History of Time

""Was ein Kalender ist, weiß wohl jeder, aber wie umfassend und nachhaltig er unseren Alltag, unsere Zeitrhythmen, unser Denken und Fühlen prägt, ist kaum jemandem bewußt. Jörg Rüpke zeichnet die Geschichte des Kalenders von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart nach und präsentiert in unterhaltsamer Form ebenso überraschende wie faszinierende Erkenntnisse über diesen wirkungsmächtigen kulturellen Zeitgeber.

Im Anfang war der Kalender – und zwar in Gestalt des Mondkalenders. Er bot unseren Vorfahren die Möglichkeit, ihr durch den Ackerbau bestimmtes Jahr angemessen zu organisieren. Je weiter sich die Menschheitskultur entwickelte, um so mehr wuchs das Unbehagen an diesem Zeitgeber. Das Mondjahr mußte dem Sonnenjahr weichen, doch selbst dieses mußte noch nachjustiert werden. Feste wollten exakt im Jahreskreis fixiert, Gerichtstermine bestimmt, Zinstermine festgelegt sein. Nicht zuletzt die Religion verlangte nach zuverlässig bestimmbaren Daten, um den kultischen Verpflichtungen nachzukommen und die Götter nicht zu verstimmen. Herrschaft über die Zeit bedeutete zudem stets auch Herrschaft über die Menschen, ja sogar über ihr Bewußtsein – und das wurde den Mächtigen bald bewußt. So macht dieser Band auch deutlich, weshalb es wichtig war, dieses Instrument unter Kontrolle zu bekommen. ""

Seit Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts exportierten japanische Händler Soja aus der so genannten Mandschurei nach Europa und Amerika. Hier wurde es hauptsächlich als preiswerter Öllieferant für die Herstellung von Seife und Margarine verwendet. Eine Wertschätzung als Proteinlieferant fand zunächst allenfalls bei den Besitzern der zahlreichen Ölmühlen statt, die sich mit einem Absatzproblem für den Rückstand aus der Ölgewinnung konfrontiert sahen. Und eben wegen seines Ölgehaltes steigern die USA den Anbau von Soja im eigenen Land 1942 so sehr, dass Soja mit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges eine der wichtigsten "cash crops" Amerikas wurde. Zugleich wurde in keinem anderen Land der Welt mehr Soja angebaut als in den USA. Der Vortrag fragt danach, wer die Übersetzungsleistung vornahm, um asiatisches Soja in die westliche Welt zu bringen und von welchen Interesse diese Personen geleitet waren. Hinter dieser Fragestellung verbirgt sich das methodische Problem, einen Stoff zu fassen, dessen wirtschaftliche Bedeutung enorm war, aber dessen gesellschaftliche Wahrnehmung in Europa und Amerika beinahe einem Blindfleck glich. Warum war dies so? Die Ambivalenz des Stoffes Soja soll mit dem Instrumentarium der Kulturgeschichte gefasst werden, wobei dessen wirtschaftliche Signifikanz keineswegs negiert, als vielmehr erklärt werden soll.

This article explores an interesting episode in the history of time, health, and modernity: Britain's 1908 and 1909 Daylight Saving Time (DST) Bills. While the original DST scheme was unsuccessful, the discussions surrounding its implementation reveal tensions central to early twentieth century modernity, namely between industrial time and 'natural' bodily rhythms. This article argues that DST was essentially a public health measure aimed at improving the conditions of indoor workers like shop girls and clerks through government regulation of the private time of the labouring classes. Drawing on the extensive evidence provided to two House of Commons Special Committees, this article reveals how DST debates drew together contemporary discussions around sunlight therapy, night work, and the importance of regular sleeping and eating to tackle Britain's endemic urban diseases like consumption and anaemia. I suggest that the idea of bodily rhythms was increasingly important in medical thinking in this period and that the study of rhythmicity points to the potential for incorporating temporality as an analytical category in medical history.

This book provides a definitive account of the history of the Roman calendar, offering new reconstructions of its development that demand serious revisions to previous accounts. It examines the critical stages of the technical, political, and religious history of the Roman calendar, provides a comprehensive historical and social contextualization of ancient calendars and chronicles and highlights the unique characteristics which are still visible in the most dominant modern global calendar.

