TY - JOUR
AU - Ogle,, Vanessa
AB - The year 2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of E. P. Thompson’s landmark article ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ in the pages of this journal. At currently 4,298 citations on Google Scholar, it is one of the most frequently cited articles in the field of history.1 Although ostensibly about work and industrial labour in particular, the appeal of Thompson’s suggestive piece has extended far beyond a more narrowly defined labour history, into cultural history and general problems concerning the period since the eighteenth century, of life under Enlightenment rationalism and capitalist modernity. In any case, E. P. Thompson’s article established the centrality of time for understanding the logic of capitalism. Thanks to the broad, overarching questions it raised, even non-Marxists could safely feel compelled. In the fifty years since Thompson’s writing, the study of economic life has undergone manifold transformations. ‘History of capitalism’ is a relatively new area of interest, above all in the United States, an umbrella category of sorts uniting approaches that previously might have existed separately as economic history, political economy, legal history, social history, labour history and environmental history. Women and questions of gender, often conspicuously absent as both writers and subjects of economic history, are very much a part of this new and different history of economic life. Many works are, moreover, deeply informed by cultural history.2 In the past decade or so, there has been a now well-documented return of capitalism and political economy to the teaching of history and Ph.D. topics in the United States, in a markedly different key from a previous generation’s economic history.3 Kenneth Lipartito has written one of the most insightful review articles engaging with some of these ‘new’ histories of capitalism and charting some of the directions in this growing area of research (I am consciously avoiding ‘field’ here).4 Based on Lipartito’s suggestions, I shall use E. P. Thompson’s original intervention on the topic of time and capitalism to raise broader questions of how such a new history of capitalism might benefit from more explicit reflection on the times and temporalities of capitalism. ‘Time’ is understood here as the time measured by clocks, calendars and natural timekeepers such as the sun and the moon. ‘Temporality’ is taken to describe how past, present and future relate to one another, for instance through repetition and cyclical temporalities or ruptured and discontinuous temporalities, and through experiences and expectations. ‘Temporality’ can be described as a form of experience and thought among historical actors, and it can be applied as a category of analysis through which the historian today understands certain developments in the past. Time and temporality are related (an interest in material time might be an expression of or contributing factor to a new sense of temporality), but they can also be historicized in their own right, as the two often have to be studied through primary sources of vastly different kinds. More often than not, such definitions are blurred in reality, and existing histories of time have often treated the relationship between material and imaginary time with insufficient care. Such problems of time and temporality have been conspicuously absent from new histories of capitalism and political economy. Through a selective reading of various authors (E. P. Thompson, Reinhart Koselleck, Dipesh Chakrabarty and William H. Sewell — unfortunately, all of them men), I propose a number of ways in which time and temporality can enrich the new history of capitalism. To start with E. P. Thompson: Thompson’s argument in his short article runs roughly like this. At some point in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the growing regularity of factory work saw people abandon what he referred to as task orientation, the organization of time according to the necessity of performing particular tasks, mostly in disregard of the time spent in carrying out these tasks. Under task time, work was irregular; the performance of certain labours such as cutting the corn during harvest or milking cows was followed by periods of less intense work or even idleness until another bout of activity was dictated by the rhythms of nature. Thompson argued that as more and more people left agriculture to toil in workshops and factories under overseers equipped with clocks and watches, task time gave way to an internalized time orientation, a consciousness that understood time to be the monetized time of uniform working hours. In his interpretation, there was an implied relationship between the external time of proliferating mechanical timekeepers, the synchronized work rhythms of industrial capitalism and the internal intellectual and mental capacity of ordinary men to lead a ‘time-oriented’ life, fully conscious of and disciplined by the value of time. Puritan ethics also played a role in preaching time thrift, a theme central to even older Weberian arguments about the relationship between certain forms