The title of Vanessa Ogle's The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 is misleading. It evoked in this reader an expectation that the book would be a triumphalist chronicle of how heroic reformers transformed time, creating a universal system of time zones to meet the needs of a modern and interconnected world. After all, as anyone who has read other works about the history of time measurement will know, this triumphalist story of progress is par for the course in the field. But Ogle's book actually does the opposite, and as such it is a breath of fresh air. Ogle argues that time reform was not very impressive, or even very successful. In many ways, global time reformers failed to implement their desired changes, and where they did succeed, it was by appealing to national interests, not international ones.

It would be unfair, however, to merely categorize Ogle's work as a story of failure. Her argument is carefully constructed to make a case about the ways in which global interaction works. In particular, she emphasizes the unevenness of globalization, and the need to counterbalance Eurocentrism in history. Time reform emanated from multiple sources worldwide, and these ideas penetrated different societies to different degrees. To achieve this global perspective, Ogle jumps from location to location, and from time period to time period, very quickly. In some cases this feels like one is getting merely a snapshot of one locality before speeding on to another. There is no space for in-depth case studies, and it occasionally feels as if only the surface has been scratched on a particular subject. Meanwhile, most of East Asia and South America receive no sustained attention at all, and thus feel conspicuously absent in this otherwise global story.

Nonetheless, the case studies which Ogle does develop are fascinating, and are put to good use. She begins by examining time reform in France and Germany, arguing that reforms in both countries were implemented for national purposes, rather than because of any desire to unify time zones internationally. She then turns to demonstrating how impotent colonial governments were at implementing European notions of time in African and South Asian colonies. Particularly compelling is her account of how residents of India, and of the city of Bombay in particular, refused, as a method of resistance against a colonial power, to adopt British time. European ideas about time, Ogle argues, had little penetration in colonial societies.

Where European ideas about time failed to penetrate, non-Western reformers offered alternative solutions. Ogle skilfully demonstrates that the Ottoman Empire, far from being ‘stagnant’, as Europeans viewed it, was full of reformers in their own right. Ottoman reformers drew on their own customs as well as European ideas to formulate plans to reinvigorate their empire. Social reformers championed the cultivation of personal time-management skills and self-improvement, in an attempt to fend off European incursions. Meanwhile, religious time intermingled with clock and calendar time, sparking debates about global unity and regionalization. Islamic scholars debated whether the date of Ramadan could be confirmed by telegram, and whether believers in different longitudes should observe Ramadan simultaneously, or separately according to local time. Once again, Ogle carefully draws attention to the conflict between global and national interests, and the limits of universal reform.

One of Ogle's most engaging contributions is her claim that many people, as late as the twentieth century, could not easily unlink time from the natural rhythms of the sun. Reformers attempting to implement ‘Summer Time’ in Britain, she argues, were resisted by those who found it ridiculous that the law, not the sunrise, should determine the beginning and end of the day. This argument is more controversial than it seems. Ogle's argument contradicts one of the seminal works concerning time in history: E.P. Thompson's ‘Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’ (Past & Present (1967)). Thompson argued that industrial capitalism forced eighteenth-century workers to develop a new time-sense, following the discipline of the clock rather than a more natural, task-oriented sense of time. But Ogle moves this change in time-sense a century and a half later, arguing that workers of the eighteenth century had learnt time-discipline without developing a new time-sense. Ogle suggests that even by the 1920s many people still did not grasp time as abstract, unlinked to ‘natural’ schedules.

Ogle's engagement with Thompson raises more questions than it answers: if not industrial capitalism, then what was it that finally made people understand time in the abstract? Ogle does not venture an answer. Her purpose is merely to draw attention to the unevenness of time reform, and the glacially slow speed at which it took place. To drive home the point, she concludes with a chapter on calendar reform, or rather the lack of it. Calendar reform in the twentieth century was a failure. If clock time was transformed globally, albeit slowly and driven by national interests, calendar reform was the transformation that never happened. It is a powerful case for the limits of global internationalism.

At its heart, the book is more about globalization than it is about time. It is a potent reminder that globalization is not merely a descriptive term for the flow of goods, ideas, people and money. Globalization, Ogle suggests, is an ideology. Europeans who imagined a universal time that would unite a globalized world imagined that world as one which they dominated. The increased connectivity of the twentieth century highlighted national differences, and incited competition. Globalization, far from killing the nation state, invigorated it. Global time reforms were only successful by a patchwork process of local change, nation by nation, region by region. Utopian internationalist schemes were ultimately beholden to the whims of nations. The method by which time was transformed demonstrates not globalization's potency, but rather its limits. The Global Transformation of Time deftly critiques globalization by highlighting its unevenness, its misplaced Eurocentrism, and its limitations.