Contemporary Authors

• The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2015

1. The global transformation of time : 1870-1950 LCCN 2015006973 Type of material Book Personal name Ogle, Vanessa. Main title The global transformation of time : 1870-1950 / Vanessa Ogle. Published/Produced Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2015] Description 279 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9780674286146 (hardcover : alkaline paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 001735 CALL NUMBER QB223 .O35 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• University of Pennsylvania - http://www.history.upenn.edu/people/faculty/vanessa-ogle

  Vanessa Ogle
  Modern Europe; historical globalization and political economy; imperialism and colonialism; Europe and the Middle East;

  Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor of History
  College Hall 206F
  Office Hours: On Leave, 2016-2017
  Teaching Schedule: On Leave, 2016-2017
  vogle@sas.upenn.edu
  215.898.6513

  Vanessa Ogle teaches and writes about the history of modern Europe from an international and global perspective. Prior to joining Penn's History Department in 2011 she completed a doctorate at Harvard University (2011). She has received language and thematic training in both modern Western European and Middle Eastern history, and the interactions between Europe and the Middle East are one of her main areas of interest and expertise. In 2013-2014, Ogle was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study - School of Social Science in Princeton, NJ. Ogle recently received the International Research Award 2016 in Global History administered jointly by the universities of Basel, Heidelberg, and Sydney, and her current book project on tax havens, offshore money markets, and the shadow political economy will be supported by a research grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) as well as fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) over the coming years. In 2016-2017, she is a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University.

  Click here for a link to the conference program for Global Histories of Taxation, an event Ogle organized as part of the International Research Award 2016 in Basel in December 2016.

  Ogle's first book, “The Global Transformation of Time 1870 - 1950" follows European and American attempts to make clock times, calendars, and social time more uniform, from international conferences to Germany and France, Britain, the British Empire/German Colonies/Latin America, British India, late Ottoman Beirut, scholars of Islam in the Eastern Mediterranean, and eventually to the League of Nations. 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, calendars, and social time from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards.

  Yet clock times and calendars were not only concepts that were standardized and internationalized. Time also had a more foundational role to play in nineteenth-century globalization. A globalizing world led contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time - historical, evolutionary, religious, social, or legal – served as the backdrop against which to imagine the global by comparing nations and societies and situating them in universal time. Time established the hierarchies that separated ‘advanced’ from ‘backward’ peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism.

  Time’s role as a universal metric meant that a surprisingly wide array of observers commented on varieties of time. Involving German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nation bureaucrats, such exchanges about time often heightened national and regional disparity. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the 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. In addition to shedding light on the dynamics of historical globalization and an interconnected world, Contesting Time is a methodological intervention in the practice of global history and provides one model for writing the history of processes that encompass and affect potentially nothing less than ‘the world.’

  Ogle's next book project, "Archipelago Capitalism: The Other International Political Economy, ca. 1870s-1980s," explores the formation of a distinctly non-territorial and non-national economic and legal order that was put in place in the postwar decades and that would come to form the basis for today's global economy as it emerged from the 1970s and 1980s. The book will focus on Britain, Germany, the United States, and France, and look at the emergence of tax havens and offshore finance, unregulated currency markets, and special economic zones in the shadow of the public eye.

  Another project Ogle is pursuing is a legal and intellectual history of the question, who has the right to own and access natural resources like minerals, oil, and water, ca. 1870s-present. The project is currently titled "Owning the Earth: The Struggle to Control Natural Resources," and will consist of a number of case studies from a range of regional backgrounds and debates at the level of international law and international organizations, as well as NGOs. Future interestes include a history of the Egyptian Society of Political Economy, Statistics, and Legislation, founded in 1909 in Cairo, as well as the history of Tangier from the early 19th to the mid-20th century.

  Publications

  BOOK:

  The Global Transformation of Time 1870 - 1950 (Harvard University Press, October 2015).

  Social Science History Association President’s Award, best first book, 2014

  Berkshire Conference of Women Historians' prize for a best first book in any field other than history of women, gender, sexuality, 2016

  American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize for the best book in European International History Since 1895, 2016

  Non-academic reviews have been published in the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, and Foreign Affairs

  Select ARTICLES:

  “Whose Time is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s to 1940s," American Historical Review 120, no. 5 (Dec. 2013): 1376-1402.

  Winner of the Council for European Studies' First Article Prize in the Humanities for articles published during a two-year period between 2012 and 2013

  "State Rights Against Private Capital: The 'New International Economic Order (NIEO)' and the Struggle Over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962-1981," Humanity (2014).

  reviews:

  Review of Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, Journal of World History, forthcoming, 2016.

  Review of Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times, American Historical Review 121, no. 3 (2014): 885-886.
  Courses Taught:
  HIST 137 International Society in the Twentieth Century
  HIST 202 Empires and Decolonization
  HIST 206 Globalization: The First Wave
  HIST 421 European International Relations Since WWI
  HIST 670 Approaches to Cross-Regional History

• Toynbee Prize Foundation - http://toynbeeprize.org/global-history-forum/globalizing-time-globalizing-capital-a-conversation-with-vanessa-ogle/

  GLOBALIZING TIME, GLOBALIZING CAPITAL: A CONVERSATION WITH VANESSA OGLE
  OCTOBER 12, 2014TIMOTHY NUNAN 3 COMMENTS
  It’s a familiar routine for scholars of global history. Having squeezed in a visit to an archive during a spring break or stretch of summer vacation, you get off the airplane in a foreign land, stretch your legs, and feel, in spite of the local caffeine injection, tired. You set your watch, several hours ahead if coming from the United States and several hours back if coming to Europe and try to make the best of the first day on foreign soil.

  Soon, however, jet lag sets in. You either fall asleep in your dinner or wake up hours before the local bakers do. Exhausted, you read tips on how to beat the exhaustion, where you learn that the body needs an equivalent number of days to time zones crossed to beat off the exhaustion. The scholar coming from California to Moscow, for example, has eleven days of misery to endure before he or she is fully up to date with local time. You remain grateful for the chance to pursue your research, but, counting the time zones, groan at the routine.

