Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 2

technological change, globalization, world systems, international trade,
colonialism, and postcolonialism in an attempt to paint a comprehensive
portrait of how time-space compression occurred under varying historical
and geographic conditions. This project is not primarily concerned with
Geography in the sense of an intellectual discipline produced by geographers,
academic or otherwise; it is not a work about how geographers think,
although it touches upon that issue from time to time, for geography as
created and lived by people is much larger than Geography as an explicit
corpus of knowledge.
Time and space inevitably appear “natural” to people living within every
social context, that is, as lying outside of society and beyond human control.
Indeed, time and space seem so “natural” that they typically do not to need
explanation. Hence Harvey (1990:418) maintains that “The social de nitions

of space and time operate with the full force of objective facts to which all
individuals and institutions necessarily respond.” This process has important
implications for the people who make space and time: as Loy (2001:263) puts
it, “temporality is one of those social constructions which, once objecti

fi

ed,
returns the compliment by objectifying us.” The same can be said about
space. But recent scholarship has revealed how time and space are indeed
social constructions; every society develops di

fi

ff erent ways of dealing with

and perceiving them. For example, we find time, lose time, make time, invest

time, kill time, borrow time, budget time, waste time, run out of time, etc. Far
from being natural, time and space are socially created, plastic, mutable
institutions that profoundly shape, just as they are shaped by, individual
perceptions and social relations. The “meanings” of time and space (and
meanings are always plural) are the subjective signi

fi

cance that they hold for
people who experience and construct them in daily life, the daily rhythms
of existence in which people engage as they construct their biographies. In
making time and space, we make ourselves. Time and space are both “object-
ive” and “subjective,” that is, they exist both as abstract entities that seem to
take on lives of their own, and simultaneously, as lived experiences highly
meaningful to the people who create and change them. The study of time and
space is therefore much more than an abstract academic exercise, but an
analysis of politics, for time and space are deeply implicated in how societies
are structured and change and how people live within them. As Harvey
(1990:419) puts it, “Each social formation constructs objective conceptions
of space and time su

fi

cient unto its own needs and purposes of material and
social reproduction and organizes its material practices in accordance with
those conceptions.”

Experiencing time and space
Every individual's experience of time and space is intimately bound up
with the complex process of perception, of attaching symbolic meaning to
sensations through language. If language is how we bring the world into