Topics for HIST 101 World History

Introduction

Hunter Gatherers

Rise of Agriculture. Critique of Eurocentrism and the Notion of Progress

The problem of teleological views. Define teleology.

The World in the 1500s: China, Islam, Europe and the Americas
Reading Quiz : Robert Marks, selection. Watch Documentary Guns Germs and Steel, episode 1.
15 min, episode 47 and 48, on Indian Ocean Trade and Europe, and episode 81, The Trans-
Pacific Silver Trade and Early Modern Globalization.

First stage of Colonization?

Commerce throughout the world from the beginning of history to now. Trade, exploration, and
the Portuguese in the 1400s. The Chinese Voyages of exploration in the 1400s and why they
stopped.
Conquest of the Americas?
Reading Quiz : Selection from Skidmore history of Brazil, what it says on Portugal. Selection
from the Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Primary Sources.
TEXT ON CAJAMARCA?
Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History,
1400-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
p. 22-4: “The greatest population densities in the Americas were located in Mesoamerica and the
Central Andes, the two regions where agriculture first developed in the hemisphere. Agriculture
was a relatively late development in the Americas. Plant domestication in the Americas appeared
approximately five thousand years after it began in the Middle East. Native Americans, were
handicapped by a smaller availability of wild plants and animals that could be domesticated. Of
the five leading cereal crops in the world, only one – maize – was an original American crop.
America was even less well endowed with useful animal species capable of domestication. Of
the five most widespread domesticated species – cows, sheep, goats, pigs and horses – none were
present in the Americas after about 15,000 to 10,000 B.C.E. The turkey and dog were
domesticated in Mesoamerica and the llama, alpaca and guinea pig in the Central Andes. The
implications of this relatively late and incomplete social and cultural evolution are profound.”
“Eurasian high cultures had a significant head start and biological advantage. States arose more
than three thousand years earlier in Mesopotamia and Egypt than in Mesoamerica. The Chinese
were inventing writing fifteen hundred years before agricultural villages even appeared in
Mesoamerica and the Central Andes. Without horses or oxen, no wheeled vehicles or any other
type of labor-saving technology based on animal power was invented in the Americas. Eurasia’s
domestic animal species gave their human caretakers infectious diseases such as smallpox,
chicken pox, influenza, plague, measles, and cholera, which with repeated exposure over
millennia gave these populations increased genetic resistance to those same illnesses as they
became largely childhood diseases. In tropical Africa yaws, yellow fever, smallpox and the most
fatal strain of malaria exposed generations who survived and resisted. However, the peoples of
the Americas, without generations of exposure, developed no resistance to these particular
deadly diseases, and thus they would be profoundly vulnerable when the Atlantic was finally
breached.” […]
“America’s isolation from the rest of the world and the isolation of significant cultures within the
hemisphere, along with late plant and animal domestication, contributed to the absence of iron-
ore metallurgy and the late and limited development of literacy. Native Americans worked with
soft metals and crafted both luxury and utilitarian objects but otherwise remained in the Stone
Age. Stone, wood and bone were the principal materials for tools. The only writing systems in
the Americas originated in and remained limited to ancient Mesoamerica.”
p. 39: “Western Europe increasingly became receptive to change, particularly in its capacity to
assimilate the practical ideas and technology of other cultures, primarily Middle Eastern and
Asian cultures. The water mill was an ancient Roman invention borrowed by the Europeans, but
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries thousands of mills were built and applied not only to
grinding grain but also to fulling cloth, driving saws, producing iron, manufacturing paper and
more. The windmill was borrowed Persian technology and, with European modifications
creating a more powerful motor, provided more energy than water mills. From the complicated
gearing of water and windmills emerged the first mechanical clocks and the wheel lock
mechanism for firearms. Improvements in metallurgy led not only to beautifully knightly armor
and weapons but more and better productive instruments like the pitchfork, ax, scythe and
harrow.”
p. 46: “In contrast with many parts of the world, and with other civilizations, Medieval Europe
was not united or dominated by an empire but was an arena of discrete and competitive territorial
states. These states made ware on one another, with advanced princely and royal power and only
further consolidated national divisions. To those who dreamed of the order and unity of the
Roman Empire, this state system was a sign of chaos and feebleness. It was, in fact, a source of
strength and innovation. Competitive states and mercantile wealth produced a dynamic
civilization that readily absorbed the knowledge and technology of other civilizations. These
states became creative and aggressive and soon expanded into the Atlantic and around the
world.”
European colonial enterprises in the 1600s.
The difficulties of colonizing Africa. The difficulties of colonizing Asia. Europeans as
middlemen in trade.
Reading Quiz : Guns, Germs and Steel, episode on the difficulty to colonize Africa

Forced Labor Throughout the World

Feudalism, Slavery in Africa, and other forms of Coerced labor, the absence of wage labor.
Explain when wage labor begins to emerge and expand and how it is the dominant form today.
Preliminary notion of capitalism.
On Feudalism: http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture23b.html
Read about slavery in Africa before the Europeans from Thorntorn of look for other books on the
topic.
On the life of Medieval Peasants:
https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/HIST201-1.1.4-MedievalPeasants-
FINAL1.pdf

Slavery and Globalization

Chapter 7, Uprooted
p. 326: “The best recent scholarly assessments hold that approximately 12 million captive
Africans were exported from the coast of Africa and that around 10,500,000 were delivered alive
to one of many Atlantic (mostly American) slave-trading ports. It required something on the
order of thirty-five thousand voyages to transport this many people from Africa to the Americas.
Four of every five immigrants to the Americas before 1820 were African captives, that is, there
were 8.4 million African involuntary immigrants compared to 2.4 million European immigrants.
For a considerable [page 327] portion of its post-Columbian era, the Americas were more of an
extension of Africa than of Europe.”
p. 327 “We should remember that the Atlantic slave trade was not the only slave trade out of or
into Africa. From 1580 to 1680, there were some 850,000 Christians captured by Barbary pirates
and enslaved in Muslim North Africa. […] Historian Paul Lovejoy has estimated that more than
eleven million captives were carried east to the Muslim world in the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and
Sahara desert trades from 650 C.E. to 1900. Ralph Austin has placed that number at seventeen
million. All of the transatlantic slave trades were based upon a domestic African system of
slavery and slave trading, which underlay and facilitated the transcontinental and transoceanic
slave trades. Indeed, slavery was a aprt of most African societies and slave trading was an
ancient practice. Berbers and Arabs were connected to preexisting slave-trading markets and
networks. However, the increasing pace of the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century
made slavery and slave trading much more important in some African societies. The Atlantic
slave trade may have even contributed to the formation of new societies in Africa as well as in
the Americas.
The plantation complex in the islands of the Atlantic Mediterranean and the New World was the
engine that powered the Atlantic slave trade. Most enslaved Africans – about two-thirds brought
to Madeira, the Canary Islands, São Tomé, Brazil, the Wild Coast of Guiana, Spanish America,
and numerous [page 328] islands in the West Indies – were shipped and purchased to cultivate,
harvest and process sugarcane, the ‘white gold’ of the tropical Atlantic. There were plantations
worked by African slaves that produced other luxury or high value staples: tobacco, indigo,
cotton, coffee, and rice. African slaves were put to work in Spanish American silver mines and
Brazilian gold mines. African slaves nearly everywhere worked as cowboys, mule train drivers,
stevedores, shoemakers, stonemasons, and house servants. However, sugar and slavery was the
magic formula that transformed continents. As the sixteenth-century refrain went, ‘Whoever says
sugar says Brazil, and whoever says Brazil, says Angola.’”
“The Atlantic slave trade began in the fifteenth century, expanded during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and peaked in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century was the age
of the trade’s contraction and ultimate demise. Some of these captives went to plantation islands
of the near Atlantic. Naturally, most traffic was directed to the tropical and semitropical
plantation zones of the Americas. In most of these regions during the course of the trade, slave
populations did not reproduce themselves. Because there were always more men than women, in
combination with unhealthy disease environments, poor and inadequate nutrition, excessive
labor, violent punishment and general mistreatment, plantation regimes could maintain their
levels of slave populations only through continuous importation of new slaves.”
“The ties among Europe, Africa, and the Americas were never seen as clearly as in the famous if
simplified triangular pattern related to the slave trade. Europeans shipped metal, cloth, guns and
other manufactures to Africa and bartered these goods for captives. Commercial and ruling elites
on the coast of Atlantic Africa became integrated into the Atlantic World. They not only became
part of Atlantic commercial networks but also sent diplomatic missions to Europe and the
Americas, adopted European languages, became literate and numerate, and even accepted
Christianity to some extent. Slaves were transported across the Atlantic to the plantations, farms,
and cities of the Americas in exchange for sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo and coffee. These
valuable staples produced by slaves were then shipped back to Europe. Although only about two
thirds of ships actually made this complete triangular course, people and products did follow this
patterns and numerous variations of it.”
[…]
“The Portuguese purchased the first captives on the coast of Africa in the 1440s and 1450s. The
Portuguese had earlier practiced ‘man-stealing,’ the [p. 329] kidnapping of people on the coast
(as would other Europeans in the years to come) but traders learned that this was the difficult
way of obtaining slaves. Local rulers and merchants were happy to trade slaves for European
merchandise.”
[…]
“Nine years after the first Portuguese purchases, a papal bull authorized Portugal to reduce to
servitude all heathen peoples. Of course, the church had long accepted slavery in principle, as a
necessary part of the world of sin. Until the eighteenth century, the European conscience was
more troubled by the enslavement of Native Americans than that of Africans. Iberians would
eventually prohibit Indian slavery in law, although these bans were never absolutely enforced.
Many Europeans believed that slavery was itself benign. During the age of the slave trade, good
Christians considered slavery beneficial to Africans who were removed from heathen conditions
and introduced to the word of God. Francisco de Auncibay in 1592 informed the Spanish
Council of the Indies regarding the acceptability of African Slavery:
The negroes are not harmed because it is very helpful to these wretches to save them from
Guinea’s fire and tyranny and barbarism and brutality, where without law of God, they live like
savage beasts. Brought to a healthier land they should be very content, the more so as they will
be kept and live in good order and religion from which they will derive many temporal and,
which I value most, spiritual advantages.
About a half century later, a synod of French Protestant churches considered the morality of the
slave trade. […] [These were the words of the synod:] “Through slavery, as it has been always
acknowledged to be of the right of nations, is not condemned in the word of God.”
[…]
Page 330 “Generally, those rulers [from Africa], merchants and middlemen who traded slaves to
Europeans did not barter their own countrymen and women. We begin to see a pan-African
identity among those who became the slaves of Europeans and Euroamericans.”
[…]
Page 330: “It is true that Africans came from a continent were slaves were kept, worked and
bought and sold. Given the great cultural diversity of sub-Saharan Africa, there were no one type
of slavery. There were different levels of servitude, bondage and exploitation.” QUOTE
EQUIANO HERE
CHECK FROM PAGE 331 TO 371
PAGE 331, LAST PARAGRAPH, STARTING WITH “ATLANTIC AFRICA BEFORE THE
GREAT EXPANSION… UNTIL THE END OF THE PAGE.
TOP OF PAGE 332 AND FIRST 8 LINES OF SECOND PARAGRAPH OF SAME PAGE
INCORPORATE ACCOUNT OF WILLIAM SNELGRAVE AND ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT
IT
PAGE 341, EVERYTHING AFTER SUBTITLE 7.2 THE BUSINESS OF SLAVING
ALL OF PAGE 342
MIDDLE PARAGRAPH OF 348 STARTING WITH “THE ATLANTIC SYSTEM AND
ENDING IN EUROPE”
VIDEO AND IMAGES OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE?
PAGE 355 HAS AN ACCOUNT OF THE CAPTIVITY OF OTTOBAH CUGANO, 1787,
INCLUDE THAT.
RESUMIR LA SECCIÓN 7.6 “THE IMPACT OF THE TRADE ON AFRICA” QUE VA DE
LA PÁGINA 366 A PAGINA 371.

From: Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared
History, 1400-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
 15 min, episode 6: Effects of the Atlantic Trade on the Americas, and episode 42, The Senses of
Slavery, and episode 76, The Trans-Pacific Slave Trade

Colonial Imperialism in the 1700s.

Expansion and the old System of Colonialism begins to crack too (in the US). Africa, Asia,
India, expansion and conflicts in the Americas. Attempts to increase taxation and the conflicts
they bring.

The Industrial Revolution

Atlantic Revolutions: The US

15 min, episode 4, Perspectives of the Founding Fathers, and episode 14: Early Drafts of the
Declaration of Independence, episode 32 and 33, The American Revolution in Global Context,
parts 1 and 2.

Atlantic Revolutions: France

The Decree Abolishing Feudalism August 11 1789

Website: http://www.historywiz.com/primarysources/decreefeudalism.htm

Atlantic Revolutions: Haiti and Latin America and the rest of the world
15 min, episode 13: Simón Bolivar
Decadence of Spain. Tensions in the empire before the rise of independence. Castes and the
impossibility to enforce the caste divisions. Caste revolts (1690 in Mexico?). Peninsulars and
Criollos. Attempts to increase taxation. Bourbon reforms. How the conflicts start in the
periphery. San Martín and Bolivar. The extension of liberalism in 18th century Latin America
prior to the revolts.
The 19th Century,
Transportation Revolution. Changes in Space and Time. Rise of Wage Labor. Mass migration.
Cities of Sin. Eroding of traditional communities.

The rise of the Modern World

Self-subsistent economy, characteristics:

1. Importance of Kinship

2. Families constitute units of production

3. Each member of the family and the community plays a role in the process of production

4. No anonymity, there is a relative low density of the population and everyone knows each
other

5. Trade with other communities is limited to a few luxury products, but most of what
people need for their lives is produced by themselves

6. Communities are isolated from one another because they are self-sufficient and do not
need to enter in contact with other peoples to obtain anything needed for their life

Modern globalized economy, characteristics:

1. Kinship becomes only an issue of affection rather than economic production

2. Families are not directly engaged in production

3. Most people need to sell their capacity to work so that they can earn a wage to make a
living

4. All the products we consumed were produced by other people

5. World trade is inherent to the modern economy, countries are not anymore isolated, they
depend on each other for their own survival

Political consequences of the difference between self-subsistence communities and the modern
globalized economy:
Under self-subsistence economies, people need to respect the authority of the elders. It is
difficult to question tradition and the relations of power become very difficult to challenge.
Individuals need to spend all their time under the control of their family members and they
cannot disagree. There is nowhere else to go and no possibility of leading an alternative life, and
this is why individuals need to respect the Status Quo. In this context, democracy is very unlikely
to emerge.

In the modern globalized economy, on the contrary, people do not need to respect tradition or
authority. Their subsistence does not depend on following rules from above; they only have to do
so in their jobs. In their private life, people have more freedom for several reasons. First of all,
people have a private life of their own. That life can be developed beyond the control of
employers and the family if the person chooses to do so. Also, the higher density of population
usually leads to anonymity. In this context, the idea of democracy as the best political system
tends to become hegemonic.

