Railway clocks: Temporal bases of transnational law

Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft In: Jessie Hohmann and Dan Joyce, eds., Objects of International Law (OUP 2018) Railway clocks A co-constitutive relationship I propose to explore aspects of time and transnational law by observing the object of the railway clock. What does the railway clock reveal? Typically not the contest that was waged throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century for control of time. Time, as it is told by devices such as railroad clocks, has been standardised. By standardised time, I mean what is also referred to as uniform, universal time, namely common measurement based on seconds, minutes and hours— abstract units organised globally in time zones coordinated to the Greenwich meridian. Railways took a lead in developing and propagating standardised time to their own advantage under law. Railway clocks were instrumental to their program. Railway clocks competed with public clocks— often part of churches, sometimes on municipal buildings—keeping different time scales. Some public clocks were set to keep local time, typically geared to mean solar time, a mechanical approximation of the movement of the sun, with 12 noon occuring when the midday sun would bisect a chosen meridian (in the form of a local landmark). Others localities oriented their time to the local mean time of larger nearby communities, or exhibited variations in the mechanical operation of the clock and the measurements it would keep. When kept, for instance, by the church in a British village, local time affirmed the enduring authority of the clergy; when kept by a comparable municipality, local time affirmed an identity at once indigenous and secular. Standardised time as announced by railway clocks meant a different master, entailing strict mechanical conformance to an abstract standard, oriented universally to a single appointed meridian. 1 Time-keeping devices today speak of precision, not a contest for temporal dominance. The time they tell is at once abstract and everywhere felt, an artefact of rationality that has been singularly naturalised and universalised. But the relationship that I will explore here is not just about law creating standardised time. Transnational law and standardised time have enabled one another. Their relationship is co-constitutive: law was mobilised to create standardised time in the 19th century; standardised time has made possible the growth of a particular law globally. As first carried and conveyed by the railroad clock, and affirmed by international law, standardised time is a measurement working constantly and ubiquitously to make networks possible, a universal technology. Those networks are material and transactional in nature—moving for instance commerce or capital, according to contracts—and those contractual transactions have entailed coordinated development and proliferation of a hegemonic legal discourse capable of supporting their validity in series across numerous jurisdictions. The object of the railway clock, and the 1 See Trish Ferguson, ‘Hardy’s Wessex and the Birth of Industrial Subjectivity’, in Ferguson, ed., Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) p. 57. 1 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft technological assemblage of which it was a part—including telegraphs and astronomical observatories—worked in conjunction with variously situated industrialists, scientists, lawyers and government personnel to enable coordinated time management under law across diverse jurisdictions. Those jurisdictions include national and international legal regimes, encompassing a variety of public and private actors and acts—adding administrative and regulatory law to proliferating rules of capital, commerce, contract and tort—in a way that today is increasingly referred to under the banner of transnational law. I will use that term here. 2 Railway clocks shed light on an aspect of transnational law that remains too obscure. Though transnational law is described as crossing and transcending the borders of innumerable communities, the normative bases by which these new legal networks are possible in the first place remains unclear. In other words: there is not yet an adequate account of the common, constitutive elements that have allowed transnational networks to flourish as coherent enterprises under law, despite the fact that their many points of connection may be situated in widely different jurisdictions and political communities, exhibiting widely different normative expectations. The railway clock, materially imposing a common system of measurement at once abstract and fundamental to daily life, presents a chapter in that story. In railway clocks and the networks in which they have operated, we see the early development of transnational networks connecting particular interests, actors and expectations across borders. Observing the role of lawyers and legal offices in developing standardised time demonstrates how law has been engaged to universalising effect ‘on the ground’—by which I mean that standardised time is commonly used the world over—but also the particular interests and structural developments that have gone into that universalising program. Observing the counterpart role of railway clocks and time controls in developing transnational law demonstrates how transnational legal relations have been able to flourish across (and despite) diverse normative environments; and the peculiar values that have supported (and been supported by) these relations, in contradistinction to the values of the communities they have traversed. The ubiquity of standardised time was a historical victory for railroad companies and privileged, amateur clubs of gentlemen scientists, who together enlisted governmental and military offices to their cause, joining law, science, technology, government