The Transformation of the World (19 page)

Things were different on the cotton plantations of the American South before the Civil War, where overseers had long imposed an intense rhythm on “gangs”
of slaves and backed it up with extreme violence. Slave owners soon got their hands on the newfangled mechanical timepieces, which they made available as part of the arsenal of labor discipline. Unlike factory workers—whether in England, Japan, or the slave-free Northern states of the United States—slaves were in no position to argue with their bosses over working hours. Here the clock was much more plainly a one-sided instrument of compulsion, although in the end it changed the life of the slave owner too; master and slave shared the new world of pitilessly ticking hands. The clock also served another, quite different purpose, insofar as the plantation oligarchy tried to use it to link up with cultural practices in the more developed North. As in countless other situations around the world, a privately owned timepiece became one of the most potent symbols of modernity.
¹¹³

On closer examination, it is necessary to make a number of further distinctions: between village and city time, men's and women's time, old people's and young people's time, military and civilian time, musicians' and master builders' time. Between the objective time of the chronometer and subjectively experienced time stands the
social
time
of “typical” life cycles in the family and work. This in turn exhibits various mixes of cultural norms, economic tasks, and emotional needs. One question especially worthy of consideration is whether and under which circumstances social time was also experienced collectively, for example, as the cycle of a generation.

Acceleration

Was acceleration the characteristic experience that exceptionally large numbers of people shared as they moved into the nineteenth century?
¹¹⁴
In the wake of the steam engine and its mechanical combination with wheels and ship's propellers, the nineteenth century became the age of the speed revolution. Although the dramatic increases in speed made possible by air travel and greatly improved road transport would come only in the next century, the railroad and the telegraph marked a decisive break with all previous history. They were faster than the fastest horse and carriage or the fastest dispatch rider. The conveyance of people, goods, and news was released from the shackles of the bio-motor system. This development had no causes other than technological ones. However different the cultural reactions and modes of employment, the effects of rail travel were in principle the same all over the world.
¹¹⁵
The experience of
physical
acceleration was a direct consequence of new technological opportunities.

The fact that the railroad had been invented in Europe was less significant than that it spread across whole continents. The railroad was culturally neutral in its
potential
uses. But the same was not true of its
actual
use; there were many different ways to deploy it. It has even been claimed that the Russian public showed little enthusiasm for the fast speed of rail travel (which was anyway more measured than in the West), because of a cultural preference for slowness that faded only when the observation of other countries showed how backward Russia was
becoming.
¹¹⁶
Trains were not only faster but also more comfortable than older forms of land transport. In 1847, en route from Tauroggen (today's Tauragé in Latvia) to Saint Petersburg, the French composer Hector Berlioz spent four days and four nights in an ice-cold sledge, which he describes as a “hermetically sealed metal box,” enduring “torments I had never suspected in my most lurid dreams.”
¹¹⁷
On the other hand, there was the new calamity of the train crash: in England, where Charles Dickens barely survived one in 1865 on a journey from the south coast to London; in Russia, where Tsar Alexander III suffered the same experience in 1888; as well as in India and Canada. By 1910 at the latest, mechanical acceleration and denaturation of the experience of time was in principle, though not necessarily in fact, a reality for most of the world's population.
¹¹⁸

This can be stated less confidently about the new temporal categories used in interpreting the world, which Koselleck has analyzed in relation to the
Sattelzeit
around 1800 in Western Europe. The accelerated experience of history was only loosely connected with the greater physical speed of travel and communication. Nor did it attain the same universality. We have already seen how small was the radius of the
direct
influence of the French Revolution. But it also raises the question whether the philosophical-historical model that Koselleck detects in the epochal changes in Europe around 1800—that is, the forcible “breaking open” of a time continuum through revolutionary action in the present—can be found anywhere else in the world.
¹¹⁹
Was there anything comparable in those parts of the world that were not shaken by 1789—and if so, when? Did they doze on in the slumber of premodernity? Or were their “breaking open” experiences different? England, which had beheaded a king way back in 1649, was agitated but not convulsed by the events in Paris. By 1789 the United States had already codified its revolution into a written constitution and was directing it into safe institutional channels.

Where else in the nineteenth century do we find the perception that something totally new has irrupted into familiar life cycles and conventional expectations of the future? Millenarian movements and apocalyptic preachers lived on this effect. They did exist in various regions, from China via North America (among Native Americans as well as whites such as the Mormons) to Africa. As many testimonies show, African Americans experienced the end of slavery as the sudden dawning of a new age, even if the actual “death of slavery” was often arduous, protracted, and disappointing.
¹²⁰
From the French Revolution to the Chinese Taiping movement of the 1850s, the vision of the new was often bound up with a resolve to link it with a reorganization of time. A calendar that breaks with tradition is itself part of what a revolution is about. However, it should by no means be seen as always involving messianic spiritualization or resistance to the logocentrism of a previously hegemonic culture.

More characteristic for the age since the late eighteenth century is an urge to rationalize the recording of time, to make it more in keeping with the modern world. This was the case in France in 1792, in Japan after the Meiji Renewal of
1868, or in Russia in February 1918 when the Bolshevik regime moved without delay to introduce the Gregorian calendar. The same impetus is evident in the counterstate that the Chinese Taiping rebels sought to construct, whose calendar had eschatological as well as thoroughly practical references. The “new heaven and new earth,” we read in the Taiping documents, shall overcome the false teachings and superstitions of the past and enable the peasantry to distribute their labor time in a rational manner.
¹²¹
Time was supposed to be simple, transparent, and devoid of magic.