“During the nineteenth century, the formation of marriage ties, for most groups in the population,
became based on considerations other than judgments of economic value. Notions of romantic
love, first of all having their main hold over bourgeois groups, were diffused through much of
the social order. ‘Romanticizing’ became a synonym for courting, and ‘romances’ were the first
form of literature to reach a mass population. The spread of ideals of romantic love was one
factor tending to disentangle the marital bond from wider kinship ties and give it an especial
significance. Husbands and wives increasingly became seen as collaborators in a joint emotional
enterprise, this having primacy even over their obligations towards their children. The ‘home’
came into being as a distinct environment set off from work; and, at least in principle, became a
place where individuals could expect emotional support, as contrasted with the instrumental
character of the work setting. Particularly important for its implications for sexuality, pressures
to have large families, characteristic of virtually all pre-modern cultures, gave way to a tendency
to limit family size in a rigorous way. Such practice, seemingly an innocent demographic
statistic, placed a finger on the historical trigger so far as sexuality was concerned. For the first
time, for a mass population of women, sexuality could become separated from a chronic round of
pregnancy and childbirth.” Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love
and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 26.

p. 4-5

“The !Kung Bushmen […] always consumed fresh meat immediately after it became available: ‘ The fear
of hunger is mitigated; the person one shares with will share in turn when he gets meat and people are
sustained by a web of mutual obligation. If there is hunger, it is commonly shared. There are no distinct
have and have-nots. One is not alone… The idea of eating alone and not sharing is shocking to the !Kung.
It makes them shriek with an uneasy laughter. Lions could do that, they say, not men.’ Marshall [an
anthropologist] described in detail how four hunters who killed an eland, following ten days of hunting
and three days of tracking the wounded animal, bestowed the meat upon others – other hunters, the
wife of the owner of the arrow that first wounded the prey, the relatives of the arrow’s owner, etc. She
recorded sixty-three gifts of raw meat and thought there had been many more. Small quantities of meat
were rapidly diffused, passed on in ever-diminishing portions. This swift movement was not random or
quixotic, it actually illuminated the interior organization of the !Kung band, the distribution of kinfolk,
divisions of sex, age, and role. Each occasion to eat meat was hence a natural occasion to discover who
one was, how one was related to others, and what that entailed.”

In opposition to this: “The connections between food and kinship, or food and social groups, take
radically different forms in modern life.”

p. 130-1

“…at least in Great Britain of the nineteenth century, food choices, were reckoned partly in terms of
available time, and not solely in terms of relative cost. Second, it is clear that fuel was an important part
of food costs, so that food that circumvented this outlay would be more attractive. Third, the division of
labor within the family shaped the evolution of British food preferences; a wife’s leaving the house to
earn a wage had a restrictive effect on the family diet, even though her work might increase the family
income” […] “There seems no doubt that sugar and its by-products were provided unusual access to
working-class tastes by the factory system, with its emphasis on the saving of time, and the poorly paid
but exhausting jobs it offered women and children. The decline of bread baking at home was
representative of the shift from a traditional cooking system, costly in fuels and in time, toward what we
would now proclaim as ‘convenience eating.’ Sweetened preserves, which could be left standing
indefinitely without spoiling and without refrigeration, which were cheap and appealing to children, and
which tasted better than more costly butter with store-purchased bread, outstripped or replaced
porridge, much as tea had replaced milk and home-brewed beer. In practice, the convenience foods
freed the wage-earning wife from one or even two meal preparations per day, meanwhile providing
large numbers of calories to all her family. Hot tea often replaced hot meals for children off the job, as
well as for adults on the job. These changes were an integral part of the modernization of English
society. The sociological changes that they accompanied would continue to mark the modernization of
the rest of the world.”

José C. Moya, “Modernization, Modernity, and the Trans/formation of the Atlantic World in the
Nineteenth Century,” in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, The Atlantic in Global
History, 1500-2000 (New Jersey: Pearson, 2007).

p. 179: “…some of the changes during the nineteenth century were so drastic that they could be
categorized as changes in kind rather than degree.”
p. 180 “…in general, economies in the Atlantic World of the nineteenth century moved from
mercantilism to liberalism, toward an increasing division of labor (both internal and
international), toward increasing commercialization and monetarization…” […] “To admit
directionality in certain historical processes during specific periods is not at all teleologic.
Neigher is it a metanarrative, something that denotes a much more totalizing and grand tale. […]
many of the nineteenth-century transformations displayed clear directionality.” […] “… the
transition from a system of high birthrates and death rates to one of low fertility and mortality –
did take place in Europe during the long nineteenth centuryand is taking place in much of the
world. This transition produced – as mortality rate fell faster than fertility – the first sustained
population explosion in human history. Europe’s population grew from 140 million in 1750 to
430 million in 1900, and its share of the world’s inhabitants rose from 17 to 25 percent. […]
“The aptly name of ‘demographic revolution’…”

p. 181 “The European exodus to the Americas, however, would eventually be five times as large
as the African one. Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Great Depression (with a
gap during World War I), 51 million Europeans migrated to the New World in the most massive
transcontinental movement the world had ever witnessed. The global migrations of the past half
century have finally surpassed that flow in absolute numbers, but they are far from matching it in
relative terms (i.e. in relation to the planet’s population then and now). If African slavery had
been the characteristic transatlantic population flow of the eighteenth century, European peasant
and proletarian free migration became the distinctive Transatlantic movement of the nineteenth
century, particularly after its midpoint.” […] It churned out an increasing variety of articles that
generated a consumer culture of demands and desires, particularly among the young, the
principal fount of transatlantic migrants. Contemporary popular theater in Europe abounded with
characters who blamed the exodus on the younger generation’s acquisitiveness and its cravings
for factory-made shoes and garments instead of the homespun espadrilles and blouses, for
watches, guns, phonographs, bicycles, and other gadgets of the industrial age. Other products of
the industrial revolution, such as cheap wood-pulp paper and the photograph, raised the
emigration fever high by carrying information and images of material ‘across the pond.’”

“The industrial revolution also made possible the international division of labor on which the
commercial integration of the Atlantic World rested. It created direct demands for a variety of
American raw materials: hides for machine belts and tallow for soap and lubricants from the
huge feral cattle herds of the River Plate early in the century, cotton from the US south, wool
from Argentina (which had the largest sheep flock in the world by the 1880s) after the
industrialization of woolen production in the mid-1800s, natural rubber from the Amazon after
Charles Goodyear developed vulcanization around the same time, timber from Canada, and
linseed from the pampas and the prairies. By promoting urbanization and the growth of a middle
class, industrialization, along with the demographic revoluti0n, expanded consumer demand for
New World goods that were previously elite articles or grown by European peasants: Cuban
sugar, Brazilian coffee, Virginian tobacco, Venezuelan and Ecuadorian cacao, and cereals, beef,
and mutton from the temperate plains of Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, and Canada.
And the increased industrialization of North America and parts of South America created
demand foci along the western shore of the Atlantic basin also.”
Page 182: “…it was during the nineteenth century demographic transition and economic shift
from mercantile to industrial capitalism that this region dramatically increased its relative
importance in the world.”

Page 183 “In 1800, Britain, France, and the United States together accounted for less than one-
tenth of the world’s manufacturing and China alone for one-third. By 1900, the share of the three
North Atlantic countries had raised to almost one-half of the world’s output, and China had
decreased to a mere 6 percent.” […] “British urban dwellers became the most important
exporters of manufactures and capital across the Atlantic and the most important consumers of
foodstuff and raw commodities that moved in the opposite direction.

 Julio Cortázar

from  Cronopios and Famas "The Instruction Manual"  

 

                                               Preamble to the Instructions 

                                                  on How to Wind a Watch 

Think of this: When they present you with a watch they are gifting you with a
tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren't simply
wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last you, it's a
good brand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren't just giving you this minute
stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along with you. They are
giving you—they don't know it, it's terrible that they don't know it—they are
gifting you with a new, fragile, and precarious piece of yourself, something
that's yours but not a part of your body, that you have to strap to your body like
Spanish your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of something hanging onto your wrist. They gift
Text you with the job of having to wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it
goes on being a watch; they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-
shop windows to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the
telephone service. They give you the gift of fear, someone will steal it from you,
it'll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of your trademark
and the assurance that it's a trademark better than the others, they gift you with
the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They aren't giving you
a watch, you are the gift, they're giving you yourself for the watch's birthday. 

                                                  Instructions on How
                                                      to Wind a Watch
 Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down
with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now
another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races,
like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the
breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly. strap it to your wrist, let
it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies,
everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the
watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in
the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already
unimportant.

Thompson:
Among the Nandi an occupational definition of time evolved covering not only each hour, but half hours
of the day — at 5-30 in the morning the oxen have gone to the grazing-ground, at 6 the sheep have been
unfastened, at 6-30 the sun has grown, at 7 it has become warm, at 7- 30 the goats have gone to the
grazing-ground, etc. — an uncommonly well-regulated economy. In a similar way terms evolve for the
measurement of time intervals. In Madagascar time might be measured by "a rice-cooking" (about half
an hour) or "the frying of a locust" (a moment). The Cross River natives were reported as saying "the
man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted" (less than fifteen
minutes).6 It is not difficult to find examples of this nearer to us in cultural time. Thus in seventeenth-
century Chile time was often measured in "credos": an earthquake was described in 1647 as lasting for
the period of two credos; while the cooking-time of an egg could be judged by an Ave Maria said aloud.
In Burma in recent times monks rose at daybreak "when there is light enough to see the veins in the
hand".7 The Oxford English Dictionary gives us English examples — "pater noster wyle", "miserere
whyle" (1450), and (in the New English Dictionary but not the Oxford English Dictionary) "pissing while"
— a somewhat arbitrary measurement. Pierre Bourdieu has explored more closely the attitudes towards
time of the Kabyle peasant (in Algeria) in recent years: "An attitude of submission and of nonchalant
indifference to the passage of time 6 E. E..Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), pp. 100-4; M. P.
Nilsson, Primitive Time Reckoning (Lund, 1920), pp. 32-3, 42; P. A. Sorokin and R. K. Merton, "Social
Time: a Methodological and Functional Analysis", Amer.Ji. Sociol., xlii (1937); A. I. Hallowell, "Temporal
Orientation in Western Civilization and in a Pre-Literate Society", Amer. Anthrop., new ser. xxxix (!937)-
Other sources for primitive time reckoning are cited in H. G. Alexander, Time as Dimension and History
(Albuquerque, 1945), p. 26, and Beate R. Salz, "The Human Element in Industrialization", Econ. Devel.
and Cult. Change, iv (1955). esp. pp. 94-114. 7 E. P. Salas, "L'Evolution de la notion du temps et les
horlogers a 1 epoque coloniale au Chili", Annales E.S.C., xxi (1966), p. 146; Cultural Patterns and
Technical Change, ed. M. Mead (New York, UNESCO, 1953), p. 75- TIME, WORK-DISCIPLINE, AND
INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM 59 which no one dreams of mastering, using up, or saving . . . Haste is seen as a
lack of decorum combined with diabolical ambition". The clock is sometimes known as "the devil's mill";
there are no precise meal-times; "the notion of an exact appointment is unknown; they agree only to
meet 'at the next market' ". A popular song runs: It is useless to pursue the world, No one will ever
overtake it.8 Synge, in his well-observed account of the Aran Islands, gives us a classic example : While I
am walking with Michael someone often comes to me to ask the time of day. Few of the people,
however, are sufficiently used to modern time to understand in more than a vague way the convention
of the hours and when I tell them what o'clock it is by my watch they are not satisfied, and ask how long
is left them before the twilight." The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously
enough, upon the direction of the wind. Nearly all the cottages are built. . . with two doors opposite
each other, the more sheltered of which lies open all day to give light to the interior. If the wind is
northerly the south door is opened, and the shadow of the door-post moving across the kitchen floor
indicates the hour; as soon, however, as the wind changes to the south the other door is opened, and
the people, who never think of putting up a primitive dial, are at a loss ... When the wind is front the
north the old woman manages my meals with fair regularity; but on the other days she often makes my
tea at three o'clock instead of six------ " Such a disregard for clock time could of course only be possible
in a crofting and fishing community whose framework of marketing and administration is minimal, and
in which the day's tasks (which might vary from fishing to farming, building, mending of nets, thatching,
making a cradle or a coffin) seem to disclose themselves, by the logic of need, before the crofter's
eyes.11 But his account will serve to emphasize the essential conditioning in differing notations of time
provided by different work-situations and their relation to "natural" rhythms. Clearly hunters must
employ certain hours of the night to set their snares. Fishing and seafaring people must integrate their
lives with the tides. A petition from Sunderland in 1800 includes 8 P. Bourdieu, "The attitude of the
Algerian peasant toward time", in Mediterranean Countrymen, ed. J. Pitt-Rivers (Paris, 1963), pp. 55-72.
9 Cf. ibid., p. 179: "Spanish Americans do not regulate their lives by the clock as Anglos do. Both rural
and urban people, when asked when they plan to do something, gives answers like: 'Right now, about
two or four o'clock' ". 10J. M. Synge, Plays, Poems, and Prose (Everyman edn., London, 1941), p. 257. 11
The most important event in the relation of the islands to an external economy in Synge's time was the
arrival of the steamer, whose times might be greatly affected by tide and weather. See Synge, The Aran
Islands (Dublin, 1907) PP- 115-6. 60 PASTAND PRESENT II the words "considering that this is a seaport in
which many people are obliged to be up at all hours of the night to attend the tides and their affairs
upon the river".12 The operative phrase is "attend the tides": the patterning of social time in the seaport
follows upon the rhythms of the sea; and this appears to be natural and comprehensible to fishermen or
seamen: the compulsion is nature's own. In a similar way labour from dawn to dusk can appear to be
"natural" in a farming community, especially in the harvest months: nature demands that the grain be
harvested before the thunderstorms set in. And we may note similar "natural" work-rhythms which
attend other rural or industrial occupations: sheep must be attended at lambing time and guarded from
predators; cows must be milked; the charcoal fire must be attended and not burn away through the
turfs (and the charcoal burners must sleep beside it); once iron is in the making, the furnaces must not
be allowed to fail. The notation of time which arises in such contexts has been described as.,task-
orientation. It is perhaps the most effective orientation in peasant societies, and it remains important in
village and domestic industries/ It has by no means lost all relevance in rural parts of Britain today.
Three points may be proposed about taskorientation. First, there is a sense in which it is more humanly
comprehensible than timed labour. The peasant or labourer appears to attend upon what is an observed
necessity. Second, a community in which task-orientation is common appears to show least demarcation
between "work" and "life". Social intercourse and labour are intermingled — the working-day lengthens
or contracts according to the task — and there is no great sense of conflict between labour and "passing
the time of day". Third, to men accustomed to labour timed by the clock, this attitude to labour appears
to be wasteful and lacking in urgency.13 12 Public Rec. Off., W.O. 40/17. It is of interest to note other

[…]
It is by no means clear how far the availability of precise clock time extended at the time of the
industrial revolution. From the fourteenth century onwards church clocks and public clocks were
erected in the cities and large market towns. The majority of English parishes must have possessed
church clocks by the end of the sixteenth century.18 But the accuracy of these clocks is a matter of
dispute; and the sundial remained in use (partly to set the clock) in the seventeenth, eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.19 C

[…]
A great advance in the accuracy of household clocks came with the application of the pendulum after
1658. Grandfather clocks begin to spread more widely from the 1660s, but clocks with minute hands (as
well as hour hands) only became common well after this time.23 As regards more portable time, the
pocket watch was of dubious accuracy until improvements were made in the escapement and the spiral
balance-spring was applied after 1674.24 Ornate and rich design was still preferred to plain
serviceability.

