Churches

Despite the tangled ligatures of feudalism that often subjected a person or territory to multiple claims of obligation based on religious, secular, or personal bonds,Footnote ⁵² medieval time emanated from a single source. Combined with a general indifference to time in daily, secular life, the efforts of the Roman Catholic ChurchFootnote ⁵³ to ensure orderly religious observance resulted in a common view of time as belonging only to God, ciphered solely by scriptural revelation, and associated primarily with the afterlife. The Church alone ‘kept the day and times of year, it told people which days were holy and which not, it determined when to work and when not to’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Daniel Philpott makes the counterfactual claim that modern sovereignty would not have emerged when it did without the challenge of ‘Protestant propositions’ to the Church's predominance, the violent responses of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, and the resulting alliances between kings and religious pluralists who opposed them.Footnote ⁵⁵ These alliances typically led to an increase in secular authority and the eventual impotence of ecclesiastical claims within territorial realms. Philpott discusses the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of the new sovereign states, staring inward at their subjects and outward at a world of equals devoid of ‘robed ecclesiasts who claim temporal authority within their borders’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Concomitant with this revolution in authority was the de-monopolisation of time.

However, the time that secular authorities wrested from the Church's grasp was already rationalised and abstracted in two important ways. First, time had already come to be viewed as a commodity, in large part due to monastic communities. The monks’ vocation ‘was to pray and pray often’,Footnote ⁵⁷ but they also had to keep monasteries functioning on a daily basis. In order to ensure a balance between the sacred and the mundane, canonical hours dictated a specific number of services each day as well the times of their observance.Footnote ⁵⁸ As more services were added, the longstanding habit of dividing the day into quarters became insufficient.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thus, the celestially determined day was increasingly subdivided to enable religious observance, and this process encouraged a commodified view of time. The good monk attended to his duties in such a way as to maximise the amount of the day he could devote to prayer, so time usage came to understood as a form of worship. This view was extended to the secular realm, becoming ‘axiomatic’ by the early twelfth century, when the political philosopher John of Salisbury wrote that nothing was more ‘unworthy […] than the man who wastes time – this precious time, the one thing you can't get back once you lose it. The man who, wasting time, wastes his own life, […] dishonors himself’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this critique can be found an early association of productivity with virtue, a connection later institutionalised in, among other places, modern industrial capitalist factories.

Second, and in support of the commodified view, Church time reckoning was accomplished with the assistance of mechanical invention. By the end of the thirteenth century, mechanical timekeepers were an established item in cathedral accounts.Footnote ⁶¹ While the development of various types of measuring devices had been ongoing for centuries, Landes argues that this period marks the ascension of the mechanical reckoning device because churches spent large amounts to construct them, and because their attachment to bells to signal the hours to observers necessitated that they be placed ‘in high places – the better to hear them’.Footnote ⁶² Older reckoning devices such as water clocks were unsuitable for tower placement since ‘no one hauls water any higher than he has to’;Footnote ⁶³ smaller and lighter mechanical clocks were the solution, and they began to appear atop church towers during the fourteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁴ An important corollary of this argument is Landes’ observation that rationalising and abstracting ‘sensibilities preceded the invention of the mechanical clock; indeed helped create the need and gave birth to its realization’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Thus, the existing temporal knowledge that sovereigns annexed from the Church was of a particular character that anticipated the abstract, rationalising tendencies of modernity. Significantly, struggles over temporal authority did not involve questions about the nature of temporality itself, and thus served to reproduce and refine it rather than challenge or alter it. Modern temporality in turn helped to produce particular modes of social life. The roots of modern sovereignty trace back to conflicts over secular-religious authority relationships, and the roots of modern time can be found in religious authority. A largely unacknowledged result of those struggles was the export of commodified, mechanised time from the religious to the secular realms, manifested in the rise of cities in early modern Europe, where tower clocks and commodified views of time became increasingly prevalent.

