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The Business of Emotions in
Modern History
History of Emotions
Series Editor:
Peter N. Stearns, University Professor in the Department of History at
George Mason University, USA and Susan J. Matt Presidential Distinguished
Professor of History at Weber State University, USA
Editorial Board:
Rob Boddice, Senior Research Fellow, Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence
in the History of Experiences, Tampere University, Finland
Charles Zika, University of Melbourne & Chief Investigator for
the Australian Research Council’s
Centre for the History of Emotions, Australia
Pia Campeggiani, University of Bologna, Italy
Angelika Messner, Kiel University, Germany
Javier Moscoso, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Madrid, Spain
The History of Emotions offers a new and vital approach to the study of the past. The
field is predicated on the idea that human feelings change over time and they are the
product of culture as well as of biology. Bloomsbury’s History of Emotions series seeks
to publish state-of-the-art scholarship on the history of human feelings and emotional
experience from antiquity to the present day, and across all seven continents. With
a commitment to a greater thematic, geographical, and chronological breadth,
and a deep commitment to interdisciplinary approaches, it will offer new and
innovative titles with convey the rich diversity of emotional cultures.
Published:
Fear in the German Speaking World, 1600–2000, edited by Thomas Kehoe
and Michael Pickering
Feelings and Work in Modern History, edited by Agnes Arnold-Forster
and Alison Moulds
Feeling Dis-Ease in Modern History, edited by Rob Boddice and Bettina Hitzer
Emotional Histories in the Fight to End Prostitution, by Michele Renee Greer
Emotions and Migration in Argentina at the Turn of the 20th Century, by María Bjerg
Emotions in the Ottoman Empire, by Nil Tekgül
The Business of Emotions in Modern History, edited by Mandy L. Cooper and
Andrew Popp
Forthcoming:
The Renaissance of Feeling, by Kirk Essary
The Business of Emotions in
Modern History
Edited by
Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2023
Copyright © Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp, 2023
Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp have asserted

their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as Editors of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute

an extension of this copyright page.
Cover image © 1940, London, UK. Business as usual at a bakery

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To Kyle, and to my students, who inspire me every day.
To the memory of Valerie and Derek Popp.
vi
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Contributors xi
Acknowledgments xiv
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp 1
Part One Disciplinary Emotions
1 Accounting for the Middling Sorts: Emotions and the Family Business,
c. 1750–1832 Katie Barclay 31
2 Emotional Strategies: Businesswomen in the Civil War Era United
States Mandy L. Cooper 49
3 Selling Trust in the Antebellum Service Sector Daniel Levinson Wilk 65
4 The Cold War and the Making of Advertising in Post-War Turkey
Semih Gökatalay 83
Part Two Enabling Emotions
5 Marriage à la mode du pays: When Identity and Contractual Love

Became a Pledge for the Signares’ Business Cheikh Sene 107
6 “the commerce of affection”: Masculinity and Emotional Bonds Among
Boston Merchants Laura C. McCoy 125
7 From Scotland with Love: The Creation of the Japanese Whisky
Industry, 1918–1979 Alison J. Gibb and Niall G. MacKenzie 143
8 Malone’s on the Southside: Hearing a Telling of Their Story Andrew Popp 159
Part Three Unruly Emotions
9 The Worst Business in the World? The Emotional Historiography of the

Arms Industry Catherine Fletcher 177
10 Making Sense of Financial Crises in the Netherlands: The Emotional
Economy of Bubbles (1637–1987) Inger Leemans, Joost Dankers, Ronald
Kroeze, and Floris van Berckel Smit 195
viii Contents
11 Waiting for Fevers to Abate: Contagion and Fear in the Domestic Slave
Trade Robert Colby 219
12 Selling Out or Staying True? Fear, Anxiety, and Debates About Feminist
Entrepreneurship in the 1970s Women’s Movement Debra Michals 239
Select Bibliography 257

Index260
Figures
I.1 A trader. Courtesy of Getty Images 2

4.1 “For this little Mehmetçik [referring to the boy] to become such a
robust Mehmetçik [referring to the soldier], Çapamarka flour must
be mixed with his food.” Akşam, November 13, 1945 87
4.2 “The healthy child of today is the symbol of [future] victories.”
Akşam, May 8, 1948 89
4.3 “It can make your dream come true.” Cumhuriyet, December 3, 1949 93
4.4 Emotional Marketing and Banks. Akşam, January 11, 1948,
Akşam, May 28, 1948; Akşam, September 29, 1949; Yeni İstanbul,
January 5, 1950; Akşam, February 17, 1950 94
4.5 Advertisement for American baby powder. Cumhuriyet,
November 7, 1947; Akşam, February 5, 1948 97
4.6 “Give a Frigidaire as a gift to your home!” Cumhuriyet,
December 29, 1950 99
5.1 Trading posts in Senegambia, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries 109
5.2 A signare Source. Courtesy of the artist, Corentin Faye 118
10.1 Nieuw-Jaars Geschenk / Lauwmaand herdenking, in Het Groote
Tafereel der Dwaasheid (1720). Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-
OB-83.573 196
10.2 Mushrooms (“Bubbles”) with the names of Dutch joint stock
companies. The short poem calls out to people to curb their
enthusiasm and desire. Detail of Bernard Picart, Monument
consacré à la postérité en mémoire de la folie incroyable de la XX.
année du XVIII. siècle. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-1908-2355 202
10.3a–e The emotional economy of the 1720 Wind Trade. Details of
Bernard Picart, Monument consacré à la postérité en memoire de
la folie incroyable de la XX. année du XVIII. siècle. Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam, RP-P-1908-2355 204
10.4a–b The “Beursbarometer,” a weekly infographic used to take the
atmosphere of the stock market, published in De Telegraaf,
October 31 and November 11, 1929 207
x Figures
10.5 Reprint in De Telegraaf (November 6, 1929) of the 1720s cartoon

“Wind Is the Beginning, Wind Is the End,” originally printed in
The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) 209
10.6 Emotions at the stock exchange (from left to right): “Desperation
(‘wanhoop’), joy (‘vreugde’) and despair (‘vertwijfeling’).”
“Rotterdamse studenten op beurs ervaring rijker.” “Na de krach
wilden we een kroeg beginnen.” Het Vrije Volk, November 14, 1987 213
Contributors
Katie Barclay is deputy director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of
Emotions and associate professor, University of Adelaide. She writes widely on the
history of emotions, family life, and gender. Her recent publications include Caritas:
Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (2021) and Academic Emotions: Feeling the
Institution (2021). With Kate De Luna and Giovanni Tarantino, she edits Emotions:
History, Culture, Society. Her current work explores the emotional dynamics of
accounting practices.
Robert Colby is an assistant professor of History at the University of Mississippi.

He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for American Studies at
Christopher Newport University. His work on the United States’ domestic slave trade
and the American Civil War has won prizes from the Society of American Historians
and Society of Civil War Historians, and has appeared in the Journal of the Civil War
Era, Slavery & Abolition, and the Journal of the Early Republic.
Mandy L. Cooper is a lecturer of history at the University of North Carolina at

Greensboro and an editor of H-Emotions. Her manuscript explores the relationship
between emotional family bonds and the development of commerce and governance
in the United States from the Revolution through Reconstruction.
Joost Dankers is associate professor and manager commissioned research at Utrecht

University in the Department of History and Art History. He is interested in the
history of Dutch business, financial crises and cartel formation in an international
perspective, and in the social significance of historical research in general. He has
initiated and supervised research projects on behalf of Royal Dutch Shell, Heineken
International, and Royal Dutch Airlines KLM. He co-authored studies on financial
institutions like Rabobank Nederland and Dutch savings banks. His most recent book
(co-authored with colleagues from Utrecht) is Driven by Steel: From Hoogovens to Tata
Steel, 1918–2018 (2018).
Catherine Fletcher is professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University,

UK. She has published widely on early modern European political and diplomatic
culture. Her most recent book is The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of
the Italian Renaissance (2020). She is grateful to the Arms and Armour Heritage Trust
for supporting her research on the history of firearms.
Alison J. Gibb is senior lecturer in Marketing at the University of Glasgow, UK, and
former marketing director for a number of Scotch whisky brands.
xii Contributors
Semih Gökatalay is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, San

Diego. His research and publications have been focused on the economic and business
history of the Middle East during the transition from empire to nation states.
Ronald Kroeze is associate professor of Political History and director of studies

at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Department of Art and Culture, History,
Antiquity. His research interests focus on the history of modern politics, democracy,
anti/corruption and good government, and colonial governance. He has also
published on business–politics relations, the impact of (new public) management and
neoliberalism on national and European politics, business history, financial history
and heritage, applied history, and oral history. One of his key publications (co-edited
with Guy Geltner and André Vitoria) is A History of Anticorruption: From Antiquity
until the Modern Era (2018).
Inger Leemans is professor of Cultural History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and

principal investigator of NL-Lab at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on early modern cultural history,
the history of emotions and the senses, cultural economy, history of knowledge and
digital humanities. She has published about the history of (radical) Enlightenment,
pornography, cultural infrastructure, stock markets and financial crises. In the recent
volume Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies (edited with Anne
Goldgar, Routledge 2020) Leemans analyzes the stock market in terms of emotional
economy.
Niall G. MacKenzie is professor of Entrepreneurship and Business History at the

University of Glasgow, UK, and co-editor of Business History. His research interests
are in the intersection of business history, entrepreneurship, and policy. His work
has appeared in Business History, Business History Review, Human Relations,
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Product Innovation Management,
Regional Studies, Small Business Economics, and Asia Pacific Journal of Management,
among others.
Laura C. McCoy is an independent scholar and equity advocate based in Chicago,

IL. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2020 with the dissertation
“In Distress: A Marketplace of Feeling in the Early American Republic.” Her research
interests include the history of gender and emotion work in early American capitalism,
and equity in the modern workplace.
Debra Michals is an assistant professor and director of Women’s and Gender Studies
at Merrimack College. Her research interests focus on the links between the history
of activism and entrepreneurship, particularly for marginalized groups, which she
chronicles in her forthcoming book, She’s the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship
since World War II (Rutgers University Press, 2023). Her publications also include a
study of feminist banks and credit unions, “The Buck Stops Where? 1970s Feminist
Credit Unions, Women’s Banks, and the Gendering of Money.”
Contributors xiii
Andrew Popp is professor of History at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

He has written on a range of topics in British business, social, and cultural history,
with a current focus on business, emotions, and the everyday. He is editor-in-chief at
Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History.
Cheikh Sene is I Tatti Harvard Florence/DHI Rom Joint Fellow for African Studies
for 2022–23.
Floris van Berckel Smit is a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the
Department of Art and Culture, History, Antiquity. His research interests focus on
the history of higher education governance, (new public) management, political
history, learning histories, and oral history. He has participated in various projects in
which he collaborates with historians, political scientists, educational scientists, public
governance experts, and organizational sociologists. In 2020 he published (with co-
author Ab Flipse) Van democratie naar New Public Management: invoering van de Wet
modernisering universitaire bestuursorganisatie aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, on
the rise of new public management in Dutch university governance.
Daniel Levinson Wilk is professor of American History at SUNY-Fashion Institute of

Technology, New York City. He writes about the history of waiters, elevators, and the
modern service sector. He is also a trustee of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition,
which has almost completed its decade-long goal of putting a vertical memorial to the
victims of the 1911 fire on the façade of the building where it took place.
Acknowledgments
When writing or organizing any project, you incur countless debts along the way—
perhaps even more so when the project is one primarily carried out during a global
pandemic. The list of people who have provided encouragement, support, and
assistance along the way is, to be sure, innumerable. Yet, there are a few people in
particular who I’d like to thank. First, I must thank my co-editor, Andrew Popp.
This project has been a long while in the making, but every step of the way has been
delightful, fun, and completely enlightening. I have learned so much through this
process and have thoroughly enjoyed every bit. Thank you. And to our contributors:
thank you all for your work, your dedication, and your excitement about this project.
It’s been a pleasure working with you all. Additionally, I would like to thank Meggan
Cashwell, who provided invaluable comments on my own chapter, as well as my
students at UNCG, whose insightful questions, comments, and enthusiasm helped to
shape a significant portion of the chapter.
Finally, as always, I thank my husband Kyle for his love and support throughout
this process.
Mandy L. Cooper
At this stage in my career there are many people to whom I feel deeply indebted. They
may have helped shape me as an historian, or as a person, or as both. All of that has
played its part in making me whatever kind of scholar I am now. Obviously, it is not
possible to directly thank so many people. Nonetheless, I am thankful. But I do wish
to thank by name my co-editor, Mandy L. Cooper. One could say these have not been
the easiest of circumstances—almost from start to finish, this project has unfolded
alongside a global pandemic—and yet working with you could not have been easier,
or more fun, or a better, richer learning experience. Thank you. In addition, I wish to
thank Agnes Arnold-Forster, for reading and providing invaluable feedback on my
own chapter, as well as audiences at the Business History Conference, Baltimore, 2018,
and the Centre for Business History, Copenhagen Business School.
And I am truly thankful for the love and support of my family; for Theo, Clara, and
Marina, and for Christine.
Andrew Popp
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market
Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp
Introduction
So familiar and formulaic are the images we can categorize them as belonging to a
genre: panic porn. They capture the faces and bodies of traders during periods of crisis
on the world’s stock markets. The faces above all else, very often with a hand clasped
across mouth, eyes raised in supplication. In centering individuals, these images also
center emotions and their performance, as in the image in Figure I.1. They are visceral
and invite us to speculate about the emotions the subjects are experiencing: disbelief,
shock, fear, confusion, indecision, and uncertainty? They also invite us to consider our
own emotions: pity, empathy, pleasure, schadenfreude? At the same time, however, they
picture moments of extremity at which the unwanted and unwelcome has burst in on
this world, provoking rupture, dissonance, and displacement. This is not how things are
meant to be, they seem to say (even as such events keep recurring through time). The
worlds of business and emotions do not belong together. They get in each other’s way.
That has often been the conclusion of historians of business. The essays in this
volume bring the histories of emotions and of business into focused and productive
dialogue. Our originating motivation is simple: so long as histories of business
minimize the entanglement of emotions and business, they are incomplete. Incomplete
not because thinking about emotions would in some way “add” to how we think about
business and its history, but because thinking about business and its history should be
impossible without thinking about emotions.
As Rob Boddice has observed, “Objectivity is … an affect—a posture of situated
scientific practice, rather than a true understanding of the world.”1 An affectation of
objectivity has characterized approaches to the history of business and our practices as
historians of business. Cailluet and his colleagues argue that the few works attempting
to integrate the histories of business and emotions have remained in “partial isolation
because of the difficulties to integrate emotions” into the field.2 Bringing emotions
1
Rob Boddice, “History Looks Forward: Interdisciplinarity and Critical Emotion Research.” Emotions
Review 12, no. 3 (2020): 132.
2
Ludovic Cailluet, Fabian Bernhard, and Rania Labaki, “Family Firms in the Long Run: The Interplay
Between Emotions and History.” Enterprise et Histoire 91, no. 2 (2018): 9.
2 The Business of Emotions in Modern History
Figure I.1 A trader. Courtesy of Getty Images.
into any domain of historical research certainly involves difficulties of methods