[…]
And John Tibbot, a clock-maker in Newtown (Mon.), had perfected a clock in 1810 which (he claimed)
seldom varied more than a second over two years.30 In between these extremes were those numerous,
shrewd, and highly-capable craftsmen who played a criticallyimportant role in technical innovation in
the early stages of the industrial revolution. The point, indeed, was not left for historians to discover: it
was argued forcibly in petitions of the clock- and watchmakers against the assessed taxes in February
1798. Thus the petition from Carlisle: . . . the cotton and woollen manufactories are entirely indebted for
the state of perfection to which the machinery used therein is now brought to the clock and watch
makers, great numbers of whom have, for several years past. . . been employed in inventing and
constructing as well as superintending such machinery .. . .31

[…]

The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and . of idleness, wherever men were in
control of their own working lives (The pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers,
small farmers, and perhaps also with students — today, and provokes the question whether it is not a
"natural" human work-rhythm.) OnMonday or Tuesday, according to tradition, the hand-loom went to
the slow chant of Plen-ty of Time, Plen-ty of Time: on Thursday and Friday, A day t'lat, A day t'lat.™ The
temptation to lie in an extra hour in the morning pushed work into the evening, candle-lit hours.60
There are few trades which are not described as honouring Saint Monday: shoemakers, tailors, colliers,
printing workers, potters, weavers, hosiery workers, cutlers, all Cockneys. Despite the full employment
of many London trades during the Napoleonic Wars, a witness complained that "we see Saint Monday
so religiously kept in this great city . . . in general followed by a Saint Tuesday also".61 If we are to
believe "The Jovial Cutlers", a Sheffield song of the late eighteenth century, its observance was not
without domestic tension: How upon a good Saint Monday, Sitting by the smithy fire, Telling what's
been done o't Sunday, And in cheerful mirth conspire, Soon I hear the trap-door rise up, On the ladder
stands my wife: "Damn thee, Jack, I'll dust thy eyes up, Thou leads a plaguy drunken life; Here thou sits
instead of working, Wi' thy pitcher on thy knee; Curse thee, thou'd be always lurking. And I may slave
myself for thee".

[…]

Saint Monday, indeed, appears to have been honoured almost universally wherever small-scale,
domestic, and outwork industries existed; was generally found in the pits; and sometimes continued in
manufacturing and heavy industry.63

[…]

This irregular working rhythm is commonly associated with heavy week-end drinking: Saint Monday is a
target in many Victorian temperance tracts. But even the most sober and self-disciplined artisan might
feel the necessity for such alternations. "I know not how to describe the sickening aversion which at
times steals over the working man and utterly disables him for a longer or shorter period, from following
his usual occupation", Francis Place wrote in 1829; and he added a footnote of personal testimony: For
nearly six years, whilst working, when I had work to do, from twelve to eighteen hours a day, when no
longer able, from the cause mentioned, to continue working, I used to run from it, and go as rapidly as I
could to Highgate, Hampstead, Muswell-hill, or Norwood, and then "return to my vomit" . . . This is the
case with every workman I have ever known; and in proportion as a man's case is hopeless will such fits
more frequently occur and be of longer duration." We may, finally, note that the irregularity of working
day and week were framed, until the first decades of the nineteenth century, within the larger
irregularity of the working year, punctuated by its traditional holidays, and fairs. Still, despite the
triumph of the Sabbath over the ancient saints' days in the seventeenth century,69 the people clung
tenaciously to their customary wakes and feasts, and may even have enlarged them both in vigour and
extent.70 But a discussion of this problem, and of the psychic needs met by such intermittent festivals,
must be left to another occasion.

[…]

One other non-industrial institution lay to hand which might be used to inculcate "time-thrift": the
school. | Clayton complained that the streets of Manchester were full of "idle ragged children; who are
not only losing their Time, but learning habits of gaming", etc. He praised charity schools as teaching
Industry, Frugality, Order and Regularity: "the Scholars here are obliged to rise betimes and to observe
Hours with great Punctuality".88 William Temple, when advocating, in 1770, that poor children be sent
at the age of four to work-houses where they should be employed in manufactures and given two hours'
schooling a day, was explicit about the socializing influence of the process: There is considerable use in
their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn
their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to
constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them . . . . 89 Powell,
in 1772, also saw education as a training in the "habit of industry"; by the time the child reached six or
seven it should become "habituated, not to say naturalized to Labour and Fatigue".90 The Rev. William
Turner, writing from Newcastle in 1786, recommended Raikes' schools as "a spectacle of order and
regularity", and quoted a manufacturer of hemp and flax in Gloucester as affirming that the schools had
effected an extraordinary change: "they are . . . become more tractable and obedient, and less
quarrelsome and revengeful".91 Exhortations to punctuality and regularity are written into the rules of
all the early schools: Every scholar must be in the school-room on Sundays, at nine o'clock in the
morning, and at half-past one in the afternoon, or she shall lose her place the next Sunday, and walk
last.92 Once within the school gates, the child entered the new universe of disciplined time. At the
Methodist Sunday Schools in York the teachers were fined for unpunctuality. The first rule to be learned
by the scholars was: I am to be present at the School... a few minutes before half-past nine o'clock . . . .
88 Clayton, loc. cit., pp. 19, 42-3. 89 Cited in Furniss, op. cit., p. 114. 90 Anon. [Powell], A View of Real
Grievances (London, 1772), p. 90. 91 W. Turner, Sunday Schools Recommended (Newcastle, 1786), pp.
23, 42. 92 Rules for the Methodist School of Industry at Pocklington, for the instruction of Poor Girls in
Reading, Sewing, Knitting, and Marking (York, 1819), p. 12. TIME, WORK-DISCIPLINE, AND INDUSTRIAL
CAPITALISM 85 Once in attendance, they were under military rule: The Superintendent shall again ring,
— when, on a motion of his hand, the whole School rise at once from their seats; — on a second motion,
the Scholars turn; — on a third, slowly and silently move to the place appointed to repeat their lessons,
— he then pronounces the word "Begin" . . . ." The onslaught, from so many directions, upon the
people's old working habits was not, of course, uncontested. In the first stage, we find simple
resistance.91 But, in the next stage, as the new timediscipline is imposed, so the workers begin to fight,
not against time, but about it. The evidence here is not wholly clear. But in the betterorganized artisan
trades, especially in London, there is no doubt that hours were progressively shortened in the
eighteenth century as combination advanced. Lipson cites the case of the London tailors whose hours
were shortened in 1721, and again in 1768: on both occasions the mid-day intervals allowed for dinner
and drinking were also shortened — the day was compressed.95 By the end of the eighteenth century
there is some evidence that some favoured trades had gained something like a ten-hour day.

[…]

It was exactly in those industries — the textile mills and the engineering workshops — where the new
time-discipline was most rigorously imposed that the contest over time became most intense. At first
some of the worst masters attempted to expropriate the workers of all knowledge of time. "I worked at
Mr. Braid's mill", declared one witness: 96 Rules for the Government, Superintendence, and Teaching of
the Wesleyan Methodist Sunday Schools, York (York, 1833). See also Harold Silver, The Concept of
Popular Education (London, 1965), pp. 32-42; David Owen, English Philanthrophy, 1660-1960
(Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 23-7. 94 The best account of the employers' problem is in S. Pollard, The
Genesis of Modern Management (London, 1965), ch. v, "The Adaptation of the Labour Force". 95 E.
Lipson, The Economic History of England, 6th edn. (London, 1956), iii, pp. 404-6. See e.g. J. L. Ferri,
Londres et les Anglais (Paris, An xii), i, pp. 163-4. Some of the evidence as to hours is discussed in G.
Langenfelt, The Historic Origin of the Eight Hours Day (Stockholm, 1954). 96 A Letter on the Present
State of the Labouring Classes in America, by an intelligent Emigrant at Philadelphia (Bury, 1827). 86
PAST AND PRESENT There we worked as long as we could see in summer time, and I could not say at
what hour it was that we stopped. There was nobody but the master and the master's son who had a
watch, and we did not know the time. There was one man who had a watch ... It was taken from him
and given into the master's custody because he had told the men the time of day . . . . 97 A Dundee
witness offers much the same evidence: . . . in reality there were no regular hours: masters and
managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning
and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as
cloaks for cheatery and oppression. Though this was known amongst the hands, all were afraid to speak,
and a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss any one who
presumed to know too much about the science of horology. 98 Petty devices were used to shorten the
dinner hour and to lengthen the day. "Every manufacturer wants to be a gentleman at once", said a
witness before Sadler's Committee: and they want to nip every corner that they can, so that the bell will
ring to leave off when it is half a minute past time, and they will have them in about two minutes before
time ... If the clock is as it used to be, the minute hand is at the weight, so that as soon as it passes the
point of gravity, it drops three minutes all at once, so that it leaves them only twenty-seven minutes,
instead of thirty. 99 A strike-placard of about the same period from Todmorden put it more bluntly: "if
that piece of dirty suet, 'old Robertshaw's enginetenter', do not mind his own business, and let ours
alone, we will shortly ask him how long it is since he received a gill of ale for running 10 minutes over
time".100 (The first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters the importance of time;
the second generation formed their short-time committees in the ten-hour movement; the third
generation struck for overtime or time-and-ahalf. They had accepted the categories of their employers
and learned to fight back within them. They had learned their lesson, that time is money, only too
well.101 VI

Time in Japan

Japan Review, No. 14, THE BIRTH OF TARDINESS: The Formation of TimeConsciousness in Modern Japan
(2002), pp. 5-9

Japan Review, 2002, 14:5-9 Introduction Hashimoto Takehiko Arriving

Page 7:
The spread of railroads in the nineteenth century, too, radically altered the conscious ness and
management of time. The task of running trains on schedule not only demand ed the enforcement
of strict punctuality, but it also stimulated the creation of a system of universal standard time,
whereby time in all localities became precisely synchronized. Until then, time had been
determined independently in each region. With the aid of electronic communications, clocks
everywhere were set by reference to standard time, ensuring that train schedules operated
smoothly according to a unified temporal frame. It was just as these new time systems were
being forged in the West that Japan emerged from its isolation, and undertook the wholesale
transplantation of Western social structures. Rigorous attention to time figured especially
critically in just those sys tems so key to modernity?railroads, factories, schools, and the
military?so that time discipline began to take root from quite early on. Still, the implementation
of a modern time system required vigorous efforts, and involved no little confusion, conflict, and
coercion. T
unctuality and the Introduction of Scientific Management to Japan Hashimoto Takehiko "If you
want success in your work, do what I say. If your employer wants you to start work at seven
o'clock in the morning, always be there at ten minutes before seven. If he wants you to stay until
six o'clock at night, always stay until ten minutes past six."1 Frederick Winslow Taylor, the
acknowledged founder of Scientific Management, received this advice on punctuality from his
uncle when he set out to find a job. Born in a wealthy Philadelphia family, Taylor had originally
intended to go to Harvard to become a lawyer, but was forced to give up this dream owing to his
weak eyesight; instead he decided to take an apprenticeship to become a mechanical engineer.
His uncle, a noted banker, was concerned that young Taylor was embarking on a life other than
what had been expected for him, and invited him to his house and gave him this advice. Taylor
did become an engineer-manager, and he founded a system of scientific man agement that
attempted to rationalize an entire labor process. It analyzed each step or action that was an
element in the process of production, devised a best method for that step, and designated it as the
standard of evaluation for that step. For its proper execu tion, it was essential that the work be
conducted according to a predetermined schedule. Time discipline was required of laborers as a
fundamental precondition for the realiza tion of scientific management. American-made
Taylorism was introduced into Japan in the Taisho era. It was then that the conditions of factory
workers were investigated, in the context of preparation for establishment of a Japanese version
of factory law, and the importance of time discipline began to be recognized. In the age of
scientific management, the importance of time effi ciency was emphasized not only in the
industrial world but also in the daily lives of ordi nary people as was exemplified by the
establishment of "Time Day" in 1920. Statements appealing to time discipline abound in those
years. Examining the historical sources, the present chapter investigates the conditions of time
discipline in Japanese factories and offices from the late Meiji through the early Showa eras,
continuing Suzuki's account in the previous chapter. 99
p. 100
1 NO WATCHES NECESSARY FOR FEMALE WORKERS: PUNCTUALITY AND THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF FACTORY LAW Factory laws prohibiting heavy labor by young
workers were established in Europe in the nineteenth century. The Japanese government planned
to establish a corresponding law toward the end of the nineteenth century. In preparation for its
establishment, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce launched a nationwide survey of the
working and living conditions of factory workers. The investigation resulted in the publication of
a report, The Conditions of Workers (Shokko jijo), in 1903.2 Referring to the starting and
finishing times of working hours, it cited arguments offered by factory managers to justi fy long
working hours at their factories: Work discipline in our country is so low that workers do not
distinguish between working and resting time. It cannot be ignored that European workers are
fully engaged in their work during working time. This is why we should not worry about a heavy
burden being placed on Japanese workers even if we prolong working hours.3 The Conditions of
Workers also cited a similar statement regarding textile factories, made by one of the
government investigators: We asked factory owners in the regions of Kiryu and Ashikaga in
Gunma Prefecture about their lengthy working hours. They answered that although the working
day was sixteen or seventeen hours and appeared to be long, loom-operators did not work like
machines; they did not always fully concentrate on their work; and when tired, they tried to
evade supervision to take a rest, to chat with fellow workers, or to go smoking.4 Here, managers
responded to the criticism of long working hours by referring to their observation that workers
did not adhere to regulations pertaining to time, but took breaks during work, in fact. While
conceding that work-discipline was lower in Japan than in Europe, the investigators of the
Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce pointed out the possibility of the reverse causal relation:
"long working hours made them loosen their work-discipline." They argued that managers
should attempt to improve efficiency through regularizing the work and shortening working
hours rather that lengthening them. I
Following pages:
Uno listed the following six methods to increase the rate of attendance and to stabi lize it: (1)
incentivization; (2) reward for perfect attendance; (3) short term reward; (4) daily payment of
wages; (5) remedying habits; and (6) rest. The first method, incen tivization, was subcategorized
into four ways: (i) sanctioning absentees; (ii) promoting workers with good attendance; (iii)
forcing workers to leave their lodgings; (iv) delaying pay. He further subdivided (i), sanctioning
absentees, into three practical measures: (a) This content downloaded from 129.170.195.148 on
Sat, 20 Jul 2013 16:32:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

