The Business of Emotions in Modern History 9781350262492, 9781350268876, 9781350262508

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: At the Heart of the Market Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp
Part One Disciplinary Emotions
1 Accounting for the Middling Sorts: Emotions and the Family Business, c. 1750–1832 Katie Barclay
2 Emotional Strategies: Businesswomen in the Civil War Era United States Mandy L. Cooper
3 Selling Trust in the Antebellum Service Sector Daniel Levinson Wilk
4 The Cold War and the Making of Advertising in Post-War Turkey Semih Gökatalay
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
6 “the commerce of affection”: Masculinity and Emotional Bonds Among Boston Merchants Laura C. McCoy
7 From Scotland with Love: The Creation of the Japanese Whisky Industry, 1918–1979 Alison J. Gibb and Niall G. MacKenzie
8 Malone’s on the Southside: Hearing a Telling of Their Story Andrew Popp
Part Three Unruly Emotions
9 The Worst Business in the World? The Emotional Historiography of the Arms Industry Catherine Fletcher
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
11 Waiting for Fevers to Abate: Contagion and Fear in the Domestic Slave Trade Robert Colby
12 Selling Out or Staying True? Fear, Anxiety, and Debates About Feminist Entrepreneurship in the 1970s Women’s Movement Debra Michals
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. 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.

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Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: At the Heart of the Market  Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp

ix xi xiv 1

Part One Disciplinary Emotions 1 2 3 4

Accounting for the Middling Sorts: Emotions and the Family Business, c. 1750–1832  Katie Barclay Emotional Strategies: Businesswomen in the Civil War Era United States  Mandy L. Cooper Selling Trust in the Antebellum Service Sector  Daniel Levinson Wilk The Cold War and the Making of Advertising in Post-War Turkey  Semih Gökatalay

31 49 65 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 6 “the commerce of affection”: Masculinity and Emotional Bonds Among Boston Merchants  Laura C. McCoy 7 From Scotland with Love: The Creation of the Japanese Whisky Industry, 1918–1979  Alison J. Gibb and Niall G. MacKenzie 8 Malone’s on the Southside: Hearing a Telling of Their Story  Andrew Popp

107 125 143 159

Part Three Unruly Emotions 9

The Worst Business in the World? The Emotional Historiography of the Arms Industry  Catherine Fletcher 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

177

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11 Waiting for Fevers to Abate: Contagion and Fear in the Domestic Slave Trade  Robert Colby 12 Selling Out or Staying True? Fear, Anxiety, and Debates About Feminist Entrepreneurship in the 1970s Women’s Movement  Debra Michals Select Bibliography

219 239 257

Index260

Figures   I.1   4.1

  4.2   4.3   4.4

  4.5   4.6   5.1   5.2 10.1

10.2

10.3a–e

10.4a–b

A trader. Courtesy of Getty Images “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 “The healthy child of today is the symbol of [future] victories.” Akşam, May 8, 1948 “It can make your dream come true.” Cumhuriyet, December 3, 1949 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 Advertisement for American baby powder. Cumhuriyet, November 7, 1947; Akşam, February 5, 1948 “Give a Frigidaire as a gift to your home!” Cumhuriyet, December 29, 1950 Trading posts in Senegambia, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries A signare Source. Courtesy of the artist, Corentin Faye Nieuw-Jaars Geschenk / Lauwmaand herdenking, in Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid (1720). Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-POB-83.573 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 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 The “Beursbarometer,” a weekly infographic used to take the atmosphere of the stock market, published in De Telegraaf, October 31 and November 11, 1929

2

87 89 93

94 97 99 109 118

196

202

204

207

x 10.5

10.6

Figures 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) 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

209

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.

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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 coauthor 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 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. 1

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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 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. 3

Introduction: At the Heart of the Market

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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 Boddice, “History Looks Forward,” 133. 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. 5 6

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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 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. 9

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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 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. 16

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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 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. 21

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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 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. 26

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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

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 TwentiethCentury 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). 30

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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 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. 36

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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

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. 43

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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

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. 50

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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 twentiethcentury 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. Affectoriented 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 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 EighteenthCentury 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. 57

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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 decisionmaking 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

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. 64

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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 Ibid. 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. 72 73

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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 nonfinancial 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 Cailluet et al., “Family Firms in the Long Run,” 4. 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. 80 81

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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. 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. 84

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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

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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 multidirectionality 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 coordinating 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 selfdiscipline, 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 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 128.

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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,

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the clash of differently scripted versions of marital love proved unsettling. Andrew Popp examines a different emotional resource: nostalgia. Bringing us to the twentyfirst 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

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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 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.

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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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Harris, Richard. “The Birth of the North American Home Improvement Store, 1905–1929.” Enterprise and Society 10, no. 4 (2009): 687–728. Hartigan-O’Connor, Ellen. “Abigail’s Accounts: Economy and Affection in the Early Republic.” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 3 (2005): 35–58. Heemskerk, Eelke and Meindert Fennema. “Women on Board: Female Board Membership as a Form of Elite Democratization.” Enterprise and Society 15, no. 2 (2014): 252–284. Hochschild, Arlie Russel. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hoffarth, Matthew J. “Executive Burnout.” Business History Review 90, no. 4 (2016): 701–708. Husz, Orsi 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. Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Jacobson, Lisa. “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. Jacoby, Sanford M. “Employee Attitude Testing at Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1938–1960.” Business History 60, no. 4 (1986): 602–632. Jones, Sophie and Siobhan Talbott. “Sole Traders? The Role of the Extended Family in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Business Networks.” Enterprise and Society (2021): 1–30. Kenely, Monica. “Marketing the Message: The Making of the Market for Life Insurance in Australia, 1850–1940.” Enterprise & Society 16, no. 4 (2015): 929–956. Ketchum, Alexandra D. “Cooking the Books: Feminist Restaurant Owners’ Relationships with Banks, Loans and Taxes.” Business History 64, no. 1 (2022): 1–27. Klein, Maury. “In Search of Jay Gould.” Business History Review 52, no. 2 (1978): 166–199. Kobrak, Christopher. “Family Finance: Value Creation and the Democratization of CrossBorder Governance.” Enterprise and Society 10, no. 1 (2009): 38–89. Kocka, Jürgen. “Family and Bureaucracy in German Industrial Management, 1850–1914: Siemens in Comparative Perspective.” Business History Review 45, no. 2 (1971): 133–156 Larsen, Eirinn and Vibeke Kieding Banik. “Mixed feelings: Women, Jews, and business around 1900.” Scandinavian Journal of History 41, no. 3 (2016): 350–368. Lieberman, Hallie. “Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America.” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 2 (2016): 393–433. Lindebaum, Dirk, 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, 1–19. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018. Lipartito, Kenneth. “Culture and the Practice of Business History.” Business and Economic History 24, no. 2 (1995): 1–41. Lipartito, Kenneth. “Connecting the Cultural and the Material in Business History.” Enterprise and Society 14, no. 4 (2013): 686–704. Lipartito, Kenneth. “The Ontology of Economic Things.” Enterprise and Society 21, no. 3 (2020): 592–621. Lipartito, Kenneth and Lisa Jacobson, ed. Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

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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.

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1

Accounting for the Middling Sorts: Emotions and the Family Business, c. 1750–1832 Katie Barclay, University of Adelaide

Introduction In 1815, George Heywood, an English grocer, reflected on his lengthy courtship of Mrs. Owen, a widow, mother, and businesswoman, and its failure: I now feel willing after four years attention and solicitude for her to give up all my poor and feeble presentations to her. I begin to see such inequality in our ages, persons, properties, family and circumstances in life that I almost doubt whether we should be as happy as I have imagined, and as we ought to be perfectly equal we ought to bear some proportion before marriage. After I had been industrious for years her family or friends might come to me and say all I had belong’d to them, that I had nothing before I knew them, how hard a case would this have been and not an improbable one.1

Heywood was a journeyman when he began his courtship and at least part of the attraction of Mrs. Owen was that she offered him the opportunity to move from employee to owner of his own business. Like many such romances, pragmatic ambition coupled with affection and the desire for an industrious wife competed with the investments and expectations of children from a first marriage. Articulating his decision to end this relationship in his account book/diary, a hybrid text, Heywood drew on a well-established biblical principle that one should not be unequally yoked in marriage. Originally deployed to prohibit marriage outside of the faith, by the eighteenth century this concept had been expanded to apply especially to social class but occasionally to personal qualities, such as age, intelligence, or personality.2 The George Heywood, “George Heywood’s Diary and Memoir,” in Business and Family in the North of England during the Early Industrial Revolution: Records of the Lives of Men and Women in Trade, 1788–1832, ed. Hannah Barker and David Hughes (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2020), 212–13. See also Hannah Barker, Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 297. 1

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growing importance of the companionable marriage placed greater weight on the compatibility of the couple. The desirability of “perfect equality”—an equality that rarely extended to gender hierarchies—was a popular trope by 1815 and Heywood would have encountered plenty of stories and proverbs that supported this choice.3 Yet, it is notable that it was not until Heywood needed to justify ending his relationship that such considerations came to figure in his decision-making. That Mrs. Owen came with children, a business, and an age gap had been evident since their first encounter. Situated within a text that included both tables of accounts and a narrative littered with income and expenditure, and their justifications, the decision to weigh the attributes of a marriage partner against oneself in an effort to judge “equality” was suggestive of the way that practices of accounting came to influence not only business matters but how people felt about each other. This chapter explores accounting practices amongst the middling sorts in Britain and Ireland between 1750 and 1850 as not only an important cultural practice, but a mechanism for disciplining the self and its attendant emotions. It contributes to histories of business by providing insight into the culture of the men and women who ran the many family enterprises that were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, suggesting, like others, how the mentalities of capitalism emerged not only within the workshops of entrepreneurs but also the family practices and feelings of the entrepreneurial.4 The importance of accounting to eighteenth-century middling families has been noted. Margaret Hunt described the flourishing culture of double-entry bookkeeping as accompanied by a “propaganda campaign” that situated this practice at the heart of moral, frugal living.5 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall describe the uptake of accounting as part of a more general effort in the eighteenth century to render the world “in a more measurable, even quantitative way.”6 Young people, especially of the mercantile classes, were educated to value accounting practices as central to effective financial management, to worldly success, and to the maintenance of a harmonious household.7 Accounting offered an order that could be applied at every level, from personal accounts to household management to those associated with business and finance. It was a practice expected of both men and women and to which children were introduced at a young age, offering an education that they could use across their lives.8 Helen Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: the Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Esther Godfrey, “Gender, power and the JanuaryMay marriage in nineteenth-century British literature,” PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2006. 4 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1992), 229; Eleanor Hamilton, Entrepreneurship across Generations: Narrative, Gender and Learning in Family Business (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013). 5 Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 49. 6 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 202. 7 Margaret Hunt, “Time-management, Writing and Accounting in the Eighteenth-Century English Trading Family: a Bourgeois Enlightenment.” Business and Economic History 18 (1989): 150–59. 8 Effie Botonaki, “Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Spiritual Diaries: Self-Examination, Covenanting and Account-Keeping.” Sixteenth-Century Journal 30, no. 1 (1999): 3–21; Amanda Vickery, “His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Household Accounting in eighteenth-century England.” Past and Present (2006), supplement 1: 12–38. 3

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Significantly, accounting practices not only bolstered the claims of middling families to frugality, morality, and careful living, but could become an opportunity for families to negotiate their identities and relationships, and exercise power and affection. Accounting practices entrained people to feel for each other, according to an ethical logic that arose through accounting culture.9 This chapter extends this discussion to consider how accounting practices enabled a “quantified self,” whereby a mercantile or capitalist logic came to influence how people understood the self and related to other members of their community. Emotional responses to events, the value judgments and decisions that arose from such feeling, and affective relationships with others—behaviors closely tied to the production of self and identity—came to be underpinned by the logic of accounting practices. As Craig Muldrew suggested, the early modern “economy of obligation” was underpinned by trust, family affections, and ethical duties of care, which ensured that matters of credit and debt were never passionless affairs.10 Buttressed by marriage and kinship ties, which often provided an impetus for economic behavior that sat at tension with the pursuit of profit, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century family businesses shared much in common with their predecessors.11 This chapter draws on the principles and methodologies of the history of emotion to recognize that such family feeling is not simply a “natural” behavior that disrupts the rationality of capitalist systems.12 Rather, emotion is understood here as a social practice, shaped by cultural norms and beliefs, and whose form is determined by an individual’s socialization and education. Accounting practices directed the flow of feeling, what form it should take, how people and things were valued, and the boundaries and scope of affective ties; they enabled a particular “emotional regime.” This chapter argues that emotion is central to capitalism and that accounting practices offer a site where such feeling is given shape and definition. This chapter draws on a study of accounting books that survive for the middling sorts in Britain and Ireland between 1750 and 1850. This was a period associated with the making of a new middle class, rooted not only in a growing mercantilism and easier access to cheap consumables, but early industrialization, urbanization, and economic transformation.13 The middling sorts constitute a diverse group. At one end are men like the extraordinarily wealthy and upwardly mobile Edinburgh banker Gilbert Innes Katie Barclay, “Illicit Intimacies: the Many Families of Gilbert Innes of Stow (1751–1832).” Gender & History 27, no. 3 (2015): 576–90. 10 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 1998); Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Katie Barclay, “The Emotions of Household Economics,” in Routledge Companion to Emotions in Europe: 1100–1700, ed. Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch (London: Routledge, 2019), 185–99. 11 Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage, and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; Barker, Family and Business; Katie Barclay, “Capitalism and Consumption,” in The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, ed. Katie Barclay and Peter Stearns (London: Routledge, 2022). 12 Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: an Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns.” History and Theory 49 (2010): 237–65. 13 Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 9

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of Stowe (1751–1832), who rose to be the chief executive officer for the Royal Bank of Scotland. His surviving accounts, ranging several hundred books, include personal accounts, household accounts, business accounts, and accounts for his estate, kept by his factor.14 Between his own record and that of his mother, Innes’s expenditure can be tracked from infancy to death. At the other end are people like George Heywood, a modest Manchester grocer. His formal accounts cover only a year of his life, and his more open-ended narrative account largely captures his early years before marriage. Women too are represented. The personal accounts of Susanna Pope chart forty years of her life in northern Scotland, a rare record of a middling woman whose relationships and experiences can be reconstructed through her expenditure but about whom we know little else.15 Where accounts exist as part of an archive, they have been considered in that context, but not all do. This chapter considers accounts as a narrative of the self, a technology through which people create a story of the self and their relation to others.16 It begins with a discussion of accounting practices as a cultural form during the eighteenth century that enabled a particular form of selfhood, which can be compared with a modern “quantified self,” and that encouraged individuals to view their own actions and those of others in terms of an ethical weighing of value. It then considers how this quantified self shaped how people related to each other, first looking at family life, and in a final section, community and trade relationships. Not least important here is recognizing that accounts were not made by individuals alone, but could be produced by groups, especially families, and often refused a clear distinction between family finance and that of the business, farm or other income stream that funded family expenditure. The quantified self of eighteenth-century accounting practices, and its emotional regime, was thus produced as part of a collective negotiation about how and what to count.

Account Books and the Quantified Self The culture of accounting in Britain and Ireland, and its associated quantified self, shared much with the rest of Europe, bolstered by the circulation of advice books and training manuals translated across multiple languages.17 If accounting practice could be useful in all spheres of life, and books were written for diverse groups from youth to the manager of the household to the landed gentry, the texts themselves associated bookkeeping with merchant life. The Gentleman’s Complete Book-Keeper (1741), for example, began by arguing that “every prudent Person that has but the least Regard His records are held by the National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh [hereafter NRS] at GD113. Pope’s account book is held by the Highland Archive Centre, Inverness at D318/1. 16 Jason Scott-Warren, “Early Modern Bookkeeping and Life-Writing Revisited: Accounting for Richard Stonely.” Past and Present 230 (2016), supplement 11: 151–70; Adam Smyth, “Money, Accounting and Life-Writing, 1600–1700: Balancing a Life,” in A History of English Autobiography, ed. Adam Smyth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 86–99. 17 Daniel A. Rabuzzi, “Eighteenth-Century Commercial Mentalities as Reflected and Projected in Business Handbooks.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 2 (1995/6): 169–89; James Aho, Confession and Bookkeeping: The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005). 14

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to his own Estate, or for the Welfare of his Family” acknowledged the convenience of keeping books. The author, however, particularly tied this practice to merchant life, littering the text with references to this group: “For the Merchants themselves (who commonly are the most exact in keeping their Books and Accounts of any) differ very much among themselves about the Number of Books”; “These Things being so well known to the Merchant’s Acommptant”; “that does commonly occur in the Course of Merchandizing, or in other Ways of Dealing.”18 The Servant’s Directory or Housekeeper’s Companion, designed for servants and housekeepers, provided account templates for their envisioned female audience to complete, viewing the principle purpose of such a record as managing household engagements with trade: “so you may take your Receipts once a Week, once a Month, once a Quarter, or a Year, as you pay your Tradespeople; but with these Rules you never can make a mistake.”19 Advice books aimed at men of business—a term that was construed widely to include merchants, factors of estates, and trustees—more fully lauded the value of keeping accounts.20 Account keeping allowed the merchant to engage in trade—a noble profession performed even by King Solomon himself—and assured the wealth not only of private families, but “Princes, Potentates and Commonwealths.”21 Accounts not only measured the flow of resources but were performed as an ethical practice. John Carpenter’s advice book, like many others, saw bookkeeping as the “Art of equality, which restoreth just as much as it taketh from another, without partiality; and therefore it may be fitly compared to a paire of Balances.”22 A well-organized and transparent financial record affirmed character. The “unfortunate” individual who fell into debt could use their accounts as “the fairest and best Apologie of his Innocence and honesty to the World.”23 The practice of keeping accounts became a discipline of the self through which one could take measure of an economic performance that was simultaneously that of identity and character. Account keeping could allow the individual to know themselves across the life course: “he shall or may know how his Estate-standeth (in every respect) to a penny, and how the same increaseth or decreaseth; as likewise, how much he hath gained or lost, by any one particular Commodity that he dealeth in, from the beginning of such his Accompt to the end of any Term or Time afterwards, through the whole Course of his Dealing.”24 For some, this allowed a person to be collapsed into their financial estate. Robert Colinson contrasted what a man of trade “in ane instant can see” in his accounts with a person looking in the mirror; both were a display of self Richard Hayes, The Gentleman’s Complete Book-Keeper (London: J. Noon, 1741), 1, 3, 13. H. Glass, The Servant’s Directory or House-Keeper’s Companion (London: W. Johnston et al., 1760), part 6, 3. 20 I have not found any aimed at women in business, although there are those aimed at housekeepers and servants, who are presumed female. This could just be a limitation of my sample, but it suggests they’re rare. 21 John Carpenter, A Most Excellent Instruction for the Exact and Perfect Keeping Merchants Bookes of Accounts by Way of Debitor and Creditor (London: James Boler, 1632), preface. 22 Carpenter, A Most Excellent Instruction, 1. 23 Robert Colinson, Idea Rationaria, or The Perfect Accomptant (Edinburgh: David Lindsay et  al., 1683), 1. 24 J.H, Clavis Commercii: or the Key of Commerce, Shewing the True Method of Keeping Merchants Books (London: Eben Tracy, 1704), 1. 18 19

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and (due to the association between appearance and morality) character.25 Accounting practices, and the ethical self they produced, were at the heart of mercantile identity, but also a moral order offered to other groups as a principle for orderly living. It was a future-oriented practice that offered a pattern and evidence of a good life. The emphasis on economic prudence and financial probity, which in earlier centuries might have precluded this group from political life, as it was placed at odds with the independence of a landed class, was to become a predominant mode of living.26 The keeping of accounts was recognized as a disciplinary activity, requiring education and training, and to be maintained over time. If accounts could be reckoned at various points in the year, not least to accommodate payments of tradesman or to invoice for income, the maintenance of a financial record was a daily activity. Individuals were encouraged to carry “waste books,” where they would note every transaction and purchase as a memory aide. These could later be transferred into a more permanent record to be held for posterity as evidence of economic behavior. Through performing these daily rituals, individuals learned and naturalized the ethical logic of accounting practices, while the account book itself offered suggestions as to its shape and form. There was no single way to organize one’s finances. An individual might keep an account of their personal expenditure, including clothing, leisure activities, or frivolous consumption, separately from that of a household account. This might particularly be the case if a household account was kept by a servant, or for a record produced by a number of individuals with different family responsibilities. Businesses might keep their accounts separate from the household; farmers might keep a record of farm produce and sales distinct from the household budget. For others, however, such distinctions were unnecessary, and accounts might appear in a single book, ordered by date and time, rather than function. Most accounts tried to bring some order to expenditure. Account books that grouped by product were common: clothes, cereals, meats, wages, charity. So were those that collected information under particular individuals, like a tradesman or customer. For small businesses, farms and large households, the distinctions between income and expenditure, business and consumption could be fragile. It is not always evident when goods were purchased to sell or for private use. The list of servant wages often included staff with multi-purpose functions for home and business. These decisions, and the various forms of order created, acted as structures for financial and emotional life, offering ways to think about a self-made through production, consumption, reproduction, and exchange. This can be seen in the selectivity of many accounts. Some began accounts to abandon them, only to restart them months or years later, offering a patchy financial record. Innes of Stowe is remarkable for the detail his offer, but those of many others appear to be missing large categories of purchase—food, frivolity, clothing—that raise questions as to whether there were additional accounts that did not survive or whether cash purchases went unrecorded. What is missing might be as suggestive of Colinson, Idea Rationaria, 1. Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: the Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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the mental world of the account keeper as what was considered necessary to include. Combining and disguising frivolous purchases as cash might affirm a frugal self that a fuller account might disturb. Excluding produce grown in a garden from the record might suggest that the practice of accounting was viewed as a relationship with the outside world, rather than labor or productivity. Such decisions indicate not only degrees of shrewdness in financial management but how individuals ordered, valued, and felt about their economic choices. Here the failures may also be suggestive of the challenges of this practice, where keeping accounts requires effort and discipline. The capacity for accounts to display a budget deficit might itself have had a dissuasive effect. The accounting practices of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middling sorts can be interpreted as a form of quantified self. The term “the quantitative self ” was recently coined to describe the process through which people build identities using repetitive measurements of the body, its health, and associated practices.27 In recent years, this has been marked in the use of wearable technologies that measure steps walked, heart-rate, or distance cycled, producing not only information about health or performance but groups who share and compare such data and offer each other feedback. The quantitative self is formed through the disciplinary practice of measuring the body and its behaviors.28 Sometimes associated with “data fetishism,” such activities place a value on the production of particular numbers, or with measuring improvement over time.29 The moral self becomes equated with a performance interpreted through a metricized lens, reinforced by supportive, and sometimes judgmental, communities of practice. The quantitative self not only defines itself through numbers but can come to  display the characteristics and attributes that their data suggests—thus the keen cyclist evidences their achievement not only through data but physical appearance or better health. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middling families, the keeping of accounts should have been a routinized and daily activity, which produced a record of achievement that could be shared with a community to display moral character, or which might become evidence of a lack of financial acumen. Accounts should stand for something more than the measure—they evidence wealth, frugal household management, or conversely imprudent business practices—but also offered their own value as a daily practice that supported community relationships. Accounting practices of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middling sorts produced a quantified self that in turn shaped how individuals came to relate to each other and so levels of affection, care and commitment, duty and obligation. If an “economy of obligation” draws attention to the ways that credit relationships were informed not only by rational risk-taking but emotions and relationality, attention to accounting practices highlights how engagement in economic behaviors shaped both the self and the affective quality of people’s relationships with each other. Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking (Cambridge: Polity, 2016); Btihaj Ajana, ed., Self-Tracking: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018). 28 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 29 Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (London: Duke University Press, 2014); Helen Kennedy and Rosemary Lucy Hill, “The Feeling of Numbers: Emotions in Everyday Engagements with Data and their Visualisation.” Sociology 52, no. 4 (2018): 830–48. 27

