Keeping Time

Time is an amazing thing.  It controls almost every aspect of our daily lives, from how we act, to who we see, to how we make our lively-hoods.  Every minute, hell, every second really counts in this day and age.  Truly a fascinating idea especially given that it is a construction of the last 300 or so years.  Thompson's article about the keeping of time as if it were a commodity is an excellent example of the Annales school at work.  Social history is the history of the little people; the individuals that keep societies and nations (excuse the pun) ticking.  His article seeks, quite effectively, to illuminate times changing identity as societies in Europe transitioned from agrarian to industrialized over the course of the 18th and 19th century.
During this age people began to sell not their labor, or skill necessarily, but their time in villages and cities to entrepreneurs and businessmen for whom labor was cheap and replaceable, but time was not.  Thompson's whole article fascinates as it digs wholeheartedly into the dirt: the nitty-gritty of people's lives through a thorough examination of the most fundamental element life.  This period in human history saw people become ever more aware of how every moment must be measured and monetized and used wisely or else consequences could be enormous.  People bought pocket watches and clocks capable of tracking minutes.  Town invested in church clock towers and businesses woke their workers en masse with horns and chimes signalling the beginning of the work day.  Thompson gives us a glimpse into the time were time was no longer a vague concept of when things needed to be done, but an exact measurement of man's mortality.  Time is no longer passed after the close of this era, but instead, spent.