This rule provided that no wages would be paid to workers who were more than ten minutes late,
and it was much stricter than the rules on lateness of any private company at that time. Knowing
this rule, even late risers might have decided to be on time. Time discipline can, in a broad sense,
be referred to as bodily discipline. The Rules of the Kure Arsenal listed no fewer than thirty-
seven items of punishment. Of these, items relating to time discipline were targeted against those
who left work without permission, started getting ready to leave before the designated time, were
absent without notice, or did not comply with orders to work on a scheduled day off. The rules
also forbade drink ing, chatting, smoking, reading, playing games, and so forth during working
hours. In keeping with the arsenal's seaside location, it even included a statement not to collect
fish, clams, or seaweed.17 Such a listing of these items suggests that the forbidden behav iors
might have been everyday occurrences in the arsenal. On the other hand, all these detailed, strict
provisions about time and bodily discipline were instituted as precondi tions for implementing
scientific management; conducting Godo's time and motion study was the next step.
Hashimoto Takehiko requiring absentees to be in a special room and not permitting them to enter
their own dormitory rooms, (b) delaying their meals until after their non-absentee coworkers had
eaten, and (c) not permitting them to go outside. Of these three sanctions, Uno noted, the delay
of meals especially frustrated the workers and increased their antipathy to the company. He
therefore suggested that adequate discretion was necessary when managers adopted these
methods. To implement method (iii), forcing workers to leave their lodg ings, a "helper" or
"supervisor" visited rooms of individual workers in dormitories, and urged them to go to work.
Some managerial staff members were assigned the duty of urging the attendance of workers who
were not absentees. They employed three tech niques to accomplish their duties: (a) staying at a
room or a house until all workers had left; (b) shouting at laggards to go out; (c) giving
permission for a day off only after the worker put on his or her clothes for work. Method (5),
remedying habits, was a counter measure against faking illness, as was represented by the case of
Teikoku Pharmaceutical Company, which demanded that all those who requested a day off for
illness be checked by a medical doctor. They said that the bad habit of claiming illness often
occurred in dormitories of female workers, and not infrequently as many as five or six workers
simul taneously requested a day off due to illness. The number of absentees greatly decreased
within less than a year after this regulation of medical checks was enforced. After introducing
these several ways of avoiding absenteeism, Uno made the case that the utmost importance
should be placsd on time discipline.8 His arguments started with the psychological and
physiological analysis of the causes of absenteeism. When the weather turned warm, a young
craftsman would sleep deeply and miss the steam whistle sound, as in the line from the classic
poem "spring sleep, miss the sunrise." When he was awakened, he would realize that it was too
late to go to the factory, and decide to take the day off. If this frequently happened, it would lead
to the vicious temptation to gam ble and play. What then would be a method to avoid
oversleeping? Uno did not take the position that workers should wake up as early as possible. It
was said that farmers "go out under stars, and come back under the moon." Such an agrarian
custom of early rising might be enforced easily upon young workers who where from farming
families or otherwise from a farming background. But that work was significant ly different from
that of factory workers, "who are regulated by rules and propelled by machines, and are engaged
in monotonous work for long hours, always under pressure not to make incorrect products or to
make errors." That was much different, in terms of spiritual tension and bodily fatigue, from
"farmers who are engaged in labor, talking and singing freely in beautiful natural surroundings."
Consequently, rising too early would prevent adequate rest. Managers of the Kanegafuchi
Corporation suggested to those who came to the factory immediately after the first whistle, that
they should not come so ear ly and should instead wait until the second whistle blew. Don't be
either too late or too early; punctuality was essential?so concluded Uno. Punctual attendance
necessitated punctual sleep. The time to sleep was strictly deter mined at company dormitories.
Uno suggested similar measures should be taken at pri This content downloaded from
129.170.195.148 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 16:32:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and
Conditions
Punctuality and the Introduction of Scientific Management to Japan vate houses. In the areas
where workers resided, someone in charge should signal time to sleep by striking two wood bars,
and company-owned baths, barbers, and shops should be ciosed thirty minutes before this
sleeping time. In connection with this, he cited a "door knocking" method abroad. In Manchester,
England, a man walked around work ers' homes, and tapped their doors or windows every
morning until he heard a voice from inside. They were so strict in punctuality in the area around
Manchester that it took only a few incidents of tardiness in a week to cause workers to lose their
jobs. For that reason, the workers themselves hired the door tapper and paid him threepence a
week to knock at the window until he got an answer from within. The door tapper did not exist in
Japan, but there was a similar job for the workers at one Kanebo factory. A village in which
some fifty workers lived was located about a mile away from the factory, and the morning
whistles occasionally could not be heard, depending on wind condi tions. Parents of these female
workers alternately took responsibility to knock on the doors of their houses every morning.
Parents also saw the girls off to the factory, and accompanied them back to the village after
work. Uno also referred to lunch. If the workers had to make their own lunches before leaving
for work, they had to get up too early in the morning. So he suggested that the families should
make lunches for their daughters, and bring them to the factory. Punctuality at factories required
this disci plined way of daily life and the support of family members. 3

Japan Review, 2002, 14:121-133 Teaching Punctuality: Inside and Outside the Primary School
NlSHIMOTO Ikuko
mately shrinks to a point. When did Japan start to become a punctual society? In 1873, the Meiji
government enacted a calendrical reform and adopted the Western time system. Through novel
terms 121 This content downloaded from 129.170.195.148 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013 16:33:48 PM All
use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Nishimoto Ikuko such as "minute" and "second," even ordinary Japanese became familiar with
very fine divisions of time. With new institutions operating under a new temporal order, people
were compelled to change their attitudes toward time, and to learn to be punctual. It is hard, of
course, to understand a new concept such as doing things on time, and harder still actually to
make it a habit. Children, however, absorb novelty relatively easily. Training them requires
patience, but the results are more enduring. In what follows, I propose to examine the period
from the beginning of the Meiji era up to just before the beginning of the Pacific War, and to
explore how elementary schools impressed upon children the importance of punctuality and the
value of time.3 I shall focus mainly on regulations and textbooks in public schools, but I shall
consider as well some influences from outside the classroom. But let us glance first at the
situation before the great push toward time discipline, and review briefly the nature of traditional
education.4 Children in the Edo period attended hankd (schools run by domainal governments
under the bakuhan system), kan gakujuku (schools where shogunate-approved Confucian
orthodoxy was taught) or ter akoya (popular schools), depending on the class to which they
belonged. In terakoya, where the children of the merchant class studied reading, writing
(calligraphy) and arith metic, lessons started at the hour of the dragon (eight in the morning) and
ended at the hour of sheep (two in the afternoon); in summer, school began at the hour of the
rabbit (six in the morning) and ended earlier at the hour of horse (noon). These were rough
guidelines, and there were usually no specific regulations regarding what time to start.5 Even
when such regulations existed, without clocks at hand, children could only guess the hour by
rudimentary methods such as consulting the sunlight (which of course was of no avail on cloudy
and rainy days), or listening for the crowing of the cock. Instruction was personalized. Children
of different ages and levels studied together in one room, but the teacher gave individual lessons.
Pupils, singly or in pairs, took turns reading aloud from their textbooks, and the teacher would
explain how to read difficult Chinese characters. In the case of calligraphy, pupils would be
given sample models and sent back to practice; the teacher would then circulate and correct each
pupil's work, while the others worked on their own assignments. Children, therefore, received
their lessons in the order that they came, and went home when they finished their day's task.
They arrived in twos and threes, and returned likewise. Terakoya had holidays on five sea sonal
festival days, New Year's Day and Bon (the Buddhist All Souls' Day); there were also no lessons
on the first and the fifteenth days of each month. Lesson hours were often changed to suit the
teacher's convenience. Although the education system underwent radical change in the Meiji era,
such individualized instruction did not completely disap pear; calligraphy schools, for instance,
still basically follow the same style of instruction even now. The educational system instituted by
the new Meiji government was based on Western models, and especially that of the United
States. Between 1871 and 1873 the Education Minister Tanaka Fujimaro and others went on an
extended observation tour This content downloaded from 129.170.195.148 on Sat, 20 Jul 2013
16:33:48 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Teaching Punctuality: Inside and Outside the Primary School to study education in Europe and
America. Upon their return, they invited an American educator, David Murray, to teach in the
new teachers school, and for the first textbooks they relied heavily on translations of teaching
materials used in the United States. But it wasn't just the contents that changed; the new
education system also radically trans formed the method of instruction. One such fundamental
change was the replacement of consecutive individualized teaching by simultaneous group
instruction. Groups of children now came to study the same curriculum at the same moment.
With this change, temporal discipline for the first time became critical to education. 1
TEACHING TIME DISCIPLINE: SCHOOL REGULATIONS AND TIMETABLES Like many
Meiji institutions, the Ministry of Education and the modern elementary school system were
inaugurated in 1872. From the outset it was marked by an insistence on time discipline. In 1873,
the Ministry of Education issued the Seito kokoroe (Directions to Elementary School Childrenf\
outlining precepts for a disciplined life both at school and home: 1. Get up early in the morning;
wash your face and hands, and rinse your mouth; brush your hair; bow to your parents; and
prepare to leave for school after breakfast.... 2. Make sure that you are at school ten minutes
before the start of class every day. . . . 6. Be seated and wait for your teacher's instructions in the
waiting room until it is time for school to begin. 7. If you are late for school, do not enter the
classroom without permission; explain the reason for your tardiness and wait for your teacher's
instruc tions. Especially noteworthy here is the phrase "ten minutes before" in the second clause.
The Meiji government had introduced the new calendar only that year. Clocks had yet to make
their way into ordinary households. It is not clear how children were supposed to know when to
set off for school. O

Migration and uprooting: the destruction of community and peer to peer relations through
displacement to far away places. Gemeinschaft and Gesselschaft, Weber and Durkheim’s take on
this. Rise of the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Mechanical reproduction of art and the press, rise of nationalism.

Transformation of space from Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The

Industrialization of Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: The University of California Press,
1977).
p. 13 “As the new technology terminated the original relashionship between the pre-industrial
traveler and his vehicle and his journey, the old technology was seen, nostalgically, as having
more ‘soul.’ In addition to this sentimental line of thought there appeared another criticism of
steam power that also had a high regard for the old technology but, while using the same
arguments with a modern content. This was accomplished by transferring the economically
obsolete old technologies to a new realm, that of leisure and sports. What de Quincey deplored as
a loss of sensory perceptions, others now attended to reinstitutionalize. Thus, for instance, W. B.
Adams’ Pleasure Carriages, published in 1837, was the precursor of a literature of leisure and
sports whose ever-increasing growth the century was to witness. In this book, the use of horse-
power was no longer treated nostalgically, but from a point of view regarded the use of steam as
merely unsportmanlike:” CITA Y SIGUE en página 14: […] “The uniform speed of the motion
generated by the steam engine no longer seemed unnatural when compared to the motion
generated by animal power; rather, the reverse became the case. Mechanical uniformity became
the ‘natural’ state of affairs, compared to which the ‘nature’ of draught animals appeared as
dangerous and chaotic. An anonymous text from the year 1825 gives us an idea of the adaptation
to this industrialization of travel.”

Uniform movement means we do not experience any kind of direct relationship with the terrain.
We cannot feel its humidity, texture, its rocky, sandy or earthy nature, and if anything we see
space as a sort of passing-by postal that we see from a far, as spectacle. Meanwhile, space
vanishes and we are in a sort of waiting room until arrival.
What happened with machines is that even though accidents were less likely to happen on
railways, if they did, they were more likely to be fatal. Whereas with horses, accidents were
much more common but rarely fatal. This is a tension that has become ever more increasing.
Airplanes are probably the safest form of transportation created by humans, but at the same time,
if an accident were to happen, the likelihood of surviving is among the lowest compared to other
forms of transformation. This has led to the repression of fear, but fear is unconsciously there all
the time and an accident in an airplane becomes tragic for the whole planet, among other things
because it exposes the tension.

About the Transformation of Sleep, from Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, The Slumbering Masses:
Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2012).
“Americans have not always slept the way they do now. By all accounts, Americans, like other
people around the world, used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more
periods throughout a twenty-four-hour period. Sometimes referred to as ‘first’ and
‘second’slumber, nap, or sleep, a day’s sleep was divided between the night and the day. With
the advent of the consolidated workday in the 1840s and onward, while struggles were waged
over how long that day would be, ranging from twelve to eight hours, sleep was consolidated. At
least this was the case for many Americans. But there have been always those who sleep
otherwise: night workers who who sleep through the day, parents who nap while their children
do the same, rebellious sleepers of all sorts, as well as all those who sleep in a more disorderly
fashion: insomniacs, narcoleptics, and their kin. And in much of the world, because of a lack of
electric light and unconsolidated workdays, people still sleep in an unconsolidated fashion. There
is nothing particular in tune with nature of primal, or healthy about unconsolidated sleep: it, too
is subject to social formations and cultural expectations, albeit of sorts different from those
associated with consolidated sleep. The most natural sleep may be sleeping whenever one feels
tired and being awake whenever wakefulness takes hold. But who is so fortunate to sleep so
spontaneously?
As a result of ever-present biological and social impacts on our sleep, unbiased conceptions of
sleep are not possible. Science3 can never uncover the truth about human sleep because sleep is
always biological and social, cultural and natural, historical and emergent, and will always be
perceived through contextual lenses. Ultimately, no certainty can be had. This undergirds the
science and medicine of sleep with a foundational doubt: What is sleep, and how can it be
known? Instead of able to answer these questions definitively, sleep researchers have defined
models, averages, norms, and pathologies, providing the basis for medical intervention. These
conceptions of normalcy compound and are compounded by everyday spatiotemporal rhythms
that shape the lives of individuals and institutions: sleep binds individuals to institutions and
when discovered sleep disrupts these interactions, medicine intervenes to reorder the everyday.
These everyday orders, in turn, structure American capitalism, a form of capitalism that is tied to
long-standing conceptions of normalcy, medicine, and everyday life. If this sounds vertiginous, it
is in no small part due to the historical and contemporary interactions of medicine, science, and
capitalism that formulate spationtemporal orders of everyday life that in turn produce our
contemporary desires for sleep. These desires bind individuals to society in intimate ways that
are complex and difficult to isolate or clarify casually.” (Pages 3 and 4).
[…]
“That physicians are the experts to tend to sleep disorders has to do with the assumption that
biological causes require medical treatments rather than an attempt to reorganize institutions to
allow for variations of human sleep.” (page 15)
[…]
“Desire is about both whole bodies and their parts; it is about bodies and their interactions with
other bodies but also interactions internal to individual bodies. My desire for stimulation, my
appetite for caffeine, has as much to do with deep-seated chemical dependencies as with my
want of particular somatic feeling, my taste for a particular chemical composition, and my need
to be able to attend to my daily responsibilities. To support my modest and legal addiction, I am
caught in expectations of labor and productivity, global networks of trade, the weather patterns
of faraway places, and the lives of coffee bean farmers. Insomniacs are tied in similar fashion to
pharmaceutical companies, their research and production facilities, distribution networks, the
Food and Drug Administration; the prescription and daily intake of a drug are never solely about
an individual and his or her chemical treatments. In perceptible and imperceptible ways, desire
binds forces together into forms of life that obscure the interconnections.” (page 15 and 16)
“The colonial trade of sugar, coffee, and tea, according to Sidney Mintz, stimulated productivity
and helped workers consolidate their sleep by working through the day. The introduction of
energy drinks, sleep- and alertness-promoting pharmaceuticals, and caffeine to the workforce,
substances now integral to American everyday life, is one way in which bodies and their
capacities are seen as being influenced by molecular forces. These basic chemicals are the
descendants of this capitalist interest in the shaping and control of human biology. And, at the
heart of these conceptions of human biology and its potentials is the need for reproduction, the
need for reliable rhythmic order. This ordering is always bound to cultural expectations of
normal human bodies, their limits and potentials, and orderly society.” (pages 18 and 19)
From Chapter 2: “The Protestant Origins of American Sleep”
p. 54 and 55: “Sleep, as early as Mather’s colony in Massachusetts, has become associated with
death and inefficiency. It is also intimately tied to the everyday, for each day we are subject to
the temptations to lie in bed too long, to indulge too much. And at the end of life, we will be
judged against those daily indulgences. These same problems were associated with sleep well
into the 1800s, when similar moral discourses were used during the early industrial period in an
attempt to produce a laboring mass of consolidated sleepers.
Benjamin Franklin, like Mather, was no physician or scientist. But his moral prescriptions on
sleep collaborate in the foundations of economic and moral thinking about sleep and
wakefulness. In his essay “An Economical Project,” published in the Journal of Paris, Franklin
takes the French to task for their late rising. He writes teasingly:
‘Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon… will be as
much astonished as I was, when they hear of this [the sun’s] rising so early; and especially when
I ensure them, that he gives light as he rises. I am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact…
And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the
same result.’
The problem that Franklin identifies among Parisians, especially the elite among them, is that
they spend their nights in revelry and retire to bed too late to take advantage of the sun’s light.
Instead, because they start their days after noon, they stay up late and burn tens of millions of
pounds worth of candles each year in support of this habit. Franklin proposes that they instead
wake up with the sun, ending their evenings much earlier and saving the cost of the millions of
candles they would otherwise require. He explains, ‘Obligue a man to rise at four in the morning,
and it is more than probably he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening; and having had
eight hours sleep, he will rise more willingly at four in the morning following. Franklin recourse
to habit – the daily rising at a set hour, leading to the consolidation and timeliness of sleep – is
echoed by those who follow him, more properly in the idiom of medicine and science. So too are
his assumptions about the economic value and efficiency of sleep, which are returned to
repeatedly through recourse to the interconnection of humans with nature and their
environment.”