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Metricizing the Family The self that emerges through accounting practices was not produced in isolation but in relation to family and community, a group that extended to those with whom account keepers traded and employed. Account books are a rich source of names— they list the people who were paid for goods and services and the family members who received them. On one page of his accounts alone, Richard Latham, a yeoman farmer in Lancashire, mentions his daughter Betty, “2 cordiels bottls 2s6d: Betty Latham she going at home—3/4”; his brother whom he employed as a laborer from time to time, “John at moss ground 2 dayes 1s8d—1/8,” and a couple from whom he made a purchase and who were likely related to his sister-in-law Alice Forshaw, “for 1 calf of James & Isobel Forshaw 29th of August—14/6.”30 Family and business relationships often closely overlapped. For bookkeepers who acted as money managers for others, or who ran the accounts for another’s business or estate, they can offer access to a web of connections, highlighting nodes within economic networks and allowing financial interdependencies to be traced. A social network analysis might fruitfully produce a picture of community life, of the short and longstanding relationships between customers and tradespeople, of the casual laborers and temporary servants who moved in and out of households and businesses, and of gifts and benevolence provided to local charities and the poor. Noting who was named—Betty Latham—and who was subsumed under a trade identity— washerwoman—might suggest something of the different statuses that attached to individuals for the account keeper. Account keeping involved the inscription of social and business relationship through a lens of exchange, a repetitive gesture that continually reinscribed economic functions to family and community life. The quantitative self of the accounts was brought into a quantified relationship with the other. As records that were produced about relationships, and which were at times multiauthored or produced on the behalf of another or a business, accounts could operate as a location where such relationships were negotiated, contested, and affirmed. The boundaries of account keeping—who kept what accounts and what expenditure was under a person’s responsibility—could reify domains of authority within a family, reduce conflict, and so ensure that the family affections operated in an orderly way. Middling women were often made responsible for the expenses of the household, receiving payment from the family budget to settle accounts. This could offer women considerable latitude of expenditure and reinforced their authority over their financial domain. Margaret Aikman, for example, when providing an account of her marriage to a spendthrift husband to a family friend in 1731, described how she “Dubled my expence of the House upon him [her husband] and saved that and som for buying cloaths for myself and the children which I never did until I got a 100 pound together and then give it to him to buy a South Sea bond till at length I gave him five in that nature.”31 Aikman’s authority over the household expenses offered her an opportunity Richard Latham, The Account Book of Richard Latham, 1724–1767, ed. Lorna Weatherhill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 110. 31 NRS, GD18/4640 Margaret Aikman to John Clerk, June 22, 1731.

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to shore up the finances of the household through prudent investment, despite her marriage to a man with little financial ability. When such payments appear in the account books of husbands who provide the underlying income, they are often noted with little detail. James Beattie, for example, recorded such payments as “Given to Mrs. B. for the current month” and even “Family expences paid to Mrs. Dun during Mrs. B’s illness.”32 The number recorded varied and so was not a set  allowance, but rather appeared to reflect a needed or desired expenditure. How this expense was outlaid was never recorded by Beattie, and if we might expect that behind such a record may have been a more detailed justification by his wife or a proxy, nonetheless the account form reinforced that it was not his role to explain this cost. The inscription of the boundaries of economic domains in accounts therefore affirmed the location of various interests and authority in marriage and offered opportunity for women like Aikman who used it to their advantage. Account books were also deployed in negotiations between family members. This could be frivolous. The three Innes siblings, who lived together in Edinburgh during the second half of the eighteenth century, all kept detailed financial accounts of their expenditure. On one occasion in 1806, arguing over who had paid for a painting that hung in their house, Gilbert and Jane bet twenty guineas on who remembered the price correctly, before turning to their accounts as the determinative record.33 Accounts here were deployed to resolve a minor, and entertaining, dispute, facilitating a peaceful household. Offering a history for a piece of shared property, accounts could support relationships over time, providing evidence of the flows of finances that might otherwise be the cause of friction. Accounting practices could also be the cause of conflict. As I have highlighted elsewhere, Gilbert Innes of Stowe insisted that his many mistresses and illegitimate children kept accounts of their expenditure, both as a moral and educational practice and as a mechanism for managing his financial support.34 Arguments and justifications around expenditure feature as a large component of his correspondence with a group that he often resisted as defining as family but who viewed themselves as such. A failure to demonstrate appropriate financial probity through account keeping was a source of anxiety for those who relied on Gilbert for an income or employment, unsettling their sense of themselves as capable actors, and indeed, as worthy of Gilbert’s love. At times, this anxiety manifested as anger, such as when Gilbert’s son and factor William lost patience with Gilbert’s continual criticism of his records and wrote a multi-page letter outlaying the pain and hurt that it caused him.35 Importantly, if Gilbert had hoped that mediating his familial relationships through a quantitative lens might have reduced the emotional obligations of a group that he held at a distance, he instead found that monitoring and managing the expenses of others reinforced an intimate connection, not least the domestic affections that arose between the “providing” husband and his James Beattie, James Beattie’s Day-Book, 1773–1798, ed. Ralph S. Walker (Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1948), 82 (May 23, 1778) and 89 (December 5, 1778). 33 NRS, GD113/5/400 Note of the wager signed by Jane Innes and Gilbert Innes, May 29, 1806. 34 This argument is detailed at length in Barclay, “Illicit Intimacies.” 35 Ibid. 32

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dependents. Love arose, perhaps against his will, as the repetitive practices of account making became a form of family making for the Inneses. The centrality of accounting to ordering family life is most evident in the hybrid form of many accounts. While some accounts resemble what a modern reader might expect by that term, with lists of goods and services and their prices, many others combine a record of expenditure and purchase with narrative descriptions, details of important events (especially births, deaths, and marriages), and diary entries. Some accounts primarily exist as letters to another. It can be tempting to consider that such hybrid forms were not accounts but rather, like waste books, aides memoir of debits and credits that could be transferred to a more formal record. However, often the narratives that accompany accounts, or where accounts appear in narrative form, act as more of an explanation and justification for expenditure or economic decision-making than a diary that also contains finances. I suggest that this hybrid form of accounting reflects the ways that the logic of economic life came to permeate the middling self, where accounts displayed not only income and outgoings but moral character and so required to be placed within and alongside narratives that justified and enabled the interpretation of such data. These in turn shaped how the family produced through accounts came to consider each other through a quantitative lens. Georgie Heywood’s diary provides a useful example here, where his diary-account book provides a financial record of his expenditure and the logic that underpinned his decisions. Thus in 1815, he describes a visit that he makes to his family: [I] went to Longly to see sister & Richard, he was not in, she did not know where he was. I stopt and got Tea, gave her 2oz Tea & 6 for Butter–Child 2d. Was sorry to find them in such low circumstances  … they have a good house & Garden for £6 a year, the garden would produce more. I call’d to see mother-in-law [e.g. stepmother], she is all poverty, she wants to profess some religion, but I cannot hear such cant, she cannot afford to send David [stepbrother] to school, perhaps she thought I should pay for him but I am not inclined to do any thing more for her or him. I find I might beggar myself to do for one and another of them and all would not be enough. I got breakfast with her on Monday and gave her 1/- to pay for some Cloggs and 1½d for David.36

Heywood combines a record of expenditure on the occasion of a visit with his family with an assessment of his family’s economic standing, and a consideration of his financial and emotional obligations towards them. He is happy to provide small gifts of groceries and money, particularly for the children, but not to take on larger financial obligations. Here the seeming insatiability of his stepfamily is placed as a risk to his own solvency, and so their requests become unequitable within relationships that should be marked by balance, just as an account book should suggest. Notably, this was not just an economically rational decision but a mechanism through which affective ties were assessed, valued, and found worthy of further investment. Through enabling quantified selves, accounting practices shaped the emotional dynamics of social life. Heywood, “Diary and Memoir,” 213–14.

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Accounting for Community Accounting practices not only shaped relationships between family members or those who produced accounts together but influenced how the middling sorts came to relate to others in their community, including those with whom they did business. This might especially be seen in the way that charitable giving was practiced and articulated through accounts. Charitable giving is a significant feature of many account books of this period, reflecting its wider social importance to a Christian community for whom neighborly love was expected to be a daily practice.37 Giving part of your income to the poor or to those in need was required of the Christian life; so too was gift-giving. The latter, sometimes overlapping with hospitality in the home, was a key social activity that affirmed ties between family and friends, business partners, and the wider community.38 As a number of theorists of both charitable giving and the gift suggest, if money and goods exchanged under this umbrella were expected to be freely given, not least if they were to reflect well on a person’s moral character, nonetheless they bound people into a web of obligation, marked by loyalty, gratitude, and service (and conversely anger, irritation, and hurt that might arise from failure).39 For the poor this might simply require remembering the benevolent in prayer, but for others, such behaviors should be reciprocated at appropriate times in the life course.40 An account book that measured such giving became a useful mechanism for assessing both gratitude and reciprocity within a community connected through the affective obligations produced by charitable exchanges. Much of this type of giving in account books is listed under generic headings such as “benevolence” or “given at church,” but diaries might also note who received charity, the circumstances, or curious events, such as the money Jane Innes gave to support an abandoned baby in 1782.41 Within established communities, where giving and receiving happened within a known network, recording who received such gifts and the longerterm outcomes became part of managing social and emotional relationships. The Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner’s account-diary from the 1750s provides a particularly interesting example of how quantitative thinking came to shape his gift-giving and charitable action, and so of how this way of relating to others became a dominant framework for social relationships. Turner routinely gave money to Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 38 Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Felicity Heal, “The Idea of Hospitality in Early Modern England.” Past & Present 102 (1984): 66–93. 39 Rab Houston, Peasant Petitions: Social Relations and Economic Life on Landed Estate, 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014); Katie Barclay, “Negotiating Independence: Manliness and Begging Letters in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland,” in Nine Centuries of Man: Manhood and Masculinity in Scottish History, ed. Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Ewan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 142–59; Sara Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 40 Barclay, “Negotiating Independence”; Steven King, “Regional Patterns in the Experiences and Treatment of the Sick Poor, 1800–1840: Rights, Obligations and Duties in the Rhetoric of Paupers.” Family & Community History 10, no. 1 (2007), 61–75. 41 NRS, GD113/5/419/2 Account book of Jane Innes, February 1782. 37

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charitable causes, particularly during traditional periods of giving like Christmas.42 On December 21, 1758, for example, he noted his diary that “This being St Thomas’s Day, gave [33] people one penny and a draught beer for a Christmas gift.”43 Such activities marked a desire by this group to practice charity and to record that they did so, affirming their benevolence through an account that was both a register of financial activity and an evidence of moral character. Yet, if that was the case, like other social relationships, account books could also become records of the contest and negotiation that such exchanges might produce. A few days after giving charity to the poor in 1758, Turner offered his postman John Streeter 12d for “his box,” the traditional end of year gift given to servants, apprentices, and tradesmen by their customers.44 Far from being happy with this gift, Streeter was offended by the meager contribution and returned a week later, on January 4, to give back the 12d, saying it “was [not] enough,” at which “I gladly received and then gave him just nothing.”45 A year later, Turner offered 2s—noting in his diary that it consisted of the 12d from the year previous that had been returned and 12d for this year—and Streeter appears to have accepted this amount.46 Whatever underlay this dispute, the “gift” for the box did not simply reflect Turner’s benevolence but was part of a negotiation between these men as to the worth of the service being provided; the tip symbolized Turner’s gratitude and his apparent stinginess soured this economic relationship by acting as a critique on the service offered or the lowly status of the man who provided it. Gratitude was a necessary social emotion within economic relationships that were not limited to a simple exchange of labor for wages, but contributed to the production of a community bound by duties and obligations and their affective dimensions.47 The account book that allowed for these relationships to be measured, not only in relation to previous years but with tips from and to others, drew particular attention to the economic value that was associated with these obligations and so came to shape the emotional world of trade. Not least important here was the requirement for a “perfect equality” that should emerge within an account, if not in a single transaction then over time. Charitable giving was complexly tied into ideas of social equality, ideally reinforcing social hierarchies wherein the benevolent was in a superior position to the recipient, and where both parties recognized their place within a God-given social order.48 For those in the middle, however, rapid social mobility, both up and down, challenged this ideal, contributing to an anxiety with one’s own economic success and how it shaped relationships with others.49 That a family or business might fail, as well as succeed, led Tim Hitchcock, “Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London.” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 478–98. 43 Thomas Turner, The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765, ed. David Vaisey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 169 (December 21, 1758). 44 Ibid., 169 (December 28, 1758). 45 Ibid., 171 (January 4, 1759). 46 Ibid., 196 (December 29, 1759). 47 See the related discussion by McCoy (Chapter 6) in this volume. 48 Houston, Peasant Petitions. 49 K. Tawny Paul, The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 42

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to particular sympathy for middling families who fell on hard times.50 For those who also held debts with those who were struggling, charitable giving might also reflect a consideration of how one’s own actions contributed to the balance of their accounts. Thus, Turner recorded a charitable donation he gave to Master Paris for his sons, whose debts if not paid would require them to leave the country, with the note: “I gave the man 2s. 6d for his son—not that I did it so much from principle of charity as self-interest, having formerly bought some brandy of them. I could not tell but their poverty might induce them to do that for me which another has done for them, in order to clear themselves.”51 Turner offered the men a financial gift in the hope that it would delay them calling in a debt for brandy that he had purchased from them. Here he recognized his “own interest,” in wishing to avoid having to pay his own debt, but also the ways that the obligations produced by credit and debt relationships extended beyond the transaction into aiding those with whom you traded. It may well be that Paris approached Turner knowing that these considerations would shape the likelihood of Turner offering support. The “perfect equality” measured by the accounts did not simply apply to fair dealing within trade, but to a measurement of the obligations that emerged between those operating in an exchange relationship, where self-interest and care of the other combined. Such calculations were not limited to relationships with more distant trading acquaintances, but could be critical to the smooth functioning of everyday sociability amongst groups where business and friendship overlapped. Turner’s antagonistic relationship with Dr. Snelling is a case in point. Snelling was the Turners’ doctor, something that was especially significant during the period in which the diary was kept as his wife had a long illness, ending in her death in 1761. If the relationship was primarily functional, it nonetheless required Snelling to spend considerable time in the Turners’ home, including staying overnight and eating meals with the family. Within a context where account books not only measured the balance between services provided and payment made, but the affective obligations that surrounded that practice, friendship—with its hospitality and gift-giving—could confuse attempts to measure a perfect equality between businessmen. Turner’s reflections on Snelling’s behavior is thus worth quoting at length: Dr Snelling went away after breakfast. I paid him half a crown for cutting my seton and likewise am to pay John Jones for his horse’s hay, oats etc. 18d. which together make 4s. Oh, could it have been imagined that he [Snelling] could have took anything of me, considering that I paid him £39 for curing my wife, great part of which I paid him before he had it due, and all of it within 5 months after he had performed the cure. I always do and ever did use him after the

Peter Wessel Hansen, “Grief, Sickness and Emotions in the Narratives of the Shamefaced Poor in Late Eighteenth-Century Copenhagen,” in Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor, 1780–1938, ed. Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren, and Steven King (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 35–50. 51 Turner, The Diary of, 121–22 (November 10, 1757). 50

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The Business of Emotions in Modern History best manner I was capable of when he was at our house. He was that man that never gave my servants anything, no, not even the meanest trifle that could be. Notwithstanding they always waited on him like as if they were his own servants. Oh, thou blackest of friends, ingratitude, what an odious colour and appearance does thou make! Oh, may the most ever-to-be-adored Supreme Excellency that sees and views all our most private and secret actions and even knows our most secret thoughts before we bring them into action guide me with His grace that I may never be guilty of that hateful crime, nor even so much as to indulge an ungrateful thought.52

That Snelling took a very small sum of money—4s—for a minor procedure, when on the same occasion he was given an overnight stay and had recently been paid a large sum in a timely fashion was viewed as a mark of ingratitude by a loyal customer. Turner weighed up not only the service with its cost, but its place within a larger relationship of hospitality and friendship, one where Snelling had conspicuously failed to display any generosity towards the household that provided him care. By contrast, Turner regularly noted his tips for the servants in the houses where he received hospitality, keen to record his own good behavior.53 Weighed up in a hybrid account-diary, Turner’s consideration of gratitude, or its lack, in this social relationship was measured in service, in money, and in an array of socio-emotional practices of hospitality and gift-giving. If this “economy of obligation” predated Turner and his account books, nonetheless the uptake of accounting practices and their foregrounding as a measure of ethical life came to quantify that which was often previously considered customary, and to place this quantified relationship to the other at the center of a record that was expected to display one’s moral character for those who wished to hold one to account. The practice of accounting came to quantify and shape how the middling sorts engaged with each other.

Conclusion The repetitive and ritual nature of account keeping directed the imagination of the middling sorts during the Industrial Revolution, shaping how they articulated their relationship to each other and how they came to frame the moral self. As a practice that was ideally performed daily, accounting was not simply a convenient mechanism for tracking finances, but a discipline of the self that placed financial probity as a central moral characteristic. Within a structure that emphasized balance and equality, it offered an opportunity to measure oneself in relation to others and to use that calculation as part of a consideration of the value of social relationships. As with any form of selfdiscipline, the self that was produced through this activity was not defined by numbers alone, but rather quantitative practices became a mechanism to articulate, explore, and evaluate a larger emotional framework—to place the “economy of obligation,” as Turner, The Diary of, 20 (December 29, 1755). For example, see ibid., 23 (January 26, 1756) and 24 (January 29, 1756).

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Muldrew framed it, under scrutiny and to bring a rational order to the intangible, the emotional and the ethical.54 As Turner’s diary suggests, relationships based not only on trade but on hospitality, gift-giving, and friendship could now be accounted for through a metricized lens. The middling sort that was produced through accounting practices brought this method for feeling and relating to their families—where accounts could become a site of negotiation, conflict, and resolution—and to their wider economic relationships with customers, service providers, and trading partners. Far from attending only to profit and loss, accounting practices looked for a “perfect equality” between social actors that required each to measure and perform the obligations of loyalty, gratitude, recognition, and neighborly love, and to hold the formal aspects of their trade relationships in balance with the less tangible obligations required of a caring community. Such consideration extended business relationships into the domain of emotion, as the practice of trade continued to be marked by an outward display of neighborly affection that was so critical to the quantified self of the period.

