Modernity is the time when time has a history

In the time of the Greek Olympics no one thought of track or Olympic records, let alone of breaking them. The invention and deployment of something other than the power of human or animal muscles was needed for such ideas and for he decision to assign importance to the differences between the capacities of human individuals to move, to be conceived and to stimulate practice – and so for the prehistory of time, that long era of wetware-bound practice, to end, and the history of time to start. The history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 110