Cities

Territorially delineated cities, and later city-states, were important antecedents to the modern state because, as an alternative to the cross-cutting jurisdictions of the medieval period,Footnote ⁶⁶ they provided an example of a unified polity ruled by a distinct authority.Footnote ⁶⁷ As discussed above, Protestantism provided a crucial impetus to political change by challenging Catholic authority,Footnote ⁶⁸ but Protestantism was also significantly related to the rise of urban life. Philpott argues that the growing urban commercial class displayed an ‘elective affinity’ for Protestant propositions in that higher literacy rates and a burgeoning sense of ‘administrative autonomy’ predisposed urban populations to embrace challenges to Church and imperial authority, in contrast to rural areas where Protestantism ‘took root the least’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although cities eventually gave way to sovereign states as the dominant mode of political authority, Hendrik Spruyt argues that city-states displayed important features of modern sovereignty: ‘the city-state developed notions of sovereignty and the public realm […] And like the sovereign state, the city-state had territorial borders’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Cities were equally important to the development of modern time. Borrowing directly from the Church, cities relied on a commodified view of time and on mechanical tower clocks for much of their daily social organisation. In contrast to rural consciousness, which merely ‘received’ or ‘perceived’ time, urban consciousness ‘tracked’ and ‘used’ time itself.Footnote ⁷¹ To the emerging middle class ‘Time was no longer the ephemeral time of the afterlife.’Footnote ⁷² The bourgeoisie had cultivated its socio-political relevance by acquiring wealth through commerce and trade, and such activities ‘required formalized calculation of time’ as well as a common, commodified understanding of time's passage.Footnote ⁷³ Whereas medieval time had belonged to God alone, urban businessmen utilised ‘mathematical precision’ to calculate interest rates on loans based on the belief that ‘time itself had value’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Time was also a symbol of the urban challenge to Church authority: ‘Throughout Western Europe towns constructed clock towers which were strategically placed opposite belfries of the churches’,Footnote ⁷⁵ offering denizens new sources of daily order. Crucially, such alternatives challenged only the Church's temporal authority, not the authority of Church temporality. ‘[T]he rulers of Europe seized upon and delighted in the new bell-ringing clocks […] costly to build and maintain, but well worth it for their plangent ubiquity – the ideal, quotidian reminder and symbol of high authority’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Such authority was viewed as emanating from the constructor rather than the construction of time. Nevertheless, by wresting the right to mark time from the Church, the mechanised calculation of city time contributed to the overall rationalisation of social and business activities that helped carve out an urban niche in the emerging modern social order.Footnote ⁷⁷

The temporal transformation in fourteenth century social life that rationalising and standardising efforts wrought cannot be overestimated. Whereas the daily life of the rural peasant was defined solely by the sun, city time was ‘man-made […] an invitation to serial engagements: with careful planning (that is, timing), one can multiply oneself’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In municipalities, serial engagements both facilitated and responded to an expanding array of services and opportunities available to urban populations. As Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum explicates, municipal governments and citizenries bore much of the responsibility for a ‘growing flood of deliberative and decision-making processes’ epitomised by burdensome committee, court, and guild participation, all regulated by the new tower clocks and bells.Footnote ⁷⁹ As responsibilities increased, temporal rationalising techniques further subdivided the urban day, which in turn allowed for the scheduling of more activities – a recursive process that contributed to the sense of ‘hustle and bustle’ that would become synonymous with cities. Although the temporal rationalising innovations that underpinned this process appear in retrospect as ‘a long-term development toward greater temporal precision’, in the context of emerging city life it amounted to an ‘abstraction […] away from the natural system of reference’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Such abstraction held the kernel of the idea of compartmentalisation endemic to modern, urban life – multiplying oneself implies adopting different roles in different contexts at different times.