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Emotional Strategies: Businesswomen in the Civil War Era United States Mandy L. Cooper, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

Introduction Cries filled the air of nineteenth-century New Orleans as market women and men hawked their wares. Clementine, a Black creole woman who sold calas (a type of pastry), sang out to the women passing by: Beeeeeelles calas—Beeeeeelles calas—Aaaaaa! Madam, mo gaignin calas, Madame, mo gaignin calas, Tou cho, tou cho, tou cho. Beeeeeelles calas—Belles calas À madame mo gaignin calas, Mo guaranti vous ye bons!1

Just like Clementine’s calas, “Everything” that these Black creole women sold “was either ‘bel’—beautiful—or ‘bon’—good.”2 The streets so filled with similar cries that the sounds of “Rich basses and shrill trebles, whining, pleading, cajoling, screaming […] blended and mingled into a symphony.”3 As street vendors in nineteenth-century New Orleans called and sang out their wares, they played with the emotions of those passing by to convince them to purchase their goods. When businesswomen in the Civil War era South expressed a particular emotion, it did certain work, allowing them (hopefully) to achieve particular goals, like making a sale, enticing a customer, or receiving a tip. Achieving that goal meant Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana, ed. Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1987), chapter 2. As Ashley Rose Young has pointed out, singing made “good business sense” as it preserved the voice and carried over crowd noise. Ashley Rose Young, “Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in Nineteenth-Century America” (Phd diss., Duke University, 2017), 107. 2 Saxon, Dreyer, and Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya, chapter 2. 3 Ibid., chapter 2. 1

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knowing which emotions to express or to elicit in potential customers in particular situations: these women had to know the boundaries and expectations of the business community, the emotional norms that disciplined the market. For these women, who made a living selling goods despite the restrictions of coverture on their business activities, emotion was key. Other women invested in stock, bought and sold all manner of goods, managed boardinghouses, ran schools, and kept the household economy afloat. For all of these women, strategically deploying specific emotions at certain times allowed them to successfully navigate the business world.4 Paying attention to emotion as a strategy for attracting customers, selling goods, and participating in the business world reveals several things about the way business worked in the Civil War era United States. More importantly, however, if we take emotion and plays on emotion seriously as a clear business strategy, we can more clearly see how women navigated through and around the laws that were designed to keep them from fully participating in the economic realm. Emotion was key to conducting business—from the personal level to the seemingly impersonal decisions to buy and sell stock. This chapter examines the strategies that Southern women— Black and white, enslaved and free—used in the Civil War era to participate in a variety of business activities, despite being constrained in law. This chapter focuses broadly on women in the Civil War era South who engaged in business, whether by selling wares at market, running boardinghouses or schools, or investing in stock. I define the Civil War era as roughly the years between the 1820s and the early 1900s. While the war itself only lasted from 1861–1865, broader trends and questions defined the era; thus, taking this longer chronological approach reveals continuities despite intense disruptions while also highlighting key moments of change for women in business. It allows us, for example, to see similar emotional strategies used by women advertising their services in the 1820s and the 1860s, or by women selling food in the streets of New Orleans in the 1850s or the 1890s. Women have always worked, despite a variety of legal constraints, as the literature on women’s work makes clear. The literature on women’s work in early America has Under coverture, once a woman married, her legal identity was subsumed under that of her husband. Thus, technically, a married woman would not have been able to conduct legal affairs—like obtaining loans, entering into contracts, etc. (Of course, as the women in this chapter show, there were ways around this.) See particularly Laura F. Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the 19th-Century United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). Edwards highlights the reality of coverture for both married and unmarried women, as well as other dependents. Theoretically, coverture protected married women. In reality it made it so difficult to conduct legal matters in their own names that it left them exposed. Households functioned similarly—with children, servants, and enslaved people all subordinate to the household head’s authority. Similarly, wage workers (both men and women) worked under their employers, who had a similar legal control over the workplace. The logic of coverture affected more than just married women. Edwards shows how women—white and Black, enslaved and free, married and unmarried—worked within this system. See also Edwards, “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book: Federalism, Women, and Governance.” Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no. 4 (December 2019): 504–23; Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019); Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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emphasized women’s prominent role in the household economy, as well as their presence in—and importance to—trading networks.5 Recent scholarship on the nineteenth century goes a step further and focuses on white women’s active role as enslavers.6 Other recent scholarship highlights the importance of enslaved women’s emotional labor in the development of capitalism in the antebellum United States.7 Together these strands of scholarship make clear women’s active involvement in the business world, whether they were Black or white, enslaved or free, elite or working class, and married or unmarried. All women participated in the economic realm. This chapter builds on that work, combining methodologies from affect theory and the history of emotion to look at more “traditional” business activities, including selling goods and services, advertising, and purchasing stock, revealing how individual women used emotion to navigate the legal constraints of conducting business as a woman in the Civil War era. In affect theory, scholars studying affective labor (or “the labor of interaction and human contact that can elicit ‘intangible feelings of ease, excitement, or passion’”) typically focus on the affect economy, examining workers such as flight attendants, waitresses, and models.8 The majority of these studies focus on forms of waged labor, following in the footsteps of Arlie Russel Hochschild’s work on emotional labor, or “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display,” such as when a flight attendant keeps a smiling, calm, and friendly persona even under stressful situations. Hochschild further specifies that “emotional

On women in economic networks, see Marta V. Vicente, Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Early Modern Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sheryllynne Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 1760–1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (Boston: Brill, 2006); Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (New York: Ecco, 2012); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Hartigan-O’Connor, “Abigail’s Accounts: Economy and Affection in the Early Republic.” Journal of Women’s History 17, no 3 (Fall 2005): 35–58; Karen L. Marrerro, Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2020). On women in the household economy, see Hartigan-O’Connor, Ties that Buy; Alexandra Finley, An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 6 In particular, see Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property. Jones-Rogers emphasizes that married white women both acknowledged and enforced that the people that they enslaved were their property, not their husbands’ property, despite coverture. She also documents how these married women’s property rights were recognized in the court system and in their communities. Kirsten E. Wood’s Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) shows how widowed white women exercised similar property rights. Inge Dornan sheds light on similar white widows in colonial South Carolina. Dornan, “Masterful Women: Colonial Women Slaveholders in the Urban Low Country.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (December 2005): 383–402. 7 See, for example, Finley, An Intimate Economy; Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property. 8 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), 234. 5

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labor is sold for a wage.”9 Yet, not all women worked for pay—such as the enslaved women in this chapter. But, these women still used similar emotional strategies to navigate through the business realm. They still performed affective or emotional labor. Combining those insights with Bill Reddy’s theory of emotives and Barbara Rosenwein’s discussion of emotional communities helps us understand the emotional work these women performed—and why specific emotional strategies helped them navigate the world of business. As Reddy explains it, an emotive is an emotional expression that “both describes […] and changes […] the world.”10 If we think of the business community as an emotional community, or a group of people with “a common stake, interests, values, and goals” that are imbedded in “shared vocabularies and ways of thinking,” then we can begin to understand these women’s actions.11 The business community in the Civil War era, like all emotional communities, had internalized norms surrounding emotion. Individuals in the community regularly expressed emotions like respect, esteem, and, yes, non-emotional rationality. Those who made the right moves—expressing the right emotions at the right times to the right people—would be rewarded with access to the business world. Much as the merchants in Laura McCoy’s chapter later in this volume (Chapter  6) traded in a commerce of affection to compete in the market, the women in this chapter recognized (and traded on) the emotional norms by which individuals in the business community co-ordinated their world. Women knew exactly what it entailed to enter that community and be recognized as a valid member: they had to use the community’s “shared vocabularies,” including those tied to emotion. Yet, they also recognized that because they were women, or because they were both a woman and Black, some of the emotions they performed or expressed should be performed in certain ways to be most effective, because wider society (the larger emotional community to which the business community belonged) had particular ideas about the proper emotions that people could express, based on their gender, race, freedom status, and class, among other things. Thus, if we understand these women as operating within two emotional communities, each with set rules and expectations, we can begin to understand why they expressed or performed certain emotions to further their business endeavors—and why those emotions in particular might have worked for them.

Arlie Russel Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 7. Similar to Wissinger, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define affective labor as labor that “produces or manipulates affects such as feelings of ease, wellbeing, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.” See Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 108. On Hardt and Negri’s concept of affective labor, see Johanna Oksala, “Affective Labor and Feminist Policies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (2016): 281–303. For a brief examination of affective labor, see Michael Hardt, “Foreword: What Affects Are Good For,” xi, and Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” 21–22, both in The Affective Turn. 10 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 128. 11 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 25. 9

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Whether a woman was enslaved or free, investing in stock or managing boardinghouses, selling goods or running a school, she had a deep awareness of the various emotional strategies necessary to conduct business in the nineteenth century. Finding these emotional strategies involves some detective work. It means gathering bits and pieces of information scattered throughout narratives, memoirs, newspaper articles, and letters. It includes putting together what we know about emotional care work and emotional labor both today and in the nineteenth century with these fragments and vague reminiscences about women’s work in the Civil War era. This chapter pulls on those scraps, focusing on women across the South—Black and white, enslaved and free— who used different emotional strategies to make their way in the business world. Each individual story in this chapter is like a separate block in a sampler quilt in which each block showcases different techniques, strategies, and approaches. They look visibly different, and the quilt itself can at times seem disjointed. And yet, each block uses a similar starting point, relying on techniques and strategies that build on the techniques used in previous blocks as the quilter works to learn the techniques. Once the quilt is put together, it tells a clear story—a story of developing techniques and approaches to the same task: piecing together pieces of material into something larger. More importantly, the patchwork approach shows the varied ways that individual women used their knowledge of these emotional strategies to conduct business in what was, ostensibly, a man’s world. In the case of the women in this chapter, each woman’s story and strategy was unique. They lived in different parts of the South. Some were white; some were Black. Some were enslaved; some were free. Some were business owners; others were not. Each woman’s situation, her use of emotions, her business was just that—hers. Yet, these women’s emotional strategies were strikingly similar in terms of their initial approach. Moreover, in many cases, women clearly built on the techniques used so effectively by a larger community of women who performed various kinds of work during the Civil War era. Despite the different approaches, strategies, places, and situations, the stories of these businesswomen have a common thread: emotion was clearly a key strategy, whether for making a sale, bringing in customers, or earning tips. As women in the Civil War era South navigated the business world, they watched, listened, and learned from each other, developing strategies that deployed emotion in different ways, all to great effect. This chapter begins with more overtly emotional strategies, examining the emotion-laden cries and appearances of street vendors in New Orleans, both in the antebellum period and in the later nineteenth century, highlighting continuity as well as market women’s adaptability to the changing circumstances. From there, it turns to shopkeepers, focusing on female milliners and mantua makers to highlight how such women drew in customers—and maintained customer loyalty—through the use of particular emotional appeals. The chapter then examines advertisements placed by a variety of women business owners—milliners and mantua makers, tavern-keepers, boardinghouse keepers, and school mistresses, in particular. These ads display strikingly similar emotional appeals—some of which were inherently gendered. The chapter then examines the emotional strategies used by an enslaved women to obtain her freedom. The chapter ends with the presence of

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emotion in women’s investment decisions—highlighting the studied non-emotional, rational language in transactional requests. * Travelers in nineteenth-century New Orleans often commented on the character of the French Market, relating tales of the many vendors. In the 1850s, Swedish writer Fredrika Bremmer observed, “Most of those who offer articles for sale are black Creoles, or natives, who have the French animation and gayety, who speak French fluently.” She continued, “‘Bon jour, madame! bon jour, madame!’ was addressed to me from many lips with the most cheerful smiles.” The market itself was “lively and picturesque” and full of “cheerful life, and good humor.”12 In the 1870s, Massachusetts-born author Edward King recalled the “rotund and ever-laughing madame who sells little piles of potatoes.”13 Later visitors to New Orleans remarked on the effectiveness of these marketing tactics, saying that “before you know it you have your hands down in your purse” to get money to buy what the women vendors were selling.14 These strategies took several different forms, including outright expressions (or performances) of emotion along with performing specific roles that evoked sentimentalism and nostalgia in potential customers. Street vendors’ varying expressions of cheerfulness were a common theme in travel narratives and later folk tales. This cheerfulness, whether mere performance or genuine feeling, was an effective means to sell wares. As Ashley Rose Young has argued, street vendors used a variety of rhetorical techniques, including wit, humor, and irony, to capture shoppers’ attention and sell their products.15 Yet, these cries—and the performance of cheerfulness, good humor, and flattery that accompanied them—were quintessentially a form of emotional labor: they were selling a product (or a service) by portraying a specific emotion. For women in particular, positioning themselves as cheerful or their goods as beautiful acted to draw in customers. Of course, women vendors could also be so persistent that people would buy their goods simply “for the sake of escaping the[ir] horrid yelling”—not because of any positive emotion.16 These women drew in customers by creating specific feelings in passersby—whether pleasant or unpleasant. After the Civil War, market women traded on the sense of nostalgia that many white Southerners relied on as they sought to rewrite the history of the antebellum period and memorialize the Old South. In the post-war period, white Southerners Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, vol. II (New York: Harper & Bros. Publishers, 1853), 213. 13 Edward King, The Great South: A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1875), 46. 14 “Toto the Creole Praline Woman.” Springfield Republican, August 20, 1894. 15 Young, “Nourishing Networks,” 112–114. 16 Touring the Antebellum South with an English Opera Company: Anton Reiff ’s Riverboat Travel Journal, ed. with an introduction by Michael Burden (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 49. 12

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put forth the Lost Cause narrative that glorified the Old South; sanitized the system of slavery as one in which enslaved people were happy, docile, and part of the family; and cast the Civil War as a matter of honor and states’ rights. As David Blight has pointed out, “The Lost Cause took root in a Southern culture awash in an admixture of physical destruction, the psychological trauma of defeat, a Democratic Party resisting Reconstruction, racial violence, and with time, an abiding sentimentalism.”17 The sentimental figure of the mammy became the centerpiece of much of this nostalgia and rewriting of history.18 The mammy was the quintessential “faithful slave” in Lost Cause narratives, both in personal reminiscences and in popular literature.19 It was that sentimentalism that these market women used in their favor. By creating a sense of nostalgia in white Southerners who walked past as they called out their wares—or simply in the way they presented themselves through clothing—these women used white Southerners’ sentimental longing for the Old South against them. In so doing, they turned the sentimentalism and nostalgia clearly in their favor, working emotion as a strategy to further their own economic interests. In fact, as Blight points out, this sentimentalism came to be at the heart of the reunion of the United States—for white Northerners as well as Southerners. Thus, these market women’s emotional strategies would likely have been effective for White Northerners visiting the South as well. Women who sold pralines were particularly adept at trading on this sentimentalism and nostalgia, for generations after the war. As folk tales from late nineteenth-century Louisiana related, pralines had been sold in New Orleans for years and always by Black women of “the ‘Mammy’ type.”20 Praline vendors like la viellllo Tolo, Tante Titine, and Praline Zizi used “soft, crooning voices” that were irresistible to children—and to their parents, who longed for the comfortable and happy days of their youth when they were cared for by an enslaved mammy.21 These women tugged on feelings of nostalgia for decades after the Civil War, setting themselves up “garbed in gingham and starched white aprons and tignons” and “smiling at the passers-by.”22 One observer recalled that as he saw a praline vendor named Toto seated at Jackson Square selling her pralines to children playing around her, “the time comes back when you, too, were a little child David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 258. On the development of the Lost Cause, see chapter 4. 18 The premier work on how the figure of the mammy was deployed in the twentieth century is Micki McElya’s Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 19 On the mammy and other elements of the Lost Cause in popular literature, see Blight, Race and Reunion, chapter  7. For personal reminiscences, newspapers, poems, and essays, see chapter  8. The United Daughters of the Confederacy lobbied for years to have memorials to mammies put up in every state, even going so far as lobbying Congress for a national mammy memorial in the nation’s capital. On the mammy memorials, see pages 287–89. For more on the national mammy monument, see Micki McElya, “Commemorating the Color Line: The National Mammy Monument Controversy of the 1920s,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003): 203–18. 20 Saxon, Dreyer, and Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya, chapter 2. 21 “Are Pralines Losing Ground?” The Daily Picayune, September 13, 1893. 22 Saxon, Dreyer, and Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya, chapter 2. 17

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and used to go with your nurse to the old Creole square in the summer evenings, just to spend your ‘picayune’ for one of ‘Toto’s’ pralines.”23 These free Black women—whether born free or emancipated following the war— knew well which roles were acceptable to perform, and knew how to capitalize on that knowledge. To potential white customers, it was acceptable for them to play the part of happy, loving, old mammy. In fact, it was largely expected by White patrons. Like Toto, their decision to do so should be understood in that context. Yet, it was also a conscious decision about what would sell—and memories of the Old South appealed. Black market women would then turn a profit, bettering their own circumstances, and undermining the prevailing hierarchy in the process.24 Clearly, these types of emotional strategies were convincing to customers in the Civil War era United States, whether by women hawking their wares in markets, on the streets, or in their own shops. As one woman later recalled, New Orleans’ most fashionable milliner in the 1840s was a woman named Olympe who was particularly adept at using emotion to make a sale. Olympe specialized in imported chapeaux (hats), a specialty item with a more elite clientele. She sold her hats by creating feelings of pleasure and the appearance of being close, intimate friends with each customer. Olympe always met customers at the door to her shop and exclaimed that she had found the perfect bonnet in Paris to fit them. Even more enticing was that she claimed to have had the bonnet shipped over specially for them. Olympe would then gush over how lovely the customer looked in their new bonnet, as if the sale was closed. As the woman recalled, “Olympe’s ways were persuasive beyond resistance.”25 Olympe treated each customer (or potential customer) as a friend of such close acquaintance that she thought of her wherever she journeyed. Because of that bond, she always went the extra mile to make her “friends” happy. Her actions in doing so would have been incredibly familiar to her clientele. After all, it was what they did for their own friends. In fact, women regularly shopped for their female friends and relatives, particularly when traveling. Olympe’s first strategy, then, was to treat the women as if they knew each other intimately, with all of the emotional closeness implied. Olympe worked to make her customers find pleasure in feeling special: each woman was someone who she immediately thought of when she saw a beautiful bonnet in Paris—so much so that she shipped it overseas only for that one woman. The woman and the bonnet were then united in Olympe’s shop as an act of fate. Whether or not Olympe was telling the truth (and, as most people would guess, she probably was not), the effect was the same: each of the women who patronized her business felt loved, valued, and beautiful, finding pleasure not just in the hat, but also in their relationship “Toto the Creole Praline Woman,” Springfield Republican, August 20, 1894. Nicole Eustace has demonstrated that cultural representations of gender were both racialized and gendered and were tied to power. Thus, emotional expressions could both reinforce or undermine social and political hierarchies through contestations and assertions of status. Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), esp. 12. 25 Eliza Moore Chinn McHatton Ripley, Social Life in Old New Orleans, Being Recollections of My Girlhood, electronic edition, 1998, Documenting the American South, p. 60. Originally published in 1912 (New York and London: D. Appleton & Company). https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/ripley/ ripley.html#ripley58 [accessed December 14, 2021]. 23 24

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(or their perceived relationship) with Olympe. Olympe’s tactics helped ensure that customers would return to her shop—and spread the word to all of their friends, ensuring the growth and prosperity of her business. Milliners and mantua makers often emphasized pleasure in their advertisements for similar reasons. Miss Twohig, a milliner in Oxford, Mississippi, proudly announced in the Oxford Falcon that she had received a new shipment of goods at the end of March 1867. She did not stop there, however, and “respectfully invite[d]” customers to “call and see her,” before she assured them that they would “not fail to be pleased with both her goods and price.”26 If a potential customer was assured that they would be happy with their visit—and presumably with their purchase as well—then they would be more likely to patronize the establishment. Pleasure was key: no one wanted unhappy customers, so they promised to create a pleasurable experience and, like Olympe had, worked hard to do so. Happiness was perhaps the strongest selling point to a clientele who wanted to feel good during and after their visit to a shop like the ones run by Olympe and Miss Twohig. As these women’s advertisements made clear, emotion was a deliberate marketing strategy. Free women of color like Rebecca Dwight of Charleston used a similar approach in advertising their services. Rebecca, who operated a drinking space called the Long House during Charleston’s race week, presented herself as a respected businesswoman in advertisements in the mid-1820s, invoking language commonly used in business culture to firmly establish her credentials. Her advertisement “respectfully” told her “friends and former customers” that her space had been completely renovated and repaired and would have the “best of WINES and LIQUORS” as well as providing “soups, Relishes, &c.”27 Ads like Rebecca’s showed that the women who posted them knew the conventions of business culture where respect and friendship were valued by many.28 In her ad, Rebecca cast herself as a friend who would be grateful if her friends patronized her establishment. Much like Olympe, who portrayed each of her female customers as a personal acquaintance, Rebecca did the same. The implications of doing so were clear to anyone who read the ad: customers were friends, and friends took care of each other. If Rebecca’s customers at the Long House were friends (or at least treated as friends), then they could be assured of the “best of WINES and LIQUORS” like the ad stated—and much like a friend attending a dinner party would be treated. This type of framing was an even more common strategy for women who ran boarding houses. Mrs. Spencer of Oxford, Mississippi, “respectfully” placed an ad that she was accepting boarders and “earnestly” solicited visitors.29 Mrs. D. C. Speck of Columbia, South Carolina, talked about the “gratifying” patronage that had made her determined to grow her boardinghouse and give it a “distinctive title.” She was quick to assure potential customers that travelers would be “accommodated promptly and “Miss Twohig, Milliner and Mantua Maker,” Oxford Falcon (Oxford, Mississippi), March 30, 1867. “Rebeca Dwight,” Charleston City Gazette, February 17, 1826. Thanks to Warren Milteer for sharing this source with me. 28 For more on this aspect of business culture, see Mandy Lee Cooper, “Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States,” PhD diss., Duke University, 2018, particularly chapters 1 and 2. 29 “This Way Boarders!” The Oxford Falcon, March 30, 1867, 3. 26 27

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well” and that servants would be “attentive […] to individual wants.”30 Other women advertised that they would provide “every attention to render it most agreeable to her boarders” or that “every effort” would “be made to render those comfortable who may favor her patronage.”31 Emotional labor was not only part of boardinghouse keeper’s jobs, but it was also a clear business strategy, with women who ran boardinghouses advertising their emotional labor for their customers. Part of their job was to provide comfort for their guests. As Alexandra Finley has demonstrated in her work on enslaved women, for a woman to keep a proper household, she needed to “creat[e] a sense of warmth, safety, and devotion for other residents, and appearing to happily do so out of love and devotion.”32 Potential boarders expected this type of emotional labor on their behalf from women who ran boardinghouses.33 Women like Mrs. Spencer and Mrs. Speck recognized these emotional expectations and marketed/advertised themselves and their services to take advantage of them. They recognized that women were expected to be nurturing, comforting, and caring, ensuring the pleasure of all in their household: this was a woman’s job as hostess. More importantly, though, it was a mother’s job. They knew that they were playing on particular, gendered expectations of the emotional role of wives and mothers, just as they knew that part of their role as boardinghouse keeper was to fulfill that role for their lodgers.34 In depicting themselves and their boarding houses in this way, they posed themselves as a person who could be trusted to care for anyone who boarded with them, whether men, women, or entire families. It also ensured that potential boarders would be drawn in, wanting to board with someone who would ensure their comfort within the household as they would in their own homes with their own families. Some female boardinghouse owners went above and beyond and promised to cater to the individual needs of their guests as any good friend or family member would. Mrs. E. A. Ford opened a new boardinghouse in Wilmington, North Carolina, and declared that “no exertion will be spared calculated to add to the happiness and contentment of her guests.”35 Others, like Mrs. A. B. Taylor of Shreveport, Louisiana, emphasized the pleasure that her boarders would find. Mrs. Taylor “pledg[ed] herself that nothing shall be wanting on her part that can tend to the comfort and pleasure of her guests.” Both “families and single gentlemen” would be assured of “pleasant rooms.”36 For mothers who boarded with their families, they were also ensured a bit of respite from their own emotional and physical labors if they lodged with someone who ensured that “Central Hotel,” The Newberry Herald (Newberry, South Carolina), March 27, 1867, 4. “NOTICE—FOR RENT—PARLORS AND Chambers, with board” and “BOARD, &c.—MRS. BATES,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), July 6, 1855. 32 Finley, An Intimate Economy, 5. 33 Ibid., 113. 34 For other examples of this type of emotional strategy that emphasized comfort, see “NOTICE. – FOR RENT – PARLORS AND Chambers, with board,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), May 30, 1855; “Boarding,” Richmond Daily Dispatch, March 1, 1856. “Mrs. M.C. Greer’s Boarding House,” “Notice – For Rent – Parlors and Chambers,” “Board, &c. – Mrs. Bates,” all in Evening Star (Washington, DC), May 30, 1855. 35 “New Boarding House. Mrs. E. A. FORD,” Tarboro’ press. Tarborough (Edgecombe Co., NC), July 19, 1851. 36 “Private Boarding. Travis Street, adjoining the Baptist Church, Shreveport,” The South-Western (Shreveport, Louisiana), February 27, 1861. 30 31

