Concluding thoughts - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 214

geographically, and socially, but they serve as analytical conveniences to draw
out similarities and di erences in how time and space were reconstituted

throughout world history. Each round of time-space compression brought
with it not only profound social, political, and economic transformations, but
new ways of conquering space and time, of giving meaning to these dimen-
sions, measuring them, altering their signi

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fi cance in the structures of political

authority. Each round or era was signi cantly shaped by its predecessors,

often retaining numerous elements within itself, and each in turn set the
preconditions within which its successors unfolded.
The rise of capitalism, which began well before the sixteenth century but did
not become hegemonic until that time, initiated a major round of time-space
compression. The various European colonial empires that began to take shape
at this moment were one re

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fix of early modernity,
extending the bourgeois order and market interactions on a worldwide basis.
The discovery and conquest of the New World, in addition to the genocide it
unleashed on Native Americans, marked the

fl ection of decisive spatial fi

first of a series of encounters
through which the West came to discover itself, as well as the rise of discourses
that legitimized and sustained Western notions of superiority. Europe became
master of the world's oceans, and the colonial, mercantile world system was
overwhelmingly maritime in orientation. As a planetary system of surplus
value extraction funneled untold wealth into Europe, the ideological and intel-
lectual dramas of the Renaissance, and later, the Enlightenment, accentuated
the long tradition of ocularcentrism, a process manifested most explicitly in
Cartesian notions of space and the objective, disembodied observer. Cartog-
raphy played a central role in this process, simultaneously rendering the earth
intelligible through the construction of a grid in which places could be posi-
tioned (literally and

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figuratively) and naturalizing the role of the invisible, all-
knowing, panopticonic view from nowhere. This epistemological standpoint
was reproduced and reinforced in perspectival painting. Intimately associated
with these trans

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gurations was the rise of the bourgeoisie and commodity pro-
duction. Simultaneously, the impacts of printing transformed the circulation
of knowledge, binding together ever-larger populations through communities
of shared belief and knowledge. As capital, goods, people, and information
circulated on increasingly large spatial scales, the time-space compression of
early modernity generated a new scalar form, the nation-state, legitimating
and naturalizing it via the geographies of inclusion and exclusion demarcated
by citizenship. Led by the state rather than the market, the diverse, variegated
spaces of nationality were brought together via a transportation revolution
that made it increasingly easier to move across the earth's surface, such as
canals and stagecoaches. The spectacular technological and imperial achieve-
ments of Europe were naturalized in a doctrine of progress that tended to
linearize time and minimize spatial di

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erences as authentic and on-going,
reducing geography to stages in a teleological sequence that legitimated the
current order.
Early modernity was displaced in the eighteenth century by late modernity,

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