Concluding thoughts - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 217

Over great lengths of historical time, it is evident that time-space compres-
sion increased dramatically in intensity. The process assumes widely divergent
expressions under the various forms of capitalism at di erent historical con-

ditions. Thus, early modern mercantilist capitalism prior to the Industrial
Revolution initiated a global wave of colonialism in which commodity rela-
tions penetrated vast numbers of nonwestern societies and brought them into
the world on terms favorable to Europe; late modern capitalism, fueled by the
Industrial Revolution, conquered land, sea, and air with ever-more e

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ective
means of transportation (steamships, railroads, airplanes) and telecommuni-
cations (telegraph, telephone) to form a well-connected system of nation-
states; and postmodern capitalism stitched together the world's places through
a vast web of

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fiber optics and satellites, moving money and information at the
speed of light to create a seamlessly integrated network that may undermine
the Westphalian system of nation-states. Optimists typically exaggerate the
positive impacts of new transportation and communication technologies.
Thus the telegraph was supposed to lead to world peace; the airplane would
make armies obsolete, since they could be attacked from above; the television
would educate viewers and enhance democracy; nuclear power would lead
to an age in which energy was “too cheap to meter.” None of these things
happened, of course, testimony to the need for constant criticality and sober-
ing realism. In the developing world, where time-space compression has been
the least pronounced, mass poverty and inadequate infrastructures continue
to trap billions in essentially premodern, pre-industrial lives.
What does the historical geography of time-space compression imply for
our theoretical understanding of social relations? Several analytical lines of
thought were o

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ered in Chapter 2, including early (largely empiricist) works,
Marxist accounts that lodge time-space compression within the produc-
tion dynamics of capital accumulation, world-systems theory, structuration
theory, and various poststructural perspectives that seek to make sense of
the network-like character of postmodern territoriality. While we may safely
jettison certain views as unrealistic or unhelpful (e.g., technological deter-
minism and neoclassical economics), the very complexity of the process of
time-space compression indicates that we need multiple tools, di

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erent lan-
guages, and diverse conceptual lenses to understand its causes, manifest-
ations, and consequences under widely varying historical and geographic
circumstances. Obviously certain transportation and communications tech-
nologies did have widespread impacts, even if unanticipated ones, in facilitat-
ing increases in the scale and rapidity of human interaction. Obviously the
quest to extract surplus labor did fuel round upon round of capitalist expan-
sion and searches for new markets, in the process unleashing a

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firestorm of
technological and social change. Obviously everyday life and the unintended
reproduction of social relations did reshape time and space as people both
generated and adjusted to changes in their worlds, through language, ideol-
ogy, and political action. And obviously the networks so central to the non-
Euclidean spaces of poststructuralism did exist both alongside and within the

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