The Business Of Emotions In Modern History

The Business of Emotions in Modern History shows how businesses, from individual entrepreneurs to family firms and massive corporations, have relied on, leveraged, generated and been shaped by emotions for centuries. With a broad temporal and global coverage, ranging from the early modern era to the present day in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, the essays in this volume highlight the rich potential for studying emotions and business in tandem. In exploring how emotions and emotional situations affect business, and in turn how businesses affect the emotional lives of individuals and communities, this book allows us to recognise the emotional structures behind business decisions and relationships, and how to question them. From emotional labour in family firms, to affective corporate paternalism and the role of specific emotions such as trust, fear, anxiety love and nostalgia in creating economic connections, this book opens a rich new avenue of research for both the history of emotions and business history.

Work in all its guises is a fundamental part of the human experience, and yet it is a setting where emotions rarely take centre stage. This edited collection interrogates the troubled relationship between emotion and work to shed light on the feelings and meanings of both paid and unpaid labour from the late 19th to the 21st century. Central to this book is a reappraisal of 'emotional labour', now associated with the household and 'life admin' work largely undertaken by women and which reflects and perpetuates gender inequalities. Critiquing this term, and the history of how work has made us feel, Feelings and Work in Modern History explores the changing values we have ascribed to our labour, examines the methods deployed by workplaces to manage or 'administrate' our emotions, and traces feelings through 19th, 20th and 21st century Europe, Asia and South America. Exploring the damages wrought to physical and emotional health by certain workplaces and practices, critiquing the pathologisation of some emotional responses to work, and acknowledging the joy and meaning people derive from their labour, this book appraises the notion of 'work-life balance', explores the changing notions of professionalism and critically engages with the history of capitalism and neo-liberalism. In doing so, it interrogates the lasting impact of some of these histories on the current and future emotional landscape of labour.

Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History is the first book to innovatively combine the history of childhood and youth with the history of emotions, combining multiple national, colonial, and global perspectives.

The first accessible text book on the theories, methods, achievements and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry.

Offering insights on the wide range of sources that are available from across the globe and throughout history for the study of the history of emotions, this book provides students with a handbook for beginning their own research within the field. Divided into three parts, Sources for the History of Emotions begins by giving key starting points into the ethical, methodological and theoretical issues in the field. Part II shows how emotions historians have proved imaginative in their discovering and use of varied materials, considering such sources as rituals, relics and religious rhetoric, prescriptive literature, medicine, science and psychology, and fiction, while Part III offers introductions to some of the big or emerging topics in the field, including embodied emotions, comparative emotions, and intersectionality and emotion. Written by key scholars of emotions history, the book shows readers the ways in which different sources can be used to extract information about the history of emotions, highlighting the kind of data available and how it can be used in a field for which there is no convenient archive of sources. The focused discussion of sources offered in this book, which not only builds on existing research, but encourages further efforts, makes it ideal reading and a key resource for all students of emotions history.

The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World brings together a diverse array of scholars to offer an overview of the current and emerging scholarship of emotions in the modern world. Across thirty-six chapters, this work enters the field of emotion from a range of angles. Named emotions – love, anger, fear – highlight how particular categories have been deployed to make sense of feeling and their evolution over time. Geographical perspectives provide access to the historiographies of regions that are less well-covered by English-language sources, opening up global perspectives and new literatures. Key thematic sections are designed to intersect with critical historiographies, demonstrating the value of an emotions perspective to a range of areas. Topical sections direct attention to the role of emotions in relations of power, to intimate lives and histories of place, as products of exchanges across groups, and as deployed by new technologies and medias. The concepts of globalisation and modernity run through the volume, acting as foils for comparison and analytical tools. The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World is the perfect resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of emotions across the world from 1700.

This study addresses two desiderata of historical emotion research: reflecting on the interdependence of textual functions and the representation of emotions, and acknowledging the interdependence of studies on the premodern and modern periods in the history of emotion. Contemporary research on the history of emotion is characterised by a proliferation of studies on very different eras, authors, themes, texts, and aspects. The enthusiasm and confidence with which situations, actions, and interactions involving emotions in history are discovered, however, has led to overly direct attempts to access the represented objects (emotions/feelings/affects); as a result, too little attention has been paid to the conditions and functions of their representations. That is why this study engages with the emotion research of historians from an unashamedly philological perspective. Such an approach provides, among other things, insights into the varied, often contradictory, observations that can be made about the history of emotion in modernity and premodernity.

Seeking to bridge the gap between various approaches to the study of emotions, this volume aims at a multidisciplinary examination of connections between emotions and history and the ways in which these connections have manifested themselves in historiography, cultural, and literary studies. The book offers a selected range of insights into the idea of emotions, affects, and emotionality as driving forces and agents of change in history. The fifteen essays it comprises probe into the emotional motives and dispositions behind both historical phenomena and the ways they were narrated.