The Global Transformation of Time

1870–1950

Vanessa Ogle

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674737020
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

As new networks of railways, steamships, and telegraph communications brought distant places into unprecedented proximity, previously minor discrepancies in local time-telling became a global problem. Vanessa Ogle's chronicle of the struggle to standardize clock times and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards.Time played a foundational role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time—historical, evolutionary, religious, social, and legal—provided a basis for comparing the world's nations and societies, and it established hierarchies that separated "advanced" from "backward" peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism.Debates and disagreements on the varieties of time drew in a wide array of observers: German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after unification of calendars never came to pass. The Global Transformation of Time reveals how globalization was less a relentlessly homogenizing force than a slow and uneven process of adoption and adaptation that often accentuated national differences.

CHAPTER ONE

National Times in a Globalizing World

IN THE SECOND HALF of the nineteenth century, the world was rapidly becoming more interconnected. People, goods, capital, and ideas moved with growing ease and speed across countries, regions, and continents. In the very same decades, nationalism surged in Europe, bureaucracy and administrations grew in many states, and governments erected legal and economic barriers against the movement of people and goods. These tendencies were similarly central to the process of globalization, as were movements and flows. Time, too, was simultaneously becoming a more global preoccupation, in that certain concepts and ideas spread and moved. At the same time, such concepts and ideas constituted an element of national and regional identity, when those same circulating ideas were anchored in specific contexts to serve national goals.

The interplay of national and global time was a matter of legislative and bureaucratic time. Scientists and other experts drafted and circulated ideas and proposals about global time reform, envisioning an ambitious worldwide system that would supersede particular local and national times. Such information was subsequently picked up in different countries by self-stylized reformers and journalists, who then published newspaper articles and pamphlets on the reform of time from the perspective of Germany, France, or another European country. These publications were often what informed officials in different nation-states on the latest proposals and developments in timekeeping. Yet these lawmakers, bureaucrats, and railway administrators understood uniform time to be a technocratic device in the service of national interests and national administrative rationality. A comparison of French and German politics of time unification illustrates this interrelatedness of globalization, state- and nation-building, and nationalism.¹ Scientists convening at international conferences devised schemes for global time governance, but their ideas required mediation and translation to attain meaning in national politics. Government officials and administrators understood that the world was becoming more interconnected. But to them, the conclusion to draw in the face of globalization was to make the flow of goods, people, and ideas serve the interests of the nation-state. Nationwide mean times were positioning devices that situated a country in its immediate regional and possibly global geopolitical context.

Besides the politics and bureaucracy of time, the French and German stories also engender the social and cultural tenor of time reform, a logic that was always part of nineteenth-century time reorganization: in France, the domestic watch industry managed to turn the preoccupation with accurate and precise uniform time into a business that thrived on ideologies of time thrift and punctuality; in Germany it was less often precision that came up in debates about time and more regularly the social impact of time reform as potentially changing people’s behavior. Rationalizing interests of administrators thus overlapped with cultural and social motives for time reform; in many cases, the two were inseparable.

Initially, German and French time politics did not take much note of the other side’s doings. That changed in the years immediately preceding and following World War I. Growing antagonism among European powers and deteriorating relations between Germany and France in particular did not fail to leave their mark on time politics. Internationalist meetings and conferences now became a battleground for Franco-German competition. Yet nationalism was not the only factor that shaped the reform of time beyond the level of international conferences and global plans. While nationalism was central to the global spread of mean times, local politics, too, shaped the reorganization of time. The national or nationalist meanings and functions of universal time as identified by government officials and bureaucrats were often met by local demands for unified mean times. Together, this push-and-pull on various levels made for an uneven and multitiered spread of uniform time. Such nested, multidirectional moves characterized not only the process of time unification, but also state-building more broadly.