and sources. In business history, those are far from the most significant barriers. As
Kenneth Lipartito has argued:
Economic theory portrayed humans as calculating engines and strategic actors,

fully cognizant of the world, always seeking gain and advantage. Self-interested
behavior was universal across time and space. Economists claimed that rational
choice could explain such matters as politics, the law, virtually all social institutions,
family patterns, and even sex. The logic of action in history was clear—individuals
always understood and pursued their self-interest, and their self-interested
actions.3
Similarly, Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson identify an over-reliance on

“scienticism” as a “trap” into which much scholarship on business has fallen, led astray
by “the assumption that reason governs.”4 Simply put, business history’s conceptual
and theoretical repertoire has provided little in the way of encouragement or guidance
for those who wish to understand emotions in ways that do not reduce them to a
deviation from norms of rationality. Boddice argues that historians “have long assumed
3
Kenneth Lipartito, “Connecting the Cultural and the Material in Business History.” Enterprise &
Society 14, no. 4 (2013): 687.
4
Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson, Reimagining Business History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2015), 40.
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 3
a kind of fourth-estate practice of keeping other disciplines honest, in part by exposing

assumptions paraded as given truths, and in part by adding context (often political,
cultural, or affective) to narratives presented as neutral or objective.”5 It is in this spirit
we aim to further the integration of emotions into the historical study of business.6
We also aim to contribute to the history of emotions. Again, the aim is more than
additive, even if more firmly embedding business in the thematic repertoire of the
history of emotions is valuable and worthwhile. Business is assumed to be a realm of
strategy, choice, decision, and action. Claims of rationality will emerge as a heuristic
for sensemaking amidst the emotional complexity—and sometimes chaos—that has,
historically, been inherent to business. Thus, if emotions “history’s contribution to
emotion knowledge” is the “disruption of the very starting point of emotion research,”
then bringing in business represents another welcome unsettling of emotions history’s
own boundaries and points of departure.7
This introduction has four aims. First, it surveys relevant literature, primarily
historical, on emotions and business, though what exists is scattered across a number
of scholarly domains and traditions. In business historical research, the approach
has mostly (though not exclusively) been “additive”—business history + emotions.
We will also survey a range of other disciplines within and beyond history, including
management and organizational studies, as well as the broad field of the history of
emotions. We beg understanding of our omissions. Secondly, surveying the literature
prepares the ground for our claims for the value of integrating the histories of emotions
and business. Third, arguments for the value of this endeavor foreground explanation
of the structure we have adopted and for brief introduction of the individual chapters.
Finally, we will consider some of the challenges of doing this work, whilst also looking
forward, with optimism and expectation, to the work that we hope will be done in the
future. Our desire is that this volume will excite others to follow the traces of emotions
into the beating heart of the market.
Reviewing the Literature
In 1941, Lucien Febvre called for a history of emotions.8 His call, however, was largely
ignored for over forty years, until 1985, when Peter and Carol Stearns published
“Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards.”
They defined emotion as “a complex set of interactions among subjective and
5
Boddice, “History Looks Forward,” 133.
6
See Ute Frevert, “Passions, Preferences, and Animal Spirits: How Does Homo Oeconomicus Cope
with Emotions?” in Science and Emotions after 1945, ed. Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2014), 300–17.
7
Ibid.
8
Lucien Febvre, “Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past,” in
A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (New York:
Harper and Row, 1973), 12–26. As Susan Matt has pointed out, Febvre was not alone in making
this call. Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias, among other European scholars in the early twentieth
century, focused on the role of emotions in history. Susan J, Matt, “Current Emotion Research in
History: Or, Doing History from the Inside Out.” Emotion Review 3, no. 1 (2011): 117.
objective factors, mediated through neural and/or hormonal systems, which gives
rise to feelings (affective experiences as of pleasure or displeasure) and also general
cognitive processes toward appraising the experience.”9 They proposed the concept of
emotionology, or “the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within
a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression,” arguing
that all societies have emotional standards, whether implicit or explicit, and these
emotional standards vary across both space and time.10 The concept of emotionology
can be used to delineate between a society’s collective standards for emotion and an
individual’s (or a specific group’s) emotional experiences. Conceptually, emotionology
helps distinguish between a society’s thinking about emotion and the actual experience
of emotion, between the professed emotional values of a society and actual emotional
experiences of an individual or group.
Just over ten years later, William Reddy began the process of fleshing out a theoretical
framework for the history of emotions, first in his 1997 article “Against Constructionism:
The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” and then in his landmark 2001 book The
Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions.11 In The Navigation
of Feeling, Reddy provided a framework for the history of emotions, combining ideas
from the affective turn in cognitive psychology and cultural anthropology with new
theories in order to deal with historical change. He defined emotions as “goal-relevant
activations of thought material that exceed the translating capacity of attention within
a short time horizon.”12 Reddy proposed two key concepts that have come to define
much of the theoretical underpinnings of the field: emotives and emotional regimes.
Emotives are “a type of speech act … which both describes (like constative utterances)
and changes (like performatives) the world.”13 Combined with translation (“something
that goes on, not just between languages and between individuals, but among sensory
modalities, procedural habits, and linguistic structures”), emotives help to bridge the
gap between cognitive psychology and cultural anthropology in the study of emotions.14
According to Reddy’s theory, emotions can be self-managed through emotives in order
to achieve a goal.
Further, Reddy argued that all societies have an emotional regime, a “set of normative
emotions and official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them,”
and that an emotional regime is essential for the stability of any political regime.15
The concepts of emotional suffering (acute goal conflict brought on by the activation
of emotions), emotional refuge (something that provides an individual with a release
from the emotional regime), emotional liberty (the freedom to change goals and
challenge emotional management), and induced goal conflict (effects of policies that
9
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and
Emotional Standards.” The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813.
10
Ibid.
11
William M. Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions.” Current
Anthropology 38, no. 3 (1997): 327–351; William M. Reddy, A Navigation of Feeling: A Framework
for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
12
Reddy, A Navigation of Feeling, 128.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 79.
15
Ibid., 129.
support going against the emotional regime) all play a key role in Reddy’s theoretical
framework for understanding the political (and historical) components of emotion.
Subsequently, Barbara Rosenwein argued for the inclusion of emotional expression
(including expressions such as tears, blushing, and more, not just linguistic expression)
in “Worrying about Emotions in History.”16 In her 2006 book Emotional Communities
in the Early Middle Ages, Rosenwein argued that historians should focus on emotional
communities rather than emotional regimes, which are not universally applicable.
Rosenwein defines emotional communities as “groups in which people adhere to the
same norms of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or related
emotions,” and in which “other sets of emotional norms … coexisted with those that
were dominant,” leading to a number of emotional communities existing at the same
time.17 To give an example, it is common to talk of “the business community.” Such
categorization is typically predicated on a belief in the existence of structural factors,
such as an alignment of interests or fulfillment of certain roles, like “business owner.”
Nonetheless, it is telling that the “business community” often also finds itself having
sentiments, such as “confidence” or “pessimism,” ascribed to it. Sentiment and affect
become formative elements of its identity.
Historians of emotion, including those in this volume, generally rely on one (or a
combination) of these three approaches—Stearns and Stearns’s emotionology, Reddy’s
emotives and emotional regimes, or Rosenwein’s emotional communities.18 Regardless
of the theoretical underpinnings, historical specificity and cultural context are key.
Rosenwein, for example, asserts that the meaning of the word emotion itself is neither
self-evident nor universal—an argument we extend to reason and rationality, often
positioned as non- or anti-affects. Nor do all cultures have the same emotions. For
example, in France, “love is not an emotion; it is a sentiment. Anger, however, is an
emotion, for an emotion is short term and violent, while a sentiment is more subtle
and of longer duration.”19 Rosenwein argues, then, that “emotions” is “a constructed
term that refers to affective reactions of all sorts, intensities, and durations.”20 The very
nature of emotions is social and relational, historically and culturally specific.
In a 2007 article, Daniel Wickberg argued that the “problem with the history of
emotions is its tendency to separate emotion from cognition, to treat emotions as if
16
Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History.” The American Historical Review 107,
no. 3 (2002): 821–845.
17
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2006), 23, 2.
18
A plethora of interviews, conversations, and introductions to the field have been published in recent
years. These works tend to present these three as the defining theoretical underpinnings of the field.
For examples, see Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara
Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns.” History and Theory 49 (2010): 237–265; Matt, “Current Emotion
Research in History”; Nicole Eustace, Eugenia Lean, Julie Livingston, Jan Plamper, William M. Reddy,
and Barbara H. Rosenwein, “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions.” The American
Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1487–1531; Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Doing
Emotions History (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Jan Plamper,
The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015);
Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).
19
Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 3.
20
Ibid., 4.
they were a discrete realm rather than seeing them as linked to larger characterological
patterns involving modes of perception and thinking as well as feeling.”21 While some
early work in the history of emotion did have this problem, more recent works have
seen emotions (and reason) as linked to larger patterns and ways of thinking, dissolving
boundaries between emotions and other forms of knowing. Scholars like Nicole
Eustace and Michael Woods, whose works focus on the build-up to the American
Revolution and the American Civil War, respectively, exemplify this movement.22 As
Woods put it, “Emotion and reason are intertwined, not incompatible.”23 Like Woods
and Eustace, the literature on the history of emotion in the past ten to fifteen years
(including this volume) shows that emotion and reason were inherently intertwined
and should not be considered separately. Yet, with a few exceptions, much of this new
literature, as Barbara Rosenwein has pointed out, tends to focus solely on politics and
the state.24
This volume takes up Wickberg’s call to treat emotions as part of larger, historically
and culturally specific patterns. Yet, we also see some commonalities in the way
emotions are—and have been—used across time and cultures. Critically, emotion and
reason, so often placed in sharp contrast with each other, have more often been deeply
intertwined. In fact, as the essays in this volume show, reason/rationality has often been
a particular type of emotion: claims to reason/rationality may themselves be thought of
as “emotives,” as affective performances of non-emotion, if you will. In parallel, affect
theory has a long tradition of focusing on the idea of emotional labor, building on Arlie
Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. In this
tradition, scholars examine the emotional labor performed by workers such as flight
attendants, waitresses, and models for a wage.25
21
Daniel Wickberg, “What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New.” The
American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 682.
22
Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional
Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
23
Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict, 14.
