Peter J. Taylor 
Modernities 
A Geohistorical Interpretation

Taylor develops a geohistorical argument which focuses on the periods and places of modernities, offering a grounded analysis of what it is to be modern. He identifies three ‘prime modernities’ which have defined the development of our modern world: today’s consumer modernity preceded by the industrial modernity of the nineteenth century which was itself preceded by mercantile modernity.

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Preface.

Prologue: Being Geohistorical.

Who’s Modern?.

1. Modern, –ity, –ism, –ization:.

Ambiguous to the core.

Social theory with smoke in its eyes.

2. Prime Modernities:.

Multiple moderns versus multiple modernities.

Consensus and coercion in the projection of hegemonic power.

3. Ordinary Modernity: .

Cultural celebrations of the ordinariness.

Feeling comfortable: the modern home.

Suburbia: the domestic landscape of consumer modernity.

Not modernism.

4. Modern States: .

Inter-stateness.

Absolutism as a political way of life.

Going Dutch.

The changing nature of territoriality.

5. Political Movements: .

Parties and movements.

Movements and modernities.

Socialism against the modernity that Britain built.

Environmentalism against the modernity that America built.

r 6. Geographical Tensions:.

Where and what?.

Place-space tensions.

Nation-state as enabling place and dis-enabling space.

Home-household as enabling place and dis-enabling space.

7. Americanization:.

Incipient, capacious and resonant Americanizations.

Inside America: conditions for constructing a modernity.

Outside America: seeing the most modern of the modern.

Americanization and globalization.

Epilogue.

Presents and Ends.

System logic: the extraordinary effect of ordinary
modernity.

Political practice: the post-traditional challenge.

References.

Index.

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Peter Taylor is Professor of Geography at Loughborough University.