Pre-Industrial Rural Time. Modern societies schedule work routines, household management, sleep, and entertainment according to demarcations of time. This temporal allocation is a product of an abstract reckoning generally based on a twenty-four-hour day and a seven-day week. This way of thinking had much to do with the increasing importance of efficiency and profit in business or industrial enterprises. Pre-industrial life, in contrast, took place in a different temporal system. For peasants across Europe, time was calculated by seasonal and agricultural rhythms and by the social routines of the village. The year was not primarily conceived in terms of months, but rather as veillees, times for sowing, haying, and harvesting in rural France. These events were social occasions at which villagers gathered to repair farm implements, shell nuts, spin thread, embroider, or prepare jams or wine. They began sometime after...