Early modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 55

perception, and time and space are thus products of the mind, tools it uses to
render reality meaningful. This argument not only helped to secularize time
and space, but lodged their genesis within the individual mind, thus constitut-
ing a critical moment in the ascendancy of bourgeois individualism. Similarly,
philosophers such as Locke, in arguing that all knowledge originates with
sensation, rejected long-standing notions of a priori human nature and
repositioned the human subject as a product of historical circumstances.
The Renaissance rationalization of space was also manifested in the explo-
sion of cartography, which, among other things, led to a renewed interest in
Ptolemy, who, for all his errors, remained the chief classical authority to
whom geographers turned in making sense of the newly unfolding world. The
Ptolemaic revival thus reveals how one geographical imagination selectively
incorporates elements of another. In the empiricist epistemology of the era,
maps were considered accurate and scienti c representations of the world that

replicated their essential characteristics, allowing the far away to be brought
to observers close to home. With colonialism, the need to represent distant
places—to make them present for those who were not there—rose exponen-
tially. Renaissance cartography in e

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ect consisted of the “geo-graphing” of
remote regions to facilitate their control. Indeed, Renaissance cartography
was part of a much broader, thoroughgoing transformation in the spatial
consciousness of the West.
However, far from constituting a detached, objective viewpoint from
nowhere, a view that reduces map-making to a technical process, cartography
was a social process deeply wrapped up in the complex political dynamics of
colonialism. After all, in order to get to, conquer, govern, and administer their
colonies, the Europeans

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first had to know them spatially. The grid formed by
latitude and longitude was one of several such systems deployed worldwide to
facilitate the exchange networks of incipient capitalism, making space smooth,
fungible, and comprehensible by imposing order on an otherwise chaotic
environment. For European navigators, smoothing space by reducing it to
distance, rendering the oceans navigable, ordering the multitude of world's
places in a comprehensible schema. The projection of Western power across
the globe necessitated a Cartesian conceptualization of space as one that could
be easily crossed, a function well performed by the cartographic graticule.
Inserting various places in all their unique complexity into a global graticule
of meridians and longitudes positioned countries, and locales within them,
into a single, uni

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ed, coherent and panopticonic understanding of the world
designed by Europeans, for Europeans, allowing places to be compared and
normalized within an a

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rmation of a god-like view over Cartesian space at the
global level. Colonial mapping was thus not simply a tool for administration,
but equally importantly, a validation of Enlightenment science and central
part of the colonial spatial order: mapping of

ered both symbolic and prac-
tical mastery over space. Kirby (1996:46) elegantly summarizes the symbolic
and political repercussions of cartography during the European expansion,
in which maps created a dividing line for explorers moving into the void:

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