of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism.5 My impression has always been that this argument, and the idea behind it, was so intuitively compelling to most historians that, for a long time, few actually set out to question Thompson’s findings. His often impressionistic methodology, relying on few, mostly literary sources, went largely unchallenged. So did his assumption about the relationship between the materiality of time — the proliferation of timepieces of different sorts, from the clock mounted atop the factory building to the overseer’s pocket watch to, later, punch clocks — and the internalization of time-discipline and the development of a particular ‘time-sense’ and time-consciousness. Yet, more recently, a considerable literature by historians such as Paul Glennie, Nigel Thrift and Michael O’Malley, among others, has taken on Thompson and has left few of his initial arguments untouched. I commented on and followed the critiques offered in these works in my own book The Global Transformation of Time, in which I also used the example of British daylight saving or summer time during the first decades of the twentieth century to add certain corrective observations of my own.6 It turned out that, roughly a century after Thompson’s assumed ‘internalization’ of abstract, homogeneous time and its attendant discipline, ordinary as well as more educated people had tremendous difficulties imagining time as an abstract grid of twenty-four hours that was grafted onto the natural times of day and night. Especially but not exclusively among rural populations, task time and natural, biophysical rhythms continued to shape how time was imagined and experienced. The growing availability of affordable timekeepers and the proliferation of public time through tower clocks and other devices did not necessarily generate or reflect an ability or compulsion to experience and understand time as severed from natural, biophysical and even heavenly rhythms. Industrial capitalism, on the other hand, was perfectly able to adapt to such heterogeneous temporal landscapes.7 While time-discipline (and the logic of capitalism) was likely not as sweeping as Thompson envisioned, the questions he raised nevertheless retain validity in light of the recent return of capitalism. If we are, as Kenneth Lipartito suggests, to ‘reassemble the economic’ as a new historical materialism for writing histories of capitalism, then we need to take up some of the same problems that Thompson identified: the role and experience of technologies in altering behaviour and conceptions of time, not limited to the nineteenth century but with radio, television and computers (not to speak of the internet), reaching far into the twentieth; on the other hand, some of these topics have, if not roots and direct origins, then certainly analogies in earlier periods, raising the question of continuities and ruptures. Jacques Le Goff, for example, famously argued that the spread of public clocks aided the expansion of commercial society in late medieval and early modern Europe.8 Another set of problems surrounding social time could take its cues from Thompson but add a gendered dimension: women joining the workforce profoundly altered gendered notions of task time, where certain tasks and the times for carrying out such work were associated with the (female) domestic sphere, others with the (male) public sphere and the workplace. The times of what, for lack of a better term, may be called neoliberalism in particular could benefit from a Thompsonian set of questions: the de-standardization of working hours and work rhythms since the 1970s, with the gradual introduction of work from home (again, with important gendered implications) and other schemes emphasizing flexibility, but also, with the impact of instant communication technologies that make the geographical location (or rather, time zone) of a workplace less relevant, the waning and replacement of certain socio-temporal and even natural rhythms such as day and night. It has led, in the words of one observer, to a 24/7 society that no longer reserves time for sleep and rest, preaching non-stop availability of consumption and satisfying needs other than sleep.9 Economic history in an older key tended to focus on production, whereas new histories of capitalism very much consider consumption and leisure to be part of the story. E. P. Thompson may not have found all the right answers for reconstructing the rhythms of everyday work and other parts of life, but his interest in experience, in resistance, in language and imagination, offer much inspiration for a multifaceted approach to capitalism and political economy in late capitalist (and other) consumer societies. Reinhart Koselleck was ostensibly interested in very different questions and problems. In my view, his writings cohere uneasily, amounting more to a loose collection of positions and insights from which it is best to draw eclectically. While time in the Thompsonian sense does occasionally play a role in his writings (in a strangely unsophisticated manner, for instance by equating clock time with natural time and rhythms),10 he is primarily concerned with temporality — the relationship