IT IS GENERALLY ACCEPTED that the sixteenth-century Iberians acted as pioneer navigators and discoverers with a sense of space - a sense of non-European space - different from that of most Europeans of that century. I am suggesting that, as European settlers in non-European areas, they acted from their first dealings with non-European peoples - peoples of Africa, Asia, America - with a sense or a notion of time different from that of most Europeans of the era of the most important European settlements in the same areas. I know it is out of fashion to speak of space ant time separately, I am referring, however, to different historical knowledges of space and time. From this point of view, I am suggesting that in relation to space Iberian nagivators were more advanced in their scientific knowledge than most Europeans engaged at the same task; and that in relation to time they were less advanced in their scientific knowledge than most of their European competitors or rivals in the conquest of non-European lands and peoples.

     This lag had disadvantages for them of an economic character. But, as I am about to suggest, it possibly had certain advantages of a psychosocial or psychocultural kind.

     Professor R. H. Tawney, in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, suggests that Spain and Portugal did not reap the material harvest of the empires into which they stepped in Asia. To Asia he might have added Africa and remote islands in the Pacific and in the West Indies and, to a certain extent, continental America itself.

     In all these areas one might agree with Professor Tawney that Spain and Portugal were mainly the political agents of more astute Europeans better versed in the arts of economic exploitation of non-Europeans. Most of the non-European lands where they established themselves did not bring them much material profit; nor had the Spaniards and the Portuguese who conquered these lands for their king and for the Roman Catholic Church reached a capitalistic and bourgeois phase in their technical and economic development so as to organize themselves, among non-European populations and in the face of Eastern and tropical values desired by European populations, with that efficiency generally associated with capitalism and with a capitalistic bourgeoisie.

     They were archaic in this and archaic also in their sense of time: a preindustrial sense of time that did not associate time with economic production or with money and so made them satisfied with their slow vessels for the transportation of goods from the East and from the tropics to Europe. It was by developing a more rapid type of vessel for his commercial purpose that the Dutch and the England won a remarkable victory over the Spaniards and the Portuguese in the inter-European competition over Eastern and tropical markets. This is a fact that has not received adequate attention. But it is import and significant.

     Even before the invention of the steam engine and the beginning, through express trains, of an Anglo-Saxon cult of speed, quickness of motion and velocity, and, at the same time, of promptness, of punctuality, of the habit of being always exactly on time - never late - North Europeans began to associate their economic activity with the Puritanical notion that "time is money" and money, not something to be looked down upon, but the sign of a prosperity protected by God. The typical Iberian man never followed this almost purely pragmatic, although also religious, philosophy of time.

     Naval historians of the British, like James A Williamson in The Ocean in English History, tell us that the first Portuguese navigators in the East simply copied from the Arabs the practice of monsoon sailing. Thus their movements swung to and fro in alternations of six months. It was - I venture to remark - an Eastern rhythm of navigation, with a considerable disregard for promptness, velocity, punctuality. Meanwhile the English and the Dutch, as soon as they began to compete with the Portuguese in the Eastern seas, began to follow an entirely novel route, presumably inspired - I suggest - by a North European passion for promptness and velocity already associated with the idea that "time is money". This new route, we are told by Williamson, was quicker and also independent of the seasonal delay of the monsoons. It seems that in the type of vessel used by the Portuguese - the carrack or naos - seaworthiness and probably rapidity were sacrificed to bulk: a tendency of the Portuguese and of the Spaniards in all their types of architecture. Possibly their sense of time inclined them to prize bulk as being everlasting and to have a certain disdain for rapidity, as being a perversion of the proper use and enjoyment of time as life: a life to be live slowly.

     It is important to consider how two different and even contradictory notions of time influenced, from the sixteenth century, the behavior of Europeans in Asia, Africa and America, and their relationship with non-European peoples, civilizations and cultures. This contradiction also colored, in an enduring manner, the different consequences of a sociological nature of their imperial contact with these peoples and their cultures.

     For it seems to some of us, students of the social and psychological aspects of the contact of Iberians with non-Europeans, that one of the explanations for the relative success, from a human, psychosocial and cultural point of view, of the Portuguese and the Spaniard among these peoples is that their sense or notion of time was not very different from the sense or notion of time dominant among non-European peoples and cultures. The almost religious, Puritanical cult of a strict clock time among North Europeans seems to have been responsible for a psychosocial distance between North Europeans and non-Europeans, which expressed itself, on the one hand, in the disdain of North Europeans for what they considered the laziness and the lack of ambition for material gain among a large number of non-Europeans and, on the other hand, in the unwillingness of non-Europeans to do severe systematic industrial and even agricultural work under a regime of slave labor, especially when this regime was of industrial slavery rather than of patriarchal slavery.

