Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 9

shot through with each other. This work follows Pomeranz and Topik's
(1999:xvii) view that “In moving back and forth between the local and the
global, the meaning of each is enriched.”
As an expression of a society's changing ability to master space, time-space
compression is a mechanism through which places are produced as nodes
within increasingly wider networks of mobility and power. Such a view of
space is quite at odds with the prevailing Euclidean notion so widespread
in Western societies since the Renaissance. Following Smith (2003:23), this
volume asserts that “geographies are the product of an intense relationality
between places connected by social and cultural, economic and political pro-
cesses.” Time-space compression refers to how people construct changing
geographies of accessibility over time, i.e., the formation and destruction of
di erential patterns of centrality and peripherality that favor some groups

and places more than other groups and places. Every act of time-space com-
pression destabilizes previous power-geometries, uproots older networks and
gives rise to new ones, and thus becomes entangled in the relations of class,
gender, and ethnicity that run through all societies. In this sense, it is the study
of how relational geographies are constructed and reconstructed as systems
of interconnectedness, unevenly binding people and locations together in
ever-changing manifolds of power and interaction. Time-space compression,
therefore, invites us to avoid thinking of space as a passive surface and time as
a linear arrow; rather, time and space loop around one another, fold in upon
themselves, and twist and turn in complex, contingent ways that can best be
likened to origami.
Time-space compression can be approached by examining the changes in
daily life that ensued as new technologies, cultures, and forms of social cohe-
sion were introduced and older ones concomitantly annihilated. Because ideas
are inevitably products of their historic and geographic circumstances, inter-
pretations of time and space are tied to the social and material conditions in
which di

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erent cultures and individuals existed. This analysis, therefore,
weaves back and forth between the ontological and the epistemological, that is,
between the historical circumstances that structured and restructured the
temporal and spatial relations of societies on the one hand and the philo-
sophical interpretations that were given to them on the other. Discourses of
time and space, therefore, do not simply mirror historical circumstances, but
construct them: ways of thinking are simultaneously re

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ective and constitu-
ent of social reality. By examining the histories and geographies of times and
spaces, this project attempts to show how they have been steadily foreshort-
ened—compressed, folded, and imploded—as rising productivity, accelerat-
ing transportation and communications, and extended spatial scales of social
relations unfolded.
Understanding time-space compression is a more pressing issue today than
ever. We live in the midst of an enormous and intense wave of globalization
that is reworking the world economy, sucking in and spitting out regions at an
unprecedented rate, and ushering in unprecedented changes in lifestyle and

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