Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 12

manner. Theoretical rigidity comes at a steep price, and while borrowing from
contradictory conceptual views opens one to allegations of conceptual
inconsistency, it also allows for complex issues to be tackled from a variety of
analytical perspectives. Every theory, of course, foregrounds some aspects
and backgrounds others; yet given the enormous complexity of the historical
and geographical record, which requires di ff erent approaches to understand

di erent topics, the notion that one must choose only one conceptual lens

from the suite of available options seems to me to be counterproductive.
For reasons of convenience, the temporal trajectory of global time-space
compression is segmented into three broad world-historical epochs of capital-
ism: the Early Modern, Late Modern, and Postmodern. In framing the
volume this way, there is no assertion here that these constitute some type of
serial, teleological progression; rather, each was the contingent, unintentional
outcome of its predecessor. Successive chapters ascertain the broad contours
and changing con

ff

fi gurations of time and space within each era, acknowledg-

ing their di erences and diversity while pointing to their commonalities and

similarities. Each of these epochs, obviously, comprised vast lengths of time
and great numbers of local and regional cultures, and their di

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erentiation
from one another is essentially arbitrary. Each epoch of time-space compres-
sion simultaneously drew upon older, existing forms of spatiality and tem-
porality, incorporating some aspects and obliterating others, and ushered in
new ones in a series of “creative destructions.” However, to apply the term
“creative destruction” to all forms of time-space compression is to impose a
distinctively capitalist logic over social formations throughout history that
were often, if not typically, not capitalist at all.
Early modernity—mercantile capitalism before the Industrial Revolution—
is the subject of Chapter 3. Radiating outward through the maritime net-
works of colonialism, capitalism both constructed a planetary system of
exchange and confronted Europe with its Oriental Other. A central motor of
this system was Sung and Ming dynasty China and its conversion to a silver-
based economy. Discursively, colonialism was closely associated with an
increasingly dispassionate Western view of time and space, as exempli

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ed in
the Cartesian symbolic order. As Harvey (1984) argued, geography as a body
of ideas and practices was not just descriptive of this process but constitutive
as well. Cartography, for example, rationalized global space in Eurocentric
terms, facilitating processes of control and administration as much as trade.
Printing greatly enhanced the distanciation of social intercourse, allowing
widespread contacts and di

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usion of ideas without face-to-face contact. The
Renaissance and Enlightenment exempli

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ed the intellectual changes of early
modern time-space compression, including the Copernican revolution and
perspectival painting. These changes were important moments in the scalar
jump from the city-state to the nation-state, the most important social and
political unit of the modern era, homogenizing local cultures and economies
by incorporating them within ever-larger units of social and political control.
The late modern period, which began with industrialization and continued

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