Time(scapes) in the Atlantic World

Abstract

Timescapes are integral to understanding the rhythms of daily life in the Atlantic world between the 17th and 19th centuries, and they both intersect with and help define the major historical movements connected to the early modern and modern eras such as the Age of Discovery, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Despite this, they are an understudied subsection of the historiography. Due to increased urbanization, the processes of globalization, and changes in technology and production, the ways in which people interacted with and understood time evolved between the 16th and 19th centuries. Cities were unlike rural areas in that they did not push waking and sleeping patterns to meet the luminance demands of agricultural production. Instead, people expanded the usability of the day by shifting work and sociability patterns outside daylight hours. The sailors who connected the Atlantic world to the rest of the globe worked through days and nights that were split into shifts determined by time, not light. Temporal exactness increased in importance with the proliferation of clocks and watches. New lamps and fuels provided brighter, cheaper, and cleaner light. This could be for labor—such on sugar plantations, in cloth mills, or in the home—or for social interactions, including in coffeehouses, residences, or theatres. And with the growth of the modern state, cities began to systematically police the night, using lighting technology from streetlamps in a way to see and control parts of the population that had historically remained hidden. As an analytical concept, the idea of “timescapes” incorporates multifaceted notions of stasis and movement, blurred temporal boundaries, intersections between individual and collective memory, social divisions between public and private life, and questions of place. Historians and philosophers have discussed the difficulty of dividing time, such as differentiating between day from night during the hazy boundaries of twilight. Within the confines of a day, people have divided time into recognizable sections such as morning or evening, but rather than being immutable these are often relative to an individual’s social or political context. Most historical analysis of time has focused on the night and activities related to it including entertainment, sleep, and technology, a fact reflected in this bibliography.