Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 10

outlook across the planet. At the center of this maelstrom is the dramatic
recon guration of time and space, which have been splintered and reshaped

at breathtaking speeds. Witness, for example, the enormous impacts of the
Internet, the ability of

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financial funds to travel at the speed of light, the
capacity of increasingly mobile corporations to wield the threat of moving
against communities, or the highly accelerated product cycles that character-
ize most advanced forms of manufacturing. All of these phenomena testify to
the changed nature of time and space in the wake of postmodern capitalism,
and all are woven into the fabric of daily life for the vast majority of the
world's people. Yet an historical perspective reveals that far from being the
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first time in which relational geographies have been transformed, the current
epoch is but the latest chapter in a long series through which the world's
cultures have given time and space a dramatically new texture.

A note on methodology
The view adopted here weaves back and forth between the theoretical and the
empirical, the abstract and the concrete, the objective and the subjective, the
real and the imagined, the tangible and the intangible, the global and the local,
between the scales of the human body—the most intimate of geographies—
and the world system, the scale most removed from everyday experience
(Harvey 2001b). The analysis draws upon multiple literatures, ranging from
the histories of technology, time, trade, transportation, and communications,
colonialism, and globalization to conceptual treatments of the social con-
struction of vision. In doing so, it touches upon an enormously diverse group
of topics.
The approach adopted here is explicitly historical, open-ended, and anti-
reductionist, emphasizing the contingent, path-dependent constellations of
forces that generated changes in the historical and geographical organization
and perception of time and space. This view is starkly at odds with neoclassical
and rationalist approaches that begin and end with individual actors, assume
interests and identities are

fixed or natural, and portray social and spatial
relations in terms of universal laws rather than historical processes. The work
seeks to walk the line between overly theoretical accounts that su

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er from a
lack of historical detail on the one hand and empiricist treatments, which never
manage to see the forest of generalization for the trees of data, on the other.
Unfortunately, this strategy leaves little room for detail, nuance, or subtlety,
all of which would, obviously, make the argument more sophisticated and
persuasive. The volume of necessity operates at a high level of generality,
without the luxury of delving into numerous particularities and speci

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cs. For
the sake of parsimony, no topic is given detailed consideration; for an argu-
ment this wide in scope, I hope the reader will allow this degree of simpli

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tion. Each of the topics discussed here could fill volumes, and has. The reader

will forgive me then for spreading myself so thin, and I ask his or her patience
as the text gleefully rampages across history and geography, ransacking

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