Vanessa Ogle´s insightful volume, entitled, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (2015), analyzes the gradual prioritization of mean time over solar time as a global project that enabled mutual intelligibility among nations in an increasingly interconnected world. Conventional wisdom attributes the universalization of time to the colonial, imperial and hegemonic powerhouses of the modern age, but her assessment is that, while mean time was never neutral, and it does give an adaptive advantage to the powerful and their technologies, the actual process was often “additive and unintended” (208) in surprising ways. She notes that “public time, private time, religious time, clock time (and) calendar time,” (121) coexisted at the local level in complex and layered fashion to constitute unique national identities that were unprecedentedly modern. Global time and the attempt at a universal calendar, according to this author, were more about depiction than practicality. “Time,” she writes, “is what made the global imagination possible in the first place,” (7). Technology drove time uniformity in many cases. Railroad workers and telegraph operators promoted it, while agricultural workers and religious monastics resisted it. Moreover, the written word, often in the form of pamphlets and almanacs, was crucial for promoting the cause. 

The author points out, in the beginning of the period she addresses, “a genuine inability to imagine time and time zones as abstract conventions,” (36). One might take that a step further. Even as universal Greenwich time began to take hold, people still needed to see it, as a ball dropping, or hear it, as a bell chiming or a cannon firing. Ostensibly, solutions to the problem of precise synchronization of measurement devices, those mechanisms also served to reify time for popular consumption. What was at stake seems to have been the nominalism of modern, competitive, Protestant Europe in contrast with the essentialism of the feudal, communalist Catholic past. Nominalist thinking (basically, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”) is a dualized world of body and soul, rich and poor, black and white, similar and different, making the structural “unevenness” (204) of global capitalist modernity inherent to the structural system. In that sense, she seems justified in putting the notion of the “developing” world in quotation marks, (202). The modern scientific universe of abstractions (like time and money) separate from concretions (like food and shelter) is not a developing force, but a polarizing one. 

Dr.Ogle’s work brings to mind Chaplin’s (1936) film, Modern Times. The tramp gets trapped, not just in a factory, but in a clock. She mentions Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday in reference to her idea that it is not the nation-state that is threatened by global interconnectedness, but the comfortable security of multinational empire, (201). She makes ample use of C. A. Bayly’s comprehensive study, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914. The uniformity of the world system, from Bayly, is her starting place, as she deftly identifies a wide range of local diversities as the “software” that nations have created to run on that system. Her chapter on time management in Beirut is particularly captivating, in that sense. While adopting the western fascination with timepieces, and the upward mobility of those who use time for self-improvement, she points out that the objective of that self-improvement in the Levant is community-oriented (not unlike the feudal European world) rather than individualistically competitive for personal gain. This is but one example of what the author calls, the “highly particular appropriations of universalized time,” (176). Another parallel with Bayly’s work might be how she portrays the old regime of sacred time in contrast to the modern public secular time. That is almost exactly how Bayly explains the modernization of art.  

Dr. Ogle’s most persuasive argument, again, shadowing Bayly, is her insistence that conventional histories have often put the cart before the horse to explain the shift in understanding time. She poses the example of E. P. Thomson’s theory, that industrialists had implemented the time shift to overcome task-oriented labor and thus commodify work hours, (71-73, 179, 212). In fact, she shows that the time shift occurred first, and piecemeal, at the urging of scientific communities, military men and railroad workers. Then, industrialists, among others, took advantage of it. On the other hand, her understanding of daylight in the tropics and in extreme northern latitudes to be a bit thin, perhaps more academic than experiential. In the Amazon basin, except for mad dogs and Englishmen with watches, people do tend to avoid exertion at midday, as she says, but daylight savings time is irrelevant, and most communities opt out of it, because the day is consistently twelve hours long. On the other extreme, while daylight savings might be handy for ultimate frisbee players in Texas, daylight in Ireland need not be lengthened in midsummer. In fact, everyone has to sleep while the sun is up, sometimes. New research might be in order regarding the Latin American scientific communities she mentions, the ones who promoted universal mean time in Latin America. They were, in fact, an important transnational nineteenth-century cohort of liberal, anti-clerical, intellectual, scientific, modernizing and military men. (And most of them were Freemasons, of the more radical Mediterranean school.) Opposition came from wealthy, Catholic, conservative, land-owning, traditionalist elites (and women). This rift marked Latin American politics into the twentieth century. It became the continental system into which local identities developed. It was also the deep motivation for a lot of coups and foreign interventions.