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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
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo


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


as Londoners buy their supplies of rolls, loaves and crumpets before
the usual night raids on the city. Bettmann/Getty Images.

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


in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased
to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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


ePDF: 978-1-3502-6250-8
eBook: 978-1-3502-6251-5­

Series: History of Emotions

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To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.­
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.
4 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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.
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 5

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.
6 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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.
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 7

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.
8 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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).
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 9

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.
10 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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.
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 11

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.
12 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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.
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 13

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.
14 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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.
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 15

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.
16 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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.
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 17

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
18 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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.
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 19

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,
20 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market 21

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.
22 The Business of Emotions in Modern History

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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the battle-lines towards the right. Everywhere the battle was close,
fierce, and deadly.
Meanwhile the Prince of Iran with the Guard rode down into the
plain, and with javelins at rest charged the Touranians in flank and
rear. This soon relieved the pressure in front. Confusion and terror
seized the Touranians. Those who sought to resist went down before
the shock of the huge Persian horses and the thrust of the long
javelins.
The contest became a slaughter. Thousands of the luckless
Touranians rode into the river, seeking to ford it and thus escape; but
quicksands and treacherous water-holes swallowed them up or
mired them down, so that they became easy prey to the pursuing
archers. The Aryan infantry assumed the offensive, crossed the
torrent-bed, and drove the Touranians back upon the lances of the
Guard, who in turn hurled them back upon the infantry. The larger
part died. Some broke through and fled. The noon sun looked down
upon heaps of slain and wounded, upon despairing squads flying
over hill and plain, and upon a river whose waters were red with
blood and choked with bodies. The Aryan victory was complete,
overwhelming, and decisive.
But the victors also suffered. Their loss was heavy in men, but worst
of all they had lost their Great King. Cyrus at the head of the Guard
had ridden into the press and restored the battle. When the assault
on their rear caused the Touranians to give back, he had followed
furiously. Then an arrow struck him in the neck just above the collar
of his coat-of-mail, inflicting a deep wound. He reeled from the
shock, plucked out the weapon with his own hands, and then fell
fainting from his horse into the arms of Otanes, who carried him back
out of the battle.
CHAPTER II
AN OATH

