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The hidden politics of time: How clocks, calendars and time zones came to be

The hidden politics of time: How clocks, calendars and time zones came to be

B1๐Ÿ‡ฐ๐Ÿ‡ท ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด โ†’ ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ English

August 14th, 2026

The hidden politics of time: How clocks, calendars and time zones came to be

B1
Please note: This article has been simplified for language learning purposes. Some context and nuance from the original text may have been modified or removed.

๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ English

Time is a concern for everyone, but people have never measured it in the same way.

์‹œ๊ฐ„์€ ๋ชจ๋“  ์‚ฌ๋žŒ์—๊ฒŒ ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ๋ฌธ์ œ์ด์ง€๋งŒ, ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์€ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์„ ๊ฐ™์€ ๋ฐฉ์‹์œผ๋กœ ์ธก์ •ํ•œ ์ ์ด ์—†์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

The way we track time has been shaped by culture, religion, economics, and politics.

์šฐ๋ฆฌ๊ฐ€ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์„ ์ธก์ •ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐฉ์‹์€ ๋ฌธํ™”, ์ข…๊ต, ๊ฒฝ์ œ, ์ •์น˜์˜ ์˜ํ–ฅ์„ ๋ฐ›์•˜์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Elizabeth Cohen, a political science professor at Boston University, says every way of measuring time is chosen by people.

๋ณด์Šคํ„ด ๋Œ€ํ•™๊ต์˜ ์ •์น˜ํ•™ ๊ต์ˆ˜์ธ ์—˜๋ฆฌ์ž๋ฒ ์Šค ์ฝ”ํ—จ์€ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์„ ์ธก์ •ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ชจ๋“  ๋ฐฉ์‹์€ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์ด ์„ ํƒํ•œ๋‹ค๊ณ  ๋งํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

None of it is natural.

๊ทธ์ค‘ ์–ด๋А ๊ฒƒ๋„ ์ž์—ฐ์Šค๋Ÿฌ์šด ๊ฒƒ์ด ์•„๋‹™๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Calendars have been very different across history.

๋‹ฌ๋ ฅ์€ ์—ญ์‚ฌ์— ๋”ฐ๋ผ ์•„์ฃผ ๋‹ฌ๋ž์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Some follow the sun, some follow the moon, and some follow both.

์–ด๋–ค ๋‹ฌ๋ ฅ์€ ํƒœ์–‘์„ ๋”ฐ๋ฅด๊ณ , ์–ด๋–ค ๋‹ฌ๋ ฅ์€ ๋‹ฌ์„ ๋”ฐ๋ฅด๋ฉฐ, ์–ด๋–ค ๋‹ฌ๋ ฅ์€ ๋‘˜ ๋‹ค ๋”ฐ๋ฆ…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Even today, the Gregorian calendar is used worldwide, but other calendars are still used for religious or cultural reasons.

์˜ค๋Š˜๋‚ ์—๋„ ๊ทธ๋ ˆ๊ณ ๋ฆฌ๋ ฅ์€ ์ „ ์„ธ๊ณ„์—์„œ ์“ฐ์ด์ง€๋งŒ, ๋‹ค๋ฅธ ๋‹ฌ๋ ฅ๋“ค์€ ์ข…๊ต๋‚˜ ๋ฌธํ™”์ ์ธ ์ด์œ ๋กœ ์—ฌ์ „ํžˆ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Daylight saving time shows a wish for natural time, says Michael Oโ€™Malley, a history professor at George Mason University.

์ผ๊ด‘ ์ ˆ์•ฝ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์€ ์ž์—ฐ์ ์ธ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์— ๋Œ€ํ•œ ๋ฐ”๋žŒ์„ ๋ณด์—ฌ์ค€๋‹ค๊ณ  ์กฐ์ง€ ๋ฉ”์ด์Šจ ๋Œ€ํ•™๊ต์˜ ์—ญ์‚ฌํ•™ ๊ต์ˆ˜ ๋งˆ์ดํด ์˜ค๋ง๋ฆฌ๊ฐ€ ๋งํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

He notes that it only makes sense in a society that is fully focused on clocks.

