The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 - Rilegato

Ogle, Vanessa

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674286146 ISBN 13: 9780674286146

Casa editrice: Harvard Univ Pr, 2015

Riassunto

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 and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards.

Time played a foundational role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time—historical, evolutionary, religious, social, and legal—provided a basis for comparing the world’s nations and societies, and it established hierarchies that separated “advanced” from “backward” peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism.

Debates and disagreements on the varieties of time drew in a wide array of observers: German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after 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.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

'Writing global history is still a high-stakes venture, and Ogle's "The Global Transformation of Time" is an impressive testimony to the potential of the genre. We get a deep sense of the talk about time and calendars among transnational experts and politicians as well as the everyday intelligence that produced differentiated time regimes times for travel, for work, for leisure, for religious practice or, as may be, for milking cows across the globe in Berlin and Beirut, London and Bombay, and their rural hinterlands. Reading this book is a tremendous intellectual pleasure from beginning to end.' - --Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

'(An) accessible and prodigiously researched book... Ogle has insightful things to say about many topics.' - --Financial Times

'The powerful lesson of Ogle's book is how the gradual global transformation of time over the course of the twentieth century came to suit many different parties, all of whom thought they had something to gain from new modes of integration and connectivity. The process we anachronistically call globalization , Vanessa Ogle shows, was made up of forces that often used international means to solve national or parochial problems.' - --Times Literary Supplement

L'autore:

Vanessa Ogle is Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Harvard Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674286146
• ISBN 13: 9780674286146
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 279