THE wounded King was tenderly borne to his pavilion in the camp,
and his injury was dressed by the most skillful surgeons in the army.
He was weakened by loss of blood, however, and suffered much
pain. He became feverish. The surgeons had but little skill in those
days; and the wound was deep and infected. He suffered the pain
with heroic resignation and, after a while, fell into a restless sleep, in
which he tossed about and muttered continually.
Meanwhile the King of Iran, having taken chief command, pushed
the victory to completion and recalled the troops to their camp from
the bloody plain only when the last enemy had disappeared or died.
Prince Darius and the Imperial Guard pursued the fugitives as long
as they held together in a body, but when they scattered, some
crossing the Jaxartes and others taking refuge in the southern hills
where it was difficult to follow them with heavy horse, he left further
pursuit to the light-armed cavalry and returned to camp with his
shouting, singing troopers. He did not learn of the King’s condition
until within bowshot of camp, where an orderly from his father met
him bearing the sad news. At once the shouts and songs of his
troopers were turned to sighs and tears. They entered the camp in
silence. They were dusty, blood-stained, and weary, and their joy of
victory had given place to dejection. The Great King’s headquarters
were in the midst of the camp. The Prince caused his battalions to
form around the pavilion in a square, with their faces toward it. Then,
leaving them still mounted, he went in to inquire concerning the
King’s condition.
It was almost sundown. The herons, which had fled away in the
morning, were now returning with heavy wings to the marshes along
the river. They did not alight, however, but hurriedly flapped away
when they found the marshes filled with the dead bodies of men and
horses.
The Prince found the chief captains of the army assembled in the
outer room of the pavilion. His father was wearily reclining on a
couch, while the others stood near in whispering groups; but he rose
as the Prince entered, and embraced him and kissed his cheeks,
exclaiming:
“My son, to the Guard belongs much of the glory of our great victory.
Never have I seen a movement so well made or a blow struck at
more opportune time. But alas for the Great King! He is sorely
wounded and has a fever. He is now sleeping, but he mutters and
tosses in his sleep.”
“May we go in and see him? The Guard waits anxiously to hear his
condition,” inquired the Prince.
The King of Iran called the chief surgeon out of the inner room where
the wounded monarch lay and, after a whispered consultation with
him, bade his son follow and went into the inner room with him. The
stricken man lay on a silk-covered couch, apparently asleep, while
an attendant waved a fan above his head. Aroused by their
entrance, the Great King opened his eyes, half-raised himself upon
his elbow, and stared wildly at them. The surgeon gently sought to
repress his movements. He quickly recognized the King of Iran and
the Prince and smiled as he sank back upon the couch.
The surgeon bowed low before him and exclaimed: “Let not my lord
move! It may open the wound and cause it to bleed afresh!”
But Cyrus impatiently waved him aside, and said weakly: “Let be! If I
am to die, I die; if I am to live, I will live! I have had a vision! Draw
near, my good cousin and my beloved Prince! Is the victory
complete? Did many escape?”
The King of Iran answered: “It is your most glorious victory, O King of
Kings! Hundreds of thousands of dead Touranians testify to the valor
of your arms and the effectiveness of your battle-plans.”
“It is well!” he sighed. “To you, my beloved Prince, is due the thanks
of your King, of the army, of all Iran! Oh, my heart leaped when I saw
the Guard with spears at rest ride down upon the enemy! It was then
that I rushed into the battle. Now I lie here! So be it! I know that I am
about to die. I have had a vision. Now I would see the sun set, lest I
never see it again. Cause the curtains to be rolled up. This close air
stifles me!”
Servants quickly rolled up the heavy side-curtains of the pavilion. At
a motion of the sufferer the Prince knelt by his side, placed an arm
beneath his shoulders, and gently raised him. Instantly the Guards,
standing at attention about the tent, uncovered their heads, bowed to
their horses’ necks, and roared out a salute, while tears streamed
down their grimy cheeks and many wept aloud. The men of Iran
were emotional, weeping or laughing like children as the mood
seized them. The Great King smiled upon them and feebly waved his
hand in greeting. He whispered to the Prince:
“How they love me! It is sweet to die surrounded by those who love
you. Ah, if I might now have my children here! I would give them a
parting blessing and die in peace. My sweet daughters, Athura, the
wise, and Artistone, my babe! Bardya, my strong Prince, and
Cambyses,— But, lay me down! The sun is setting! So sets my life!”
“Say not so, my lord!” exclaimed the Prince, his eyes swimming in
tears. “It has been a glorious day!”
“True, my son! And the wrongs of Iran have been avenged. A nation
of warriors has been wiped out. No more will the Tourans threaten
my people. We shall make this river the boundary of our empire.
Fortresses and cities must be built along it so that never again may
the yellow men of the plains carry desolation south of it. Advise my
sons to this policy. Nay, tell them I have ordered it so!”
The Great King closed his eyes. The tent-sides were then dropped.
The troopers dismounted and went into camp, satisfied to have seen
