PublicPast · Journal of Public History
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The modern world is closely related to the precise measurement of time . Everyday activities revolves around clocks, schedules and timetables across the globe. The article focuses on the history of timekeeping in Europe from the appearance of early mechanical clocks in the late Middle Ages to the standardization of time in the nineteenth century. The mechanical clock became important because it was gradually integrated into everyday urban life. It influenced commerce, transport, work, and individual behaviour. The article focuses on different temporal arrangements that were made before the rise of mechanized clocks. It describes how public clocks and timekeeping became more widespread throughout European cities. It also discusses the increasing economic relevance of strict time division and regulation. The article highlights innovations that made individuals responsible for measuring time as a new phenomenon that required society to think about regulating time on a larger scale. It concludes that modernity involved a fundamental change in temporal organization and a revaluation of the role of time measurement in societies.
Somewhere in India today, a civil services aspirant is underlining a line in their notes: "The Indus Valley people worshipped a Mother Goddess." The sentence sits comfortably next to facts about drainage systems and granaries, presented with the same air of settled certainty. It will likely appear, in some form, on an answer sheet this year. What the aspirant is unlikely to know is that this "fact" is a nearly century old interpretive guess, one that the discipline of archaeology itself has long since been complicated, qualified, and in many cases abandoned. This editorial is about that gap, between what historians and archaeologists now understand about the Indus Valley Civilization, and what continues to circulate as unquestioned truth in India's civic and educational institutions.
A young student today can meet the past without ever opening a history book. A search engine supplies the first answer and a short video the first narrative, while a platform decides what appears next. Increasingly, the first "historian" a student talks to may be an artificial intelligence system. The shift looks ordinary, yet it raises a question that historians now have to answer. Who tells us the past when the historian is no longer the only interpreter of history?
This article examines the role of railways in the political economy of colonialism across Asia and Africa, arguing that colonial rail infrastructure was designed primarily as an instrument of resource extraction rather than as a mechanism for integrated regional development. Drawing on economic history scholarship concerned with British India, East Africa, Central Africa, and southern Africa, the article traces four interlocking dimensions of colonial railway systems: their spatial orientation toward coastal ports rather than interior connectivity; the financial arrangements that transferred fiscal risk onto colonised populations while delivering returns to metropolitan investors; the restructuring of agricultural land use toward export monocultures; and the organised movement of coerced and indentured labour along rail corridors. The article further contends that the developmental asymmetries produced by these systems were not incidental byproducts of otherwise neutral infrastructure, but structural outcomes of an imperial economic logic. Evidence drawn from famines in late nineteenth-century India, the labour regimes of southern African mining, and the post-independence persistence of colonial transport geographies in Ghana and elsewhere supports this contention. The article concludes that reading colonial-era railway maps as records of extraction rather than as evidence of modernisation offers a more historically accurate framework for understanding the infrastructural inheritances that continue to shape economic geography across the Global South.
The Silk Road is popularly remembered as a conduit for luxury goods: bolts of silk, jars of spice, and porcelain packed into camel saddlebags moving between China and the Mediterranean. That picture is not wrong, but it is badly incomplete. The same roads, river crossings, oasis towns, and caravanserais that carried silk also carried things nobody had packed on purpose. Fleas riding on marmots and grain sacks carried *Yersinia pestis* out of the Central Asian steppe and, centuries later, into the crowded cities of Europe. Buddhist monks, Nestorian Christian missionaries, and Muslim traders carried scripture, liturgy, and law along the same routes their goods traveled, converting entire steppe confederations in the process. Papermaking, gunpowder, and printing moved from Chinese workshops into Islamic and then European hands, arguably reshaping the trajectory of world history more than any bolt of cloth ever did. This article draws on recent archaeogenetic research, religious history, and the history of technology to argue that the Silk Road's deepest legacy was not commercial but infrastructural: it built a durable set of human and animal connections across Eurasia, and those connections carried whatever was capable of moving along them, wanted or not. The article closes by considering what this braided history of contagion, conversion, and invention suggests about how connectivity itself, rather than any single good, is the true unit of historical analysis.
There is a question that has grown more insistent with each passing decade, and it sits at the heart of what this journal intends to pursue: who, exactly, does public history belong to? The question is not merely academic. It is political, ethical, and deeply personal. It concerns the monuments that line our avenues, the museums that school children file through on rainy mornings, the community elders whose testimonies go unrecorded, and the algorithms that now decide which version of the past reaches us first. It concerns power, in other words, and the uneven distribution of the authority to narrate.
