Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chile. Late modern colonial time-space compression actively worked against
the interests of vast swaths of the planet's inhabitants, many of whom suf-
fered not only relative but absolute declines in their standard of living. For
example, South Asia in 1700 was the planet's largest exporter of textiles in the
world and accounted for one-quarter of world manufacturing (Marks 2007);
the British East India Company, prying open markets in Bengal, drove most
Indian weavers out of business. By the mid-eighteenth century, after suc-
cumbing to the tsunami of British textile imports (and quotas against Indian
exports), India was steadily deindustrialized to become the immiserated
country that it is today.
This economic transformation was accompanied by the British geo-
graphing of India on behalf of the East India Company, which serves as
an excellent example of European attempts to rationalize space through-
out various parts of the world (Edney 1990). Starting in 1802, the Great
Trigonometrical Survey of India lasted for half a century. Using triangula-
tion based on observations of stars and a series of rods and chains, the crew
painstakingly mapped the entire subcontinent in what became the largest
continuous measurement of the Earth's surface ever achieved, an e
ort that
resembled the Township and Range system used to demarcate the space of
the U.S. Trigonometric surveys as an expression of Cartesian rationalism not
only led to accurate and useful (to the British) maps, but rea
ff
rmed British
cultural and scienti
c superiority over those they conquered (Edney 1990). In
addition to facilitating British administrative control, the survey provided a
discursive framework for integrating the entire subcontinent: “The geo-
graphical rhetoric of British India was so e
fi
ective that India had become a
real entity for both British imperialists and Indian nationalists alike. Both
groups held 'India' to be a single, coherent, self-referential geographical
entity coincident with the bounds of the South Asian subcontinent and the
extent of British power” (Edney 1990:15). The surveying and mapping
project, therefore, e
ff
ort at time-space
compression in which regions that were less well known and remote from
British control were brought into Eurocentric forms of understanding.
Colonialism in North America witnessed multiple, profound transform-
ations in space and time. Enlightenment America carried with it all of the
ideas, inspirations, and complexities of its European counterpart, its faith in
progress and its individualism, and coupled it with a home-grown sense of
the New World as a redeeming land, the “city on the hill” in which the sins of
the past would be swept away. Whereas the idea of progress had been con-
fi
ff
ectively constituted part of a vast e
ff
fined in Europe to the elites, in America it became a form of grass-roots
evangelicism (Nisbet 1980). The initial topologies of access in the New World
were complex and confusing. In colonial America, the considerably lower
expenses involved in transporting goods by water versus land produced start-
ling relational geographies of cost: even in the early nineteenth century, for
example, most towns on the Atlantic seaboard of the U.S. imported English
coal rather than use wood from forests a few miles inland (Pomeranz and
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