MariTIME: Disruptions and Temporality in Maritime Business and Labour

During the last four centuries, maritime businesses have created organizational and technological disruptions within the world of shipping. This panel explores how these disruptions have changed and shaped time, temporality, and time-consciousness in maritime business and labor in American, European, and global markets. The three papers explore disruptive processes, including vying interpretations of the meaning of time as new business models challenged ascendant practices (Knox Tucker), the technological transition from sail to steam (Tinning), and the unfreedom sailors experienced as time-space compression restricted their lives (Markkula). Businesses have long drawn connections between time and profits, seeking to maximize revenues by minimizing transit and task times. This panel problematizes that axiomatic relationship by viewing it through the lens of highly contested paradigm-shifting processes in the maritime sector. Relying on archival evidence, datasets, and oral histories, the papers argue that disruptions in how businesses account for time and reimagine it in new ways have profound consequences for managers, consumers, and workers in capitalist societies. Together, the three papers combine insights from business history, social history, and historical ethnography to present new interpretations of time as a site of disruptive contestation. By doing so, the session compares and contrasts developments within a global industry over a span of four centuries.