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The Global Transformation of Time 1870-1950, by Vanessa


Ogle review
Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Even if you didnt 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 hadnt been invented. As Vanessa Ogle reminds us in The Global Transformation of Time, there was
simply much less agreement about all temporal matters then.
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 Ogles accessible and
prodigiously researched book.

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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. Ogles 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,
RRP29.95/$39.95, 288 pages
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