between past, present and future — and often, with the temporality of a very particular time period, the transitory passage to modernity in Europe from the eighteenth century on. In this period, Koselleck argued, a cleavage opened between what he referred to as ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectations’. The experiences of the past no longer provided guidance for the present and in turn gave rise to a pronounced interest in plans, prognoses and utopias, in other words, in the future. Henceforth, political concepts contained within themselves such temporalizations, with ‘revolution’ perhaps being especially illustrative. In other writings, Koselleck borrowed a phrase from the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and pointed to the simultaneous existence of ‘non-simultaneous’ histories. In this image, a given moment encapsulates multiple temporalities: developments or institutions with a much older origin that continue to cast their shadow even though they might appear ‘out of time’ now; and radically new concepts and practices that embody the world to come, the future. Such notions of ‘layers of time’ (Zeitschichten, the title of the final volume of Koselleck’s essays) piled upon one another as nested constellations were strongly influenced and informed by Fernand Braudel’s earlier distinction between long-, medium- and short-term factors exerting influence on the unfolding of events.11 Koselleck’s argument about modernity’s obsession with the future would have been much stronger had he taken the emergence of modern industrial and financial capitalism into account. His writings are largely limited to the history of political events mixed with the history of political ideas. Yet it was capitalism that more than anything depended on the futures it generated. Investors had to calculate future rates of return, involving factors as different as the next harvest or political developments that could impact the conduct of business. This was certainly true for mercantile societies previously, and one question this raises is whether Koselleck’s rupture in fact comes too late. Yet there is a qualitative transformation in later varieties of capitalism that expresses itself perhaps primarily in attempts to govern and plan economic futures and even out some of the capriciousness of economic whims and fortunes. Rebecca L. Spang has detailed the French monarchy’s and, later, republic’s fine-grained practices of borrowing and debt relations, the sophisticated temporalities underlying these debts, the assumptions about the political stability (‘uneventfulness’) of the future, and the increasingly burdensome temporality of having to service the growing state debt in the future under a different regime.12 From a certain point in the nineteenth century, financial instruments such as futures contracts, while known in some form at least since the seventeenth century, became so widespread even among smaller, ordinary investors that officially regulated markets for these instruments were established to institutionalize this aspect of a capitalist economy. Closely tied to this future orientation was the emergence of risk as a concept to govern uncertainty and an unknowable future. While hazard, dangers and economic losses had always threatened human societies, from roughly the seventeenth century onwards risk denoted a threat that could be or was made to be calculable with probabilistic tools. Various forms of insurance, including maritime, fire, property and life, accompanied these new calculations. The ability to hedge against loss and economic hardship was central in encouraging certain undertakings that might otherwise have been deemed too risky.13 As another example of capitalism’s obsession with the future, economic forecasting eventually became an industry to serve governments and private parties alike. Born out of the First World War’s dramatic economic impact and, tied to that, a growing desire to tame and govern a crisis-prone and delicate world economy, forecasters (‘fortune tellers’ as their historian refers to them) made predicting the unpredictable into a profession without which contemporary economic life and political cycles would be unthinkable.14 The idea of a regularly crisis-ridden economy became popular during the Great Depression. It was here that the notion of the business cycle firmly took hold among members of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich August Hayek and others’ so-called Austrian School of Economics and other economists. What might previously have appeared as punctual eruptions and shocks was now thought to be part of a much more regular cycle of economic ups and downs with different temporal lives, some shorter, others more protracted. After the Second World War, economic planning, most commonly in five-year chunks of future time, became the dominant economic policy in much of the communist or socialist Second World and the emerging, decolonized Third World. The Club of Rome’s famous Limits to Growth report, published in 1972, as well as a growing number of scientists in different fields, began using computer simulations to predict the future of planet earth