the King alive, and praying to Ahura-Mazda, Giver of Life, that he
might recover. The King of Iran, with uncovered head, stood for a
while looking down upon the sufferer, while his son still knelt at the
side of the couch. Presently Cyrus opened his eyes and looked
intently upon the sad countenance of the Prince.
“Would that you were my own son, Darius Hystaspis!” he exclaimed.
“I love you well and I know that you have deserved well of me. Ask of
me what you will. It shall be decreed ere I die!”
The Prince bowed his head till his forehead touched the King’s
hands, which nervously clasped his own strong right hand between
their palms. Then he looked up into the grave eyes of his father
inquiringly. The latter indicated by a nod that he should speak what
was in his mind.
“O King of Kings,” he said, “you have been as a father to me! If I
have found favor with you, let my reward be very great! I ask no less
than that you will give me for my wife your daughter, Athura!”
Cyrus was greatly pleased. He smiled approvingly as he answered:
“Truly you ask much! But not too much; and you shall have her, if
she so wills. I doubt not that she will gladly consent. She must marry
whom she will. Her mother married me even against her father’s will
and she was ever the light and joy of life to me. In her love I rejoiced
all the days of her life. I have given her no successor. I go to meet
her soon. I rejoice to call you son. Would that Athura were here to
wed you now! I pledge her to you. Now I have a request to make of
you, and your royal father. I constituted my son, Cambyses, regent in
my absence, that he might learn to rule. My soul is exceedingly
anxious concerning him. His passions are great; he is violent and he
endures no opposition to his will. He will need advisers and
supporters. My son, Bardya, is of better nature; he is brave but
impulsive. Much have I thought of them. It will depend upon you two,
King and Prince of Iran, whether the family of Cyrus shall continue to
reign. This I have seen. I ask of you that you will pledge me your
royal oaths that, as long as Cambyses or Bardya live, you will
support them on my throne—Cambyses first, and Bardya second.”
He ceased. The Prince again looked up to his father, who had
listened attentively and who now spoke without hesitation: “My son,
we are Kings of Iran only. Cyrus, our cousin, is King of Kings. By his
own genius he has made this great empire. It is his. He conquered it.
He extended his scepter over other peoples. We forfeit none of our
hereditary rights by swearing as he requests. As for me, I am ready
to swear!”
“And I also!” added the Prince.
The Great King extended his two hands and took the right hands of
father and son between his palms, saying, “Is it an oath in the
hearing of Ahura-Mazda and His recording angel?”
“It is an oath!” they solemnly answered.
“It is well,” said the King, releasing them. “May Shraosha, the swift
messenger of God, take those oaths and register them in heaven!
Now I will tell of my vision. I saw Mount Demavend, and, upon its
snowy summit, I beheld a great eagle. He spread his wings and,
behold! they reached across all the heavens and their shadow
covered the earth. The countenance of the eagle, Prince Darius,
when I closely observed it, was your countenance. Shall it come to
pass that you will overshadow the world? Or will you spread your
protecting wings in days to come over this empire and by your help
shall my sons reign well? Ahura-Mazda knows! Let his will be done!”
The King’s weak voice ceased. He closed his eyes. The Prince and
his father remained silent. A rising wind touched the tent and made it
quiver. In the adjacent room was a low murmur of conversation. After
a moment’s silence the Great King again opened his eyes and
continued:
“Since this empire of mine is new and my will has been its law, there
are no laws by which succession to my throne may be regulated. By
right of birth, Cambyses should succeed to the supreme power. Yet I
am not happy in him. He is inclined to evil ways and regards not the
customs of our race. He runs after the folly of the Medes. He seeks
the pleasures of Babylon. I have thought much on this. Perhaps it
would be just that he should be given Medea, Susiana, Babylonia,
and all the western provinces to rule, since their customs he follows.
Bardya is not so. He loves our ancient customs. To him I will give
supreme rule over Iran and the provinces of Hind, of Hyrcania, and
the Scyths and of all our eastern conquests; but he shall
acknowledge Cambyses as overlord of the world, aiding him with an
army in war, but undisturbed by him in peace. Thus will I do justly
and satisfy all Iran, whose people love not Cambyses. I will make a
testament and a decree ere I die. Call hither my scribe. I would
relieve my mind of care by making such decree. Call in the nobles of
Iran to hear my will!”
The scribe came. The nobles of Iran entered the room. They saw the
King’s will written down on Egyptian papyrus. Two copies were
made. The King signed them and impressed thereon his seal. Then,
greatly exhausted, he indicated that he would be alone; and all left
his presence to seek refreshment after the day of toil, and to discuss
the Great King’s last decree.
It was the duty of the Prince, as commander of the Imperial Guard,
to appoint the watches at the King’s pavilion. Otanes, the King’s
shield-bearer and personal guard, slept in the outer room and stood
at the door on state occasions. There were usually with Otanes
several noble youths who acted as pages or orderlies to the Great
King. But on this night the King of Iran and several others of the