     It is true that slavery among the Portuguese and the Spaniards who became planters and exploited mines of gold, silver and diamonds in America, Africa e Asia was not always of the patriarchal type. It became, in certain cases, industrial slavery. But it is true also that in this type of activity the Portuguese and the Spaniards were only pioneers: with regard to efficiency they were in most cases sooner or later surpassed by other Europeans who developed more rapid and more profitable methods and techniques of exploiting agriculture and mines in the tropics and in the East.

     The Portuguese and the Spaniards were also, if not the pioneers of, the men who made possible a number of industries developed in European on the basis of products from the American tropics, from India and from Africa, which they were the first to value as in the case of dyestuffs: dyewoods that produced red and yellow tints, like brazilwood; or the blue extracted from the indigo of India. This is also true of many other tropical products that eventually became the basis for prosperous European industries: sugar, cotton, cocoa, quina, tobacco, for instance. These were values discovered by Iberians, or assimilated by them from non-Europeans. In some cases, the Iberians were the first ones to use these products as part of a new type of civilization in which tropical civilizations and cultures added something so important to European civilization as to give to it a new dimension and to European man new social and cultural possibilities.

     Modern social historians agree on considering the so-called Industrial Revolution, which products the world in which we live today, an immense quickening of industrial activity. industrial activity in a new rhythm. Human life in harmony with clock time rather than with nature or with tradition associated with nature.

     We should not forget, however, that the Spanish and Portuguese activities in Asia, Africa and America made possible this new type of industrial production by to European capitalism and bourgeois industrialism, material for manufacture in a new scale and in a new rhythm. Not long ago a British historian acknowledged this, in a very clear statement: "We may regard the industrial age" - he wrote - "as a fruit of the enterprise set going by Columbus and Henry the Navigator."

     It is true that neither the fellow countrymen of Columbus nor those of Henry the Navigator fully participated in the technical and economic revolution that was the fruit of a typically Iberian enterprise and of a typically Iberian way of assimilating values from non-European. That revolution was the expression - at once a cause and an effect, as a now fashionable method of sociological and historical interpretation would put it - of an attitude toward time on the part of North Europeans that was absolutely different from the Iberian attitude. This attitude considered only in its psychocultural aspect - not taking note of the fact that the presence of coal and iron was a basic condition for the development of modern industry in the northern part of Europe - may be owing to some extent to a cold climate, which may have been responsible as a stimulus, especially when modern methods of heating were unknown, for a quickening of activity in men. But it was probably stimulated, also, by the Protestant religion which, since the sixteenth century, had been another and perhaps correlated influence for rapid activity among North Europeans, through the ethical and religious idealization of the active, efficient, prosperous, quick, never idle or even delayed, business or industrial man, to whom obedience to clock time became almost a part of his religious rites.

     Historians and sociologists who emphatically write that Spain and Portugal displayed, in their contacts with Asia, Africa and America, only military and Catholic energies of a high but romantic, unpractical type, seem to forget that it was as a result of their more prosaic activities as colonizes of Asiatic, African and American areas, and as founders of Euro-tropical industries developed in a slow rhythm of production, that it was possible for Europe to go through some of the most important phases of what is known as the Industrial Revolution. For their failure to participate fully in this Revolution there may be found a number of explanations but this psychocultural one should never be neglected: their sense of time was an obstacle to their participation in that revolution. On the other hand, it was, since their first contact as Iberians and as Christians with Negro Africans, Asians and Amerindians, an advantage for these contacts, from the psychosocial point of view of facilitating their intimacy with these peoples and their contac with non-European cultures in a way that was not possible on the part of North Europeans.

     This advantage is not to be measure in terms of a purely Iberian advantage although it certainly contributes to explaining why the Iberians have given to many of their colonies conditions for developing into real nations. It seems also to contribute to explaining why these nations have remained fundamentally Iberian in the European and, in some cases, the civilized part of their national structures. The advantage I refer to is to be measured in terms of a panhuman development of cultural and ethinic interpenetration, much more extensive and intensive in the tropical areas, African, Asian and American, that have been colonized - provided that this is the exact word - by the Spaniards and the Portuguese, than in the ones colonized by the English, the Dutch, the French.