by modelling the interactions among population growth, pollution, food production, resource depletion and other factors. Calls for long-term strategies and sustainability thinking competed with the short-term political pressures of election cycles.15 To sum up, an orientation towards the future and concomitant attempts to make the future more governable, to hedge against dangers with new concepts and a new language of risk, risk management and the politicization of uncertainty as a threat to entrepreneurship of all sorts, are indeed important hallmarks of modernity. What Koselleck failed to see is that capitalism as a socio-economic formation, and even the planned economy, bring out this particular temporality in its most pronounced form. I have so far avoided addressing perhaps the most pervasive shortcoming in Koselleck’s writings: a Eurocentrism that does not reflect on the limits and biases of concepts and periodizations. These limitations are apparent in the intellectual figures Koselleck chooses to illustrate his arguments about the possibilities of history, the history of concepts, and temporality: in construing lineages of thought typically running from antiquity to the nineteenth century through figures such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Hegel and Burckhardt, his writings may almost serve as examples of what a certain kind of intellectual history (although rarely found in such unadulterated form in more recent works) may lack. But the limitations extend to the conceptual level as well. Ultimately, Koselleck’s time remains linear. ‘Layers of time’, simultaneity, ‘synchronicities of the non-synchronous’ and even repetition of patterns of behaviour and experiences do not reverse such linearity. There might now be multiple histories and times present in a given moment, instead of one homogeneous, universal time. But these times and histories of certain developments are merely paused, accelerated or decelerated momentarily in their progression. Reinhart Koselleck’s multiple temporalities are therefore ill-suited to capture lateral, horizontal relations between different geographies and spaces across the globe without immediately temporalizing difference.16 Yet the geographies and spatialities of capitalism are one of the most difficult and central problems in historicizing capitalism. Capitalism existed prior to taking on systemically global traits, even though individual commodities and trades such as cotton or slaves had long since bound together the economic fortunes of faraway localities.17 But, at the very latest since the second half of the nineteenth century, world regions had become economically connected in ways that allowed crises and slumps to affect economies far beyond a point of origin, prices to converge, and waves of labour migration to alter profoundly sending and receiving societies alike. Major macro-level questions such as the history of the Industrial Revolution, the history of globalization as an increasingly interconnected world, and the economic history of low-income (to avoid the temporalized category of ‘developing’) countries since decolonization all have to grapple with the difficulty of telling such stories without resorting to what Dipesh Chakrabarty has termed the temporality of the ‘waiting room of history’: the ‘not yet’, based on the assumption of one single homogeneous, universal time in which certain developments such as the emergence of capitalism or the Industrial Revolution first appear in one locality (Europe) at one point in time to then ‘move outward’ and trickle down the ladder of developmental time. In this vein, Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe offers a critique of historicism: a particular mode of deploying temporality in universally applying categories of history and social thought that are derived from and infused with European history. He does not reference Koselleck directly, but uses Bloch’s phrase of the ‘synchronicity of the non-synchronous’, as well as Marxist notions of ‘uneven development’, as examples of historicism: such concepts are in play when contemporary India is described as the land where ‘the temple stands next to the factory’. E. P. Thompson comes in for similar criticism.18 Conceptualizing time and temporality in approaching the history of capitalism from a global perspective might be the most difficult task at hand. One of the more embarrassing traits of the history of capitalism has so far been not just a general focus on the Western world, but its unreflecting and at times self-congratulatory US-centrism.19 In a majority of instantiations, ‘history of capitalism’ still amounts to ‘history of American capitalism’, without any perceived need to question the usefulness of writing about an American capitalism, an American economy that is often intrinsically global. William H. Sewell did not intend his article entitled ‘The Temporalities of Capitalism’ to address global perspectives specifically, but he offers a framework that is particularly useful in this regard.20 Sewell’s other articles, many of which are collected in the volume Logics of History, contain many illuminating observations on the ‘eventfulness’ of