In their earliest works, Horace Walpole (Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose, 1758) and Lord Byron (Fugitive Pieces, 1806) built a queer temporality of fugitive time out of the occasional pieces and sporadic readers that Samuel Johnson first theorized in The Harleian Miscellany. These juvenile poets aligned several forms of fugitive print—loose scraps, detached fragments, burned books, and encoded secrets—and fugitive figures—political exiles, queer aristocrats, runaway slaves, and amateur poets (often themselves). Walpole and Byron redeem both carefree and imperiled fugitive lives by engaging two antithetical discourses of disappearance: languid, idle ease, and sudden, active flight. This discontinuous eighteenth-century poetics becomes increasingly racially coded as it crosses the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. Fugitive pieces linked Old World flights of fancy and New World runaway slave advertisements, collected works and secure colonial property, and literary selections and sugar cane extracts. In their surprising affirmations of an intermittent, occasional time that allies irregular idlers, miscellaneous fugitives, asylums for poetic pieces, and abolitionist accounts of disabled bodies, juvenile poets moved beyond their era’s straight narrative of imperial progress.

This article traces the time practices relevant to Edo-period pleasure quarter life and business in 18th and 19th century Japan, discussing two time patterns that appeared in pleasure quarter price lists at the time which allowed customers to engage sex workers and geisha entertainers for company: on the one hand, more long-term, loosely circumscribed stays in the quarters based around diurnal rhythms of light and darkness; on the other hand shorter transactions centered on units of time measured with incense sticks - two aspects of time that were central to the trade plied in the quarters. I argue that the sex trade is significant in that it provided a rare example of a service “paid by the hour” in early modern Japan,  thus crucially also calling us to (re-) consider larger issues regarding the economic value of time within the early modern Japanese world of work, and especially its relationship to modern time and labor. The exigencies of a certain trade required the elaboration of a set of time units and, where necessary, a system to measure and co-ordinate them, which ultimately indicates the existence of an abstract notion of time that commanded a certain monetary value in early modern Japan. As such, the present article serves to qualify narratives that mainly identify the commodification of time with Japan’s industrialization, modernization and Westernization in the late 19th century, as well as with the dissemination of mechanical clock-time.

Kategóriou času sa zaoberá každá vedná disciplína a nakoľko sa minulosť odohráva vždy v čase a priestore, tak ani história ako veda nie je výnimkou. Pri skúmaní času si historická veda interdisciplinárne vypomáha metódami príbuzných vied, ako sú filozofia, antropológia alebo sociológia. Je potrebné, aby historik chápal nielen to, ako čas metodologicky uchopiť, ale aby poznal aj mentalitu danej spoločnosti a to, ako čas vo svojej dobe chápala. Cieľom tohto príspevku je popísať doterajšie prístupy k času v historiografii a napokon explikovať ako spoločnosť vnímala čas od staroveku až po 20. storočie. Za predel pri skúmaní tohto fenoménu považujeme priemyselnú revolúciu, ktorá si vynútila unifikáciu svetového času, a preto sme nasledujúcu časť príspevku rozdelili práve týmto historickým medzníkom do dvoch samostatných kapitol. Pojem mentalita, ktorý do reflexie dejín zaviedol Karl Lamprecht, sme v názve príspevku zvolili zámerne, nakoľko mentalita predstavuje sociálno-psychický stav danej doby, čo bolo zároveň predmetom nášho skúmania. Ako zdroj sme pri písaní použili práce domácich aj zahraničných historikov, filozofov, sociológov a antropológov, keďže sa naša práca zaoberá predovšetkým kultúrnymi dejinami, resp. dejinami mentalít.

Like a number of other prologues of the early modern period, the prologue to Romeo and Juliet is clear about the length of time its play will take in performance. Two hours. But how literal is that claim? A tendency to take the prologue at face value has resulted in the assumption that Shakespeare’s plays, most of which take longer than two hours to perform, have not survived in their stage form. Instead, goes the argument, we have them in a totally different version: as they were rewritten, at length, for the page.
This article will question whether plays ever habitually took two hours to perform. It will look at the lengths of playtexts and will ask when and why the ‘two hour’ claim was made. But it will also investigate a bigger question. What did ‘two hours’ mean in the early modern period? Exploring, in succession, hourglasses, sundials and mechanical clocks, it will consider which chronological gauges were visible or audible in the early modern playhouse, and what hours, minutes and seconds might have meant to an early modern playwright who lacked trustworthy access to any of them. What, it will ask, was time, literally and figuratively, for Shakespeare—and how did chronographia, the rhetorical art of describing time, shape his writing?