  It’s a familiar routine for many, indeed, but not as old as one might think. Until the late 19th century, as University of Pennsylvania professor and global historian Vanessa Ogle shows in her work, efforts towards a global standardization of time ranged from negligible to chaotic. The standardization of time that we have today, and the divisions that we use–Central European Time from Madrid to Montenegro, Greenwich Mean Time, and scientifically controlled Coordinated Universal Time to keep time zones themselves punctual–are all relatively recent inventions.

  Unpacking this story, and seeing how contentious the seemingly most universal thing in the world–time–could be are great themes for global history. That’s why the Global History Forum was excited to sit down to interview Ogle, who is close to publishing her findings on the history of time standardization and well underway on a second project on the global history of “archipelago capitalism.” Speaking over coffee, we discussed her journey to global history, her first project, and her current work.

  Ogle’s journey began in Germany, where she was born and where she attended school and university. There, she noted, history at the level of primary schools and the Gymnasium (the German equivalent of American high school), was often explicitly national in focus. True, secondary school pedagogy saw greater attention devoted to the history of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the complicity of the Wehrmacht, the Nazi-era German Army, in mass killing as a state policy. But all of these events still found their framing through the history of a German state. That trend reflected a perhaps particularly German scholarly framing. Even at the university level, scholars studied areas outside Europe not as part of the general history curriculum but rather in area studies departments separate from the discipline of history. Little wonder that other European countries’ national histories, much less those of, say, the Middle East, entered but little into secondary school curricula.

  Yet once Ogle reached the Free University of Berlin, where she completed her undergraduate and Master’s work, the horizons expanded. Earlier coursework in French opened the door for Ogle to pursue a Master’s thesis on French colonial exhibitions. Having completed this work, however, Ogle still yearned for more regional grounding. She began to study Arabic and dabbled in Persian, admittedly “without a goal,” but with a sense that she wanted to study European history through its colonial world and with regional languages. The Levant, roughly today’s Lebanon and Syria, stood out in particular. Turned into a French Mandate by the League of Nations, the area was a “little laboratory” of peripheries stacked one upon the other. The area had been a periphery of the Ottoman Empire before the Treaty of Sèvres assigned it to Paris, but even then, the area occupied the French colonial mind less than, say, Algeria, Morocco, or West Africa.

  Spurred by the desire to learn more, Ogle attended Harvard for graduate school, where she worked with global historians Sven Beckert and Charles S. Maier. Having learned to operate independently in the sometimes-anonymous world of German universities, Ogle thrived in the coursework-driven approach of the first years of an American doctoral program. She took a year-long course on the history of capitalism with Beckert and courses in Middle Eastern history, all the while enhancing her knowledge of Arabic.

  Questions about a drive towards uniformity perhaps inherent in capitalism began to occupy her. How, she wondered, at a time when economic and financial globalization were bringing places like Beirut and Bombay into closer and more intensive contact with metropoles in Paris and London, did Europeans and non-Europeans think about the “objective” differences of time across the planet? These questions led Ogle to begin the project that became her dissertation, “Clocks, Calendars, and Conversion Charts: Reorganizing Time During the First Wave of Globalization.” The book manuscript resulting from the PhD is set to appear shortly with Harvard University Press under the title of Contesting Time: The Global Struggle For Uniformity and Its Unintended Consequences, 1870s-1950s; in the meantime, however, Ogle has published a synthesis of some of her results in an article for the American Historical Review, published in December 2013.

  In her work, Ogle looks at several groups that conceived of, and reacted to, attempts at time unification in different ways. The initiators of the project were Europeans and Americans–the leading members of the emerging global economy of the first wave of globalization–who quickly realized the need for standardization as “the necessary lubricant for the uninterrupted flow of people, goods, and ideas.” Without standardizing measurement and time itself, international commerce would be impossible. Some of the institutions that resulted from this moment stick with us today, like the meter as a unit of length measurement or the International Telecommunication Union (originally the International Telegraph Union). Some projects faltered, like the attempt to unify calendars globally: Julian calendar stalwart Russia resisted, and even today Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Nepal, Iran, and Afghanistan use their own calendars for official time.

  Yet perhaps most all-encompassing was the drive to standardize time itself. Scientists and diplomats pioneered the use of a global system of time zones in 1884, and “out of the standard time movement grew attempts to end the waste of daylight by introducing so-called daylight saving or summer time.” Time in Europe was constantly politicized, redefined, and renamed. The concept of Adriazeit (Adriatic Time) enjoyed a boom in the late 19th century, part of a transnational project to imagine German-speaking Europe plus northern Italy as part of a shared universe. The same goes for the concept of “Mitteleuropäische Zeit,” a term that literally translates as “Middle European Time” but contains registers of Friedrich Naumann’s term Mitteleuropa–an idea of a not always German-speaking but often German-influenced Middle Europe anchored by Berlin, Prague, and Vienna.

  What time is it in Europe? A time zone map produced by German officials in 1893 implicitly argues for grouping together Scandinavia, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Italy as part of a Central European time zone. Today, in contrast, "Central European Time" includes spaces from the former Russian Empire to Iberia.
  What time is it in Europe? A time zone map produced by German officials in 1893 implicitly argues for grouping together Scandinavia, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Italy as part of a Central European time zone. Today, in contrast, “Central European Time” includes spaces from the former Russian Empire to Iberia.
  Yet as Ogle shows, the advance of a system of uniform, hour-wide mean times and the dissemination of accurate times in accordance with time zones was an arduous, protracted process that took much longer to accomplish than hitherto assumed. The conferences and scientists who had pioneered the use of time zones in 1884 were quickly forgotten and never really affected administrators and legislators in their efforts to implement uniform, country-wide mean times. One reason for the slow spread of uniform mean time was the difficulty of imagining time as abstract and severed from natural and seemingly immovable rhythms of day and night or physiotemporal rhythms of sleep, wake, and nourishment. Europeans involved with drafting summer time legislation and mean times alike struggled as late as the 1920s to picture time as an abstract and moveable grid. Another reason was that colonial administrations were often too thinly spread to attempt a task as challenging as the implementation of territory-wide times. As a result, prior to the 1930s and even 1940s, there was no worldwide system of uniform mean times.