24
For Rosenwein’s critique, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions,
600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 10. Exceptions to this trend include: Eva
Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Agnes
Arndt, “Entrepreneurs: Encountering Trust in Business Relations,” in Encounters with Emotions:
Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity, eds. Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen, and
Margrit Pernau (New York: Berghahn, 2019); Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion
Books, Ltd., 2019), particularly Chapter 6; Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison Moulds, eds. Feelings
and Work in Modern History: Emotional Labour and Emotions about Labour (London: Bloomsbury,
2022). See also Thomas Dixon’s argument that emotions are part of and cannot be separated from
decision-making, captured as felt judgments. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The
Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
25
On emotional and affective labor in affect theory, see particularly Arlie Russel Hochschild, The
Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983); Elizabeth Wissinger “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry,”
in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticento Clough, with Jean Halley, 231–260.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and
Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 108; Johanna Oksala, “Affective
Labor and Feminist Policies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (2016):
281–303; Michael Hardt, “Foreword: What Affects Are Good For,” xi, and Patricia Ticineto Clough,
“Introduction,” 21–22, both in The Affective Turn.
Within business and economic history, and the new history of capitalism, a small
but growing literature has drawn directly on the history of emotion to examine
the relationship between emotions and business in such areas as: the language of
credit and sensibility; family business; business and religious affect; and emotions
and capitalism.26 Similarly, a cultural turn in business history has focused on how
economic actors construct webs of meaning rooted in subjectivities, challenging a
prior, underlying reliance on methodological individualism derived from economics.27
Likewise, increasing attention is being paid to capitalism’s dark or hidden side.28
Nonetheless, if historians of business have not ignored emotions they have tended
to compartmentalize both emotions and the study of emotions, with emotions
typically conceived of and treated as resources, competencies, or elements of a strategic
repertoire that businesses possess or leverage. Emotions have thus been positioned as
components of that bundle of assets and capabilities that constitutes the firm.
This might be thought of as emotions through addition. Thus, Cailluet and his
colleagues ascribed their motivation for bringing together a collection of essays on
emotions and family firms to a search for “‘business history with emotions,’” calling
this a “sensible project” to initiate.29 If emotions do somehow penetrate nearer to
the core of business, they do so as unwanted intrusions, as in the fears that paralyze
or distort markets during panics. This approach to bringing emotions into business
history is colored by the discipline’s choice of the market-located business enterprise
as its primary object of analysis, a position that assumes the possibility of isolating
discrete, bounded, self-activating units, interacting through an automatic system of
signals and responses (inputs and outputs, supply and demand, prices). Emotions have
had to find their place in a framing that considers them essentially aberrant.
Nonetheless, mapping how business history has sought to include emotions helps
us better establish our own contribution. Prominent are studies of the role of emotions
in mediating relationships between firms and consumers. Firms sell products and
26
Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage,
and Life in the Early Nineteenth-Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); John Corrigan,
Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth-Century (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2001); Margot Finn, “The Female World of Love and Empire: Women, Family
and East India Company Politics at the End of the Eighteenth Century.” Gender & History 31, no.
1 (2019): 7–24; Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, “Abigail’s Accounts: Economy and Affection in the Early
Republic.” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 3 (2005): 35–58; Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families:
Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Mandy
L. Cooper, “Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States,” Phd
diss., Duke University, 2018; Andrew Popp and Robin Holt, “Emotion, Succession, and the Family
Firm: Josiah Wedgwood & Sons.” Business History 55, no. 6 (2013): 892–909; Alexandra J. Finley,
An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade (Chapel Hill:
UNC Press, 2020); John Tosh, “From Keighley to St Denis: Separation and Intimacy in Victorian
Bourgeois Marriage.” History Workshop Journal 40 (1995): 193–206; Nicholas Wong, Andrew Smith,
and Andrew Popp, “Religiosity, Emotional States, and Strategy in the Family Firm: Edm. Schluter &
Co Ltd., 1953–1980.” Enterprise et Histoire 91, no. 2 (2018): 98–125.
27
Lipartito, “Connecting the Cultural and Material in Business History”; Lipartito, “The Ontology of
Economic Things.” Enterprise and Society 21, no. 3 (2020): 592–621; Finley, An Intimate Economy.
28
Kenneth Lipartito and Lisa Jacobson, ed. Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
29
Cailluet et al., “Family firms in the Long Run,” 9. Emphasis added.
services based on their affective appeal, promising affective responses from or affective
benefits for consumers. Sometimes affect is the offer; sometimes it is peripheral.
Here, affect is performed.30 Cynically or sincerely, advertisers have used emotional
appeal to sell everything from toothpaste, contraception, and sanitary products to life
insurance, self-service shopping formats, and home improvement stores.31 Whereas
selling contraception or life insurance might hinge on reassurances and promises of
security, marketers also found themselves applying emotional balms to consumers
discomfited by innovations such as convenience foods or the new experience of
queuing.32 Emotional appeals have applied to the marketing of everything from the
most mundane—the humble harmonica—to the sublimities of Italian supercars.33
Emotional selling has relied on visibility, and contended with the necessity for
invisibility.34 The mechanisms through which emotional appeals were leveraged have
ranged from the most trivial, as in the cheap retail “premiums” studied by Woloson,
to the awesome, including the exploitation of history itself.35 Rarely have such appeals
been subtle, as in the belief of advertising agency J. Walter Thompson that Mexican
consumers were “over” emotional, naturalizing acceptable (and unacceptable) levels
of emotionality. Some enterprises were more considered and thoughtful, developing
richer understandings of the cultures in which they sought to operate, touching the
30
Scholars studying affective labor have discussed its role in selling services, particularly those that
have examined the affective labor of workers in the service sector. See Elizabeth Wissinger, “Always
on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the
Social, ed. Patricia Ticento Clough, with Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007);
Hochschild, The Managed Heart. Scholars studying emotional labor in the US have similarly focused
on the performance of emotion necessary to sell services. See Finley, An Intimate Economy.
31
Peter Miskell, “Cavity Protection or Cosmetic Perfection? Innovation and Marketing of Toothpaste
Brands in the United States and Western Europe, 1955–1985.” Business History Review 78, no. 1
(2004): 29–60; Kristin Hall, “Selling Sexual Certainty? Advertising Lysol as a Contraceptive in the
United States and Canada, 1919–1939.” Enterprise and Society 14, no. 1 (2013): 71–98; Camilla
Mørk Røstvik, “Mother Nature as Brand Strategy: Gender and Creativity in Tampax Advertising
2007–2009.” Enterprise & Society 21, no. 2 (2012): 413–452; Monica Kenely, “Marketing the Message:
The Making of the Market for Life Insurance in Australia, 1850–1940.” Enterprise & Society 16,
no. 4 (2015): 929–956; Andrew Alexander, Dawn Nell, Adrian R. Bailey, and Gareth Shaw, “The
Co-Creation of a Retail Innovation: Shoppers and the Early Supermarket in Britain.” Enterprise
and Society 10, no. 3 (2009): 529–558; Richard Harris, “The Birth of the North American Home
Improvement Store, 1905–1929.” Enterprise and Society 10, no. 4 (2009): 687–728.
32
Margaret Weber, “The Cult of Convenience: Marketing and Food in Postwar America.” Enterprise &
Society 22, no. 3 (2021): 605–634; Adrian R. Bailey, Andrew Alexander, and Gareth Shaw, “Queuing
as a Changing Shopper Experience: The Case of Grocery Shopping in Britain, 1945–1975.” Enterprise
and Society 20, no. 3 (2019): 652–683.
33
Hartmut Berghoff, “Marketing Diversity: The Making of a Global Consumer Product—Hohner’s
Harmonicas, 1857–1930.” Enterprise and Society 2, no. 2 (2001): 338–372; Paolo Aversa, Katrin
Schreiter, and Fillipo Guerrini, “The Birth of a Business Icon through Cultural Branding: Ferrari
and the Prancing Horse, 1923–1947.” Enterprise and Society (2021): 1–31.
34
Rachel Gross, “From Buckskin to Gore-Tex: Consumption as a Path to Mastery in Twentieth-
Century American Wilderness Recreation.” Enterprise & Society 19, no. 4 (2018): 826–835; Hallie
Lieberman, “Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century
America.” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 2 (2016): 393–433.
35
Wendy Woloson, “Wishful Thinking: Retail Premiums in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America.”
Enterprise and Society 13, no. 4 (2012): 790–831; José Antonio Miranda and Felipe Ruiz-Moreno,
“Selling the past. The Use of History as a Marketing Strategy in Spain, 1900–1980.” Business
History (2020).
emotional chords of local or domestic cultures.36 From time to time, businesses have
even pulled on emotions to claim they are acting disinterestedly for the greater good,
participating in public service campaigns around child safety, for example.37 More
recently, business historians have begun exploring business’ impact on emotions at
the level of the experience of everyday life.38 The financialized self, for example, might
experience a radically reordered relationship to the affective experience of being in the
world.39 In turn, this connects to a growing interest in the emotional dimensions to
constructions of moral economies; community-based beliefs about the proper ordering
of the relationship between business, economy, and society.40 Here, the emotionalized
“selling” of business takes place across the largest canvas.
If emotions were important to how things were sold, then they were also sometimes
important to whom things were sold to. Gender has played an important role, with
business (and sometimes historians) believing that women are inherently more
emotional (and thus less rational) consumers. Jacobson revealed how “advertising
discourses on the archetypal boy consumer promoted a masculinized ideal of
consumption that broke decisively from the stereotype of the emotion-driven female
shopper. Boys were lauded as rational, informed buyers who prized technological
innovation.” Similarly, studying early automobile advertising, Schorman relays how
one executive believed there was “no room for emotion or visual imagery as persuasive
forces. ‘Man is a reasoning animal,’ he once wrote. ‘You cannot win converts to your
opinion except by appeal to reason.’”41 There is a curious process at work in these
examples, in which an affect (that of rationality) is performed as being affectless,
beyond or outside the confines of the emotional. Of course, both men and women
buy and drive automobiles. Some products, such as post-mastectomy breast implants,
might be largely consumed by women, but others, like romance novels, are no less
subject to gendering than the car.42 As important here as the gendering of both products
and consumers is the persistent belief that “emotions” and “reason” can be split off
from one another, confined to separate, inviolable domains. Business historians have
36
Julio E. Moreno, “J. Walter Thompson, the Good Neighbor Policy, and Lessons in Mexican Business
Culture, 1920–1950.” Enterprise and Society 5, no. 2 (2004): 254–280. Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez,
Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinationals in Spain and Mexico, 1860–1940
(London: Routledge, 2021).
37
Paul M. Renfro, “Keeping Children Safe is Good Business: The Enterprise of Child Safety in the Age
of Reagan.” Enterprise and Society 17, no. 1 (2016): 151–187.
38
Andrew Popp, “Histories of Business and the Everyday.” Enterprise and Society 21, no. 3 (2020):
622–637.
39
Orsi Husz and David Larsson Heidenblad, “The Making of Everyman’s Capitalism in Sweden:
Micro-Infrastructures, Unlearning, and Moral Boundary Work.” Enterprise and Society (2021):
1–30.
40
Ewan Gibbs, “The Moral Economy of the Scottish Coalfields: Managing Deindustrialization under
Nationalization c.1947–1983.” Enterprise and Society 19, no. 1 (2018): 124–152.
41
Lisa Jacobson, “Manly Boys and Enterprising Dreamers: Business Ideology and the Construction
of the Boy Consumer, 1910–1930.” Enterprise and Society 2, no. 2 (2001): 225–258; Rob Schorman,
“‘This Astounding Car for $1,500’: The Year Automobile Advertising Came of Age.” Enterprise and
Society 11, no. 3 (2010): 468–523.
42
Kirsten E. Gardner, “Hiding the Scars: A History of Post-Mastectomy Breast Prostheses, 1945–2000.”
Enterprise and Society 1, no. 3 (2000): 565–590; Denise Sutton, “Marketing Love: Romance
Publishers Mills & Boon and Harlequin Enterprises, 1930–1990.” Enterprise & Society (2021): 1–31.
rarely exposed these divides or distinctions—emotion/reason, affect/affectless—to the