nobility kept silent watch in the outer room, anxiously consulting the
surgeons as they went in and out upon their ministrations. The
Prince, after setting a double guard around the pavilion, went alone
down to the river and for an hour slowly paced back and forth on the
low bank along the shore. He wished to be alone with his thoughts.
A violent wind was blowing from the north. The lap and wash of
waves, thrown up by its power, and the rustle of reeds and grass,
were the only sounds coming to his ears. The subdued noise of the
vast encampment drifted away behind him as he looked out across
the stream. The moon had not yet appeared. The stars were dim and
hazy behind dust-clouds raised by the great wind. Alone thus,
though thousands of men were near, while the whispers of the
moving air suggested the voices of those wailing spirits released
from their mortal bodies in this day’s slaughter, the young man
reviewed the past and contemplated uneasily the future.
First in his thoughts, as indeed she had been for years, was Athura,
eldest daughter of Cyrus, known to the Greek historians as Atossa,
the most famous, most beautiful, and most queenlike woman of her
age. He had loved her from the day when he, a youth of fourteen,
and she, a child of ten years, had first met and played together in the
great park surrounding his father’s palace at Persepolis, where she
had come to visit with her mother, the queen. She had often been his
companion in sports since the time he had entered the service of the
Great King, as a page. Lately he had not seen her often, as his
service in the Imperial Guard had called him away to the wars. But,
when he had last met her in the ancient city, Bactra, to which place
she had accompanied her father when he started on this expedition,
they had made mutual avowals of love and pledges of faith, subject
to her father’s consent. Now the expedition was ended. He had the
consent of Cyrus to their marriage. Happiness seemed to be in store
for him.
But the future was not without clouds. Cyrus was dying. What then?
The hate-filled countenance of Cambyses arose before his mind.
The large, square body of that Prince, the bullet head, the black, dull
eye, the fat face, usually expressive of scorn, he well remembered.
He seemed to hear again the brutal laugh, the bitter gibe or threat,
the coarse words, and the raucous tones of the Prince, as he had
heard them often when as boys they played together. Cambyses had
hated him, apparently for no other reason than that he could not
bully him as he was accustomed to bully other boys. More than once
they had engaged in personal encounters; and the officers, who ever
guarded the King’s children, had to interfere and separate them.
Some of these combats had arisen when he had gone to rescue
Athura or Bardya from their brother’s abuse. Cambyses also hated
Bardya, whom Cyrus loved. More than once Cyrus himself had
inflicted corporal punishment upon the elder Prince for abusing his
playmates, and in later years he had often caused him to be
confined in his room as a punishment. If Cyrus should die, the
violent, degraded, drunken Cambyses would be King, with power
absolute of life and death, and able to wreak vengeance upon the
royal brother and sisters, as he had often sworn he would do, when
he should come into power.
Prince Darius did not fear Cambyses. But if Cambyses should
disregard his father’s will and forbid the marriage of Darius and
Athura, what would be the result? The Prince involuntarily laid his
hand on the hilt of his sword. Cambyses could be overthrown, since
the people and the army of Iran loved him not; and the younger
Prince Bardya would then reign. Bardya was a friend of Darius and
would approve the marriage. But to the Prince came the
remembrance of his oath to Cyrus. He had sworn to uphold
Cambyses. No matter what the Prince should do or what wrong he
should inflict upon him or his friends, he must henceforth support him
on his throne! As the possibilities involved in that oath occurred to
his mind, the young man smote his hands together and groaned. But
he said to himself that perhaps Cambyses, the King, would be
different from Cambyses, the man. In any event, the nobles of Iran
and the King, his father, would compel Cambyses to give Athura to
him. Cambyses would not dare refuse to regard his own father’s
pledge.
The moon appeared, a dim, pale disk behind a veil of flying dust.
The wind increased in violence. Thin, broken clouds floated across
the sky. The river, vaguely seen, was filled with choppy waves. The
howl of a wolf came faintly from beyond the stream. A great
sadness, a sense of impending danger, filled the soul of the Prince.
A voice aroused him, saying, “Gracious Prince, the King has
awakened and is calling for you!” It was one of the King’s pages who
thus summoned him. Throwing off his depression, he followed the
youth into the tent, pausing only at the door to direct the guards to
take additional precautions to prevent the wind from throwing down
the swaying shelter. The King turned a wan, pain-drawn
countenance towards him as he entered and beckoned him to a low
stool at the side of his couch.
“My son,” he said, speaking slowly and with difficulty, “I am unable to
sleep. This wound pains me greatly and the wind roars about the
tent. I am very lonely. I seem to stand naked and alone before God! I
am about to step out into the dark. I would have you near me. You
have been with me so many years that you are to me as a son. Now
that I have promised my daughter to you, I have a double claim upon
you. Sit here, unless you are weary and must sleep. It has been a
