ABSTRACT
David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, published in 1989, was to
become a bestseller, and has since achieved the status of a classic. For Harvey,
a geographer, building on Marx’s explanations of globalization, capitalism is
the main driving engine of globalization. His 1989 publication was a mate-
rialist interpretation of post-modernity as born of the inconsistencies and
contradictions within capitalism. It advanced a theory of time-space com-
pression through the increasing speed with which commodities circulate
through the market system. Harvey shows that over a period, time and
space have been contracted in the interest of greater profits. He identifies the
economic depression that swept Britain and Europe in 1846-47 as a turning
point in that, thereafter, throughout the latter half of the 19th century, there
was a radical readjustment in the sense of time-space in economic, political
and cultural life.