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they too would experience comfort, happiness, etc. These advertisements drew in men who expected women to care for them and women who might need lodging for a time and wanted at least a brief respite from the emotional care work of motherhood and wifehood. Much like female boardinghouse keepers, women who ran schools and academies for young ladies often portrayed themselves as caring and comforting individuals and emphasized their motherly affections for their charges. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Mrs. Harris announced that her school for young ladies had reopened in November 1846. She assured the parents of her prospective students that “particular care is bestowed on the children committed to her charge.” Moreover, her “mode of discipline” was one of “uniform gentleness” and was “calculated to produce the happiest effects upon all dispositions.”37 Her phrasing was clearly designed to put the anxieties of parents and guardians at ease. By casting herself as a maternal figure who would care for the wellbeing of the young women attending her school with compassion and gentleness, Mrs. Harris made parents feel that their daughters would be healthy and happy in her care. Other women, like Mrs. L. A. Garner of Alexandria, Virginia, emphasized that, in addition, they would attend to the young ladies’ “moral and religious instruction” as any good mother would.38 It was even more important that their marketing included these assurances, as they needed to create feelings of trust and alleviate anxiety in the hearts of parents who might send their children to board with them away from home—especially if those children were daughters. This type of emotional labor was common for women who worked in other types of service industries in the antebellum era as well; many relied on emotional strategies not just to earn their wages, but also for additional income through tips. Moses Grandy’s daughter, Catherine, struck a bargain with her enslaver to hire herself out in the early nineteenth century, pay him a weekly hire wage, and keep the rest, with the end goal of purchasing herself for $1,200. Catherine secured work on a steamboat on the Mississippi River for $30 a month, and she also sold apples and oranges to those on board. As Moses related, “commonly, the passengers give from twenty-five cents to a dollar, to a stewardess who attends them Well.”39 Moses’s words, “a stewardess who attends them Well,” are both vague and revelatory. When considered in relation to the emotional labor promised in advertisements for boarding houses—the emotional care work that women in the service industries provided—his words reveal a clear approach on Catherine’s part. Catherine could have simply worked as a stewardess, earning $30 a month. Yet, she strategized, discovering more ways to make money. Yes, selling apples and oranges was one of those ways. (And, yes, she likely used emotional strategies to attract customers there as well, much as street vendors did, even if we do not have a record of that.) Catherine clearly recognized that part of her role as a stewardess was to provide emotional care and comfort to the passengers—a type of emotional labor that, if she performed it well, could earn her extra money in tips. “School for Young Ladies” The Arkansas Banner, November 4, 1846. “Boarding and Day School,” Alexandria Gazette, October 6, 1846. 39 Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy: Late a Slave in the United States of America (London: C. Gilpin, 1843), 48. First electronic edition, 1996, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, DocSouth. https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/grandy/grandy.html [accessed December 31, 2021]. 37 38

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Through her wages as a stewardess, her sales of apples and oranges, and her tips from passengers, Catherine earned $60 a month, double her set wage. Catherine acquired her freedom, then found her sister Charlotte, struck a similar bargain with Charlotte’s enslaver, and together, the two women earned enough to purchase Charlotte’s freedom as well.40 Catherine’s emotional labor and care work hastened the process of purchasing both her own freedom and that of her sister.41 Her story highlights that for many enslaved women, emotion was a key part of taking control of their labor, the products of their labor, and even their lives. So far, all of these women’s strategies have relied on the outward performance of emotion or the creation of particular emotions in potential customers; yet, women’s decisions to invest in particular stock—and particularly the way they presented those decisions to men—reveal a different type of emotional strategy: non-emotion. Many more elite women who heavily invested in stock took an active role in managing their investments. To do so, they had to present their choices as clearly rational—and themselves as knowledgeable about the market and business culture more broadly. Ann Miles, a wealthy White woman in South Carolina, wrote in early January 1816 to Richard Singleton to inquire about the $20,000 payment that he had said he would be sending soon after Christmas. She needed the payment because, as she informed him, she had the “opportunity of purchasing Public Stock to advantage.” Moreover, she continued, “my friends inform me” that the public stock was “rising in value.” Thus, she asked Richard to “oblige” her and make the payment to her “as soon as possible,” whether by personally delivering the payment to Charleston or by sending a payment through his factor in Charleston. Her language—and the overall letter—leaned heavily on the language of business culture and reminded him of the reciprocal obligations inherent in business relationships.42 But Ann Miles’s request for repayment—and her explanation of her investment— reveals a different key emotional strategy: presenting a rational, studied, non-emotion to prove that she was competent to handle the money and make (detached and rational) decisions for herself. This tactic was an important one, and a clear inversion of the more explicitly woman-centered emotional strategies that boardinghouse keepers and school mistresses used. Because she was not fulfilling a “woman-ly” job, Ann had to present herself as a businessman would expect from another businessman: coolly rational and knowledgeable. Her presentation of herself and her business acumen was a projection of non-emotion rather than emotion to create the appearance of being rational, which was so prized in the business world. * Ibid. The type of emotional labor that Catherine performed was likely similar to that performed by flight attendants today. See Hochschild, The Managed Heart. Her reliance on tips would have been similar to servers in the restaurant industry today, who typically perform such emotional labor to ensure that they receive tips. 42 Ann did not mention the reason for the payment in her letter. Ann B. Miles to Richard Singleton, January 8, 1816, in Box  1, Folder 11 of the Singleton Family Papers #668, Southern Historical Collection at Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For more on this language and these conventions, see Cooper, “Cultures of Emotion,” chapter 2. 40 41

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For women in the Civil War era South, emotion was a key business strategy. Women performed specific emotions to entice customers, portrayed themselves in certain ways to create emotions like nostalgia in potential customers, advertised themselves and their businesses in ways that assured emotional happiness for patrons, and created the appearance of rational non-emotion to prove themselves as worthy of participating in the business world. As they did so, they revealed their knowledge of the broader emotional conventions that shaped both their society and the business world that they engaged with, carefully portraying themselves as knowledgeable of their own role in society and business more broadly. Women clearly thought through which strategies would be most effective at getting and keeping customers, and some women used multiple types of strategies to navigate the business realm successfully, whether in terms of customer service or marketing. These women undoubtedly learned from each other and from the larger business culture, carefully paying attention to what emotions they should portray, when they should portray them, and to which groups of people they should do so in order to be most successful. Emotion, or at least the appearance of it, was clearly a strategic decision made for the good of their business—whatever that may be. Of course, these emotional strategies were not always successful, but, they were still recognized as what they were, an emotional strategy tied to business/labor. The women in this chapter spanned a broad spectrum of Southern society across the Civil War era. They include elite white women in the 1820s, free women of color in the 1830s, middle-class white women in the antebellum and post-war period, enslaved women in the early nineteenth century, and Black women in the late nineteenth century. Their involvement in the business world covered a broad range of activities and enterprises, including making loans and purchasing stock, running various businesses, working in the service economy, and more. And yet, despite their different places in society and their different business activities, these women shared a common strategy: using emotion to navigate the complex relationships that made up the business world during the Civil War era. These strategies themselves were both similar and different. Like a sampler quilt, one key technique that was continually refined, expanded, and built upon ties them together: women’s use of emotion to navigate the legal dimensions of the business world.

Bibliography Archival and Manuscript Sources Singleton Family Papers #668, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Periodicals, Newspapers, and Websites Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, VA) Charleston City Gazette (Charleston, SC) Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA)

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Evening Star (Washington, DC) Oxford Falcon (Oxford, MS) Richmond Daily Dispatch (Richmond, VA) Springfield Republican (Boston, MA) Tarboro’ Press (Tarboro, NC) The Arkansas Banner (Little Rock, AR) The Newberry Herald (Newberry, SC) The South-Western (Shreveport, LA)

Published Sources Bremer, Fredrika. The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, vol. II. New York: Harper & Bros. Publishers, 1853. Burden, Michael, ed. Touring the Antebellum South with an English Opera Company: Anton Reiff ’s Riverboat Travel Journal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Blight David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. Clough, Patricia Ticento. “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticento Clough, with Jean Halley. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Cooper, Mandy Lee. “Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2018. Dornan, Inge. “Masterful Women: Colonial Women Slaveholders in the Urban Low Country.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (December 2005): 383–402. Edwards, Laura F. “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book: Federalism, Women, and Governance.” Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no. 4 (December 2019): 504–23. Edwards, Laura F. Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the 19th-Century United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Eustace, Nicole. Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Finley, Alexandra. An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Grandy, Moses. Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy: Late a Slave in the United States of America. London: C. Gilpin, 1843. First electronic edition, 1996, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Documenting the American South. Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Haggerty, Sheryllynne. The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 1760–1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods. Boston: Brill, 2006. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael. “Foreword: What Affects Are Good For,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticento Clough, with Jean Halley. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Hartigan-O’Connor, Ellen. “Abigail’s Accounts: Economy and Affection in the Early Republic.” Journal of Women’s History 17, no 3 (Fall 2005): 35–58. Hartigan-O’Connor, Ellen. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

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Hartog, Hendrik. Man and Wife in America: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Hochschild, Arlie Russel. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860. New York: Ecco, 2012. King, Edward. The Great South: A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1875. Marrerro, Karen L. Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2020. McElya, Micki. “Commemorating the Color Line: The National Mammy Monument Controversy of the 1920s,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003: 203–218. McElya, Micki. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Nathans, Sydney. A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Oksala, Johanna. “Affective Labor and Feminist Policies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (2016): 281–303. Pearsall, Sarah M.S. Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ripley, Eliza Moore Chinn McHatton. Social Life in Old New Orleans, Being Recollections of My Girlhood. New York & London: D. Appleton & Company, 1912. Electronic edition, Documenting the American South, 1998. Romney, Susanah Shaw. New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Salmon, Marylynn. Women and the Law of Property in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Saxon, Lyle, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant, eds. Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1987. Vicente, Marta V. Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Early Modern Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Wissinger, Elizabeth. “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticento Clough, with Jean Halley, 231–60. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Wood, Kirsten E. Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Wulf, Karin. Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Young, Ashley Rose. “Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in NineteenthCentury America.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2017.

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Selling Trust in the Antebellum Service Sector Daniel Levinson Wilk, SUNY-Fashion Institute of Technology

Introduction Tools are everywhere waiting for us to pick them up, but sometimes we can’t see them. More powerful than a hammer, a steam engine, an elevator, or an automobile, more powerful than agriculture or fire, the ability to trust is the greatest tool in humanity’s kit. Sometimes we can see it but can’t get to it. Trust is a hard emotion to master. Charles Willis trusted in the face of a hotelkeeper’s deception. The confidential clerk for the merchant firm Windle & Son, Willis sold merchandise, handled money, offered credit to customers, and searched out repayment. The job required subjective judgments about people, especially when deciding how much credit to offer. Was a customer who walked into their Manhattan store virtuous and competent enough to pay back the debt on time? At one point Willis must have asked these questions about Charles Lovejoy, a local hotelkeeper who usually did his own shopping, though he sometimes sent the bartender. As Willis got to know him over the years, he trusted him with more debt. In late 1841, Willis sold Lovejoy $200 in knives, forks, and other goods, all on credit. Soon after, he learned that Lovejoy, who had always suggested he owned his hotel, actually leased it from a landlord, an entirely different financial standing. Then Willis read in the newspaper that Lovejoy had filed for bankruptcy. His trust evaporated, and he confronted Lovejoy at his hotel and again at his personal residence on Charlton Street, lecturing Lovejoy on his responsibilities and pointing out objects around the room that Lovejoy had purchased from Windle & Son.1 Historians often focus on failures of trust, which leave long documentary trails. But think of all the people who earned Charles Willis’s trust, all the people who believed in each other in spite of all the Lovejoys. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Americans tested themselves. They extended the vote to all White men. Northern states slowly freed slaves and began to count some Black men’s votes. Men started living in one place and working Testimony of Charles F. Willis in George H. Blanchard, “In the matter of Charles H. Lovejoy, Bankrupt,” Bankruptcy Records, C-F 1398, Act of 1841, United States District Court for the Southern Federal District of New York, National Archives and Record Administration, Northeast Region, New York City [hereafter referred to as Bankruptcy Records, C-F].

1

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in another, leaving wives home alone all day with the children, servants, and slaves. The government deregulated food and privatized money. The guild system collapsed, and apprentices living in masters’ households and eating at their tables became the youths of an industrial working class, living in boarding houses and tenement slums without patriarchal supervision, working in factories on the west side and partying on the Bowery. Young men and women from villages bound together by friendship, intermarriage, experience, adjacent land, and gossip left for factory towns and anonymous metropoles. Forced to trust each other in greater numbers and with less coercive oversight, Americans failed on many counts, most still with us: patriarchy, poverty, racism, all the ways we fall back into a master–servant mentality, an assumption that when we collaborate, one must always dominate another. But capitalist to capitalist, and in many other social relationships, people learned to feel trust and found that it worked, because people often did what they said they’d do. Entrepreneurs of trust helped build that feeling. One might even say that they disciplined people to feel trust so that they would participate in the marketplace. They came in many fields—accounting, insurance, cheap newspapers, credit reports, anticounterfeit circulars, the pseudo-science of physiognomy, sentimental fashion and etiquette, courts convened by the US Bankruptcy Act of 1841. These new industries sold new kinds of knowledge that helped people feel alright about building modern capitalism together. Proprietors of service firms were also entrepreneurs of trust: tavern and coffeehouse keepers, restaurateurs and hoteliers, barbers and bootblacks. They made intense use of emotional labor to induce emotions of wellbeing in customers who might, at that moment, be deciding whether to trust each other. Men and women courting. Logrolling politicians. Businessmen sizing each other up. To help these negotiations along, service entrepreneurs put more trust into the atmosphere. They offered customers tools, stages, and marketplaces for trust. They sold a feeling that was conducive to capitalism. What does it mean to call trust an emotion that is bought and sold, an intangible commodity that has been crucial to the development of capitalism? This chapter will lay the theoretical base for this claim, drawing on the work of many disciplines and focusing particularly on Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotional labor. It offers almost no evidence. This is in part because the theory posits an unconscious transfer of emotion from the worker–customer relationship to the customer–customer relationship. It is also because the emotional labor of service workers, even more than servants and slaves, tended to be ignored, and did not make its way into the historical record. Perhaps other scholars will find the theory interesting enough to find some evidentiary basis for testing the theory; I’ll keep looking too.

The Service Sector Through the nineteenth century, writings on commodified services tended to discuss service as a non-good. Like political economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, entrepreneurs and critics drew this distinction and then ignored most of the things that

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set services off from goods, let alone qualities outside the relevance of the dichotomy, belittling services as “unproductive” or “reproductive” labor.2 During the nineteenth century, American service entrepreneurs moved beyond the household model of the colonial tavern and developed an array of new occupations that are still recognizable today—desk clerk, janitor, elevator operator, restaurateur, etc.—but ideas about service did little to keep up. As late as the turn of the twentieth century, most celebrants and critics of service industries, especially hotels, identified other aspects (especially architecture and technology) as more significant than the new division of labor. They still saw workers through the prism of traditional master– servant relationships. In the early twentieth century, service-sector entrepreneurs began to articulate understandings and ideologies of “service” that set their industries off from agriculture and manufacturing; decades later the “service sector” became an object of academic study. Scholars of the late twentieth century, like earlier ones, tended to define services as commodities that are not goods, and service jobs as jobs that are not making goods. From Daniel Bell (services are part of the post-industrial society that will come to displace manufacturing) to Harry Braverman (services are deskilled in different ways than manufacturing jobs, but it amounts to the same sort of oppression), to William Julius Wilson (post-war American poverty is driven by the disappearance of manufacturing, and low-paying service jobs don’t measure up), to Barbara Ehrenreich (ditto), services are seen mostly in the mirror of manufacturing.3 This focus on what services are not often leads to confusion over what work is in the “service sector”—do we include business services like finance, law, insurance, real estate; professionals like doctors and nurses, teachers, and architects; clerics; people in sales; any job that doesn’t produce a good; anything that’s not agriculture or manufacturing? Many argue that these disparate kinds of services are linked intimately in the development of capitalism after 1945—high-paid service jobs and low-paid service jobs expand in tandem, especially in our global cities, as the middle class collapses.4 These scholars, like everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Donald Trump, blame ruin on the decline of manufacturing. If we stopped looking at services through the mirror of manufacturing, though, we might see the real fault—the decline of the labor movement since Ronald Reagan. If unions were still strong today, servicesector jobs would provide middle-class incomes. Even the name generally given to our current phase of capitalism—post-industrial capitalism—shows nostalgia for a An exception can be found in the utopian/feminist defense of apartment houses found in Sarah Gilman Young, European Modes of Living (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881). Jean-Claude Delaunay and Jean Gadrey, Services in Economic Thought: Three Centuries of Debate (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992). 3 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Books, 1974), 359–74; Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973); William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 4 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

2

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manufacturing-based economy and contempt for the expanding economy of services. They can’t bear to call it service capitalism. In our age of service capitalism, more of us work in jobs that do not produce tangible things in factories or on farms. More of us specialize in the “customer service” at the ends of long supply chains. More of us work in trust-building occupations of the sort pioneered in the antebellum United States. And more of us work in bars and restaurants, enabling emotions, performing and evoking feelings, putting trust into the air all around the world, helping to make this capitalist thing go.

Emotional Labor Some sociologists in the early post-war period looked at services without being completely blinded by their status as non-goods—William F. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman—but it wasn’t until the publication of Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart in 1983 that service workers were defined as what they are, a set of jobs with or adjacent to heightened emotional labor, instead of what they aren’t.5 Emotional labor is the work of performing emotions on the job in order to evoke emotions in others.6 The commodity is the trip on the airplane, but it is also the emotional “state of mind” that the flight attendant’s emotional performance creates for the customer. The emotional labor that characterizes the service sector is, according to Hochschild, deeply oppressive and psychologically damaging, especially if done well. Hiding our true feelings behind a smile—what she calls “surface acting”—is for amateurs. To really do the job, you have to go deep—adjust your feelings and then express them sincerely. This is where the damage lies. Our entire emotional lives can be hijacked by our corporate employers’ drive for profits.7 Hochschild also distinguishes emotion work or management, in which people try to manage each other’s emotions in all sorts of situations, from emotional labor, in which they do it specifically to earn money. Hochschild sees emotion management as inevitable, probably going back to the beginning of humanity, sometimes done on terms of equality and sometimes not. She sees emotional labor as relatively new and dystopian—large corporations coercing the emotional worlds of service workers by paying them to feel a certain way and convey that feeling authentically to their customers.8 Hochschild is wrong that emotional labor is new. Since the time of Charles Lovejoy and Charles Willis, stores, hotels and other firms, some with hundreds of employees, have sold commodified services in which managers pushed workers to emote in certain ways. Since the beginning of the twentieth century and accelerating in the 1920s, huge service corporations have created the kinds of standardized, codified direction of emotional labor that she describes as a product of the post-war world. And even Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 6 Ibid., 7. 7 Ibid., 33. 8 Ibid., 49. 5

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before the nineteenth century, way back to our most ancient texts, there were inns, taverns, and other businesses selling emotional labor for money. If you worked for an innkeeper, your emotions were not your own. Moreover, Hochschild’s distinction between emotional labor and emotion work presupposes a distinction between work and all the other things we do in our lives. But it’s only been two centuries and change since we began to distinguish home from work and business from family. Even in the time of Lovejoy and Willis, a small hotel or store was usually a family affair, and most of the large hotels and stores were also run  by  families, with lots of non-family hired to do the customer-facing work. A boss telling a worker how to smile was often the husband or father of that worker. Hochschild says that emotional labor for money is a modern trend, but emotion work was implicated in economic gain much more frequently before the nineteenth century, when work and everything else were all mixed together. Hochschild is also too negative about emotional labor. Compared to the millenniaspanning reigns of slavery and servitude, the modern service sector is remarkably gentle in its demands for emotional labor. We are rightly disturbed by the flight attendant whose smile is plastered on so tightly that she has trouble relaxing it when she goes home, or the Filipina nannies who love their young charges in California because they miss their own children so much. But we ought to be more disturbed by the love of an enslaved wet nurse sent to feed her antebellum mistress’ daughter, her own children sold down to the Deep South or the Texas frontier, never to be seen or heard from again.9 More recently, sociologists such as Robin Leidner and Rachel Sherman have also challenged Hochschild’s dark view of service work, though not by comparing it to slavery, servitude, and other systems that dole out more emotional abuse.10 Historians of sales and service industries have followed in the sociologists’ wake, and on these two questions—whether emotional labor is relatively new, and whether it is generally oppressive (especially in contrast to manufacturing work)—they have avoided the mistakes of Hochschild and others. The earliest and most significant work is Susan Porter Benson’s study of department store workers, Counter Cultures, Ibid., 24–6; Janet Golden, A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996); Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 101–23. 10 In Global Women and her related book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich notes that during her stint as a maid for a corporate, Taylorized home-cleaning service, she first resented her loss of control over cleaning methods but “came to love the system” because it was truly more efficient, and it helped her keep track of where she had cleaned and what she still had left to do. “After a week or two on the job, I found myself moving robotlike from surface to surface, grateful to have been relieved of the thinking-process.” Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 5, 135, 146; Rachel Sherman, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2001); Greta Foff Paules, Dishing it Out: Power and Resistence Among Waitresses in a New Jersey Restaurant (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Working in the Service Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Sharon C. Bolton, Emotion Management in the Workplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Amy Hanser, Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008). 9

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which appeared in 1986, three years after The Managed Heart. Benson does not cite Hochschild and may not have been aware of her work, though she does mention the Baltimore department store Hochschild Kohn and Company. Benson’s theoretical point of reference is Harry Braverman, who argued that service-sector entrepreneurs deskill and disrespect work the same way managers in manufacturing do. Benson argued that it was quite the reverse—because department store workers, unlike factory workers, had face-to-face relationships with their customers, they were sometimes able to leverage those relationships to offset the power of their managers. Though Benson does not use the term “emotional labor,” she sees it as a powerful tool that workers can use to their advantage in labor-management conflicts. In addition, she dates the rise of this kind of work much earlier than Hochschild et al., to the late nineteenth century. Still wrong, but less wrong by half a century or so.11 From Benson on department stores followed Dorothy Sue Cobble on waitress unions and vast, excellent literatures on flight attendants, African-American hair workers, and Pullman porters. Alongside these labor histories of service work, which all discuss emotional labor in one form or another, came another set of histories of service-sector firms and industries that focused on entrepreneurship, not emotional labor. These historians see the hotel and other service industries as sites of modernity— for political parties, public personae, a “public sphere”—but they do not say much about the contributions of the service labor that went with the space.12 Neither sociologists nor historians of emotional labor make much use of psychologists’ theories of emotions, but perhaps they should. (Historians of emotion like Barbara Rosenwein, William Reddy, and Carol and Peter Stearns make more serious attempts to engage with psychologists’ theories, but rarely discuss emotional labor—they are more concerned with the history of particular emotions coming and going out of fashion; or changing emotional regimes or communities, like the wave of sentimentalism that struck the Anglo-American world in the 1800s.13) In particular, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Hochschild also cites Braverman on the deskilling of service work, in order to note that he only discusses the deskilling and standardization of physical and mental labor in service work, not the emotional labor. Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 119. 12 Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Andrew P. Haley, Turning the Tables: The Aristocratic Restaurant and the Rise of the American American Middle Class, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2009); Quincy T. Miles, Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History (London: Orion, 2004). 13 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); 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): 813–36; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia & Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Doing Emotions History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 11