critique they deserve, even as they have unpicked the gendered appeals advertisers and
others have invoked or invented.
The gendering of emotions has also colonized the internal structuring and
functioning of firms, where businesses—and historians—have again relied on
assumptions and categories. Unsurprisingly, there has been considerable reliance on
the theoretical framing of emotional labor. The mirror figure to the emotionalized
consumer is the salesperson, expected to perform selling as an emotional act, one that
became increasingly subject to corporate codification and control and thus hardly an
opportunity for emotional “authenticity.”43 Selling first emerged as a male role, even
when the product or service being hawked was gendered female by society. Perhaps
in response to the emotions generated by this work, salesmen developed exaggerated
displays of masculinity, expressed through dress, for example.44 Masculinity has also
sometimes been a defense against the emotional trials of immiseration and career
insecurity.45 In time, using women to sell to other women effectively leveraged emotions
circulating around notions of the home and domesticity.46 Service workers, from railway
porters to bellhops, also have a long history of being studied as doing emotional labor.47
Selling builds emotional bonds between business and consumer, but is not the only
site of emotional labor, generating studies of the emotional wellbeing of employees,
whether that be connected to the attitude testing of workers to programs to instill
employee loyalty via paternalism or religiosity.48 Attempts at the emotional enlistment
of employees have often taken place in the context of organization-wide attempts at
using emotions to buttress corporate cultures, for example through workplace rites
and rituals, or during corporate change processes.49 Consideration of the emotional
43
Walter Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004).
44
Andrew Popp and Michael French, “‘Practically the Uniform of the Tribe’: Dress Codes Among
Commercial Travelers.” Enterprise and Society 11, no. 3 (2010): 437–467.
45
Michael French, “‘Slowly Becoming Sales Promotion Men?’: Negotiating the Career of the Sales
Representative in Britain, 1920s–1970s.” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 1 (2016): 39–79; Peter Scott,
“Managing Door-to-Door Sales of Vacuum Cleaners in Interwar Britain.” Business History Review
82, no. 4 (2008): 761–788.
46
Katina Manko, Ding Dong! Avon Calling! The Women and Men of Avon Products, Incorporated
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
47
Daniel Levinson Wilk, “Tales from the Elevator and Other Stories of Modern Service in New York
City.” Enterprise and Society, 7, no. 4 (2006): 695–704; Daniel Levinson Wilk, “The Red Cap’s Gift:
How Tipping Tempers the Rational Power of Money.” Enterprise & Society 16, no. 1 (2015): 5–50.
48
Sanford M. Jacoby, “Employee Attitude Testing at Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1938–1960.”
Business History 60, no. 4 (1986): 602–632; Margaret C. Rung, “Paternalism and Pink Collars:
Gender and Federal Employee Relations, 1941–50.” Business History Review 71, no. 3 (1997):
381–416; Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf, “Managers and Ministers: Instilling Christian
Free Enterprise in the Postwar Workplace.” Business History Review 89, no. 1 (2015): 99–124.
49
John Griffiths, “‘Give my Regards to Uncle Billy …’: The Rites and Rituals of Company Life at Lever
Brothers, c.1900–c.1990.” Business History 37, no. 4 (1995): 25–45; Jürgen Kocka, “Family and
Bureaucracy in German Industrial Management, 1850–1914: Siemens in Comparative Perspective.”
Business History Review 45, no. 2 (1971): 133–156; Jennifer Delton, “Before the EEOC: How
Management Integrated the Workplace.” Business History Review 81, no. 2 (2007): 269–295; Ruth
Barton and Bernard Mees, “The Charismatic Organization: Vision 2000 and Corporate Change in a
State-Owned Organization.” Enterprise and Society (2021): 1–22.
wellbeing and character of employees has naturally extended to leadership. It has often
been assumed not only that leadership is naturally gendered but that it is so because
of the gendered distribution of vital emotional traits. Once more, unquestioned
distinctions between reason and emotion intrude, leading to the systematic
exclusion of women from leadership positions, from boardrooms to the Hollywood
director’s chair.50 Where women were accorded room close to the top, it was often in
subsidiary roles to which they were thought better fitted, for example in providing
emotional support as corporate wives.51 Of course, emotionality was never far from
the homosociality of male corporate leaders, who formed and inhabited emotional
communities.52 If male salesmen liked to assert a particular masculine emotionality
through modes of dress, then so did corporate leaders.53
If leaders are expected to display (male-gendered) emotional characteristics
such as detachment and calculation in their decision-making, then the figure of
the entrepreneur is allowed a little more emotional leeway. Ever since Schumpeter’s
construction of the entrepreneur as the actor who “gets things done,” the entrepreneur
has been a man of sometimes impetuous action. Fundamentally future-oriented,
facing a world of non-calculable uncertainty and risk, the entrepreneur is permitted a
dose of intuition and spontaneity.54 The entrepreneur is one business figure for whom it
seems to be respectable to talk about “character,” with all that implies about emotional
traits.55 Unsurprisingly, the entrepreneur has often been an intensely gendered figure,
and historians have explored how, as entrepreneurs, both men and women performed
gendered and emotionalized cultural scripts.56
In addition to impinging on human actors, emotions have also been attached to
specific organizational forms and behaviors. Family firms have routinely been assumed
to be especially emotionalized realms. This is one area in which the distinctions between
business and emotions, reason and affect, break down, a family firm being inherently
50
Karen Mahar, “True Womanhood in Hollywood: Gendered Business Strategies and the Rise and
Fall of the Woman Filmmaker, 1896–1928.” Enterprise and Society 2, no. 1 (2001): 72–110; Eelke
Heemskerk and Meindert Fennema, “Women on Board: Female Board Membership as a Form
of Elite Democratization.” Enterprise and Society 15, no. 2 (2014): 252–284; Søren Fris Møller,
“Histories of Leadership in the Copenhagen Phil–A Cultural View of Narrativity in Studies of
Leadership in Symphony Orchestras.” Business History 59, no. 8 (2017): 1280–1302.
51
Therese Nordlund Edvinsson, “Standing in the Shadow of the Corporation: Women’s Contribution
to Swedish Family Business in the Early Twentieth Century.” Business History 58, no. 4 (2016):
532–546.
52
Therese Nordlund Edvinsson, “The Game/s that Men Play: Male Bonding in the Swedish Business
Elite 1890–1960.” Business History (2021).
53
Eric Guthey, “Ted Turner’s Corporate Cross-Dressing and the Shifting Images of American Business
Leadership.” Enterprise and Society 2, no. 1 (2001): 111–142.
54
R. Daniel Wadhwani, “Gales, Streams, and Multipliers: Conceptual Metaphors and Theory
Development in Business History.” Enterprise and Society 21, no. 2 (2020): 320–339; R. Daniel
Wadhwani and Christina Lubinski, “Reinventing Entrepreneurial History.” Business History Review
91, no. 4 (2017): 767–799.
55
Maury Klein, “In Search of Jay Gould.” Business History Review 52, no. 2 (1978): 166–199.
56
Susan Broomhall, “Face-making: Emotional and Gendered Meanings in Chinese Clay Portraits of
Danish Asiatic Company Men.” Scandinavian Journal of History 41, no. 3 (2016): 447–474; Eirinn
Larsen and Vibeke Kieding Banik, “Mixed Feelings: Women, Jews, and Business around 1900.”
Scandinavian Journal of History 41, no. 3 (2016): 350–368.
inseparable from the family emotions that animate and motivate it.57 Nonetheless, even
here the literature can exhibit a significant degree of instrumentality about emotions,
particularly when drawing on family business studies, which insist on a near implacable
separation of firm and family as domains of study.58 The importation of constructs
such as the curiously impassive notion of “socio-emotional wealth” is unlikely to help
business historians significantly improve their own emotional intelligence. Business
networks, viewed as depending on bonds and ties based in trust and connections of
family and amity, are another form of business organization for which the importance
of emotions is sometimes acknowledged. The literature is extensive, focusing on many
different temporal and geographical contexts, from early modern France to twentieth-
century Australia via the Atlantic World.59 Networks are, by definition, relational,
making them difficult to divorce from emotions. Yet there has been a tendency to treat
an affect such as trust as the functional property of the structure of the network, not
the conditional, contingent flow of feeling between network members, though there
are exceptions.60
Networks, consumers, and markets all demand engagement in one form or
another. So do stock markets, banks, creditors, regulators, and governments. Affect-
oriented words are often used in relation to stock markets, which are frequently
characterized as febrile, feverish, dull, bullish, panicked, or irrational (meaning,
emotional).61 Enterprises and investors have often found stock markets frightening and
unpredictable environments, too often deserted by reason.62 These affects are found
not only on the bourses of great European capitals, but also in Mandate Palestine,
where Pfefferman and de Vries found that gendered emotions structured access to
credit for female micro-enterprises.63 Regulatory reactions to panics and crisis have
often aimed at control, seeking to preventatively tamp down flares of emotion, whether
of exuberance or despair, whilst emotions have crept into corporate governance law
57
Hartmut Berghoff, “The End of Family Business? The Mittelstand and German Capitalism in
Transition, 1949–2000.” Business History Review 80, no. 2 (2006): 263–295; Christopher Kobrak,
“Family Finance: Value Creation and the Democratization of Cross-Border Governance.” Enterprise
and Society, 10, no. 1 (2009): 38–89.
58
Begoña Giner and Amparo Ruiz, “Family Entrepreneurial Orientation as a Driver of Longevity
in Family Firms: A Historic Analysis of the Ennobled Trenor Family and Trenor y Cía.” Business
History 64, no. 2 (2022): 327–358.
59
Arnaud Bartolomei, Claire Lemercier, Viera Rebolledo-Dhuin, and Nadège Sougy, “Becoming a
Correspondent: The Foundations of New Merchant Relationships in Early Modern French Trade
(1730–1820).” Enterprise and Society 20, no. 3 (2019): 533–574; Claire Wright, Simon Ville, and
David Merrett, “Quotidian Routines: The Cooperative Practices of a Business Elite.” Enterprise &
Society 20, no. 4 (2019): 826–860; John Haggerty and Sherryllynne Haggerty, “Visual Analytics of an
Eighteenth-Century Business Network.” Enterprise and Society 11, no. 1 (2010): 1–25.
60
Sophie Jones and Siobhan Talbott, “Sole Traders? The Role of the Extended Family in Eighteenth-
Century Atlantic Business Networks.” Enterprise and Society (2021): 1–30.
61
Larry Neal, “The Money Pitt: Lord Londonderry and the South Sea Bubble; or, How to Manage Risk
in an Emerging Market.” Enterprise and Society 1, no. 4 (2000): 659–674.
62
James Taylor, “Inside and Outside the London Stock Exchange: Stockbrokers and Speculation in
Late Victorian Britain.” Enterprise and Society 22, no. 3 (2021): 842–877; Janette Rutterford and
Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, “The Rise of the Small Investor in the United States and United Kingdom,
1895 to 1970.” Enterprise and Society 18, no. 3 (2017): 485–535.
63
Talia Pfefferman and David de Vries, “Gendering Access to Credit: Business Legitimacy in Mandate
Palestine,” Enterprise & Society 16, no. 3 (2015): 580–610.
in the form of conceptions of the good or moral economy.64 Even tax lawyers can be a
source of discomfiting emotions for a business in the wrong circumstances.65
Where it is much harder to find emotions is in what we might think of as the higher
functions of business: decision and strategy. Here reason and rationality—or, at least,
claims to those attributes—often hold sway. Business historians, influenced by their
intellectual proximity to economics, have modeled their understanding of decision-
making according to precepts such as bounded rationality, in which our capacity for
rationality is not limited by a surfeit of unwelcome emotions but simply by our own
feeble powers of cognition. With more computing and more information ever more
rational (that is, non-emotional) decision-making will be possible. Reason remains
attainable and aspirational. However, both conceptual and empirical work is beginning
to question the reign of reason, even regarding decision and strategy, including,
inter alia, in relation to decision-making, merger decisions, and organizational
commitments.66 However, business historians have rarely inquired closely into how
businesses understood what is commonly called “human nature,” particularly the
balance and relationship between reason and feeling. Merle Curti’s 1967 paper on
conceptions of human nature in the US advertising industry is an interesting exception,
tracing shifts in beliefs about that balance and relationship.67
However, in 1956, sociologist William Whyte introduced the world to “organization
man,” the human embodiment of the collectivist ethos of corporatism. A 2016
roundtable convened to reconsider this text posed a simple, but vital, question: “Just
where do new business ideas come from?”68 Pursuing this question, the assembled
scholars exposed a series of paradoxes that illuminate the uneasy relationship between
emotions and reason in understandings, then and now, of business activities.
One central paradox was how to achieve both the efficiencies of scale, routinization,
and bureaucracy and the creativity and innovation of entrepreneurialism.
Organizations had become “stifling and inhumane.”69 Creativity had come to seem
“the opposite of ‘business,’” again setting up a reason/emotion dichotomy.70 Corporate
responses to this dilemma were emotionalized as sending “a shiver down the spine
of American business.”71 Answers, it was thought, might lie in better understanding
64
David Chan Smith, “The Mid-Victorian Reform of Britain’s Company Laws and the Moral Economy
of Fair Competition.” Enterprise and Society 22, no. 4 (2021): 1103–1139.
65
Alexandra D. Ketchum, “Cooking the Books: Feminist Restaurant Owners’ Relationships with
Banks, Loans and Taxes.” Business History 64, no. 1 (2022): 1–27.
66
Daniel Raff, “Business History and the Problem of Action.” Enterprise and Society 21, no. 3 (2020):
561–591. Andrew Popp, “Making Choices in Time.” Enterprise and Society 14, no. 3 (2013): 467–474;
Julie Bower and Howard Cox, “How Scottish & Newcastle Became the U.K.’s Largest Brewer: A Case
of Regulatory Capture?” Business History Review 86, no. 1 (2012): 43–68; David L. Mason, “The Rise
and Fall of the Cooperative Spirit: The Evolution of Organisational Structures in American Thrifts,
1831–1939.” Business History 54, no. 3 (2012): 381–398.
67
Merle Curti, “The Changing Concept of ‘Human Nature’ in the Literature of American Advertising.”
Business History Review 41, no. 4 (1967): 338.
68
Christopher McKenna, “Introduction: From Management Consultant to Psychological Counsel.”
Business History Review 90, no. 4 (2016): 691.
69
Samuel Franklin, “Creativity.” Business History Review 90, no. 4 (2016): 694.
70
Ibid., 696.
71
Ibid., 700.
how to manage employees’ fruitful, but troubling and unsettling, emotions. Could
emotions be harnessed, rationalized even? Some management consultants and
theorists thought so, the circle squared: “‘creativity’ could be understood rationally
and thereby operationalized—taught, improved, and deployed on demand—so as to
dovetail with the metrics of managerial science.”72 In search of their creative wellsprings,
managerial participants in programs designed by management consultants Synectics
were encouraged to follow “subconscious cues about what ‘felt right.”’73 Synectics
was positioned as “a more efficient and dependable method for corporate innovation
that made use of ‘the personal, the non-rational, the seemingly irrelevant, emotional
aspects’ of an employee, which they believed were essential to innovation.”74 Thus,
not only could creativity be rationalized but, against received wisdom, reason was
not always the surest route to efficiency. Meanwhile, others argued that the “business
world was entering the ‘age of the intuitive manager’ … a new type of leader who
relied not on established procedures or analytical reasoning, but on the ‘visionary
and anticipatory qualities’ of intuition.”75 Nonetheless, those pushing the intuitive
manager had to battle corporate “skepticism of intuition,” and to encourage executives
to recognize the “reason and order in intuitive judgment,” out of which emerged a
“shared … commitment to explicate intuition in rational terms.”76 Emotions remained
in need of the taming influence of reason.
The creativity paradox was not the only unintended consequence of corporatism.
Management burnout was another, with emotions now the enemy. If post-war
management thinking had “sought to restore individuals, in all their emotional and
psychological complexity, to management thinking,” by the 1970s “darker implications
of that belief were beginning to manifest themselves; in particular, emotional
investment could be particularly taxing.”77 The risk of burnout was “compounded for
managers by the fact that they were expected to govern, guide, and direct the emotions
and interactions of their subordinates.”78 As ever, management consultants were ready
with answers—but not answers that involved a better understanding of emotions.
Instead, the recommendation was “not less work but rather less emotional involvement
in work,” avoiding “the pitfalls of emotional interaction with … staff.”79 Emotions were
better banished.
We have given extended consideration to a single set of articles for two reasons.
First, we need more such studies of what business (and scholars) have thought about
how people think and act and the roles therein of reason and emotion. Second, and
more importantly, the analysis has shown the extent to which that thinking has
struggled, and failed, to escape a binary distinction between affect and rationality.
Non-historical business and organizational scholars have also shown interest in
emotions. A special issue of Enterprise et Histoire on emotions and family business
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid., 699.
74
Ibid.
75
Kira Lussier, “Managing Intuition.” Business History Review 90, no. 4 (2016): 708.
76
Ibid., 709.
77
Matthew J. Hoffarth, “Executive Burnout.” Business History Review 90, no. 4 (2016): 701.
78
Ibid., 702.
79
Ibid., 703.
brought together historians and family business scholars aimed at seeding a process
of cross-fertilization between the two groups, arguing that while “emotions may be
an undeniable influence in any decision making” they may play a particularly notable
role in family businesses, involving “unique interactions,” when emotions generated
in the business “spill over to the family sphere.” These dynamics create “fertile soils
for studies into emotions’ interactions with business decisions,” again dichotomizing
business and emotions.80 Nonetheless, believing multidisciplinary approaches might
prove productive, the issue sought to be the “‘first’ to tackle emotions as an object for
business historians and management scholars.”81
As Andrea Colli has noted, family business studies have “approached the issue of
emotions and sentiments with caution, largely because of the difficulty of analyzing them
with a solid and sufficiently theoretical framework.” To date, socio-emotional wealth has
“represented the major contribution” of the field to the study of emotions in business
contexts.82 Socio-emotional wealth argues that the value placed by family firms on non-
financial returns can shape priorities, motivations, attitudes, behaviors, and choices—in
the firm. The causal flow is in one direction: from familial emotional priorities to strategic
choices at the firm level. This can be characterized as a highly functional relationship
and we believe it offers historians little scope for enriching the play of emotions in
business contexts, or economic contexts more generally. Indeed, many approaches to
emotions in organization and management studies are self-described as functional: that
is, as performing a specific function in an almost mechanical fashion.83 The operation of
such mechanisms would often also be assumed to be acultural and ahistorical, or at least
relatively so, giving little scope to the historian attuned to cultural and temporal difference.
This review of the literature has introduced key concepts and approaches from
the history of emotions, whilst also providing insights into the rich potential of a
greater recognition of the historically specific entanglement of business, emotions, and
cognition; potential found in the many dimensions across which this entanglement
has played out and in the difficulties in maintaining boundaries between emotions
and reason as ways of knowing and acting. Next we succinctly state our core argument
before introducing the structure and content of this volume.
Our Argument
When Kenneth Lipartito observed that business historians had “not recognized
that culture inheres in the very idea of rationality,” his purpose was—first—to
critique the discipline’s attachment to structural-functionalist models of the
80
Cailluet et al., “Family Firms in the Long Run,” 4.
81
Ibid.
82
Andrea Colli, “A Theory of Emotions and Sentiments in Family Firms: A Role for History.” Enterprise
et Histoire 91, no. 2 (2018): 126.
83
Dirk Lindebaum, Deanna Geddes, and Peter J. Jordan, “Theoretical Advances Around Social
Functions of Emotion and Talking about Emotion at Work,” in Social Functions of Emotion
and Talking About Emotion at Work, ed. Dirk Lindebaum, Deanna Geddes, and Peter J. Jordan
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018), 1.
economy, and—second—to propose that a cultural analytical lens might provide