  In those instances where a colonial state did move to unify time, Ogle shows how subaltern denizens were forced to think of time more abstractly than the men who ruled them. In the British Indian entrepôt of Bombay, for example, throughout the latter decades of the 19th century authorities sought to impose Madras time to Bombay (the southern Indian city had been used as a reference chrono-point for Indian telegraph services since the 1860s). But locals both Indian and British rejected Madras time as foreign and artificial. Bombay, after all, was the primus inter pares of Indian cities: why take on a lesser city’s authority for something as essential as time? Even as some government offices adopted Madras time, other official institutions remained on Bombay time, creating a wild chronotopology wherein certain people followed one time as authoritative and others, the other.

  Two decades later, in the middle of the first decade of the new century, British colonial authorities tried to reform Indian time again. In 1903, the government in India agreed to adopt a time five and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, originally for use only by telegraph stations and railway stations, but also available for local application by British authorities if they wished. When the matter was brought up for debate by the Bombay Municipal Corporation, Indian Standard Time aroused a predictable wave of anti-colonial outrage. The leading Bombay politician and intellectual Pherozeshah Mehta decried the measure: “It is not fair and proper that the population of this City should be driven like a flock of dumb cattle because the Chamber of Commerce and the Port Trust adopted Standard time . . . a measure adopted by Government without consulting the feelings and sentiments of the people and without giving them an opportunity of expressing their opinion.”

  The measure was defeated, but this time opposition to standardization was linked to opposition to British colonialism itself. Time unification had the ironic effect both of creating an Indian “national space” that framed anti-colonial activity while itself being an object that nationalists could attack as alien. Global attempts at timekeeping were reframed in “specific local constellations that took on national flavors.” If the German railmasters had failed to see the abstraction behind time management, Indian nationalists, less obsessed with “real time,” could exploit this global project to frame their own abstract ideological projects. As Ogle explains, “While many other instances of adopting universal standards occurred fairly unceremoniously and without a national rebranding of uniform time, these examples nevertheless speak to the pliability and adaptability of universalizing concepts as well as to the importance of national frames of reference even in an age that was characterized by increasingly transnational cross-border exchanges. Globalization certainly consisted of interactions between the global and the local, but these contacts could bring national differences to the fore.”

  The stakes of time standardization took on different forms in the Ottoman Levant. (Here, Ogle’s hard-earned Arabic language skills come into play.) While the Levantine city of Beirut was part of the Ottoman Empire, intellectuals in the port city felt under siege at once by a modernizing Ottoman state and the influx of European merchants and traders whose societies had, to one extent or another, supplied the Ottoman Tanzimat program with models for reform. Out of this cultural crisis emerged what was later called the Nahda (“Renaissance”) movement, an attempt for Arabs in the Ottoman Empire to improve themselves in an effort to meet the double challenge of Istanbul and the West.

  Time was one arena where these tensions played out. Given Beirut’s diverse religious and ethnic milieu–Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic Christians plus (mostly) Sunni Muslims and Druze, and a small Jewish community–Beirut was a city saturated in time. Muslims began the day at sundown; “Frankish” Europeans at midnight. Different calendars added to the confusion. But in contrast to India, Beirut was not a colony (at least not of a European empire), nor was it subject to centralizing efforts at time reform. Members of the intelligentsia and merchant elite, however, devoted gallons of ink to the matter of time, specifically with reference to the ideas of “progress” and “backwardness.” Nahda figures soon turned to the pages to exhort readers to stop “wasting time,” while watch merchants hawked their goods in the pages of the Arabic-language press. Samuel Smiles’ pamphlet Self-Help was translated into Arabic in 1880, and Arab authors in Beirut took to the message of the book with great energy, seeking “to radically change people’s moral economy of time.” If the denizens of the Bilad al-Sham had fallen behind Europeans, Turks, or Armenians, then the common practice of “killing time” (qatl al-waqt) was one likely reason for the decline.

  The Ottoman-era clock tower in Beirut, home to multiple different "time communities."
  The Ottoman-era clock tower in Beirut, home to multiple different “time communities.”
  The example of Arab reformers discussing time in the Levant moreover highlights the simultaneity of a globalizing world. Ideas certainly moved from one part of the world to another, albeit not without being transformed in the process. A global history perspective on time reform brings out that in several other instances, similar ideas were articulated simultaneously in different parts of the world without direct transmission–as a response to overarching political, economic, and social transformations but formulated in and on distinctly local terms. While Arab intellectuals exhorted their contemporaries to stop killing time for the purpose of self-strengthening, William Willet, a British reformer, in 1907 published a pamphlet with the title “The Waste of Daylight,” which would launch the daylight saving movement in Europe and the United States. And while Europeans and Americans launched an effort to unify calendars by adopting a globally uniform world calendar, Muslim learned men discussed the practice of determining the Islamic lunar month and asked how universal Islamic time could be, given that Muslims lived all over the world.

  In light of Ogle’s research into European time practices, the efforts of Levantine figures to convert their readers make for an ironic and entertaining picture. Europeans, as the story of the German railway stations shows, were hardly as disciplined as the picture that Beirut intellectuals ascribed to their “Frankish” objects of emulation. All the same, the European-led effort to impose universal time had the effect of creating an “objective” frame of reference without which the concept of “wasting time” had no meaning. In cosmopolitan Beirut, after all, one Orthodox Christian’s tardiness was a Muslim’s haste; lateness and being “on time” didn’t mean anything if all could not agree to universal standards. In contrast to the colonial setting of British India, moreover, universal time was met not by anti-colonial nationalism and mobilization but a lively debate on how Arabs could co-opt the most useful features of “Europeanization” to aid an Arab Renaissance. Explains Ogle: “In the view of Bombay’s middle classes, British time was the illegitimate time of the colonizer, which was of no utility to those who truly represented the Indian ‘nation.’ Beirut writers, on the other hand, saw a potential weapon in efficient time management that, if embraced collectively as a people, could be turned against the threat of colonialism.”