El estudio de las periodizaciones en la historia nos abre diversas problemáticas en torno al tiempo y las formas de comprender el pasado. El tiempo consiste en un fluir, un continuo, compuesto de prolongaciones, rupturas y cambios. Sin embargo, los historiadores tendemos a periodizar y clasificar los momentos históricos, refiriéndonos a edades, épocas o siglos, con lo cual, de alguna manera, cercenamos la historia, ya sea para generar énfasis en ciertos procesos o comprender de mejor forma alguna fracción de la temporalidad.

El texto que aquí se presenta fue leído el 30 de agosto de 2017 en el Planetario de Bogotá como parte de la Serie de Conferencias organizadas por la Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia a propósito de la conmemoración de sus 240 años de existencia. El autor fue invitado para dar a conocer parte de su trabajo de investigación sobre un libro particular del Fondo Mutis de la Biblioteca titulado "Tratado General y Matemático de Reloxería" (1789 y 1791), escrito por don Manuel de Zerella y Ycoaga, relojero de la corte española. El propósito de la conferencia fue describir la materialidad del libro y señalar, mediante el caso de los ilustrados neogranadinos, la manera cómo este tipo de obras circularon, se emplearon y fueron leídas en el mundo hispanoamericano del siglo XVIII.

“Maps, Calendars and Diagrams: Space and Time in Seventeenth-Century Maritime East Asia.” In Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang, eds. Sea Rovers, Silk, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in World History, 1500-1750.  (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016) 86-113.

En este artículo el autor nos da a conocer un tipo de mercancía de la cual no se tenía mayor noticia para este territorio, señalando el tipo de relojes que llegaron, los lugares donde se ubicaron y el significado social de su uso. El texto propone que el reloj introdujo la noción cuantitativa del tiempo mediante su circulación, la cual condujo a la aparición de nuevas posturas y formas de distinción social que de alguna u otra manera terminaron por afianzar la cronometría como una práctica habitual. Con ello el autor liga, a través de los múltiples usos que tiene este objeto, el tiempo de la metrópoli con la vida cotidiana de la Nueva Granada, instituyéndose así el tiempo del reloj como el tiempo “natural”.

Abstract – Historians of medieval Islamic society have not paid the same attention to night activities as a topic for social history, as specialists of the medieval west have. Examining cases and narrative sources in Cairo and Damascus, this paper presents the complex reality of a Mamluk city that cannot be reduced to the dangers felt by its inhabitants at nightfall. A public lighting system and night markets in the Mamluk city facilitated circulation throughout the evening and for a great part of the night. Public spaces were monitored and controlled by authorities and neither Cairo nor Damascus should be seen as enclosed and partitioned spaces. Commercial exchanges, public entertainment and traffic contributed to extend daytime activities beyond nightfall and to cast the urban space as a place of socialization. Besides, Mamluk power and religious authorities also invested the city through celebrations and ceremonies performed by night which often turned into popular festivals and outlets while urban elites considered night-time as an opportunity to perfect their social role in a more intimate way and to provide evidence of their elevated status. This paper describes the broad range of individual and collective night practices and restores these activities to their rightful place in Cairene and Damascene daily life.

Keywords : Mamluk Era, Cairo, Damascus, night-time, social practices, daily life, criminality, vol, police, public celebrations, public space, lighting, illuminations

Résumé – En tant qu’objet d’histoire sociale du monde musulman médiéval, la nuit n’a pas suscité jusqu’à maintenant d’intérêt comparable à celui manifesté, depuis de nombreuses années, par les historiens de l’Occident médiéval. Les exemples du Caire et de Damas, étudiés dans cet article à partir des sources narratives, mettent en évidence la réalité complexe d’une ville mamelouke, qui ne peut se réduire, à la nuit tombée, à la peur qu’elle aurait inspirée à ses habitants. Partiellement éclairés, les rues et les marchés étaient fréquentés tout au long de la soirée et pendant une grande partie de la nuit. Loin d’être abandonnée par les autorités, la ville était surveillée et contrôlée, sans pour autant être transformée en espace clos et cloisonné. Commerces, divertissements et circulation contribuaient en effet à prolonger le jour et à faire de l’espace public un lieu de sociabilité nocturne. La nuit, la ville était également investie par le pouvoir politique et les autorités religieuses lors de célébrations qui, bien souvent, prenaient la forme de fêtes populaires, véritables exutoires pour les populations. Par ailleurs, au-delà de ces manifestations publiques, les élites urbaines mettaient à profit la nuit pour parfaire leur rôle social, dans un cadre plus intime, et ainsi dispenser les générosités nécessaires à la consolidation de leur statut. Ainsi, le présent article cherche à dépeindre l’étendue de ces pratiques nocturnes, qu’elles soient individuelles ou collectives, et à mettre en lumière leur importance dans la vie quotidienne des Cairotes et des Damascènes à la fin du Moyen Âge.

