Michael: I don't know whether you're referring to David Landes's thesis about medieval European clocks. He falsely asserts that they regulated labor time -- actually nobody regulated labor time until there was the discipline of factory labor and essentially an industrial revolution. Landes -- the most Eurocentric of modern historians -- simply "telescopes history," seeing modern practices and attitudes in the middle Middle Ages. Needham, also Nathan Sivin, have shown (as you note) that clocks are as old and as important in China as in Europe Cheers Jim B