long, hard day, but a glorious one for Iran!”
“Father, I am not weary,” replied the Prince. “My heart is heavy for
you! I pray God you may recover! Is the wound so bad, then? Once
before you were hurt in battle and recovered.”
“This wound is fatal. It is poisoned. The weapon that pierced me was
unclean. Even now I feel it throb and burn. I know the symptoms. I
have watched many a dying officer, wounded by unclean darts. But I
am at peace. I have been a man of war all my life; but I have ever
had right with me. I have lived uprightly and wronged none. Justice
has never been sold by me. Oppression has been rebuked. I have
crushed the rulers of nations to free their people from tyranny and
misrule. I do not fear to die. I am an Aryan. Ahura-Mazda is God and
there is none other! My mind dwells much on the future, my son.
Discourse to me of that. You sat at the feet of Belteshazzer, the wise,
he that was chief of the college of wisdom in Babylon. He talked to
me often of God and of his own people. I made a decree that his
people should be returned to their home at Jerusalem and rebuild
their temple to God. Call this to my son’s remembrance, when you
go to him, and say to him that I lay it upon him to obey. What said
Belteshazzer of that which lies beyond death?”
“He taught that the spirit continues to live after the body dies.”
“Yes, truly, so said he to me! But in that he agrees with our
Zoroaster.”
“He taught much as did the great Master. Indeed, he agrees that
Ahura-Mazda, the Holy One, the Father of Truth, the Life-Giving
Spirit, is but another name for the same God he worships as Jah,
who is the Father of all spirits and the Giver of Life. He teaches that
there is one God, a loving Father, the Eternal One; and that in the
far-distant past there were but one man and one woman, from whom
sprang all the races of men; and that all worshiped one God, the
Father of all; but that many of their children have forgotten Him and
have wandered away, making Gods of their own imaginings. He is a
mighty prophet and holds communion with messengers from God
and with spirits.”
“I have heard wonderful things of him, how that fire will not burn him
nor wild beasts harm him. What says Zoroaster of the dying?”
“He taught that Shraosha, the swift messenger, stands ready to
receive the soul and to conduct it over the bridge that is straight and
narrow into paradise, where the great angel, Bohman, will greet it
and say, ‘How happy art thou who hast come hither from mortality to
immortality!’ Then will the soul enter upon eternal blessedness.”
“You said that Belteshazzer talks with unseen spirits and is a mighty
prophet. Do not the Magi also call up the dead and prophesy?”
“They say so, Sire. But Belteshazzer says that they are liars and that
their art is black. He admits that they may talk with spirits, but
accuses them of dealing with demons and evil spirits. They worship
the spirits who inhabit the dark places of earth and work ill to men.”
The Great King lay silent a moment with closed eyes. At length,
heaving a deep sigh, he said:
“It is all a mystery! But I shall soon know. I am troubled concerning
Cambyses. I have heard that he has dealings with the Magi and has
attended their worship. God forbid that he should fall into their
hands! They are a vile sect, regarding neither oath nor promise.
They prey upon the weak and superstitious. They would throw down
our ancient laws. I have not been intolerant of others’ creeds or ever
interfered with their religion. Each nation has continued to worship
God in its own manner, giving obedience to me only in matters of
government. Can it be said that one God is better than the other?
How was I to judge the unknown things of God? But I know that God
rules, whether named Ahura-Mazda, Jah, Merodach, Jove, or Ra.
Men know him not!”
Again he fell silent, with closed eyes and pallid face turned to the dim
light of the lamps which hung from the ridge-pole by chains, flaring in
the currents of air and swinging to and fro as the tent rocked under
the shocks of the mighty wind.
Rousing himself again, he continued: “I feel that my spirit will soon
depart. When it does, I lay upon you the task of conveying my body
to Pasargadæ, where you shall deposit it in a suitable tomb. Take
half of the Guard with you. Leave the remainder here with the King,
your father, who must finish the work I have begun and establish
fortresses along this river so that never again may the Touranians
recover the land we have conquered, or further molest Iran. Let my
body be entombed after the fashion of our fathers. Take a message
to Bardya and say that I have blessed him. Restrain him with your
advice, that he do not rebel and bring on war with his brother. Take
my love and blessing to Athura and Artistone. Into your care I give
Athura. May long years of happiness be yours! But I am very weary
and I would sleep. Sit here by me. It is pleasant to know that you are
near!”
The King closed his eyes and sank into a stupor. The Prince bent his
head upon his hands and silently wept. Presently becoming calmer,
he sat still in meditation, listening to the irregular breathing of the
sufferer. After a while he also slept, with his head resting on his
arms, which were folded across his knees. The hours went by, while
the great wind continued to bellow around and to whip the awnings
of the pavilion and while the life of the Great King slowly flickered
out. Darius was awakened by the surgeons, who, alarmed at the
long silence in the sick-room, had come in to look at the King.
“Great Cyrus is dead!” he heard one of them say.
CHAPTER III
PREXASPES