  Not content to rest upon her laurels, however, Ogle has begun work on a second book project tentatively entitled Archipelago Capitalism. The project examines the emergence of an economic and legal order in the postwar decades that would eventually become foundational for today’s global economy as it emerged from the 1970s and 1980s. The period between the 1940s and 1970s is often viewed as one in which the nation-state assumed its greatest importance yet. European reconstruction, the welfare state, decolonization and the end of empires, planned economies, and development and ‘modernization’ efforts in the Third World were all different forms of economic, political, and social state-building and nation-making. Even the UN and the Bretton Woods system, while ostensibly international, were predicated on nation-states as their building blocks. Archipelago Capitalism seeks to counter this narrative for the postwar era by focusing on the simultaneous emergence of a de-territorialized, non-national, and privatized order. Tax havens and offshore financial centers primarily in the Caribbean; Free Trade or Special Economic Zones in Asia, Latin America, and later, the Middle East, and Africa; the so-called “Eurodollar” market in the City of London; and the activities of multinational corporations that connected these sites, formed an extraterritorial and unregulated economic and legal regime of islands of unregulated capitalism.

  These institutions are so much a part of the world today that it can be hard to imagine global capitalism without them. This spring, the French economist Gabriel Zucman used newly-available banking data on foreigners’ bank accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg to provide credible data on tax evasion, estimating that some 7 percent of global wealth is stashed in offshore tax havens. (That partly explains why economists’ records of international balance sheets persistently show net deficits, as if the world is in debt to itself.) Likewise, tax specialists like the German Prince Rubert von Löwenstein ran merchant banks that helped wealthy clients like the Rolling Stones funneled their money into offshore institutions that, in the case of the Stones, resulted in effective tax rates at 1.6%. (Not bad, given that the marginal tax rate in the United Kingdom is 60%.)

  But, as Ogle explains, this “archipelago capitalism” has a history. If Contesting Time takes place in an age of free flows of capital, Archipelago Capitalism shows how, “in different ways, the postwar expansion of capitalism and industry throughout the world soon ran up against the post-1945 order. The volume of world trade between states increased sharply, but the mobility of capital had been restricted by the architects of Bretton Woods. As a consequence, bankers, businessmen, and the politicians beholden to them found other methods and sites to invest capital.” Yet this new project faced road bumps. Ogle explains: “At the same time, decolonization or nationalist assertion against outside interference led to a surge of economic development and industrialization under the banner of ‘modernization” and spelled perhaps the greatest expansion of capitalism and markets yet. In the shadow of these developments, former colonies and states now freed from informal foreign control became sites for carrying out limited, laboratory-like experiments in unregulated capitalism. When the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates came undone in the economic and political turmoil of the early 1970s, a landscape of unregulated financial markets, tax havens and offshore finance, and economic zones was already in place.”

  The new institutional infrastructure prompted innovations in the circuits of capital. Political party platforms had to be reinvented to accommodate the needs of an ever more financialized economy. So, too, did the territory of empire. While imperial crown jewels were granted independence, others, like Bermuda, the Cayman and Virgin Islands, Hong Kong, and Singapore, became nodes in a global web of capital. Ogle tracks the story of how these élite actors responded to the double challenge posed by decolonization and the post-war consensus, with an emphasis on the architecture of capitalism they created in and outside Europe. Engaging with scholars of capitalism like Alasdair Roberts (whose Logic of Discipline was Ogle’s favorite recently-read book when we met with her) and Rawi Abdelal, Archipelago Capitalism promises to spark new conversations among historians of modern Europe, global history, and the history of political economy.

  Far from telling a story of smoke-filled rooms, champagne-drinking and-cavier eating bankers, and their conniving attorneys, Ogle aims to explore the push-and-pull factors between national governments and the wealthy and corporate actors who made their home (for tax purposes if nothing else) on national soil. The story of who supplies what, and who demands what, in this story is, after all, murky. Mayors like Michael Bloomberg or Boris Johnson (the Mayor of London) would argue that the presence of so many financial services firms in Manhattan and the City of London generates the taxation necessary for those cities to run the social services, schools, and parks that they do. The hyper-gentrification of Manhattan may grate on those who wistfully recall the days of “Crooklyn” and Escape From New York, but, so friends of the financial services industry would argue, great cities thrive by granting the Big Finance the insular soil (whether on Manhattan or in the City) it needs to base the employees who man the invisible archipelago beyond.

  A similar dynamic presents itself in the case of corporate taxation and dividends. This summer, President Obama spoke out against the recent trend among US corporations to seek so-called “inversions,” moves to re-incorporate abroad for the purpose of avoiding American corporate taxes after Pfizer and Walgreens had announced to pursue such strategies. American readers, now blissfully between Presidential election cycles, may by now have forgotten the predictable refrains of candidates noting that the United States has one of the highest effective corporate tax rates in the world–35% at the marginal rate, although the average effective tax rate has hovered around 12% in recent years. If the United States wants to generate more jobs, they insist, it should lower its tax rates to those comparable of, say, Ireland, which has a low 12.5% tax rate. (Corporate leaders looking for better could try Chile or the UAE, which has a 0% corporate tax rate.)

  Yet in a world where corporations claim the rights of the citizen, it’s not entirely obvious why corporate income should be taxed much lower than individual income. The pull factor imposed by countries, and trading blocs, suggests Ogle’s work, are part of the answer. It’s characteristic that in the course of negotiations over the new EU-USA Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, discussions over a minimum corporate tax were off the table. One can debate whether the putative gains in household income that more streamlined trade would bring (about $50 a year) would offset the lack of transparency.

  What’s clear in any case, however, is that without an understanding of the history of deterritorialized capital, we’re less likely to be able to debate it today and in the future. As the frantic reception of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century showed this past spring, taxation, both corporate and individual, is a topic of growing interest not least because of its impact on inequality Here again is an example of where a global approach makes a significant difference to how historians can make the past legible to present-day audiences.

  That said, as Ogle reflects, today’s job market can be tough for aspiring global historians. Teaching, she notes, is often determined by the needs of the curriculum at universities; practically, this means that the demand for modern Europeanists, national history, and other traditional fields still outpaces that for true globalists or internationalists. Ogle’s position, for example, is nominally for European transnational history, which means that she teaches primarily as a historian of modern Europe, albeit with a strong emphasis on Europe’s relations with other parts of the world. Still, because students’ most familiar reference points are, for better or for worse, often American or European, embracing a more truly global curriculum can be difficult. One would like to use the Ottomans and the Safavids for courses on comparative empire, but it’s often easier–and more pedagogically successful–to use the British and the Russians.

