Timezones and Colonialism

I sometimes joke with people in other timezones that as an "unreconstructed Imperialist" (I'm nothing of the kind) I think we should use GMT for the whole world all the time (yes, even British Summer Time)

Like if it's 10 o'clock in the morning in London then it's also 10 o'clock in the morning in Paris, Moscow, Delhi, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

There'd never be any more confusion about whether we meant 10 o'clock your time or 10 o'clock my time, they'd just be the same thing!

That's a crazy extreme example - and a joke. But what got me thinking about this yesterday was talking to a client in Kuala Lumpur and having the common issue of misunderstanding over what time we were actually meeting.

And afterwards, I was thinking "I bet Malaysia doesn't have DST so when we talk after March, I'm going to have to pay attention again to the time difference being one hour less." So I had a look at the Wikipedia page for Time in Malaysia and yes I was right, but... woah, then I looked at the section on the history of it.

"The local mean time in Kuala Lumpur was originally GMT+06:46:46" So if it's 10am where I am, it would be 16:46:46 - I love the 46 seconds btw! That is until 1901 when the Malay Peninsula took on the same mean time as Singapore which was (counting on my fingers, 8 minutes 39 seconds later at GMT+06:55:25) but that was only for 4 years when it got standardised to GMT+07:00:00. OK. So Malaysia is a particularly complicated example. But it strikes me as one of those things that we're not even conscious of now, that standardised time came out of industrialisation and then spread across the world because the industrial powers "ran" their colonies. It just feels like a really deep way to control other peoples, to not only take control of their economy and extract wealth but to even change what time of day it is, to make things easier for the empire!