and commerce, among other things. The contest for standardised time was waged in international conventions and local communities, and in courts of law and public opinion. In the end, the victory was decisive: the time that is seen around the world today is its uniform legacy. The vestiges of times indigenous to local communities go unrecognised, even where artefacts remain. I will sketch here in brief, by focusing on the keepers of the railway clocks, the co-constitutive relationship of standardised time with transnational law, to suggest how transnational legal relations have flourished across, despite, and sometimes to the cost of disparate normative systems. I propose first to tell that story by means of a time line. More precisely: I propose to contruct a time line about a linear construction of time. 2 Jessup’s initial definition of transnational law remains the touchstone: ‘all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers ... [including] public and private international law ... [and] other rules which do not wholly fit into such standard categories.’ Philip Jessup, Transnational law (Yale University Press, 1956). 2 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft Thereafter, I will offer some further reflections on the co-constitutive relationship of standardised time and transnational law. Throughout, and in keeping with this volume, I invite you to consider the substance of the story by reference to the object and body of the railway clock. Its materiality may be appreciated in several related respects. First, its aesthetic force: not all clocks were as grand as the one at York, pictured with this chapter (though some were still grander), but the railway clocks of the 19th century and into the 20th were consistently imposing. Second, the intricate technical detail behind its facade: the railway clock, like the public clock in the town hall or church tower, represented a significant and costly material undertaking. Third, its existence along a network: its purpose and operation were materially defined by the two sets of networks to which it was joined, telegraph and railroad. Especially in the context of US cities, the extension of the material network made visible by the railway clock dominated the extension of time into new territories. 3 But before I proceed, a disclaimer: for purposes of brevity, I will largely restrict myself—in highly abbreviated fashion—to two locations instrumental to the development of universal, uniform time as it has been enshrined in international law, namely England and the US. This means, among other things, entirely or nearly entirely neglecting debates about standardised time among Islamic legal scholars, and the consequent spread of standardised time in Islamic lands; neglecting internecine conflicts among European powers for control of standardised time; and neglecting the larger colonial history of standardised time. 4 This chapter is a very small part of a larger story. A Time Line In 1784, the British Post Office mail coach service began using a strict schedule, for which it adopted the mean time kept by the clocks and their technicians at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). 5 Mail coach guards were required to carry timepieces set to GMT. This made Greenwich a meridian—a latitudinal line serving as reference point—for public postal timekeeping in Britain, and in 1840, the Great Western Railway in Britain began using only GMT standard time. By 1847, most British railways were all using civil GMT. The railways’ interest in standardised time, however, was not commonly shared, and was protested across localities in England as 'railway-time aggression.' Across the Atlantic, the US Post in the 1830s and ‘40s began putting pressure on private railroads for punctual service, which led to distributions of watches and other time-keeping technologies as part of the push for more rigorous time management. The US Naval Observatory in 1845 had begun keeping public time for US federal purposes. 6 3 Carlene Stephens, ‘Before Standard Time: Distributing Time in 19th-Century America’, (1985) 28 Vistas in Astronomy, 113. 4 These topics call for more research generally, but can be found throughout the literature list, and especially in Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015). 5 For all of the historical detail, I have relied on the archival work of the authors cited throughout this section. 6 Eviatar Zerubavel, ‘The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective’ (1982) 88 The American Journal of Sociology 5-7; Carlene Stephens, ‘”The Most Reliable Time”’: William Bond, the New England Railroads, and 3 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft In 1851, William Bond in Massachusetts started the first publicly available timekeeping service based on telegraphed time signals. Bond was simultaneously running the Harvard College Observatory and a family business in timekeeping devices, Bond & Son. The time measurements were offered free of charge through the observatory, but the devices necessary to do anything with the measurements were sold through the shop. The commodification of time was also a commercial enterprise, and New England railroads were the primary customers. Their business was enhanced by their invention of a break circuit device that attached to the escapement of a railway clock, with a drum chronograph to record the instant of an astronomical event in a time scale, capable of transmitting that signal by telegraph. The Bonds had originally devised something similar for the US Coast Survey (the oldest civilian scientific agency in the US federal government), to measure lines of longitude, and then adapted it to time-keeping use. 7 The invention reflects two aspects of the object of the railway clock mentioned in the introduction, namely, its intricate technical machinery, set to work in an operation