an alternative, better set of answers to some of the questions puzzling the field.
Lipartito’s anti-functionalism noted but did not elaborate on the existence of
emotions.84 Though critical of structural-functionalist approaches for their
insistence that what human actors “believed and felt was unimportant,” Lipartito’s
answer to the question of “what lies beyond … the boundaries rationality?” was
“the realm of culture.” Lipartito defined culture as “a system of values, ideas, and
beliefs which constitute a mental apparatus for grasping reality,” and business
culture specifically as “that set of limiting and organizing concepts that determine
what is real or rational for management.”85 Business historical studies owe Lipartito
a considerable debt for his advocacy for cultural analysis. We acknowledge that
and extend it by arguing that if culture inheres in the very idea of rationality, then
so does affect. This then is our first core argument: that reason and rationality do
not have borders beyond which lie the disordered wilds of feeling. We propose the
removal of conceptual boundaries between reason and rationality and affect, feeling,
and sentiment. Claims to rationality are heuristic devices, made from subjective
affective positions, and generative of further subjective affective positions.
What do we do with such a proposition, which threatens to upend the toolbox on
which historians of business have relied for generations? Are emotions simply always
there, always prior? Here we turn to the history of emotion and, in particular, Rob
Boddice’s “striking takeaway” that though “the brain makes emotions, it makes them
in a body that is situated in time and space.”86 The business historical, we argue, as a
second core proposal, is a key time and space within which emotions are made and
which is itself constantly remade by embodied emotions—a powerful exemplar of
“bodies, brains, and worlds, locked in dynamic but unstable relationships.”87 Why key?
Boddice argues that sense and feelings are “directed and made meaningful in exchange
or interaction, in and through social contexts and institutions, and through culturally
bound scripts of expression and action that provide the building blocks of emotional
and sensory lives, and experience itself.”88 As a dominant institution under modernity,
business provides a particularly powerful social context for affective exchange and
interaction and thus for the writing and rewriting of compelling culturally bound
scripts directing expression, action, and experience. The concept of cultural scripts
returns us to Lipartito, who argued that business “has contributed to the construction
of such powerful ideas as rationality and efficiency, to such values as progress and to
such structures as technology and bureaucracy.”89 Bringing together our propositions,
reframing rationality as affect as well as thought not only opens up new perspectives
on the history of business but also on the role of business in shaping the affective world
we inhabit today.
84
Kenneth Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History.” Business and Economic History 24,
no. 2 (1995): 14.
85
Ibid., 3, 5, 2.
86
Boddice, “History Looks Forward,” 131.
87
Ibid., 132.
88
Ibid.
89
Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” 36.
Thus, in this volume, we aim to effect a deep integration of the histories of business
and emotions, showing that emotions are—and have been—at the heart of the market,
of the enterprise, and of capitalism.
Structure
This volume is not intended to be the definitive treatment of business and emotion.
Rather, we aim to initiate a sustained and growing discussion—to provide places to
start. The geographic and chronological breadth of the volume—from Africa to Asia,
to Europe, and to North America, from the early modern period to the present—
highlight the potential for further exploration. Focusing on different subjects and
sources, utilizing different methodologies, the chapters address enterprises as varied
as family businesses, slavery, the arms industry, whisky, advertising, finance, feminist
entrepreneurship, and the service sector.
Yet, despite their differences, the chapters address some overarching themes and
questions, revealing commonalities and promising areas of further research. Several
chapters discuss the various ways that emotions have been (and still are) sold—from
selling feelings of trust in the service sector, to selling nostalgia and national/regional
pride. Others focus on specific emotions: fear, nostalgia, anxiety, love, pride, anger, and
more. Several focus specifically on gender, questioning the gendered nature of various
emotions in business. By taking seriously what happens when emotions and emotional
situations—whether fear and anxiety, nostalgia, love, or the longing of distance and
separation—affect businesses, and, in turn, how businesses affect the emotional lives of
individuals and communities, this collection reframes conventional understandings of
both business and emotion. Examining business in all its facets through the lens of the
history of emotion allows us to recognize, and to question, the emotional structures
behind business decisions and relationships.
The volume is structured around three key elements and concepts from business
that are radically reframed in terms of emotions and emotionality. The first section
focuses on disciplinary emotions, analogous to the co-ordinating and disciplining
functions of markets; the second on enabling emotions, analogous to the numerous
dependencies and obligations that tie businesses and economies together; and the
third on unruly emotions, analogous to the dynamic and volatile forces that can both
propel and upend businesses and economies.
On one level, this structure might be thought of as just a rather neat device (at
least, we hope it is quite neat). Working with analogy it aids the readier transposition
of ideas and claims across realms—business and emotions—that we are accustomed
to thinking of as separated by a near impermeable barrier. And we hope that it does
work like that. But our intentions in adopting this structure do not end there. We do
not wish to argue merely that some things in the realm of emotions are “like” some
things in the realm of business. Instead, we suggest the possibility of a thoroughgoing
reconfiguration or reorientation of historical studies of business around emotions
and emotionality. We use the language of business as a Trojan horse. In this sense,
our choices around structure are meant to echo and to reinforce the propositions
we advanced in the section above entitled “Our Argument”: namely that reframing
rationality as affect as well as thought not only opens up new perspectives on the
history of business but also on the role of business in shaping the affective world we
inhabit today. At the same time, the structure reflects a further important element of
our framing: an emphasis on the work that emotions do, as well as the performative
nature of emotions. Thus, in framing the volume around three types of emotions, we
are also explicitly building on and expanding Reddy’s work on emotives, or emotional
expressions that describe and change the world.90
One more word on structure. Our schema maps the depth, complexity, and multi-
directionality of the relationship between business, economy, and emotions. Yet, it
provides but a first outline of a typology of these interactions. We look forward to
others taking up, adding to, and elaborating on this tentative typology, which has much
more to yield.
Disciplinary Emotions
Firms and entrepreneurs operate in highly complex systems requiring intricate