Find something about the rise of the division between working time and leisure time. Does
Thompson talk about that? Explain how before wage labor, there was no such clear division and
things tended to mix, especially when people were in control of production.
Explain the rise of Taylorism and the need to discipline the workforce.
 Sleeping In: A Short History on Sleep before the Industrial Revolution

In what could be considered a very bad idea, Robert Louis Stevenson trekked through Cevennes,
France, among mountains and lower highlands, despite his youthful bad health, aboard a donkey
named Modestine. It was the autumn of 1878 and he was many years, half a decade in fact, from
the fame of his greatest literary success: Treasure Island. What did lend itself to a towering
reputation was his embarking on the traditional grand tour of Victorian gentlemen, which
explained his  presence on top of a mountain range in the South of France, and it was no mean
feat when he breached one of the highest ranges to make camp at a small clearing. After dining
on chocolate, brandy, other delicacies that befit his social status, the budding writer made to kip
in the sleep cap he carried with him under the day’s dying sun. But instead of embarking onto
unforeseen travels in his dreams, his sleep was interrupted shortly after midnight.

Waking to smoke a cigarette and enjoy the blissful silence of the bewitching hour, it was only
after his wakeful contemplation that young Stevenson was able to return to his sleep. But not
only did he forget about his sleep break, he also later recorded in his travel journey that
“unknown to those who dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping
hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet.” Naming it his “perfect hour,” Stevenson
continued that he felt delighted to be free from the “Bastille of civilization” and that his world
had begun “afresh.” [1] What may have seemed like a simple sleep break did not appear to
Stevenson that way, and he continued to ruminate on it’s origin and significance.

For Stevenson, the only difference in his sleeping pattern was that he was outdoors rather than in
the confines of the city; and it caused him to wonder at the effect of the natural world on
humanity. Was there some “thrill of mother earth below our resting bodies,” he wondered. “Even
shepherds and country folk who are the deepest read in these arcana have not a guess as to the
means or purpose of this nightly resurrections. Toward two in the morning they declare the thing
takes place; and neither know or inquire further.” These new thoughts left him puzzled.

But unbeknownst to him, Stevenson had come upon the type of sleep that was commonplace
among humanity prior to the modern era; where a wakeful hour or more of contemplation
interrupted the blissful dreams of most Western Europeans, and not just those sleeping out under
the stars. In fact, it was commonplace for people to wake up and complete tasks; either to smoke
a cigarette, use the restrooms, or even converse with neighbors. This break between the “first
sleep” and the second was time for thoughtful pondering on the earlier dreams of the night, even
prayers, and were given great significance. In fact, these ruminations on early night sleep dreams
lent themselves to the common superstition that dreams were somehow explanatory or predictive
in and of themselves.

The sleep that we are more familiar with, which became commonplace after the rise of the
Industrial Age and contains no midnight breaks for pondering, suggests that we spend less time
contemplating our consciousness, and therefore are at a disadvantage to the interrupted,
segmented slumber which expanded the minds of humanity prior to our race to mechanize.
Stevenson may have never known that he was making these claims, but the bare truth of the
matter is this: have we lost some semblance of introspective in our attempts to get an
uninterrupted night of sleep?

_________________________________________________________________

To examine this topic, we must take a magnifying glass to the world of sleep as it was for the
early modern British society, with occasional references to elsewhere in the Western World,
including Europe and the Americas. Although England makes the bulk of this inquiry, it is true
that England was the standard for western society, even before the Industrial Revolution, where
we begin our search for patterns. Without regard to the somewhat sparse references in scholarly
articles to the sleeping habits of pre-industrial congregations, it is through the records of dreams
that we are able to piece together the bedtime rituals, sleep deprivation, and differences between
the sleeping practices of the different ranks of society. [2] And although this article will mainly
focus on the incredible importance of sleep in everyday life, the more important, and more
defined argument will be in the investigation of segmented sleep and it’s affect on early modern
dreams.

The lack of proper documentation of sleep is in part due to the understanding that
contemporaries of the time simply overlooked it’s need to be studied due to it’s commonplace
nature in the everyday life of humans. We can, however, decipher some hints from medical
journals, diaries, imaginative literature and legal depositions, who often reference sleep. And
while it was often contemplated by many people of the time, for the thinkers of the age it took an
easy backseat to the broader issues affecting class, religion, race, and gender of the age. It is only
in the modern times that historians, scientists, scholars, and doctors have researched how
individuals during the pre-industrial revolution dressed, bathed, ate, and slept, and that it has not
only had a profound impact, but indeed a profound difference, in the way our sleep has changed
throughout modern history. [3]

With the factories and mills exploded with excitement and industry, the imaginative literature of
the age became obsessed with the idea of restful, peaceful sleep, drawing to contrast the marked
difference between the life they lived during wakeful hours, and the ones lived in one’s dreams.
The bed became, in poetry, prose, and drama, places of serenity, a “respite from thought,” a
place that led to “happier regions.” [4] Not only did it provide a respite from working life, it also
allowed for a break in the rigid social norms of the time, when rank, finance, and privilege reined
in the British class system; all these could be escaped in sleep, and it was long thought during the
time that those who escaped it more fully with slumber were those of the peasants, who had
“simple minds” and therefore eased more fully into the peaceful realms of sleep than those of a
higher position. [5]

But lying in these discoveries of the time’s idea of sleep lies the questions that define the age: did
all social classes, despite theories of the time, enjoy the same kind of sleep? How did the nature
of the life of the lower class affect their sleep, and therefore affect their station? And finally, was
there a secret to what sleep provided people, other than the much deserved, much needed rest, of
the body, and reprieve from everyday life?
_________________________________________________________________

Prior to the nineteenth century, little is known about the sleeping habits of the people; not the
time at which they went to bed, nor the hour when they rose the next morning, or how their sleep
varied throughout the night from one night to the next. It is only the understanding of light, and
the expensiveness of candles, that it is assumed that many fled to their beds soon after sunset
every night, and arose with the sun every morning. Because wealthier families had more
opportunity to candles, their nighttime activities could vary greatly from most households of the
time, who, at the appearance of darkness, stopped work and socialization. [6]

Physicians of the time followed the opinion of the Aristotelian belief that sleep originated in the
abdomen as part of a digestive process called “concoction,” and therefore wrote of sleep as a
credit to physical vitality, lively spirits and increased longevity for it’s role in the proces. In fact,
“Bed as medicine” was a popular Italian proverb of the time, and contemporary thought was that
retiring early would invoke the best benefits of sleep. [7,8]

At the same time however, contemporaries were known to look ill favorably on excess, saying it
was cause for unnecessary sluggishness, that for the Puritanical Americans of the time, railed
against as a mortal sin. [9] So what, in the end, predicated the perfect amount of sleep? Common
among writers throughout the Continent urged a standard 6 to 8 hours of rest per night, unless
under certain circumstances such as ill health, with some issuing seasonal adjustments to account
for the longer summer daylight hours, and the short winter days. [10]

_________________________________________________________________

Cropping up in the popular literature of the age; from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Henry V we
see the preoccupation with rest of seven or eight hours rather than twelve, and the smaller
numbers were what drew such fascination. Dreams however, became just one side study of sleep,
for conditions such as narcolepsy and sleepwalking permeated newspapers as well as literary
works. Such colloquialisms such as the Scottish saying “ye sleep like a dog in a mill, which
indicated light and anxious sleep, or the Welsh aphorism “Men thrive by sleep, not long but
deep”, referencing it is the continuity rather than the length that measure good sleep, became
common phrases, even medical advice, for the community at large. [11]

With the rising importance placed on sleep, the contraptions that humans used to sleep evolved
as well, mainly bedroom furniture. English beds moved from straw pallets made directly on the
floor to wooden frames outfitted with pillows, sheets, blankets, and “flock mattresses” which
were typically filled with rags and stray pieces of wool. More affluent homes began the trend of
decorative headboards, feather mattresses, and heavy curtains surrounding the bed to block out
drafts or light that could disturb sleep throughout the night. Not only were better beds becoming
things of social entitlement, but also greater comfort and better sleep. This rise in significance
led to the trend that newlyweds purchase, or be gifted, a new bed as one of their first married
possessions, and it was one of the first items to be read off in a will. In somewhat jest Carole
Shammas has said that the early modern era could be renamed: “The Age of the Bed”, for it’s
importance, and transformative power, on society. [12]
Once bedtime became a thing of sacredness, households became painstakingly compulsive
toward anxieties that could potentially interrupt their slumber. Many thought threats to their body
and soul lurked throughout the night over their defenseless bodies, or that darkness was indeed
the shadow of Death come to take souls to the grave through the night. [13] Other thoughts that
worried the sleeping were those of thieves breaking in to steal household possessions; they
barred doors, locked shutters,and carried swords or firearms to bed with them to allay the
common fears of the time. [14] Fleas and bedbugs were also feared as sleep interruptions, as well
as drafts caused by open windows or too much moonlight, and nightcaps were worn to shield
against the cold air.

Other traditions that unfolded throughout the nighttime fears were prayers said by the man of the
household to calm nerves, the use of a candle as a “night light,” the washing of hair, bodies, and
teeth prior to sleep, the use of medicine such as brandy or laudanum to aid sleeping or calm
anxiety, and the discouragement of late night suppers so that digestion did not interrupt slumber.

While we may think of pre-modern slumber as significantly more peaceful than our own, due to
their less complicated world, in fact the 17th century sleep was much more likely to be
interrupted and therefore contain restlessness, troubles, and fear. [15]  And more than that, the
medical maladies of the time were far more severe on everyday life; everything from angina,
gastric ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, influenza, asthma, and tuberculosis (known during the time
as consumption) caused pain and sensitivity throughout the night with little to no relief. The poor
experienced even worse conditions, usually being susceptible to freezing temperatures, insects,
and annoying noises. Often the urban populations slept in the streets, devoid of fireplaces or
proper homes, on top of or beneath wooden platforms, haystacks, stables, barns, or where
applicable, in caves. [16]  Ordinary men and women of the population suffered from sleep
deprivations, sleep debts, and ultimately chronic deprivation, that could attest to loss of
motivation and physical well being among the masses, complicating everything from the
common mood to social friction.

_________________________________________________________________

Until the end of the early modern era, Western Europe experienced two major intervals of sleep,
separated by the hour of wakefulness Stevenson discovered on his adventure into the French
countryside. The first sleep was often referred to as the “first sleep,” the “first nap” or “dead
sleep.” [17] These terms were not only in English, but common in French, Italian, and Latin as
well. And while Stevenson’s “nightly resurrection” has no common name, the term “watch” was
coined by the Oxford English Dictionary to mean the “disinclination or incapacity for sleep.”
The second of the sleep intervals was known as the “second” or the “morning sleep,” and both
phases have been documented as lasting equal amounts of time, and for those falling asleep near
sunset, it was common to experience the “watch” toward midnight and falling back asleep
thereafter. So common was this sleep break that contemporaries felt little need to analyze it, and
great writers of the time, including George Wither and John Locke, commented on it as a
common feature of life, and despite minor disturbances throughout the night, the pattern of
waking throughout the night was a customary division of night. [18]
In fact, many different parts of early modern society were aided by the break in sleep, or at least
the result of it. Petty crime, theft, and burglary had opportunity if one or more hours of the night
could be spent busy, many the echelons of high society extended their social hours to include the
“watch,” and indeed it was suggested that fertility among laborers was increased due to the
midnight wakefulness; men who came home physically exhausted were more likely to have
enjoyment, and successful intercourse, if there was a rest period after the day’s troubles.

The effects of dreams on early modern society, which were pondered and pursued during the
nighttime interval, were seen as informative of prospects as well as time’s past. While some
visions were believed to be a reflection of nothing more than a sour stomach, other dreams
carried divine prophecies and foreshadowed what was yet to come. In fact, there was a surging
sale of dream books, entire compendiums, fortune teller books, devoted to translating different
types of visions, that The Weekly Register in 1732 noted that “the English Nation has ever been
famous for Dreaming.” [19] Ever a separation in the classes, dreaming among the poorer
communities as see by playwrights and poets to soothe oppression and weariness, as well as
provide the principal relief of drawing the poor out of their realities and into the independence of
their souls and a daily escape from suffering, and in fact, in the Middle Ages, the Catholic
Church believed doctrine that only monarchs and men of the church experienced dreams that
were truly meaningful. However much dreams were part of pre-modern Western societies, the
strength of their staying power has not endured as well as non-Western cultures, but were still
important among British communities.

_________________________________________________________________

While it is an interesting note to view the pattern of broken sleep in context to the deeply
religious nature of the early Christian and pre-Industrialized Europe—St. Benedict required his
monks to rise after midnight and recite psalms, which spread throughout Germanic monasteries,
and it was a common practice among Catholics in the High Middles Ages to pray in the quiet
hours of the morning—the Christian teachings, and therefore Church as whole, was not
responsible for the actual occurrence, just the time spent while awake. Indeed, historical writers
such as Plutarch, Virgil, and Homer, as well as non-Western cultures that practiced beliefs other
than Christianity, exhibited similarly segmented patterns of sleep. [20]

Therefore the very basis of the puzzle remains; the curious anomaly, and genuine mystery of
segmented sleep prior to the Industrial Revolution is juxtaposed with today’s consistent sleep
patterns, and it’s cause seems not to be rooted in Middle Age writings. True, many wild animals
still exhibit the midnight wakefulness, giving us reason to believe that in humanity’s natural state
our natural pattern of slumber includes this nightly watch, and has very little to do with sleeping
outdoors.

One such explanation for the change in modern human’s sleeping patterns is the invention of
modern lighting, and it’s psychological impacts on sleep. “Every time we turn a light,” says
chronobiologist Charles A. Czeisler, “we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we
sleep” with changes directly to the brain as one of the apparent consequences of light exposure.
But scientists hardly believe that light is the only factor; sleeping conditions, boredom, forced
rest, darkness, financial class, and many other such factors of the modern world are undoubtedly
also parts of the equation.

