The Transformation of the World (18 page)

We get closer to a history of nineteenth-century mentalities if we consider which experiences of time may have been characteristic of the age. This is a case of cultural construction and is one of the favorite criteria used by anthropologists and cultural theorists to distinguish civilizations from one another.
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Indeed, there is scarcely a more demanding or productive starting point for a comparative approach to cultures.
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Conceptions of time vary greatly both on the level of philosophical or religious discourse and in everyday behavior. Can anything sufficiently general be said about images and experiences of time in the nineteenth century?

No previous age had developed such uniformity in its measurement of time. At the beginning of the century there were myriad times and temporal cultures specific to particular locations or milieux. By its end the order of world time had settled over this reduced, but not entirely vanished, multiplicity. Around 1800 no country in the world had a synchronized time signal beyond the limits of a particular city; every place, or at least every region, adjusted its clocks by its estimation of the solar noon. By 1890 the measurement of time had been coordinated within national frontiers, and not only in the advanced industrial countries. This would not have been possible without technological innovations. The standardization of clock time was a challenge that occupied many engineers and technicians—even the young Albert Einstein. Only the invention and introduction of telegraphic electrical impulses made a solution practicable.
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In 1884 an international conference met in Washington, with delegates from twenty-five countries, and approved a single “world time” (the one we still use today), dividing the globe into twenty-four time zones each of 15 degrees of longitude. The driving force behind this historic agreement was a private individual, Sandford Fleming, a railway engineer who emigrated from Scotland to Canada, and who may safely be described as one of the most successful “globalizers” of the nineteenth century.
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Advocates of time reform had been proposing similar plans since the beginning of the century, but governments had shown little interest until the 1880s. The logic of train timetables had cried out for coordination,
but the actual work of reform had dragged on and on. As late as 1874, railroad time in Germany was calculated on the basis of local times in big cities, each of which had to be precisely measured and officially monitored.
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Passengers had to calculate for themselves the hour at which they would reach their destination. In 1870 the United States had more than four hundred railroad companies and seventy-five different “railroad times”; each passenger had to report to the counter in accordance with the time in use for his or her journey. A first step toward standardization was the electrical synchronization of clocks for the reckoning of time within a single railroad company.
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But where was the measure to be taken from? Since the eighteenth century, sailors had largely agreed on a standard time that took the longitude of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as the zero meridian, and since 1855 some 98 percent of all public clocks in the United Kingdom had used Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), even though this became compulsory only 1880.
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In 1868 New Zealand became the first country in the world to make GMT official. In the United States, where the coordination problems were of a different magnitude, a GMT-based national standard time was introduced in 1883 with four geographical time zones. This was the idea that caught on at an international level the following year, with adjustments in the many cases where the national territory was spread out over a wide area.
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Standardization occurred at two levels: within and between nations. Not infrequently the international coordination came first. In the German Reich, which was small enough to dispense with separate eastern and western time zones, an official standard time came into effect only in 1893, after the aged Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, the nation's foremost military authority, had made a moving plea in the Reichstag five weeks before his death. France adopted GMT as late as 1911. What were the reasons for its revealing hesitation?
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It is a remarkable paradox that the major moves toward international standardization—the same is true of weights and measures, postal and telegraphic communications, railroad gauges, etc.—went hand in hand with the strengthening of nationalism and nation-states. For this reason Sandford Fleming's plans met with fierce resistance in France. When the Washington conference of 1884 was considering the proposal to accept Britain's imperial observatory on the Thames as the zero meridian, Paris much preferred to see its own “older” meridian observatory play that role (there were also any number of other suggestions, from Jerusalem to Tahiti). However, not only had the Greenwich meridian long been in use in ocean navigation; the American railroads had already set their clocks to GMT, no doubt in acknowledgment of British hegemony that was freely given, not imposed. The French objections therefore had no practical chance of acceptance.

In 1884, relations between France and Britain were not particularly bad, but each of them had staked a claim to represent the peak of Western civilization. It was therefore no trivial matter whether Britain or France was the reference country dominating global standard time. France even offered a deal: it would
accept that the zero meridian should run through a district of London if the British agreed to adopt the metric system of weights and measures. As everyone knows, that did not happen; an attempt to decimalize time, back in year II of the Revolution, had likewise been an utter failure.
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Of course, no one could force the French to join an international time system. In the mid-1880s every city in France still had its local time adjusted to the height of the sun; the country's railroads ran to Paris time, which was 9 minutes and 20 seconds ahead of GMT. In 1891 a defiant law made this Paris time the
heure légale
throughout the country. In 1911 France finally adopted the universal time standard, essentially dispelling the anarchy in European time. The French example shows that national uniformity did not necessarily precede international standardization, and that global regulations did not automatically cancel national specificities. Tendencies to the nationalization of time were also present during the period of its universalization. But at least in this case the tendency to standardization was victorious in the end.

