Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American SouthMastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners particularly masters and their slaves came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth and nineteenth century