Zero Hours are not real. They are a metaphor for expressing a wish to lock certain experiences and practices securely in the past while embracing a new beginning. They serve here as a signature for approaching global history through the varying ways in which global actors break up time. What should be locked in the past in, say, India during the 1930s? After the First World War, what kind of art ought to be safely forgotten and banished into the past, as it obstructed a better path into the future? Which concepts serve as the semantic carriers of narratives of new beginnings, of historical change and the perceived need to break up time? How are pasts from which one would need to break away from constructed among economic thinkers? Similar questions are dealt with in this volume. We here treat time not as a phenomenon that disciplines and restructures daily life and labour of global societies, making global sameness through waking up early and going to work. We treat time as interpreted time, as temporalisation of social imagination.