In addition to communal duties, the urban populace also saw its professional activities curtailed and regulated in accord with the emerging time consciousness. By the late fourteenth century statutes for day labourers and artisans alike were based not on sunrise and sunset but on specific points on the tower clock face.Footnote ⁸¹ The new time regulations uniformly restricted work for reasons of quality and professional parity.Footnote ⁸² By way of examples, the following passages are indicative:

Seasonal and weekly variations were also taken into consideration: ‘Only during winter could [belt makers] continue by candlelight until nine […] On Saturdays and on evenings preceding high holidays, belt makers had to stop at four, needlemakers and smiths in the winter at four, in the summer at six and seven, respectively.’Footnote ⁸⁴ In an interesting twist, whereas commodified time had helped John of Salisbury to turn productivity into a virtue, it now served the purpose of constraining that work ethic. In this way, modern temporality was both the creator and master of modern labour. Social control based on time was made possible in two new ways afforded by the ever-growing precision and consistency of mechanical clocks. First, ‘events, whose previous temporal determination was vague or nonexistent’, were ‘fixed on a temporal axis’, as in the case of market hours of operation, a term suggestive of the change.Footnote ⁸⁵ Second, the concept of duration in social and commercial activities was revolutionised in that requiring a maximum or minimum length of time to those activities was made possible by the presupposition of ‘abstract times that are always of equal length’.Footnote ⁸⁶

The increasingly autonomous urban bourgeoisie welcomed political bargains offered by such kings as France's Louis IX and Henri IV that included a ‘legal framework and ideological legitimation’ based on territorial boundaries and ‘an exact locus of authority’ instead of medieval cross-cutting,Footnote ⁸⁷ bolstering the momentum of territorial sovereignty. Prior to these bargains, bourgeois self-sufficiency was facilitated in part by constructing secular tower clocks that offered an alternative marker but similar mode of reckoning time to that of the Church, whose commodified and rationalised understanding of it was well-suited to the development of commerce and the abstraction of daily life upon which urban vitality relied. As a result of the appropriation of Church time, social and commercial relations became more predictable, but such acclimation was not accomplished without conflict. Nowhere was this conflict more apparent than in labour relations, in particular disputes in the urban, modern factory.

Factories

Capitalism, here emblematised by the industrial factory, is a nearly ubiquitous component of conventional accounts of the rise of territorial state sovereignty.Footnote ⁸⁸ Immanuel Wallerstein explains the existence of the sovereign states system as part of a ‘unilinear’ process related to capital in general, and specifically as a response to the ‘needs of class forces operating in the world economy’, an argument whose causal relationship Spruyt reverses without challenging the fundamental connection between the two.Footnote ⁸⁹ Rodney Bruce Hall goes as far as to claim that modern states that accomplish the Janus-faced task of providing a ‘favorable forum’ for citizenship while competing well internationally are linked significantly by their ability to ‘provide favorable forums of capitalist production’,Footnote ⁹⁰ and that the dominant unit in international affairs is the specifically modern, capitalist, nation-state.Footnote ⁹¹

Clearly, it is not easy to imagine the historical rise of modern sovereignty without the presence of capitalism. It is even more difficult to imagine capitalism, especially as embodied in factory life, without a commodified understanding of timeFootnote ⁹² and the controlling presence of a mechanical signalling clock. Moreover, Landes argues that the rise of modern time consciousness encouraged the industrial revolution by exposing a conflict in the eighteenth century between the traditional putting-out system, in which rural and cottage workers operated unbound by any time other than sunrise and sunset, and owners/employers, who had adopted a sense of time-as-commodity.Footnote ⁹³ The perception of profits lost by the employers due to the poor efficiency of the dispersed labour force could only be reconciled by ‘bringing the workers together in a place where the employer could directly oversee their performance’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Just as in the monastic day and in city commerce, during the industrial revolution ‘the importance of a rational economic use of time and the new forms of time discipline moved to the forefront of public interest. Mechanization of production, [and] industrial working conditions […] made [employers and workers alike] more keenly aware of the economic implications of the organization of time and working time’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Capitalism is predicated on a distinctly modern notion of efficiency in which ‘each unit of time is utilized in as productive a manner as possible given scarce resources’,Footnote ⁹⁶ contrasted to the pre-modern notion of efficiency as constant busyness. Thus, ‘Control of time is a major part of capitalist life.’Footnote ⁹⁷