Mots-clés : Période mamelouke, Le Caire, Damas, nuit, pratiques sociales, vie quotidienne, criminalité, vol, police, fêtes publiques, espace public, éclairage, illuminations

Hagen, 15.01.2020) Uta Kleine "Renaissance", "Reformation" und "Revolution" sind Begriffe die die Erfahrung von zeitlichem Wandel in eine Bewegung übersetzen. Als solche, als ‚Bewegungsbegriffe' nämlich R. Koselleck), sind sie zunächst Erfindungen der Moderne, die aus der Fortschrittsvision des 19. Jahrhunderts erwachsen sind. Sie werden zur Markierung größerer Epochenzäsuren benutzt. Nehmen wir hier nur die bekanntesten: Die italienische Renaissance des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts und die protestantische Reformation des 16. Jahrhunderts als Umbrüche vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit und die Französische Revolution von 1789 im Verein mit der Industriellen Revolution 1750-1830 als Übergang von der Neuzeit zur Moderne. In dieser Bedeutung haben sie sich in der historischen Wissenschaft etabliert. Von allgemeinen Bewegungsbegriffen sind sie in der Moderne zur spezifischen Epochenbezeichnungen geworden.

Die Zeiten ändern sich mit der Zeit: Angesichts aktueller Verschiebungen in der temporalen Organisation (vom Aufstieg der Erinnerungskulturen bis zu apokalyptischen Zukunftsszenarien) lohnt es sich, die Frage nach einer Geschichte der Zeiten zu stellen. Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge, die sich auf die Frühe Neuzeit als einen Zeitraum konzentrieren, in dem die Modellierung von Zeitkulturen grundlegende Veränderungen erfahren hat. In der historischen Betrachtung eröffnen sich dabei Perspektiven einer Zeit-Geschichte und Pluritemporalität. Zeitpraktiken sowie Zeitwissen erweisen sich als Leitlinien zukünftiger Forschung.

This paper addresses the questions of when, why, and to what degree ancient physicians concerned themselves with temporal precision. Taking On Critical Days as a case study, it explores how Galen of Pergamum incorporates hourly timekeeping into his defense and refinement of Hippocratic "critical-day" schemes, designed to help physicians anticipate turning-points in febrile diseases. The paper proposes that Galen, in both his fever case histories and his astronomical explanations for critical days, uses hourly timekeeping to support certain claims about himself, his medical methodology, and the authority of Hippocrates.

This paper reconstructs the relationship between the now, motion, and number in Aristotle to clarify the nature of the now, and, thereby, the relationship between motion and time. Although it is clear that for Aristotle motion, and, more generally, change, are prior to time, the nature of this priority is not clear. But if time is the number of motion, then the priority of motion can be grasped by examining his theory of number. This paper aims to show that, just as numbers are generated by the soul, time is not presupposed by motion, but emerges through the soul’s articulation of motion. Time is co-constituted by the soul and motion. The now is the key to understanding both the contribution of motion and soul to the being of time. The now is part of the soul’s articulation of motion, and sets the stage for an act that distinguishes a unit from its underlying motion. The now, then, sets up an abstraction by which the soul generates the temporal number from motion. Reconstructing this account of abstraction allows us to formulate more strongly Aristotle’s claim to the ontological dependence of time on motion. The paper then gives a systematic overview of the relationships between the now and number in order to address the question of whether the now might be extended. It closes with an examination of the possibility that motion depends on time, and how universal time is possible.