     It is not insignificant that, in their sense of time, the sixteenth-century Iberians were rather Christians with something Eastern in their way of being Christians and of being semi-Europeans - socially and culturally semi-Europeans - than orthodox Europeans who had begun to be, like the North Europeans, predominantly bourgeois: an industrialist and capitalist type of civilized man. This type of European, who is considered socially and culturally orthodox, was, paradoxically, Protestant in his religion and in his ethical behavior; his Protestantism contributed to his cult of clock time as a part of his methodical, systematic activism. The Catholic Iberian, in contrast to the socially and culturally orthodox European who reached his maturity through the Industrial Revolution, may be, paradoxically, considered from this sociological point of view a heretical European.

     Not many years ago, a British university scholar who became a specialist in the study of Iberian peoples and languages reached the conclusion that in places like Valencia the people seem to be so disdainful of anything fixed that an outsider has the impression that time, according to these people, is really made, as some Iberians are inclined to consider it, for cats and dogs, not for men. This British university scholar would agree with other observers of Iberian life that, for a real Iberian, time is the servant, not the master, of men; and according to him, as well as to other students of the Iberian culture, it was the Arab who contributed to the development among Iberians of the tendency to leave the future to work out the preconceived pattern of God - in this particular respect more like Allan than like the Christian God. Hence the Iberian's "detachment," his disdain for chronometric time, capitalistic money, and all the "customary symbols" of what the typical West European has considered, in the last two centuries at least, the real "well-being" of men and of nations. The Iberian attitude may have been, for Professor Atkinson and for other North European analysts of Iberia, thirty years ago "the very antithesis of the spirit that informs ours present age"; but - I dare to suggest - it is not so any more.

     Automation has given to the West European and even to the Anglo-American conception of human well-being a different direction, with leisure as a tremendous reality that instead of meaning an economic and an ethical deficiency in human culture and in social organization, means social and cultural development on a higher plane. For it means - some modern social philosophers and social scientists are inclined to think - social and cultural development to a point that makes organization of labor or idealization of constant toil for increasing production and dependence of economic production upon clock time in so extreme a way signify also a constant sacrifice of the present to the future. Extreme idealization of toil has become an archaic tendency. Therefore, it is not the Iberian conception of time that is now archaic, with regard to the most advanced forms of civilized life, but the Anglo-Saxon conception that went to the extreme of identifying, not only in Europe but in the imperial activities of Europeans in Africa, Asia and America, time with money.

     The Iberian sense of time seems to be one explanation for the fact that, for the Spaniards and for the Portuguese in their activities both in Europe and overseas, persons and things have been not only what they seem to be but seen, considered and treated through what an able interpreter of Iberian psychology, apparently applying a medieval philosophical saying, has described as "a double truth," that of the immediate detail - an objective, realistic truth - and that of the poetic whole: a truth that includes an interpretation of things and persons as constant, through extremely slow development in a triad - past, present and future. It was because they saw Africans, Asians, Amerindians, both as a poetic truth and as an immediate truth, and acted according to a double vision of these non-European realities that the Portuguese as well as the Spaniards were, from the beginning of their activities in Africa, Asia and America, more creative than other Europeans engaged in similar activities. The Iberians had the courage not only to build a monumental city like Goa, in India, in the sixteenth century, but to build fortresses, universities, cathedrals and entire cities in America and in Africa that have survived, as monuments and institutions, a severe conflict with tropical climate and with non-European social time. They have also established themselves in tropical spaces, believing, in a way more poetic than scientific - although also scientific, in some cases - in the possibilities of developing enduring cultures or permanent civilizations in these spaces, through a bold mixture of men and cultures: the ones taken from Europe to Asia, Africa and America and the ones found outside Europe.

     What did the English, the Dutch, the French see in a population of naked Amerindians like the one that was found by Europeans in Brazil? Nothing but an inferior people who aroused no interest in progressive Europeans. What did the Iberians see in them? A people who when a Mass was said in their presence in a forest gave the Portuguese the impression of taking a lively interest in that Christian demonstration of religion and culture. Consequently, Christians and civilized persons in potential. At the same time the brown Amerindian women were considered beautiful by the newcomers: such brown women remind the Portuguese of some of their own women with Moorich blood.

