Geography Reference
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political transformations of the early modern era. Indeed, the rise of the
capitalist class and printing were symbiotic phenomena, as the latter allowed
standardized, codi
ed contracts, licenses, deeds, and decrees, all of which
greased the wheels of the new, more complex division of labor. Economically,
for example, printing encouraged Europeans to adopt paper money, an
innovation imported from China, which allowed this standardized abstrac-
tion of value to circulate rapidly on a wide scale. The monetization of eco-
nomic relations, “including the great fairs, shipping, insurance, and
fi
financial
services, further lubricated commerce and helped to create a European-wide
market” (Cantor 1994:376). Politically, printing helped to erode the personal
loyalties that were central to the decentralized feudal order, opening the pos-
sibility of increasingly centralized rule. For the disciplinary state, printed,
standardized documents were essential: rational bureaucratic systems neces-
sary for intergenerational rule hence both challenged the political order of
feudalism and helped to spread an increasingly literate, secular culture.
Widespread reading rather than writing was another powerful impact of
the printing press. In literature, it led to the rise of the novel, with a led
fi
fi
ned,
linear sense of plot and time. Printing and reading had signi
ects on
individual identity and subjectivity that made them important parts of early
modern time-space compression. Ong (1982) suggests that widespread reading
unleashed by printing led to a notion of personal privacy and individualism,
which accompanied the steady commodi
fi
cant e
ff
cation of social relations over the
next half millennium. Reading encouraged self-re
fi
ection and exploration of
interior psychic spaces. Moreover, this process led to the very idea of a
fl
xed
point of view, a foundational part of the Cartesian metaphysic that under-
pinned both modern science and modern perspectives on time and space. Ong
(1982) notes how the spread of silent reading at home from the twelfth century
onwards led to a greater emphasis on privatized spaces and abstract thinking,
a practice that spread from monasteries to universities and, by the
fi
fifteenth
century, to the aristocracy and mercantile elite. The notion of the individual
“self ”—unknown in the medieval period—began to take shape under the
thrust of commercialism, Protestantism, and rising literacy. Lyon (1978:67)
asserts that “the invention and spread of movable type is probably the most
important mechanical contributor to the idea of the unique self.” In the
context of the political transformations that broke up feudal empires into
autonomous sovereign states, this process was central to the modernist con-
ception of identity: indeed, the construction of the individual and the nation-
state as a community of citizens may be seen as two di
fi
ff
erent but intertwined
facets of one underlying process.
Anderson (1983) famously linked together the disparate social cultural,
economic, ideological, and political processes associated with printing to
argue that nationalism co-evolved with print capitalism and the growth of
print-based culture once vernacular languages became the norm of printed
communications. In his view, the advent of the printing press served to con-
nect disparate populations over wide geographical areas. This process had
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