Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History, edited by Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley – University of Chicago Press, December 2020

Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley bring together essays that challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts— “power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how “temporal regimes” are constituted through the shaping of power in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on a wide variety of subjects: human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and innovative contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

Ann Stoler, The New School

“What a gift this magnificent edited volume will be for those of us who have long sought to identify the implicit and violent ways in which power is garnered in battles over timing and time. With conceptual and empirical acuity, this is a volume that ‘harasses’ disciplinary strictures as it explodes the most revered canons. Moving from ‘multiple temporalities’ to conflictual ones is at the heart of this collective agenda, each author showing why such a conceptual and methodological move disrupts the seamlessness of linear histories and are critical moves we need to make. Here is a volume of depth, creativity, and inspiration for those long obsessed with thinking time and temporalities and for those who have not broached how profoundly such thinking recalibrates our collective futures—both their dark diagnostics and enabling horizons.”

Udi Greenberg, Dartmouth College

“This exciting and wide-ranging collection explores a crucial nexus of modern life: how social-political visions and conceptions of time shape each other. Its dazzling collection of case studies brings to life political leaders, scientists, economists, activists, and jurists as the authors chart how the interaction between temporality and authority transformed life across the globe. With original research and fresh methodological insights, Power and Time is a vital contribution to our understanding of contemporary history.”

Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University

“In Power and Time, Edelstein, Geroulanos, and Wheatley have curated a constellation of essays that take up the fascinating and vexed relation between the history of time and the times of history. The essays provide incredible range but maintain a tight thematic focus through the analytical pairing of power and time. In doing so, they offer an original and comprehensive survey of temporal regimes and the reciprocal feedback loop between the nodes of power that create them and the means by which that power is maintained. Power and Timeis impressive in scope and depth and an important contribution to the new metaphysics of time.”