     "That which I plainly perceive to be Mambrino's helmet, seems to three to be only a barber's basin and perhaps another man may take it to be something else," Don Quixote once told Sancho. Never was a merely realistic vision of persons and things put under a sharper analysis than this one, by a Don Quixote who, like some other psychopaths, had something in him of a shrewd psychologist. Of the European or rather sociologically Christian vision of extra-European persons and thing that has made the series of contacts of the Iberians with Africans, Asians and Amerindians, a greater sociological or human success than similar contacts of other Europeans with the same non-European peoples, it may be said that it has been a Quixotic poetic vision completed, but not dominated, by a Sancho-realistic one.

     Other Europeans were more successful from an economic point of view in their dealings with non-Europeans than were the Iberian pioneers, to whom they soon became superior, through their higher efficiency of technique in matters of transportation, economic production and military action. But this superiority, although expressed in a number of cases in a very rapid tempo or in a rhythm of "time is money," would prove inadequate to survive sociologically in a non-European space and in a non- European or rather panhuman, social time. In this field it was to be surpassed by the creative activity of the Iberians in non-European areas and among non-European peoples. Some of these peoples, mixed with Iberians or with descendants of Iberians, or led by Iberians or descendants of Iberians, more than a century ago organized themselves in nations or quasi nations, which, although politically independent from Spain and Portugal, have remained sociologically attached to Spain and Portugal in a way that is not true of former colonies of other European nations. Such an attachment includes an identification with an Iberian sociologically significant notion of social time that, although inadequate to an industrial civilization based mainly on well-organized human labor, seems to correspond better than the strictly Anglo-Saxon notion of time to a civilization based on automation, and whose destiny will probably be very different from the one that deterministic Marxist or near-Marxist ideas ascribe to the human future.

     Again one is reminded here of an Iberian philosophy of life, inspired by a traditional Iberian idea of man's relation to time. It may be said that the time that has come to be analyzed, in the twentieth century, by Bergson, the philosopher, and popularized by Proust, the historian-novelist, and according to which time is experience rather than nature, complex existence physical, psychological, cultural - rather than a mere expression of mechanics and physics, is similar to that traditional Iberian philosophy.

     "What are you painting?" was Don Quixote's question to a man he saw painting nobody knew exactly what. It might turn into a man, into a woman, into an animal, into a tree, into a house, into a church. Or into a combination of all these images in a symbol. "That is as it may turn out," was the very Iberian answer of a painter whose art was an expression not a preconceived idea that was to be put into practice in a preconceived period of time, but of a vital, free, existential, creative relation between the Artist and Time itself. The same sort of existential, free, non-systematic relation between creative art and creative time has resulted in some of the most characteristic masterpieces of Iberian literature Don Quixote is certainly an example of this and we known that of Tirso de Molina, of Calderón, and even of Lope de Veja, foreign critics have written that their plays are "wanting in system." The same might be said by a Boileau of the unacademic pages of Peregrinaçam of Fernão Mendes Pinto.

     And it one goes from the field of art to that of sociological achievement in what is now Iberian America, in what are the various extensions of Iberian culture or civilization in Asia and Africa, one finds that all of them are also wanting in system; all of them have suffered, or are still suffering, as much from a lack of technical correctness as of sociological constructions, just as Don Quixote suffers from it as an artistic creation. There have been in all these Iberian achievements, both artistic and sociological, what foreign critics of Iberia and foreign interpreters of Iberian ethos generally agree in describing as "improvisation." It is, however, gradual improvisation, and, as such, an improvisation that has meant, in many cases, the sacrifice of systemization, planning, methodological precision, artistic correctness, to a constant and direct contact of man, through time, with life and nature. Through this contact, the artist, the statesman, the philosopher, the plain man, has usually developed, within the Iberian culture, an art or a philosophy or, simply, has lived a life, according to what experiences time brings to him. Exactly lithe the painter who gave Don Quixote that very Iberian answer: "This is as it may turn out."

     "Is it not a danger to Christian Civilization to allow race mixture between whites and black?" This is a question that the Dutch in South Africa and the English in the Rhodesias have asked themselves since their first contacts with Africa; and afraid of the new colors and the new shapes of men and of culture that would result from free human contacts of this type, they have developed a systematic policy of segregation, similar to the one that since the Civil War has been also a systematic policy of the United States. But in Iberian America as well as in Iberian Africa the tendency in this field, as in other ones, has been to admit and even seek new colors and shapes: "This is as it may turn out." As it may turn out with time.