  At the same time, as Ogle notes, what may seem like limitations are also grounds for scholars to keep working hard. It may be fashionable today to criticize global history for not presenting a novel methodology clearly enough, but the truth is that the members of a new generation of scholars–with Ogle among them–have barely started publishing their work as monographs yet. As new works appear, among them Sven Beckert’s book on the global history of cotton due out later this year and Ogle’s Contesting Time, one hopes that it will become more common for history departments and universities writ large to offer courses in global history. It’s up to the current generation of scholars to write the works that win praise and interest not only from our colleagues, but a new generation of students, all in a way that might re-orient history departments away from national history framings and towards a more ecumenical global re-orientation. If Ogle’s and other scholars’ work is any indication, the prospects for the field’s future seem bright indeed.

• Dissent - https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-a-global-history-of-time-vanessa-ogle

  Booked: A Global History of Time
  Timothy Shenk ▪ December 17, 2015

  The Makkah Royal Clock Tower in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia (Yasser Abusen / Flickr)
  Booked is a monthly series of Q&As with authors by contributing editor Timothy Shenk. For this interview, he spoke with Vanessa Ogle about The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015).
  The steady passage of time provides contemporary life with its foundation—a background so indispensable that it becomes, for the most part, invisible. Like everything else that matters, however, time has a history. With The Global Transformation of Time, Vanessa Ogle uncovers that history, turning calendars and clocks into the stuff of utopian dreams and ferocious contestation. Writing the history of time, she demonstrates, requires grappling with issues that continue to define our world: the tangled careers of globalization and nationalism, the struggle to reconcile uniform standards with stubborn diversity, the local origins of global ambitions, and much more besides. Matters of both geopolitics and everyday life, these are some of the most daunting questions confronting interpreters of either the past or the present. For anyone seeking to make sense of them, The Global Transformation of Time will prove an essential resource.
  Timothy Shenk: At the end of the nineteenth century, you write, “it was tremendously difficult even for lawmakers and at least moderately educated bureaucrats to imagine time as abstract and empty.” Today, the idea of time being anything other than abstract and empty is what’s hard to grasp. How was time understood before its standardization?
  Vanessa Ogle: It’s easy to forget how recently people struggled to think about time as we think of it today. For much of history, time meant local time, taken from the position of the sun in the sky. Uniform, standardized mean times, on the other hand, are less directly attached to the sun. Our present-day system of mostly hour-wide time zones means that in Europe, for example, mean time can commonly diverge from local time by as much as half an hour. Contrary to a century ago, the vast majority of people today don’t think or care about this divergence. This is a big change from the beginning of the twentieth century, when such differences were thought to interfere with all kinds of habits and rhythms. The sun and the seasons were seen to determine the course of daily life, in sometimes irregular fashion. Work on the farm was often more intense during harvest times and slowed down during other parts of the year. Work in the morning started early for those who milked cows and later for those harvesting the corn after the night’s dews had dried off. For far longer than historians usually believe, people understood biophysical rhythms of wake and sleep, even meal times, to be regulated by natural timekeepers and thus to be unchangeable and fixed.
  Shenk: The campaign to make time uniform gets underway, you note, at the close of the nineteenth century, which means that for the overwhelming majority of human history it was not seen as either a pressing or a practical concern (or both). What changed, and who were the major advocates of this shift?
  Ogle: What compelled a small group of European and American scientists, railway officials, and observatory heads to push for the adoption of a system of worldwide time zones was the impression of an increasingly globalized society. They saw themselves as providing the infrastructure for that brave new world. Telegraphs, steamships, and railroads seemed to suggest that the world was becoming smaller, and that everything was somehow connected—not unlike contemporary talk about a global village. A system of standard time would allow for fast and easy calculation and comparison of time differences. Uniform time would lubricate the flow of goods, capital, and people.
  Shenk: One of the most impressive things about the book is how genuinely global it is. Decisions made in Bombay and Beirut are just as significant as what takes place in London and Paris. That departs from the way historians have usually thought about the history of time, where ideas born in the metropole eventually make their way to the colonies. What do we gain by shifting the optic like this?
  Ogle: There are many insights to be gained from adopting a more global perspective, but two are particularly important. The first concerns the dynamics at work in a globalizing world. The move toward implementing a system of uniform time zones based on the prime meridian at Greenwich, United Kingdom, certainly originated in the Western world. But nineteenth-century globalization inspired an astounding number of people across the globe to simultaneously think about changing notions of time and space on their own terms. In other words, they responded to similar overarching political, economic, and social transformations, but without a direct transmission from an “origin” to a number of other, non-Western destinations. The changes in ideas about time, especially during the first decade of the twentieth century, were too simultaneous to be directly inspired by one another. The origins of modern time are multiple.
  The second advantage of a global perspective concerns Europe. My book is an attempt to write European history from a global vantage point by comparing Europe to other parts of the world. Both Euro-Americans and Muslims in the Arab world and beyond were experimenting with universal time. But only Europeans and Americans designed universalizing schemes such as standard time or a world calendar to be implemented everywhere and substituted for existing arrangements. When Muslim scholars discussed an Islamic calendar that would unite all Muslims, they never meant for it to replace existing calendars. Comparing the two brings out both the specificity of European history as well as its unexpected similarities with other histories.
  Shenk: The book is preoccupied with what you call “perhaps the most challenging analytical question” that global historians of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries face: how can we reconcile the twinned ascents of globalization and nationalism? What does the history of time reveal about this larger puzzle?
  Ogle: It’s a larger puzzle indeed, one that extends into the twenty-first century. The relationship of the nation-state to what we commonly call globalization is far from settled. One interpretation has been to characterize the rise of nationalism as a backlash against globalization—keeping immigrants out, shielding domestic economies through protective tariffs. But as the history of time shows, there’s more to this.
  The impression of a globalizing world evoked a sense of competition among great powers and encroachment among weaker countries. From the vantage point of observers in the non-Western world (the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan), the nineteenth-century global village was what remained after Europeans had placed territory after territory under colonial rule. In consequence, globalization and the transformation of time were interpreted and implemented to serve nationalist and regionalist politics. In Germany for instance a national time zone became an instrument for creating unified, homogenous national space, where one time ruled instead of various regional times. In colonial Africa, governments often used mean times that could differ from Greenwich by half an hour or twenty minutes or whatever suited the particular colony or group of colonies best in their view, based entirely on regional considerations of feasibility. Reformers in the late Ottoman Levant viewed time management as a tool for self-strengthening that would reinvigorate Arabs and allow them to stand up against European colonialism.
  What is more, the international circulation of ideas often fed into national state-building efforts since so much of the knowledge that was traded internationally was about the state and the nation in one way or another. Scientists and diplomats who exchanged ideas about time zones at international conferences or in internationally circulating magazines and newspapers gave administrators and reformers the tools for building stronger nation-states. In other words, globalization contributed to the formation of nations and regions as it propelled nationalism and state-building on the level of ideas and ways of thinking about the world as much as on a more structural level.
