These histories have their echoes in the present day. A Taylorist chart from 1916 tracks the seconds taken to make a stopwatch, broken down in actions from “loosen nut with wrench” to “remove bolt from slot”. (Odell points out that it was not the concept of work that was alien to these communities, who “organised their activities based on different ecological and cultural cues”, but rather the notion of “abstract labour hours”.) Elsewhere, factory workers were subject to harsh temporal discipline, famously embodied by the methods of engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor.
An 1861 letter from a British arrival in South Africa containing the line “we have left time and been launched on to eternity”, encapsulates contemporary beliefs that positioned the time-keeping, industrious “civiliser” against the timeless, idling “other”. To talk about time today is to talk about work, and Odell begins by tracing the roots of our current system – in which time is exchanged for wages – to 19th-century industry and empire.
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