CYRUS, the Great King, had been conquered by a greater King. The
generals and nobles of his army gathered in solemn council on the
day following his death. The King of Iran presided. On him, as upon
an anchor in a storm, the others depended; and it was in the hearts
of many to declare him successor to the mighty dead. There was no
love in their hearts towards Cambyses, the heir. His open contempt
for their ancient customs and religion and his erratic and brutal
disposition had not attracted them. The army had given the throne
and his distinctive eminence as King of Kings to Cyrus; it could give
them to another, now that he was gone, in spite of his expressed will.
At the right hand of the King stood the Prince, his son, his eyes
heavy with sorrow. Otanes, Gobryas, Hydarnes, Vomisces, and a
score of Persians of lesser note were there; and also Prexaspes, the
Mede.
As usual Prexaspes was carefully dressed; he was ornate in golden,
jewel-set armor and half enveloped in a silken cloak, the famous
Medean robe. His hair and beard were curled and perfumed. He
moved with exaggerated grace and carried his fine head haughtily.
His brothers-in-arms could ill conceal their contempt for his foppish
manners. They were rough, ready men, straight of look and direct of
speech. They loved not an Aryan who copied the manners of
Babylon and Nineveh and, as they suspected, the vices of those
ultra-civilized peoples. But they knew that Prexaspes was a brave
and able commander of horse and on that account ignored his
manners. He was a fair sample of the higher classes of Medes, who,
residing on the borders of the more effeminate peoples of the great
Mesopotamian valley, had been infected by their manners and
customs.
The Medes, in the former days, when they had conquered the lands
now occupied by them, had been sturdy, simple people. Centuries of
intercourse with the Assyrians and Babylonians had materially
changed their qualities and had not only affected their dress and
manner of living, but had injected into their ancient religion, which
was a monotheistic creed, new ideas that were polytheistic, much to
the indignation of their brethren of Persia and Bactra who still clung
to the ancient faith. The Medes had permitted the fire-worshipers of
the northern provinces to practice their occult arts and had to some
extent adopted those practices. There had, as a consequence,
grown up a priest class of Magi, or seers, wise men, prophets, who
claimed to communicate with the gods of hill, mountain, and plain,
and who did undeniably work wonders that could not be duplicated
by the priests in the Aryan temples, and thereby not only discomfited
the latter in the eyes of the people, but impressed the rulers of
Medea in their favor.
It was said that Prexaspes was a follower of the Magi, but on that
subject he adroitly avoided conversation. Cyrus, whose policy had
ever been to conciliate those he conquered, had recognized the
military ability of Prexaspes and had forborne to examine closely into
his creed or his manner of life. In return the latter had given him
faithful service and had been extremely useful in dealing with the
Medean nobility and in recruiting for the army.
As soon as all who had been bidden were assembled, the King of
Iran addressed them briefly: “I have called you together to consider
the great calamity that has befallen this army and the empire. Great
Cyrus sleeps with his fathers. The decisive victory of yesterday
resulted thus in greater loss to us than to the enemy. The command
of this army has fallen upon me until a messenger can be sent to
bring orders from Cambyses, who, by the will of his august father,
succeeds to the throne of the King of Kings. It was the will of Cyrus
that we hold all this country and make the Jaxartes the future
boundary of Iran. It shall be done. We shall remain here until the
enemy shall fully submit, and we shall build fortresses along this
river. On this spot where great Cyrus departed this life, let us found a
city named in honor of the Great King. It shall be a monument to his
glorious victory and a bulwark of the empire. What say you?”
He paused. Otanes, upon whom the King’s eyes rested, answered:
“Let it be so! Let the King’s will be law!” Nods and exclamations of
assent came from the company.
The King continued: “The Great King ordered that his body be taken
to Pasargadæ, there to rest in the tomb prepared by him and in
which rests the body of his wife. He directed that my son take the
Imperial Guard for an escort and convey his body, when embalmed,
to its resting-place. This shall be done. As for me, I shall remain here
until the frontier be made safe. My son shall select such of you as he
desires to accompany him on his honorable mission. It will be
necessary to send a special messenger to Cambyses with the Great
King’s last decree. He shall travel with the Guard and my son until he
reach Bactra; but then he must go more swiftly, in order that
Cambyses may make fitting preparation for the funeral of his father.
Who will volunteer for this service?”
Silence fell upon the company. There was no desire in any of them
to greet Cambyses. They would rather have deposed him. But
Prexaspes stood forth and said: “O King, if it please you, I will bear
the message to Cambyses, the King of Kings.”
The King regarded Prexaspes a moment thoughtfully. He liked not
this man, but he could think of no reason to deny him. He said:
“You shall go. But swear before us here that you will faithfully carry to
Cambyses this decree and assure him of our support!”
