ABSTRACT
In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, the nineteenth century was the age of industrialization, spreading nationalism and standardization. The multiplicity of pre- and early modern systems of measurement and calendars were replaced by fewer, as typically adopted by the West’s great powers and tacitly enforced on the rest of the world through commerce and imperialism. Trains, in order to ply seamlessly from Paris to Moscow and from London to Istanbul, needed compatible timetables, exactly the same gauges, and the same system of measures and weights. Obviously, this homogenizing ideal of a single set of standards as needed by technology and trade has not been achieved to this day, but the number of different systems was radically reduced. In 1851 the British decided to establish a prime meridian at London’s Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In the subsequent three decades two thirds of maps began to be produced with the use of this “Greenwich meridian,” which became accepted by virtually all cartographers by the turn of the twentieth century. In 1875, at Paris, all the great powers (bar Britain), including the Ottoman Empire, and alongside a clutch of independent nation-states from all around the world, signed the Metre Convention. This was the beginning of the metric system as it is known today. The United Kingdom with its worldwide empire preferred to stick to the mile and pound, or its own “imperial system” of weights and measures. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII promulgated a New Style Calendar, also known as “Gregorian,” in contrast to the former Julian (Roman) Calendar (“New Style”) calendar, originally proposed by Julius Cesar in 45 BCE. Because the sixteenth century was the high point of the religious strife between Catholics and Protestants, at first only Catholic polities adopted the Gregorian Calendar, namely Poland-Lithuania and the Habsburgs in Central Europe. Apart from Prussia, which adopted the new calendar in 1610, other Protestant polities within the Holy Roman Empire vacillated for a century longer, while Britain and Scandinavia’s kingdoms followed suit even later, only in the mid-eighteenth century. The Ottomans, the Russian Empire and the Balkans’ Orthodox nation-states desisted until after the Great War. Bolshevik Russia adopted the already two and a half centuries old “new” calendar in 1918, Greece in 1922, and the post-Ottoman Turkey as late as 1926. However, within Greece and the European Union, the Autonomous Monastic State of Mount Athos continues using the Julian Calendar to this day.