  Shenk: When most historians think about time, the first name that pops into their heads is probably E. P. Thompson. His article “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” is a classic, and Google tells me that more than three thousand works have cited it since it was published in 1967. Your book is one of them, but it offers a very different interpretation of time’s history. Can you explain Thompson’s position, and where you break from it?
  Ogle: Wow—maybe I should have checked the number of citations before I chose to disagree with Thompson? On a more serious level, it is and remains a classic, and as a teacher, it’s a great article to assign to illustrate the kind of work historians do, the kinds of questions they ask. Thompson argued that sometime around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people abandoned “task orientation,” that is, spending time as necessitated by performing certain irregular tasks—cutting the corn during harvest, milking cows. By the middle of the twentieth century, people led time-oriented lives toiling under the merciless regime of the workplace overseer. Changes to the work day led people to view time as the monetized time of uniform working hours. Following this line of reasoning, the adoption of mean times and the proliferation of clocks and cheaper wristwatches in the second half of the nineteenth century showed how time was increasingly understood to be abstract rather than tied to certain tasks.
  I found this argument intuitively convincing until I began reading discussions about daylight savings in the first decades of the twentieth century. It turned out that hardly anyone, certainly not workers, government officials, legislators, and other moderately educated Europeans, could imagine time as detached from natural and biophysical rhythms. There was, therefore, a widespread belief that with the adoption of something like standard or daylight saving time, meal times, working hours, and even railway timetables would have to be adjusted to fall at the same “actual” point in time as previously. I took this to show how people lived simultaneously in multiple times—the regularized, uniform times of disciplined work, the natural times caused by the earth’s movement, as well as religious time.
  In an evil twist, this also meant workers could be subjected to the discipline industrial capitalism demanded and generated in the absence of a large-scale distribution of accurate time, without the proper application and understanding of mean times and abstract time. Workers internalized the discipline of the workplace but without conceiving of time as abstract and uniform. They comfortably continued to inhabit several different regimes of time. Capitalism therefore did not need uniform, abstract time to expand across the globe. Workers submitted to capitalist discipline without the aid of abstract clock time and uniform mean times. This is why there were so few capitalists clamoring for the adoption of uniform time—they could do perfectly without.
  Shenk: “Outside of Europe and North America,” you write, “there was no system of time zones at all . . . prior to the middle decades of the twentieth century.” That’s much later than historians have typically assumed. Why did earlier scholars miss this struggle, and why was there so much resistance to establishing time zones in the first place?
  Ogle: Indeed, this goes against much of what historians thought they knew about time zones. The main reason lies in the archives. Those who have written about standard time are often historians of science who work with the papers of observatories, scientists, and international conferences. But when you look at government archives, which show the process of implementing and legislating time, a very different picture emerges: one of patchy application, and also indifference. Indian nationalists in Bombay did resist what they considered “British” Greenwich time for almost fifty years, but it was more the logic behind adopting mean times that made for such a slow universalization of standard time. Based on regional and national considerations, mean times with half-hour, quarter-hour, and even twenty-minute differences from Greenwich often seemed more fitting, given local climates and conditions of daylight depending on latitude. War and occupation in the first half of the twentieth century also brought with them such frequent time changes that there was hardly any stability. Invading and occupying powers changed times in places to suit their own organizational and administrative practices.
  Shenk: To flip the last question around, given how much resistance supporters of uniform time faced on the ground, why did they win out so completely?
  Ogle: Uniform, hour-wide time zones became the global norm mostly in an additive and unintended process. By the time this happened around the mid-twentieth century, the internationalist movement that had initially propagated such a system had long since faded. It was a combination of the globalizing impact of the Second World War and the rise of military and commercial aviation that ultimately created a now more practical rather than ideological concern for uniform time. But even today some countries use time zones as expressions of nationalism: China observes one single time for the entire country, and North Korea just adopted a mean time of 8:30.
  But uniform time only won out if we consider calendar time to be a separate matter, and that was not always what historical actors thought. The movement to unify clock times was intertwined with another effort: to introduce a standardized, uniform world calendar. We have forgotten about it because it failed due to vocal protests from different religious groups. As a result, while the Gregorian calendar has certainly become widely used in many non-Western parts of the world, other calendars rooted in local religions and beliefs remain simultaneously in use. At the beginning of the twentieth century, calendar reform garnered even more attention than the reform of clock time. Yet only one half of that effort, the introduction of uniform time zones, came to succeed.
  Shenk: Religion might not seem like it would be an important factor in a history of time, but it’s central here, both as impetus and obstacle to reform efforts. From missionaries proselytizing for both Jesus and the discipline of the clock to worshippers using prayer times to keep track of their days, faith is everywhere. The most extended discussion of this relationship occurs when you turn to Islam. How did Islam shape the politics of time, and does this history tell us anything about Islam more generally?
  Ogle: Religion ultimately caused calendar reform to fail, when religious leaders in Europe and the United States voiced their opposition to calendar reform ever more forcefully in the interwar period. Time was and is central to Islam. Wherever Muslims lived in significant numbers, the fivefold daily call to prayer continued to regulate daily life even in the presence of mechanical clocks.
  Time was important to other religious rituals as well. During the holy month of Ramadan, for example, Muslims are obliged to fast from sunrise to sunset. And Ramadan, like other months and holidays, had to be timed by determining the start and end of a month in the Islamic calendar. This was done by observing the sky and spotting the new moon. Around 1910, a controversy among Muslim scholars erupted over whether it was in accordance with Islamic law to use a telegram to establish the beginning and end of the holy month of Ramadan, and thus to determine the Islamic calendar. It’s a fascinating debate about the incorporation of new technologies into Islam, and about the permissibility of using technology to determine religious time. Was it in accordance with Islamic law to simply send a telegram that reported a moon-sighting somewhere in a remote province, and to then have a judge rule that the month (and the fast) had begun, based on such a telegram? Was technology reliable and trustworthy enough to be deployed in the service of religious time? The debate reveals an Islam that is preoccupied with science, and with combining the natural time of the planets with scientific calculations and rationality. It also shows Islam to be a system of thought that was malleable enough to accommodate and integrate innovations into existing legal frameworks.
  Shenk: References to an increasingly globalized world, where borders are eroding and people brought closer together, have become an almost unavoidable trope. You call this “connectivity talk,” and you think it misses out on a lot of what’s most important about the history of globalization. But, as you acknowledge, it’s also linked to the increasing excitement for global history—a trend that has helped bring us your book. What do you believe that “connectivity talk” obscures about globalization, and what lessons does that have for those of us who want to understand its history?
  Ogle: The current interest in global history is undoubtedly part of the realization that we are living in an increasingly globalized world, even though global history and globalization are not synonymous. But such assessments are not merely descriptive. Connectivity talk risks making itself the normative mouthpiece of all kinds of highly ideological utopias, from Silicon-Valley inspired visions of a networked world to free-market capitalism. Stories about connections, flows, and exchanges across continents and regions are fascinating but they can obscure the conditions of interconnectedness: nationalism; war; the centrality of empires; new centers of power; entrenched economic inequality and divisions of labor. Global histories should avoid following the ideas and exchanges among international organizations and experts alone and instead remain grounded in various national and local archives and languages.

