Introduction

Fanon, Cabral, and Coates illustrate how the reproduction of the colonial ever-present is undergirded by colonialism’s manoeuvring in time. Thus, time and temporality are essential to understanding the interplay between legal knowledge and colonialism and how colonial logics are carried into the future. Temporality (materially constructed by memory practices, but also with non-human agents) denotes a subjective movement through moments, while time (socially constructed and cognitive) represents the objective attempt to quantify, measure, and mark that movement (see generally Bluedorn 2002: 14; Hoy 2012: 92; Birth 2012: 102; Grabham 2016: 16, 34–5; Abazi and Doja 2018: 240). In other words, temporality can be described as ‘the experience and perception of time’ (Lundström and Sartoretto 2021: 2). Times and temporalities, therefore, connect the earth and all its inhabitants – human, non-human, and inanimate – across space–time (Grabham 2016: 30). The introduction of the clock as a record of time is intimately linked with the acceleration of modes of accumulation and dispossession, which intensified during the colonial–enslavement project and increasingly thereafter under the auspices of globalised accretion of capital. Euro-modern legal knowledge, especially within the common law, is heavily reliant on time and temporality to make its meanings.