‘Time’ in the Time of Empire: The Idea of Linear Time during the Era of Late Colonial-Capitalism from William Marsden to Munshi Abdullah

Though many historical accounts of Western Imperialism and Colonialism have been written by now, most of these works have tended to focus upon the conquest of territorial space. This paper looks at another, under-studied, dimension of colonial expansionism in Southeast Asia, and will consider how ‘time’ was also a concern among Western colonialists of the 18th to 20th centuries. It will look at how a distinctly Western understanding of time – as something singular, linear, uni-directional and teleological – was brought to the region by Western colonialists and Orientalists, and how the imposition of this linear understanding of time effectively marginalised and erased local understandings of time, history and chronology among native Southeast Asians themselves.