Concurrent with the widespread transition to industrial production beginning in the eighteenth century, the combination of notions of productivity with the mechanical clock's ability to specify precise start-points, end-points, and duration produced a factory life in which the worker's entire existence outside the home was at the beckon and mercy of the clock.Footnote ⁹⁸ Attached to a whistle or bell, and often architecturally reminiscent of Church and city towers,Footnote ⁹⁹ the factory clock signalled every step of the workday. Its control by management abetted the maximal extraction of value creation from the labour force by setting the length of a day's labour during which foremen would spur workers to contribute more than a day's product.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

This clock exerted a most direct and unyielding influence on factory life, so it is not surprising that it became a primary source of conflict between labour and management. Rural persons who came to work in factories often viewed their new jobs as ‘a kind of jail, with the clock as the lock’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The primary reason for this sentiment was management's control over the shift clock: ‘the employer knew the time, whereas the employee had to take his word for it’.Footnote ¹⁰² In this sense, the factory clock exercised power that was both ‘visible and unverifiable’.Footnote ¹⁰³ During the early stages of the industrial revolution, labour forces often suspected management of tinkering with the shift clock. Their suspicions were exacerbated by the absence of coordination between clocks from one location to another (for instance between their town square clock and the factory clock), for while clocks were more and more accurate, they still had no global referent against which to be set in the first instance, resulting in a proliferation of local times.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The natural response, increasingly within the economic reach of labourers due to the proliferation of inexpensive personal timepieces in the nineteenth century, was for workers to keep their own clock in order to check the factory's time against their own.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For instance, in 1863, workers at a power-loom spinning mill in Wiltshire, England, refused to return from a strike until a workers’ clock was procured to monitor the factory horn.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In this manner, factory labourers, like city leaders before them, contested authority over time without challenging the authority of a particular type of time – they fought ‘not against time, but about it’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As cities imported the Church's time within their walls, workers imported capitalist time into their individual lives. This is most evident in the emergence by the late nineteenth century of the concepts of ‘leisure time’ and ‘free time’, ideas responding to a ‘labor time’ controlled by someone else. As Stephen Hanson notes, ‘Early liberal capitalist regimes forced newly urbanized workers to adjust to the idea that the rule of abstract time is inexorable; work must therefore be steady and disciplined and “free time” kept within strict bounds.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Correspondingly, leisure time came to be seen as a measure of wealth, and thus deserving of zealous safeguarding.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Much like urban serial engagements, such practices contributed to the further compartmentalisation of modern life and the embedding of rationalised time consciousness in Western Europe.

As I will argue in the next section, modern time and territorial sovereignty were exported to the colonial frontier during the nineteenth century period of colonial nationalism. By then, modern clock time had become Western Europe's standard method of reckoning while territorial sovereignty accommodated the majority of Western European geography, and both were part of the effort to re-make colonial cultures in the Western European image. Both standards resulted from socio-political interactions epitomised in churches, cities, and factories. Technologies associated with the rise of modern time also facilitated colonial territorial expansion, necessitated a truly globalised time standard, and set the stage for a cataclysm far more destructive than the religious wars that provided crucial motive force to the initial rationalisation of modern time and space.