history, on when and how happenings interact with structures, expectations, culture and beliefs to turn into more impactful ‘events’, how structures and agency interact along differing temporal trajectories, and how time is highly ‘lumpy, uneven, unpredictable, and discontinuous’.21 Taken together, Logics of History offers a more rigorous and systematic understanding of historical temporality and ‘eventfulness’ than Koselleck produced.22 Admittedly, it might also help for the specific context of capitalism under concern here that Sewell usually furnishes examples from political (French Revolution) or socio-economic developments to illustrate his arguments, rather than relying on ideas and writings drawn from rather traditional lineages of European thought. In his ‘Temporalities of Capitalism’, he applies his theory of ‘eventfulness’ to the particular topic of capitalism.23 In some regards, capitalism appears to defy these logics. On the one hand, capitalism seems to be ‘super-eventful’: a constant search for new profit opportunities, ‘creative destruction’, can be easily read as eventfulness ‘on steroids’, as Sewell puts it.24 At the same time, capitalism’s ‘extreme abstraction … enables core processes of capitalism to escape from the irreversibility of time and to sustain a recurrent logic at their core’.25 The abstract, universal logic of capitalism means that the constant change and creative destruction have something strangely repetitive and cyclical about them. These repetitive rhythms are often referred to as business cycles, but they do not have to be conceived as such.26 Sewell writes, ‘This recurrent logic must, in some sense, be extremely abstract, since the concrete institutions and materials through which the repetitive pattern manifests itself change radically over time’. Another feature of capitalism similarly defies an eventful conception of temporality: a relentless drive towards expansion (although, in my reading, ‘expansion’ is not coterminous with ‘growth’ here). This permanent expansion is somewhat peculiar as it is possible to predict confidently that capitalism will expand, continue to move into different localities while abandoning others, but not how, in what direction, as expansion is governed by ‘highly contingent and eventful logics’.27 How, then, are we to conceptualize this interplay between universal and particular, abstract and concrete, in the dynamics of historical capitalism, and how does such a conceptualization help to write the history of capitalism in less Western-centric ways? As Sewell argues, capitalism generates and retains its expansive dynamics through contingent events. Capitalism’s dynamism requires constantly renewed opportunities for profits, and events provide these opportunities. Events create the possibilities for capitalism’s universal expansion, but at the same time they ‘produce the geographical and sectoral unevenness that from the beginning has been a distinctive signature of capitalist growth’.28 Such an emphasis on contingency and eventfulness as part of a universal logic of capitalism serves to decentre Eurocentric narratives, for instance about the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of modern capitalism.29 Perhaps most helpfully, Sewell’s temporality of capitalism can steer us away from stagist understandings of ‘transitions’ to capitalism (in the non-Western world in particular), and can instead help us to view hybrid forms — variations of capitalism — as eventful fuel for the universal (geographical and general) expansion of capitalism.30 In summary, E. P. Thompson allows us to return to the problem of the connection between new materialities of time and the social imaginary, often represented through language. With Koselleck, we have to take seriously how societies viewed their own position vis-à-vis the past and the future, and the opportunities offered for the expansion of capitalism once its particular futures had been opened up and expanded. Again, this is not to say that medieval and early modern commercial societies did not care about future returns on investments, that relationships of debt and credit didn’t bind members of earlier societies into temporalities straddling past, present and future, as one set of examples. But it might be fruitful to combine E. P. Thompson’s arguments about time and capitalism with Koselleck’s points about modernity’s future-orientedness here to make a case for a transformative shift: Thompson got it right that something indeed changed with capitalist modernity. Yet it was not so much clock time and the wholesale internalization of time-discipline, but the temporality of capitalism, and, compared to earlier times, the proliferation and institutionalization of ways and means to govern uncertainty and hedge against risk, that were germane to capitalist modernity. Lastly, Chakrabarty serves as a reminder of the traps and implicit biases — a particular temporality — running through our categorical repertoire, especially when it comes to reading histories of capitalism in the Western and non-Western world through one frame of analysis. Sewell’s temporalities of capitalism open avenues for grasping unevenness as a