ABSTRACT
The global expansion of capitalism, starting in the sixteenth century ushered in a dramatically new world-historical era in which the process of time-space compression, which had distinctly premodern roots, accelerated rapidly, became permanent, and was increasingly accepted as natural by large numbers of the world’s people. At the core of this period were the trading and colonial empires that flourished across the planet (Tracy 1991), which, in creating the first Eurocentric global system, brought together vast realms of the planet under the umbrella of Western political, economic, and ideological domination. Materially, this process led directly to a transformation of Europe from a collection of impoverished feudal states to the hegemon of the world system due to the waves of surplus value flowing into the continent from its overseas possessions. Culturally and ideologically, the hegemonic configuration of ideational traits that accompanied this process-modernity-itself reflected and produced a steady series of changes over time and across space. The earliest forms of modernity, those associated most closely with colonialism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, indicate the constellation of attributes that characterize global capitalism prior to the Industrial Revolution. Modernity, of course, was not one single, unified discourse, but a multitude of interlaced discourses whose Western orientation reflected and contributed to the West’s political and economic hegemony.