Ships

Accounts of the rise of territorial sovereignty typically view the contribution of European mariners either in terms of the importance of navies to military balances of power or in terms of the significance of burgeoning long-distance tradeFootnote ¹¹⁰ to the economic mobility of Europe's emerging middle class. However, maritime exploration also made possible a cartographic comprehension of the world and thus underpinned the ‘geographic imagination’ necessary for intercontinental territorial sovereign delineation.Footnote ¹¹¹ The epic efforts of seafaring explorers to chart the earth's surface, and later of colonisers to acquire territorial assets for their sovereign homelandsFootnote ¹¹² would not have been possible without a consistent, accurate mode of navigation. Accurate navigation became a reality with the clock-based discovery of the longitude.

Sailors had long been able to discern latitude by making use of the North Star and the sun.Footnote ¹¹³ However, longitude was much more problematic: ‘Since the earth turns continually on its axis, there is nothing visible from one longitude that is not visible in the course of the day from every other [longitude]’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This difficulty results from the earth's motion, which also brings day and night, making it the ‘original clock’;Footnote ¹¹⁵ appropriately, clocks would eventually provide the solution. Accurate longitude became important in the fifteenth century as soon as Europeans undertook transoceanic voyages. By the sixteenth century, long-distance trade gave longitude ‘the highest political and commercial urgency’ because navigational errors not only risked the lives of those aboard but the substantial investments of European entrepreneurs.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Accordingly, European powers interested in colonial expansion, including Spain, Holland, France, and England, initiated contests offering lucrative awards to anyone who could devise an accurate method of determining longitude.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Better navigation also held obvious implications for European navies at the time. Importantly, though, the quest for longitude was not viewed as solely a matter of national competition or security. Perhaps because it ‘was the great mystery of the age, a riddle to seamen, a challenge to scientists, a stumbling block to kings and statesmen’, and had attained an aura matched only by ‘the fountain of youth and the philosophers’ stone’,Footnote ¹¹⁸ longitudinal precision was seen as a project ‘transcending national interests and boundaries’,Footnote ¹¹⁹ an early example of cooperation in the embryonic international system.

The full story of the determination of the longitude deserves more space than is presently available.Footnote ¹²⁰ In this context, the relevant aspect of its discovery is the crucial role that modern time played. The break-through solution used increasingly accurate chronometers to monitor time at a place of known longitude, which could then be compared with local times at uncharted locales and the difference transformed into a measure of distance.Footnote ¹²¹ Clearly, the further explorers travelled from their European points of reference, the more important chronometric consistency and accuracy became. Life on the high seas was not conducive to the precision instruments employed in land-based clocks, and it was not until the late seventeenth century that inventors could find a way to make marine chronometers ‘more or less impervious to motion’,Footnote ¹²² allowing for accurate long distance measurement and mapping. Thus, the comprehension of the world's oceans was dependent on innovations in time.

Rails and wires

Much as maritime knowledge and strength allowed Europeans to seek out and subdue peripheral coastsFootnote ¹²³ around the world, railroads and telegraphs played a crucial role in the comprehension and conquest of colonial interiors. Such processes preceded colonial disputes over territorial delineation of European holdings across Africa and Asia that effectively set the boundaries along which many future modern states would be constituted following the World Wars of the twentieth century. Contrary to maritime pursuits, which waited on temporal innovations, railroads and telegraphs spurred time reckoning revolutions as they covered more and more of the globe.

Railroads provided the fastest travel and communication over long distances in human history. They also crossed a plethora of ‘local times’ based on a municipal clock set against some natural marker such as ‘high noon’ and thus dependent on the geographic position of the locality.Footnote ¹²⁴ Railways initially set each rail line to the time of the largest city or town it served and kept two clocks at all stations, one for the line time and one for local time.Footnote ¹²⁵ This practice lost efficacy as more and more track was laid, placing more than one large city on the same line and running multiple lines through single cities. Local reckoning and crisscrossing rail lines produced a plurality of pertinent times involved in train travel,Footnote ¹²⁶ and travellers often missed their connection.

