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.

This one-day workshop aims to explore new methodologies and approaches to studying emotions in histories of early modern work. It asks: 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, such as care, motherhood, health, and forced/indentured labour enable us to contribute to histories of work and occupational identity more broadly?

Programme

9.00 onwards arrival and coffee, Scarman Conference Lounge

09.45-10.00 Welcome

10.00-11.00 Panel 1: Emotions and the Labour of Travel

Eva Johanna Holmberg (University of Helsinki) – 'He that will not work shall not eat (except by sickness he be disabled)’: Settler-Colonial Misery in Jamestown

Richard Ansell (Birkbeck University) – Loyalty and Intimacy in Eighteenth-Century Servants’ Travel Journals

11.00-11.30 Break

11.30-12.30 Panel 2: Emotions and forced/unfree labour

David Lambert (University of Warwick) – 'Against the Spirit and Enterprise of the Republic We Have No Chance’: The Emotional Labour of Counter-Insurgency in the Revolutionary Caribbean

Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins University) – Grief, Un/requited: Reckoning with the Losses of Enslaved Women

12.30-13.30 Lunch

13.30-14.30 Panel 3: Emotions and the Labour of Care

Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (University of Cardiff) - Medical Care, Surgeons and Emotions at Sea

Emma Marshall (University of York) – The Emotions (and Politics) of Healthcare in the Gentry Home

14.30-15.00 Break

15.00-16.30 Panel 4: Emotions and occupations

Robert Stearn (Birkbeck University) - Conceptualising Emotions as Work and Skill in Early Modern Service: Evidence from Handbooks, Diaries, and Prose Fiction

Anna Pravdica -Emotion, Authenticity, & Labouring Class Poets in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain

Katie Barclay (Macquarie University) - The Emotion of an Eighteenth-Century Banker

16.30-17.30 Roundtable/concluding discussions