Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 13

through the post-WWII economic boom, is explored in Chapter 4. The broad
contours of this epoch may be traced through technological changes that
greatly enhanced the mobility of people, goods, and information (i.e., the
railroad, steamship, telegraph, telephone, bicycle, automobile, and airplane),
many of which gave rise to the popular notion that space had e ectively been

annihilated. Late modernity witnessed sustained, large-scale and rapid indus-
trialization; widespread and profoundly disorienting urbanization; mass con-
sumption; the triumph of modern science over religious notions of time
and space; and new representational forms (e.g., photography, the cinema,
impressionism). 2 By the end of the nineteenth century, with the entire globe
colonized, the changing geopolitics of the world system gave rise to a new
relational politics of imperial con

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fl ict. The bloodiest century in history, the

twentieth, witnessed two major con agrations that also generated new under-

standings of time and space into being. During the post-WWII boom, trans-
national corporations sutured together vast numbers of disparate places,
generating a variety of new forms of uneven development in the worldwide
spatial division of labor. Simultaneously, the threat of nuclear annihilation
locked the superpowers into a deadly dance of mutual assured destruction.
“Postmodernism”—an annoying vague term—refers both to the onto-
logical reality of global capitalism that took shape in the late twentieth century
and to several epistemological perspectives known for their shared distrust
of totalizing narratives. In Chapter 5, the intense time-space compression
unleashed by postmodern capitalism is summarized through an interrogation
of the massive technological and political changes it fostered, such as the
microelectronics revolution and the birth of a globalized telecommunications
network. Television and the Internet symbolize the ephemeral, rapidly shift-
ing virtual communities of the postmodern era, in which electronic com-
munications rivals or exceeds its face-to-face counterpart. Equally signi

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cant
are the processes of ever-more intense globalization, hypermobile electronic
capital, the triumph of neoliberalism, and the rise of transnational forms
of governance, all of which threaten to undermine the primacy of the
nation-state and the Westphalian political system.
In some respects, Derwent Whittlesey (1945) presaged this volume with a
prescient and wide-ranging essay, “The Horizon of Geography,” in which he
summarized the changing scale of spatial consciousness that accompanied
humanity's ascent from hunting and gathering to the modern age. His com-
ments succinctly summarize the intellectual impetus of this work: “By scru-
tinizing successive space-horizons from the most primitive known down to
the present, it should be possible to determine the character and limits of
geographic space in the present world of revolutionary technology and social
adaptation” (p. 3). It is in that spirit that this exploration begins.

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2 Kern's (1983) well-known volume explored many of these changes, although not with an
explicit eye toward time-space compression.