defined by the network to which it was attached. Moreover, the Bonds’ history offers an early example of what becomes a recurring theme: the interconnection of time and space measurement devices, developed, administered and used by mixed civilian and government groups. And by this point in the story, a number of representative characters have already made an appearance: the railroads; time keepers and time keeping devices; government agencies; military offices; and amateur scientists. During the same period, standardised time had also become grounds for legal contest. In 1858, Curtis v. March, a landmark case in England, established local time as controlling under British law. 8 At trial, the defendant, relying on local time, had arrived late to proceedings—but the proceedings were conducted by the court according to GMT. In the defendant’s absence, and on the basis of GMT time-keeping, the trial court awarded judgment to the plaintiff. The judgment was overturned on appeal, establishing local time as the valid measurement for legal proceedings and purposes. The decision represented controlling law until it was reversed by legislative act, in the form of the appropriately named Definition of Time Act of 1880, which also formally indexed standard mean time in England to Greenwich. The case of Curtis v. March reflects, among other things, conflicted relations between courts and indices of uniform time, and underscores that courts did not solely nor straightforwardly determine the contest to control time as a matter of law. 9 In 1874, US Railroads began organising a yearly General Time Convention. William Allen, who plays a larger role here, was appointed secretary. Another figure, Cleveland Abbe, the new head of meteorological services in the US Army Signal Service, enters the story in the same year. Abbe was bothered by the multitude of time standards relied on by the public at large, when they led to analysis problems for observations of an April 1874 aurora among the network of US astronomy enthusiasts. In 1875 Abbe wrote to the American Meteorological Society about the problem as he perceived it. The Society made Abbe Chairman of a new Committee on Standard Time. In that Time Awareness in 19th-Century America’ (1989) 30 Technology and Culture5. 7 Stephens (n 5) 1. 8 Curtis v. March, 157 Eng. Rep. 719 (Ex. Ch. 1858). 9 Jenni Parrish, ‘Litigating Time in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’ (2002) 36 Akron Law Review,3-4. 4 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft capacity, in May 1879, Abbe submitted an ambitious Report on Standard Time. The 1879 Report offered an implementation plan for the adoption of uniform time, including the use of time from observatories and a four-zone system, indexed to Greenwich. The plan focused its attention on government and the railroad and telegraph companies. During the same period, beginning in 1876, Sanford Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, independently began promoting uniform global time zones, each encompassing 15 degrees longitude, at 1 hour time differentials. In early 1880, Abbe and Fleming began a correspondence. Abbe sent his Report to Fleming, and Fleming forwarded it along to scientific societies and government agencies in Canada and England. In their correspondence, Abbe had also suggested an international convention to further the cause. The same year, 1880 (the year of the Definition of Time Act in England), the American Association for the Advancement of Science established the Standard Time Committee, also at Abbe's suggestion. In the following year, the US Naval Observatory had a competing bill introduced in Congress to index uniform time in the US to a Washington DC meridian. That bill failed. This was a period of considerable opposition to standardised mean time spearheaded by the Populist political movement in the US. In this light, it bears noting, that throughout this story it will appear that the US government was better mobilised above and below, so to speak, the level of national legislation: below, at the level of administrative offices; and above, towards ends of international law—even where domestic policy was the primary or ultimate target. 10 In 1881 William Allen became aware of the increasing scope of government involvement in standardised time, including the efforts of the Naval Observatory. The prospect of railroads losing control over the process of keeping time as a matter of law alarmed him. By the following year, Allen developed a comprehensive proposal for standard railway time and time zones. In pitching his plan in 1883, he provided maps of the existing system of forty-nine railroad times, together with maps of a system of five time zones. These maps, together with detailed circulars, were sent to 570 railroads. Moreover, he warned against the whims of ‘the ruling classes’, meaning the US Congress, and the contest for control the legislature represented. 11 Significantly, the concern underlying Allen’s alarm reflected the legal stakes of time controls. As Curtis v. March (and other cases that we will see below) demonstrated, standardised time measurement had the effect of defining and delimiting legal relations. In opposing the government, the railroads meant themselves to define and maintain control of those legal relations. In 1883 US & Canadian railroads collectively and under their own initiative adopted four standard time zones, indexed to Greenwich, unilaterally putting Standard Railway Time into effect across North America. That initiative, it bears reminding, was inseparable from the objects of the railway clocks. The railroads possessed the railway clocks and the networks to which they were joined, and they leveraged that materialised authority to define the value of time for the publics that relied on them. 12 Allen’s initiative kept the railroads ahead of the government operationally within the United States. It was a position that they were able to maintain in conjunction with the object of the railway clock, 10 Ian Bartky, ‘The Adoption of Standard Time’ (1989) 30Technology and Culture 34-39. Bartky, ‘Inventing, Introducing and Objecting to Standard Time’ (1985) 28Vistas in Astronomy, 110. 12 Bartky,(n 9)39-45. 11 5 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft the face of which worked to establish the material reality of railway time across space, cutting through and speaking over the multiplicity of other, local time keeping objects and practices. At the same time, Cleveland Abbe kept the US government at the head of pack internationally. In his capacity as chief scientist of the US Army Signal Service, but also mobilising geographical and meteorological societies, he drafted a joint resolution that called for the United States government to host an international conference on a standard meridian and uniform time. And in 1884, the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC was held. 13 Twenty-five sovereign states participated, their delegations composed largely of professional experts including directors of national observatories, representatives of hydrographic services, and also top naval personnel. 14 As a result of the conference, several things were written into international law. Among them, Greenwich was named the Prime Meridian for the world, the mean time kept at the Royal Observatory defining the ‘Universal Day’. 15 England’s identification with the universal meridian was a point of imperial pride, reflected in the majesterial aesthetic of the railway clock at York, and in still grander clocks in cities throughout the United Kingdom. The French delegates had opposed Greenwich as the Prime Meridian. The motivation was keyed to national interest—an association between control of time standards and national autonomy that persists to this day. But they maintained their opposition by appeal to the ideal of neutrality, which was supposed to obscure their diplomatic self-interest in disqualifying their competitor from possessing the meridian. 16 The American and British, in their counter, also denied their own self-interests, appealing rather to ‘the common good of mankind,’ and ‘citizens of the world.’ 17 These were interesting rhetorical moves that may be familiar to the contemporary reader. Both sides appealed in conflicting fashion to universalist values, in a contest to enjoy particular control of the so-called Universal Day. Moreover, these diplomatic appeals to universalist values were happening at the same time as local opposition mounted to the objectives for which these universalist arguments were waged. As international time keeping was consolidated, local opposition across the US had escalated. In 1883, Bangor’s mayor barred Railroad Standard Time under law. Elsewhere, an Indianapolis editorial lamented domination of life experiences by railroad time. Savannah, Georgia; cities throughout Ohio; Bath, Maine; Detroit and Port Huron, Michigan, all saw controversy. There was a general and coordinated appeal among clergy to what was called God's Time, against railroad time. 18 In 1889, a Georgia court maintained solar time, rejecting railroad time as ‘an arbitrary and artificial standard of time, fixed by persons in a certain line of business’. 19 The Court held that ‘[t]o allow the railroads to fix the standard of time would be to allow them at pleasure to violate 13 Rebekah Higgitt and Graham Dolan, ‘Greenwich, time and “the line”’ (2010) 34Endeavour, 35. Zerubavel(n 5),15. 15 The text of the Convention and proceedings are available on the web via Project Gutenberg, at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17759/17759-h/17759-h.htm#Page_13 (last accessed 6 May 2017). 16 International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day: Protocols of the Proceedings (October, 1884)36, 55-57. 17 Ibid, 6, 75. 18 Bartky(n 9) 49-54; Parrish (n 8), 6. 19 Henderson v. Reynolds, 10 S.E. 734, 735 (Ga. 1889). 14 6 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft or defeat the law.’ 20 The language of the Court’s judgment made clear the degree to which the command of law had been conjoined in legal imagination with the definition of time. In 1890, in Searles v. Averhoff, an appellate court again ruled against railroad standard time. 21 But the power and constitutive potential of standardised time continued to grow. In 1891, the American Railway Association was established at the General Time Convention—the Time Convention becoming the platform for establishing the identity of the association as a whole. As an aside, an interesting sort of inversion has occurred here. In its purpose and operation, the railway clock was defined by the material networks to which it was joined—but now the associative networks became defined by the time these objects produced. Finally, however, in 1918, the US Standard Time Act was successfully passed, authorising the US Interstate Commerce Committee to set boundaries between time zones as a matter of federal law. From this point on, the railroads recede from the frontline of ongoing time-control developments in the US, as they already had in England, having achieved—in combination with (though sometimes despite and sometimes thanks to) the other parties in this story—their fundamental goal of a universal measurement system capable of defining relations uniformly under law according to an abstract and mechanically-kept standard, which railway clocks reproduce to this day. Further reflections on time and law What does the time line reveal? It reveals a mix of participants falling on either side of the traditional private and public divide. All could qualify as elite: gentlemen scientists, railroad chiefs, military administrators; involving private and public offices, mobilised in local courts and international conventions. They were not always operating in lockstep. Rather, they were competing to control the definition of standardised time under law. They did this with one set of time keeping devices, namely railway clocks joined to telegraphs and observatories, competing with others, such as watches and church towers. The organisation and reach of the network, as well as in some cases the grandiosity of the clock itself, made railway clocks powerful allies in this contest. The courts were not typically at the vanguard of the same—but this should not diminish an appreciation of the role played by law. Neither international law nor the legal system in the US, for instance, provided instruments or actors that singularly established standardised time. But law was central in two other respects. One, because legal and governmental offices were nonetheless crucial to the strategies that ultimately succeeded in establishing standardised time around the world. And two, because law did provide the web of entitlements and constraints that made establishing standardised time an urgent and competitive venture for the railroads and others in the first place. Moreover, even as opposition to standardised time was being recognised in national courts, other legal offices in government were being mobilised—ultimately successfully—to endorse it. In that way, law contributed to the construction of standardised time. How has standardised time 20 21 ibid. Searles v. Averhoff, 44 N.W. 872 (Neb. 1890). 7 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft contributed to the construction of transnational law? Law has been defined as the stabilisation of expectations. 22 Expectation is a function of time. Standardised time defines a common temporal basis for expectations, establishing conditions conducive to their management. The abstraction of standardised time allows a normative link, in the form of a common basis of expectations, across otherwise disparate normative regimes (even more so when the connections at issue are global, and not localised to one country or another). Moreover, mastery of temporal terms contributed to—and contributes to—mastery of the legal relations they support. And this reflects the central importance of establishing standardised time in the first place. The ability to define expectations, and thereby master the legal relations defined in turn by those expectations, is the principal leitmotif throughout the story above—whether in William Allen’s alarmed reaction to government involvement, or the diplomatic jockeying at the International Meridian Conference, or the language of the Georgia court in 1889. The capacity to define relations explains the urgency of the efforts chronicled in the time line. As Carol Greenhouse has made clear in A moment's notice: time politics across cultures, time—not just standardised time—has been consistently crucial to governing regimes, but differently according to different contexts and values of time. 23 And as Mariana Valverde has made clear in Chronotopes of law: Jurisdiction, scale and governance, the value of time is fundamental to the assertion of jurisdiction. 24 Moreover, standardised time, by its ubiquity today, is an example par excellence of international law, as part of what may now be called transnational law, achieving a universalising effect in everyday life, establishing a common time standard across the globe. Where once the railway clock competed with local time keeping devices, now countless watches, clocks and other time-keeping objects are coordinated together with the railway clock. When the American Society of International Law commemorated its century mark in 2006, it produced a list of 100 accomplishments to celebrate: universal time calibrated to the Greenwich Meridian was first on the list; uniform units of time measurement were sixth.25 But despite the triumphalism of the American Society of International Law, the relation between law and time has otherwise been either artificially separated, or black-boxed. By separated, I mean that issues of time are treated as external to law, something ‘out there’, to be reckoned with—or, conversely, that law is peripheral to the study of time. By black-boxed, I mean that the connection between time and law, when recognized at all, is taken for granted, the product of their interaction treated as closed or inevitable, its contingency on specific choices and values marginalized or ignored. 26 But the brief time line here already demonstrates that there is nothing inevitable in their history of interrelationship: the two together have been maintained and mobilised on the basis of specific and contingent legal and political strategies, for specific and contingent legal and political purposes, to the specific and 22 See Niklas Luhmann, Klaus Ziegert, and Fatima Kastner, Law as a social system (Oxford University Press, 2004). Carol Greenhouse, A moment's notice: time politics across cultures (Cornell University Press, 1996). 24 Mariana Valverde, Chronotopes of law: Jurisdiction, scale and governance (Routledge, 2015). 25 Lucinda Low, International Law: 100 Ways It Shapes Our Lives (American Society of International Law, 2006). 26 I am borrowing the vocabulary popularised by Bruno Latour, among others. See, eg, Bruno Latour, ‘How to Write the Prince for Machines as well as for Machinations’, in Brian Elliott, ed., Technology and Social Change (Edinburgh University Press, 1988) 13, 17. 23 8 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft contingent advantage of some—and corresponding disadvantage of others. The point borrows from the one made by Fleur Johns in her work Non-legality in International law: Unruly Law. 27 Johns has shed light on the practice of delimiting the legal field and exercising power within it by defining what exists beyond its ostensible scope. When the nature of time is held to be outside the scope of law, or inaccessible to it, that has consequences for persons and practices within the field. In short, the presumption of law’s irrelevance or inapplicability is also an argument about the law, which represents choices of values and policy associated with the law. Fundamentally, and since its inception, the maintenance of standardised time undergirds transnational networks predicated on transactional—and, hence, contractual—engagements. The values associated with time, however, have not remained entirely static. 28 Though now taken for granted, the precise value of standardised time and the nature of its interrelationship with law remains contingent on choices and conditions made every day. The products of some of those choices have put enormous pressure lately on national and international arrangements under law. In combination with satellites, cables, and the technologies of nuclear clocks, for instance, increasingly precise standardised time measurements enable information systems capable of reliably transmitting large amounts of information nearly instantaneously, and likewise they underlie the transactional exploitation of that system, whether in futures trading on the Chicago Board of Trade market, via big data aggregation, or through restricted intellectual property exchanges. Standardised time enables GPS (the Global Positioning System) and other global navigation satellite systems. Global navigation satellite systems are, among other things, a critical part of military and security technologies such as drones. For these reasons DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency in the US Department of Defense) is working presently both to improve the precision of cesium (atomic) clocks, and to miniaturise them for deployment in the field with military personnel. 29 What began with an assemblage of telegraphs, railway tracks, observatories and clocks, has continued to develop into countless new technologies, still elaborating on the global standardisation of time in conjunction with transnational law to achieve an expanding menu of purposes. Those purposes today are still largely related to transactional concerns of commerce and finance, but also include security and other political objectives that recall the imperial dimensions of this story, manifest on the face of the clock at York. In sum, the co-production of standardised time and transnational law has been and remains crucial to two fundamental aspects of liberal-capitalist ordering, namely, property and security. Likewise, in the scientific celebration of science, conveyed by the pretense to a universal and uniform good, 27 Fleur Johns, Non-legality in International law: Unruly Law (CUP, 2013). See Hartmut Rosa, Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity (Columbia University Press, 2013). 29 ‘DARPA-funded Atomic Clock Sets Record for Stability’, in DARPA News, http://www.darpa.mil/newsevents/2013-08-29 (last accessed 6 May 2017); ‘Reducing Tics in the Tocks of Atomic Clocks: If GPS goes down, more stable atomic clocks could save the day’, in CHIPS: The Department of the Navy's Information Technology Magazine, http://www.doncio.navy.mil/(2cb4hzjjev04ch45uageewao)/CHIPS/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=7274 (last accessed 6 May 2017). 28 9 Geoff Gordon: g.gordon@asser.nl Author’s final draft standardised time also represents liberal-capitalist ideology. It is a naturalised artifice that ubiquitously interpellates the vocabularies of rationalism and progress into countless interactions every day. As such, in their interrelationship, standardised time and transnational law have played a central role in enabling the global expansion of liberal-capitalist orders. Here, I have focused on the object of the railway clock as it has contributed in its materiality to the co-production of standardised time and transnational law. The number of coordinate objects, together with the number of networks in which they operate, has multiplied over time. Standardised time and transnational law are reproduced today with myriad technologies—hardware and software, circuits and clocks, smart devices and satellites—enabling countless transactions in networks spanning the globe. The materiality of these networks belies the ideological assumption of anything other than a contingent condition—but equally so, the sheer material scope of these networked objects attests to their power, and structures the values historically linked to universal, uniform time. In addition to rationalism and progress, regimentation, efficiency, acceleration and risk avoidance have all been associated with standardised time, recognised by law, and acknowledged as values. 30 This chapter has addressed how standardised time and transnational law have been developed together in networks that defy traditional legal and political delimitation. It is a sketch of the foundational interrelationship of transnational law and standardised time, manifest in the object of the railway clock, in the operation of which can be discerned some of the values prioritised in transnational legal relations, their foundations and maintenance. Their example remains pertinent to debates over the distribution of values supported by networks under transnational law today— public and private networks, regulatory and commercial—connected under law by common terms of expectation defined by standardised time, as pronounced by railway clocks from the 19th century onwards. Referring back one last time to the image of the object for this chapter, the massive clock at York reflects the mix of imperial and industrial ambitions that it carried, together with the host of actors, offices and other objects canvassed in this story, to produce mutually implicating systems of globally standardised time and transnational law for transactional purposes. 30 See Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015). 10