Concluding thoughts - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 215

in which capitalism's relentless quest to minimize the turnover time of capital
and maximize output and pro ts found new expression in the Industrial

Revolution, which, over a century or more, initiated ever-larger and more
complex changes in the global division of labor. Railroads and steamships
reduced the friction of distance exponentially, facilitating the penetration of
the last as-yet unconquered corners of the globe and giving rise to new forms
of spatio-temporal experience. Urbanization increased until, in many coun-
tries, the majority of the population lived in cities, many of whom were drawn
from rural areas and were bewildered by the complex, hectic, and rapidly
changing worlds they faced. Old, medieval urban quarters were swept aside
by the tsunami of modernity, including the boulevards and infrastructure
that lent industrial cities their functional and spatial coherence. The earliest
forms of telecommunications—the telegraph, then telephone—allowed, for
the

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first time, co-presencing over vast distances by multitudes of people. By
the late nineteenth century, Fordist production systems, particularly capital-
intensive oligopolies, arose as national markets displaced local ones. Rising
incomes allowed ever-more people to engage in mass consumption, worship-
ping at the altar of the commodity. Gradually, religious conceptions of time
and space gave way in the face of growing secular understandings, those
fostered by geology, biology, and astronomy. By the end of the century, the
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flux in culture, the loss of the certainties associated with absolute space and
linear time, were manifested in a variety of cultural forms, including Impres-
sionism and Cubism, photography, the cinema, and the theory of relativity.
Like the railroad before them, the bicycle, the automobile, and aviation led to
unprecedented levels of mobility as well as new experiences of movement and
the celebration of speed. With the entire world colonized, imperial rivalries
erupted in the form of World Wars I and II, which industrialized the process
of mass death and led to bewildering changes in the global and local struc-
tures of time and space. By the mid-twentieth century, at least in the eco-
nomically developed worlds, cheap, rapid, and convenient mobility had
become the norm for vast numbers of people, a phenomenon made possible
only by the continued flow of cheap fossil fuels. Increasingly low-density

suburban environments were one manifestation of this round. Globalization,
an on-going process from at least the fourteenth century, if not before, was
another, particularly through transnational corporations that dwarfed their
predecessors in size and spatial scope.
The time-spaces of modernity, so intimately associated with colonialism,
industrialization, and commodi

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cation, may broadly be summarized as a set
of surfaces over which social relations played. The term “surface” in this
context connotes a relatively

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flat and stable world easily amenable to rational
comprehension, that is, to the ocularcentric ways of knowing that emerged in
classical Greece but reached their highest expression in the Enlightenment.
Surfaces are, therefore, the epistemological and ontological embodiment of
Newtonian absolute space, in which proximity reigns in its importance for
how people interact. For example, the graticule homogenized space much the

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