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recent studies by Lisa Feldman Barrett and others argue that emotions are neurologically constructed, and less dependent on external stimuli than we think.14 Our emotions follow our perceptions too quickly for our perceptions to fully discern what they are seeing, hearing, or smelling. Our brains, using a little sensory data and filling in a lot with guesses guided by our memories and prejudices, can get it wrong. We misjudge our sensations, and we misjudge which sensations lead to which feelings. One time Barrett went on a date and thought she really liked the guy, but it was just the first symptoms of the flu.15 This explains why a good waiter, bartender, or barber might help you trust a fellow customer. Your brain doesn’t necessarily know the source of that feeling of trust; you might think it’s the guy having dinner with you when it’s really the guy serving the food.16

Theories of Trust You can turn pretty much any theory about living things into a theory about trust— Darwin, Marx, Freud, Milton Friedman—just by substituting the word here and there. A slew of scholars argue for the role of trust in the history of the modern world. Trust builds democracy. Trust builds capitalism. Trust decreases corruption. Modern institutions help to expand the circle of trust beyond our kin and close friends, allowing broader co-operation. Trust allows people to come together to create law, See, for example, Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 4. 15 More specifically, the brain anticipates and processes sensory information by running simulations of what the person might actually be seeing or experiencing, and then uses those simulations to adjust its regulation of unconscious functions in our nervous system, our immune system, and our endocrine system, a process known as interoception. As more information comes in, the brain continues to match it to the most likely scenarios we have already imagined, discarding scenarios that no longer fit. What our brain imagines is informed by past experiences, though that includes our experiences of hearing stories, looking at art, and being bombarded by mass media. Lisa Feldman Barrett, “The Theory of Constructed Emotion: An Active Inference Account of Interoception and Categorization.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12, no. 1 (2017): 1–23. 16 Some psychologists discuss trust as an emotion. In one experiment, Antonio Damasio, Ralph Adolphs, and Daniel Tranel showed images of people to experiment subjects and asked them to rate how “trustworthy” and “approachable” they seemed, from 1 to 5. The control group sorted the trustworthy and untrustworthy groups somewhat consistently. In the experimental group, whose participants had damage to their amygdalas, everyone was deemed trustworthy, even and especially those deemed most untrustworthy by the control group. The authors do not show us the pictures. They do not consider that what society considers “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy” may be driven by stereotypes. Did the damaged amygdala erase fear, boosting trust, or did it forget the racism and prejudice that probably fueled the decisions of the control group? Even so, Damasio’s critics also see trust as an emotion. Criticizing Damasio’s reduction of complex, culturally defined emotions into basic neurological drives, English professor Daniel Gross writes “when it comes to seriously analyzing a ‘secondary’ or social emotion such as an embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, pride, or, for that matter, the feeling of trust, literary insight gives way to evolutionary biology and ‘secondary’ emotions reduce to ‘primary’: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.” Gross does not believe in this reduction to primary emotions—trust is just as much an emotion as happiness. Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 32. Thanks to Bill Reddy for pointing me to this. 14

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science, business, art, and everything else we modern people do. It is a source of “social capital” that humans use to get ahead and build wealthy, happy, powerful societies.17 Our community of business historians is thick with studies of commercial networks— entrepreneurs and business people who somehow figured out how to trust each other and maintain that trust over time.18 It is also thick with studies of entrepreneurship in trust—the institutions, cultures, and events that created incentives and disincentives to trust and be trustworthy, or that stepped in when trust was broken: Rowena Olegario and Josh Lauer on credit and credit reporting, Stephen Mihm on people who printed and forged money, Edward Balleisen on bankruptcy and fraud. Much of the best work is on the antebellum United States, the decades before the Civil War, the era of Charles Willis and Charles Lovejoy.19 A few studies explicitly note the role of service firms in building trust. Among hotel historians, the classic piece is “Palaces of the People,” a chapter in Daniel Boorstin’s book The Americans: The National Experiment. It celebrates hotels as centers of nationalism, sociability, architectural and technological innovation, politics, finance, and communication. “They were both creatures and creators of communities,” wrote Boorstin, “as well as symptoms of the frenetic quest for community.”20 More broadly known is the relatively short but famous passage in Jurgen Habermas’ The Structural See, for example, Kenneth Arrow, The Limits of Organization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974); Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Geoffrey Hosking, Trust: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity, 1989 [1962]); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 1998); Laurence Fontaine, The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Pamela Walker Laird, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and many other contemporary economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians, not to mention their forebears, especially sociologists Simmel, Durkheim, Weber, Tonnies, and Parsons. 18 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History,” The American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (2003): 404–33; Susie J. Pak, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Philip Scranton and Patrick Friedenson, Reimagining Business History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 34–37. Scranton and Friedenson also have a chapter on “Trust, Cooperation, and Networks.” 19 Rowena Olegario, A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Rowena Olegario, The Engine of Enterprise: Credit in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Edward Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Edward J. Balleisen, Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 20 Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Knopf, 1965), 134–47; Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1650 (London: Longman, 1983), 134–47, quote on 143. 17

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Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) about the coffeehouses of London in the 1700s. They helped create a “public sphere” distinct from both family life and the government, where one could debate questions of art, literature, economics, and politics.21 In 1989, the same year that Habermas’ book finally came out in English, Ray Oldenburg published The Great Good Place, a celebration of service-sector businesses as creators of human community; he coined the phrase “third place,” which the Starbucks corporation later co-opted to market its coffee shops. Likewise, Elizabeth CurridHalkett’s The Warhol Economy (2009) gives many examples of how networking and business deals take place in restaurants, bars, and clubs. Boorstin mentions the high status of the hotelkeeper in antebellum America—European travelers were shocked— but he, Habermas, Oldenburg, and Currid-Halkett have little else to say about the hosts of these establishments, let alone their servants, slaves, employees, and the emotional labor that goes into building trust.22 Historians of service industries consistently note their importance in building trust/networks/a public sphere/social capital/class consciousness: In the hundred years after the first coffee-houses opened in London, they came to be ubiquitous features of the modern urban landscape, indispensible centres for socializing, for news and gossip, and for discussion and debate.23 [The bar] is where the freedom to associate has been traditionally exercised. … Bars are where people gather and talk.24 Restaurants … provided a staging ground for social interactions and stratification, for gender mores and conventions, and for working out social relationships and public behavior in the increasingly complicated metropolis.25 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 31–43. The original was published in 1962, but it was not translated into English until 1989. 22 Oldenburg even argues against the significance of managers and workers in creating a sense of community: “It is the regulars, whatever their number on any given occasion, who feel at home in a place and set the tone of conviviality. It is the regulars whose mood and manner provide the infectious and contagious style of interaction and whose acceptance of new faces is crucial. The host’s welcome, though important, is not the one that really matters; the welcome and acceptance extended on the other side of the bar-counter invites the newcomer to the world of third place association.” Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe, 1999 [1989]), 34; Howard Schultz, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (New York: Hachette Books, 2012), 120. See also Phillipe Aries, “The Family and the City,” Daedalus 106, no. 2 (Spring 1977), 227–35; W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability Among the French Working Class, 1789–1914 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art & Music Drive New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Simon Shaw-Miller, Tag Gronberg, and Charlotte Ashby, The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Leona Rittner and W. Scott Haine, The Thinking Space: The Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2016); Shachar M. Pinsker, A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 23 Ellis, The Coffee-House, 1. 24 Christine Sismondo, America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), xii–xiii. 25 Cindy R. Lobel, Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 101. 21

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The Business of Emotions in Modern History As middling folk transformed restaurant culture, they were creating the modern middle class.  … small preferences about where and what to eat, repeated daily, could serve as the basis for identity but also discovered a common enemy. Bound together by their contempt for the extravagance of the rich, middle-income diners shaped themselves into the modern middle class.26 During the 1820s, black-run barbershops emerged as microcosms of the public sphere in the new republic. The enfranchised men of the community, its citizens, gathered for egalitarian camaraderie, and barbershops were one of the favorite gathering places.27 With the level of trust and public intimacy that existed in barber shops, black barbers were uniquely situated as conduits of racial politics. They overheard conversations about private and public matters and developed working relationships with their patrons and customers. Black barbers literally and figuratively had the ear of influential men.28 … hotels were different. They played a distinctive role in organizing civil society because they functioned simultaneously as gathering places and travel accommodations. Hotels brought local people together, put them into contact with strangers and outsiders, and tied them into larger networks of commerce, politics, and association  … [b]y focusing and projecting the power of direct personal contact.29 … luxury hotels contributed to a burgeoning civil society [and] supported the growth of a new public sphere, different from the one Jurgen Habermas identifies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which operated in deliberate disregard for status. Instead, American urban luxury hotels intentionally conferred a contrived and highly prized social standing upon all those who visited and lived within.30

Most of these books cite Habermas, but none cites Hochschild, few dwell on emotional labor, and none asks what it means to call trust an emotion that is bought and sold. We must piece it together ourselves, from scraps of theory about emotions, trust, and the service sector.

A Theory of Trust as an Emotion That is Bought and Sold in the Service Sector The concept of emotional labor (as articulated by Arlie Hochschild and others) defines services as more than non-goods. Managers and workers of service establishments exert emotional labor to evoke emotions in their customers; this is a primary function Haley, Turning the Tables, 6. Bristol, Knights of the Razor, 51. 28 Miles, Cutting Along the Color Line, 7. 29 Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel, 232. 30 Molly Berger, Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829–1929 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 4–5. 26

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of services, not a byproduct. One of the emotions frequently evoked is trust—people go to service establishments together in the hopes that they will trust each other more after the visit, and workers use emotional labor to create an atmosphere of trust. On a neurological level, during the service interaction, a feeling of trust grows from our predicting, misjudging brains’ attempts to interpret sense perceptions and act on them. The emotional labor of a service worker is easily interpreted as the trustworthiness of a fellow customer. Service workers have been providing this kind of emotional labor since the beginning of recorded history, but in the last 200 years there have been changes. The division of labor in service firms (as everywhere) has increased. Service workers have learned to use their three-way relationship with bosses and customers (described by Susan Porter Benson and others) as leverage to improve wages and working conditions. Styles of service have become less (though still) servile and emotionally damaging to perform. During these years, the emotional labor of service workers helped individual customers to trust each other, and also contributed to an emotional regime (of the sort discussed by William Reddy and others) in which the feeling of trust—finding the feeling, interpreting it, encouraging it, decrying its absence—became central to the culture. And this emotional regime of trust has helped build the complex co-operation at the heart of capitalism. In other words, buying and selling trust helped people find the confidence to buy and sell other things too. Service workers of the nineteenth century built trust, but were not its beneficiaries. More often, their exclusion from the circle of trust was something that customers could bond over, by treating workers badly or demeaning them and sharing a laugh about it. Service workers—especially African American and Irish workers—willingly and unwillingly offered themselves up as stereotypes that evoked a feeling of mastery in customers. Even if you did not own slaves, you could feel like a slave master if you ate in some of the fanciest restaurants in America, North or South. In the nineteenth century, there were a few thwarted attempts to expand the circle of trust to include these service workers, but the ideal relationship between customers and service workers remained that of a master and servant, or master and slave. This would change in the twentieth century, as ideologies of service articulated by managers, workers, and service-sector labor leaders brought more dignity to the work, and the circle of trust expanded a little more.

Selling Trust in the Antebellum Service Sector The antebellum era was a crucial period for entrepreneurs of trust. Historians often suggest that Americans became less trusting and less trustworthy during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is true that “confidence” became an obsession in American culture. The eight US presidents leading up to Abraham Lincoln each made the word a centerpiece of their inaugural addresses, and President Andrew Jackson used the word in practically every public address he ever made—both to thank the people for their confidence in him and to warn them against confidence in his enemies, like the

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Second Bank of the United States. The popular literature and fiction of the time was obsessed with the question of confidence and its betrayal, capped by Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man, today a central text for historians and literary scholars looking back on that era.31 Lack of trust also characterized American politics, especially sectional politics, as Northerners’ and Southerners’ paranoia about each others’ motives grew during the era.32 Some Americans celebrated their reputations as frauds, most famously P. T. Barnum. But most worried. Most saw these problems as evidence of a decline, but one could argue instead that trust and trustworthiness increased dramatically during this period, just not as dramatically as the new demands placed on them. During this period, democracy and capitalism vastly raised the requirements of trust on ordinary people, and although Americans often failed to meet these new challenges, they tried, and sometimes they succeeded. The gap between increased expectations and increased effort gave people the sense that trust and trustworthiness were in decline, and historians have found and echoed those assessments. Perhaps this is a mistake, the same mistake, perhaps, that we are making today at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As the requirements to trust increased, government protections declined. Legislatures and judges deregulated the labor system, the money supply, meat production, and medical licensing.33 Courts made it much harder to sue or prosecute fraud.34 Management and regulation of communication devolved from the federal government to the states and private corporations, which is why we have a federal mail system but no government-run systems of telegraphs, telephones, or internet.35 Historians have sometimes exaggerated deregulation in the age of Jackson. Local regulations continued to govern fire prevention, health and sanitation, inspection and licensing, trade and fraud, alcohol and prostitution, and many other aspects of life.36 But the government’s role in policing individuals’ economic activities declined. Karen Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Matt Seybold, “Destroyer of Confidence: James Gordon Bennett, Jacksonian Paranoia, and the Original Confidence Man,” American Studies 56 no. 3/4 (2018): 83–106; Kathleen De Grave, Swindler, Spy, Rebel: The Confidence Woman in 19thCentury America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995). 32 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1952); David B. Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1983), 4–5; Michael W. Pfau, The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005); Mark W. Summers, A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 33 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000 [1776]), 4–5; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in NineteenthCentury America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters, 27–33; Gergely Baics, Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Lewis A. Grossman, “The Origins of American Health Libertarianism.” Yale Journal of Health Policy and Ethics 13 (2013): 76–134. 34 Balleisen, Fraud, 48–51. 35 Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 36 William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 31

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As the government’s role in policing trustworthiness receded, the private sector stepped into the void. Surpassing old and ancient techniques—signatures, notaries, blood oaths, wax seals—entrepreneurs of trust founded new strategies, new professions, and new industries to help people size each other up. Newspapers, trade journals, currency circulars, and credit reports shared information about reputations and past practices that could be used in decisions about whether to do business, and pressured businesspeople to stay true to their word. Even when their work was not conducted face-to-face, entrepreneurs of trust were engaged in emotional labor. They aimed to make people feel enough trust to do business.37 But before, during, and after the antebellum decades, service firms always played an important role—arguably the most important role, though it would be impossible to measure—in the entrepreneurship of trust. During the colonial era, businesspeople, politicians, criminals, and revolutionaries used taverns to meet, make plans, and size each other up. This continued after the American Revolution, as the functions of the tavern were fragmented among many new industries—especially hotels, restaurants, saloons, barbershops, and gentlemen’s clubs such as the Philadelphia Club (founded 1834), the Century Club in New York (1847), the Somerset in Boston (1851), and the Pacific Union in San Francisco (1852).38 Meetings in service establishments initiated long relationships of trust among individuals, like an 1837 banquet at the City Hotel, where Washington Irving met his future publisher George Palmer Putnam.39 They nurtured those relationships, as when Andrew Carnegie was invited out to dinner by his mentor Thomas A. Scott: “Mr. Scott would occasionally insist upon my going to his hotel and taking a meal Other ways to build commercial trust became more widespread after the Civil War: branding goods to create consumer loyalty, the creation of trade and professional associations and schools that policed their industries, the growth of professional accounting and its acceptance of the responsibility to keep honest books and root out fraud. And the balance also tipped away from trust and back toward coercion, as federal and state governments shifted from deregulation to increased regulation, and large business corporations asserted control over business decisions in industries where they became dominant. Nancy F. Koehn, Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2001); Thomas L. Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976); Samuel J. Haber, The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions, 1750–1900 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand, 278–9, 445–8; Margaret Levenstein, Accounting for Growth: Information Systems and the Creation of the Large Corporation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 20–39; Gary John Previts and Barbara Dubius Merino, A History of Accountancy in the United States: The Cultural Significance of Accounting (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 135–44; John L. Carey, The Rise of the Accounting Profession: From Technical to Professional, 1896–1936 (New York: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, 1969); John Richard Edwards and Stephen P. Walker, eds., The Routledge Companion to Accounting History (New York: Routledge, 2008). 38 E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (New York: The Free Press, 1958), 337. 39 Putnam would always look back fondly on the dinner, and repeated its success in 1855, when he organized a dinner at New York’s Crystal Palace, catered by the Astor House, that helped launch the New York Book Publishers’ Association. Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 67, 360–6. 37

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with him, and these were great occasions for me.”40 Companies were founded in service firms, like the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, created at a meeting in the Clarendon Hotel in 1854; Peter Cooper was unanimously elected the chairman.41 Service firms could build communication among individuals from different communities, as when abolitionist US Senator William Sumner stopped by the Boston barbershop of John Smith to hear the concerns of the Black community.42 Working-class saloons were places to network—to find jobs, win votes, build associations, unions, and communities—all by sitting down and talking it over. Service firms even offered places to hide out when experiments in trust failed: President Andrew Jackson escaped to Gadsby’s Hotel after he invited the public to the White House for an inaugural reception and received “a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping” and grinding a 1,400-pound gift cheese into the carpets.43 Service firms hosted countless associations, organizations, and societies. Even the Washingtonians, the first great temperance organization in US history, held meetings at Chase’s Tavern in Baltimore until Mrs. Chase chased them out.44 They hosted conspirators in crime and dissent. In 1842, Thomas Wilson Dorr set up an alternate state government in a tavern in Rhode Island because the government wouldn’t let Roman Catholics like him vote. Dorr was convicted of treason and sentenced to hard labor, the government seized the tavern and drank up all the liquor, and Rhode Island passed a new law allowing any adult—even African Americans—to vote, as long as they paid the one-dollar poll tax.45 The past two centuries are full of examples like this—people, organizations, trades, social classes, and nations learning to trust each other as customers in service firms. No doubt you have your own examples, including some very important moments in your life. In each case, you purchased emotional labor that helped you to feel trust. The trust you have purchased is an emotion in several senses. It has a physiological component that can be either exciting or calming (heart-rate, breathing, glandular activity), and that is hard to untangle from the related unphysiological causes and effects. It is not a rational measurement—even if we think we are scientists of trust, we cannot use a character reading in a bar as definitive evidence of someone’s trustworthiness. But even rational measures like news reports and credit scores communicate information that is never dispositive. In the end, evidence about trustworthiness, like other data we use to make “rational” decisions, help to shape a feeling, and it is the feeling on which we choose to act. When Scott moved from Pittsburgh to Altoona to take over as Superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, he took Carnegie with him, where they lived together for several weeks in the same hotel room, until Scott moved his family to town. Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 81 [quote], 82. 41 Thomas Hughes, Life and Times of Peter Cooper (London: Macmillan, and Co., 1886), 212. 42 Bristol, Knights of the Razor, 75. 43 Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 53–4; Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 72; Sismondo, America Walks into a Bar, 120; Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society (New York: Scribner, 1906), 295 [quote]. 44 Sismondo, America Walks into a Bar, 106–7. 45 Ibid., 131. 40

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Do different kinds of service create different feelings of trust? Do some promote democracy and capitalism better than others? Styles of service did indeed vary in the antebellum period (as they still do today). Most importantly, you could choose what color your waiter or barber was—Black, Irish, or white. Thus we see trust balanced with another emotion—mastery. The desire to feel like a master over a servant or slave remained strong in the nineteenth century, and service firms responded to that too. As they sold customers a feeling of trust among each other, they also sold them a feeling of mastery over their employees. The trust was built, in part, by the shared mastery. Ultimately, though, we don’t know how the emotional labor of service workers created an atmosphere of trust, or the effects of their different styles of service. The evidence from the antebellum period isn’t detailed enough; neither is evidence from today. We could make generalizations—a calm, mature, mellow-voiced waiter might provide the right mood for a romantic dinner, a more energetic bartender for a night out with the coworkers—but mostly we’d be guessing. Just like Charles Lovejoy could only guess whether to trust people like Charles Willis, and whether that feeling of trust came from some legitimate intuition, or just a spell of good weather.

Bibliography Aries, Phillipe. “The Family and the City.” Daedalus 106, no. 2 (1977): 227–35. Arrow, Kenneth. The Limits of Organization. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974. Baics, Gergely. Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Balleisen, Edward, J. Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Balleisen, Edward J. Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Baltzell, E. Digby. Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class. New York: The Free Press, 1958. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. “The Theory of Constructed Emotion: An Active Inference Account of Interoception and Categorization.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12, no. 1 (2017): 1–23. Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Berger, Molly. Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829–1929. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976. Bluestone, Barry and Bennett Harrison. The Deindustrialization of America. New York: Basic Books, 1982. Bolton, Sharon C. Emotion Management in the Workplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The National Experience. New York: Knopf, 1965. Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Books, 1974.

