The reason that clocks turn clockwise has to do with sundials, which were the first clocks. In the northern hemisphere, the earth rotates counter-clockwise, which means that from our point of view the sun appears to move across the sky in a clockwise direction.

Therefore, if you build a sundial to tell time, the shadows will move across it in a clockwise direction.

With mechanical clocks, you could of course make them go around either way, but the earliest ones were presumably designed to turn the same way the shadows on a sundial do, simply because that's what people were used to.

Published in Dawn, Young World, July 6th, 2019