In the mid-19th century, the need for an accurate time becomes ever more important for many economic and industrial sectors, as well as for maritime and railway transport. States took a keen interest in these developments, which resulted in the founding of an increasing number of state observatories. While this well-known phenomenon has attracted the attention of numerous historical researches, the actual setting up of an observatory has more rarely been studied. Based on the well-documented case of the Observatoire cantonal de Neuchâtel, we will look at the setting up of the establishment through its scientific instruments and work procedure. Founded in 1858, the Observatory was primarily intended to fulfill the needs of the watchmaking industry while contributing to the progressive standardization of Swiss time. Adolphe Hirsch, the Observatory's first director, spent 3 years setting up, installing, and calibrating an operating chain dedicated to the time service. The astronomer's correspondence shows his expectations and the manufacturers' technical capabilities. We can thus reconstruct the steps in the design of the scientific instruments-which operated as a network. The outcome being a highperformance operating chain for the time determination. During the commissioning process, Adolphe Hirsch chose an emerging technology-the printing chronograph. In fact, the Observatory was entirely configured around this new method, placing this institution among the first in the field. This new observation technique modifies the episteme of time determination and the role of the human factor within the process.

Ciência dos homens, no tempo": eis a célebre definição de história oferecida há mais de sete décadas por Marc Bloch 1 , e cuja primeira palavra permite maior discordância do que as demais. Pois se é controversa a condição científica da história, é unânime que seu foco deva estar em seres humanos e no tempo. Esta última palavra, aliás, também pode nos remeter a um fenômeno social: partindo-se de uma história de homens no tempo, é possível tomar o tempo como objeto da história 2 . Um objeto qualquer, como tantos outros? Não exatamente, na medida em que este apresenta potencial singular de requalificar uma reflexão teórica inescapável: o problema da dívida tanto da realidade social como de seu conhecimento para com aquilo que aquela palavra revela (ou encobre). Com o avanço desse duplo tratamento de tempo -como condição da história, como objeto da história -logo o simples singular deve ensejar um singular coletivo. Afinal não há, a rigor, um único tempo da história, de uma época ou de uma sociedade. Sempre, como nos ensina Braudel, toda e qualquer história é sempre constituída por uma pluralidade de tempos simultâneos: uns mais lentos e longos, outros mais 1 BLOCH, Marc. Apologia da história ou o ofício do historiador. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2001, p.55.

In yet another controversial move, the Turkish government recently issued a decree instructing all public offices to organize the workday schedule around prayer time on Fridays-a move which is likely to influence school schedules as well. The significance of this decree within the current political climate of Turkey aside, what we observe in this instance is a particularly poignant example of the main problematic of Avner Wishnitzer's brilliant study: the social, political, and cultural contexts, meanings, and implications of temporal organization. The very question regarding the role of the state in the social organization of time-clearly still a very valid question in contemporary Turkey-is a crucial one for this work.

s nem csupán -ennek részeként -egy művészeti stílus megjelölésére használjuk. 2 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, hrsg. von der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Darmstadt-Leipzig-Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1923-, II. 1, 35. (E kiadásra a továbbiakban a rövidítéssel utalok.) 3 Jacques Vaucanson (1709-1782) mechanikai szerkezetei (egy dobos, egy fuvolista, valamint egy táplálkozni és emészteni képes kacsa) az 1730-as években keltenek feltűnést Párizsban.

Más que un catálogo de relojería, el lector tiene en sus manos un trabajo que indaga sobre la relación del ser humano con el tiempo, vínculo inexorable que se logra gracias a un dispositivo que convierte el tiempo en objeto perceptible. A pesar de que se trata de un trabajo sobre un estudio específico acerca de una sociedad en particular, no se debe ignorar que los relojes hacen parte de una historia que surca desde el mundo Antiguo, pasando por la Edad Media como punto coyuntural, hasta el mundo Contemporáneo. Teniendo como base la colección de relojes de la Casa Museo Quinta de Bolívar y el Museo de la Independencia Casa del Florero, el libro señala la relación corpórea y mental con los relojes mecánicos, la historia de la relojería en el Nuevo Mundo —particularmente en la Nueva Granada—, y el historial de los relojes de los museos.

