acknowledGemenTs

in THeory, the pool of intellectual debt ought to shrink with each new book, as one grows older and more independent. In my experience, the opposite has been the case. As you get older, you get less shy about asking for help and you venture further into terrain where you depend on the guidance of oth‑ ers. This book could not have been written without the en‑ couragement, conversation, and advice of many friends and colleagues. Special thanks go to the following, who read all or part of the manuscript and offered detailed comments and stimulating suggestions: Deborah Baker, David Barclay, Peter Burke, Marcus Colla, Amitav Ghosh, Oliver Haardt, Charlotte Johann, Duncan Kelly, Jürgen Luh, Annika Seemann, John Thompson, Adam Tooze, Alexandra Walsham, and Waseem Yaqoob. As then‑anonymous reviewers for Princeton Univer‑ sity Press, François Hartog, Jürgen Osterhammel, and Andy Rabinbach made enormously helpful comments on the man‑ uscript. Nora Berend, Francisco de Bethencourt, Tim Blan‑ ning, Annabel Brett, Matthew Champion, Kate Clark, Allegra Fryxell, Alexander Geppert, Beatrice de Graaf, Paul Hartle, Ulrich Herbert, Shruti Kapila, Hans‑Christof Kraus, Jona‑ than Lamb, Rose Melikan, Bridget Orr, Anna Ross, Kevin Rudd, Magnus Ryan, Martin Sabrow, and Quentin Skinner all offered precious advice on specific issues or passages of text. Nina Lübbren’s writing and thinking about time and nar‑ rative in art have shaped the book in many ways. Josef and Alexander, once happy distractions from the work of writing, have grown into thoughtful conversation partners whose in‑ sights nudged me through various bottlenecks. Kristina Spohr

[ ix ] [ x ] acknowledGemenTs read and commented on the text at many stages in its evo‑ lution and sustained its author with criticism, advice, and companionship. The History Department of Princeton University gave me the opportunity to develop the ideas explored in this book by inviting me to present the Lawrence Stone Lectures in April 2015, and my thanks go to Brigitta van Rheinberg of Princeton University Press for her encouragement of this proj‑ ect from its inception and Brigitte Pelner, Amanda Peery, and Joseph Dahm for help with the preparation of the text for pub‑ lication. I am grateful to my colleagues at the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge and at St Catharine’s College, and to one in particular, Sir Christopher Bayly, who died in April 2015. Even now, whenever I walk into the main court of St Catharine’s of an afternoon, I look across to the window of C3, on the off chance that Chris might be leaning in his shirt sleeves on the window sill and invite me up for a drink. The conversations that followed always led to unexpected places. Time is an elusive but also an inescapable subject matter, especially now that the relationship between past, present, and future has become such a central preoccupation of politics and public discourse. In times of flux, the most lasting things ac‑ quire heightened value, which is why I dedicate this book to my sister Kate and my brother Justin, who were there (almost) from the start. Time and Power fiGUre 1.1. Frederick William, the Great Elector, engraving by Pieter de Jode from a portrait by Anselmus van Hulle. Source: Anselmus van Hulle, Les hommes illustres qui ont vécu dans le XVII. siècle… (Amsterdam, 1717).