Emotions and Labour in the Early Modern World
Reflections by Naomi Pullin (Department of History)
Over the last fifty years, the history of the emotions has developed into a productive and well-established field. Curiosity about how people felt in the past and the intersection between experiences, identities and emotions has generated a rich seam of scholarship across time and place. Meanwhile, histories of work have also flourished, with ever-expanding sub-fields from labour history and occupational structure to women’s work and enforced labour attracting considerable attention in recent years. But despite rich scholarship in both fields, studies of the two rarely intersect.
On 8 April 2025, Naomi Pullin (University of Warwick) and Charmian Mansell (University of Sheffield) organised a one-day workshop: ‘Emotions and Labour in the Early Modern World’, which set out to explore new methodologies and approaches to studying emotions in histories of early modern work. Generously supported by the Humanities Research Centre Conference Fund and Humanities Research Centre Visiting Speaker Fund, the Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre and the Institute of Advanced Studies, the event was fully international, with keynote presentations and a series of events involving two leading scholars in this field: Professor Katie Barclay (University of Macquarie, Sydney) and Professor Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins, Baltimore).
The event opened with a welcome from Naomi Pullin and Charmian Mansell, who set out some of the core questions and ideas underpinning this event: how can we use the history of emotions as a framework or category of analysis in the study of work? How can we access how people felt about work in the past? What methodologies can we use? From what sources can we unpick emotional labour as well as emotions about labour? And what does a focus on the emotional work connected to marginalised types of labouring identity contribute to histories of work and occupational identity more broadly? This set the agenda for the day, as each of the speakers responded to these prompts.
Panel 1 explored different emotional perspectives on the labour of travel. Eva Johanna Holmberg (University of Helsinki) examined how archaeological evidence might be used to access how labouring people in colonial Jamestown experienced both physical suffering and pain from starvation. Richard Ansell (Birkbeck, University of London) examined the labour of eighteenth-century servants through a study of their travel journals. In his talk, he questioned how far these travelling servants expressed their own views in their writings and how genuine emotional expression was mediated by a performance of loyalty to their masters.
Panel 2 moved from the labour of service to other forms of forced and unfree labour, in a colonial context. David Lambert (University of Warwick) examined the emotional labour of counter-insurgency in the revolutionary Caribbean through an assessment of the military governor John Moore. Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins), provided an methodologically innovative approach to the topic of grief and grievance and ways of accessing and approaching enslaved people’s emotions (and the emotions of their masters).
Professor David Lambert: 'Against the Spirit and Enterprise of the Republic We Have No Chance’: The Emotional Labour of Counter-Insurgency in the Revolutionary Caribbean’
Professor Sasha Turner: ‘Grief, Un/requited: Reckoning with the Losses of Enslaved Women’
After lunch, Panel 3 considered another form of unpaid labour – the labour of care in early modern Britain. Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (University of Cardiff) offered an paper on the emotions of surgeons on board ships, using their writings to understand how they navigated and negotiated a difficult working environment. Emma Marshall (a postdoctoral researcher at the University of York) delivered another important paper on the ways in which different forms of care were documented and discussed in the letters of gentry households, distinguishing between emotional labour and labour that produces emotions.
The final panel of the day considered the emotions attached to occupational identity. Robert Stearn (Birkbeck, University of London) offered an insightful paper on sincerity and deceit in master/servant relations through the concept of ‘eye service’, as discussed in handbooks, diaries and prose fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Anna Pravdica (a PhD student in the History Department) and Katie Barclay (Macquarie University), offered interesting papers on labouring identity through an examination of labouring class poets and eighteenth-century bankers respectively.
Professor Katie Barclay: ‘The Emotion of an Eighteenth-Century Banker’
The event concluded with a roundtable and concluding discussion on future directions that we might be able to extend this collaboration, especially as we will plan a follow-up event at the University of Sheffield in 2026. In particular we questioned the ways in which a history of emotions might enhance/challenge older studies of pre-modern labour, and how this work challenges and expands prevailing definitions on the historical meaning of ‘work’. Moreover, as the papers all collectively evidenced, there are important and fruitful ways in which scholars can show how emotions shaped constructions of labouring and occupational identity.
The event was well attended and fully interdisciplinary involving an audience of thirty early career researchers, PhD students, Taught MA students, and established staff from across the Faculty of Arts (especially History, English, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Film & Television Studies), as well as some external participants.
The funding from the Humanities Research Centre enabled us to cover Katie Barclay’s expenses from Australia and to invite a diverse range of speakers at the cutting edge of early modern emotions and labour history. Katie Barclay is a leading scholar in the field of emotions history, and we were privileged to have benefitted not only from her paper at this workshop, but her engagement in a wider programme of events centred on teaching the history of emotions (on 6 April) and a masterclass with Professor Sasha Turner on researching emotions history (8 April), in conjunction with the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies.
The feedback received on the day of the workshop and subsequently has underscored how timely and stimulating these events were for a range of members of the academic community at Warwick, and beyond. Aside from developing new networks and conversations, these events have enhanced both the national and international profile of early modern and eighteenth-century studies at Warwick, and we hope will lead to further collaboration and an academic publication on this timely and important topic.
Naomi Pullin
Department of History