LE JOUR CIVIL À ROME l existe un découpage du jour antérieur au système des heures. Chez les Romains, le jour civil débutait au milieu de la nuit pour se terminer au minuit suivant ; c'est une donnée culturelle puisque d'autres peuples faisaient commencer le jour au lever du soleil, à midi, ou encore au coucher du soleil. Cette délimitation avait de nombreuses conséquences pratiques : les auspices d'un magistrat, par exemple, restaient valables jusqu'à échéance du jour civil. Les premières lois écrites au milieu du V e siècle av. J.-C., les XII que le lever et le coucher du soleil. Le milieu du jour (meridies) aurait été ajouté 2 / Les Dossiers d'Archéologie / n°354 >> Le temps civique et l'apparition des premières horloges à Rome Rome a ignoré les horloges et les heures durant des siècles. Ce n'est qu'au III e siècle avant J.-C. que des cadrans solaires sont installés dans la cité. Les premiers sont des butins de guerre et exaltent le prestige des généraux victorieux. Le temps civique devient alors plus segmenté et plus fiable, surtout après l'apparition d'une horloge hydraulique en 159 av. J.-C.

The present paper explores the social lives of European timepieces as a particular set of objects in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Japan, when the archipelago first encountered the “Southern Barbarians” from Portugal and Spain. Rather than viewing them solely as instruments of time measurement or as decorative objects, I discuss clocks as actors that moved within networks of exchange primarily between Europe and Japan, but also, significantly, within East Asia and Japan itself. Along their trajectory, these devices assumed shifting and at times contradictory meanings for various actors; this is particularly true in view of the fundamental clash between European and Japanese systems of time-reckoning, which essentially rendered early European-style mechanical clocks ‘timeless’ in Japan, with its equinoctial system of variable hours. For Jesuit missionaries and foreign emissaries who brought these early devices to Japan, they were timekeepers, objects of ecclesiastical use, paragons of European ingenuity, and above all diplomatic tools that granted access and established connections with the Japanese ruling elite. For the Japanese, by contrast, these global objects assumed meaning within their highly developed local gift-culture as desirable novelty items, particularly within the socially volatile environment of the unification of the country under Tokugawa control. My contention is that these microhistories of exchange help us understand why mechanical clocks did not have the same ‘revolutionary’ effect on time-reckoning in Japan as they did in Europe; the social lives of these objects strikingly illustrate the power imbalances in diplomatic negotiations that made Japan impervious to coercion by the European powers.

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Η παρούσα εργασία προσπαθεί να παρουσιάσει ένα κομμάτι από το έργο του E.P Thompson ‘‘Time, work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’’ (Χρόνος, εργασιακή Πειθαρχία και Βιομηχανικός Καπιταλισμός). Επιχειρείται  μια προσπάθεια αποσαφήνισης των βασικών εννοιολογικών πλαισίων του έργου, καθώς και παρουσίαση ενός μέρους των κριτικών που αφορούν αυτό. Η μεθοδολογική προσέγγιση που χρησιμοποιείται, είναι η βιβλιογραφική ανασκόπηση σε συνδυασμό με το σχολιασμό και την κριτική ανάλυση των περιεχομένων.

This book investigates how a new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France with the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering. With the emergence of these practices, the future transformed from something that was largely believed to be predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. I argue that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and create a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but was fundamentally different from it. I analyze a number of historical developments in the book: various practical and philosophical foundations of Enlightenment ideas of time and the future; ideas of progress and the uncanny temporality of the philosophes assumptions of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous; the first economic modelling and forecasting device, the tableau économique (the economic picture) of the Physiocrats; the emergence of biological engineering in the work of the naturalist Buffon and some of his associates; and the creation of the Republican clock and calendar in the French Revolution, demonstrating that they were a new type of social engineering that radicalized the active orientation to the future that had been developed over the preceding fifty years.

L’objectif est de s’interroger sur le rôle de l’Église dans la mesure du temps en milieu rural, dans le domaine liturgique certes, mais également dans les progrès du temps mathématique puis du temps mécanique, et sur des liens éventuels avec la Réforme catholique. Il s’agit de voir dans quelle mesure nous passons d’un « temps flottant » (Lucien Febvre) à une maîtrise du temps, qui est liée à une volonté d’encadrement religieux et d’individualisation des pratiques. Sont convoqués pour cette enquête les modifications intervenues dans le calendrier liturgique, l’usage des cloches, la possession et l’utilisation des cadrans solaires et des horloges (statuts synodaux et livres liturgiques, comptes de fabrique, inventaires après décès, objets conservés). Les réussites et les limites de l’entreprise se perçoivent aussi par l’étude du calendrier des offrandes, des récits d’événements à l’occasion des procès, des exigences des laïcs à l’égard de leurs prêtres (comptes de fabrique, archives judiciaires, procès-verbaux de visites pastorales). L’étude aboutit à des conclusions nuancées et néanmoins significatives.

