Vanessa Ogle's The Global Transformation of Time complicates stories of “globalization” as a unidirectional process of economic standardization and transnational interconnectedness. In a study of “time reforms” from 1870–1950, Ogle deftly demonstrates that “globalization”—rather than “connecting” the world through a homogenizing and inevitable movement of capitalist markets—engendered and accentuated regional and national distinctions. She cities sources in English, German, French, and Arabic to trace the politics of time as they played out on the ground in a number of locations.

Ogle describes “globalization” and “connectivity-talk” as a highly normative ideology. According to narratives of globalization, capitalism—for better or worse—has penetrated every region and locale, standardizing the ways in which individuals think about and engage the world as economic subjects. Important to these accounts, according to Ogle, is a purported transformation in how individuals began to conceive of time as “abstract” and “homogenous.” Ogle delineates Benedict Anderson's “imagined communities” as representative of this mode of interpretation. Yet, Ogle demonstrates how “time” itself became an object of debate and comparison within the colonial and imperial projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “interconnectedness” that emerged within these political interactions, according to Ogle, did not entail homogenization. Instead, it occasioned moments of comparison through assertions of cultural, religious, racial, and national particularities.

The decision to begin in 1870 is important for this interpretation of “time reform.” Through the figure of Helmuth von Moltke (with whom she begins the book), Ogle claims that the standardization of railroad schedules in Germany during the 1870–1 conflict with France was primarily a matter of national security (2). This bolsters her analysis that the standardization of time involved national definition more than an inevitable “modernization” of economies. For instance, after the adoption of “Greenwich Time” in 1880 by Britain and in 1883 by the United States, Germany and France resisted it. France adhered to “Paris Time” until the early twentieth century, while Germany accepted “Central European Time” (set one hour in advance to Greenwich time) at the end of the nineteenth century. Even with the institutionalization of national “mean times” for railways and civil life, the coexistence of “local times” further obstructed standardization efforts.

Ogle points to attempts to implement daylight savings time (DSL) as an example of the difficulty of establishing “abstract” time (48). In Western nation-states and in colonial states in Africa, Asia, and the Levant, reformers believed that DSL was imperative in the maximization of labor productivity, as well as the regulation of the body politic broadly. Through her discussion of DSL, Ogle shows that the regulation of time through law proved elusive. Narratives that privilege “centralization,” according to Ogle, fail to account for the ways in which the “peripheries” interacted with and defined “time.” Whether it was colonial governments highlighting the intensity of the Sub-Saharan climate, or people simply ignoring public clocks in Europe, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, states did not always have the capacity (and, at time, did not want to) standardize temporality.

The most compelling aspect of Ogle's book involves her analysis of narratives that identify “modernity” with a particular kind of economic subjectivity. Contrary to accounts of “modernity” as a totalizing process, Ogle's account illumines the uneven, contradictory, and heterogeneous elements of our “global” moment. By framing the politics of time as a comparative project through and through, Ogle is able to show how individuals and groups in a variety of locations analyzed their own worlds in the register of “time.” In efforts to standardize time, Western colonizers constructed racial, political, and “civilizational” hierarchies through the dichotomization of the “modern” and the “primitive.” Arab businessmen interacted with an increasing Western presence by encouraging “Eastern self-improvement,” and Islamic leaders began to conceive of a global umma through the unification of a religious calendar based on calculated hours and dates.

As Ogle reminds us, while “globalization” and “modernity” has entailed widespread changes in economic conduct, it has not produced a “global” community held together within a homogenous temporality. In this way, Ogle connects narratives of “globalization,” “modernization,” and “interconnectedness” to broader disciplinary questions involving the nature of “history” in the first place. In attending to the diversity of experience with “time,” Ogle, much like the Annales historian Jacque Le Goff, points to the multiplicities of temporalities and mentalities existing across geographies (71). Ogle has produced a masterpiece that not only displays rigorous methodological engagement with her object of study. More than that, she provides a template in how to think about scholarship and its relation to the “time” in which it is embedded.