Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nmvwc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-30T11:57:59.141Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“NOTHING IS THE WAY IT SHOULD BE”: GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TIME REGIME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2017

SEBASTIAN CONRAD
SEBASTIAN CONRAD*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Freie Universität Berlin E-mail: sebastian.conrad@fu-berlin.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When European clocks first arrived in seventeenth-century Japan they generated a commotion. The highly complex but also very precise instruments had been brought to Nagasaki by the Dutch East India Company that monopolized the sparse and highly regulated trade between Japan and Europe for more than two centuries. As an expression of the technological sophistication achieved in early modern Europe, mechanical clocks were hi-tech products of their time. They operated with a spring to store the energy, and their making required highly developed skills in casting and metalwork. The new technology made it possible to emancipate the measurement of time from sunshine and to achieve an evenness of temporal rhythms, not only during the day, but also at night.

Type
Essay
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 821 - 848
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

* For comments, criticism, and suggestions, I am especially grateful to Aleida Assmann, Frederick Cooper, Shruti Kapila, and Martin Mulsow. This work was supported by an Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2010-DZZ-3103).

References

1 Sakai, Tsunoyama, Tokei no shakaishi (Tokyo, 1984)Google Scholar; Taira, Sawada, Wadokei: Edo no haiteku gijutsu (Tokyo, 1996)Google Scholar. For time keeping during the Tokugawa periods see also Frumer, Yulia, “Translating Time: Habits of Western-Style Timekeeping in Late Edo Japan,” Technology and Culture 55/4 (2014), 785–820CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Yoshirō, Okada, Meiji kaireki: “Toki” no bunmei kaika (Tokyo, 1994)Google Scholar; Tanaka, Stefan, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar; Coulmas, Florian, Japanische Zeiten: Eine Ethnographie der Vergänglichkeit (Reinbek, 2000)Google Scholar; Ikuko, Nishimoto, “The ‘Civilization’ of Time: Japan and the Adoption of the Western Time System,” Time and Society 6 (1997): 237–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sakae, Tsunoyama, Jikan kakumei (Tokyo, 1998)Google Scholar.

3 Tanaka, New Times. See also Takehiko, Hashimoto and Shigehisa, Kuriyama, eds., Chikoku no tanjō: Kindai Nihon ni okeru jikan ishiki no keisei (Tokyo, 2001)Google Scholar; Ikuko, Nishimoto, Jikan ishiki no kindai: “Toki wa kane nari” no shakaishi (Tokyo, 2006)Google Scholar; Ryūichi, Narita, “Jikan no kindai: Kokumin kokka no jikan,” in Shinichi, Ōtsuka, ed., Kindai chi no seiritsu: Kindai Nihon no bunkashi, vol. 3 (Tokyo, 2002), 1–51Google Scholar. I borrow the term “metronomic society” from Young, Michael, The Metronomic Society: Natural Rhythms and Human Timetables (Cambridge, MA, 1988)Google Scholar.

4 This is similar in spirit to Moyn, Samuel, “Imaginary Intellectual History,” in McMahon, Darrin M. and Moyn, Samuel, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford, 2014), 112–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For recent stocktaking of the global-history approach see Bentley, Jerry H., ed., The Oxford Handbook of World History (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar; Northrop, Douglas, ed., A Companion to World History (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conrad, Sebastian, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Munich, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, Lynn, Writing History in the Global Era (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; Olstein, Diego, Thinking History Globally (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For various approaches that emphasize the role of connections see Espagne, Michel, “Sur les limites du comparatisme en histoire culturelle,” Genèses: Sciences sociales et histoire 17 (1994), 112–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Werner, Michael and Zimmermann, Bénédicte, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History & Theory 45 (2006), 30–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saunier, Pierre-Yves, Transnational History (Basingstoke, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Connected Histories: Toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” in Lieberman, Victor B., ed., Beyond Binary Histories: Reimagining Eurasia to c.1830 (Ann Arbor, 1997), 289–315Google Scholar.

7 Darwin, John, “Globe and Empire,” in Berg, Maxine, ed., Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century (Oxford, 2013), 197–200, at 198Google Scholar.

8 For an approach to global history that privileges the concept of integration over the concern with connections see Conrad, Sebastian, What Is Global History? (Princeton, 2016), 62–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Armitage, David, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 103Google Scholar. For an early refutation of diffusionist approaches see Blaut, J. M., The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

10 The most influential interpretations along such lines have been formulated in the context of postcolonial studies. See, for example, Cohn, Bernard, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar; Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.