Die Zeiten ändern sich mit der Zeit: Angesichts aktueller Verschiebungen in der temporalen Organisation (vom Aufstieg der Erinnerungskulturen bis zu apokalyptischen Zukunftsszenarien) lohnt es sich, die Frage nach einer Geschichte der Zeiten zu stellen. Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge, die sich auf die Frühe Neuzeit als einen Zeitraum konzentrieren, in dem die Modellierung von Zeitkulturen grundlegende Veränderungen erfahren hat. In der historischen Betrachtung eröffnen sich dabei Perspektiven einer Zeit-Geschichte und Pluritemporalität. Zeitpraktiken sowie Zeitwissen erweisen sich als Leitlinien zukünftiger Forschung.

Do nights have a history to tell? How would the history of the working-class nights look? This question drove me to research the lives of the 19th-century labouring poor in colonial India. Following the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1981), I wanted to know what the 19th-century labouring poor, especially the cotton textile mill workers of Bombay who worked for 13 or 14 hours a day, did at night. Did they just go to bed or did they socialise with friends, roaming the streets of the city?

We know a lot about the daytime lives of workers. Historians of capitalism, slavery, labour and commodities have favoured the daytime. But that’s only half the story – the other half of our lives is spent at night. Nights are critical to the history of capitalism and labour: control over the night-time was a political act for workers. It asserted their dignity as independent beings. Night was where workers dreamed and pursued their own visions, both together and as individuals.

During the 17th century, the meanings of the night and nightlife in Europe fundamentally changed. In the move towards industrialisation, the night generated new notions and practices of religious experience, a new kind of crime world, as well as new public and private spaces, court culture, witchcraft trials, regulation and policing (through street lights). In Evenings’s Empire (2012), the historian Craig Koslofsky calls it the colonisation of the night: the way urban people slept, socialised and worked radically changed from the early modern period. Artificial lights stretched the daytime realm into the night. Many activities that required light were now possible after dark too. Rural people continued to sleep as humans long had, where the evening slumber is divided in two. But urban people shifted to a single sleep of seven to eight hours. A greater demarcation developed between the day and the night, especially in cities. Night stood for repose, and day for labour. This was not the case before industrialisation. In craft and artisanal work, people had task- or nature-oriented notions of time.

Disciplined industrial capitalism reversed time and work, and people had to master timed notions of work and life, as the British historian E P Thompson showed in 1967. Clocks and timekeeping proliferated and acquired new authority. It took fines, penalties, bells, schooling, workshop clerks and preaching to affect new practices of work life separated from the usual everyday social life (sleeping, chatting, family time). Industrial capitalism required workers to remain attentive, efficient and committed at the shop floor. In the case of colonial Bombay, the capitalist employers’ project was especially incoherent. They did not demarcate the clear boundaries of work and leisure. It was workers who demanded a fixed and timed notion of work.

Bombay’s cotton mills took off in the 1850s. Poor construction and sanitation made mill compounds unhygienic. Cotton floating in the air was suffocating, and running boilers made them hot. Depending on how one counted, cotton-factory workers in the decades 1850-90 laboured between 13 to 16 hours per day. During the winter, mills relied on gaslight to lengthen the workday. Only in the first decades of the 20th century did nightshifts become common when the majority of mills installed electric lights. Workers and employers constantly fought over the boundary between work and leisure. Employers complained that leisure intruded into the working hours, and workers complained that work intruded into their free time.
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Resumen: Carlos III, interesado por las nuevas corrientes del pensamiento ilustrado que circulaban por Europa, promovió desde el comienzo de su reinado, la publicación de tratados y la creación de escuelas-fábricas de relojería en España con el fin de potenciar este arte. El franciscano Manuel del Río fue el primero en publicar en 1759 un tratado titulado Arte de reloxes de ruedas para torre, sala i faltriquera. El relojero de cámara Manuel de Zerella escribió en 1781 un Tratado general y matemático de reloxería que comprende el modo de hacer reloxes de todas clases, y el de saberlos componer y arreglar por difíciles que sean acompañado de los elementos necesarios para ella, como son aritmética, álgebra, geometría, gnomónica, astronomía, geografía, física, maquinaria, música y dibuxo precisos para poseer a fondo el Noble Arte de la Reloxería. Por último, los relojeros franceses Felipe y Pedro Charost solicitaron permiso para establecer una fábrica de relojería en Madrid. Una de las condiciones que se les impuso fue la redacción de un tratado metódico simple de relojería que apoyara la formación de los aprendices de su escuela.