Today we live in a world that is characterized by it’s never-ending nature; non-stop lights to
follow our all-night television and radios, non-stop action with twenty-four hour gas stations and
supermarkets, and non-stop entertainments that has become the primary time of employment for
many growing sectors of Western work forces. Edison’s invention of mechanical light, and his
theory that “put[ting] an undeveloped human being into an environment where there is artificial
light and he will improve,” has carried past our sunsets and our sunrises and has increased the
pace of our modern lives. In the United States alone, around 30 percent of adults average 6 hours
or fewer hours of sleep at night, and many consider sleep itself to be a waste of time. [21]

The one takeaway, and remarkable implication, of the segmented sleep of our historical
communities is that our modern, non segmented sleep and all of its destructiveness has been a
modern invention of the last 200 hundred years, rather than scientific or cultural phenomenon of
our ancestors. Our dreams, however unimportant in our western culture, have been consolidated
in our seamless sleep, and it is no small thing that by turning night into day with modern
technology has increased our efficiency, but perhaps has also obstructed one of the oldest
avenues of the human psyche for self awareness and personal growth. Perhaps more than just the
lack of hours, that is, perhaps, the biggest loss; to be “disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated
of our dreams and fantasies,” as paraphrased by Thomas Middleton. [22]

Resources
1. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Cevennes Journal: Notes on a Journey through the
French Highlands,Gordon Golding, ed. (New York, 1979), 79–82.
2. Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer (March 20, 1753): 229. Nearly twenty years ago,
George Steiner argued that studies of sleep “would be as essential, if not more so, to
our grasp of the evolution of mores and sensibilities as are the histories of dress, of
eating, of child-care, of mental and physical infirmity, which social historians and
the historiens des mentalités are at last providing for us.” “The Historicity of Dreams,”
in Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London, 1996), 211–12. More
recently, Daniel Roche has implored, “Let us dream of a social history of sleep.” A
History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800, Brian
Pearce, trans. (Cambridge, 2000), 182. Historical accounts of dreams have included
Peter Burke, “L’histoire sociale des rêves,” Annales: E.S.C.28 (1973): 329–42; Richard
L. Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century
Spain (Berkeley, Calif., 1990); Steven F. Kruger,Dreaming in the Middle
Ages (Cambridge, 1992); Carole Susan Fungaroli, “Landscapes of Life: Dreams in
Eighteenth-Century British Fiction and Contemporary Dream Theory” (PhD
dissertation, University of Virginia, 1994); Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph
 Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman (Cambridge, 1970), 183–87; S. R. F. Price,
“The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorous,” Past and Present 113
(November 1986): 3–37; Manfred Weidhorn, Dreams in Seventeenth-Century English
Literature (The Hague, 1970); Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History
of Dreaming, David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds. (New York, 1999); Charles
Carlton, “The Dream Life of Archbishop Laud,” History Today 36 (December 1986):
9–14. Attitudes toward sleep, from the ancient world to the twentieth century, are
chronicled in Jaume Rosselló Mir, et al., “Una aproximacion historica al estudio
cientifico de sueño: El periodo intuitivo el pre-cientifico,” Revista de historia de la
psicologia12 (1991): 133–42. For a brief survey of sleep in the Middle Ages, see Jean
Verdon, La nuit au Moyen Age (Paris, 1994), 203–17; and for an examination of key
medical texts touching on sleep during the early modern era, see Karl H. Dannenfeldt,
“Sleep: Theory and Practice in the Late Renaissance,”Journal of the History of
Medicine 41 (October 1986): 415–41.
3. Charles Gildon, The Post-Boy Rob’d of His Mail . . .(London, 1692), 109.
4. Johnson, Adventurer (March 20, 1753): 232. Among poets, Christof Wirsung echoed,
sleep represented “the pleasantess amongst all goods, yeas the onelie giver of
tranquility on earth.” Praxis Medicinae Universalis: or, A Generall Practise of
Phisicke . . .(London, 1598), 618. See also Albert S. Cook, “The Elizabethan
Invocations to Sleep,” Modern Language Notes 4 (1889): 457–61.
5. Works of John Taylor the Water Poet Not Included in the Folio Volume of 1630, 5 vols.
(1870; rpt. edn., New York, 1967), vol. 1. For the “sommeil du juste,” see Verdon, La
nuit au Moyen Age, 203–06. Earlier, the belief that “the sleep of a labouring man is
sweet” was expressed in Ecclesiastes 5:12. See alsoDu Bartas: His Divine Weekes and
Workes, Joshua Sylvester, trans. (London, 1621), 465; Robert Daborne, The Poor-
Mans Comfort (London, 1655); John Collop, “On Homer,” in Poesis Rediviva(London,
1656), 63; Cheesman, Death Compared to Sleep, 12; William Somervile, Ocassional
Poems, Translations, Fables, Tales . . . (London, 1727), 275; “The Peasant,” General
Advertiser (London), November 16, 1751; ballad quoted in Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed
and Troubled Englishmen: 1590–1642 (New York, 1968), 84.
6. Thomas Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters . . .(London, 1608). For a sampling of
this belief, see Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century, Ian
Patterson, trans. (Cambridge, 1986), 39; Jacques Wilhelm, La vie quotidienne des
Parisiens au temps du Roi-Soleil, 1660–1715 (Paris, 1977), 70; Maria Bogucka, “Work,
Time Perception and Leisure in an Agricultural Society: The Case of Poland in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Labour and Leisure in Historical Perspective,
Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, Ian Blanchard, ed. (Stuttgart, 1994), 50; Barbara
and Cary Carson quoted in James P. Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society
in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 315; David D.
 Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New
England (New York, 1989), 214.
7. Henry Davidoff, A World Treasury of Proverbs from Twenty-Five Languages (New
York, 1946), 25. See, for example, Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions . .
., T. Newton, trans. (London, 1576), 57; John Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein Dicing,
Dauncing, Vaine playes or Enterluds with Other Idle Pastimes . . . (London, 1577), 8;
William Vaughan,Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health . . .(London, 1607),
53; The Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, Thomas Johnson, trans.
(London, 1649), 26–27; Henry Hibbert, Syntagma theologicum . . . (London, 1662),
282; Dannenfeldt, “Sleep,” 407–12.
8. John Trusler, An Easy Way to Prolong Life, By a Little Attention to Our Manner of
Living . . .(London, 1775), 11. How widespread this notion was may be seen in such
proverbs as “go to Bed with the lamb and rise with the lark” and “would you have a
settled head, You must early go to bed.” Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the
Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries(1950; rpt. edn., Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1966), 36.
9. Baxter quoted in Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture
of Puritan New England (New York, 1995), 124; Thomas Elyot,The Castle of
Helthe (London, 1539), fols. 45–46;The Schoole of Vertue, and Booke of Good Nourture
. . . (London, 1557); William Bullein, A Newe Boke of Phisicke Called y Goveriment of
Health . . . (London, 1559), 91; Andrew Boorde, A Compendyous Regyment or a
Dyetary of Health . . . (London, 1547); Michael Cope, A Godly and Learned Exposition
uppon the Proverbes of Solomon, M.O., trans. (London, 1580), fols. 85, 415v–16;
Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 58; Northbrooke, Treatise, passim; Sir Thomas
Overbury, The “Conceited Newes” of Sir Thomas Overbury and His Friends, James E.
Savage, ed. (1616; rpt. edn., Gainesville, Fla., 1968), 167; The Whole Duty of
Man . . . (London, 1691), 188–89; Richard L. Greaves, Society and Religion in
Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), 385–87.
10. Bullein, Newe Boke of Phisicke, 91; Boorde,Compendyous Regyment; Venner, Via
recta, 279–80;Directions and Observations relative to Food, Exercise and Sleep (London,
1772), 22; Dannenfeldt, “Sleep,” 430.
11. William Rowley, All’s Lost by Lust (London, 1633); Thomas Shadwell, The Amorous
Bigotte (London, 1690), 43; The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant (New York,
1964), 146; Boswell, [“On Sleep and Dreams”], 2: 112; Henry Vaughan, Welsh
Proverbs with English Translations (Felinfach, Wales, 1889), 35; Erik Eckholm,
“Exploring the Forces of Sleep,” New York Times Magazine (April 17, 1988): 32.
12. William Harrison, The Description of England,Georges Edelen, ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1968), 201; Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 73; Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As
Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans(New
 York, 1993), 66; Carole Shammas, “The Domestic Environment in Early Modern
England and America,” Journal of Social History 14 (Fall 1990): 169, 158; F. G.
Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Home, Work and Land (Chelmsford, Eng., 1976), 12–15;
Pounds, Culture of the English People, 145–47; Flandrin, Families in Former
Times, 102; Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th
Century, Marie Evans, trans. (Leamington Spa, Eng., 1987), 130–31; Roche,History of
Everyday Things, 182–85; Robert Jütte,Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern
Europe(Cambridge, 1994), 69–70; Pardailhé-Galabrun,Birth of Intimacy, 73–81.
Anthony Burgess interpreted the elevated height of bedsteads “as a symbol of
overlordship” for which there was “no utilitarian rationale.” Not only did raised beds
remain accessible to vermin, but it was “easier for your enemies to stab you than if you
were on the floor.” Burgess, On Going to Bed (New York, 1982), 84. To be sure, the
height of bedsteads dramatically distinquished men and women of property from
other household members, including children confined to trundle beds and servants,
but my experience as a graduate student without the benefit of a bedstead makes me
skeptical that persons found it no more comfortable to enter and exit a raised bed.
Moreover, medical opinion warned against resting “upon the ground, nor uppon colde
stones, nor neere the earth: for the coldnesse of stones, and the dampe of the earth, are
both very hurtfull to our bodies.” Cogan, Haven of Health,235. See also Steven
Bradwell, A Watch-man for the Pest . . .   (London, 1625), 39.
13. Boswell, [“On Sleep and Dreams”], 2: 110; Richard Steele, The Husbandmans Calling:
Shewing the Excellencies, Temptations, Graces, Duties, etc. of the Christian
Husbandman (London, 1670), 270. “We are unable to think of, much more to provide
for, our own Security,” observed the eighteenth-century poet James
Hervey. Meditations and Contemplations, 2 vols. (London, 1752), 2: 42. See also
Stephen Bateman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation . . . (London, 1569);
Thomas Amory, Daily Devotion Assisted and Recommended, in Four
Sermons . . . (London, 1772), 15; Benjamin Bell, Sleepy Dead Sinners (Windsor, Vt.,
1793), 8. For Sigmund Freud’s influential discussion of “neurotic ceremonials”
pertaining to sleep, see “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, ed., 23
vols. (London, 1957–66), 9: 117–18; Barry Schwartz, “Notes on the Sociology of
Sleep,” Sociological Quarterly 11 (Fall 1970): 494–95; Stanley Coren,Sleep Thieves: An
Eye-Opening Exploration into the Science and Mysteries of Sleep (New York, 1996),
165.
14. See, for example, September 8, 11, 1794, Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 1: 590, 592;
December 2, 1766, and February 8, 1767, The Blecheley Diary of the Rev. William Cole,
1765–67, Francis Griffin Stokes, ed. (London, 1931), 161, 184; The Justiciary Records
of Argyll and the Isles, 1664–1742,John Cameron and John Imrie, eds., 2 vols.
 (Edinburgh, 1949, 1969), 2: 466; Old Bailey Sessions Papers, May 19–20, 1743,
December 5–9, 1746; Deposition of Mary Nicholson, February 20, 1768, Assi
45/29/1/169.
15. Herbert’s Devotions: or, A Companion for a Christian . . . (London, 1657), 1. See also,
for example, Edmund Spenser quoted in Deverson, Journey into Night,133;
Quarles, Complete Works, 2: 206; October 12, 1703, Cowper Diary; Lady Charlotte
Bury, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, A. F. Steuart, ed., 2 vols. (London, 1908), 1: 31;
Richard Brathwait, Natures Embassie: or, The Wilde-mans Measvres (London, 1621),
120; Thomas Shadwell, The Miser (London, 1672), 18; George Powell, The Imposture
Defeated: or, A Trick to Cheat the Devil (London, 1698), 28; April 4, 1782, Journal of
Peter Oliver, Egerton Manuscripts, British Library, London; Benjamin Mifflin,
“Journal of a Journey from Philadadelphia to the Cedar Swamps&Back,
1764,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 52 (1928): 130–31. The
supplement to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédieidentified numerous obstacles to sleep:
“Hunger prevents sleeping, indigestion, any irritating cause that constantly agitates
some part of the body, the cold in one part of the body, feet for example, while the rest
is covered, violent sounds, anxieties&annoyances, a preoccupation, melancholy,
mania, pain, shiverings, warm drinks, drunk from time to time, like tea, coffee, several
diseases of the brain that are not yet well determined, all these prevent
sleep.” Supplément a L’Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et
des métiers . . . , 4 vols. (1777; rpt. edn., New York, 1969), 4: 809. For an extended
discussion of sleep disturbances, see Ekirch, At Day’s Close.
16. William Hill quoted in Menna Prestwich, Cranfield: Politics and Profits under the
Early Stuarts(Oxford, 1966), 529; Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled
Englishmen, 13; Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1: 432; A. L. Beier, Masterless
Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640(London, 1985), 83–84;
Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, 69–70; Legg, Low-Life, 18. “Bulkers” are mentioned in
theOld Bailey Sessions Papers, July 5, 1727; Legg, Low-Life, 99; Grose, Dictionary of
the Vulgar Tongue; Lance Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular
Culture, 1749–1764 (Oxford, 1986), 29.
17. For the term “first sleep,” I have discovered sixty-three references within a total of
fifty-eight different sources from the period 1300–1800. See below in the text for
examples. “First nap” appears in Colley Cibber, The Lady’s Last Stake: or, The Wife’s
Resentment (London, 1708), 48; Tobias George Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand
Count Fathom, 2 vols. (London, 1753), 1: 73; Emily Bronte,Wuthering Heights, Ian
Jack, ed. (Oxford, 1981), 97. For “dead sleep,” see Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury
Tales (Avon, Conn., 1974), 93; Henry Roberts, Honurs Conquest (London, 1598), 134;
Rowley, All’s Lost by Lust; Thomas Randolph, Poems with the Muses Looking-
glasse . . .(Oxford, 1638); Shirley James, The Constant Maid (London, 1640); Robert
 Dixon, Canidia: or, The Witches . . . (London, 1683), 6. The fewer references to
segmented sleep I have found in early American sources suggests that this pattern,
though present in North America, may have been less widespread than in Europe, for
reasons ranging from differences in day/night ratios to the wider availability of
candles and other forms of artificial illumination in the colonies. Two sources—
Benjamin Franklin, “Letter of the Drum,”Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), April
23, 1730, and Hudson Muse to Thomas Muse, April 19, 1771, in “Original
Letters,” Willam and Mary Quarterly 2 (April 1894): 240—contain the expression “first
nap.” I have also found references to segmented sleep in twelve works of American
fiction published during the first half of the nineteenth century. All the stories take
place either in America or in Europe, with nearly half set before 1800. See, for
example, Washington Irving, The Beauties of Washington Irving . . . (Philadelphia,
1835), 152; Irving, A Book of the Hudson . . . (New York, 1849), 51; Irving, Bracebridge
Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra (New York, 1991), 398, 813; Richard Penn
Smith, The Forsaken: A Tale, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1831), 2: 211; James Fenimore
Cooper, The Ways of the Hour (New York, 1850), 276; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales
and Sketches: A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, Tanglewood Tales for Girls and
Boys,Roy Harvey Pearce, ed. (New York, 1982), 293. While visiting London one
winter, Hawthorne, in fact, noted a difference in the nature of English nights and sleep
from his own experience in New England: “At this season, how long the nights are—
from the first gathering gloom of twilight, when the grate in my office begins to grow
ruddier, all through dinnertime, and the putting to bed of the children, and the
lengthened evening, with its books or its drowsiness,—our own getting to bed, the brief
awakenings through the many dark hours, and then the creeping onward of morning.
It seems an age between light and light.” January 6, 1854, Hawthorne, The English
Notebooks (New York, 1962), 44.
18. George Wither, Ivvenila (London, 1633), 239; John Locke, An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding(London, 1690), 589. See also Francis Peck,Desiderrata curiosa:
or, A Collection of Divers Scarce and Curious Pieces . . . , 2 vols. (London, 1732), 2: 33.
For references to the “first sleep” of animals, see, for example, James Shirley, The
Constant Maid (London, 1640); Samuel Jackson Pratt, Harvest-Home . . . , 3 vols.
(London, 1805), 2: 457; Caroline Matilda Kirkland, A New Home . . .(New York,
1839), 140.
19. The Weekly Register: or, Universal Journal (London), December 30, 1732;
“Somnifer,” Public Advertiser,October 24, 1767. For dream books, see, for example,
Nashe, “Terrors of the Night,” 1: 369–70;The Art of Courtship: or, The School of
Delight . . . as Likewise the Interpretation of Dreams ([London], 1686); Nocturnal
Revels: or, A Universal Dream-Book . . . (London, 1706); “Somniculus,” Worcester
 Journal, December 21, 1744; Lilly, Groatsworth of Wit; Chap-Books of the Eighteenth
Century, John Ashton, ed. (New York, 1966), 81–82; Price, “Future of Dreams,” 32.
20. F. G. Moore, Livy, 6: 372–73; Virgil, The Aeneid,Robert Fitzgerald, ed., John Dryden,
trans. (New York, [1965]), 43; Pausanias, Description of Greece,W. H. S. Jones and H.
A. Ormerod, trans., 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1966), 2: 311; Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans, John Dryden, trans. (New York, 1979), 630, 1208; Chapman’s
Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey and the Lesser Homerica,Allardyce Nicoll, ed., 2 vols.
(Princeton, N.J., 1967), 2: 73.
21. Patricia Edmonds, “In Jampacked Days, Sleep Time Is the First to Go,” USA
Today, April 10, 1995. See also Avi Sadeh, et al., “Sleep Patterns and Sleep Disruptions
in School-Age Children,” Developmental Psychology 36 (May 2000): 291–301.
Ironically, we might be less willing to shortchange our time in bed were the quality of
modern sleep worse. Despite periodic complaints of insomnia, our sleep today far
excels the fitful slumber characteristic of past centuries. At least in the Western world,
no longer does the sleep of such large numbers of people fall prey to periodic pain,
frigid temperatures, and voracious pests, among other early modern maladies. But if
not the quality, then the quantity of our sleep continues to diminish.
22. ehr, “Impact of Changes in Nightlength,” 283; Wehr, “‘Clock for All Seasons,’” 339;
Joseph Lawson, Letters to the Young on Progress in Pudsey during the Last Sixty
Years (Stanningley, Eng., 1887), 73; Thomas Middleton, “The Black Book,” inThe
Works of Thomas Middleton, A. H. Bullen, ed., 8 vols. (1885; rpt. edn., New York,
1964), 8: 14; Dotto,Losing Sleep, 36. Roger Bastide has written, “In our Western
civilization, however, the bridges between the diurnal and nocturnal halves of man
have been cut. Of course, people can always be found—and not only in the lower
classes of society—who consult dream books, or who at least examine their dreams
and assign to them a role in their lives. But such vital functions of the dream remain
personal and never become institutionalized. On the contrary, far from constituting
regularized norms of conduct they are considered aberrant; they are classed as
‘superstitions’; sometimes it is even suggested that people who look for significance or
direction in dreams are not entirely all there.” Bastide, “The Sociology of the Dream,”
in Gustave Von Grunebaum, ed., The Dream and Human Societies(Berkeley, Calif.,
1966), 200–01.
The myth of the eight-hour sleep
By Stephanie HegartyBBC World Service

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you.
A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour
sleep may be unnatural.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of
people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a
very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours
before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we
must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16
years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two
distinct chunks.