Telegraphs, following fast on the heels of trains globally (and preceding them in some colonies), provided a solution to the problem of temporal coordination.Footnote ¹²⁷ By broadcasting a daily time signal, they facilitated the uniform correction of local clocks by a single, master clock. Convincing localities to change their time to match some distant source was another matter altogether, and required extensive commercial and political appeals to the connection between ‘advanced society’ and a ‘common standard’.Footnote ¹²⁸ But where railroads covered extremely broad distances, such as the United States (US) and Russia, a single national time was insufficient, and in 1883 time zones were instituted in the US for the first time.Footnote ¹²⁹

In 1884, the International Meridian Conference (IMC) proposed a system of time zones covering the entire earth, with the prime meridian marked by the Greenwich observatory in England.Footnote ¹³⁰ Unlike the quest for longitude, the IMC and subsequent ratification process were sources of persistent international dispute, suggesting that time was an important component of Western national identities. During the conference, Americans claimed that using Greenwich as a global referent challenged the ‘sovereignty’ of the American National Observatory and imposed ‘English time’ on the US.Footnote ¹³¹ The French delegation refused to accept Greenwich unless the US and England adopted the metric system.Footnote ¹³² France's proposal was rejected, and the French abstained from the final vote, portending a lengthy ratification process. In Europe, Germany did not adopt Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) until 1893, when Helmuth Von Moltke declared, ‘we have in Germany five different units of time […] which, since we have become an empire, it is proper should be done away with’.Footnote ¹³³ Portugal, Holland, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Ireland, and most of South America did not adopt GMT until after 1905. France was most intransigent, refusing to ratify until 1911, and then only by ‘defining their standard as “Paris Mean Time, retarded by nine minutes twenty-one seconds”’ from GMT.Footnote ¹³⁴ Arguments for and against GMT indicate the duality of the new institution – on the one hand, a singular time symbolised the increasingly unitary nation-state, on the other, it signified nation-states’ subordination to a global standard. However, the coordinating power that a global standard offered to commerce, factories, railways, governments, and militaries eventually prevailed.Footnote ¹³⁵ Once France gave its mitigated assent, the IMC system, much like the telegraphy that facilitated it, covered most of Europe and the Americas.

As railroad tracks and telegraph wires enveloped more and more of the earth, territory and time came increasingly under the coordination, regulation, and control of Western European (and now American) powers, a process C. A. Bayly refers to as the world-wide ‘convergence’ of time.Footnote ¹³⁶ Technological dominance on the oceans had facilitated European conquests in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth, it furthered the interior development of Europe and its ‘frontier’. When colonialism took on a nationalist character, Western European notions of spatial and temporal organisation were part of a particular vision of ‘civilization’ that was exported to the colonies.

Frontiers

Hall distinguishes between eighteenth century mercantilist imperialism, motivated by a desire for increased tradable commodities and taxable wealth available through the attainment of colonies,Footnote ¹³⁷ and nineteenth century nationalist imperialism, ‘a crusade to transmit [Western European] national culture and institutions to the periphery – a process that transformed peripheral societies’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Railroads and especially telegraphs supported the kind of order and control necessary for such transmissions, aiding the colonial development of commerce, modern administrative practices and economic structures, and helping to quell political unrest.Footnote ¹³⁹ The penetration of the concept of territorial sovereignty in the post-colonial era is evidenced by the retention of colonial geographic borders. But the Western time that rails and wires helped to standardise and import also remained behind when imperialists relinquished the frontier.

Nationalist imperialism operated at nearly all levels of colonial life, and ‘Every form of social power at the command of the imperialist states was harnessed to thoroughly penetrate and transform peripheral society, economy, ideas, and self-perceptions.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Particularly important in the course of modern sovereignty's expansion was the view of territorial statehood as communicating authority, simplifying enforcement, and reifying power.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Furthermore, territorial sovereignty was seen as an important part of the positive legal tradition communicated to colonies,Footnote ¹⁴² as well as the context for modern political administration.

