ABSTRACT
It is now widely accepted in historical sociology that the concept of time–space distanciation is central to understanding ‘how social systems “bind” time and space’ (Giddens 1981: 90; Warf 2008). Victoria’s reign saw major accelerations in communications, both in a purely physical sense of movement of goods and people, and in an electronic sense in the movement of information. These accelerations produced major reconfigurations in the organization of time and space by people and societies, first identified by Hägerstrand (1975). More recently Harvey has analyzed time–space compression as central to the emergence of the modern and postmodern worlds (Harvey 1989).