“I swear!” responded Prexaspes, solemnly, lifting both hands towards
the sun and turning his face to it. A frown passed over the calm
features of the King. He liked not this exhibition of Mithra worship.
But he made no comment, only saying:
“Say to the Great King, Cambyses, that I, Hystaspis, King of Iran,
have sworn to support him and his brother on their thrones according
to the will of Cyrus; and my word shall be kept! Advise him also that
the ancient laws and customs in Iran must not be disregarded. His
great father gave heed to them; and on them the Aryan peoples lay
great weight. In their observance will he gain strength; and the men
of Iran will in return dash to pieces his enemies. Do I not speak
truth?”
The speaker’s eyes glanced inquiringly over the company. The
black, sparkling eyes of Prexaspes likewise swept over it and noted
the expression on every countenance. Nods of approval and
unanimous spoken assent indicated the sentiment of all. Prexaspes,
bowing low before the King, answered:
“I will exactly report your words, O King! I shall take great pleasure in
assuring the Great King that all here are his loyal supporters.”
The King was about to dismiss the council, when a messenger rode
up from the east in great haste. He was from the pickets stationed
near the battlefield. The King waited till he had dismounted and
drawn near.
“A message, gracious King, from Captain Mardux of the scouts!”
cried the messenger, bowing low till his hands touched the earth.
“Speak!” commanded the King.
“The captain is approaching with a company of Touran princes, who
come to the Great King to tender submission. He has halted at the
outer limits of the camp to await your orders. Shall he slay them or
bring them hither?”
“Bring them hither!”
The messenger again bowed low, backed from the circle, and sprang
on his horse. As soon as he was gone, the King said:
“It will be best not to inform these men of the death of Cyrus. No lie
need be spoken. But I am the King. Cyrus is not dead but sleepeth.
Send hither an interpreter.”
Gobryas, to whom the last command was spoken, departed to
summon an interpreter. Meanwhile the King caused a purple-
covered chair to be brought out and placed on a platform made of
camp-chests covered with a costly rug. In this he seated himself, and
with his son at his right hand, Otanes at his left, and the other nobles
near, all dressed in glittering mail and fully armed, he was ready to
receive and impress the coming delegation. A glittering crown of gold
studded with gems, high and pointed, like the miter of a priest, was
placed on his head. In his hand was a scepter, a silver rod tipped
with a golden pomegranate. Right royal was his aspect; and the
stern countenances of his captains added to the impressiveness of
the scene.
Captain Mardux, a stout, bluff soldier, who had won his promotion
from the ranks by prowess and shrewdness, presently rode up with a
company of cavalry, escorting five men of swarthy countenance,
long-haired, almond-eyed, mounted on powerful ponies, sitting on
goatskins instead of saddles, and clothed in silken garments and
pointed fur caps. The captain caused them to dismount and led them
before the King, where, in obedience to an expressive gesture of the
captain’s hands, they threw themselves flat upon the earth in
salutation. Here they lay face-downward while the captain reported
as follows:
“These dogs, O King, came to us with hands in air, showing
themselves unarmed and asked to be taken to the Great King. I
know some words of their language and so understood that they
come as messengers from the Tourans.”
“It is well, Mardux. Bid them rise to their knees.”
Captain Mardux roused the prostrate men with his toe and made
them assume a kneeling posture. From this position, they glanced
with ferret eyes at the King and his supporters. They were evidently
greatly impressed, but their sullen countenances exhibited no fear.
Gobryas now appeared with an interpreter, a man of Bactra who had
conducted trading expeditions over the great plains in more
peaceable days. Thereupon the following colloquy occurred between
the King and one of them:
“Who are you and whence come you?”
“We are messengers of the Queen of the Massagetæ. We come
from her encampment, a day’s journey eastward.”
“What seek you?”
“We come to greet the Great King, Cyrus, whose power even the
gods cannot withstand. Behold! our King is dead on yonder field, and
the King’s son is dead. Our people are broken. The bodies of our
slain choke the great river. Only old men and children are left. Who
can withstand Cyrus? Like the lightning and the whirlwind he sweeps
up from the south! He smites and men are not! We come to tender
unto him a handful of earth, a broken twig, and a cup of water, and to
ask his pardon, that we may henceforth be his men and live under
the shadow of his arms.”
“Cyrus, the Great King, sleeps and we cannot awaken him. Behold
me, the King of Iran, Hystaspis! I will receive your tokens of
submission.”
“It is well! We know of you, O King of Iran, surnamed the Just. Have
we not heard of your strong arm and most just and merciful heart? If
it be permitted, we will arise and present to you our tokens of
submission, asking mercy for our remnant of people.”
“It is permitted!”
The men arose. One produced a small casket of carved wood inlaid
with ivory, and opening it so that it revealed the brown earth of the
desert therein, he solemnly placed it in the outstretched hand of the
King. Another produced a twig of wood plucked from a stunted oak,
