Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1850, an inexpensive daily press and popular readership had appeared
throughout Europe and North America. In France, this process occurred in
1881 as o
cial censorship was abolished, along with the surety bond and
stamp tax. Anderson (1983) emphasizes newspapers as important vehicles in
the construction of nationalist identities, providing a shared national experi-
ence of “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous,
empty time.” Similarly, McLuhan (1962) argued that through newspapers,
peoples began to see themselves as coherent, uni
rst
time. Not surprisingly, advertising agencies formed around this expanding
medium as early as the 1840s. By the 1870s, popular magazines as well as
newspapers were circulating among the literate middle class. “By the late
nineteenth century, popular education, mechanized printing, and cheap
paper had created a mass reading public accustomed to the habits of print”
(Marvin 1988:112). Paradoxically, the invention of printing also threatened
the viability of the public domain in that “newspapers actually created
monopolies of information. The emergence of the 'audience' spelled danger
for public life, as it transformed people into essentially private readers and
listeners” (Lyon 1978:44).
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ed collectivities for the
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The spatial
fix of early modernity: the nation-state
Despite popular impressions of capitalism as a social and economic system
predicated on the existence of mythologized “free markets,” the nation-state
was in fact a fundamental part of the emergence of capitalist society. Max
Weber noted long ago that the growth of capitalism was as much predicated
on the legal systems and property rights enshrined in the state as it was in the
role of private property and markets. To put it bluntly, as Smith (2003:142)
does, “The genesis of national states as a system for organizing the world's
political economy provided an eighteenth-century 'spatial
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economic dilemmas of emergent capitalism.” During the Enlightenment, as
feudal bonds holding the masses to the soil gradually eroded, the state
became a primary mechanism welding them together, and the nation-state
gradually replaced Christianity as the fundamental unit of normative pacifi-
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fix' for speci
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-
cation. In the process, the spatial scale of interaction, mobility, communica-
tions and class relations expanded decisively over broader territories using
the stabilizing mechanism of the state. Tilly (1990) points out powerful gov-
ernments in emerging nation-states destroyed or absorbed most of their
feudal alternatives. The result was that the nation-state came to
mean
“soci-
ety,” to be used synonymously with it. The international system legitimated
by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 underscored the centrality of the nation-
state to the early modern world system, a world of absolute spaces and
explicit, non-overlapping boundaries. Such a geopolitical structure was
unprecedented: “The modern state system of territorially
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fixed and mutually
exclusive sovereignties is an historically unique form of spatial organization”
(Anderson 1996:140).
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