Local populations in Britain’s Natal colony, at the southern tip of the African continent, divided the year into 13 lunar cycles. Until revolutionaries jettisoned the Julian calendar in 1918, Russia was 13 days behind western Europe. Clashing calendars made the headaches even worse. By the end of the century, this maddening variety of competing local times was making it difficult to transport everything from spices to armies. In Germany, travellers had to clarify whether departures were according to Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Ludwigshafen, or Frankfurt time. American railways recognized 75 different local times in 1875 three of those were in Chicago alone. Timekeeping was a messy and bewildering business in most parts of the 19th-century world. As a Frankfurt literary society put it in 1864: “The more spatial separation is overcome … the more urgent and important is the need for a general, matching calculation of time.” Modern timekeeping did not simply emerge it had to be imposed. Many Westerners felt that globalization required more accurate and predictable ways of measuring time. Technology also forced greater precision of calculation and measurement. Railways, steamships, subways, telephones, and radio thundered into existence all at once, collapsing distance and compressing time in ways that dazzled and disoriented. It was also a moment of great technological progress. The fin-de-siècle was a global age like our own, linked across borders and continents and oceans. Our modern timekeeping regime was born at the end of the 19th century. Joseph Stalin thought the weekend was a bourgeois luxury he abolished it in 1929 in a bid to transform ordinary Russians into good Communists. Julius Caesar knew this when he reshuffled the Roman calendar in 46 B.C.E. Time, in other words, has always been a product of the human imagination-and a source of tremendous political power. The Inca and the Mayans drew different cosmologies from different tales, cyclical and continuous. Judeo-Christian societies learned to perceive historical time as linear and unidirectional because of a particular story they told themselves about the fate of humankind. Indeed, our sense of time has everything to do with how we relate to one another and understand our place in the universe. Yet time isn’t as natural or as objective as it seems. The history of time reform illuminates the uneven nature of globalization, but it also offers us a way to think more deeply about technological change at a moment when we're nearly overwhelmed by it.įrigid Offices Might Be Killing Women’s Productivity Olga Khazan Lined up against French scientists, British colonial officials, German war heroes, American businessmen, and Arab reformers were English farmers, mill workers in Bombay, and Muslim scholars across the Middle East. It was an ambitious project, championed and resisted and repurposed by an extraordinary cast of characters. Yet in her imaginative and thought-provoking new book The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950, Vanessa Ogle reminds us that standardization and simultaneity had to be invented.Īs the 19th century dissolved into the 20th, the nations of the North Atlantic struggled to impose their ways of marking time on the rest of the globe. These are the conventions that let us talk and travel and trade across the world without batting an eye. Today, we take our global system of timekeeping largely for granted: 24 time zones rippling serenely outward from Greenwich a year of 12 months, divided into 52 weeks, recognized from San Francisco to Shanghai the much-loathed biannual leap of daylight saving time. Journalists called this dispute the “Battle of the Clocks.” It lasted nearly half a century. It wasn’t until 1950, three years after Indian independence, that a single time zone was adopted nationwide. To early 20th-century Indians, this looked like yet another attempt to crush local tradition and cement Britannia’s rule. They were protesting the proposed abolition of local time in favor of Indian Standard Time, to be set five-and-a-half hours ahead of Greenwich. Refusing to work at their looms, they pelted factories with rocks, their revolt soon spreading to the heart of the city, where more than 15,000 citizens signed petitions and marched angrily in the streets. In January 1906, several thousand cotton-mill workers rioted on the outskirts of Bombay.
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