and another a small jar of water, which were solemnly received and
passed on to Otanes by the King, who then said:
“Hear now the King’s sentence! You are pardoned. Enough blood
has been shed to atone for past injury. You are brave men whom the
Great King will delight to own as his children. Your lands and all your
property are forfeit to him, but these he will let you use so long as
you serve him in good faith. But in order that you may enjoy his
protection, it will be necessary for you to render to him each summer
season ten thousand good horses, as many cattle, and a like
number of sheep. That he may have evidence of your good faith and
in order that your people may be instructed in his laws, you must
send to our city of Bactra each year one hundred of your most noble
youths, to enter the King’s service, whose lives shall be forfeit should
you rebel. Furthermore, you shall maintain for the King’s service ten
thousand horsemen, fully equipped, who shall march whither he
wills. You shall guard these lands against all foes. In return for these
light services, the power of the Great King shall be over you, your
foes shall be his foes, and his mighty arm will give you peace. You
shall go out and come in according to your customs, but you shall
molest no man who acknowledges the Great King as his master. I
have spoken!”
The ambassadors bowed themselves to the earth, and their
spokesman replied:
“Let all these conditions be written on tablets, O Gracious King! Most
merciful and gracious is your heart! Our people will most gladly
submit and will faithfully observe these conditions. And now we beg
that as an earnest of our good intent, we may bring to you our first
offering of ten thousand horses, ten thousand sheep, and as many
cattle, for the use of our Lord and his army. So may the Great King
see that we deal not with crooked tongues or lying lips.”
“It is so ordered!” assented the King, graciously. “While we have a
sufficiency of victuals, fresh meat will be welcome to the army. The
treaty shall be written on tablets. Go now with Captain Mardux and
partake of refreshments ere you return to your people. Say to them
that we shall build here a great city to be named the City of Cyrus,
and it shall be a place for trade where they may exchange the
product of their herds for the fruits of the south countries. Let them
send laborers to assist, and the King’s bounty shall be sufficient for
them. But of this we will give you further information at a future day.”
The ambassadors withdrew, greatly pleased that the sentence of the
King was not more burdensome. A week later, the required horses,
cattle, and sheep were brought to the camp, and the one hundred
youths as hostages were surrendered. Within a year, the walls of a
city were begun and a colony of loyal Aryans located within them as
the nucleus of an emporium which flourished there a thousand
years, rejoicing in the name of the Great King who there died for his
race.
Meanwhile expert embalmers, who had learned their art in Egypt,
prepared the body of Cyrus for its long journey to the city of his
fathers. When well prepared, it was enclosed in a heavy casket,
placed on a four-wheeled chariot drawn by ten royal white stallions,
and, encompassed by the Imperial Guard, was conveyed to its tomb.
The great army, drawn up in two long parallel lines, gave sad
farewell to its hero-king as the funeral car passed along between,
escorted by the Guard; and tears streamed down every Aryan
cheek. To Prince Hystaspis, who led the van, with Gobryas at his
side, a roar of acclamation, a royal salute, and shouted wishes for a
safe journey and quick return, came from the successive companies
he passed. Prexaspes, riding some paces to the rear, noted the
great demonstration and pondered deeply thereon.
All day the funeral car and its splendid escort moved slowly
southward. The Prince of Iran was silent, absorbed in meditation.
Gobryas vainly endeavored to engage him in conversation. The
troopers noted his downcast mien and whispered together
concerning it. It was well known that Cambyses hated the Prince.
Every soldier in the army had discussed it with his fellow since the
Great King died. All had hoped that King Hystaspis would claim
Cyrus’ throne, his by right of birth and age, if being descended from
an older branch of the Achæmenian family counted; but they had
been disappointed when the King had announced his support of
Cambyses. What if the Prince could be persuaded to seize the
throne? It was a new throne anyway, this throne of the King of Kings,
the Emperor of many nations. If he would take it, they would give it to
him! So reasoned the army. King Hystaspis would accede if the
Prince should declare his acceptance. It would be better to go
against Cambyses sword in hand and to contest for the prize of
sovereignty with him, than to be seized and slain by the madman
after submitting to his sway. All day on the march and much of that
night around their camp-fires, the troopers discussed the matter. The
result of their consultation appeared next morning. The Prince, after
a restless night in which evil dreams disturbed his slumber when he
did succeed in his efforts to sleep, rose and went forth just as the
sun was rising. He was greatly surprised to see his ten thousand
men drawn up in solid masses, forming a hollow square around his
tent. He was nonplussed when every cap was hurled into the air,
every sword struck buckler and every head bowed low in salute to

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