co-ordination. Conventional thought argues that the market is the dominant co-
ordinating mechanism, working through rational responses to prices and other signals.
The market is also a disciplinary mechanism, punishing enterprises that misread the
signals and rewarding those that make the right moves. The assumed rationality of
the market remains robust but has long been questioned. The chapters in this section,
however, go further than simply suggesting that emotions complicate our assumptions
about market rationalities and market power. Instead they show that the consideration
of emotions can reveal deeper modes of co-ordination and discipline, rooted in
subjectivities that can be prior to markets.
Katie Barclay’s essay focuses on the middling sorts in Britain and Ireland from 1750
to 1850 to tie emotion to one of the most commonly used business history sources—the
account book, which might be thought of an institutionalized cultural script. Revealing
the emotions at the heart of this seemingly rational and straightforward source, Barclay
shows how accounting practices were a way for the middling sorts to practice self-
discipline, including of their emotions. In doing so, a particular type of capitalist self
was produced or performed, one rooted in the performance metrics that accounting
offered (and offers). Mandy Cooper’s essay turns to the ways that businesswomen in
the Civil War era US South—Black and white, free and enslaved—deployed emotions
strategically to help their businesses succeed, showing how social context shaped
emotional expression and action. As Cooper shows, these women recognized the
emotions at the heart of market co-ordination and discipline throughout the Civil War
era and used them to their advantage.
Daniel Levinson Wilk explores a concept at the heart of business history: trust.
In examining how trust was sold in the antebellum service sector, he lays out a
consciously theoretical argument that trust was an emotion that was both bought and
90
Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 128.
sold—and that trust was crucial for the development of capitalism. Levinson Wilk
wrestles with the intangibleness of this commodity, particularly in the service sector,
where the emotional labor of workers has tended to be ignored, both in the sources
and in the historiography. Semih Gökatalay shifts the discussion to selling another
type of emotion, examining how advertisers in the social context of early Cold War
Turkey sold a sense of safety and security (and American-ness) in the face of a growing
Soviet threat. Focusing on emotions in advertisements, clear examples of cultural
scripts, Gökatalay shows that during the early Cold War era, Cold War tensions heavily
influenced emotional marketing strategies, both in Turkey and globally. Together,
these four essays reveal the market co-ordination and discipline that so often relied on
emotion and emotional norms, whether in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, the
nineteenth-century United States, or twentieth-century Turkey.
Enabling Emotions
Firms and entrepreneurs must possess resources, such as physical assets, financial
capital, and human capital, in order to compete in marketplaces. More recently,
concepts such as social and emotional capital have been added to the bundle of
resources with which firms compete against one another. Firms and entrepreneurs are
also often reliant on others for access to key resources, building webs of reciprocal
obligations, including financial debt but extending to include notions such as trust
and reciprocity. The chapters in this section reveal a series of other, equally important,
connections and entanglements between firms, entrepreneurs, markets, customers,
cultures, and societies that are rooted in emotions. Indeed, it is often through emotional
commitments that enterprises gather the other resources they require.
Cheikh Sene begins this section by examining the complex emotions involved in the
institution of contractual marriages between signares (mixed-race female merchants/
traders) and Europeans in Senegal—and how those emotions and the marriages
themselves changed from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Sene shows how
the signares used these marriages (and their attendant emotions) to develop their
trade networks and further their own social status. Laura McCoy similarly looks at
networks, shifting the focus to the relationship between masculinity and emotional
bonds amongst Boston merchants in the nineteenth century. Examining prescriptive
literature, correspondence and memoirs, McCoy reveals that Boston merchants formed
a supportive brotherhood that traded in a commerce of affection with each other in an
attempt to successfully navigate the ever-looming specters of failure and risk.
Allison Gibb and Niall MacKenzie turn to a different sort of commerce of affection:
the marriage between Rita and Masataka Taketsuru, which helped establish the
Japanese whisky industry in the early twentieth century. Analyzing letters from Rita
to her family in Scotland, among other sources, Gibb and MacKenzie highlight Rita’s
centrality to the early development (and success) of Nikka Whisky through her work,
social connections, financing, and emotional encouragement of her husband. In
so doing, they highlight both the emotional side of business and the transnational
differences that, through emotions, shape businesses and business relationships. Here,
the clash of differently scripted versions of marital love proved unsettling. Andrew
Popp examines a different emotional resource: nostalgia. Bringing us to the twenty-
first century, he examines how community businesses anchored people in a sense of
place that bridged time. Situating his analysis on the outpouring of feelings of loss and
nostalgia upon the closing of one such business, Popp argues that nostalgia—or, more
specifically, culturally scripted expressions of nostalgia—create bridges between the
past, the present, and the future. Taken together, these four essays reveal the emotions
so often at the heart of the relationships between businesses, individuals, and the
communities of which they were a part.
Unruly Emotions
Capitalism is a dynamic system in which change is a constant and volatility never far
away. Change is seen as originating in the innovativeness of firms and entrepreneurs,
in the ebb and flow of competitive advantage, and in bursts of irrationality in the
marketplace. In turn, effects from these processes ripple out to induce change and
volatility in societies and cultures. This section explores how this situation has never
been a one-way street, with emotions generated outside the economic sphere frequently,
sometimes dramatically, intruding into it. These unruly emotions are the subject of this
section. These chapters highlight the power of emotions such as fear and anxiety to
shape the actions of businesses, individual entrepreneurs, and communities and show
that such emotions are integral and ever present, not peripheral or occasional.
Catherine Fletcher’s essay deals with these unruly emotions in two distinct—and
yet clearly connected—ways. First, she examines the emotions of the arms industry
itself (the fear, pride, and other emotions created by and used to sell arms). Yet, she also
turns to how historians and others have written about the arms industry, prompting
us to consider our own emotional response to and investment in our topics—and what
that might mean for the literature. Inger Leemans, Joost Dankers, Ronald Kroeze,
and Floris van Berckel Smit turn to one of the emotions most commonly associated
with business—anxiety surrounding financial crises. Taking a long view of financial
crises in the Netherlands, the authors highlight what happens when unruly emotions
and unruly markets collide. Using three case studies (early modern bubbles and the
crises of 1929 and 1987), they highlight the historical phenomenon of sensemaking
that accompanied each financial bubble (and its associated cultural bubble). In each
crisis, emotions were seen as essential driving forces of the stock market, and emotion
narratives played an important role in the broader processes of cultural sensemaking
that showed, over the long run, common dramatic themes and plots.
Robert Colby examines the fears and anxieties surrounding a different crisis—
cholera outbreaks affecting the domestic slave trade in the antebellum United States.
He focuses on slave traders’ extensive correspondence networks to show how they
sought to navigate emotionally and pathologically volatile markets. In so doing, Colby
reveals that fear of disease fundamentally shaped the business of slavery, with the
emotions of everyone involved in the trade factored in to their business decisions—
except the enslaved men and women upon whom profits depended. Debra Michals
brings us firmly into the twentieth century, examining the fears surrounding feminist
entrepreneurship in the 1970s. She shows how anxieties about the future of feminism
played out in the feminist movement’s passionate internal debates and critiques
of feminist businesses (of which there were thousands). Perhaps more importantly,
though, Michals’s essay shows that critiques of capitalism, politics, and emotion
were (and remain) deeply intertwined. The institutionalization of feminist enterprise
provoked contending expressions and actions. These four essays get at the very heart
of unruly emotions: fear, anxiety, suspicion, and even pride. Together, they highlight
how such unruly emotions fundamentally shaped the development of businesses,
individual—and collective—entrepreneurship, and capitalism itself.
Looking Forward
Conceptually, the chapters in this volume apply theoretical approaches from the
literature specifically on the history of emotions and from affect theory more
broadly. The theoretical literature on the history of emotions emphasizes the work
that emotions and emotional situations do simply by their presence—whether in an
emotional regime, as William Reddy posits, or an emotional community, as Barbara
Rosenwein has argued.91
This volume builds on that work, while turning the conversation specifically to
the emotional structures behind business decisions and relationships. The range of
methodologies, sources, and approaches explored here highlight the multiple areas in
which paying attention to emotion can further the field of business history—and vice
versa. They also highlight the potential for further avenues of research, thematic and
methodological.
Perhaps, for example, there is an overarching emotional regime in each society and
culture. But, perhaps there is also a set of emotional communities within that regime
that provide emotional refuge. (As, for example, feminist collective enterprises provided
a refuge from starkly capitalistic economics—the dominant emotional regime—but
were themselves part of a larger feminist emotional community.) What does it do for
the history of emotions if we consider these methodological and theoretical approaches
as a “both, and” approach?
Our contributors also use a broad array of sources: account books, newspaper
articles, memoirs, correspondence, advertisements, social media, and even the
historiography of business itself. All of these sources show the potential for examining
the emotional dimensions of business sources—some old ones with a new eye, as with
account books or business correspondence, and some new ones, as with social media
or the historiography of particular businesses. But these are not the only avenues of
research. Corporate records, for example, while seemingly rational and non-emotional,
tend to follow prescribed formats. Much as Katie Barclay has shown the emotional
91
Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages;
Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology”; Matt and Stearns, eds., Doing Emotions History; Rosenwein,
“Worrying about Emotions in History”; Plamper, The History of Emotions.
structure behind account books, if we consider “rational” as an emotive, an expression

