When I was in anthropology, many of the cultures I studied had very vague concepts of time (sunrise/sunset, passage of stars and constellations, different seasons). One of my professors spent two weeks about how time was a Western construct and how people want to go to such great lengths to have such precise measurement of it.
The very lengthy discussion around the concept was fascinating to me as a 23 year old college student who only knew it from one perspective.
Japan had a whole fancy temporal hour system before Western contact. It was more complicated than our modern framework, as it was based on the time between sunrise and sunset and so the length of the hours had to be adjusted about every two weeks. But they certainly thought quite a bit about it, so I'm not sure how it could be claimed to not be a concept there at the time.
How would the variable hours be used? Presumably access to the timekeeping was limited, so who even was aware of the difference so that they could modify their life to accommodate it?
Your professor was just wrong if they claimed time was a Western construct. Calendars, sundials, and other time keeping devices were created independently around the world.
All you need to create a clock is realize that your oil lamp consumes its fuel in a somewhat consistent interval, or a similar observation for the time it takes drips of water to fill a cup. People figured it out.
I don't know how other cultures viewed time, but i think there is a big difference between being able to make a clock and running your life by a clock. Modern industrialized society is very regimented - work starts at an exact time, ends at an exact time, lunch is exactly an hour, etc. I suspect such notions would be much less useful in a non-industrial society.
That really doesn't seem to make sense as written. Even if for "Western" you count all the way to the Middle East (where much of our chronometry originates), there's still a lot found in China and the New World. (From what I can tell, India does not seem to have a strong independent record here? Though they certainly borrowed from the inventors, just like Europe did.)
This topic of time being a western construct, it's impact on society and life is one of the subjects in the excellent book "Borderliners" [1] by Peter Høeg. A favorite of mine, though I never read the English translation.
It's a fascinating topic, and impacts our live more than we might be aware of or care to admit. I started thinking about it in a different way after reading this book.
I don't think its fair to say that atomic clocks represent a western cultural value. After all, they are extremely niche. Physicists care but the average "westerner" does not.
It wasn't even a daily utilized concept in the West until trains were chugging their way to various stations. Farmers didn't need to know the exact minute the cows came home.
And paper money is a Chinese invention. Doesn't mean it's worthwhile to spend two weeks in an anthropology class talking about how much awesomer they are.
The very lengthy discussion around the concept was fascinating to me as a 23 year old college student who only knew it from one perspective.