CHAPTER III

 

Space

Where Was the Nineteenth Century?

1 Space and Time

The relationship between time and space is a major theme in philosophy. Historians can be more modest in dealing with it. A point made by Reinhart Koselleck may be enough for them: “Any historical space constitutes itself by virtue of the time by which it can be traversed, the time that makes it politically or economically controllable. Temporal and spatial questions are always intertwined with each other, even if the metaphorical power of all images of time initially stems from experiences of space.”
¹
The geographer David Harvey, approaching the issue from a different angle, speaks of “time-space compression.”
²
The separation of the two is therefore in a sense artificial. Despite the multiple intertwining, three important differences between space and time should not be overlooked in a historical perspective.

First
, space is more directly perceptible to the senses than time. It can be experienced by each of them. In the form of “nature,” it is the material foundation of humanity's struggle to gain a livelihood: earth, water, air, plants, and animals. Time limits human life by exerting wear and tear on the organism; space may confront it in particular situations as hostile, overpowering, and deadly. Human communities are therefore arranged within very clearly defined spaces, experienced as natural environments, but not within
specific
times. Time is a cultural construct, beyond the astronomical day-night cycle, the climatic yearly cycle, and the regularities of the ocean tides. Space, however, is first of all a prerequisite of human existence, which is interpreted culturally only at a later point in time.

Second
, outside mathematics—the domain of rare specialists—space can scarcely be thought about at all
in
abstracto
. It lacks the schematic regularity of chronologically structured and numbered time. Is there pure space, or only relational space that depends on the forms of life that exist within it? Is space a theme for historians at all until human beings start trying to shape it, to invest it with myths, to assign it a value? Can space be anything other than a set of places?

Third
, time may be arbitrarily defined in terms of astronomical regularities, but it cannot be materially changed in a way that has an impact on later generations. Labor takes material shape in terrestrial space. Space is more malleable than time: it is the result of its own “production” (Henri Lefebvre). It is also easier to overcome, to subjugate, to destroy: through conquest or material exhaustion, but also through pulverization into myriad allotments. Space is the prerequisite of the formation of states. States draw resources from space. To be sure, space varies in importance from one epoch to another. As “territory,” it becomes an intrinsically political value only in modern Europe.

Where was the nineteenth century located? An epoch is defined essentially by time, but its spatial configurations may also be described. The most important model for such configurations is the core-periphery relationship. Cores are places within a larger context where people and power, creativity, and symbolic capital are concentrated together. Cores radiate out and draw in. Peripheries are the weaker poles in asymmetrical relations with cores; they are receivers rather than transmitters of impulses. On the other hand, new things keep appearing on peripheries. Great empires have been formed from the periphery, religions have been founded there, and major histories written. In favorable circumstances, such dynamic peripheries may even become cores. The weight is constantly shifting between core and periphery. Often several cores will either cooperate or compete with one another. The map of the world looks different according to the place you take as your systematic observation point. Political geography does not coincide with economic geography, and the global distribution of cultural cores is different from that of concentrations of military power.

2 Metageography: Naming Spaces

The nineteenth century was transitional in a dual sense for the development of geographical knowledge.
³
First, it was the era when European geography came to dominate the pictures that other civilizations had of the world. By 1900 it had fully taken shape as an independent discipline, with its own research methods, taxonomy, and terminology; its own career paths, academic establishments, textbooks, and specialist journals. Professional geographers thought of themselves partly as natural scientists closely linked to exact disciplines, such as geology, geophysics, or hydrology, and partly as human scientists akin to anthropologists, but in any event no longer as helpmates to the historian. With every manual, schoolbook or map, especially if it had the official stamp of approval, they exercised the “power to name.”
⁴
They became sought-after advisers to governments that were looking to establish new colonies or to “valorize” (that is, exploit) existing ones more scientifically. This model, which first arose in Germany and France, soon found adherents and imitators in other European countries and overseas, its popularity boosted by geographical societies in which amateur enthusiasts rubbed shoulders with representatives of interest groups. Wherever geography established itself as
an academic subject, it did so along these European lines; it made little difference whether the importing country was still independent or had been colonized by Europe. By 1920 or thereabouts geography had become a uniform worldwide discourse, even if scientific hybrids developed in countries such as China that had a geo-scientific tradition of their own.
⁵
The nineteenth century was the age when the outstanding contributions of individual geographers were welded into an academic discipline, an institutionally safeguarded collective undertaking.

The Last Age of European Discoveries

But while the nineteenth century was the
first
phase in the conversion of geography into a science, it was also the
last
age of discoveries. There were still heroic travelers who ventured into regions where no European had previously set foot, still blank spaces on the map to be filled in, and still journeys that could prove highly dangerous for those who embarked on them. In 1847 Sir John Franklin vanished on an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, together with some of the Royal Navy's ablest officers and a set of the best instruments of the time. Only in 1857–59 did a search party discover skeletons and other remains of the Franklin mission, which had set off from England with a crew of 133.
⁶
The last age of discoveries began in 1768 with James Cook's first circumnavigation, which took the captain and his scientific companions to Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. The Franklin debacle cast a cloud over the period when the Royal Navy was the most active force in global exploration.
⁷
Unveiling exploration of entirely unknown parts of the planet came to an end with the Norwegian Roald Amundsen's dash for the South Pole in December 1911. Afterward, heroic feats were still possible in high mountain ranges, deserts, and deep seas, but there was little more to be discovered.