Through administrative and missionary education, Western European nationalists applied a socio-cultural pressure to indigenous populations that ‘left only one rational response: abject imitation as a condition of survival and self-affirmation’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Some of the most successful socialisation projects took place in missionary schools, where the African schoolboy was ‘educated in the language of his colonial master, according to a curriculum devised by his colonial master, within a strict schedule laid out by, and in the time of his colonial master, to prepare him for service in the military, bureaucratic, ecclesiastical and administrative institutions of his colonial master’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Matriculants thus came to value the ‘rubber stamp and the row of pens in the breast pocket’ along with the ordering precision of the pocket watch.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Such temporal order had been introduced during the initial colonial period, when ‘Slave plantations […] were controlled by bells sounded to the time of the master's watch.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Western standard time was thus in the vanguard of the ‘great domestication’ of the periphery, encouraging the ‘creation of modern societies from Indochina to central Africa’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Examples of this domestication, or abject imitation, occurred in India and China when ‘municipal grandees began to build great clock towers to regulate the rhythm of bazaars and offices where once they would have put their money into temples or mosques’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Departing their homelands on ships equipped with accurate navigational instruments, national imperialists expanded the reach of Western culture around the world, transforming many local conventions and further delineating the earth's territory. Whereas eighteenth century imperialism was based on the material interests of European metropoles, the nineteenth century variety stemmed from a ‘will-to-manifest identity’ – a particularly Western European identity with specific understandings of space and time.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ If the export of cultural and political conventions was in fact an effort to ‘become the composers and fiddlers of the tune to which […] the rest of the world would dance’,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Western standard time provided the tempo. The embeddedness of modern time and space in peripheral societies became evident in the post-colonial period following two World Wars. Ironically, railroads and telegraphs, so crucial to the diffusion of modern spatial and temporal understandings, contributed directly to the first of these cataclysms.

Trenches

Territorial nationalist accounts of World War I will be familiar to most students of international politics. The standard story weaves together threads such as the entangling effect of alliances, the Balkan tinder box ignited by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, historical and ethnic links binding sentiments across territorial lines, and volleyed accusations of overly belligerent heritages. However, modern time was also crucial to the arrival of the war, as well as to its prosecution.

By the eve of World War I, railroads and telegraphs networked much of the European continent together, revolutionising diplomatic communications and military mobility. Whereas previous centuries had imposed significant logistic limitations on troop movements,Footnote ¹⁵¹ the speed and span of railways allowed powerful European nation-states to deploy forces to continental locales in a matter of hours or days, rather than weeks. Prima facie an improvement on history, deployment by rail contained a hidden danger in that it reduced mobilisation timeframes and thus limited opportunities to reverse decisions or utilise the appearance of belligerence to thaw diplomatic impasses. For instance, once initiated by statesmen, French mobilisation plans obeyed only the clock and the map:

The most extreme example of thoroughly modern mobilisation was the German Schlieffen Plan which, to preserve the element of surprise and initiative, drew no distinction between mobilisation and the immediate invasion of Belgium.Footnote ¹⁵³ Once German troops were spirited away from their barracks on rail cars, there was no mechanism for returning them until the battle had been joined and done.