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Bristol, Jr., Douglas Walter. Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2009. Carey, John L. The Rise of the Accounting Profession: From Technical to Professional, 1896–1936. New York: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, 1969. Carnegie, Andrew. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920. Chandler, Jr., Alfred D. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Clark, Peter. The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1650. London: Longman, 1943. Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth. The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art & Music Drive New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Davis, David B. The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Delaunay, Jean-Claude and Jean Gadrey. Services in Economic Thought: Three Centuries of Debate. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Edwards, John Richard and Stephen P. Walker, eds. The Routledge Companion to Accounting History. New York: Routledge, 2008. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee-House: A Cultural History. London: Orion, 2004. Fontaine, Laurence. The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Fukuyama, Francis. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press, 1995. Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gilman Young, Sarah. European Modes of Living. New York: G. P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1881. Golden, Janet. A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. Greenspan, Ezra. George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Gross, Daniel. The Secret History of Emotions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Grossman, Lewis A. “The Origins of American Health Libertarianism.” Yale Journal of Health Policy and Ethics 13, no. 1 (2013): 76–134. Haber, Samuel J. The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions, 1750–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity, 1989 [1962]. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café: Sociability Among the French Working Class, 1789–1914. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Haley, Andrew P. Turning the Tables: The Aristocratic Restaurant and the Rise of the American American Middle Class, 1880–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Hanser, Amy. Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008. Haskell, Thomas L., ed. The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

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Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1952. Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Norton, 1983. Hosking, Geoffrey. Trust: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hughes, Thomas. Life and Times of Peter Cooper. London: Macmillan, and Co., 1886. John, Richard R. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Koehn, Nancy F. Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2001. Laird, Pamela Walker. Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History.” The American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (2003): 404–33 Lauer, Josh. Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Laurie, Bruce. Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Leidner, Robin. Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Levenstein, Margaret. Accounting for Growth: Information Systems and the Creation of the Large Corporation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Lobel, Cindy R. Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014. Macdonald, Cameron Lynne and Carmen Sirianni, eds. Working in the Service Society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Matt Susan J. and Peter N. Stearns, eds. Doing Emotions History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Mihm, Stephen. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Miles, Quincy T. Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. North, Douglass C. Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Novak, William J. The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe, 1999 [1989]. Olegario, Rowena. A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Olegario, Rowena. The Engine of Enterprise: Credit in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pak, Susie J. Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Paules, Greta Foff. Dishing it Out: Power and Resistance Among Waitresses in a New Jersey Restaurant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

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Pinsker, Shachar M. A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pfau, Michael W. The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005. Previts, Gary John and Barbara Dubius Merino. A History of Accountancy in the United States: The Cultural Significance of Accounting. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Reddy, William M. The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia & Japan, 900–1200 CE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Rittner, Leona and W. Scott Haine. The Thinking Space: The Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2016. Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Sabel Charles F. and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds. World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Sandoval-Strausz, Andrew K. Hotel: An American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Schultz, Howard. Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time. New York: Hachette Books, 2012. Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Scranton, Philip and Patrick Friedenson. Reimagining Business History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Shaw-Miller, Simon, Tag Gronberg, and Charlotte Ashby. The Viennese Café and Fin-deSiecle Culture. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Sherman, Rachel. Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Sismondo, Christine. America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern Library, 2000 [1776]. Smith, Margaret Bayard. The First Forty Years of Washington Society. New York: Scribner, 1906. Spang, Rebecca L. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Summers, Mark W. A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Tilly, Charles. Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. de Waal, Frans. Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Widmer, Ted. Martin Van Buren. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005. Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Wilson, William J. When Work Disappears. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

4

The Cold War and the Making of Advertising in Post-War Turkey Semih Gökatalay, University of California, San Diego

Introduction On May 9, 1945, the government-owned Ulus [Nation] wrote that “the conclusion of the war in Europe was celebrated with joy all over Turkey yesterday.”1 The end of armed conflicts in Europe was enough to cheer up the Turkish public for reasons easy to discern. Turkey had remained neutral until February 1945, when it entered into the war on the side of the Allies. It did not suffer heavy casualties, but the interruption of international trade and the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men had brought about drastic increases in the prices of basic goods, created lingering agricultural scarcities, and corroded business confidence since 1939. With the Allied victory in Europe, a general desire prevailed in Turkey to return to pre-war economic and social conditions. Citizens looked to make a new life and demanded a better future for themselves. Their hope, however, proved to be short lived. First, a “war of nerves” between Turkey and the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the war and then the Cold War continued to create certain emotional moods, such as anxiety and fear, across the country. This study foregrounds the effects of the Cold War on how big businesses and small-space advertisers promoted their products via mass media in Turkey in the late 1940s and early 1950s. With a focus on the diverse repertoire of emotions used, it illustrates the role of international politics in shifting the link between a macro-scale business context and emotions in early Cold War Turkey. Emotional marketing included advertising efforts that primarily used a variety of emotions to attain profitability. As profit-oriented but not necessarily rational actors, Turkish firms sought to use emotions within the context of the Cold War to persuade consumers to buy their products by explaining what positive emotions, such as happiness and pride, they would feel if they bought these products and what

Ulus, May 9, 1945, 1.

1

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negative emotions, such as regret and sadness, they would experience if they chose other companies. This compartmentalization of emotions and the formation of new relationships between consumers and enterprises altered Turkish advertising at its core and was hugely influential on the incorporation of emotions into marketing. The next section discusses how companies exploited images of soldiers and army vehicles to publicize their products by taking advantage of the perception of a growing Soviet threat and trying to create a sense of safety and security. The cultivation of stronger diplomatic relations between Turkey and the United States likewise contributed to the increasing popularity of emotional marketing. In concert with integration into the capitalist world economy and modernization, commercial enterprises in Turkey imported new methods of advertising from their American counterparts, further increasing anti-communist messages conveyed through marketing communication, as well as morally conservative symbols, such as images of the happy family, and commercialized nationalist language. The third section deals with the connection between emotions and marketing techniques relying on children and family relationships. The substantial increase in the consumption of American goods and products in Turkey made up another important component of emotional marketing. As the fourth section unpacks, politicians and other public figures portrayed the consumption of American imports as a patriotic action that would increase the safety of Turks against the Soviet encroachment. Private enterprises took advantage of these developments and formulated innovative marketing approaches to cater to new customers via gendered and emotionalized selling. Although focused on Turkey, this study investigates the influence of the Cold War tensions on emotional marketing within a global framework of international relations and advertising. Pioneered by Frank Costigliola, historians of diplomatic relations have written about the role of emotions in the conduct of international relations in the Cold War.2 Although relatively little has been written about the role of emotions in the making of Turkish foreign policy, recent scholarship has given attention to the emotional dimension of Turkey’s Cold War policies after the emotional turn in the field.3 This chapter discusses the fluid, complex, and emotional Cold War context that not only held important implications for Turkish foreign policymaking, but also underpinned the growth of emotional selling and presented firms with the novel opportunity to adjust to post-war consumerism. Previous studies of Cold War cultural history have addressed the influence of Americanization on the cultural and economic spheres. Several historians have used the Cold War as an explanatory paradigm for the growing importance of emotions in See Frank Costigliola, “Culture, Emotion, and the Creation of the Atlantic Identity, 1948–1952,” in No End to Alliance the United States and Western Europe, ed. Geir Lundestad (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 21–36; Frank Costigliola, “‘I React Intensely to Everything’: Russia and the Frustrated Emotions of George F. Kennan, 1933–1958.” The Journal of American History 102, no. 4 (2016): 1075–101. 3 Mehmet Akif Kumral, Exploring Emotions in Turkey–Iran Relations (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020), 119–82. 2

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advertising in the decades that followed the Second World War.4 Scholars have further provided a comprehensive account of the acceleration of Americanization in US allies after the Marshall Plan.5 Nonetheless, there has been no in-depth historical study of the primacy of emotions in the making of Americanization and actualizing the American way of life, particularly in Cold War Turkey. By integrating the histories of emotions and business, this chapter deals with the largely unexamined emotional marketing in early Cold War Turkey. It utilizes a variety of Turkish magazines and newspapers with local and national circulation because the visual presentation of advertisements as persuasive forces was the main tool to attract consumers’ attention and influence the decisions that they made through emotional marketing. All these periodicals included similar advertisements from the same companies. In addition, this study consults memoirs and literary works to better appreciate what emotions meant in the period under consideration. An analysis of this rich trove of sources illustrates that the Cold War played a crucial role in shaping the Turkish emotional landscape and the rise of emotional selling.

The Soviet Threat and Selling Fear, Anxiety, And Pride Although Turkey stayed out of the Second World War until 1945, fear and anxiety became dominant emotions in the country throughout the war years.6 In preparation for an expected war, the Turkish government ordered that citizens extinguish exterior lights in big cities, and sirens sounded several times a day. Literary works and memoirs demonstrated the long-term psychological harm of blackouts on Turkish citizens.7 After the war turned against Germany, the threat of the Axis invasion receded, but Turkey confronted another threat. Turkey had been in close alliance with the Soviet Union in the interwar period but Soviet–Turkish relations deteriorated during the war.8 As a newly risen superpower, the Soviet Union pointed to Turkey’s delayed entry into the war and Stefan Schwarzkopf, “Advertising, Emotions, and ‘Hidden Persuaders’: The Making of Cold-War Consumer Culture in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s,” in Cold War Cultures – Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies, ed. Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 172–90; Timothy D. Taylor, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 101–26; Mark Tadajewski and Inger L. Stole, “Marketing and the Cold War: an Overview.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 8, no. 1 (2016): 2–16. 5 Richard F. Kuisel, “Coca-Cola and the Cold War: the French Face Americanization, 1948–1953.” French Historical Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 96–116; Sean Nixon, “Apostles of Americanization? J. Walter Thompson Company Ltd, Advertising and Anglo-American Relations 1945–67.” Contemporary British History 22, no. 4 (2008): 477–99. 6 M. Sinan Niyazioğlu, İroni ve Gerilim: İkinci Dünya Savaşı Yıllarında İstanbul’da ve Ankara’da Savaş Algısı (Ankara: VEKAM, 2016). 7 Yeni Hikâyeler – 1951 (Istanbul: Varlık Yayınları, 1951), 71–5; Safa Önal, Dünyanın En Güzel Gemisi: Hikâyeler (Istanbul: Mete Yayınevi, 1960), 57; Muzaffer Arabul, Çakrazlar (Istanbul: Tuncay Yayınları, 1967), 114; Reşat Enis, Ekmek Kavgamız (Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi, 1974), 57; Hıfzı Topuz, Tavcan – Savaş Yıllarında Kültür Devrimi (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2005), 67; Doğan Özgüden, “Vatansız” Gazeteci – Cilt 1 (Sürgün Öncesi) (Istanbul: Belge Yayınlar, 2010), 20. 8 Onur İşçi, Turkey and the Soviet Union during World War II: Diplomacy, Discord and International Relations (London: I.B.Tauris, 2021), 69. 4

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did not renew the treaty of neutrality due to expire in 1945.9 Setbacks in Soviet–Turkish diplomatic relations led to emotional press campaigns against leftists in Turkey, who were viewed as insubordinate toward the state. According to politicians and journalists, the Soviets and its “fifth columns” threatened Turkey’s most important values: freedom, honor, and national independence.10 At the same time, Turkish politicians worried that the Soviet Union was sowing seeds of rebellion among minorities, mostly Kurds, against the Turkish state. The cumulative effect of these developments created a feeling of anxiety and alarmed Turkish leaders in the months that followed the war.11 The perception of the Soviet threat became the main source of fear in early Cold War Turkey. Turkey was isolated in the international arena and tried to confront the Soviet Union alone since the United Kingdom and the United States did not offer it any support to do so in the immediate aftermath of the war.12 On the one hand, politicians tried to prepare citizens for a possible conflict with the Soviet Union. On the other, they made efforts to alleviate anxiety by assuring the public that Turkey had the military power to defend itself against a Soviet invasion. The speeches of high-level politicians testified to this dual approach. In his speech at the National Assembly, the speaker of the assembly Kâzım Karabekir stated that Turkey was ready to defend itself to death in case of an attack by the Soviet Union.13 For their part, journalists portrayed the Soviet Union as the gravest danger to Turkey in emotive columns. Hüseyin Câhit Yalçın, who was an influential MP and the editor of pro-government Tanin [Resonance], for example, called the Soviet Union an “impostor” that sought to occupy Turkey.14 Nadir Nadi of anti-government Cumhuriyet [Republic] wrote that “brave Turkish men” were ready to defend their countries against Soviet imperialism.15 War fears led authorities to continue intensified security requirements. As it had done during the war, the government asked citizens to blackout their homes at night. Stringent blackout regulations cultivated a constant sense of danger among ordinary citizens in the late 1940s.16 Since the Soviet Union appeared as an emerging threat, it became inseparable from a generalized sense of fear at the national level throughout the early Cold War. After fear became the predominant emotion in contemporary life, the broader marketing strategy of businesses began to stimulate multiple emotions, such as courage and pride. Advertisers, including child-oriented firms, used military references to trigger a sense of safety in the consumer, exemplified by the ads of Çapamarka, a Mustafa Aydın, “Determinants of Turkish Foreign Policy: Changing Patterns and Conjunctures during the Cold War.” Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 1 (2000): 106. 10 Necmeddin Sadak, “Turkey Faces the Soviets.” Foreign Affairs 27, no. 3 (1949): 449–61. 11 Mustafa Sıtkı Bilgin and Steven Morewood, “Turkey’s Reliance on Britain: British Political and Diplomatic Support for Turkey against Soviet Demands, 1943–47.” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 2 (2004): 41; Jamil Hasanli, Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2011), 208–10. 12 Şaban Halis Çalış, Turkey’s Cold War: Foreign Policy and Western Alignment in the Modern Republic (London: I.B.Tauris, 2017), 58–64. 13 Minutes of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, December 20, 1945, 44–5. 14 Hüseyin Câhid Yalçın, “Bolşevikler Maskeyi Yüzlerinden Attılar,” Tanin, July 13, 1945, 1. 15 Nadir Nadi, “Milli Misak Şuuru,” Cumhuriyet, December 28, 1945, 1. 16 Burhan Felek, Felek (Istanbul: Gündüz Yayınevi, 1947), 140; Savaş Sönmez, “1950’lere Doğru Çerkeş Sokağı ve Çevresi.” Ankara Araştırmaları Dergisi 4, no. 2 (2016): 194. 9

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leading firm in baby food founded in 1915.17 The firm bought large orders of space in periodicals to advertise after the formation of the republic in 1923.18 It had creative marketing employees with a massive advertising budget and placed advertisements with various papers with national circulation in the early Cold War. As the government and press emphasized the tension between the Soviet Union and Turkey, there was an increase in the number of militaristic symbols in the firm’s advertisements. For example, a boy holds a toy gun in Figure 4.1. The advertisement connected the future of Turkey’s territorial integrity and national security to healthy

Figure  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, 8. Oya Baydar and Gülay Dinçel, 75 Yılda Çarkları Döndürenler (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, 1999), 110–12. 18 Orhan Koloğlu, Reklamcılığımızın İlk Yüzyılı, 1840–1940 (Istanbul: Reklamcılar Derneği, 1999), 263. 17

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and strong generations, who could eliminate the fear and anxiety that the Soviet threat generated. Another of the company’s advertisements depicted a baby resting on a bed, with a necklace marked with the logo of Çapamarka being placed on it. There is a Turkish flag on the sheet, and the caption reads “Turkey demands a strong generation.”19 Firms such as Çapamarka not only promoted their products through repetition of militaristic themes but also kept the threat of a Soviet invasion of Turkey alive, addressing the necessity for preparing for a long-term confrontation with a common enemy—the Soviet Union, the only great power with which Turkey’s relations were strained in this period. The repetition of such themes reinforced the perception of the Soviet Union as a permanent danger for the foreseeable future. Taking this nationwide emotional mood into account, Çapamarka sought to seize expectations that the Soviet threat would be persistent. It targeted parents who wanted to provide security and safety for their children and the nation. As these advertisements highlighted, Turks perceived themselves under threat throughout the early Cold War, but the degree of threat varied over time. After the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, there was a short-term relief because public figures believed that Turkey was not alone in its struggle against the Soviet Union.20 When the Cold War intensified and the Soviet Union increased its influence in the countries surrounding Turkey, however, the Turkish press published articles about the “Third World War” and nuclear weapons. The developments in the US political landscape further stimulated the sense of fear and anxiety. During the campaign for the 1948 United States presidential election, President Harry S. Truman benefited from “an overstated anti-communism” to “instill fear” and “exaggerated the power and influence of communists within the United States.”21 Truman’s strategy heavily influenced Turkey. Along with politicians, the Turkish press became a critical tool for spreading anti-communist messages and directing public fear.22 The fear-driven atmosphere found reflections in the business world. Şevket Rado, a columnist of pro-government Akşam, wrote that all children’s toys “complied with all the requirements of new war technology.” He pointed to the replacement of “tin soldiers” with “war machines.” He thought that toy shops in Turkey were “no different from American arsenals.” Criticizing toys that depicted war as “pleasing,” Rado sarcastically stated that “if the Allies had been so prepared at the beginning of the war, Hitler would certainly not have dared to ignite the war.”23 Rado’s observations demonstrated how the Cold War affected even toys. Children in both capitalist and communist blocs provided the most important base for contemporary support for the Cold War politics—and emotional marketing. For example, the American Heritage

Akşam, November 28, 1945, 8. Ahmet Şükrü Esmer, “Tehlike Karşısında,” Ulus, March 16, 1947, 3. 21 Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: the Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 79. 22 Yeni Sabah, January 1, 1948, 3; Yeni Sabah, January 15, 1948, 1. 23 Şevket Rado, “Vitrinlere Bakarken,” Akşam, January 4, 1948, 3. 19 20

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Foundation wanted to reach children because it believed that “loyalties and ideals built during the impressionable years of childhood often thrive for a lifetime.”24 The significance of children in the Cold War can explain the primary role of children in emotional marketing in Turkey. Like their counterparts in the West, Turkish businesses intended to create a whole new generation of customers. Çapamarka’s advertisements in January 1948 portrayed the “happy” Turkish child who grows up with Çapamarka as the “only hero of security” were emblematic of this intention.25 Similarly, the image in Figure 4.2 advertised the

Figure 4.2  “The healthy child of today is the symbol of [future] victories.” Akşam, May 8, 1948, 8. Spring, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion, 36–8. Akşam, January 22, 1948, 8; Yeni Sabah, January 24, 1948, 6.

24 25

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same firm through images of Turkish soldiers and a baby and implied the heightened sense of potential danger. As with the army, the product was explicitly depicted as a bulwark against the enemy, i.e., communism. In terms of the implications of post-war fear and anxiety in daily life, Turkey looked very much like its counterparts in the Western Bloc. For example, a fear of nuclear attack increased the importance of civil defense and created a wave of collective anxiety in West Germany.26 Likewise, the use of nuclear-related fears in the economic sphere was commonplace in the United States and its allies. Sellers branded their products as a way for families to survive a potential nuclear attack.27 Similarly, fashion designers “turned fears into possibilities, finding novelty in the products of a militarized world and assimilating them into a rather hopeful vision of modernity.”28 The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became another stimulus for the use of emotion in advertising. Since Turkey was not admitted to the organization, Turkish politicians viewed the Soviet Union increasingly as an existential threat to Turkey. In 1949, on the anniversary of Atatürk’s landing on Samsun, which was conceived as the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence, President İsmet İnönü voiced fears that the Soviet Union and its “fifth columns” posed a major threat against the territorial integrity of Turkey and called for unity against the common enemy of the nation.29 Within this atmosphere, companies decided to weave more emotions into their marketing. While advertising their products, companies tried to prove “military readiness” to deter any Soviet aggression.30 The use of emotions in advertising in early Cold War Turkey was not fruitless for companies. For example, Çapamarka, the exemplar of the businesses that benefited from emotions, was not financially successful until the 1940s, but it expanded its business and imported machines to extend its production capacity in 1950,31 and dominated the market in the following decade.32 The expansion of the company was a sign of the success of advertisements the company ran during the late 1940s. Indeed, rival companies, such as Arı Unları, began to rely on emotional marketing after the success of Çapamarka.33 For instance, one of Arı Unları’s advertisements in 1949 used a muscular wrestler as the role model for the boy. It urged that parents needed to buy its products if they wanted to fulfill their child’s “aspiration” to become “strong like a Turk.”34 As the financial success of Çapamarka and the imitation of its marketing strategy by rival companies suggests, the use of Cold War-related emotions in marketing created desires in consumers and stimulated demand.

Frank Biess, “‘Everybody has a Chance’: Nuclear Angst, Civil Defence, and the History of Emotions in Postwar West Germany.” German History 27, no. 2 (2009): 215–43. 27 Tanfer Emin Tunc, “Eating in Survival Town: Food in 1950s Atomic America.” Cold War History 15, no. 2 (2015): 179–200. 28 Jane Pavitt, Fear and Fashion in the Cold War (London: V&A Publishing, 2008), 8. 29 Akşam, May 20, 1949, 1–2. 30 Akşam, September 14, 1949, 8; Akşam, September 29, 1949, 8. 31 Hakkı Göktürk, “Çapa Marka Gıdâ Sânayii Anonim Şirketi,” in İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, ed. R. Ekrem Koçu (Istanbul: İstanbul Ansiklopedisi ve Neşriyat Kollektif Şirketi, 1958), 3733. 32 Fıstık Ahmet Tanrıverdi, Büyükada’nın Solmayan Fotoğrafları (Istanbul: Everest, 2006), 10. 33 Cumhuriyet, December 28, 1949, 6. 34 Cumhuriyet, December 1, 1949, 6. 26

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American Aid and Selling Security While the Soviet threat increased anxiety in early Cold War Turkey, increasing economic and political ties between the United States and Turkey bolstered feelings of safety and security. In addition, advertising portrayed the process of feeling safe and secure as a channel to elicit positive emotions, such as euphoria and happiness. The military supremacy of the United States, the formation of US-initiated international institutions, such as the United Nations, and the post-war recovery of the capitalist world economy combined to make possible the transition from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana, aiding Turkey’s turn toward the West.35 Political developments produced a profound change in the Turkish cultural landscape as US officials committed their energy to facilitating (largely unilateral) cultural exchanges between Turkey and the United States.36 As this section unpacks, advertising became another avenue through which to examine the effect of Americanization. The link between Americanization and advertising in Turkey should be located within a larger framework of the Cold War. As Dawn Spring has observed, “advertising and brand names became a vital part of the Cold War and American foreign policy” by 1948.37 Founded as a non-profit organization in the United States in 1942, the Advertising Council served the needs of American foreign policy in the decades to come.38 Having operated through collaboration between private and public figures, the council was able to “produce a successful U.S. propaganda apparatus.”39 The council gave messages of both fear of the Soviet Union and hope of defense against communism.40 As the previous section made clear, Turkish politicians and advertisers disseminated these dual messages. The main duty of the Advertising Council was to publicize the “American way of life.” “The American dream” was touted as a “weapon” against the Soviet threat, especially in the fifties, for target audiences in the United States and recipients of Marshall Plan aid.41 Turkey’s post-war Western orientation and cultural Americanization had farreaching effects on advertising after 1945. The pro-American press wanted advertisers in Turkey to turn toward the American model as the basis for marketing strategies.42 Dilek Barlas, Şuhnaz Yılmaz, and Serhat Güvenç, “Revisiting the Britain-US-Turkey Triangle during the Transition from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana (1947–1957).” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 20, no. 4 (2020): 642. 36 Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: United States Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 52–3; Cangül Örnek, “‘The Populist Effect’: Promotion and Reception of American Literature in Turkey in the 1950s”, in Turkey in the Cold War: Ideology and Culture, ed. Cangül Örnek and Çağdaş Üngör (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 130–57. 37 Dawn Spring, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America, 1941–1961 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 74. 38 Robert Griffith, “The Selling of America: the Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942–1960.” The Business History Review 57, no. 3 (1983): 396. 39 Inger L. Stole, “Advertising America: Official Propaganda and the US Promotional Industries, 1946–1950.” Journalism & Communication Monographs 23, no. 1 (2021): 5. 40 Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 53–80. 41 Inger L. Stole, “‘Selling’ Europe on Free Enterprise: Advertising, Business and the US State Department in the late 1940s.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 8, no. 1 (2016): 44–64; Lawrence R. Samuel, The American Way of Life: A Cultural History (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017), 50. 42 Reha Oğuz Türkkan, “Amerika Mektubları,” Cumhuriyet, October 30, 1953, 2. 35

