For a community obsessed with timekeeping devices, we almost never talk about time itself.
In part, this has to do with how tricky the subject matter is. Philosophers and scientists have long labored to create theories and concepts to help us explain what time is and how it works, both on an individual and cosmic level.
Though I make no attempt to create new concepts to understand our ephemeral relationship to time, some writers, particularly historians, can help us better understand how timepieces and our modern conception of time became standard.
In 1967, British historian E.P. Thompson published what is now considered a landmark article in economic anthropology: Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. The text traces the importance of timekeeping in the development of early-industrial capitalism, specifically in England. The arrival of wage-labor required much more accurate measurements of time, and had wide-ranging implications on how society thought of time, specifically “work time” and “free time.”
As Thompson notes, the notation of time was often “task-oriented” prior to the rise of industrial capital – the estimated, usual time it takes to cook rice or tend to crops. Today, as we all know, this task-oriented approach to measuring time feels quite old-timey – my grandparents from their grandparents left cookie crumbs to this folkloric understanding of time.
The truth is, coordinated labor required by industrial capitalism could not operate on such subjective measurements of time. It also demanded that work occur not based on historical customs – agriculture work during the day, fishing at dawn, etc. The 24/7/365 working factory left little room for the habitual rhythms of life. So what was the backbone of the rhythm of life for early industrial capitalism? The clock and watch.
Thompson observes that timepieces became a trickle-down commodity in the late 1700’s, moving from luxury to convenience, from upper class to working class. The timing is all but a coincidence.
“The small instrument which regulated the new rhythms of industrial life was at the same time one of the more urgent of the new needs which industrial capitalism called forth to energize its advance.”
Everything that we know and love today about watches, their ubiquity across socio-economic classes, finds its historical origin in regulating new social and work behaviors in early-industrial capitalism. In Part 2, we’ll dig deeper into “industrialized time” – what social and economic mechanisms created the now very natural distinction between “work” and “free time”.
Another day with the beast,