Similarly, although telegraphs and telephones facilitated unprecedented speed of communication, contemporaries described telephonic conversations as a ‘vision of death’, apropos of the diplomatic July Crisis that awakened the guns of August 1914.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Technologically accelerated exchanges at the highest levels added to ‘the spectacular failure of diplomacy’, including ‘crossed messages […] sudden surprises, and […] unpredictable timing’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Wrought by the new technologies of the era, accelerating temporalities combined with a shared confidence in the ‘soundness’ of the basic, territorial organisation of Europe to allow states and their increasingly nationalist populations to associate boldness and bravery with quick, decisive action.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The effect of the new technologies was not a single acceleration, but a ‘series of new and variable paces that supercharged the masses, confused the diplomats, and unnerved the generals’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ On the eve of World War I, time – the traditional ‘conciliator’ of diplomatic crises – effectively disappeared, drawing in its wake millions of lives.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The temporal experience of the war itself was felt keenly in the daily life of the trenches. Stephen Kern generalises this as a ‘thickened’ perception of the present, when past and future slipped away and the paradoxical duo of boredom and danger bound the imagination to an endless succession of days in the trenches.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ World War I also saw the proliferation of the wrist watch, a timepiece hitherto considered ‘unmanly’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ As significant as clocks had been for delivering the common soldier to his deployment on time, wrist watches were even more crucial in the trenches, when the importance of a coordinated instant of attack necessitated a pre-offensive ritual in which ‘a runner distributed watches which had been synchronized at field headquarters’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The appearance of watches in the trenches might have mitigated the thickened present, but since they measured the interminability of trench life and also marked the imminent moments of greatest danger, this was not the case. As one veteran observed ‘Time went by, but no one felt the passage of it, for the shadow of death lay over the dial.’Footnote ¹⁶²

Wrist watches more often marked the occasion of mass casualties rather than any moment of success. But Western standard time and all its associated technologies outlived the war, as did a belief in territorial nation-states. At the end of the war, the Treaty of Versailles, in addition to setting the terms of peace, took another substantial step in the comprehensive partitioning of the earth's surface by setting borders in Eastern Europe and much of the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁶³ European colonies would be the sites of significant fighting in the next World War, further reifying the sense of holdable territory and preceding claims by those territories’ indigenous populations. At the end of World War I, the writer James Joyce provided a synopsis of the new, deadly nexus of modern territoriality and temporality that would dominate the next half-century: ‘I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame.’Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Nascent states

After Europe and the rest of the world narrowly survived a second apocalypse, holding colonies became an increasingly difficult and indefensible practice. Philpott argues that the abrogation of colonial claims throughout Europe's periphery embedded the idea of territorial sovereignty, ‘extend[ing] globally the formula of 1648’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ For instance, UN General Assembly Resolution 1514, adopted toward the end of 1960, granted the right of self-determination to colonial peoples without establishing an explicit criterion for international recognition of the new polities. Without a criterion, and with independence within reach, former colonies generally accepted colonial borders as the limits of their new states.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The reification of Western organisational concepts was further encouraged during this period by the return of European – and American-educated indigenous elites, who brought with them Western ideas such as national pride, the value of freedom, and capitalism.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Similarly, many indigenous soldiers were sent to the fronts of World War II, where they were exposed to the Western ideals for which they were presumably fighting.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Philpott concludes that the particular character of successful post-colonial independence movements, based on Western concepts, thus encouraged the subsequent era of economic neo-colonialism.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Along with Western territorial and economic ideals, former colonies also adopted without significant opposition the temporal conventions contained in Western standard time. As discussed earlier, modern European temporality featured significantly in colonial education and governance training during the nineteenth century, hence Western temporal conventions were already in place by the 1960s. And since ideas can shape identities,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ we cannot omit the significance of a specific type of temporal reckoning, in this case that propagated by Western European colonial powers, in shaping the daily lives and roles of indigenous peoples around the world. As many colonies gained their formal independence in the 1960s, they evoked the earlier struggles for autonomy in cities and factories by challenging the sources of political control without questioning the modes of organisation of that control. If the reasoning offered has been persuasive, then the conclusion that authority over time is a component of post-colonial struggle while the authority of Western standard time remains a colonial artefact should also hold.

Such authority was not a given outside the European continent – political and social power embedded it around the world. In the periphery, authority over time has lately been ‘culturally neutralized’ as (intrinsically capitalist) ‘“modernization” or simply “development”’, part of a general attempt to create ‘“westernized” societies in aboriginal dress as a salve to “national” pride’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ It follows from this that ‘aboriginal’ garments today, in addition to holding a row of pens, continue to make room for a Western standardised timepiece.