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  • The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature
  • James Harker
Barrows, Adam . The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 224 pp. $39.95.

On or about October 1884, temporal character changed. This paraphrase of Virginia Woolf could describe the premise of The Cosmic Time of Empire, in which Adam Barrows argues that subsequent developments of the novel can be read as a series of engagements with a new conception of time. The date is that of the International Prime Meridian Conference, where representatives of twenty-four countries gathered in Washington and ratified two propositions: that the Prime Meridian would travel through Greenwich, England and that the same meridian would be the basis of a universal day. Greenwich Mean Time became universal time.

In his ambitious study, Barrows assumes the roles of historian, philosopher, and literary critic in order to weave together the standardization of time and the politics of empire, the philosophical understanding of time during the modernist period, and the innovations of literary modernism as well as preceding and succeeding literary trends. Barrows's interdisciplinary inquiry concludes that modernist fiction "engaged with rather than evaded the enlistment of temporality in the imperial project, while simultaneously forging alternative models of temporality resistant to empire's demands" (4). For Barrows, modernism is neither complicit in the imperial project of universal time (as he shows certain late Victorian novels are), nor evasive of temporal politics (in line with the common critique of modernism's bourgeois self-interest), nor defeatist (a charge Barrows levels at contemporary fiction).

Beginning in the role of historian, Barrows offers a new "reading" of the Prime Meridian Conference. Treatments of the conference tend to emphasize a battle of imperial powers in the form of French opposition to the placement of the Prime Meridian through Greenwich. But Barrows, gleaning from conference proceedings and related archival materials, tells another story. The more important debate at the conference pitted the convenience of the major industrial and commercial powers against the value of regional and cultural differences—"universal" time versus local or "social" conceptions of time. Advocating the latter, for example, was Rustem Effendi of the Ottoman Empire: "The majority of our population is agricultural, working in the fields, and prefers to count to sunset; besides, the hours for the Moslem prayers are counted from sundown to sundown" (42). The most useful ways of measuring time, Effendi and others point out, might depend on local culture rather than on universals mandated by a far-off imperial power. By highlighting otherwise neglected voices and votes from the conference, Barrows shows the debates to be not just a battle between imperial powers but a forecast of "the post-imperial politics of the global market" (50).

Barrows's uncovering of an incipient anti-globalization in the Prime Meridian Conference lays the foundation for his entry into the long debate on modernism and temporality. Barrows begins with the premise that "modernist time" traditionally comes down to one figure, Henri Bergson, who "could indeed be considered the period's governing conscience" (54). Bergson's articulation of a purely subjective, apolitical durée stands in opposition to the politicized notion of universal time. Barrrows's intervention, emphasizing "social" configurations of time, dismantles this neat opposition of subjective and universal senses of time. But how central to our understanding of British modernism is this opposition? Invoking only Bergson, Barrows presents an abridged version of the philosophy of modernism. What about Woolf's close association with G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, Conrad's interest in Schopenhauer, or Joyce's references to Vico? Granted, Barrows's emphasis is on the diversity of modernism's politics of time rather than its philosophies of time. But a [End Page 373] broader treatment of modernism's philosophies of time might yield further interesting points of connection and disjunction with its temporal politics.

If Barrows takes up the role of philosopher rather briefly, it is so that he can move to the role of literary critic and demonstrate how temporal politics play out in novels after the introduction of universal time—this is the heart of the project and its success...

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