๊ทธ๋Š” ๊ทธ๊ฒƒ์ด ์‹œ๊ณ„์— ์™„์ „ํžˆ ์ง‘์ค‘ํ•˜๋Š” ์‚ฌํšŒ์—์„œ๋งŒ ์˜๋ฏธ๊ฐ€ ์žˆ๋‹ค๊ณ  ์ง€์ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Industrialization changed time from a natural rhythm to a fixed schedule.

์‚ฐ์—…ํ™”๋Š” ์‹œ๊ฐ„์„ ์ž์—ฐ์Šค๋Ÿฌ์šด ๋ฆฌ๋“ฌ์—์„œ ๊ณ ์ •๋œ ์ผ์ •์œผ๋กœ ๋ฐ”๊พธ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

It tried to give people a regular, unchanging sense of time, Oโ€™Malley says.

์˜ค๋ง๋ฆฌ๋Š” ๊ทธ๊ฒƒ์ด ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์—๊ฒŒ ๊ทœ์น™์ ์ด๊ณ  ๋ณ€ํ•˜์ง€ ์•Š๋Š” ์‹œ๊ฐ„ ๊ฐ๊ฐ์„ ์ฃผ๋ ค๊ณ  ํ–ˆ๋‹ค๊ณ  ๋งํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

In the 1800s, U.S. railroads created a four-zone system in 1883 to make time the same across the country.

1800๋…„๋Œ€์— ๋ฏธ๊ตญ ์ฒ ๋„๋Š” 1883๋…„์— ์ „๊ตญ์—์„œ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์„ ๊ฐ™๊ฒŒ ํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด 4๊ฐœ ๊ตฌ์—ญ ์ฒด๊ณ„๋ฅผ ๋งŒ๋“ค์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

The Prime Meridian, which runs through Greenwich, England, was chosen in 1884 because Britain was a strong empire, says Kevin Birth, an anthropology professor at Queens College.

์ž‰๊ธ€๋žœ๋“œ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๋‹ˆ์น˜๋ฅผ ์ง€๋‚˜๋Š” ๋ณธ์ดˆ ์ž์˜ค์„ ์€ 1884๋…„์— ์„ ํƒ๋˜์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํ€ธ์Šค ์นผ๋ฆฌ์ง€์˜ ์ธ๋ฅ˜ํ•™ ๊ต์ˆ˜์ธ ์ผ€๋นˆ ๋ฒ„์Šค๋Š” ์˜๊ตญ์ด ๊ฐ•ํ•œ ์ œ๊ตญ์ด์—ˆ๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์ด๋ผ๊ณ  ๋งํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Time zones are political, because countries and states make their own rules.

์‹œ๊ฐ„๋Œ€๋Š” ์ •์น˜์ ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ตญ๊ฐ€์™€ ์ฃผ๋“ค์ด ์ž์‹ ์˜ ๊ทœ์น™์„ ๋งŒ๋“ค๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

China has one official time zone for national unity, though locals adjust to natural daylight.

์ค‘๊ตญ์€ ๊ตญ๊ฐ€ ํ†ต์ผ์„ ์œ„ํ•ด ๊ณต์‹ ์‹œ๊ฐ„๋Œ€ ํ•˜๋‚˜๋ฅผ ์‚ฌ์šฉํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ ํ˜„์ง€์ธ๋“ค์€ ์ž์—ฐ ํ–‡๋น›์— ๋งž์ถฐ ์ƒํ™œํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Time can also be used to control disagreement, such as through curfews or strikes.

์‹œ๊ฐ„์€ ์˜๊ฒฌ ์ฐจ์ด๋ฅผ ํ†ต์ œํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ๋„ ์“ฐ์ผ ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์˜ˆ๋ฅผ ๋“ค์–ด ํ†ตํ–‰ ๊ธˆ์ง€๋‚˜ ํŒŒ์—…์„ ํ†ตํ•ด์„œ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Cohen says time has a lot of power.

์ฝ”ํ—จ์€ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์ด ํฐ ํž˜์„ ๊ฐ€์ง„๋‹ค๊ณ  ๋งํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

People fight over it to control others or to free themselves from control.

์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์€ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์„ ๋‘๊ณ  ์‹ธ์›๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‹ค๋ฅธ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ์„ ํ†ต์ œํ•˜๊ฑฐ๋‚˜ ํ†ต์ œ์—์„œ ๋ฒ—์–ด๋‚˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด์„œ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

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