Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
containers of a
fledgling modernity, the expansionist new monarchies of the
sixteenth century were slowly, unevenly, and erratically (depending on the state
in question) imposing a general perspectivalist vision of space and a neutral
conception of time upon the territories they incorporated and annexed” (Ó
Tuathail 1996:12). In contrast to feudal empires, which often had di
fl
use
boundaries, the nation-state was predicated upon a view of geography as
Euclidean, a “horizontal order of coexistent places that could be sharply
delimited and compartimentalized from each other” (Ó Tuathail 1996:4). By
the early nineteenth cetury, increasingly standardized public education sys-
tems played a central role in linking individual identities to the state, that is,
raising the scalar level at which people de
ff
ned themselves and one another.
Schools inculcated in children with the mythology about the nation as a
uni
fi
ed entity and promoted a uniformity of belief among the population. As
Horsman and Marshall (1995:xvii) put it, “In fact, it was really only with the
introduction of mass education in the nineteenth century—and with it the
imposition of a standard language and a credo of civic responsibility—that a
sense of citizenship could be extended to every individual within the borders
of a given state.” In producing the citizen, the nation-state also constructed
moral geographies of similarity and di
fi
erence, inclusion and exclusion,
enforced by law, which underscored and sustained ideologies of nationalism.
The spaces of the nation-state sharply distinguished “us” from “them,” ampli-
fying the di
ff
erences between the community of insiders and foreign outsiders.
While nationalism inevitably exhibits a spatial imperative, in the form of
a territory for a nation to inhabit, the imagined community of nationhood also
has a temporal dimension. The time-space compression of early modern
nationalism involved the naturalization of some interpretations of history at
the expense of others. Nationalists typically selectively drew upon the most
useful stories among large sets of competing narratives concerning the past,
often mythologizing it in the form of resurrecting periods of past glory. In the
process, national traditions were invented rather than discovered, fabricated
rather than found. Time and space are merged in this context as particular
places and landscapes are transformed into centers of collective cultural
memory, such as plazas, statues, battle
ff
elds, etc. (Allan et al. 1995; Allan and
Thompson 1999) through what Massey (1994:5) calls “attempts to stabilize the
meaning of particular envelopes of space-time, even if precariously so.” Typ-
ically, this tactic led to the creation of allegedly “timeless traditions” re
fi
ecting
an innate, unchanging national character. If the past is a foreign country, as
Lowenthal (1985) famously suggested, then our views of the past are necessar-
ily embedded in and designed to serve our understandings of the present.
fl
Standardizing space and time in the early modern nation-state
The formation of early modern capitalist economies as well as the political
project of the nation-state necessarily entailed a far-reaching transformation
in its internal constitution. Spatially, this project attempted diligently to
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