Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Late modern time-space
compression
What may be called late modernity—the period from the late eighteenth to
the late twentieth century—exhibited enormous transformations in the struc-
ture and meanings given to time and space, many of which sprang from the
process of industrialization and its aftermath. This chapter seeks to provide a
brief sketch of how this era gave rise to a world so radically di
erent from its
predecessors that people living in, say, 1800, could never begin to imagine
how much it had changed a century and a half later. For example, one hall-
mark of late modernity was the rise of regular, predictable, and mechanized
forms of mass movement (Cresswell 2006); since the Industrial Revolution
began, global per capita mobility levels in the economically advanced coun-
tries (and many developing ones) have increased roughly 3.2 percent annually,
amounting to a cumulative 500-fold increase. In large part this transform-
ation can be traced to the gargantuan technological changes in production,
transportation, and communication that largely de
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fi
ne late modernity; with
inanimate energy, the limits of nature
finally could be exceeded, and by vast
margins. Such changes in how people moved were inevitably accompanied by
changes in how they thought and experienced the world. Culturally, as count-
less commentators have noted, the economic and technological circuits of
modernity were accompanied by a culture de
fi
ned, above all, by the celebra-
tion of the new and the avant-garde (Berman 1982).
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The Industrial Revolution and industrial time
Perhaps no event in world history has had such signi
cant impacts on the
global economy, cities, agriculture, trade, and everyday life as the Industrial
Revolution (Landes 1969), a series of intertwined technological, economic,
and social changes that unfolded di
fi
erentially across time and space, creating
new geographies of centrality and peripherality. Industrialization involved
massive technological changes, particularly the use of inanimate energy, as
well as transformations in the labor process and the scale of operations,
which favored large
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firms over traditional household forms of production. The
widespread introduction of machinery led to unprecedented levels of capital
intensity, productivity growth, and rising incomes, often at the expense of
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