or projection of studied non-emotion, then that might change how we understand
the content of many records. Perhaps, then, we can start to investigate the emotions
surrounding corporate decisions and strategy.
The essays in this volume rely on a range of approaches. Some focus on specific
emotions or specific businesses. Some focus on change over time. Others take
longer approaches, highlighting continuities and similarities across time and space.
But, more work remains to be done. More comparative work, for example, could
highlight similarities and differences in the historically and culturally specific ways
that businesses, individuals, and communities have interacted with, used, and felt
particular emotions—and how those interactions shaped their actions. Moreover, as
Mandy Cooper’s, Laura McCoy’s, Robert Colby’s, Cheikh Sene’s, and Debra Michals’s
chapters show, paying attention to the particular ways that gender and race have—and
continue to—shape individuals’ relationship with business shows great promise. The
emotions of the politics of business, not covered in this volume, are likely to be equally
rewarding.
Even when focusing on specific emotions, the essays in this volume raise important
questions. The section on unruly emotions, for example, focused largely on emotions
perceived as negative: anger, fear, anxiety, suspicion, etc. But, what if love is an unruly
emotion? Or friendship? Or nostalgia? What might it mean to consider how these
seemingly positive emotions intruded into the business sphere, shaping the actions of
businesses, entrepreneurs, and communities? Or, what if we consider anger, anxiety,
fear, or suspicion as a disciplinary emotion? What if those emotions play/ed an
important role in market co-ordination?
In this sense we view the heterogeneity of approaches taken by our contributors
as a strength, not a weakness. That heterogeneity is found across every possible
dimension: temporal; geographic; socio-cultural and institutional setting; sources and
methodologies; analytical operations; and specific theoretical lenses. Here heterogeneity
serves as a signal of great further potential. It shows in startling clarity that there are
few contexts in which business and emotions cannot be fruitfully explored.
By integrating the history of business with the history of emotion, the chapters in
this volume show that the presence of emotion and emotional situations (whether fear/
anxiety, rationality, nostalgia, love, or the longing of distance and separation) altered
(and were altered by) the structure and content of relationships between individuals,
businesses, and communities, placing emotion at the very heart of the market.
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Part One
Disciplinary Emotions
We are often told that we must labor to exert control over our emotions lest they
control us. Emotions run away with us. They get the upper hand. We find ourselves
caught in their grip. Our discipline breaks down. Capitalism, in contrast, holds an
inexorable sway. Under capitalism, the great disciplining force is thought to be the
inescapable judgment of the invisible, and impersonal, hand of the market—the
ultimate arbiter. In response, it is assumed, owners, managers, and entrepreneurs
seek command and control. While emotions spring from base instincts, in contrast,
rationality, the most effective of disciplinary forces, is deliberately chosen. The measure
it imposes is objective and exacting, offering the promise of command and control over
the market itself. This common framing of the economy seems to be built around some
fundamental, motivating tensions and dichotomies.
But as this section argues, those dichotomies are false. Emotions exert their own
disciplines, whether, for example, through fear, guilt, or shame, each of which cultivates
within us the imperative of their avoidance, or through more positive emotions,
which appeal to us like a siren song. Love too can keep us in line, or drive us to new
endeavors, new achievements. Duty appears a matter of conformity to social norms and
conventions, externally imposed, but exactly where does it shade into loyalty, which
with its deep interiority few would dispute is also an emotion? Instant gratification is
deplored as giving way to the tides of desire. Delayed gratification is championed as
rational and right. But is it still not gratification, rooted in the subjectivities and pleasures
of wishes and wants? Is it always rational to wait or otherwise chasten ourselves? After
all, it is not often that we frame the flagellant as rational. Emotions discipline, through
both punishment and reward, quite as powerfully as the bottom line.
30
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She realised my advantage, but she wouldn’t retreat. The Cortelyou
women never do. Yet she knew enough to allow the honours of war to
a hard-driven enemy. “The Cortelyou men are gentlemen,” she said.
Wasn’t that a neat way of telling me that I would never fail a woman
in distress? I felt pleased that she understood the family so well as to
have no fear for the conduct of even her bitterest enemy. “Besides,”
she continued, “I like the Cortelyou temper.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Yes,” she persisted, “it’s an absolutely reliable factor. Now, papa
—” Then she hesitated, realising the slip.
With an older girl I should have let her flounder, and enjoyed it;
but she was so young, and blushed so charmingly that I had to help
her out. “Don’t keep me in suspense about your father,” I said, in my
most interested of tones, as if I truly wished to know something of
that blot on the ‘scutcheon. This was my second mistake, and a bad
one.
“We’ll leave Mr. Dabney Cortelyou out of the conversation, please,”
she retorted, looking me in the eyes. Was there ever a meaner return
for an act of pure charity than that?
By the way, Kate’s eyes are not Cortelyou. I wondered from where
she got them. When we are angry we contract ours, which is ugly.
She opens hers, which is—I tried to make her do it again by saying,
“You should set a better example, then.” No good: she had got back
to her form, and was smiling sweetly.
“They are furiously disappointed so far,” she remarked.
“What an old curiosity shop the world is about other people’s
affairs! It’s no concern of theirs that my grandfather and your”—I
faltered, and went on—“that my grandfather had a row in his family.
We don’t talk of it.” When I said “we” I meant the present company,
but unfortunately Kate took it to mean our faction, and knowing of
her father’s idle blabbing, she didn’t like it.
“Your side has always dodged publicity,” she affirmed viciously,
though smiling winsomely. Kate’s smile must be her strong card.
“We have maintained a dignified silence,” I responded calmly; but
I knew that a dagger thrust below that beautifully modelled throat
would be less cruel.
She tried to carry the wound bravely. “My father is quite justified
in letting the truth be known,” she insisted.
“Then why don’t you, too, give public house-warmings in the
family-skeleton closet?” I inquired blandly. That was really a
triumph, for Kate had never talked to outsiders about the wretched
business. She couldn’t even respond with what she thought; for if she
said that it was always the side in the wrong which talked, she was no
better off, because we, like her, had kept silence, but her father had
chattered it all over town. She looked down, and I gloated over her
silence, till suddenly I thought I saw a suggestion of moisture on her
down-turned lashes. What I said to myself was not flattering, and
moreover is not fit for publication. What I said aloud I still glow over
with pride when it recurs to memory.
“Beware of the croquette!” I exclaimed hastily. “I’ve just burned
my tongue horribly.” And I reached for the ice-water.
She was as quick as I had been. The Cortelyou girls are quick, but
she—well, I think the ancestress who gave her those eyes must have
been a little quicker.
“You spoke a moment too late,” she replied, looking up at me. “I
had just done the same, and feel like weeping.” I wonder what the
recording angel wrote against those two speeches?
Then suddenly Kate began to laugh.
“What is it?” I queried.
“Taste your croquette,” she suggested.
It was as cool as it should have been hot!
We both laughed so heartily that Mr. Baxter called, “Come; don’t
keep such a good story to yourselves.”
“Pretend you are so engrossed that you didn’t hear,” advised Kate,
simulating the utmost interest. “Aren’t we doing well?”
“Thanks to you,” was my gallant reply.
“Thanks to the Cortelyous,” she declared.
“They might have known,” said I, “that we’d never have a public
circus to please them.”
“Isn’t it nice,” she responded, “since we had to have a fracas, that it
should be between ladies and gentlemen?”
“Isn’t it?” I acceded. “Just supposing there had been some cad
concerned, who would have written to the papers and talked to
reporters!”
“That was impossible, because we are all Cortelyous,” explained
Kate. I like a girl who stands up for her stock.
“Yes,” I assented. “And that’s the one advantage of family rows.”
“I want to tell you,” she went on, “that you do my father a great
injustice. Some natures are silent in grief or pain, and some must cry
out. Because he talks, merely means that he suffers.”
I longed to quote her remark about leaving her father out of the
conversation, but having told her there were no cads in the family,
the quotation was unavailable. So I merely observed, “Not knowing
Mr. Dabney Cortelyou, I have had no chance to do him justice.”
“But what you hear—” she began, with the proudest of looks; and it
really hurt me to have to interrupt her by saying,—
“Since I only get word of him from his dearest friends I am forced
to take a somewhat jaundiced view of him.”
“I suppose you are surrounded by toadies who pretend to know
him,” she said contemptuously.
I was not to be made angry. I was enjoying the dinner too much.
“It would be a very terrible thing for our mutual friends,” I
continued, “if the breach were ever healed, and we exchanged notes
as to their tattling.”
“Fortunately they are in no danger,” she answered, more cheerfully
—indeed I might say, more gleefully—than it seemed to me the
occasion required.
“Fortunately,” I agreed, out of self-respect. Then I weakened a
little by adding, “But what a pity it is you and I didn’t have the
settling of that farm-line!”
“My father could not have acted otherwise,” she challenged back.
“And the courts decided that my grandfather was right.”
“I should have done just as he did,” she replied.
“Then you acknowledge my grandfather was right?”
“I!”—indignantly.
“You just assured me you should have done as he did!” I teased,
laughing. “No. Of course both of them were justified in everything
but in their making a legal matter a family quarrel. If we had had it to
do, it would have been done amicably, I think.”
“What makes you so sure?” she asked.
“Because I am sweet-tempered, and you—”
She wouldn’t accept a compliment from an enemy, so interrupted
me with, “My father has one of the finest natures I have ever known.”
“‘Physician, know thyself,’” I quoted, getting in the compliment in
spite of her.
“That’s more than you do,” she replied merrily.
This could be taken in two ways, but I preferred to make it
applicable to her rather than to myself. I said, “Our acquaintance has
been short.”
“But we know all about the stock,” she corrected.
“I’m proud of the family,” I acknowledged; “but don’t let’s be
Ibsenish.”
“I knew you didn’t like him,” said Kate, confidentially. “I don’t
either.”
“He’s rather rough on us old families,” I intimated.
“Sour grapes,” explained Kate. “The wouldn’t-because-I-can’t-be
people always stir up the sediments of my Cortelyou temper.”
“I thought you liked the family temper,” I suggested.
“In anybody but myself,” she told me. “With others it’s really a
great help. Now, with my brothers, I know just how far I can go
safely, and it’s easy to manage them.”
“I suppose that accounts for the ease with which you manage me.”
She laughed, and replied demurely, “I think we are both on our
good behaviour.”
“I’m afraid our respective and respected parents won’t think so.”
This made her look serious, and I wondered if her father could be
brute enough ever to lose that awful temper of his at such a charming
daughter. The thought almost made me lose mine. “They can’t blame
you,” I assured her. “Your father—”
“Is sure that everything I do is right,” she interjected, “but Mrs.
Pellew?”
“We will not make Mrs. Pellew—”
Kate saw I was going to use her own speech, and she interrupted in
turn. “Of course you are over twenty-one,” she continued, “but the
Cortelyou women always have their way. I hope she won’t be very
bad to you.”
She certainly had paid me off, and to boot, for my earlier speech.
And the nasty thing about it was that any attempt to answer her
would look as if I felt there was truth in her speech, which was really
ridiculous. Though I live with my mother, my friends know who is
the real master of the house.
“Any one living with a Cortelyou woman must confess her
superiority,” I responded, bowing deferentially.
“Yes,” she said, nodding her head knowingly. “People say that she
spoils you. Now I see how you compass it.”
“We have only exchanged Ibsen for Mrs. Grundy,” I complained.
“‘Excelsior’ is a good rule,” announced Kate.
“That’s what you’ll be doing in a moment,” said I, trying to look
doleful, for we were eating the game course.
“How well you act it!” replied Kate. “You ought to go on the stage.
What a pity that you should waste your time on clubs and afternoon
teas!”
“Look here,” I protested, “I’ve done my best all through dinner,
considering my Cortelyou temper, and now, just because it’s so
nearly over that you don’t need me any longer is no reason for
making such speeches. I don’t go to my club once a week, and I
despise afternoon teas.”
“That sampler has become positively threadbare,” retorted Kate. “I
really think it must be worked in worsted, and hung up in all the New
York clubs, like ‘God bless our home!’ and ‘Merry Christmas!’”
“I much prefer hearts to clubs, for a steady trump,” I remarked.
“You play billiards, I presume?”
“Yes,” I innocently replied.
“What’s your average run?”
It was a tempting bait she shoved under my nose, but I realised the
trap; and was too wary to be caught. “Oh, four, when I’m in good
form.”
“Really?”
“Really.” I did not choose to add that I was talking of the balk-line
game, not caring to be too technical with a woman.
“That’s very curious!” she exclaimed.
“I suppose some devoted friend of mine has told you I’m only a
billiard-marker?” I inquired.
“No—but—”
“But?”
“Nothing.”
“George Washington became President by always telling the
truth.”
“That’s the advantage of being a woman,” replied Kate. “We don’t
have to scheme and plot and crawl for the Presidency.”
“How about spring bonnets?” I mildly insinuated.
“Does your mother have a very bad time persuading you to pay for
hers?” laughed Kate, mischievously.
I didn’t like the question, though I knew she was only teasing, so I
recurred to my question. “You haven’t told me what that ‘nothing’
was,” I persisted.
“I oughtn’t,” urged Kate.
“Then I know you will,” I said confidently.
“Well, Seymour Halsey said to Weedon the other night, ‘I wish you
could play with Jack Pellew, so as to knock some of his airs out of
him!’”
“Why,” I ejaculated, “I could play cushion caroms against your
brother’s straight game and beat him then!”
“I never did believe that story about George Washington,” asserted
Kate, with a singular want of relevance.
“No woman could,” I answered, squaring accounts promptly.
Here I saw the little preliminary flutter among the ladies, and
knowing that I should never speak to Kate again, I said:
“Miss Cortelyou, I’m afraid an unkind remark of mine a little while
ago gave you pain. You’ve probably forgotten it already, but I never
shall cease to regret I made it.”
“Don’t think of it again,” she replied, kindly, as she rose. “And
thank you for a pleasant evening.”
“Don’t blame me for that,” I pleaded hastily. “It was your own
fault.”
“Not entirely,” denied Kate. “We did it so well that I’m prouder
than ever of the family.”
“I decline to share this honour with my grandfather,” I protested
indignantly. “He couldn’t keep his temper, bother him!”
We were at the door now, and Kate gave me the prettiest of parting
nods and smiles.
“Wasn’t it a pity?” she sighed. That was distinctly nice of her. Just
like a Cortelyou woman.
“Whew! Jack,” whistled Ferdie Gallaudet. “I thought I should die,
and expected to sit on your body at the postmortem.” Ferdie thinks
he’s clever!
“Oh, shut up, Ferdie,” I growled, dropping back into my seat.
“Don’t wonder your temper’s queered,” persisted the little ass.
“‘Wotinell’ did you talk about?”
“Family matters,” I muttered.
“Oh, I say, that’s a bit shiny at the joints. It was too well done to
have verged on that subject.”
“We talked family matters, and enjoyed it,” I insisted.
“Ever hear of George Washington?” inquired Ferdie.
“Kate mentioned him to me to-night, and I promised to put him up
at the Knickerbocker for a month.”
“Kate!” exclaimed Ferdie.
I lighted my cigar.
“Kate!” he repeated, with a rising inflection. “Now look here, I
wasn’t born yesterday.”
“Where’s your family Bible?” I inquired blandly.
“You’ll be saying next that to-night’s arrangement was by ‘special
request.’”
“You were across the table,” I retorted. “Draw your own
conclusions.”
“I suppose you’ll join her later,” suggested Ferdie, in an irritating
manner.
I wouldn’t be bluffed by him, so I replied pointedly, “I may, to save
her from worse.”
“Give you odds on it,” offered Ferdie.
“I don’t make bets where women are concerned,” I crushingly
responded.
“Sorry the strain has left you so bad-tempered,” said Ferdie, rising.
“There’s Caldwell beckoning to me. Ta, ta!”
I have liked Caldwell ever since.
When we joined the ladies I went over to Kate.
“This is persecution,” she smilingly protested, as she made room
for me on the sofa.
“I know it,” I cheerfully groaned, as I sat down beside her. “But I
had to for the sake of the family.”
“A family is a terrible thing to live up to!” sighed Kate.
“Terrible!” I ejaculated.
“Fortunately it will only be for a moment,” she assured me.
“If you go at once,” I urged, “they’ll all think it’s the feud.”
“What a nuisance!” cried Kate. “I ought to be on my way to a
musical this very minute.”
“On the principle that music hath charms?” I queried.
“Good-night!” she said, holding out her hand. I had already
noticed what pretty hands Kate had.
“Forgive me!” I begged.
“Never!” she replied.
“You are serious?” I questioned, and she understood what I meant
as if I had said it. I do like people who can read between the lines!
She amended her “never” to, “Well, not till I have had my chance
to even the score.”
“Take it now.”
“I haven’t time.”
“I will submit to anything.”
“My revenge must be deep.”
“I will do the thing I most hate.”
“Even afternoon teas?” laughed Kate, archly.
I faltered in voice while promising, “Even afternoon teas!”
“Then I’ll send you a card for mine,” she ended, and left me,
crushed and hopeless.
⁂
No. That didn’t end the feud. It only led to a truce. For a time
things went very well, but then the quarrel broke out with renewed
force. You see, Kate claimed I spoiled the boy, and I claimed she did
the spoiling. So we submitted it to arbitration. My mother said Kate
was very judicious, and her father declared I was a model parent.
Then we called in his godmother, and she decided we all four spoiled
him. It’s been open war ever since, with an occasional brief cessation
of hostilities whenever Kate kisses me. After the boy’s grown up, I
suppose, peace will come again.
His godmother? Oh! Mrs. Baxter. You see, we couldn’t do less, for
she had talked it all over town that the match was of her making. Her
making! In ten cases out of nine she would have had a disrupted
dinner. It’s lucky for her that Kate was a Cortelyou woman!
“THE BEST LAID PLANS”
AS ENACTED
IN
Two Social Cups of Tea,

Two Social Jokes, and
One Social Agony.
Scene
Parlour in country house of Mrs. Wycherly.
Characters
Mrs. Wycherly,
Miss Helen Wycherly,
Miss Rose Newcome,
Miss Amy Sherman,
Lord Ferrol,
George Harold,
Steven Harold,
Dennis Grant.
Syllabus
ACT I
A cup of tea and two social jokes.
5.30 P. M. Friday.
ACT II
A cup of tea and one social agony.

5.30 P. M. Tuesday.
ACT I
Scene.—Parlour in country house with doors r. and l. At back, a
fireplace with open fire. Down centre l., a small table, with
white blotting-pad, large paper-knife, and writing
paraphernalia; and two chairs r. and l. Down centre r., a small
table with tea-service, and chair r. At extreme r. two easy-
chairs.
Mrs. Wycherly sits at writing-desk r. with teacup on table,
reading a letter in her hand. Amy sits at desk l. Helen at tea-
table, making tea. Steven at mantel. George and Dennis seated
at r. with teacups.
Helen. Another cup, mama?

