Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 8

perpetually folded and refolded, therefore, is to delve into the relations of
power and ideology, wealth, class, gender, ethnicity, and the state, as well as
the multitude of ways in which human subjects negotiate everyday life.
Time-space compression necessarily entails not only the physical movement
of bodies through space and time, but also how people experience these dimen-
sions symbolically. The process of folding space and time is simultaneously
conceptual and material, mental and physical, located between meaning
and matter. Time-space compression tends to make places and peoples
once thought of as remote and exotic closer and more familiar, although
reduced spatial distance does not inevitably lead to reduced social distance or
expanded intellectual horizons. Allen and Hamnett (1995:9) o er a concise

encapsulation of time-space compression as “The reordering of distance, the
overcoming of spatial barriers, the shortening of time-horizons, and the
ability to link distant populations in a more immediate and intense manner.”
Time-space compression occurs at multiple spatial and temporal scales, all
of which interact with one another, including: long distance networks of
trade that historically sutured cities, empires, and, later, nation-states together
into interactive wholes; political formations in which the state integrated
diverse peoples and places under a single authority, often through tribute,
taxes, or conscription; and the ideological and psychological dimensions of
how ideologies perceive and represent Others, the discursive and symbolic
representations of foreign or distant places that de

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ne community, identity,
and the here and now. This process, of course, depends mightily on the rela-
tive and di

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erential abilities of social formations to link places together, or, in
an older nomenclature, to conquer the “friction of distance.” Whenever the
consequences of actions in one area spill over into others, time-space com-
pression is at work. Whenever new networks of trade or migration appear,
tying together places through

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flows of commodities, innovation, time-space
compression can be detected; whenever a new medium, communications
technology, or widespread ideology, whether it be the topic or a religion or
the Web, brings together subjects into epistemic communities bound together
over vast distances, time-space compression is in the making; whenever the
spatial scale of social relations expands, such as from the city to the nation-
state or from states to empires, time-space compression is evident; whenever
new technologies expand the conceptual horizons of people, or social institu-
tions bind them together in a novel manner (such as “citizenship”), time-
space compression occurs; whenever the division of labor collapses people
into dense wads of humanity, such as the city or the factory, time-space
compression can be discerned. One way to approach time-space compression
is by looking at how external shocks to a society—diseases, invasions, techno-
logical innovations, wars—reverberate through local social relations of class,
gender, and ethnicity to change inhabitants' views of time and space and their
fabric of daily life. Conversely, locally generated changes may scale-jump to
become regional, national, or global in scope. In this way, the study of time-
space compression involves the ways in which the global and the local are

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