11 For recent advances in translation studies see Niranjana, Tejaswini, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar; Liu, Lydia, Translingual Practice (Stanford, 1995)Google Scholar; Cronin, Michael, Translation and Globalization (London, 2003)Google Scholar; Bachmann-Medick, Doris, “The Translational Turn,” Translation Studies 2 (2009), 2–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For such standard interpretation see Landes, David, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA, 1983)Google Scholar. For a critical reading of the notion of “opening” see Konishi, Sho, “Reopening the ‘Opening of Japan’: A Russian–Japanese Revolutionary Encounter and the Vision of Anarchist Progress,” American Historical Review 112 (2007), 101–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Tanaka, New Times; Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lal, Vinay, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi, 2003)Google Scholar; Nanni, Giordano, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 For recent assessments of the Meiji period see Hardacre, Helen and Kern, Adam Lewis, eds., New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan (Leiden, 1997)Google Scholar; Gordon, Andrew, A Modern History of Japan (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar; Sawada, Janine T., Practical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu, 2004)Google Scholar; Reitan, Richard M., Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan (Honolulu, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Such an approach draws on recent work in the global history of culture and ideas, such as Moyn, Samuel and Sartori, Andrew, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Moyn and Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013), 3–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Karl, Rebecca E., Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, Christopher L., National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham, NC, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sartori, Andrew, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bose, Sugata and Manjapra, Kris, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010)Google Scholar; Conrad, Sebastian, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique,” American Historical Review 117 (2012), 999–1027CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Osterhammel, Jürgen and Petersson, Niels P., “Ostasiens Jahrhundertwende: Unterwerfung und Erneuerung in west-östlichen Sichtweisen,” in Frevert, Ute, ed., Das Neue Jahrhundert: Europäische Zeitdiagnosen und Zukunftsentwürfe um 1900 (Göttingen, 2000), 265–306Google Scholar. See also Hsiao, Kung-chuan, A Modern China and a New World: K'ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (Seattle, 1975)Google Scholar.

17 On high modernity's obsession with time see Galison, Peter, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

18 For long-term histories of time see Aveni, Anthony, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Gallois, William, Time, Religion and History (London, 2007)Google Scholar. See also Hughes, D. Owen and Trautmann, Thomas R., eds., Time: Histories and Ethnologies (Ann Arbor, 1995)Google Scholar; Zerubavel, Eviatar, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar; Wilcox, David, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar; Huang, Chun-chieh and Zürcher, Erik, eds., Time and Space in Chinese Culture (Leiden, 1995)Google Scholar; Stowasser, Barbara, Time Sticks: How Islam and Other Cultures Have Measured Time (Washington, DC, 2011)Google Scholar; Blake, Stephen P., Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman Empires (Cambridge, 2013)Google Scholar.

19 Koselleck, Reinhart, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt, 1979)Google Scholar; Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt, 2000); Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA, 2002); Lorenz, Chris and Bevernage, Berber, eds., Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future (Göttingen, 2013)Google Scholar.

20 Hartog, François, Régimes d'historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris, 2003)Google Scholar; Assmann, Aleida, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne (Munich, 2013), 281–307Google Scholar.

21 Landes, Revolution in Time; Aveni, Empires of Time.

22 Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 12–14Google Scholar; Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Die Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise: Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1984)Google Scholar; Presner, Todd S., Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Cited in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 68. For the communication revolution that allowed a linking of public spheres see Hugill, Peter J., Global Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology (Baltimore, 1999)Google Scholar; Headrick, Daniel R., The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–1945 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

24 See, for example, Coulmas, Florian, Japanische Zeiten: Eine Ethnografie der Vergänglichkeit (Reinbek, 2000)Google Scholar. On the history of the calendar see Steel, Duncan, Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.

25 Quoted in Ogle, Vanessa, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s,” American Historical Review 118 (2013), 1376–1402CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 10–14. The best book on these issues is Ogle, Vanessa, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2014), 67–76Google Scholar. Specifically on the introduction of worldwide standard time see also Howse, Derek, Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar; Bartky, Ian R., One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (Stanford, 2007)Google Scholar.

27 Rimbaud, Arthur, Une saison en enfer (Paris, 1999; first published 1973), 204Google Scholar.

28 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 12, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt, 1970Google Scholar; first published 1840), 134.

29 Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

30 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), 9Google Scholar.

31 Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kwong, Luke S. K., “The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China, c.1860–1911,” Past & Present 173 (2001), 157–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Quoted in Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 79.

33 Quoted in Colla, Elliott, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC, 2007), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Abu al-Su'ud, quoted in Colla, Conflicted Antiquities, 129. See also Shaw, Wendy M. K., Possessors and Possessed: Objects, Museums, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar.