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY globalizing world was, above all, a world on the move. Migrants relocated on an unprecedented scale from Europe to the New World, soon to be joined by equally impressive numbers of Chinese shipping off to America, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Indians followed the trajectories of labor within the British Empire and worked on plantations in the Caribbean and railway constructions in Africa.² Some returned, telling of strange habits and cultures, and often discrimination and gruesome working conditions; others had never intended to see their homes again in the first place and became visible representatives of foreign societies in their adopted countries. Economically, the decades prior to the outbreak of World War I witnessed exceptional economic growth in exports of manufactures and capital, and in certain areas, the convergence of commodity prices and wages.³

Imperialism and colonialism constituted another form of interconnectedness and movement. Between 1876 and 1913, roughly a quarter of the globe came under some form of Western colonial power. Imperial imagery and knowledge found their way into popular culture back home, where colonial motives populated advertising or the penny press.⁴ Abroad, contacts between colonizing powers and non-Western societies were often replete with violence and coercion, but that does not render them less central to globalization.⁵ Nineteenth-century globalization was dominated by the North Atlantic world and Britain in particular. Europe and North America were paramount in politics, in economic development, and in their own imagination at least, in social and cultural trends in much of the world. By 1913, the leading industrial powers of Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Russia, and Italy produced over three-quarters of world manufactures. Many parts of the non-Western world, colonized or pressured by informal imperial expansion, were relegated to supplying raw materials and cheap labor. Britain, the largest colonial power of all, occupied a position central to many dimensions of globalization.⁶

The intensification of migration, economic integration, and political contacts led contemporaries to establish several international organizations, agreements, and institutes that would govern this globalized world. Internationalism, in its several hues uniting socialists, women, eugenicists, and statisticians, to name but a few, aspired to mirror this interconnected world by operating beyond the level of the nation-state.⁷ As one such international agreement, universal and uniform time, hailed as a lubricant for a highly interconnected world, was to permit the seamless flow of people, goods, and ideas. Like uniform weights and measures based on the decimal system and standardized rates for mailing letters and sending telegrams, uniform time would establish commensurability and comparability and allow for commodification and exchange.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY interconnectedness was underpinned by a new-formed network of railways, telegraphs, and steamers, girding the globe ever so tightly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Interactions between world regions were by no means new, for different innovations in transportation had previously fueled long-distance trade. In the early modern era, commercial and political exchanges over long distances led to the formation of certain regions such as the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The slave trade, Manila galleons shuttling between the Philippines and Mexico, and the Silk Road are some examples among many of earlier interconnectedness.

The latter half of the nineteenth century differed from earlier periods and phases of globalization in certain regards. First, the intensification of imperial and colonial competition, most succinctly captured in the term coined to describe the partition of the African continent in this period (the famous “scramble” as contemporaries referred to it), lifted this dimension of interconnectedness to unprecedented levels. Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century it had become nearly impossible to remain “unconnected.” In one way or another certain elements in many societies were drawn into the newly forming networks of interactions, so much so that autonomy was unsustainable. Lastly, and importantly in the context of time reform, nineteenth-century contemporaries were keenly aware of just how globalized the world they inhabited had become. Elites in places as different as Europe and North America, Argentina, China, Japan, British India, and the late Ottoman Empire looked around and reflected on a world that was seemingly becoming smaller and, in the eyes of non-Westerners, more and more dominated by European science, ideas, and all too often, brute power. Nineteenth-century globalization was self-reflective.

It was this self-conscious contemplation on the global condition that informed many calls for more uniform methods of timekeeping. Assessments such as “All men are, directly or indirectly, in relation with each other” became a common staple of internationalist talk.⁸ Sandford Fleming, a Scottish-Canadian railway engineer who was one of the first to propagate a system of worldwide time zones, spoke of the “twin agencies steam and electricity” that annihilated distances and made reform necessary.⁹ Scientists and other advocates of uniform time adopted a language of universalism in shaping international scientific exchange in the latter half of the nineteenth century.¹⁰

