"By the fourteenth century, merchant’s time was replacing the church’s time. In the textile producing regions of Ghent and Flanders, in cities like Amiens and Florence, bourgeois aldermen successfully petitioned kings and bishops to have belfry clocks “ring a bell . . . when the workers of the . . . city and its suburbs should go each morning to work, when they should eat, and when they should return to work after eating; and also, in the evening, when they should quit work for the day.”[7] Under these concordats, secular time driven by economic concerns replaced liturgical time.
The measurement of time rolled out a new relationship of power that would define the modern political economy. Workers were now conscious of their measureable productivity, and not simply their busyness at any given time." - Robert Wylie