Geography Reference
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involved not only a reworking of feudal European imaginary geographies, but
also rivers of bullion that sutured the globe into an interconnected totality.
Once the Mongols were driven out, tsarist Russia also played an increas-
ingly important role in the emerging European system of empires engul
fi
ng
the planet. Moscow, which grew to signi
cance by virtue of its cooperation
with the Mongol occupiers, became the new locus of power under Ivan IV
(the “Terrible”) as he pushed his empire east of the Ural Mountains and
south to the Caspian Sea. Similarly, the Romanov dynasty, which dominated
Russia for three centuries, extended the Siberian frontier eastward to the
Paci
fi
c Ocean, seizing large chunks of Chinese land from the decaying
Manchu (Chi'n) dynasty. Russian expansion was therefore synonymous with
Chinese contraction, and one empire's rising actor-networks generated a
decline in another's.
Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian empire-building was soon matched by
that of the Dutch and British. Around 1600, the Dutch began using a new
vessel, the
fi
fluytschip,
, for trade across the Baltic, which reduced labor costs by
half in waters that had been cleared of pirates. The
fl
fluytschip,
, produced in
large numbers, had as much an impact on European trade as did the steam-
ship centuries later. Using this technology to dominate European ocean ship-
ping transformed Amsterdam from a backwater of the Hapsburg Empire into
one of the
fl
first great commercial and banking centers of mercantile capitalism.
Similarly, the rise of Britain was enabled by the “race-built” ships that were
the
fi
fish. Unlike the
Venetians, Portuguese, or Spanish, who compelled all traders to travel in
government-organized convoys, the Dutch and English utilized privately
owned but state-chartered monopoly corporations such as the Hudson Bay
Company, British East India Company, and the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-
Indische Compagnie (VOC, or East India Company), which was active in
bringing peoples and products together in South Africa and Indonesia, where
it seized Java from the Portuguese (Steensgaard 1982; Nijman 1994). Such
institutions were important in the establishment of plantations and the com-
modi
fi
first to consciously emulate the streamlined design of a
fi
cation of labor in many regions, which constructed vast apparatuses
for linking distant strangers through long-distance systems of exchange. Trade
was managed through cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London,
whose success re
fi
erent trade net-
works, including those around the Baltic, Mediterranean, West Africa, and
the New World (Dodgshon 1998).
fl
ected their earlier ability to integrate di
ff
Discursive geographies of the colonial imagination
Colonial time-space compression not only reorganized the world materially,
it gave the planet's varied spaces new meanings in accordance with strictly
European needs, assumptions, and priorities. In imposing new spatialities
(both tangible and imagined) over the innumerable societies that fell before
the Western juggernaut, it also produced new subjectivities, new ideologies,
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