35 See Rossi, Paolo, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago, 1984)Google Scholar; Smail, Daniel Lord, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” American Historical Review 110 (2005), 1336–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See Rosenberg, Daniel and Grafton, Anthony, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

37 Quoted in Trautmann, Thomas R., “Indian Time, European Time,” in Trautmann, The Clash of Chronologies: Ancient India in the Modern World (New Delhi, 2009), 25–52, at 32Google Scholar. On Mill see Majeed, Javed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's “The History of British India” and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zastoupil, Lynn, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar.

38 Trautmann, “Indian Time, European Time.”

39 See van Kley, Edwin, “Europe's ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,” American Historical Review 76 (1971), 358–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Gould, Stephen Jay, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA, 1987)Google Scholar; Rudwick, Martin J. S., Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Cited in Nanni, The Colonisation of Time, 25. See also Comaroff, Jean, “Missionaries and Mechanical Clocks: An Essay on Religion and History in South Africa,” Journal of Religion 71 (1991), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 I discovered the woodblock print in Uhl, Christian, “Translation and Time: A Memento of the Curvature of the Poststructuralist Plane,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6 (2012), 449–50Google Scholar; my reading of the print, too, follows Uhl's interpretation.

43 Spengler, Oswald, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich, 1998), 175Google Scholar.

44 This term is used by Vinay Lal to refer to the arrival of “Western” historical thinking in South Asia. See Lal, Vinay, “Provincializing the West: World History from the Perspective of Indian History,” in Fuchs, Eckhardt and Stuchtey, Benedikt, eds., Writing World History 1800–2000 (Oxford, 2003), 271–89, at 289Google Scholar.

45 O'Malley, Michael, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (New York, 1990), 4Google Scholar. I am grateful to Norbert Finzsch for directing me to this episode.

46 Quoted in Raychaudhuri, Tapan, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India's Colonial and Post-colonial Experiences (New Delhi, 1999), 26Google Scholar.

47 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in Werke, vol. 6, ed. Trunz, Erich (Munich, 1982), 270Google Scholar. For the English version see von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Elective Affinities (Boston, 1872), 37Google Scholar.

48 Quoted in Blix, Göran, “Charting the ‘Transitional Period’: The Emergence of Modern Time in the Nineteenth Century,” History and Theory 45 (2006), 51–71, at 58–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 For interpretations of simultaneous global integration and the production of difference in the nineteenth century see Geyer, Michael and Bright, Charles, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100/4 (1995): 1034–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maier, Charles S., “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105 (2000), 807–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; Dirlik, Arif, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, 2007)Google Scholar; Osterhammel, Jürgen and Petersson, Niels P., Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, 2009)Google Scholar; Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World; Rosenberg, Emily S., ed., A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2012)Google Scholar.

50 Green, Nile, “The Hajj as Its Own Undoing: Infrastructure and Integration on the Muslim Journey to Mecca,” Past & Present 226 (2015), 193–226, at 221CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Green, Nile, “Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the ‘Muslim World’,” American Historical Review 118 (2013), 401–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989)Google Scholar; Huber, Valeska, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the notion of progress see, for example, Mardin, Serif, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (New York, 1962), 350–52Google Scholar; Wishnitzer, Avner, Reading Clocks, alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago, 2015), 155–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 For a historical perspective on such different logics see Le Goff, Jacques, “Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages,” in Le Goff, , Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980), 29–42Google Scholar. For a contemporary example see Esposito, Elena, The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society (Cheltenham, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Biernacki, Richard, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1941 (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.

54 Marx, Karl, The Poverty of Philosophy (London, 1936), 47Google Scholar.

55 Postone, Moishe, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1996), 186–260Google Scholar.

56 Shao, Qin, Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890–1930 (Stanford, 2003)Google Scholar. For the adoption of clocks and linearity see Kwong, “The Rise of the Linear Perspective.” For Soviet Russia see Hanson, Stephen, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar.

57 Quoted in Schmidtpott, Katja, “Die Propagierung moderner Zeitdisziplin in Japan, 1906–1931,” in Geppert, Alexander C. T. and Kössler, Till, eds., Obsession der Gegenwart: Zeit im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2015), 123–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Yūko, Hirade, “‘Toki no kinenbi’ no setsuritsu,” Nihon rekishi 725 (2008), 69–84Google Scholar. On the improvement campaigns see Garon, Sheldon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar; Ryūichi, Narita, “Kindai Nihon no ‘toki’ ishiki,” in Tsugitaka, Satō and Norihiko, Fukui, eds., Chiiki no sekaishi, vol. 6, Toki no chiikishi (Tokyo, 1999), 352–85Google Scholar.