permanent condition for the ongoing expansion and transformation of capitalism rather than as a temporary stage of ‘not yet’. This raises the question of exploring possible connections between Koselleck — an obsession with the future, governance, risk-hedging and predictability — and Sewell — capitalism’s inexorable global expansion. Was it that, from a certain point, the apprehension of capitalism’s web of increasingly delicate and ‘unknowable’ faraway global relations and circumstances (its growing ‘interdependence’, as a later scholarship would have it) made the institutionalization of risk-hedging, future-knowing and other techniques and instruments of planning and governance appear more necessary than previously?31 Of course, medieval and early modern long-distance traders were equally faced with problems of unknowability and danger. There is a vast literature in economic history and the history of trading diasporas that suggests various ways in which these traders overcame such problems: ties of blood and kinship among merchants and traders, ties of shared religious beliefs and obligations, and legal-contractual cultures among other examples. The case of the Cairo Genizah merchants has produced an entire subfield preoccupied with such questions. But it is worth asking what might have changed since roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in how economic exchange and ties straddled the globe. Taken together, these authors offer an opportunity to go beyond the classic E. P. Thompson article on time and industrial capitalism. Time and temporality can thus be made to occupy a central position in new histories of capitalism, albeit one that is attuned to new sensitivities and seeks to integrate questions of gender, culture and globality in historicizing economic life. Footnotes 1 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, no. 38 (Dec. 1967); <https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6728627113658392627&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en> (accessed 14 Mar. 2019). Compare 5,763 citations for Joan W. Scott’s famous ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis’, American Historical Review, xci (1986): <https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=5361388443169934248&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5> (accessed 14 Mar. 2019). 2 See, for example, Shennette Garrett-Scott, ‘ “To Do a Work that Would Be Very Far Reaching”: Minnie Geddings Cox, the Mississippi Life Insurance Company, and the Challenges of Black Women’s Business Leadership in the Early Twentieth-Century United States’, Enterprise and Society, xvii (2016); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). 3 I generally prefer ‘history of political economy’ over ‘history of capitalism’, not least because political economy is more inclusive, especially when it comes to the twentieth century. It also helps eschew some of the problematic teleological definitions of what counts as ‘capitalist’ and what is ‘pre-capitalist’ and is thus more inclusive towards premodern economic systems. But, for the sake of recognizability, I am using ‘history of capitalism’. 4 Kenneth Lipartito, ‘Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism’, American Historical Review, cxxi (2016). Many works could be cited here as examples of this new history of capitalism, without there necessarily being a clear-cut case for why some and not others are the most ‘seminal’. As economic history conferences, journals and, at times, the new history of capitalism itself can easily be a predominantly male enterprise, I should like to highlight a selection of recent contributions to the history of capitalism and political economy written by women: Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC, 2009); Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford, 2009); Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Baltimore, 2017); Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart; Rebecca L. Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York, 2013); Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Courtney Fullilove, The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (Chicago, 2017); Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston, 2017); Susie J. Pak, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York, 2017); Alexia M. Yates, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-Siècle Capital (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); Christy Ford Chapin, Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (New York, 2015); Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford, 2014); Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, Mass., 2018); Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, 2016). See also the articles as well as dissertations and books in progress by the following scholars: Kristen Alff, Betsy Beasley, Rosie Bsheer, Jeannette Estruth, Hannah Farber, Caley Horan, Kristy Ironside, Casey Lurtz, Sarah Milov, Sreemati Mitter, Amy Offner, Anne Ruderman, Tehila Sasson and Christy Thornton, among many others. Of course, this is not to invalidate the pioneering work done by women in business history, economic history and political economy for decades previously (to mind come Jane Humphries, Margaret Jacobs, Naomi Lamoreaux, Deidre McCloskey, Bonnie Martin, Emma Rothschild, Amy Dru Stanley, Francesca Trivellato, Mira Wilkins, as well as surely others), but the focus here lies on the recent revival of interest in capitalism and political economy. 