Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 6

analysis of time-space compression places emphasis on the connections and
interactions among places (and the people who live within them, for connec-
tions are always embodied) rather than individual places per se . For example,
in the simplest sense, using the maximum transportation speed at various
historical moments as a measure, the world became 60 times smaller between
1500 and 1970, when we compare the speed of airplanes (say 600 mph) with
that of medieval sailing vessels (10 mph) (Figure 1.1). 1 By accelerating the
velocities of people, goods, and information, the world is made to feel smaller
even as interactions are stretched over larger physical distances. The term
“compression” is therefore misleading: every round of time-space compres-
sion involves an expansion in the geographic scale of social activities. Often
this idea is taken to mean that space ceases to have relevance. Despite
unfortunate terms like the “death of distance” or the “annihilation of space,”
the fact remains that geography is a stubbornly persistent feature of human
life; Gould (1991:5) puts this notion nicely: “no matter how much geographic
space is shrunk by cost, or 'collapsed' by time, it always forms the underlying
platform, the backcloth, upon which things of the human world exist and
move.” Rather than the “annihilation of space,” therefore, it is healthier to
talk of how one space-time regime displaces another (Shields 1992). More-
over, the conventional view of time-space compression hides as much at the
local level as it reveals at the global scale. Far from shrinking the world evenly,
successive revolutions in the structure of time and space left it misshapen as
some places were brought together relationally more than others. Moreover,
reducing time-space compression to simple reductions in transport times fails
to do justice to its deeply phenomenological dimensions and the complexity
with which these two dimensions are wrapped up in social life, their political
and ideological origins and associations.
A satisfactory account of time-space compression therefore must address
its perceptual and political dimensions. Time-space compression broadly
de ned is about change—rapid and slow, voluntary and involuntary, external

and internal, qualitative and quantitative, evolutionary and revolutionary,
continuous and discontinuous—in people's understandings of the world and
their interactions over the earth's surface, not simply one of measuring time
or conquering distance. The process is a lens through which social orders and
transformations can be understood, i.e., as changing the ways in which human
beings have produced and restructured time and space. Similarly, time-space
compression is, among other things, a re

fi

erential mobility of
people over time and space; how mobility is conceived and represented speaks
volumes about a social order (Cresswell 2006). For most of human existence,
mobility was highly limited, and for all but a tiny minority, perceptual
horizons were strictly limited to the local. Only with the rise of modernity,

fl ection of the di ff

1 Figure 1.1, originally derived from McHale (1969), achieved “iconic status” (Knowles
2006:416) in the multiple editions of Dicken's in fl uential text Global Shift (2007).