Image copyrightBBCImage captionRoger Ekirch

says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night
His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than
500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and
literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began
about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second
sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common
knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or
smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and
often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the
hours in between sleeps.

And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
Between segments

Image copyrightAFP

Some people:

 Jog and take photographs

 Practise yoga

 Have dinner...
Ten strange things people do at night

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive
was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more
enjoyment" and "do it better".

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th
Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of
the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social
consciousness.
He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in
coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate
activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.

When segmented sleep was the norm

 "He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the
window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as
it were, the witness of his dream." Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)
 "Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As
for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning." Miguel
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
 "And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the
wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake." Early English ballad, Old
Robin of Portingale

 The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms "first sleep" and "second sleep" to refer to specific
periods of the night
Source: Roger Ekirch. Visit Roger's website.

In his new book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts forward an account of how
this happened.

"Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good," he says. The night was a place
populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks.

"Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on.
There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night."

That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and
Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution.
If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to
exploiting the hours of darkness.

This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by
candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down
through the classes.

In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass
lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much
more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed.
 Image copyrightBBCImage captionA small city like Leipzig
in central Germany employed 100 men to tend to 700 lamps

London didn't join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's
major towns and cities were lit at night.

Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.
Stages of sleep

Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep

 Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows,
muscles relax, heart rate drops

 Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights,
you may be asleep and not know it

 Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this
is when there is the lowest amount of activity in your body

 After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also
called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream

In a full sleep cycle, a person goes through all the stages of sleep from one to four, then back
down through stages three and two, before entering dream sleep

Source: Gregg Jacobs

Gregg Jacobs' site - CBT for Insomnia
Find out more about the science behind sleep
"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before
the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by
leaps and bounds."

Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged
parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.

"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in
their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.

"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as
an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."

Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes
many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented
sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light.

This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake
during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.

The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as
accounts of segmented sleep disappear.

"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking
up during the night is part of normal human physiology."

The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes
people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to
seep into waking life too.

Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of
view.

"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing
is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."

But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be
unnatural.
More from the Magazine
 Image copyrightREX FEATURES
 Margaret Thatcher was famously said to get by on four hours sleep a night

 That put her in a group of just 1% of the population

Can we really get by on four hours of sleep?
Weird things people do in their sleep

"Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from
sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep
is studied," he says.

Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of
rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress
naturally.

In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams.

"Today we spend less time doing those things," says Dr Jacobs. "It's not a coincidence that, in
modern life, the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug
abuse has gone up."

So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors
and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.
Craig Koslofsky and Russell Foster appeared on The Forum from the BBC World Service.
Listen to the programme here.

Mostrar video de San Francisco.

Norbert Ellia, On Civilization, Power and Knowledge: Selected Writings (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
“The Social Constraint towards Self-Constraint” [tit.] [This section comes from The Civilizing
Process, one vol. ed., 1994, p. 443-56.]
p. 52
“The individual is compelled to regulate his conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even
and more stable manner. That this involves not only a conscious regulation has already been
stressed. Precisely this is characteristic of the psychological changes in the course of civilization:
the more complex and stable control of conduct is increasingly instilled in the individual from
his earliest years as an automatism, a self-compulsion that he cannot resist even if he consciously
wishes to. The web of actions grows so complex and extensive, the effort required to behave
‘correctly’ within it becomes so great, that beside the individual’s conscious self-control an
automatic, blindly functioning apparatus of self-control is firmly established. This seeks to
prevent offences to socially acceptable behavior by a wall of deep-rooted fears, but, just because
it operates blindly and by habit, it frequently indirectly produces such collisions with social
reality. But whether consciously or unconsciously, the direction of this transformation of conduct
in the form of an increasingly differentiated regulation of impulses is determined by the direction
of the process of social differentiation, by the progressive division of functions and the growth of
the interdependency chains into which, directly or indirectly, every impulse, every move of an
individual becomes integrated.”
“A simple way of picturing the difference between the integration of the individual with a
complex society and within a less complex one is to think of their different road systems. There
are in a sense spatial functions of a social integration, which, in its totality, cannot be expressed
merely in terms of concepts derived from the four-dimensional continuum. One should think of
the country roads of a simple warrior society with a barter economy, uneven, unmetalled,
exposed to damage from wind and rain. With few exceptions, there is very little traffic; the main
danger which man here represents for other men is an attack by soldiers or thieves. When people
look around them, scanning the trees and hills or the road itself, they do so primarily because
they must always be prepared for armed attack, and only secondarily because they have to avoid
collision. Life on the main roads of this society demands a constant readiness to fight, and free
play of the emotions in defense of one’s life or possessions from physical attack. Traffic on the
main roads of a big city in the complex society of our time demands a quite different moulding
of the psychological apparatus. Here the danger of physical attack is minimal. Cars are rushing in
all directions; pedestrians and cyclists are trying
p. 53
to thread their way through the mêlée of cars; policemen stand at the main crossroads to regulate
the traffic with varying success. But this external control is founded on the assumption that every
individual is himself regulating his behavior with the utmost exactitude in accordance with the
necessities of this network. The chief danger that people here represent for others results from
someone in this bustle losing his self-control. A constant and highly differentiated regulation of
one’s own behavior is needed for the individual to steer his way through traffic. If the strain of
such constant self-control becomes too much for an individual, this is enough to put himself and
others in mortal danger.”
“This is, of course, only an image. The tissue of chains of action into which each individual acts
within this complex society is woven is far more intricate, and the self-control to which he is
accustomed from infancy far more deeply rooted, than this example shows. But at least it gives
an impression of how the great formative pressure on the make-up of ‘civilized’ man, his
constant and differentiated self-constraint, is connected to the growing differentiation and
stabilizing of social functions and the growing multiplicity and variety of activities that
continuously have to be attuned to each other.”
“The pattern of self-constraints, the template by which drives are moulded, certainly varies
widely according to the function and position of the individual within this network, and there are
even today in different sectors of the Western world variations of intensity and stability in the
apparatus of self-constraint that seem at face value very large. At this point a multitude of
particular questions are raised, and the sociogenetic method may give access to their answers.
But when compared to the psychological make-up of people in less complex societies, these
differences and degrees within more complex societies become less significant, and the main line
of transformation, which is the primary concern of this study, emerges very clearly: as the social
fabric grows more intricate, the sociogenetic apparatus of individual self-control also becomes
more differentiated, more all-round and more stable.”
“But the advancing differentiation of social functions is only the first, most general of the social
transformation which we observe in enquiring into the change in psychological make-up known
as ‘civilization.’ Hand in hand with this advancing division of functions goes a total
reorganization of the social fabric. It was shown in detail earlier why, when the division of
functions is low, the central organs of societies of a certain size are relatively unstable and liable
to disintegration. It has been show how, through specific figurational pressures, centrifugal
tendencies, the mechanisms of feudalization, are slowly neutralized and how step by step, a more
stable central organization, a firmer monopo-
p. 54
lization of physical force, are established. The peculiar stability of the apparatus of mental
estraint which emerges as a decisive trait built into the habits of every ‘civilized’ human being
stands in the closest relationship to the monopolization of physical force and the growing
stability of the central organs of society. Only with the formation of this kind of relatively stable
monopolies do societies acquire those characteristics as a result of which the individuals forming
them get attuned, from infancy, to a highly regulated and differentiated pattern of self-restraint;
only in conjunction with these monopolies does this kind of self-restraint require a higher degree
of automaticity, does it become, as it were, ‘second nature.’”
“When a monopoly of force is formed, pacified social spaces are created with are normally free
from acts of violence. […] The monopolization of the means of production of ‘economic’ means,
is only one of those which stand out in fuller relief when the means of physical violence become
monopolized, when, in other words, in a more pacified state society the free use of physical force
by those who are physically stronger is no longer possible.”
“In general, the direction in which the behavior and the affective make-up of people change
when the structure of human relationships is transformed in the manner described, is as follows:
societies without a stable monopoly of force are always societies in which the division of
functions is relatively slight and the chains of action binding individuals together are
comparatively short. Conversely, societies with more stable monopolies of force, always first
embodied in a large princely or royal court, are societies in which the division of functions is
more or less advanced, in which the chains of action binding individuals together are longer and
the functional dependencies between people greater. Here the individual is largely protected
from sudden attack, the irruption of physical violence into his life. But at the same time he is
himself forced to suppress in himself any passionate impulse urging him to attack another
physically. And the other forms of compulsion which now prevail in the pacified social spaces
pattern the individual’s conduct and affective impulses in the same direction. The closer web of
interdependence be-
p. 55
comes in which the individual is enmeshed with the advancing division of functions, the larger
the social spaces over which this network extends and which become integrated into functional
or institutional units – the more threatened is the social existence of the individual who gives
way to spontaneous impulses and emotions, the greater is the social advantage of those able to
moderate their affects, and the more strongly is each individual constrained from an early age to
take account of the effects of his own or other people’s actions on a whole series of links in the
social chain. The moderation of spontaneous emotions, the tempering of affects, the extention of
mental space beyond the moment into the past and future, the habit of connecting events in
tersms of chains fo cause and effect – all of these are different aspects of the same transformation
of conduct which necessarily takes place with the monopolization of physical violence, and the
lengthening of the chains of social action and the interdependence. It is a ‘civilizing’ change of
behavior.”
“The transformation of the nobility from a class of knights into a class of courtiers is an example
of this. […] With this monopolization, the physical threat to the individual is slowly
depersonalized. It no longer depends quite so directly on momentary affects; it is gradually
subjected to increasingly strict rules and laws; and finally, within certain limits and with certain
fluctuations, the physical threat when laws are infringed is itself made less severe.”
p. 57
[…]
“Through the formation of monopolies of force, the threat which one man represents for another
is subject to stricter control and becomes more calculable. Everyday life is freer or sudden
reversals of fortune. Physical violence is confined to the barracks; and from this store-house it
breaks out only in extreme cases, in times of war or social upheaval, into individual life. As the
monopoly of certain specialist groups it is normally excluded from the life of others; and these
specialists, the whole monopoly organization of force, now stand guard only in the margin of
social life as a control on individual conduct.”
“Even in this form as a control organization, however, physical violence and the threat
emanating from it have a determining influence on individuals in society, whether they know it
or not. It is, however, no longer a perpetual insecurity that it brings into the life of the individual,
but a peculiar form of security. It no longer throws him, in the swaying fortunes of battle, as the
physical victor or vanquished, between mighty outbursts of pleasure and terror; a continuous,
uniform pressure is exerted on individual life by the physical violence stored behind the scenes
of everyday life, a pressure totally unfamiliar and hardly perceived, conduct and drive economy
having been adjusted from earliest youth to this social structure. It is in fact the whole social
mould, the code of conduct, which changes; and accordingly with it changes, as has been said
before, not only this or that specific form of conduct but its whole pattern, the whole structure of
the way individuals steer themselves. […] It is normally only potentially present in society, as
agency of control; the actual compulsion is one that the individual exerts on himself either as a
result of his knowledge of the possible consequences of his moves in the game in intertwining
activities, or as a result of corresponding gestures of adults which have helped to pattern his own
behavior as a child. The monopolization of physical violence, the concentration of arms and
armed men under one authority, makes the use of violence more or less calculable, and forces
unarmed men in the pacified social spaces to restrain their own violence through foresight or
reflection; in other words it imposes on people a greater or lesser degree of self-control.”
“This is not to say that every form o self-control was entirely lacking in medieval warrior society
or in other societies without a complex and stable monopoly of physical violence. The agency of
individual self-control, the super-ego, the conscience or whatever we call it, is instilled, im-
p. 58
posed and maintained in such warrior societies in direct relation to acts of physical violence; its
form matches this life in its greater contrasts and more abrupt transitions. Compared to the self-
control agency in more pacified societies, it is diffuse, unstable, only a slight barrier to violent
emotional outbursts. The fears securing socially ‘correct’conduct are not yet banished to
remotely the same extent from the individual’s consciousness into his so-called ‘inner life.’ As
the decisive danger does not come from failure or relaxation of self-control, but from direct
external physical threat, habitual fear predominantly takes the form of fear of external powers.
And as this fear is less stable, the control apparatus too is less encompassing, more one-sided or
partial. In such a society extreme self-control in enduring pain may be instilled; but this is
complemented by what, measured by a different standard, appears as an extreme form of
freewheeling of affects in torturing others. Similarly, in certain sectors of medieval society we
fond extreme forms of asceticism, self-restraint and renunciation, contrasting to a no less
extreme indulgence of pleasure in others, and frequently enough we encounter sudden switches
from one attitude to the other in the life of an individual person. The restraint the individual here
imposes on himself, the struggle against his own flesh, is no less intense and one-sided, no less
radical and passionate than its counterpart, the fight against others and the maximum enjoyment
of pleasures.”
“What is established with the monopolization of physical violence in the pacified social spaces is
a different type of self-control or self-constraint. It is a more dispassionate self-control. The
controlling agency forming itself as part of the individual’s personality structure corresponds to
the controlling agency forming itself in society at large. The one like the other tends to impose a
highly differentiated regulation upon all passionate impulses, upon men’s conduct all around.
Both – eath to a large extent mediated by the other – exert a constant, even pressure to inhibit
affective outbursts. They damp down extreme fluctuations in behavior and emotions. As the
monopolization of physical force reduces the fear and terror one man must have for another, but
at the same time reduces the possibility of causing others terror, fear or torment, and therefore
certain possibilities of pleasurable emotional release, the constant self-control to which the
individual is now increasingly accustomed seeks to reduce the contrasts and sudden switches in
conduct, and the affective charge of all self-expression. The pressures operating upon the
individual now tend to produce a transformation of the whole drive and affect economy in the
direction of a more continuous, stable and even regulation of drives and affects in all areas of
conduct, in all sectors of his life.”
p. 59
[…]
“From earliest youth the individual is trained in the constant restraint and foresight that he needs
for adult functions. This self-restraint is ingrained so deeply from an early age that, like a kind of
relay-station of social standards, an automatic self-supervision of his drives, a more
differentiated and more stable ‘super-ego’ develops in him, and a part of the forgotten drive
impulses and affect inclinations is no loger directly within the reach of the level of consciousness
at all.”
[..]
“Later, as the conveyor belts running through this existence grow longer and more complex, the
individual learns to control himself more steadily; he is now less a prisoner of his passions than
before. But as he is now more tightly bound by his functional dependence on the activities of an
ever-larger number of people, he is much more restricted in his conduct, in his chances of
directly satisfying his drives and passions. Life becomes in a sense a less dangerous, but also less
emotional or pleasurable,
p. 60
at least as far as the direct release of pleasure is concerned. And for what is lacking in everyday
life a substitute is created in dreams, in books and pictures. So, on their way to becoming
courtiers, the nobility read novels or chivalry; the bourgeois now contemplate violence and erotic
passion in films. Physical clashes, wars and feuds diminish, and anything recalling them, even
the cutting up of dead animals and the use of the knife at table, is banished from view or at least
subjected to more and more precise social rules. But at the same time the battlefield is, in a
sense, moved within. Part of the tensions and passions that were earlier directly released in the
struggle of man and man must now be worked out within the human being. The more peaceful
constraints exerted on him by his relations to others are mirrored within him; an individualized
pattern of near-automatic habits is established and consolidated with him, a specific ‘super ego’,
which endeavours to control, transform or suppress his affects in keeping with the social
structure. But the drives, the passionate affects, that can no longer directly manifest themselves
in the relationships between people, often struggle no less violently within the individual against
this supervising part of himself. […]… the tension between ‘super-ego’and ‘unconscius’ – the
wishes and desires that cannot be remembered – increases.”
p. 61
[…]
“In some cases they lead to perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction, precisely because the
person affected can only gratifay a part of his inclinations and impusles in modified form, for
example in fantasy, in looking-on and overhearing, in daydreams or dreams. And sometimes the
habituation to affect-inhibition goes so far – constant feelings of boredome or solitude are
examples of this – that the individual is no longer capable of any form of fearless expression of
the modified affects, or of direct gratification of the repressed drives. Particular branches of
drives are as it were anaesthetized in such cases by the specific structure of the social framework
in which the child grows up. Under the pressure of the dangers that their expression incurs in the
child’s social space, they become surrounded with automatic fears to such an extent that they can
remain deaf and unresponsive throughout a whole lifetime. In other cases certain branches of
drives may be so diverted by the heavy conflicts wich the rough-hewn, affective and passionate
nature of the small human being unavoidably encounters on its way to being moulded into a
‘civilized’ being, that their enegies can find only an unwanted release through bypasses, in
compulseiv actions and other symptoms of disburbance. In othe cases again, these energies are
so transformed that they flow into uncontrollable and eccentric attachements and repulsions, in
predilections for this or that peculiar hobby-horse. And in all these cases a permanent, apparently
groundless inner unrest shows how many drive energies are dammed up in a form that permits no
real satisfaction.”
[…]
“Unplanned in that sense are those results of social patterning of individuals to which one
habitually refers as ‘abnormal’…”
p. 62
“In either case it is the web of social relations in which the individual lives during his most
impressionable phase, during childhood and youth, which imprints itself upon his unfolding
personality where it has its counterpart in the relationship between his controlling agencies,
super-ego and ego, and his libidinal impulses.[…] However, there is no end to the intertwining,
for although the self-steering of a person, malleable during early childhood, solidifies and
hardens as he grows up, it never ceases entirely to be affected by his changing relations with
others through his life. The learning of self-controls, call them ‘reason’ or ‘conscience,’ ‘ego’or
‘super-ego,’ and the consequent curbing of more animalic impulses and affects, in short the
civilizing of the human young, is never a process entirely without pain; it always leaves scars. If
the person is lucky – and as no one, no parent, no doctor, and counselor, is at present able to steer
his process in a child according to a clear knowledge of what is best for its future, it is still
largely a question of luck – the wounds of the civilizing conflicts incurred during childhood heal;
the scars left by them are not too deep. But in less favourable cases the conflicts inherent in the
civilizing of young humans – conflicts with others and conflicts with themselves – remain
unsolved, or, more precisely, through perhaps buried for a while, open up once more in situations
reminiscent of those of childhood; the suffering, transformed into an adult form, repeats itself
again and again, and the unsolved conflicts of a person’s childhood never cease to disturb his
adult relationships.”
p. 63
“But as this structure [of our society], precisely in our times, is highly mutable, it demands a
flexibility of habits and conduct which in most cases has to be paid by a loss of stability.”
[…]
“In reality the result of the individual civilizing process is clearly unfavourable or favourable
only in relatively few cases at each end of the scale. The majority of civilized people live
midway between these two extremes. Socially positive and negative features, personally
gratifying and frustrating tendencies, mingle in them in varying proportions.”
“The social moulding of individuals in accordance with the structure of the civilizing process of
what we now call the West is particularly difficult. In order to be reasonably successful it
requires with the structure of Western society a particularly high differentiation, an especially
intensive and stable regulation of drives and affects, of all the more elementary human impulses.
It therefore generally takes up more time, particularly in the middle and upper classes, than the
social moulding of individuals in less complex societies. Resistance to adaptation to the
prevailing standards of civilization, the effort which this adaptation, this profound transformation
of the whole personality, costs the individual,
p. 64
is always very considerable. And later, therefore, than in less complex societies the individual in
the Western world attains with his adult social function the psychological make-up of an adult,
the emergence of which by and large marks the conclusion of the individual civilizing process.”