Steven. She doesn’t hear you, Helen.
George. Thanks to his precious letter.
Helen (louder). More tea, mama!
Rose (outside l., calling). Are you having tea, Helen?
Helen. Yes, Rose.
Amy. And something very exciting as well.
George. More exciting even than your novel, I’ll be bound.
Dennis (calling). Bring the chocolates with you, if you haven’t
eaten them all.
Enter Rose, l., with box of chocolates and book.
Rose. What is it?
Dennis. Ask Mrs. Wycherly.
Rose. What is the excitement, Mrs. Wycherly?
George. Louder.
Amy (loudly). Mrs. Wycherly!
Mrs. W. (starting). Oh! What?
George. That is just the problem. Is he a what, or isn’t he?
Dennis (bitterly). I don’t believe it will make the least difference
even if he proves a “What is it.”
Steven (more bitterly). No, we fellows see how it will be! The
moment “me lud” arrives, we shall be nowhere with you girls.
George. George Augustus Guelph Dunstan, Earl of Ferrol and
Staunton! His very letter of acceptance has made Helen forget that it
is cream—not sugar—that I “omit for want of space.”
Helen. Not at all! If you had been polite you would have given that
cup to Rose. As for his lordling, do you for an instant suppose that I
intend to compete as long as Rose and Amy are here? No, sir—I leave
him to my betters, D. V.
Mrs. W. Well, really, I don’t think that either his titles or his being
in the hands of an oculist is any excuse for making his time so
indefinite (looks at letter). He will be charmed to pay me a visit, “by
next Friday, or perhaps even sooner.” Now isn’t that a nice position
to leave a hostess who wishes to make his stay quite as pleasant as
his papa made mine when I was at the “Towers.” Imagine this
betitled being getting into the Junction by the evening train and then
having to walk over to Beechcroft.
Rose. Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely to see him coming in at the gate, so
wet and muddy that Tiger would make the same mistake that he did
with that poor minister?
Dennis. I hope, if he does have to foot it, he will not bring the usual
number of parcels that the swells on the other side consider as
necessary as those books which Charlie Lamb said “no gentleman
should be without.”
Amy. Mrs. Wycherly, how can this man be two earls at once?
Steven. The English aristocracy finds it convenient to have an alias
now and again.
Mrs. W. I’m not sure, Amy, but I believe it has something to do
with his mother. I never could understand the peerage.
George. Ye gods! to think of a mother with a marriageable
daughter not understanding the peerage!
Helen. I won’t be slandered by you. Marriageable daughter,
indeed!
Rose (scornfully). Yes, isn’t that a regular man’s view of it?
Dennis. Well, I think it’s very creditable to be without a peer.
Amy. That depends on how you appear.
Rose. And that depends on your appear age.
George (pityingly). Don’t notice them; they’re quite harmless.
Speaking of the peerage, though, did any of you see Labouchere’s
screed in “Truth”?
Mrs. W. I haven’t, for one—what was it?
George. Bass, the proprietor of the pale ale, has just been made a
baron, and this was an editorial on the “Last Addition to the
Beerage.”
Amy. Mrs. Wycherly, do let me have the letter: I want to see what
kind of a hand he writes.
[Mrs. W. passes letter to Amy.
Dennis. There! That’s the way in this life. I’ll be bound you never
wanted to see what my writing was like.
Rose. Well, did you ever want to see Amy’s hand?
Steven. Hers is too small to make it worth while.
Amy (sweetly). Is your tea sweet enough, Steven?
Dennis. Why waste your sweetness on the desert air?
Steven. Thank you, Dennis, but I am not a deserted heir, and don’t
suppose I shall be, till The Right Honourable George Augustus
Guelph Dunstan, Earl of Ferrol and Staunton, puts in his
appearance. Till then, Mrs. Amy Sherman Micawber will never desert
her Steven.
Helen. Really, I think it is very unkind to say all these things before
Lord Ferrol arrives. If you begin like this over the “cheerful and
uninebriating teacup,” with a good dinner not far distant, what will
you say when you have just dragged yourself out of bed to breakfast?
Dennis (fiercely). The talking point will be passed. We shall act!
Bul-lud!!!
George (rising and setting teacup on tea-table). So let it be
understood, if you girls give us the cold shoulder when his lordship
arrives, we will not be responsible for the consequences.
Steven. But don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Helen. Well, you deserve to have the cold shoulder for talking to us
so.
Rose. Yes, just as if we had all turned tuft-hunters.
Mrs. W. At least it shows modesty. The boys all take for granted
they cannot stand up against the new-comer.
Rose. Oh, Mrs. Wycherly, what nice, honest, guileless men you
must have known when you were a girl! To think that these should
gain the reputation of modesty by their grumbling!
Helen. Yes, dear, they are delusions and snares, having fully
mastered Talleyrand’s aphorism “that words were meant to conceal
ideas.”
Amy. “Put not your trust in kings and princes.”
George. That’s just what we want, only please extend it to the
aristocracy.
Rose. You all deserve to have us leave you to your own devices, as
soon as we can get a decent substitute.
Mrs. W. Well, if Lord Ferrol is anything like his father, I can
promise you no unworthy one, even compared to my boys here.
Steven (crossing down stage to Mrs. W. and bowing). Mrs.
Wycherly, the race does not improve. Why are the daughters no
longer as their mothers were?
Helen. }
Amy. } Oh!!!
Rose. }
Helen (springing to her feet). Mr. Chairman, or Mrs. Chairwoman,
is not the honourable gentleman’s language unparliamentary?
Rose. It’s uncomplimentary, and I believe that is what
unparliamentary generally means.
Amy (rising). I move the expulsion of the honourable gentleman.
Helen (rising). Second the motion.
Omnes. Question! Question! Question!
Mrs. W. (rising with mock solemnity and leaning on desk).
Gentlemen, after the most mature deliberation the speaker must
announce three decisions. First, the language was not
uncomplimentary, and—
Rose } } Bribery!
Helen } together. } Treachery, treachery!
Amy } } Oh! Oh! Oh!!
Mrs. W. (pounding on table with paper-knife). Order! Order!—
And ergo, not unparliamentary. Secondly, that in consequence the
motion of expulsion is not in order. Thirdly, even if it were in order,
the question could not be taken without debate.
Rose. I appeal to the House.
Dennis (rising). All right! Three to three. Speaker throws casting
vote with us. How do you do—minority?
[Bows.
Helen (rising). Excuse me. We three decline to vote, so there is no
quorum. The question is before the House still, and can be spoken to.
Dennis. How badly the question must feel.
Amy. Not half so badly as you ought to.
Mrs. W. (pounding). Order! The dignity of the chair must be
upheld!
Rose. Then why don’t you hold it up? We’ve no objection.
Amy (rising). Mr. Speaker—
Mrs. W. The honourable member from—from—
George. Philadelphia?
[Passes Amy the chocolates

from tea-table.
Amy (sinking faintly into chair). Oh, not so bad as that!

Mrs. W. Very well—from the slough of despair—
Amy. Mr. Speaker, I rise from my slough of despair to demand,
with a tear in my eye—
Dennis. And a chocolate in your mouth—
Mrs. W. (pounds). Order!—
Amy. To vindicate myself—
George. Well, if you’re going to rise, why don’t you do it?
Mrs. W. (crossing to tea-table, and seizing hot water pot.) I shall
pour the hot water on the next person who interrupts the honourable
gentleman.
Amy. To vindicate myself and my compeers in the—alas!—
opposition. We have remained silent under the slur of malice—we
have watched the arbitrary and—(I fear corrupt is an
unparliamentary word)—ah—questionable rulings of the presiding
officer. But, so saith the adage, “Even the worm will turn;” and why
not woman? So when we hear the distinguished and courteous
stranger, about to enter our sacred portals, maligned and sneered at
—then—then do we turn upon the “allegators” and declare, that as
soon as the shadow of his “gracious”—no—I mean “early” presence
darkens these halls of misrule, then, with one accord, for better, for
worse, we will cleave to him.
Feminine Omnes. We will.
Rose. Now, boys, you see what you have done! and, as you
remarked a moment ago, “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”
[Bell rings.
Mrs. W. There, young people,—that is the dressing bell. Now don’t

loiter, for I shall frown on any one who is not in the drawing-room
five minutes before seven. I declare this sitting adjourned.
[All rise. Mrs. W. crosses back

and exits r. d. Rose
comes down c. and
whispers to Amy; they
laugh, put their hands
behind each other’s
waists, and skip up r.
Rose and Amy (singing). “Johnny, get your gun, get your sword,
get your pistol. Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.”
[Exit r. d. Men all laugh

heartily.
Helen (rapping on table in imitation of Mrs. W.). Order! Order!

George. Cash!
[Men all laugh. Helen looks

at them scornfully and
then exits r. d. Dennis
starts to follow.
George. What’s your hurry, Dennis? Lots of time.
[Sits.
Steven (reseating himself). I bless my governing star every night

that it was given to my sex to dress in the time spent by t’otherest in
doing up its back hair.
Dennis (crossing back to fireplace). Oh, yes! But as one girl said to
me, “That time isn’t worth having, for you can’t be with us!”
George. You must both have been pretty far gone, old fellow.
Dennis. Not half so badly as the girls are prospectively on “me
lud.”
Steven. No, we are in for “a bad quarter of an hour” when he shows
up.
Dennis. If he will only prove a show!
Steven (sadly). The only English swells I’ve met were very jolly,
gentlemanly fellows.
Dennis (cheerfully). All the more chance that this one turns out
the delicate little wood violet, such as we occasionally read of in the
papers as ornamenting the “Ouse of Lords.”
George (gloomily). I am afraid we shall be the flower part of this
show.
Dennis. In what respect?
George. Why, wall flowers, of course.
Steven. Really, it’s no joking matter. I don’t know how long the
girls will carry on their intended neglect, but it will be strong while it
lasts.
Dennis (coming down stage indignantly). If I have to put in two
days of life without—without—
Steven (interrupting). Faith, hope, or charity, which?
George. Why don’t you say Amy, and have done with it?
Dennis (half turning). Very well. If I have to put in a week here,
ten miles from anything, with Amy overflowing with sweetness for
that—that—
[Hesitates.
George. Oh, speak it out, old man! The word will do you good.
Dennis. No, it wouldn’t do justice to the subject.
Steven. Well, Dennis, you needn’t think you’re the only one in this
box.
Dennis. Hope he’ll get here on a rainy night, and no carriage at the
station, as Rose suggested. Do you suppose a fiver would make our
dearly beloved Burgess misunderstand the carriage order?
George. Burgess is a living proof of the saying, that “every man has
his price.”
Steven. How do you know?
George. I found it out when he drove Mrs. Wycherly home, quite
forgetting to say that Rose and I were to be picked up at Oakridge, as
she had specially directed.
Steven (reprovingly).
“You sockin’ old fox!
You pretty white cat—
I sink dear mama
Should be told about dat.”
Dennis (sadly). It might be possible to corrupt the worthy Burgess,

but, unless we could arrange for a rainy day, I don’t see that it would
do us much good. The Anglo-Saxon doesn’t think much of ten miles.
Steven. No; and the Wycherlys would be so hurt at a guest of theirs
having such an accident that they would be doubly sweet to him.
Dennis. What day did he say he would come?
Steven. “Friday, or perhaps sooner.”
George. I suppose the “D. & T.” can’t arrange one of their
numerous accidents for that train?
Dennis (crossly). Of course not! Whoever heard of a timely
railroad disaster?
George. Oh, for a mishap of some kind!
Steven (springing to his feet and slapping his leg). Fellows, I have
an inspiration!
George. Did you get it by inheritance, or out of a bottle?
Steven. Look here; his ludship does not arrive, probably, till
Friday. My friend, Frank Parker, is to come up here Tuesday. Let’s
make him personate the “Lord high everything else.”
George} together {Well?

Dennis} {What for?
[Both rise and come down

stage to Steven.
Steven. Why, in the first place, we shall fool the girls. That’s one
for us! In the second place, they’ll carry out their tender programme
on him, and so be tired of it when the “only genuine has our name
blown in the bottle” puts in his appearance. That’s two for us! Thirdly
and lastly, we will tell him to be a snob, so that the girls will find it
impossible to carry out their plans on him. That’s three for us!
Dennis. But will Parker dare to play such a trick in his first visit?
Wouldn’t he be like those would-be tragedians whose first and last
appearances are identical?
Steven. Oh, Mrs. Wycherly would forgive him anything, for he is
the son of an old sweetheart of hers. As for Frank, he’s up to
anything, and has lived so long in the West that his highest form of
amusement is a practical joke.
Dennis. But how are you going to fool our hostess?
George. Why, she has never seen Frank, and only heard of his
existence when Steven and I brought word of the jolly fellow we had
met in Colorado.
Steven. And, besides, he’s a winner in disguising his person and
voice. George and I coached all one day, lamenting that he had been
left behind, and there he was, sitting beside the driver all the time.
Now to the act!

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The Business of Emotions in Modern

History 1st Edition Mandy L. Cooper

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

First published in Great Britain 2023

Copyright © Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp, 2023

Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp have asserted

For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute

Cover image © 1940, London, UK. Business as usual at a bakery

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-6249-2

Series: History of Emotions

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Part One Disciplinary Emotions

Part Two Enabling Emotions

5 Marriage à la mode du pays: When Identity and Contractual Love

Part Three Unruly Emotions

9 The Worst Business in the World? The Emotional Historiography of the

Select Bibliography 257

I.1 A trader. Courtesy of Getty Images 2

10.5 Reprint in De Telegraaf (November 6, 1929) of the 1720s cartoon

Robert Colby is an assistant professor of History at the University of Mississippi.

Mandy L. Cooper is a lecturer of history at the University of North Carolina at

Joost Dankers is associate professor and manager commissioned research at Utrecht

Catherine Fletcher is professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University,

Semih Gökatalay is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, San

Ronald Kroeze is associate professor of Political History and director of studies

Inger Leemans is professor of Cultural History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and

Niall G. MacKenzie is professor of Entrepreneurship and Business History at the

Laura C. McCoy is an independent scholar and equity advocate based in Chicago,

Andrew Popp is professor of History at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

Daniel Levinson Wilk is professor of American History at SUNY-Fashion Institute of

Figure I.1 A trader. Courtesy of Getty Images.

into any domain of historical research certainly involves difficulties of methods

Economic theory portrayed humans as calculating engines and strategic actors,

Similarly, Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson identify an over-reliance on

a kind of fourth-estate practice of keeping other disciplines honest, in part by exposing

Reviewing the Literature

rarely exposed these divides or distinctions—emotion/reason, affect/affectless—to the

economy, and—second—to propose that a cultural analytical lens might provide

Firms and entrepreneurs operate in highly complex systems requiring intricate

structure behind account books, if we consider “rational” as an emotive, an expression

Reddy William M. “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions.”

Wissinger Elizabeth. “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry,”

Two Social Cups of Tea,

Parlour in country house of Mrs. Wycherly.

A cup of tea and one social agony.

Helen. Another cup, mama?

[Mrs. W. passes letter to Amy.

[Passes Amy the chocolates

Amy (sinking faintly into chair). Oh, not so bad as that!

Mrs. W. There, young people,—that is the dressing bell. Now don’t

[All rise. Mrs. W. crosses back

[Exit r. d. Men all laugh

Helen (rapping on table in imitation of Mrs. W.). Order! Order!

[Men all laugh. Helen looks

George. What’s your hurry, Dennis? Lots of time.

Steven (reseating himself). I bless my governing star every night

Dennis (sadly). It might be possible to corrupt the worthy Burgess,

Part One Disciplinary Emotions

Part Two Enabling Emotions

Part Three Unruly Emotions

Select Bibliography 257

I.1 A trader. Courtesy of Getty Images 2