Introduction

Abstract

During the Age of Empire the advent of new technologies – the telegraph, the telephone, railroads, and steam ships – thoroughly reconfigured people’s sense of space and time (Ballantyne 2012; Bridge and Fedorowich 2003). In a period defined by urbanization, industrialization and the rise of the nation state, societies across the globe became increasingly connected and homogeneous (Bayly 2004). In rapidly growing cities, contemporaries perceived the pace of life to be accelerating. Clock faces became a common sight on public buildings, offering visual inducements to onlookers to manage time more carefully through minute segmentations of the working day. Time was going global, as exemplified by the division of the world into “time zones” at the International Meridian Conference of 1884 in Washington, D.C. But it also permeated the personal. Changing attitudes to time informed the temporal subdivisions used to define individual lifetimes. Modern states wielded an array of new legal and institutional instruments and their imposition often had the effect of giving new meanings to categories of age.