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Time seems neutral—it just passes. But throughout history, controlling time has been a tool of power. Empires that standardized calendars, imposed schedules, and regulated clocks weren't just coordinating activity; they were extending control into the most intimate dimensions of daily life. Understanding time as a power tool helps explain why temporal standardization accompanied political conquest.
Religious Time as Social Control
Before secular states, religious institutions controlled time. The church calendar determined which days were holy, when fasting occurred, when festivals happened. This wasn't just about spirituality—it was about social organization.
Medieval church bells rang not just for worship but to structure the entire day. Matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline—the canonical hours divided the day into segments. Peasants organized their work around these bells. The rhythm of the day was the rhythm of the church.
This temporal power was deliberate. Religious authorities understood that controlling when people did things meant controlling what they did. Mandating rest on Sunday wasn't just spiritual instruction; it was a weekly reminder of the church's authority over time itself.
Imperial Calendars
When empires conquered territory, they often imposed their calendars. The Roman calendar spread with Roman legions. The Islamic calendar expanded with the caliphate. European Christian calendars arrived with colonizers. Each calendar carried cultural assumptions and power relations.
Imposing a new calendar meant changing when people celebrated, when they rested, when they counted the year beginning. It disrupted traditional rhythms and replaced them with the conqueror's rhythms. Even if local calendars survived for religious or cultural purposes, the administrative calendar was the empire's calendar.
This matters because time shapes consciousness. If your year begins when the empire says it begins, if your holy days are scheduled around the empire's calendar, if your work follows imperial rhythms, then the empire has colonized your experience of time. You literally live in imperial time.
Industrial Time Discipline
The Industrial Revolution brought new forms of temporal power. Factory owners needed workers to arrive at specific times, work for specific durations, and coordinate with machines. This required imposing clock discipline on populations that had lived by task time.
Task time meant working until the job was done—you milked the cows when they needed milking, harvested when crops were ready, rested when tired. Clock time meant working for measured durations regardless of task completion. The shift wasn't natural; it was imposed through wages, fines, and social pressure.
Factories installed clocks and enforced punctuality strictly. Workers were fined for lateness. The factory whistle became the organizing signal of industrial communities. Schools taught clock discipline to children, preparing them for factory life. The internalization of clock time—feeling obligated to punctuality, experiencing lateness as moral failure—took generations to achieve.
Railways and Standard Time
Railways extended temporal power across distance. As we've explored elsewhere, railways required time standardization. But the standardization wasn't neutral—it was imposed by railway companies and eventually by governments.
The imposition of time zones overrode local temporal autonomy. Towns that had kept their own time for centuries were forced onto standard time. The choice of where zone boundaries fell was political—cities lobbied to be on one time or another. Greenwich as the prime meridian wasn't natural; it reflected British maritime power.
Standard time enabled coordination, but it also enabled centralized control. National governments could now impose uniform schedules across vast territories. Tax deadlines, official working hours, school times—all could be synchronized. The citizen's day was increasingly regulated by central authority.
Colonial Time Regimes
Colonialism explicitly used time as a control mechanism. Indigenous time systems were suppressed. Colonial calendars were imposed. Work schedules followed colonial, not traditional rhythms.
Missionaries taught converts to abandon traditional calendars for Christian ones. Colonial schools instilled clock discipline. Wage labor, organized around clock time, disrupted subsistence agriculture organized around seasonal time. The message was clear: civilization meant accepting European time.
This temporal colonization was sometimes explicit. The colonial official who wrote that natives must learn our time was articulating a common attitude. Traditional time systems were seen as primitive, inefficient, obstacles to progress. Temporal modernization justified control.
Surveillance Time
Modern technology extends temporal power in new ways. Digital systems timestamp everything. Your location is tracked moment by moment. Your work is measured in minutes. Your attention is monetized by the second.
This creates unprecedented temporal surveillance. Earlier powers could mandate schedules but couldn't verify compliance moment by moment. Digital systems can. Your employer can know exactly when you logged in, how long you spent on each task, whether you took breaks. Your phone carrier knows where you were every hour of every day.
This surveillance capacity shifts power toward those who control the systems. Workers have less temporal autonomy when every minute is tracked. Citizens have less privacy when their movements are timestamped. The dream of precise temporal accountability becomes a nightmare of comprehensive surveillance.
Resisting Temporal Power
Understanding time as a power tool suggests possibilities for resistance. Slow movements reject imposed acceleration. Digital minimalists refuse constant connectivity. Indigenous communities maintain traditional calendars. Workers organize for shorter hours.
These aren't just personal choices; they're political acts. To claim your time as your own, to refuse the schedules that others impose, to maintain rhythms that reflect your values rather than external demands—these challenge the temporal power of states, employers, and platforms.
Time has never been neutral, and it won't become neutral. But recognizing the power relations embedded in temporal structures is the first step toward choosing your own relationship with time, rather than accepting the one imposed on you.