     Paradoxically, however, the Iberians were among the first Europeans to take clocks to the East. But they did so, accommodating their culture to non-European values and attitudes in regard to time. It is interesting for a modern student of the early relations of Iberians with non-Europeans in the East to consider the fact that the Jesuits - some of them Italian and German, but not a few of these non-Iberian Europeans trained in Lisboa or in Portuguese Goa and thus Iberianized - who developed in China a policy of accommodating Christianity to Confucian philosophy, were accused by French Catholics and Protestants, by Dominicans and even by orthodox Jesuits, of unorthodox attitudes in China, precisely with regard to matters connected with the relations between Man and Time. They were accused not only of smuggling religion into China through intelligent attempts at harmonizing European mathematics and astronomy with Chinese astrology, but also of accommodating Christian ideas regarding time to Oriental astrology.

     Goa, with the Portuguese, in India, became a center less of Portuguese and even less of European influence in certain areas of the East, than of Christian influence in the whole Eastern world. It did not develop in India as a monumental, imperial, European city but as a city that soon became a combination, a vigorously hybrid expression, of European and Eastern art and architecture, with a population whose Europeans soon adopted from the Asians, Eastern styles of dress, Eastern food, Eastern dances and festivals and even that Eastern or oriental rhythm of talking, walking, dancing, that is an expression of a non-European philosophy of time. They adopted these values and these rhythms, instead of trying to remain imperially and purely European, in their styles of dress, their food habits, their dances, their art, their architectures, their sense of time, as the British did in the same area - India - and the Dutch have done in South Africa and the French did in North Africa.

     The Spaniards and the Portuguese have been the only Europeans with an influence over non-European areas who have not emphasized, in their contacts and dealing with non-Europeans, either their European-ness or their condition as a progressive people who, having attained what some Europeans have considered the perfect social time - the rapid, quick one - in relation to production in industry and transportation of persons and goods, military technique, education, architecture, agriculture, medicine, would not or should not accept any values or techniques from non-Europeans, or consider the archaic non-Europeans their equals. The Iberians greatly emphasized, during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries when their systematic contacts with non-Europeans began, their Christian condition, potting it above - as a sociological condition - their European or national condition. Not that they were better Christians than the other Europeans, who competed with them in commercial dealing with non-Europeans. But because they felt, as a result of their long conflicts with non-Christians in their own European lands, that they were, sociologically, Christians rather than Europeans, or members of a progressive European culture. They presented themselves to Amerindians, Asians and Africans, mainly as Catholic Christians, whose notion of social time was not so much that of a constantly progressive rhythm - as the European time had become since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - but a fusion of past, present and future; not so much a time fit to continuos work, with only the Sunday dedicated to rest, but a time with much alternation between work and leisure, toil and dance, provided by the Church itself. It is easy to understand why time, so understood, was the basis for an understanding between the Spaniards or the Portuguese and non-European populations, in Asia, Africa, America, that was never reached, except by unusual individuals, by the British or by the French or by the Dutch in their dealing with the same populations.

     As to European-ness, as it was developed by the British, the French and the Dutch, in their Asian, African and American colonies through exclusive clubs, special schools, special educational facilities for Europeans, special sports, special restaurants, special hotels, special churches, special gardens and parks - also only for Europeans - it became a pan-European systematic exclusiveness on the part of North Europeans, in a way never known, conceived or practiced, except by unusual individuals or unusual groups, in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the same Asian, African and American areas. It is a phenomenon to be connected, not only with the North European particular conscience of race, but with their sense of being representatives of a superior civilization in which quick time and quick activity are values greatly characteristic of a superior civilization. This, however, is a sense of progressive time at which the Iberians never become adept. Hence the disdain of North Europeans themselves for Iberians for not having followed them, North Europeans - except through exceptional individuals or subgroups - in this very important aspect of European-ness: a sense - or, more than a sense, a cult, a mystique, almost a religion - of progressive time.

     How is man affected in his behavior by what may be considered a cult of progressive time? How much of an advantage - and not only of a disadvantage - has been for the typical Iberian man, his now traditional disregard for progressive time? Automation seems to favor the Iberian sense of time: the notion that time is not money, included.

     In his book, Le Mythe de l'éternel retour: archetypes et répétition, originally published in Paris in 1949 and recently, in English, under the title The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade refers to societies characterized by a revolt against concrete, historical, continuos time, on the one hand, and on the other hand by what the author describes as "a certain metaphysical 'valorization' of human existence," different from the Marxist, the Existentialist as well as the Hegelian types of valorization, and to be explained only by an anthropological approach to the so-called "primitive" man and to Oriental philosophy. Such an interpretation seems to be necessary to a fuller understanding of the Iberian or Hispanic Man and of this sense of time: of all his traits, perhaps, the one that has contributed in the most powerful way to make of him, as a European, and of the civilizations he has developed outside of Europe, exceptions, rather than orthodox expressions of European-ness. He is un-European and akin to primitive and Oriental men in his tendency to escape from historical time, as understood by Europeans, by living in that "repetition of cosmogony" that Eliade considers "the creative act par excellence."

