Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s

Abstract

AFTER WHAT MUST HAVE BEEN A hot day in August 1909, a journalist for a Beirut newspaper felt inclined to take an evening stroll. Jubran Massuh decided that he would "pretend to be European," and that meant donning a tie and other European apparel and adopting European behavior. But suddenly it occurred to him that it was entirely un-European to walk around aimlessly "wasting time"; after all, as Europeans said, "Time is money." Young Jubran therefore turned on his heels to get back behind his desk and spend his time studying something useful. The time-conscious European was one of several temporal identities that Jubran Massuh was juggling. 1 Four years earlier, roughly twenty-five hundred miles and an entire ocean farther to the west, another journalist, this one anonymous, had written about time. His article criticized the introduction of standard time (Greenwich Mean Time) to the city of Bombay, where the citizens insisted on keeping local Bombay time. According to the journalist, standard time had no legitimacy. It was British time, tied to the specific circumstances of British rule over much of India. The British traders and bureaucrats who advocated it were not representative of Bombay or of India as a whole. 2 In consequence, after widespread protests, a pluralistic landscape of times was not just maintained but enhanced throughout British India as cities such as At the AHR , I would like to thank Cris Coffey, Jane Lyle, the editorial board, Robert Schneider, and the outside reviewers for swift communication and crucial feedback on this essay.