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Taking inspiration from contemporaries in the United States, Turkish advertisers made greater use of visual materials in the late 1940s and early 1950s than their prewar counterparts.43 In addition to periodicals, firms mailed their advertisements to homes, urban and rural, to reach a broader audience.44 Within this atmosphere, in which advertising sectors further modernized and expanded, multi-emotional marketing made its way into print advertising. While some companies utilized only one emotion, such as happiness, most sought to combine several emotions in their classified advertisements, sometimes even seeking to arouse a mixture of negative and positive emotions simultaneously. The growth of emotional marketing was nowhere more evident than in the use of “family” in advertising. The fears of nuclear technology and the idea of civil defense increased the importance of the family in Cold War propaganda.45 Even before the Kitchen Debate, kitchens in particular and houses in general became a symbol of anti-communist social narratives in the United States. The early Cold War saw an increase in popular prescriptive food discourse in the United States in which “a highly gendered, racialized, and nationalistic home cooking ideal” had a dominant place.46 At the same time, the US government encouraged the construction of new houses, especially outside city centers. Homes were depicted as “familial rewards.”47 Suburban “dream house[s]” symbolized “American hopes for the good life” in this period.48 US policymakers assigned women a patriotic role defending their families and homes against the threat of communism.49 Through the Advertising Council and the Marshall Plan, the United States exported this ideal image of family and home to its allies.50 Turkey was exposed to messages in line with broader processes of Americanization. Housing had become a serious problem in Turkey during the war due to the interruption of international trade and the scarcity of construction materials.51 When the war came to an end, the construction of houses and housing estates accelerated, as with the rise of the suburbs in the United States.52 Concurrently, banks offered more home loans Kemal Salih Sel, “Press Advertising in Turkey.” Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands) 10, no. 3 (1964): 250–4. 44 Muhtar Körükçü, Köyden Haber (Istanbul: Varlık, 1950), 75. 45 Guy Oakes, “The Family under Nuclear Attack: American Civil Defence Propaganda in the 1950s,” in Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s, ed. Gary D. Rawnsley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 71–3. 46 Jessamyn Neuhaus, “Cooking at Home: The Cultural Construction of American ‘Home Cooking’ in Popular Discourse,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture, ed. Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 99. 47 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 161–7. 48 Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1985), 38. 49 Mary Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism (Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2008), 60. 50 Greg Castillo, “Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany.” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 261–88; Greg Castillo, “The American ‘Fat Kitchen’ in Europe: Postwar Domestic Modernity and Marshall Plan Strategies of Enchantment,” in Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users, ed. Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 38. 51 Nermin Abadan-Unat, Kum Saatini İzlerken (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007), 133. 52 Altan Öymen, Bir Dönem Çocuk (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2012), 476. 43

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to prospective customers.53 After the war, the “modern house” became a symbol of modernity in Turkey, and mainstream advertising propagated this message.54 The goal behind projecting an ideal image of a nuclear family was not only to better market products but also to give the impression of a “safe” family. One can see this ideal image of families and the promotion of new homes through emotional marketing even in the advertisements of political parties. The Democratic Party (DP), whose name was inspired by its American counterpart, was the main opposition party in Turkey in the late 1940s. The DP challenged the Republican People’s Party, which had ruled since the formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. One of the most popular ways through which the DP tried to woo Turkish voters was raffles. Figure 4.3 shows a DP-organized raffle in 1949, with prizes worth Turkish lira (TL) 500,000 going to the people and the rest to the party. One ticket cost TL 1.00. The DP included houses in the same raffle. The “modern” family in the advertisement resembled an average American family, not a stereotypical Turkish married couple.

Figure 4.3  “It can make your dream come true.” Cumhuriyet, December 3, 1949, 6. Ruşen Keleş, 100 Soruda Türkiye’de Şehirleşme, Konut ve Gecekondu (Istanbul: Gerçek Yayınevi, 1972), 203. 54 Senem Gençtürk Hızal, Cumhuriyetin İlanı: Türkiye’de Modernleşmeyi Reklâm Metinlerinden Okumak (1928–1950) (Ankara: BilgeSu, 2013), 197–200.

53

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The caption next to the couple reads: “it can make your dream come true.” The advertisement portrayed the ownership of a stand-alone house and a brand-new car as a “dream,” one that bore a striking resemblance to the American dream. Literary works were likewise full of references to Americanization and the American dream. The ownership of “the latest brand American car”55 and “American cloth” was considered a marker of social status and wealth.56 Only a handful of socialist intellectuals criticized the wide currency of the “American dream” in Turkey.57 Most public figures championed it, laying the ground for the promotion of the American way of life via emotional marketing. Banks and other financial institutions used this Americanized image of families the most. Almost all banks launched an advertising campaign featuring what they called a “happy” family and a “safe” house. Banks gave these modern houses to a limited number of families who opened any kind of new bank accounts throughout the early Cold War.59 Figure 4.4 presents different advertisements from both public and private

Figure 4.4  Emotional marketing and banks.58 Akşam, January 11, 1948, 8; Akşam, May 28, 1948, 8; Akşam, September 29, 1949, 8; Yeni İstanbul, January 5, 1950, 6; Akşam, February 17, 1950, 8. 57 58 59 55 56

Haldun Taner, Günün Adamı (Istanbul: Saray Kitabevi, 1953), 40. Refik Halit Karay, Yeraltında Dünya Var (Istanbul: Çağlayan, 1953), 90. Aziz Nesin, Medeniyetin Yedek Parçası (Istanbul: Akbaba Mizah Yayınları, 1955), 88. For other examples, see Akşam, August 24, 1951, 8; Akşam, September 18, 1951, 8. Akşam, March 1, 1948, 8.

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banks. All include portrayals of families, who were either recently married or had one child. They tried to convince customers that these houses were the right step to make the American dream true and families contented. One can see the portrayal of prosperous customers who were smiling and peaceful because of their ownership of the “dream” house. Such emotionality spoke specifically to middle- and upper-class families. There was no image that represented urban lower classes and rural populations. The reason behind their exclusion was twofold. First, these family ideals had a relatively niche audience and were entirely for urban residents who were expected to better internalize American values and the American way of life. Second, advertising was aimed mostly at the middle and upper classes because the lower classes did not have sufficient funds to invest in banks and purchase new houses. Still, as the next section elaborates, emotional marketing and the promotion of the consumption of American goods included even people from humble backgrounds over time.

The Consumption of American Goods and Selling Happiness The economic sphere was another, and arguably the most important, dimension of the influence of Americanization on emotional marketing. Economic containment, part of the Truman Doctrine and broader US foreign policy, contributed to this influence.60 The Truman administration propagated democratic freedom as a way of public diplomacy to “create support for liberal capitalism” in its allies.61 At the same time, it propagated “free enterprise” as the “economic basis” of liberal democracy.62 US officials expected the Marshall Plan to provide wider access to raw materials and primary products in countries receiving aid.63 As one recipient of American aid via the plan, Turkey committed itself to integrating into the world economy as an exporter of raw materials.64 A more liberal agenda of economic policies, contrasting with interwar protectionism, was firmly established in Turkey by 1953.65 As with other US allies, consumerism gained momentum in Turkey. American policymakers and diplomats promoted consumerism and consumer society in the Cold War both at home and abroad.66 Print propaganda was based on the slogan of “classless abundance for all,” against the Marxist emphasis on class conflict. Political leaders promised social welfare to the working classes to prevent the latter

Ian Jackson, The Economic Cold War: America, Britain and East-West Trade, 1948–63 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 11. 61 Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 48–9. 62 Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of US Foreign Policy (New York: NYU Press, 1969), 175. 63 Robert E. Wood, “From the Marshall Plan to the Third World,” in Origins of the Cold War: An International History, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter (New York: Routledge, 2005), 209. 64 Korkut Boratav, Türkiye İktisat Tarihi, 1908–2007 (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2008), 101. 65 Şevket Pamuk, Türkiye’nin 200 Yıllık İktisadi Tarihi: Büyüme, Kurumlar ve Bölüşüm (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2014), 229. 66 Mark Tadajewski, “Promoting the Consumer Society: Ernest Dichter, the Cold War and FBI.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 5, no. 2 (2013): 192–211. 60

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from turning against the former.67 “Consumer abundance” reflected American toughness and competitive spirit, as well as public confidence in the ability of the US military to defeat the Soviet Union.68 The Advertising Council and the Marshall Plan allowed the United States to transfer these ideas and slogans to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Other European nations also portrayed “consumerism” as a vital value to their societies.69 Anti-communist propaganda in the US’ European allies propagated “private consumption” as an integral part of the “American way of life.”70 Outward-looking Turkish businessmen played an intermediary role in the influence of consumerism on the emotional market. For example, Vehbi Koç, who was the president of the Ankara Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a leading member of the ruling party, made his first business trip to the United States in 1946. His main purpose was to enhance commercial relations between Turkey and the United States, as the “representative of many American firms in Turkey.”71 Anti-government businessmen, such as Nuri Demirağ, also favored close economic relations between Turkey and the United States. Like Koç, they bought American firms’ franchises and advocated for liberal economic policies and government support of private enterprises.72 The alliance with the United States and the subsequent departure from interwar statism provided fertile ground for businessmen to promote the American way of life. Even restaurants in Ankara, the Turkish capital, were named “Missouri” and “Washington.”73 Different foods, most of which Turks had been unfamiliar with before, such as sandwiches, cookies, and burgers, gained popularity. The consumption of American goods was not limited to urban wealthy classes. People from a modest background, too, began to “gravitate toward the temptation of the American lifestyle.” American goods and products, from nylon belts to chewing gum, broadened their appeal to Turkish citizens.74 A “happy” consumer referred to those who bought USmade commodities. Advertising provided a new frontier for Americanization in the Turkish commercial landscape in many areas of daily life. The number of references to the United States in advertisements multiplied after the pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine.75 It was the best marketing technique for a commodity to be “American” for sellers in Turkey. Children selling goods on the street claimed that their products came from the United Andrew L. Yarrow, “Selling a New Vision of America to the World: Changing Messages in Early US Cold War Print Propaganda.” Journal of Cold War Studies 11, no. 4 (2009): 6–7. 68 Aaron Bobrow-Strain, “Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light: Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food Power in the Early Cold War.” Food and Foodways 19, no. 1–2 (2011): 78. 69 David F. Crew, “Consuming Germany in the Cold War: Consumption and National Identity in East and West Germany, 1949–1989, an Introduction,” in Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David F. Crew (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 7. 70 Castillo, “Domesticating the Cold War,” 268. 71 Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivleri (Prime Ministry’s Republican Archives) (BCA), 30.1.0.0.42.250.4, December 20, 1947. 72 Bernard Lewis, “Recent Developments in Turkey.” International Affairs 27, no. 3 (1951): 324; Boratav, Türkiye İktisat Tarihi, 90. 73 Öymen, Bir Dönem Çocuk, 515–16. 74 Özgüden, “Vatansız” Gazeteci, 87. 75 Cumhuriyet, May 5, 1947, 5. 67

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States, even if they were made elsewhere.76 A similar keenness for “American” goods appeared in second-hand goods advertisements in Turkish newspapers. These items ranged from electric ironing machines, and sewing machines to radios and heating equipment.77 The sale of American goods took place through auctions. The sellers used emotional marketing to publicize auctions. An advertisement for an auction of American goods in 1952 stated that “those who would buy furniture can be sure that it will bring ‘beauty, comfort, and novelty’” to their homes.78 An assessment of primary accounts demonstrated that such auctions were popular.79 As such, the promotion of the American way of life created a pool of potential customers eager to buy American goods. Families were a significant target audience of emotional advertising. Figure 4.5 shows an advertisement for baby powder by the

Figure 4.5  Advertisement for American baby powder. Cumhuriyet, November 7, 1947, 4; Akşam, February 5, 1948, 8. E.L., “Readers and Writers in Turkey,” The New York Times, October 2, 1947, 30. Cumhuriyet, May 18, 1946, 4; Cumhuriyet, November 1, 1947, 5; Ulus, June 21, 1952, 4; Ulus, August 4, 1952, 5; Cumhuriyet, August 1, 1954, 7. 78 Vatan, August 23, 1952, 6. 79 Haldun Taner, On İkiye Bir Var (Istanbul: Varlık, 1954), 86; Aziz Nesin, Deliler Boşandı: Mizah Hikâyeleri (Istanbul: Karikatür Yayınları, 1957), 108–9. 76 77

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company Hasan Çocuk Pudrası [Hasan Baby Powder]. It states, “If you want your baby to be always cheerful, use Hasan Baby Powder … made from very pure raw materials from America.” Likewise, an advertisement for RCA radios claimed that the radios were “immensely popular in the United States,” and promoted them as follows: “Here is a rare and masterpiece radio that will make a family home even happier!”80 Such advertisements linked products to the American way of life and a sense of happiness.81 The Frigidaire Appliance Company was the perfect example of the businesses that promoted the American way of life via emotional marketing. Although there were other firms that sold refrigerators, the company’s name became synonymous with refrigerators in Cold War Turkey.82 The company benefited from family-oriented themes to attract new customers and claimed that its refrigerators brought health and happiness to children and families.83 In addition to these positive feelings, the company referred to negative emotions if the consumers bought refrigerators from other producers.84 In a classified advertisement in 1948, the company warned the customer as follows: “Don’t lose sleep over an inappropriate purchase! The slight hesitation of today can lead to regret tomorrow.”85 The advertisement in Figure 4.6 combined the American way of life and emotional marketing in harmony. It called for customers to “give a Frigidaire as a gift” to their homes. It portrayed a woman, presumably a homemaker, who was very happy because her husband had purchased a “Frigidaire” for her. This gendered dimension of emotional marketing was consistent with the “American way of life” that identified women primarily as wives and mothers. Emotional marketing in Cold War Turkey concentrated on the so-called traditional gender roles and a feminized ideal of consumption in a similar way.86 From a marketing perspective, the role models for Turkish families were their American counterparts, who achieved happiness by consuming American products. Frigidaire’s advertisements were emblematic of this marketing strategy that promoted the company’s refrigerators as the choice of millions of “happy,” “healthy,” and “satisfied” families around the world,87 with the company being the most popular brand in the United States.88 Soon after its entry into the Turkish markets, the company had scores of branches not only in the big cities but also provincial towns.89 Throughout the Cold War, when they thought about refrigerators, what came to the minds of Turkish consumers was Frigidaire.90 After American goods and the American way of life gained widespread currency, the companies that sold non-US products adopted similar family-oriented themes and emotional marketing strategies. As with the promotion of American goods, “happy” Akşam, April 19, 1948, 8. Also, see Cumhuriyet, April 11, 1947, 6. For example, see the ad of Duo-Therm oil stoves (Cumhuriyet, December 12, 1951, 6). 82 Cumhuriyet, March 7, 1949, 6; Cumhuriyet, August 1, 1950, 6. 83 Cumhuriyet, October 23, 1947, 6; Cumhuriyet, November 3, 1947, 6. 84 Cumhuriyet, April 16, 1951, 6. 85 Cumhuriyet, August 29, 1948, 6. 86 Many other companies advertised women as homemakers. For example, see the ad of Hotpoint refrigerators (Cumhuriyet, July 6, 1953, 8). 87 Cumhuriyet, September 6, 1951, 6; Cumhuriyet, July 12, 1952, 8. 88 Cumhuriyet, June 5, 1952, 6. 89 Cumhuriyet, September 12, 1952, 8. 90 Alber Bilen, Türk Sanayiinde Kırk Zorlu Yıl (Istanbul: Final, 1988), 80. 80 81

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Figure 4.6  “Give a Frigidaire as a gift to your home!” Cumhuriyet, December 29, 1950, 5.

families became a hallmark of emotional advertising for these companies.91 For example, an advertisement of Orion, which was a Hungarian corporation, promoted its radios as the sources of “happy hours” and “a joyful corner” at home. This example suggested that although Americanization played a decisive role in the development of emotional marketing, the use of emotions affected other companies’ strategies as well.92

Conclusion Focusing on the print advertising that became a staple of everyday life in early Cold War Turkey, this study has analyzed a variety of ways that Turkish businesses used both positive and negative emotions to market their products. The broader context Akşam, February 23, 1951, 8. For example, see Cumhuriyet, November 11, 1954, 7.

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of the Cold War was the major factor behind the intensive use of emotions. Post-war Soviet expansionism in the Balkans and the Middle East and the diplomatic spat between Turkey and the Soviet Union fueled many Turks’ fears of a communist threat to their country and the rest of the world. Furthermore, Turkey’s pro-Western orientation increased trade with the capitalist world. Turkey came into frequent contact with American culture following its pro-Western orientation after the Second World War. As an economically undeveloped country and a staunch ally of the United States, Turkey was part of a universal discourse of marketing in the post-war period. Scores of newspaper advertisements testify to the effect of the Cold War on emotional marketing. Businesses incorporated emotions into their marketing efforts and designed advertising to militarize children and society at large as they promoted their products. They further combined anti-communist messages and family-related emotions to influence consumers’ actions and increase sales. American commodities of all sorts were promoted in these newspapers and magazines. Advertisements created a role model that Turkish people were expected to look up to. Accordingly, the imported images of cheerful children, couples, and families were projected onto Turkish citizens as ideals of what they should aspire to be. To make their companies stand out in the market, entrepreneurs spent a great deal on emotional advertising. Turkish firms used the cultural and economic aspects of Americanization to expand their share in the market, engage consumers’ emotions, and launch campaigns that promoted the consumption of American goods and the American way of life. Although it is difficult to tell the exact extent of these advertisements’ reach, Turkish citizens, particularly the middle and upper classes, were inundated with these advertisements on a daily basis. The experiences of Çapamarka and Frigidaire, which were the exemplars of emotional marketing in early Cold War Turkey, suggest that emotional marketing worked. Furthermore, judging by the frequent use of emotions in advertisements and the variety of the companies that benefited from emotions to advertise their products, it is safe to argue that such companies elicited an emotionalized consumer response, and consumers tended to gravitate towards these brands that conveyed messages to evoke emotions. Indeed, the influence of the Cold War on Turkish advertising persisted, and more companies used the American way of life to reach out to large audiences in the following decades.93 Turkish companies, along with other non-American enterprises, continued to center their marketing on emotions and advertised their products through the use of “happiness” and “tranquility,” as well as the promotion of family values.94

Nazife Karamullaoglu and Özlem Sandıkçı, “Western Influences in Turkish Advertising: Disseminating the Ideals of Home, Family and Femininity in the 1950s and 1960s.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 12, no. 1 (2019): 127–50. 94 Cumhuriyet, October 28, 1959, 6. 93

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Castillo, Greg. “The American ‘Fat Kitchen’ in Europe: Postwar Domestic Modernity and Marshall Plan Strategies of Enchantment,” in Cold War Kitchen – Americanization, Technology, and European Users, ed. Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, 33–58. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Costigliola, Frank. “‘I React Intensely to Everything’: Russia and the Frustrated Emotions of George F. Kennan, 1933–1958.” The Journal of American History 102, no. 4 (2016): 1075–101. Costigliola, Frank. “Culture, Emotion, and the Creation of the Atlantic Identity, 1948– 1952,” in No End to Alliance the United States and Western Europe, ed. Geir Lundestad, 21–36. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Crew, David F. “Consuming Germany in the Cold War: Consumption and National Identity in East and West Germany, 1949–1989, an Introduction,” in Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David F. Crew, 1–20. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Enis, Reşat. Ekmek Kavgamız. Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi, 1974. Felek, Burhan. Felek. Istanbul: Gündüz Yayınevi, 1947. Göktürk, Hakkı. “Çapa Marka Gıdâ Sânayii Anonim Şirketi,” in İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, ed. R. Ekrem Koçu, 3733. Istanbul: İstanbul Ansiklopedisi ve Neşriyat Kollektif Şirketi, 1958. Griffith, Robert. “The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942–1960.” The Business History Review 57, no. 3 (1983): 388–412. Hartman, Andrew. Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hasanli, Jamil. Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War, 1945–1953. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2011. Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1985. Hızal, Senem Gençtürk. Cumhuriyetin İlanı: Türkiye’de Modernleşmeyi Reklâm Metinlerinden Okumak (1928–1950). Ankara: BilgeSu, 2013. İşçi, Onur. Turkey and the Soviet Union during World War II - Diplomacy, Discord and International Relations. London: I.B. Tauris, 2021. Jackson, Ian. The Economic Cold War: America, Britain and East-West Trade, 1948–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Karamullaoglu, Nazife and Özlem Sandıkçı. “Western Influences in Turkish Advertising: Disseminating the Ideals of Home, Family and Femininity in the 1950s and 1960s.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 12, no. 1 (2019): 127–50. Karay, Refik Halit. Yeraltında Dünya Var. Istanbul: Çağlayan, 1953. Keleş, Ruşen. 100 Soruda Türkiye’de Şehirleşme, Konut ve Gecekondu. Istanbul: Gerçek Yayınevi, 1972. Koloğlu, Orhan. Reklamcılığımızın İlk Yüzyılı, 1840–1940. Istanbul: Reklamcılar Derneği, 1999. Körükçü, Muhtar. Köyden Haber. Istanbul: Varlık, 1950. Kuisel, Richard F. “Coca-Cola and the Cold War: the French Face Americanization, 1948–1953.” French Historical Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 96–116. Kumral, Mehmet Akif. Exploring Emotions in Turkey–Iran Relations. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020. Lewis, Bernard. “Recent Developments in Turkey.” International Affairs 27, no. 3 (1951): 320–31. Lykins, Daniel L. From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

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Magdoff, Harry. The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of US Foreign Policy. New York: NYU Press, 1969. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound – American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Nesin, Aziz. Deliler Boşandı: Mizah Hikâyeleri. Istanbul: Karikatür Yayınları, 1957. Nesin, Aziz. Medeniyetin Yedek Parçası. Istanbul: Akbaba Mizah Yayınları, 1955. Neuhaus, Jessamyn. “Cooking at Home: The Cultural Construction of American ‘Home Cooking’ in Popular Discourse,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture, ed. Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, 96–110. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Ninkovich, Frank A. The Diplomacy of Ideas: United States Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Nixon, Sean. “Apostles of Americanization? J. Walter Thompson Company Ltd, Advertising and Anglo-American Relations 1945–67.” Contemporary British History 22, no. 4 (2008): 477–99. Niyazioğlu, M. Sinan. İroni ve Gerilim: İkinci Dünya Savaşı Yıllarında İstanbul’da ve Ankara’da Savaş Algısı. Ankara: VEKAM, 2016. Oakes, Guy. “The Family under Nuclear Attack: American Civil Defence Propaganda in the 1950s,” in Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s, ed. Gary D. Rawnsley, 67–84. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Önal, Safa. Dünyanın En Güzel Gemisi: Hikâyeler. Istanbul: Mete Yayınevi, 1960. Örnek, Cangül. “‘The Populist Effect’: Promotion and Reception of American Literature in Turkey in the 1950s,” in Turkey in the Cold War – Ideology and Culture, ed. Cangül Örnek and Çağdaş Üngör, 130–57. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Öymen, Altan. Bir Dönem Çocuk. Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2012. Özgüden, Doğan. “Vatansız” Gazeteci – Cilt 1 (Sürgün Öncesi). Istanbul: Belge Yayınlar, 2010. Pamuk, Şevket. Türkiye’nin 200 Yıllık İktisadi Tarihi: Büyüme, Kurumlar ve Bölüşüm. Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2014. Pavitt, Jane. Fear and Fashion in the Cold War. London: V&A Publishing, 2008. Sadak, Necmeddin. “Turkey Faces the Soviets.” Foreign Affairs 27, no. 3 (1949): 449–61. Samuel, Lawrence R. The American Way of Life: A Cultural History. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017. Schwarzkopf, Stefan. “Advertising, Emotions, and ‘Hidden Persuaders’: The Making of Cold-War Consumer Culture in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s,” in Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies, ed. Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger, 172–90. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Sel, Kemal Salih. “Press Advertising in Turkey.” Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands) 10, no. 3 (1964): 250–8. Sönmez, Savaş. “1950’lere Doğru Çerkeş Sokağı ve Çevresi.” Ankara Araştırmaları Dergisi 4, no. 2 (2016): 189–204. Spring, Dawn. Advertising in the Age of Persuasion – Building Brand America, 1941–1961. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Stole, Inger L. “‘Selling’ Europe on Free Enterprise: Advertising, Business and the US State Department in the late 1940s.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 8, no. 1 (2016): 44–64. Stole, Inger L. “Advertising America: Official Propaganda and the US Promotional Industries, 1946–1950.” Journalism & Communication Monographs 23, no. 1 (2021): 4–63.

