments, 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 period-
ized the past based on the dominant tools and technologies of each time and
implied that the sequence of stages in Europe could be universalized every-
where. 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 time-
machine, thereby reducing spatial di ff erences 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 com-
pression 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 his-
tory 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 o

fi

ered
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 o

ff

ered
sweeping teleological accounts that paid little attention to space, human con-
sciousness, or the contingency of social life. In of

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ering a universal world
history, for example, Hegel transformed the ancient observation of perpetual

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