The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950

by Vanessa Ogle

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.

Genres: History, Science, Nonfiction, World History, Academic

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2015

Reviews

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only did a “graduate school reading” of this since it’s pretty outside of my own research interests but it was very interesting! this will make me sound like a broken record but I wish when global historians analyzed europe they expanded from just western europe and germany to more of eastern europe since there is very little work on eastern european history in a global context. regardless, Ogle’s methodology is solid and her emphasis on various actor’s motives in time reform added a lot to my own understanding of both nationalism and imperialism.

[CJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This helped me re-think the history of "global connectivity." My intuition would be to treat standardization of time-zones as indicative of increased global inter-dependence. But Ogle claims that the 19th century "imagined communities" of nationalism described by Benedict Anderson should also be seen with imagined communities of globalization: Western expectations of time management collided with an actual history of uneven and slow time reform. Religious activists from 7th Day Adventists to Joseph Hertz to Muslim scholars in Rangoon opposed calendar reform initiatives in international organizations in the 1930s, while Joseph Hsue in Tianjin (aha!) proposed an "eternal calendar." Plurality of time was part of the fabric of cities like Beirut, while technologies like the telegraph sparked debates with Muslim reformers calling for an universal Islamic calendar; British politicians called for daylight savings, and opponents called it government overstretch.

[Nicole]

Used in Graduate Historiography seminar in Fall 2019. We used the book as an entry point into book reviewing, and that worked well, as there are a lot of published reviews of the book and they run the gamut from "magisterial" praise to a serious smack down. I had hoped it would fit nicely alongside my other introductory books that deal with the profession and historical methods -- as in, I thought it might say something useful about how historians conceptualize time -- but it didn't really do that, because it is much more about globalization than about time. On the plus side, the introduction to the book is exemplary.

[Garret Shields · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 - An examination of globalization thru the lens of time, and the standardization of time. I recognize the value of these new insights into globalization. It’s just that I didn’t enjoy this reading as much. Still, I’m impressed with the fresh perspective and extensive scholarship, including the non-Western perspective.

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 4 out of 5]

From new book network: "From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism, Beirut’s plurality of time was less an exception than it was a quandary to later advocates who aimed to organize time along geographical lines.

In The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), Vanessa Ogle excavates 19th century movements to reform and standardize time: summer time, calendar time, time zones, religious time, and national time among others. Ogle questions the inevitability of 21st century time, demonstrating that it was the object of active creation for nearly two centuries prior. The rise of nationalism, the consolidation of colonial practice, along with autonomous religious reform movements simultaneously gave rise to, and were in turn, molded by advocacy focused on time. New communications technologies, such as the telegraph, and time-keeping devices, such as city clock towers, similarly served as the infrastructure around which time-keeping debates became organized.

Written as a historical account, time becomes a central character in this book: casting a common lens over otherwise disconnected places and people, raising controversy, and shifting between the center and the periphery of a broader story of 19th century transformation."

[Taran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting! A topic I didn't know much about beyond the annual argument about whether we should scrap daylight savings. Some fascinating discussions in particular about thinking about late 19th century globalisation as a conscious process, and about the complementary relationship between globalisation and nationalism/nation-building.

[loni · Rating 2 out of 5]

i had to read this for uni. i liked it, though it isn't really my cup of tea.

[ACRL]

Read by ACRL Member of the Week Emily Drabinski. Learn more about Emily on the ACRL Insider Blog.