In one installment of this narrative, the administrators of a German literary and cultural society described their motives behind advocating time reform in the following terms: “The greatest successes our age can take pride in are those pertaining to the overcoming of spatial separation—be it that with the help of the telescope it is possible to penetrate the most remote depths of space, be it that on earth, a thought is transmitted through the wire, or that people and goods move on the wings of steam from place to place. Mankind’s striving to impart its intellectual gifts and goods, and to exchange the riches of different sites and countries of the earth has increased the need for such an overcoming in ever-higher degrees.” Such striving, the authors held, “does not tolerate resistance,” and if necessary, “it fights against those peoples who do not partake, who become guilty of the crime of opposing it.” Colonial conquest and informal imperial control were inevitable responses to obstructing the progress of globalization. The authors observed that “the people of the West in the old world and their offspring in the new are demanding access to the lush wilderness of Madagascar and to the often strange as much as admirable state of Japan, in the name of forced treaties or persistent incompatibilities.” Such justifications of forced “globalization” in the name of progress prefigured what President Theodore Roosevelt would term the “attendant cruelties” of civilization in his vindication of the American military intervention in the Philippines in 1899. It was rare for universalist claims to sit so comfortably and explicitly next to threats, but universalism was never neutral, and talk about the connectivity of the world went beyond impartial analysis. Globalization was not only self-reflective but also an ideology of sorts.

Our authors at the German literary association concluded that interconnectedness, forced or voluntary, mandated more uniform time: “The more spatial separation is overcome, the more general and increased the exchange in intellectual and material messages among all peoples and countries of the earth, the more urgent and important is the need for a general, matching calculation of time, through the precise correctness of its basics permitting certain calculation and determination in any place.”¹¹ Such calls, whether for uniform clock time or, as in this case, calendar time, were common among legislators, scientists, self-styled calendar and clock time reformers, and even watchmakers. The plurality of ways of counting, measuring, and valuating clock, calendar, and social time was by no means new. While most societies appear to have had a desire to mark time, they did so in myriad contrasting ways throughout history and scattered over the world. In an interconnected world where a growing number of people wound up on the move in one form or another—as part of imperial and colonial endeavors, as entrepreneurs, as migrants, missionaries, or pilgrims, for instance—such an existing heterogeneity of times now was more visible than ever before.

Prior to the advent of standard time, church towers, town halls, and train stations in Europe and North America kept solar time. Noon was marked when the sun crossed the meridian at a given location. Every city, town, and village theoretically observed a different time depending on its longitudinal position. Solar time—“true time,” as Americans referred to it—was often not much more than an educated approximation. Determining accurate local time and, later, mean time required expensive precision tools such as accurate clocks, astronomical instruments, and observatory charts.¹² Yet even where it was possible to determine solar time with some degree of certitude, the sun itself was and is an imperfect timekeeper. The earth’s axis is slightly tilted, and its orbit is not circular. The sun therefore moves closer to the earth in the northern winter than in the summer. As a consequence, solar days vary in length depending on the season. On the other hand, a mechanical clock advances uniformly. With the spread of clocks and more slowly, watches, the local time on display in every village or town became mean solar time in the early nineteenth century, that is, a time that corrects for the variations of apparent solar time as measured by a sundial.

For many decades, the coexistence of multiple solar times affected only a small number of people who traversed long distances. When around the middle of the nineteenth century railways made travel easier, faster, and more affordable, this changed. In certain connection hubs, travelers now had to calculate their way through a thicket of times kept on different lines. In 1875, about seventy-five railway times were used in the United States, six alone in Saint Louis, five in Kansas City, and three in Chicago.¹³ Railway men especially in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in Europe were savvy and connected enough to join forces with observatories and survey departments to promote the cause of uniform time zones. Internationalist activism for time standardization proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century. Professional associations, national scientific academies, and unaffiliated individuals produced a mounting number of pamphlets and articles on the scientific aspects of timekeeping and time unification. Specialists on the topic read each other’s publications, often excerpted and referenced internationally in the swelling volumes of scientific and popular-scientific journals and proceedings published in Europe and North America.

Several conferences and meetings of scientific associations promised to make the adoption of uniform time more than just a paper tiger. In 1883, astronomers, geodesists, and surveyors at the International Geodetic Association’s conference in Rome discussed the prospect of adopting a prime meridian on which to base a system of uniform hour-wide time zones. In the late nineteenth century, maps and ephemerides of different national origin were based on a variety of meridians. While many surv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. National Times in a Globalizing World
• 2. Saving Social Time
• 3. From National to Uniform Time around the Globe
• 4. A Battle of Colonial Times
• 5. Comparing Time Management
• 6. Islamic Calendar Times
• 7. One Calendar for All
• Conclusion
• Archives and Repositories
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index