The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950
G. John Ikenberry
Foreign Affairs. 95.2 (March-April 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
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The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950

By Vanessa Ogle. Harvard University Press, 2015, 288 pp.

The second half of the nineteenth century fascinates global historians. Rising European power and influence reached a climax and created an early form of globalization. For better or worse, the West and the rest of the world discovered their interconnectedness. As Ogle notes in this fascinating account of the establishment of "global time," an interconnected world required standard measures of time and space. Capitalism and a global economy demanded that large numbers of people organize and synchronize the prosaic stuff of a modern industrial life--production cycles, work schedules, delivery dates--across great distances. But Ogle is more interested in the ways in which the concept of global time helped create what she calls a "global imagination," in which peoples and societies could be understood as parts of a single, developing world system. In this way, Ogle argues, the standardization of time reflected and reproduced the world's European-led power hierarchies. International clocks and calendars united the world, but they also revealed and sometimes reinforced its inequities.

Ikenberry, G. John

Ogle, Vanessa. The global transformation of time: 1870-1950
T. Timmons
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1187.
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Globalization is all the rage in the 21st century. What technology and cultural factors led to this shrinking world? One of the factors often overlooked, even taken for granted, is our system of uniform time. Before the advent of high-speed transportation (the steam locomotive) and high-speed communication (the telegraph), local time was observed throughout the world with hardly any thought to the time in other locales. Here, Ogle (history, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chronicles the evolution of uniform time as pressure from scientists, business leaders, and activists began to impact timekeeping on local, regional, and global levels. Convincing local authorities--and especially local residents--to abandon local time tied to the rising and setting sun for a standardized time based on a distant meridian was fraught with difficulties. The progressives who advocated for uniform time found themselves dealing with nationalism, regionalism, and colonialism, as well as resistance from labor, religion, and other groups with a vested interest in the status quo. Ogle provides an intriguing glimpse into the machinations that led to the globalization of time. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All library collections.--T. Timmons, University of Arkansas--Fort Smith

Timmons, T.

Ikenberry, G. John. "The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950." Foreign Affairs, Mar.-Apr. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA444942367&it=r&asid=1cf4d3b967db214dc1e4f38cbabc6488. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. Timmons, T. "Ogle, Vanessa. The global transformation of time: 1870-1950." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1187. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661622&it=r&asid=b17d7d28103c46dcdc7c578979b6a7fa. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017.

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  Review – The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950
  KEVIN BIRTH, APR 10 2016, 587 VIEWS
  The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950
  By Vanessa Ogle
  Harvard University Press, 2015

  The history of time reckoning often is told through the lens of technological progress from the invention of the first clock through modern atomic timekeeping. This narrative obscures the politics, conflicts, and choices that shaped the growth of time standardization. Ogle’s book is a welcome antidote to this story. By adopting a global history perspective, Ogle explores the debates and conflicts over time policy during the period from the 19th century until 1950. By focusing on nations such as Germany and France, or on colonies, she offers a perspective quite different from the standard texts on time standardization.

  The book is organized around specific debates about time that unfolded in different parts of the world. Chapter 1 discusses time unification in Germany and France after the International Meridian Conference of 1884. Despite the seeming internationalism of that conference, both Germany and France followed courses toward time unification that emphasized contested issues of how time should be unified within the nation rather than across the globe. This included deciding how national time should be related to Greenwich time and whether time should be set to a meridian of a notable city, or in hour or half hour increments from Greenwich. Chapter 2 discusses the emergence of daylight saving time in relationship to the agenda of social reformers. In chapter 3, Ogle shifts the focus to how time was administered in European colonial possessions and sovereign nations outside of Europe. Her emphasis is on the unevenness of the movement toward global time standardization. Chapter 4 continues this theme by focusing on debates in British colonial India over the definition of time, and chapter 5 develops the theme with regard to ideas of time management in Muslim nations. Both of these chapters demonstrate that the eventual acceptance of uniform time and time zones offset from Greenwich was a complicated and contested process. In chapter 6, Ogle explores the emergence of the debate over a unified Muslim calendar. As she notes, Islam placed a premium on the direct observation of lunar cycles by reputable witnesses. The advent of the telegraph created complications in that reports from reliable witnesses could be relayed over long distances forcing Muslim officials to decide whether local timekeeping should be privileged over reports from far away. Finally chapter 7 addresses the late 19th and early 20th century movement toward calendar reform—an attempt to correct the problems in the Gregorian calendar, set an annual date for Easter, and try to align the days of the week with calendar days. Again, Ogle emphasizes that while there was widespread desire for calendar reform, there was not widespread agreement.