     The fact that Iberian civilization remains, to a large extent, in Europe and has developed, outside Europe, in combination with Oriental, African and Amerindian civilizations and cultures, a civilization, or a group of civilizations in which the predominant attitude of men toward time is greatly affected by myth, religion and folklore instead of having been dominated, almost entirely, since the Industrial Revolution, by a scientific vision or outlook of continuous activity as historical progress, seem to place the Iberian man and the civilization that he has developed in such a slow rhythm as to be considered archaic by progressive Europeans and Anglo-Americans, in a unique position to emerge as a creative, instead of simply a technically and scientifically progressive, civilization. Creative in the sense of the most typically Iberian or Hispanic men being capable, as only Oriental and primitive men seem to be capable, at present, of "beginning each year anew, a 'pure' existence, with virgin possibilities," as Eliade puts it, in his analysis of what he calls "archaic" or "traditional man," as opposed to "modern man." The advantage of this "archaic" or "traditional" man would be, especially, in the possibility of his being always creative through his identification with a time that "begins each year anew," thus escaping from history in its strict sense and escaping even from a logical cause and effect relationship. His time being existence rather than history. His time being a series of mythical rituals connected with the renewal of life - qualitative life - rather than a series of logical and quantitatively valuable activities.

     We are told that traditional calendars have had a tendency to make the ritual meaning of festivals fit the seasons that express renewal of live in a way at once biological and mythical: biocosmic. It seems that the Christian calendar has been followed for centuries by the Iberian Catholics in a way that has meant an intimate association of the ritual meaning of religious, popular festivals with a whole conception of life: exactly the conception of life that has made it possible for the Iberian or Hispanic man to find something in common between his feeling for time and the Chinese, the East Indian, the African, the Amerindian feelings for time. Exactly, also, the feeling for time and the way of dealing with time that gives to the Iberian, or Hispanic, man, more than to any other European, the position of marching to an epoch, now so close to Europe and to the United States, of automation and leisure, with "virgin possibilities" in regard to time as a triality, made of three separate but - as a modern philosopher, Ernst Cassirer, developing St. Augustine's idea on the subject puts it - "ontically related substances": memory, intuition, expectation.

     These three attitudes in regard to time are certainly present in the Iberian or Hispanic Man in a very characteristic way. His capacity for expectation - an aspect of the Iberian ethos that has been considered and interpreted by some of the best analysts of the Iberian or Hispanic Man, the greatest of all, among the modern ones, being, I think, Professor Americo Castro - seems to explain the Iberian or Hispanic Man's disregard for chronometric time, his frequent inclination to depend upon the "next day" or "tomorrow," his famous patience, so irritating to Anglo-Saxons - to Anglo-Saxons almost religiously adept at chronometric time - who have to deal with Iberians in Europe and with descendants of Iberians in countries like the republics of Spanish America, Brazil, Goa, Angola.

     On the other land, the interpenetration of cultures that has been characteristic of most of the contacts of the Iberians with non-Europeans seems to have had, as one of its basic conditions, a sort of secret alliance between most Iberians and most non-Europeans, with regard to time, while the British bureaucracy, in most areas of what was until recently the politically very well-organized British Empire, ruled over natives from rooms where secular, scientific, technical, mechanical clocks were an expression of the superiority of European industrial civilization over non-European cultures. This happened in some of those parts of the non-European world where the Iberians have represented and still represent a sociologically Christian civilization, not by means of clocks but of church bells, ringing not every hour, but in the morning, at midday and at the end of the evening. In this way they have acted and still act as a connection between two rhythms of life that are, in some cases, almost the same. This seems to help one to understand why India and Anglo-India, Africa and British Africa, Indonesia and Holland, the Belgian Congo and the Congo, never met in regard to attitudes towards time as an expression of life in the same way as the Spaniards and the Filipinos, the Portuguese and the Africans, the Iberians and the Amerindians, have met in a number of cases.

Source: FREYRE, Gilberto. On The Iberian concept of time. Chapel Hill: United Chapters of the Phi Beta Kappa, 1963. p. 415-430.