Communism

15 min, episode 77, The Paris Commune

1830 to 1950 European Imperialism

Technologies of Empire, the Scramble for Africa, and the Opium War in China
15 min Episode 3, Scramble for Africa, and episode 18 Eugenics, and episodes 23 and 24,
European Imperialism in the Middle East, part 1 and 2.

World War 1

The most powerful of all was now the German Empire,

1
created by the Kingdom of Prussia as a result of its victorious wars
of 1866 against the Austrian Empire and 1870 against France.

the paradoxical predicament in which

Britain found herself at the beginning of the century. She was still
the wealthiest power in the world and the proud owner of the
greatest empire that the world had ever seen; but she was more
vulnerable than ever before in her history. At the hub of that empire
was a densely populated island dependent on world trade for its
wealth and, yet more important, for imported foodstuffs to feed its
cities. The Royal Navy’s ‘command of the seas’ both held the Empire
together and ensured that the British people were fed. Loss of naval
supremacy was a nightmare that dogged successive British
governments and dominated their relations with other powers.
Ideally they would have wished to remain aloof from European
disputes, but any indication that their neighbours were showing
signs, singly or collectively, of threatening their naval dominance
had for the previous twenty years been a matter of anguished
national concern.

France
For over a century, between 1689 and 1815, Britain’s major rival for
world power had been France, and it had taken nearly another 100
years for her to realize that this was no longer the case. France had
lagged far behind in the economic development that could have
made her a serious competitor. The Revolution of 1789 had
destroyed the three pillars of the Ancien Régime – monarchy,
noblesse, and Church – and distributed their lands among peasant
smallholders who remained staunchly resistant to any
development, whether reaction or further revolution, that
threatened to expropriate them; and their pattern of life did not
encourage either the growth of population or the accumulation of
capital that made economic development possible. In 1801 the
3
Europe in 1914
population of France had totalled twenty-seven million and was the
largest in Europe. In 1910 it was still only thirty-five million,
whereas over the same period that of Britain had risen from eleven
million to forty million, while that of the newly united Germany was
over sixty-five million and still rising. After its demoralizing defeat
in 1870, the French army had found an outlet in African conquests
that created friction with Britain’s imperial interests, as did
traditional rivalries in the eastern Mediterranean, but for the
French people these were marginal issues. They remained deeply
divided between those who had profited from the Revolution; those
who, under the leadership of the Catholic Church, still refused to
come to terms with it; and an increasingly powerful socialist
movement that wanted to push it a stage further. France remained
both wealthy and culturally dominant, but her domestic politics
were highly volatile. Abroad, the German annexation of Alsace and
Lorraine in 1871 had been neither forgotten nor forgiven, and fear
of German power made France anxiously dependent upon her only
major ally – Russia.

Serfdom had been abolished after the

Crimean War, and representative institutions of a kind introduced
after defeat and near-revolution in 1905. Railway development had
enormously boosted industrial production in the 1890s, bringing
Russia, in the view of some economists, to the point of economic
‘take-off ’. But the regime remained terrified that industrial
development, however essential it might be for military
effectiveness, would only encourage demands for further political
reform, and it suppressed dissidents with a brutality that only drove
them to extremes of ‘terrorism’ (a term and technique invented by
Russian revolutionaries in the nineteenth century), thus justifying
further brutality. This made her an embarrassing, even if a
necessary, ally for the liberal West.

At the end of the nineteenth century the attention of the Russian

government had been focused on expansion into Asia, but after
defeat by the Japanese in 1904–5 it was switched to south-east
Europe, which was still dominated by the Ottoman Empire

British fears of a German invasion played upon by novelists and newspapers.

British suspicions of Germany’s growing naval power, accentuated by the opening of the Kiel
Canal, enabling German ships to move safely and swiftly from the Baltic to the North Sea
German fears of British naval supremacy
German desire for territory and influence in the east, at the expense of Russia
French Desire to win back Alsace and Lorraine
Italian desire to win territory from Austria, to expand in Dalmatia, and to control the Adriatic sea
Serbian desire to win an outlet to the sea and lead the Balkan slavs against Austrian pressures.
Russian desire to champion the Balkan Slavs against Austrian dominance
Desire of minorities inside Austria to win independence or to have a larger say in their own
affairs

Germany’s growing isolation:

Russia feared German expansion in the East and became an ally of France since 1894
Despite Britain’s many trade links with Germany, and the Kaiser’s devotion to his aunt Queen
Victoria, the good relations established by Bismark in the 1870s and 1880s had cooled by 1900.
Britain gravitated towards France and Russia. From 1908 to 1914 Britain and France consulted
over military and naval matters

Countries allied to Germany but extremely hostile towards Germany’s principal ally, Austria:
Italy.
Serbia and Bulgaria: independence assured by Bismarck and Disraeli in 1878 but increasingly
suspicious of Austrian designs towards them by 1914
Germany’s only firm ally by 1914 was Austria-Hungary. Austria had a tense relation with all its
other neighbors.

The three central empires (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) contained large
minorities groups who wished for eventual independence. Many of these groups hoped that an
Allied victory might lead to their liberation. The Allies encouraged such hopes, and offered to
support the mainorities if they turned against their imperial masters.

Italy hoped to annex Dalmatia, Albania, and other areas around the Mediterranean. Italy had
occupied Libya since 1912.
Serbia:
In 1878 it became independent from the Ottoman empire after 500 years of rule.
The Serbs of Bosnia looked to Serbia for their future, as Asutrian rule was oppressive.
Austria ruled Dalmatia, a Serb outlet to the sea.
Albania was created from Ottoman territory in 1912, deliberately cutting Serbia off from the sea.
Greece and Bulgaria had conquered the areas closer to the sea from the Ottomans in 1912-3,
blocking another possible way out to the sea for Serbia.
Austria feared unrest among its 23 million subject Slavs is Serbia were allowed to build up its
power and prestige.

Themes:
The situation of the Great Powers in the decades prior to the war. Include the Ottoman Empire
(notion of sick man of Europe).
Germany as a Great Power that broke the balance of power.
German navy growing more powerful than the British
How the shift to oil led to the conquest of Persia
Japan as an emerging power, the Ruso-Japanese war of 1905 and the 1905 Russian Revolution
The Great War as the first industrial war. It had been imagined before it happened as something
that would be a brief war, and that it would reignite honor and duty as it supposedly had existed
in medieval knighthood. Instead, it lead to a kind of war that basically buried traditional society.
This is partly what led to the later rise of the crazy 1920s. Give “Let’s misbehave” and
“Anything Goes.”
How they were not prepared for what was coming. First use of machine guns, zeppelins and first
development of airplanes (first for recognizance, later for bombing), description of life in the
trenches.
The beginning of the war. Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, conflict between Serbia and
Austria-Hungary, Germany backs up Austria, which in turn involves Russia and its allies.
German plans to invade France involve invading through Belgium, whose independence is
guaranteed by Great Britain (besides, the British feared the growing power of the German navy
that could compete with theirs as the one in charge of the global seas. This could undermine their
empire). The idea the Germans had was to quickly invade France through Belgium and win and
after that they would deal with the Russians. Instead, as the Western front became stuck for
years. Description of life in the Western Front and what the trenches were. The Eastern front as
more mobile. First Russia makes important inroads? More on the Eastern Front. Other fronts:
Southern Europe. Fights in Africa. The Arab rebellion of 1916 as an attempt to undermine the
Ottoman Empire. Telerman telegram and entrance of the US in WWI. Australians, New
Zealanders and Japan take German possessions in the pacific and in China.
Italy waited to see who would win before joining the war, even if originally it seemed that it
would join the central powers.
Consequences of the War: Fall of three empires: Russian Revolution, collapse of Austria-
Hungary and formation of new countries. Balkan and notion of Balkanization, later conflicts in
the 1990s. Collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Sykes-Picot, Rise of Turkey, formation of the
modern Middle East with its borders that led to trouble in the future. How arbitrary the borders in
the Middle East are.
Ways in which the war set the ground for WWII, experience of Mussolini and Hitler during the
war. German resentment and crisis after the War. Germany in the 1920s, the possibility of the
German Revolution in 1918. League of Nations and reparations. Economic Growth in the
countries that did not participate but provided raw materials, like Argentina.
How the war was perceived from other parts, how it lead to believing that liberalism was over
and that European civilization was in decadence. The notion of progress was not fashionable
anymore. Freud went from saying that all was about desire to claiming that there was also a
death drive. Participation of women in the war gave a big push to feminism. They were there as
nurses, but also for the first time they were also in heavy industry and in many places that had
been defined as exclusively male in the past. The biological justifications claiming that women
could not do that fell. In fact, it was after the war that women suffrage was granted in many
countries. Men tended to be in the front and women in the home front, this led to a huge rise in
prostitution among soldiers, but also sex between them.

15 min, episode 12 America’s Entry into World War I

Selections from All Quite in the Western Front

The Russian Revolution

15 min, episode 68, The Russian Empire on the Eve of World War 1
The Crisis of the 1930s, the Welfare State, the Interwar period, and the Industrialization of
the “Global South”

Fascism, the Nazis

World War 2

The Cold War and Decolonization

15 min, episode 8, America and the Beginnings of the Cold War, and episode 9, The End of
Colonialism in South Asia, episode 78, The US and Decolonization after World War II

The Fall of the Soviet Union ME VOY DE VIAJE

The End of History?

Growing Inequality, Neoliberalism, Transformations of the Left, the Cultural Wars, Uprisings
and Wars Throughout the World
Selection of News Articles.

Global Migrations in the last decades and the recent rise of nationalism.
Including a global history of race
Selections from the book by Aviva Chomsky

Global Transformations: Demography throughout history, the first and second

demographic revolutions. Aging populations
Audio de The Economist

Women and LGBT people in World History

15 min, episode 83, Simone de Beauvoir and ‘The Second Sex’

Drugs and Drug Trafficking in World History

Global History of Nutrition

Marvin Harris, Good to Eat, chapters on The Riddle of the Sacred Cow, and The Abominable
Pig

The Middle East Today

15 min, episode 2, Islamic Extremism in the Modern World