Abstract: Charles III of Spain, interested in the new theories from Enlightenment ideas of European thinking, promoted from the very beginning of his rule the publication of treatises and the creation of watchmaking school-factories in Spain with the aim of boosting this art. The Franciscan friar Manuel del Río was the first to publish, in 1759, a treatise titled Arte de reloxes de ruedas para torre, sala i faltriquera. The royal clockmaker Manuel de Zerella wrote in 1781 a Tratado general y matemático de reloxería que comprende el modo de hacer reloxes de todas clases, y el de saberlos componer y arreglar por difíciles que sean acompañado de los elementos necesarios para ella, como son aritmética, álgebra, geometría, gnomónica, astronomía, geografía, física, maquinaria, música y dibuxo precisos para poseer a fondo el Noble Arte de la Reloxería. Lastly, the French clockmakers Felipe and Pedro Charost requested permission to stablish a clock factory in Madrid. One of the conditions imposed was the requirement to draft a simple but methodical treatise of watchmaking to support the formation of its school’s apprentices.

A common ground of all the new literature on time and historicity is the actual dethroning of the future from the status it acquired during the period conventionally classified as Modern history. In the last two decades the literature on the relations between the present and the past has centered reflection on the cultural trends in the globalized world, hegemonizing when not outflanking the relevance of prognosis for collective wellbeing. My overall critique is that this literature is not addressing the transformations in time structures from the adequate historical perspective. My contest is that, in a modern society as much as in any culture evolving out of its framework, time structures need to be understood in the first place through the way the future, not the past or the present is instituted and experienced. Only once the status and role of the future is settled or re-signified from a critical chronosophy, the whole structure of time —the relations between past and present, and between these two and the future— can be properly accounted for.
This paper starts with a critical approach to the epistemological limitations and ideological underpinnings of Hartog´s category of ‘regime of memory’ and its current manifestation —that of ’presentism‘. It also deals with the difficulties inherent in speaking about the present from a temporal viewpoint. For addressing the status of the future in postmodern culture I draw from the scholarly tradition of thought on utopia and profit from Karl Mannheim´s insights: my view is that the literature on the new historicity has left unattended the complex role acquired by utopia in a context of crisis such as our era of globalization. In order to strengthen the indispensable distinction between instituted and experienced time in a postmodern culture, I address the literature on memory, but from a perspective alternative to the conventional one adopted by most historian-cronosophes, and present it as the current refuge for recovering the link between theory and practice for social transformation.

Sólo en el seno de una sociedad rodeada de relojes y reticulada por calendarios pudo emerger un libro como "Las dinámicas del tiempo", cuyas páginas recuerdan —aunque para algunos sea una verdadera novedad— que el tiempo no lo constituyen los dispositivos cronométricos sino las prácticas sociales. La previsión y la impaciencia, las contingencias y la planificación, son algunos de los temas tratados por Ricardo Uribe quien propone superar la idea del orden y control del tiempo como matriz de análisis para darle paso a la simultaneidad y la aleatoriedad; propuesta que permite resaltar el carácter histórico del tiempo y poner de manifiesto la mutabilidad de los relojes y los calendarios.
Partiendo de la escisión entre el tiempo cualitativo y cuantitativo que supuso la Ilustración en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII, el libro muestra estos efectos mediante el análisis de prácticas triviales y relaciones cotidianas surgidas entre el Padre Joseph Palacios de la Vega y los pobladores de la región de La Mojana; entre Francisco Xavier Caro, secretario interino del Virreinato, y sus compañeros del despacho; y entre los ilustrados de la Nueva Granada. Sujetos que con reloj en mano iban descubriendo una nueva manera de distribuir su propio tiempo y, sobre todo, una forma de proyectar a la sociedad en el futuro.