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Timekeeping has undergone a profound transformation over the past five centuries. Today, exquisitely accurate time is embedded invisibly in the infrastructure around us, enabling us—if we choose—to regulate our lives to the second. Such precision, and the dependence it creates, would be utterly alien to our ancestors. While we now rely dangerously on modern systems such as GPS, earlier generations lived in a world where dependence on any such technology was unimaginable—and yet daily life, work, worship, travel, and entertainment unfolded without chaos.
Historians and social geographers have offered many explanations for how this transition occurred. Some emphasise the rise of industrial capitalism and its demand for tighter temporal discipline; others argue instead for a mosaic of local ‘times’, created and negotiated within each community. If we ask how playgoers knew when to arrive for a performance at Shakespeare’s Globe are we unwittingly imposing a modern, minute-by-minute sense of personal punctuality on a society that understood time very differently?
This talk explores the diverse ways in which our modern regime of timekeeping gradually took hold—and was, at moments, resisted. We will look at the emergence of portable timekeepers for navigation and the promotion of trade and empire; the railways’ demand for a single standard time; the regulation of drinking hours; the timing of work and the calculation of wages; and much more. Join us for a journey through the shifting temporal landscapes of the past—one that challenges present-day assumptions and reveals how changing perceptions of time shaped the everyday lives of our ancestors and the records they left behind.
James Nye is a historian, lecturer and writer, focussed on the history of timekeeping. He first learned clock repair at school in Sussex, starting a lifelong involvement in horology. His PhD from Kings London used Victorian and Edwardian clock companies as case studies. He is the founder and main sponsor of The Clockworks in South East London, the world’s only museum, workshop and library dedicated solely to electrical horology. He has chaired the AHS for the last ten years, served as Master of the Clockmakers Company in 2022, and is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. In 2024 he was awarded the Harrison Medal for his extensive contribution to horology as lecturer, researcher and author. OUP published his history of the Smiths Group in 2014, and then A General History of Horology in 2022, for which James acted as an advisory editor, contributing several chapters. His most recent book, Clockmaking on Lothbury : Craft, Community and Conflict in pre-Fire London, concentrated on an early centre of clockmaking.
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