58 The most widely known treatment of such social disciplining is Thompson, Edward P., “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967), 56–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Smith, Thomas C., “Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan,” Past and Present 111 (1986), 165–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Franklin, Benjamin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, Leonard W., William B. Willcox, Barbara Oberg, and Ellen R. Cohn, 41 vols. (New Haven, 1959–2014), 3: 306–8Google Scholar; Smiles, Samuel, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London, 1859), 199–200Google Scholar. For Smiles's global career see Ogle, “Whose Time Is It?”, 1396–7. On the diffusion of Franklin's text see Reinert, Sophus A., “The Way to Wealth around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism,” American Historical Review 120 (2015), 60–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Ogle, “Whose Time Is It?,” 1398–9.

61 Quoted in On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, 2013), 11.

62 Trautmann, Thomas R., The Clash of Chronologies: Ancient India in the Modern World (New Delhi, 2009)Google Scholar; Nanni, The Colonisation of Time.

63 Tanaka, Stefan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, 1993)Google Scholar; Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation. For an overview of the global emergence of modern history writing see Woolf, Daniel, A Global History of History (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar.

64 See Guha, Sumit, “Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400–1900,” American Historical Review 109 (2004), 1084–1103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rao, Velcheru Narayana, Shulman, David, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (New Delhi, 2001)Google Scholar; Chatterjee, Kumkum, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Such an approach draws on leads by Christopher L. Hill, “Conceptual Universalization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century,” in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History, 134–58; Sartori, Andrew, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley, 2014)Google Scholar; Moyn and Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History.”

66 Quotations from Atkins, Keletso E., “‘Kafir Time’: Preindustrial Temporal Concepts and Labour Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Natal,” Journal of African History 29 (1988), 1988229–44, at 231Google Scholar.

67 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1963), 239Google Scholar. See also Alatas, Syed H., The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malayas, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

68 For some telling examples see Jean, and Comaroff, John, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1991–7)Google Scholar.

69 For such a reading in culturalist terms see William Gallois, “The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria,” in Lorenz and Bevernage, Breaking Up Time, 252–73.

70 For such emphasis on social struggles see Cooper, Frederick, “Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa,” in Dirks, Nicholas B., ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, 1992), 209–46Google Scholar; Eckert, Andreas, “Zeit, Arbeit und die Konstruktion von Differenz: Über die koloniale Ordnung in Afrika,” Comparativ 10/3 (2000), 61–73Google Scholar.

71 Quoted in Nanni, The Colonisation of Time, 194.

72 Barak, On Time, 5, 78.

73 Lowenthal, David, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar.

74 Reid, Donald, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar; Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, chap. 4.

75 Aguilar, Filomeno V. Jr, “Tracing Origins: Ilustrado Nationalism and the Racial Science of Migration Waves,” Journal of Asian Studies 64 (2005), 605–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Earle, Rebecca, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brading, Tim, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar.

77 Georgeon, François, “Changes of Time: An Aspect of Ottoman Modernization,” New Perspectives on Turkey 44 (2011), 181–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Georgeon, François and Hitzel, Frédéric, eds., Les Ottomans et le temps (Leiden, 2012)Google Scholar; Podeh, Elie, The Politics of National Celebrations in the Arab Middle East (Cambridge, 2014)Google Scholar. A thorough analysis of the multiple layers of time in the Ottoman Empire can be found in Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks.

78 For a recent reformulation of such a view see Sato, Masayuki, “A Social History of Japanese Historiography,” in Rabasa, Jose, Sato, Masayuki, Tortarolo, Edoardo, and Woolf, Daniel, eds., Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 4 (Oxford, 2012), 80–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 For recent reflections on the notion of “propensity of the times” see Hui, Wang, China from Empire to Nation State (Cambridge, MA, 2014), chap. 3Google Scholar.

80 Quoted from McMahan, David L., “Modernity and the Early Discourse of Scientific Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (2004), 897–933, at 901CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 According to the sacred texts, kaliyuga was to last for 432,000 years. See Sarkar, Sumit, “Renaissance and Kaliyuga: Time, Myth and History in Colonial Bengal,” in Sarkar, Writing Social History (New Delhi, 1997), 186–215Google Scholar.

82 Ogle, “Whose Time Is It?”, 1402. For a vivid account of how modern technology shaped debates about ritual time see the analysis of the impact of the telegraph on defining the beginning and end of the Ramadan in Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 149–76.