I think people have had weeks with assigned days for thousands of years, but with travel taking as long as it does I’m sure there have been many times in history where different cultures were ‘on different days’ at the same time.
I wonder when did it come to be that Monday is the same day in China as it is in Chad? Was it forced upon the conquered in, say, Roman times? Or was it one of those more modern standatizations?
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What you’re talking about is basically the slow standardization of the planet on the Gregorian calendar. That was an upgrade of the Julian calendar, which was a Roman thing.
There’s lots of obvious value in everyone being synchronized, particularly as long-distance travel became easier. There’s nothing magic about the Gregorian calendar, but it had a head start in the Western world thanks to the Roman empire, so it became the basis for most of Europe, then followed all the European powers on their colonization binge. At that point it had covered most of the planet so when we all converged on one that was an obvious candidate.
It didn’t happen all at once, it’s still not done. There are lots of places that still maintain multiple calendars.
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