  Throughout the book, the theme of how interconnectedness and globalization produced debate and disagreements rather than easy standardization is foregrounded. This theme is what ties together the seeming disparate cases of time and calendar reform from around the world, and this leads to Olge’s conclusion that interconnectedness and globalization do not lead to uncontested standardization. Indeed, she alludes to the emergence of global standardization being more a product of empire than interconnectedness, with interconnectedness spurring nationalism and debate more than uniformity. This conclusion echoes a point made by a quite different work about a quite different period—Sacha Stern’s Calendar’s in Antiquity.

  My main criticism of the book is that its conclusions are not bold enough given the historical data it presents. By this I mean that it could have more strongly challenged key works and assumptions in the dominant narrative of the emergence of time unification. Instead, she opts to soft-peddle criticisms of such pivotal works as E. P. Thompson’s work on time discipline, or Benedict Anderson’s discussion of newspapers and homogeneous empty time, and David Harvey’s idea of time-space compression. For instance, through the first several chapters, Ogle uncritically applies E. P. Thompson’s thesis about time, work discipline, and capitalism only to surprise the reader with a review of the criticisms of Thompson’s argument on page 71. I would have preferred foregrounding the criticisms earlier and more strongly. Likewise, she does not develop her critique of Anderson until page 211. With regard to time-space compression, she never develops an explicit critique of the concept even though globalization and interconnectedness are central themes of the book. Finally, despite addressing issues of colonialism, it is largely through the lens of colonial administrators and local intellectual elites rather than more stridently anti-imperial, anti-colonial voices that are captured in postcolonial studies.

  In effect, Ogle has produced a detailed history that challenges how we think about the emergence of global time standardization and demonstrates the complex politics that complicate simple narratives of European technoscientific developments in time metrology. Yet, she does not develop the implications of the history she has produced—that task is left for readers to ponder. Still, this is an extremely valuable addition to the literature on the history of time standardization and globalization for its breadth of examples and its challenge to the sorts of narratives of inevitable progress that dominate much of the existing literature.

  Reference

  Stern, Sacha. 2012. Calendars in Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  ‘The Global Transformation of Time 1870-1950’, by Vanessa Ogle — review
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  OCTOBER 9, 2015 by: Jeffrey Wasserstrom
  Even if you didn’t actually party like it was 1999, the turn of the millennium brought plenty of opportunities to watch others doing so. Those televised images of fireworks being launched in one timezone after another would have been inconceivable a century earlier — and not only because the devices required to transmit the 24-hour spectacle hadn’t been invented. As Vanessa Ogle reminds us in The Global Transformation of Time, there was simply much less agreement about all temporal matters then.

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  A trip of 200 miles might require you to adjust your watch to seven or eight different local times; you could hear a church bell chime noon when stepping into a train station, then look up and see a big clock reading 11:15; and many different notions were in play about when exactly years began and ended. We still do not have complete temporal uniformity: lunar new years matter more than solar ones to some populations, and there are states and creeds that do not describe the year we are living in as 2015. Still, nearly everyone is aware that January 1 is a standard marker and that it is conventional to say we are in the middle of the second decade of something called the 21st century. How exactly horological chaos gave way to order is the subject of Ogle’s accessible and prodigiously researched book.

  Ogle, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, presents the late 1800s and early 1900s as a pivotal period that saw new technologies of communication and transportation begin moving people, products and ideas over vast distances at unprecedented speeds. This triggered an exciting if sometimes unsettling sense that the planet had suddenly shrunk and, partly to come to terms with this new reality, “time reform” became a high priority for many. There was, Ogle writes, a “strikingly simultaneous emergence of ‘time talk’ around the globe”. Astronomers, politicians, railway planners, social theorists and engineers became obsessed with developing schemes to regularise clocks and calibrate calendars, convinced that doing so would improve the quality of life, boost efficiency and increase the wealth of nations.

  True to the promise of its title, The Global Transformation of Time rarely stays in one place for long. We are taken to late Ottoman Beirut, where intellectuals promoted “efficient management and use of time” in the cause of modernisation; elsewhere we learn why “debates about uniform clock times played out with particular verve” in Victorian Britain. Ogle’s determination to come at temporal issues from all possible angles can be exhausting but ultimately she makes a convincing case. Like books about commodities that change the way one thinks about such simple acts as eating cod or sprinkling salt on a vegetable, it encourages a keen awareness of how things we now take for granted are the result of complex processes, not just outgrowths of the natural order. I will never look at a row of hotel clocks telling me what time it is in London, Lima, Boston and Beijing or hear a phrase such as “time is money” without thinking about the ways that 19th century debates and developments made the former possible and the latter meaningful.

  Temporal uniformity is still incomplete — some states and creeds do not describe the year we live in as 2015
  In some ways, the period Ogle examines ends up seeming not so different from our own. One thing that is certainly familiar is the interplay of nationalistic and globalising pulls. Take this observation on time standardisation by the Austrian scientist Robert Schram. “Our century displays strange opposites,” he wrote. “While on one hand mankind is seeking to separate itself off into closely sealed off groups,” on the other hand people also “feel to unprecedented degrees the need for commonalities in everything that has to do with trade, industry and technology”.

  Ogle has insightful things to say about many topics, from the role of cosmopolitan ports in disseminating new kinds of timepieces, to Islamic calendars, to the curiously moralising tone of early discussions of using daylight savings schemes to prevent people from squandering precious sunshine hours. Perhaps her most important contribution is to show, via discussion of the various ways that power relations shaped debates relating to time, how foolish it is to view globalisation, in any period, as a smooth, value-free process of flattening out.

  We see 20th and even 21st century parallels, too, in the use by 19th century social theorists of chronologically loaded terms to differentiate “backward” cultures from “modern” ones, and in the efforts by western powers to encourage colonised groups to accept their ideas about time. In Urumqi, the Uyghur capital of Xinjiang, public clocks still strike noon when the sun is at its apex thousands of miles to the east in Beijing.

  Jeffrey Wasserstrom is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and editor of the forthcoming ‘Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China’

  The Global Transformation of Time 1870-1950, by Vanessa Ogle, Harvard University Press, RRP£29.95/$39.95, 288 pages

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