Chronometrization

All this took place in societies that were already wedded to precise timekeeping. The ubiquity of clocks and the obedience of their owners and users to the dictates of mechanical time struck many Asian or African visitors to countries like Britain and the United States as notable. A standardized time was possible only in societies that had agreed to measure time and grown used to doing so—that is, in clock societies. It is hard to say when not only academics, priests, and princes but whole societies became subject to chronometrization. Probably the threshold was reached only with the industrial mass production of cheap timepieces for the private living room, bedside table, and waistcoat pocket in the second half of the nineteenth century. This “democratization of the pocket watch,” as David Landes described it, put punctuality within the reach of all. Annual world output of pocket watches climbed from 350,000–400,000 units at the end of the eighteenth century to more than 2.5 million in 1875, at which point the manufacturing of
cheap
timepieces had been extant for only a few years.
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The main producer countries were then Switzerland, France, Britain, and the United States. It is not known how many watches found their way into non-Western pockets. In any event, like the commanding heights of world time, the devices for its measurement were mainly in the hands of white males; the world divided into the watch owners and the watchless. Missionaries and colonial rulers made new time resources available, but in doing so established their monopoly control of time. Lewis Mumford's observation that the clock, not the steam engine, was the most important mechanism of the industrial age is applicable at least for the non-Western world.
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The clock was incomparably more widespread than the steam engine. It ordered and disciplined societies in a way in which production technology alone could not have done. There were clocks in parts of the world where people had never seen a coal-fired machine
or locomotive. Yet the problem of making the prestigious device meaningful to them remained an ongoing challenge.

The watch became an emblem of Western civilization. In Japan, for want of pockets, it was initially worn around the neck or the waist. The Meiji Emperor awarded pocket watches—made in the United States at first—to the best students of the year.
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By 1880, along with the top hat, laced corset, and false teeth, the watch was considered in Latin America to be a status symbol of the Western-oriented upper classes. In the Ottoman Empire, nothing more clearly exhibited the resolve of the state and social elites to introduce Western-style modernization than the public clock towers that Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered to be built in large cities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
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The British did much the same in their world empire—for example, on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Such towers, a secular and culturally neutral offshoot of the clock-bearing church tower, made time publicly visible and in most cases audible. China, for its part, remained largely content with drum towers and their purely acoustic time signal until well into the twentieth century.

The spread of mechanical chronometry contributed to the quantification and continuation of labor processes. In the preindustrial world, E. P. Thompson argued in a famous essay, labor followed an irregular and uneven course. In the nineteenth century, however, as the division of labor intensified and production was organized within ever larger and more capital-intensive firms, entrepreneurs and market forces enforced a stricter time regime and a longer workday. Workers who moved from agriculture or handicrafts into the early factories found themselves subject to a strange new concept of abstract time represented by clocks, bells, and penalties.
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This sounds a plausible account, all the more attractive in that it places English factory workers in a situation of social discipline and cultural alienation similar to that of workers in later-industrializing countries or subjugated colonies. Thompson's thesis, with its critique of modernity, thus appears to be universalizable. The clock everywhere became a weapon of modernization. Yet this seems to have happened later than Thompson claimed. For, even in Britain, clocks that told the precise time in accordance with standard norms came into widespread daily use only toward the end of the nineteenth century.
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It is a good idea to keep the quantitative and qualitative sides of this argument separate. Karl Marx already believed that the workday had been appreciably lengthened, and many other contemporary witnesses confirm that the beginning of industrial factory production was often, or almost always, associated with an increase in the number of hours worked by individuals; workdays as long as sixteen hours appear to have been normal in the early period of cotton-spinning machines. It is true that the full picture is difficult to uncover, even with the precise and detailed techniques and quantitative procedures available to the historical sciences, but meticulous studies have established a clear rise in the length of the workday, at least for England's early industrialization up to 1830.
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This upward trend, over a period of roughly eight decades, was accompanied with
increased ownership of clocks and watches, which made factory workers more aware of the quantitative demands being made upon them.
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The struggle for a shorter working week presupposed that workers had an idea of their actual performance. With watch in hand, they could check the extent of the capitalist's impositions.

Qualitatively, therefore, it is questionable whether the clock was really nothing but an instrument of compulsion in the service of the factory owner. And if technological developments are not to be seen as an independent variable, we must ask whether the invention of the mechanical timepiece created a need for precise measurement in the first place, or whether the need had already been present and kindled a demand for the technical means to satisfy it.
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Wherever precise timekeeping was introduced, it was an instrument of mechanization, and even of the more intensive form that involved the strict metronomization of production and numerous other processes in everyday life. This was emblematic of a time regime more uniform than that experienced in a close-to-nature peasant lifestyle.
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In the nineteenth century, peasants and nomads were confronted on all sides with this regulation of time that radiated out from the cities.

Those who have learned from experience that the same strict standards of punctuality still do not apply everywhere in the world, will not underestimate the capacity of human beings to resist time and to live simultaneously in more than one temporal order: that is, to cope with discontinuous mundane experiences of time as well as with the abstract time of the clock and calendar.
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Anthropologists have found many instances of societies without astronomy or clocks that are able to distinguish between “points in time” and ongoing processes and to coordinate their activities precisely in time.
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E. P. Thompson's appealing hypothesis that the perception of time was a battlefield in the cultural conflicts of early industrial England seems to be of only limited applicability to other regions and other epochs. Its validity has been openly contested in the case of Japan. Japanese peasants of the late Togukawa period (up to 1867), who competed with one another in small economic units overwhelmingly geared to intensive agriculture and craft production for the market, did not by any means live in idyllic harmony with the rhythms of nature but related to time as a precious resource to be used in accordance with a well-thought-out plan. A bad economy of time would spell ruin for the family. When industrialization began around 1880, laborers were already occupied continuously in a flow of work through all seasons of the year. The new discipline of the factory—which in Japan was actually quite lax for a long time—did not feel too oppressive. Unlike their working-class comrades in Europe or the United States, Japanese laborers complained little about the intensity of exploitation and did not make a shorter workday one of their central demands. More important to them was the moral issue that management should recognize them as partners within the enterprise hierarchy.
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