Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
compression occurs globally, how the global economy di
erentially sutures
places together in an ever-tighter skein, and how changes in one part of the
planet reverberate across networks of trade and political control to a
ff
ect
other regions and places. As Wallerstein (1974:349) emphasizes, “the size of
a world-economy is a function of the state of technology, and in particular
of the possibilities of transport and communication within its bounds.”
Historically, this tendency meant that places
a
ff
ected
one another with
mounting frequency and importance, but by the time of the late modern
world economy in the nineteenth century, places had come to
rely
on one
another. In this view, it is impossible, or at least unfruitful, to attempt to
understand societies without some consideration of their interactions with
other societies. As Leyshon (1995:21) observes “The concept of time-space
distanciation helps us to avoid seeing societies as discrete and independent.”
An important objection to this view was that it su
ff
ers from an inherent
Eurocentrism. Blaut (1993), for example, strenuously objected to the “tunnel
of time” and the “Orient express” model of space as biasing the analysis
of world history and geography in terms that portray the economically
developed world as rational, active, and innovative, meanwhile reducing the
rest of the planet to a passive, irrational, stagnant status. Time-space com-
pression, in Blaut's alternative reading, was hardly the monopoly of the West:
every part of the world was as equally capable of traversing the world's
spaces as was Europe, and it was only Europe's accidental discovery of the
New World that propelled it to world dominance. Thus, “The point deserves
to be put very strongly. If the Western Hemisphere had been more accessible,
say, to South Indian centers than to European centers, then very likely India
would have become the home of capitalism, the site of the bourgeois revolu-
tion, and the rule of the world” (Blaut 1993:181). This assertion is at odds
with the vast bulk of historical scholarship, which has detailed Western eco-
nomic superiority and technical mastery of the seas, even on the eve of the
Renaissance. (Prior to the sixteenth century, the distribution of technical
and political power was considerably more complicated.) Blaut's account
resolutely ignores the internal dynamics of Western societies, the role of
the rising bourgeoisie, and the numerous technological, military, and insti-
tutional advantages conferred by capitalism. The ability to generate time-
space compression was not and never has been equally shared by all cultures
on the planet. This stance hardly constitutes a form of Eurocentrism, but
points to the power-geometries that unfolded di
ff
erentially since the rise of
the modern world system, i.e., the ability of the West to reconstruct the world
in a way that favored it as the planetary core and the rest of the world as its
periphery.
ff
Virilio, speed, and time-space
Central to understanding time-space compression is the mounting velocity of
social and economic transactions over time. An important, if little understood,
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