5 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. and introduced by Stephen Kalberg (Oxford, 2011). 6 Paul D. Glennie and Nigel Thrift, ‘Reworking E. P. Thompson’s “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” ’, Time and Society, v, 3 (1996); Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300–1800 (Oxford, 2009); Michael O’Malley, ‘Time, Work, and Task Orientation: A Critique of American Historiography’, Time and Society, i, 3 (1992); Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (New York, 1990). For comments on these newer works, see Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 233 n. 81, 71–2. One recent article has, to the contrary, confirmed E. P. Thompson’s arguments about the internalization of time discipline: Anne L. Murphy, ‘Clock-Watching: Work and Working Time at the Late Eighteenth-Century Bank of England’, Past and Present, no. 236 (Aug. 2017). Yet, as Murphy notes, the workers under study here were not industrial factory workers but clerks in the emerging financial sector. The overall state of affairs of internalizing time-discipline simply continues to display a large degree of heterogeneity across place(s), occupations and classes. 7 Ogle, Global Transformation of Time, ch. 2. 8 Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), 29–42. 9 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London, 2013). 10 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, 2002), 6. For a new translation of some of Koselleck’s later essays, see also Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, ed. and trans. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, 2018). 11 Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main, 2000); Fernand Braudel, ‘Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, xiii (1958). 12 Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution, ch. 2. Spang emphasizes continuities with earlier practices of debt. 13 Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference (Cambridge, 1975); Gerd Gigerenzer et al. (eds.), The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge, 1989). 14 Walter A. Friedman, Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters (Princeton, 2014). See also Jamie L. Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (Chicago, 2017). 15 The nuclearization of the Cold War and the proliferation of doomsday scenarios and the possible end of mankind created its own preoccupation with the future and ‘futurology’ as a field of expertise and research, initially based at the RAND Corporation and closely linked to systems theory but later migrating to other, less defence-oriented think-tanks and international organizations: see Jenny Andersson, ‘The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World’, American Historical Review, cxvii (2012). 16 Ogle, Global Transformation of Time, 7. Anthropologists have long since pointed out how the temporalization of space (travel to faraway colonial worlds amounts to travel back in time) was a heuristic device for temporalizing difference: see, for example, Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983). 17 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014). 18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), 49. 19 See Jennifer Schuessler, ‘In History Departments, it’s up with Capitalism’, New York Times, 6 Apr. 2013, <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html> (accessed 14 Mar. 2019). 20 William H. Sewell Jr, ‘The Temporalities of Capitalism’, Socio-Economic Review, vi (2008). 21 William H. Sewell Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 9. 22 Ibid., ch. 4 and, especially, ch. 9. 23 Sewell, ‘Temporalities of Capitalism’, 517. 24 Ibid., 526, 529. 25 Ibid., 517. 26 I am not concerned here with a genre of writing that can be characterized as ‘history of x in x thought’; hence my interest is not in the role of time and temporality in the history of economic thought or the history of business cycle theory as an example. On business cycle theory, see Mary S. Morgan, History of Econometric Ideas (Cambridge, 1990); T. W. Hutchinson, A Review of Economic Doctrines, 1870–1929 (Oxford, 1953). 27 Sewell, ‘Temporalities of Capitalism’, 521, 523. 28 Ibid., 528. 29 Lipartito, ‘Reassembling the Economic’, 15. 30 Ibid., 25. 31 See, for instance, Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and their Business World (Cambridge, 2012); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, 2011). © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2019 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Time, Temporality and the History of Capitalism
JF - Past & Present
DO - 10.1093/pastj/gtz014
DA - 2019-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/time-temporality-and-the-history-of-capitalism-1R4xZtUHSA
SP - 312
VL - 243
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -