Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South

Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy’s reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners — particularly masters and their slaves — came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrat...