Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
enormous human su
ering. Spatially, mass industrialization and urbaniza-
tion from the late eighteenth century onwards sank enormous amounts of
capital into the built environment in the forms of roads, canals, railroads,
water systems, electrical networks, and communications lines, much of which
was concentrated in dense urban pools of capital and labor rather than dis-
persed agrarian locations. The factory system itself represented a centralized
and standardized form of time-space compression, gathering together dozens,
then hundreds of workers under one roof, forging a proletariat through the
common experience of exploitation and locking together mines, agriculture,
transport system, and cities into a symbiotic network. The Industrial Revolu-
tion's enormous technical advances and the astonishing growth in the rapid-
ity of transportation centered on Newcomen's invention of the steam engine
in 1712, later perfected by James Watt in 1769. Such material and ontological
changes were inevitably accompanied by ideological ones, including rising
secularism, new forms of historical consciousness, and a generalized accept-
ance of the increased rapidity of social and cultural change. As Berman
(1982:15) argues, an important part of the experience of modernity was
the mounting feelings of unity within nation-states that accompanied the
Industrial Revolution. The subsequent rise of steamships and railroads
played central roles in reducing the turnover time of industrial capital and
giving birth to radically new geographies of economic life. From the factory
system of the textile industry to the massive waves of urbanization that
industrialization unleashed, the Industrial Revolution comprised one vast
wave of compression that altered the nature of time and space at the global,
local, and individual scales.
Another important step in this process was the 1784 invention of iron
puddling by Henry Cort, which converted pig iron to wrought iron using
coal, a process that freed the industry from its dependence on the forest and
ushered in a new Iron Age (McClellan and Dorn 1999). Bridge-building, for
example, was revolutionized by cast-iron arch bridges, wrought-iron suspen-
sion bridges, and tubular bridges. The need for new networks arose because
the previous transportation system, designed to move large quantities of low-
cost materials between many points, had become obsolete in the face of the
industrial restructuring of production, which concentrated production within
a handful of urban centers. Such heavy, bulky forms of investment, however,
were perpetually prone to obsolescence because the tempo of innovation
exceeded their cycles of amortization and depreciation, making them inertial
drags on the economy that inhibited the new spatial
ff
fi
x (Harvey 1985c;
Dodgshon 1998).
The “creative destruction” unleashed by the Industrial Revolution—its
ceaseless annihilation and remaking of the present—was often justi
ed on
the grounds that such changes would lead to a better world. And indeed they
did. But the price of making constant change appear routine was to obliterate
the very worlds that made countless millions feel happy, safe, and secure.
In accelerating the pace of technological and social change exponentially,
fi
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