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Tadajewski, Mark. “Promoting the Consumer Society: Ernest Dichter, the Cold War and FBI.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 5, no. 2 (2013): 192–211. Tadajewski, Mark and Inger L. Stole. “Marketing and the Cold War: an Overview.” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 8, no. 1 (2016): 2–16. Taner, Haldun. Günün Adamı. Istanbul: Saray Kitabevi, 1953. Taner, Haldun. On İkiye Bir Var. Istanbul: Varlık, 1954. Tanrıverdi, Fıstık Ahmet. Büyükada’nın Solmayan Fotoğrafları. Istanbul: Everest, 2006. Taylor, Timothy D. The Sounds of Capitalism – Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Topuz, Hıfzı. Tavcan – Savaş Yıllarında Kültür Devrimi. Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2005. Tunc, Tanfer Emin. “Eating in Survival Town: Food in 1950s Atomic America.” Cold War History 15, no. 2 (2015): 179–200. Wood, Robert E. “From the Marshall Plan to the Third World,” in Origins of the Cold War: An International History, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter, 201–15. New York: Routledge, 2005. Yarrow, Andrew L. “Selling a New Vision of America to the World: Changing Messages in Early US Cold War Print Propaganda.” Journal of Cold War Studies 11, no. 4 (2009): 3–45. Yeni Hikâyeler – 1951. Istanbul: Varlık Yayınları, 1951.

Part Two

Enabling Emotions Joseph Schumpeter defined the entrepreneur as someone who “gets things done,” making it sound like a simple matter of initiative and will. In this imagining the entrepreneur stands alone, as an island. Right? But whether a massive corporation or an individual entrepreneur, everyone needs certain resources to compete. No one simply “gets things done.” It is almost a given that anyone wanting to successfully enter the marketplace possess the necessary capital, the required labor, and the physical resources necessary to conduct whatever business they are about. But, how do we go about gaining those resources? Through the cold, hard art of the deal? What price must one pay to gain them, what sorts of debts must one incur? Is it only about financial debt and social capital? And what metrics do we employ—the inexorable logics of inputs and outputs, profit and loss? Or is there something more that undergirds the connections necessary to gather and marshal resources? This section takes those logics apart in order to explore the questions we pose above, revealing the deeply emotional commitments and entanglements that firms and entrepreneurs use to gather the resources they need to compete. And so, if emotions can discipline and constrain us, then they can also enable, just as powerfully as do social and financial capital. Indeed, in the right circumstances emotions might be the surest route to securing such capital. Can pleasure and happiness grease the machinery, or act as convulsive livewires that get things moving? Emotions help us tap the intelligence of ourselves and others. Loyalty and commitment? Those are more than just calculations based in past performance. Is it always right to trust the head over the heart? And emotions enable us to cope in the face of the lash of fortune. Emotions activate! Emotions animate! Emotions get things done!

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Marriage à la mode du pays: When Identity and Contractual Love Became a Pledge for the Signares’ Business Cheikh Sene, Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF), Aubervilliers, France

Introduction In the second half of the fifteenth century, Portuguese navigators called lançados (Portuguese Jewish emigrants) frequented the Senegalese coast. They created stopovers on the Petite-Côte,1 at Rio Fresco (Rufisque), Porto d’Ale (Portugal), and Joala (Joal) (see Figure  5.1) to trade with the local populations. In doing so, some formed unions with the local women, whom they called “senhora” (madam), and thus created so-called Métis communities.2 The Métis women from these unions were also called “signaras” by the Portuguese travelers to indicate the high social status they held within the Métis community of the Petite-Côte.3 It was the French who transformed the term “senhora” into signare. Thus, the signare is a European representation of a rich Black or biracial merchant. The signares became involved in trading, particularly in the export of leather, indigo and spices to Portugal and Holland, and the manufacture of cottons for the region.4 However, following the loss of the Portuguese trading monopoly on the Petite-Côte, the occupation of Gorée in 1677 by the French, at the expense of the Dutch, and the violence of the slave trade on the Petite-Côte, the signares were dispossessed of their trade. They left the Petite-Côte with their families and migrated, partly to Gambia, then to Gorée and Saint-Louis, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The LusoAfrican signares were not numerous in the trading cities of Gorée and Saint-Louis and they were quickly replaced in those places by signares resulting from unions between the French or the English and local women. Indeed, in 1658, Saint-Louis of Senegal

The coastal area between Gorée and Casamance. Françoise Descamps, “Les signares: de la représentation à la réalité,” in Histoire de Gorée, ed. A. Camara and J. R. De Benoist (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003), 60. 3 Jean-Luc Angrand, Celeste ou le temps des Signares (Sarcelles: Anne Pépin, 2006), 19. 4 Ibid. 16. 1 2

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became a French town. A few years later, in 1677, the island of Gorée was occupied by France. In Gorée and Saint-Louis, the signares wove marriages à la mode du pays (contractual marriages) with the French. These links enabled them to become rich and to invest in the gum and gold trades and in craftsmanship. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the term signare underwent a significant evolution. First meaning lady or mistress, signaling an undeniable autonomy of action and socio-economic domination, it came to designate mixed-race women, part of the group that had become inclusive of mixed-race people who asserted their racial difference within the community of the inhabitants of the trading posts of Senegal.5 There are three generations of signares. The first generation was made up of Black women living in the trading posts of the Petite-Côte at the time of Portuguese hegemony. The term signare is given to those Black women who lived in concubinage with the Portuguese. The daughters born of these unions were also called signares and constituted the second generation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, agents of the French Compagnie des Indes, in relationships with Black women from SaintLouis and Gorée, fathered a third generation of signares. These women in Saint-Louis and Gorée kept the signare title because of their high social status. It is important to point out that in Gorée and Saint-Louis, some of the signares had English origins due to the successive domination of these two cities by the English.6 However, we are interested in their descendants who are both mixed-race and signares. The latter constituted a social group in their own right because of their dual identity (European and African) and their socio-economic status. There is some research on signares.7 In contrast to these studies, which are limited only to the economic life of the signares, my study tries to focus on the use of emotions in the business of these shrewd, free women entrepreneurs. This chapter explores the emotional, social, and economic life of these charismatic businesswomen, who have been portrayed as knowing how to use their physical assets and to play on emotions to attract Europeans and defend their commercial empire. The first part will be devoted to the origin of the signares. Then, a second part will study the unions between the signares and Europeans. Finally, the third part will allow us to understand the economic stakes hidden behind these negotiated “love relationships” that allowed the signares to become rich and to form a new social class from the eighteenth century until their decline at the end of the nineteenth century.

Guillaume Vial, Femmes d’influence: les signares de Saint-Louis du Sénégal et de Gorée, XVIIIe-XIXe siècle: étude critique d’une identité métisse (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, Hémisphères éditions, 2019), 141. 6 The Seven Years’ War, which was at the origin of the English occupations of Gorée (1758–1763 and 1779–1783) and Saint-Louis (1758–1779). This city was occupied a second time during the Napoleonic Wars between 1809–1817. 7 Pierre Cariou, Promenade à Gorée (Paris: BNF, unpublished manuscript 1966); George E. Brooks, “The Signares of Saint Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth Century Senegal,” in Women in Africa, ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1976), 19–44; Jean Delcourt, La turbulente histoire de Goree (Dakar: Editions Clairafrique, 1982); Vial, Femmes d’influence; Aïssata Kane Lo, De la Signare à la Diriyanké sénégalese: trajectoires féminines et visions partagées (Senegal: L’Harmattan, 2014). 5

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Figure 5.1  Trading posts in Senegambia, seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.8

Who Were the Signares? To understand the origin of the signares, we must return to the fifteenth century, when Portugal was the first European nation to settle on the coast of Senegal. Some Portuguese men formed relationships with the women of the country, whom they called “senhora,” i.e. ladies. Thus, in Portuguese trading posts, the signares probably existed from at least the end of the fifteenth century. These Senegalese women, the first partners of the Portuguese, constitute the first generation of signare, one entirely made up of Black women. From these unions between Black signares and Portuguese, biracial or Métis children were born, constituting the second generation of signare. This generation, broadly, existed until the second half of the eighteenth century. These signares of Portuguese origin traded in leather, fabrics, and food products. Their disappearance from the economic scene can be linked to the conquest of the Senegalese coast by the Dutch, French, and English. Indeed, the Portuguese did not attach great importance to Senegambia and neglected their trading posts. Consequently, in pre-colonial Africa, as in colonial America, a neglected possession or colony became an attraction for other European maritime powers. After the Portuguese trading post at Arguin was abandoned, the Dutch Company moved in during the second half of the seventeenth century to process gum with the The exact toponymy of Senegambia as defined by the English in 1765 designates their hold on SaintLouis at the mouth of the Senegal River, which they had occupied since 1758, and the Gambia River, from where they owned the Fort James trading post. It is thus the space between the Senegal and Gambia rivers that constituted the Senegambia.

8

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Moors of Trarza. Dutch hegemony in Senegambia was very brief. Indeed, the creation of the French trading posts of Saint-Louis in 1659, the English Fort James in 1661, and the conquest of Gorée by the French in 1677, to the detriment of the Dutch, began the end of the Portuguese and Dutch monopoly in Senegal. The trade came under the control of French and English trading companies. In turn, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Petite-Côte had fallen under the exclusive monopoly of France. Unlike the Portuguese Lançados, who married the women of the Petite-Côte, we do not know of any Dutch sailors and merchants who lived with indigenous women. The end of the Portuguese hegemony in Senegal deeply affected the second generation of signare. The bulk of the immigration of Luso-African women, the second generation of signares, and their families, to Gorée and Saint-Louis took place between 1701 and 1725. The Lançados (Portuguese Jews), from whom the mixed-race minority of the Petite-Côte had come, no longer visited the coast of Senegal, which was now under French domination and, moreover, has become “unstable” because of the raids by slavers from the kingdom of Kajoor.9 The island of Gorée received some Luso-African signares weakened by the loss of the commercial monopoly of their Portuguese fathers and fleeing the violence of the slave trade on the Petite-Côte. Among these signares were Victoria Albis and Jeanne Gracia, among the first inhabitants of the island of Gorée.10 The Luso-African signares were contemporaries of the third generation of Franco-Senegalese signares born of unions between French men and Senegalese women. Thus, at the time of the appearance of the mixed-race world in Gorée and Saint-Louis, the Luso-African world continued to exist, and was even at its apogee, asserting its specificity since the end of the fifteenth century.11 Nonetheless, the Franco-Senegalese signares of Gorée and Saint-Louis gradually replaced the LusoAfrican signares economically. They played a major role in the socio-economic life of Senegal by holding a significant share of the trade because of their family ties with the French, who managed French trading interests in Senegal, and the support of their families settled in France.

Signares and Europeans: A Conditionnal Love At the beginning of the eighteenth century, trade in Senegal was dominated by the Compagnie des Indes, headquartered in the fort of Saint-Louis. At Gorée, the Company had an assistant administrator who was in charge of trade with the states of the PetiteCôte (Kajoor, Bawol, Siin, Saloum and Albréda in Gambia). In all the French trading posts in Senegambia, there were few Métis signares. Black African women were in the majority. Generally, they were businesswomen from the local high bourgeoisie, who formed relationships according to social status, including with Europeans holding high positions in the colony, such as the bourgeois or aristocratic staff of the Compagnie des Indes, especially the directors and their assistants, or the senior soldiers of the Gorée or Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares, 22. Ibid., 27. 11 Vial, Femmes d’influence, 48. 9

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Saint-Louis garrison. The Compagnie des Indes forbade its agents to bring their wives to the colonies. However, it allowed them to openly practice marriage à la mode du pays,12 and their descendants to benefit from the right to inheritance. An agent living with a signare (Black or Métis) familiar with the French language and customs enjoyed the best possible conditions. Marriage à la mode du pays was very common in Gorée, Rufisque, Joal, Portudal, and Saint-Louis between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. These marriages were business marriages initially concluded  between a village chief or king and a European merchant. Of these marriages Durand explains: The union of a white man with a black or mulatto girl has a very special conventional character. It is not indissoluble; it lasts only as long as the parties have nothing to complain about, or as long as one is not obliged to move away from the other forever. If the absence is to last only a certain period of time, the woman who is left alone, waits patiently and without failing in her duties, for the return of her husband; she chooses another only in the event of death or assurance that he will not return. This union does not affect the woman’s honour and reputation.13

According to Golbéry, the signares willingly entered into these marriages of limited duration with Europeans.14 From these contractual unions mixed-race children were born. The girls from these marriages were also called signares, because of their way of life, which was similar to that of French women. These were the Métis signares. As a group, they emerged slowly. According to André Delcourt, “in 1724, there were only five young mulattoes in Saint-Louis between 12 and 15 years old.”15 It was from the second half of the eighteenth century that the number of Franco-Senegalese signares began to increase in Gorée and Saint-Louis. In Gorée, the signares came to own many huts: thus, in 1749, ten properties out of thirteen belonged to the mixedrace population, and more particularly nine to signares.16 The majority of the first marriages à la mode du pays were unions between whites and Blacks. These unions contributed to the increase in the number of Métis signares in the second half of the eighteenth century. Thus, by 1786, Saint-Louis had 7,000 inhabitants, including 2,400 freemen, Black or mixed-race, 660 Europeans, and a little over 3,000 slaves. In Gorée, out of 2,500 inhabitants there were 522 free men, mixed-race or Black.17 The island of

See Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Dominic Thomas, and Christelle Taraud, eds., Sexe, race & colonies. La domination des corps du XVe siècle à nos jours (Paris: La Découverte, 2018), 74. 13 Jean-Baptiste-Leonard Durand, Voyage au Sénégal ou Mémoires historiques, philosophiques et politiques sur les découvertes, les établissemens et le commerce des Européens dans les mers de l’Océan atlantique (Paris: Henri Agasse, 1802), 215. 14 Silv. Meinrad Xavier de Golberry, Fragmens d’un Voyage en Afrique fait pendant les années 1785, 1786 et 1787 (Paris: Chez Treutell et Würtz, T.1, 1802), 157. 15 André Delcourt, La France et les Etablissements Français au Sénégal entre 1713 et 1763 (Dakar: Mémoire de l’IFAN no. 17, 1952), 123. 16 Marie-Hélène Knight-Baylac, “La vie à Gorée de 1677 à 1789.” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 57, 4e trimestre, no. 209 (1970): 402. 17 Robert Cornevin, Histoire de l’Afrique, L’Afrique précoloniale 1500–1900 (Paris: Payot, T.2, 1966), 351. 12

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Gorée was marked by a female presence divided into three social categories: domestic slaves; free Black women; and free and mixed-race signares.18 However, from the second half of the eighteenth century, “mulattoes were particularly desired.”19 The agents of the Compagnie des Indes were no longer fascinated and attracted by the Black signares but rather by the Métis signares for physical and cultural reasons. The bodies of the signares symbolized exoticism among Europeans. Thus, Michel Adanson, a French botanist, who was present in Senegal between 1749 and 1754, wrote “the mulatto daughters enjoyed the privileges of their mothers, privileges which their white or basan colour, so similar to that of their fathers, made them extend.”20 The Métis signares were culturally similar to European women in their dress and modes of living. Like their Senegalese mothers, the signares were much coveted by the French and English who shared the trade of Senegal and the Gambia. These marriages were as much business unions as they were love unions. Generally, married to persons holding high positions in the trading companies and in the French royal administration, the signares benefited greatly from these unions. Sometimes, as a strategy, they married the poorer staff of the Company or of the French administration, such as carpenters or masons, because of their technical know-how, which could be passed on to their slaves.21 The signares actively participated in the gum trade and also helped the Company in this trade by hiring their skilled domestic slaves to European traders. Thus, many signares accumulated significant wealth living under the protection of the French. These practices must have provoked a range of emotions, positive and negative. Indeed, some agents of the French administration even felt disgust with their colleagues, who distributed French property to the signares. Thus, for example, Michel Adanson accused the directors of the Company of theft and corruption in giving part of the staff provisions (bread, wheat, firewood) to signares, arguing that they “obtained for this purpose from the director-commanding officer, the goods from France that were refused to employees of a lower order.”22 Prominent unions involving signares included the governor of Senegal, Chevalier Stanislas de Boufflers, and Anne Pépin. Appointed governor in 1785, Chevalier de Boufflers gave the island of Gorée its status as the capital of Senegal. Married in France, de Boufflers was also the companion of Anne Pépin, daughter of Jean Pépin, surgeon major of the island, and her mother, the signare Catherine Baudet. Anne Pépin was the sister of Nicolas Pépin, father of the signare Anna Colas Pépin, who in the eighteenth century built the “House of the Slaves” on the island of Gorée. Anne Pépin, like her cousins, was a formidable trader, specializing in the smuggling of gum arabic, with the complicity of the French and English governors. During the time when she consorted with Chevalier de Boufflers, Anne Pépin was also married à la mode du pays to Ndèye Sokhna Gueye, “Splendeurs et misères des Signares: du rôle des femmes dans la traite transatlantique et l’esclavage à Gorée (XVIIe-XIXe siècles),” in Pratiques d’esclavage et d’asservissement des femmes en Afrique, Les cas du Sénégal et de la République Démocratique du Congo, ed. Ndèye Sokhna Guèye (Dakar: NENA/CODESRIA, 2017), 27. 19 Delcourt, La France et les Etablissements Français, 123. 20 Charles Becker and Victor Martin, “Mémoire d’Adanson sur le Sénégal et l’île de Gorée.” Bulletin de l’I.F.A.N, sér.B, 42, no. 4 (1980): 736. 21 Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares, 82. 22 Becker and Martin, “Mémoire d’Adanson,” 736–7. 18

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Bernard Dupuy, an employee of a Bordeaux trading company. Anne Pépin returned to her husband when the governor left. This story expresses the freedom of action of this signare and her right to dispose of her body as she wished. This right to the ownership of their bodies was shared by most of the signares, who freely chose their companions.23 The notion of freedom was extremely strong for the signares. These women seem not to have been interested in feelings of love. Indeed, the apparent absence of marital emotions, which might be seen in their ability to remarry very quickly after their husbands left for Europe, challenges our categorizations of action and motivation. As the postings of the senior employees of the trading companies and the French administrators was time limited, and with no hope of return, the signares would remarry, often with their replacements. This desire to live with a European man reinforces the idea that we are faced with actions in which it is difficult to discern what was guided by economic interests and what by feelings rooted in true love.

When “Love” Becomes a Strategy: The Fortunes of the Signares The signares lived from their economic activity and the help of their French partners. For example, Bernard Dupuy, husband of Anne Pépin, was the subject of a letter of denunciation addressed by the governor of Gorée, Boniface, to the Minister of the Navy. He was accused of living with a Métis woman (the signare Anne Pépin) with whom he was involved in the gum arabic and gold smuggling trade.24 Whatever else they were, the liaisons between Europeans and signares were marriages involving business, but in ways that are not easy to understand. Marriages à la mode du pays were the fastest way for the signares, who inhabited a mercantile culture, to increase their financial capital. Certainly, given an absence of evidence, it is difficult to determine with certainty that these unions were based on mutual love. However, it is easier to prove that they did involve strategic calculations. By marrying a European, a signare was conscious of how her financial interests might be benefited in the short term. However, the majority of the Europeans who worked for the trading companies did not stay long in Senegal. Nonetheless, signares also enjoyed longer-run benefits after a European partner departed; including from the knowledge of his language and culture.25 Not only did the European husband bring immediate material benefits, but after his departure he left behind a home, slaves, and capital to grow the signare’s trade. Thus, with the help of their European husbands, the signares dominated the local trade in cloth, gold, leather, and gum by the beginning of the nineteenth century and succeeded in forming a bourgeois class in the towns of Senegal. However, it was also believed at the time that, once married, the signare “believes herself honoured to share the bed of a white man; she is submissive, faithful, grateful, and even to the slightest care; she does everything in her power to captivate his benevolence and love.”26 This speaks not only to contemporary prejudices but also the deep complexities of the situation. Gueye, “Splendeurs et misères des Signares,” 30. Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares, 66. 25 Alain Sinou, Comptoirs et villes coloniales du Sénégal. Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar (Paris: KarthalaOrstom, 1993), 33. 26 Jean-Baptiste-Leonard Durand, Voyage au Sénégal, 212. 23 24

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In the second half of the eighteenth century, the productive capital of the signares consisted mainly of slaves, whose numbers were increasing daily, and who the signares kept for their own use, rarely selling them to Europeans.27 Examples from the mideighteenth century include Anne Fleury, who had forty-nine slaves, Marie Jacques Arnaud and her sister Madeleine (fifty-two slaves), Louise Pindatica (forty-seven slaves), and Anne Cécile (seventy-one slaves).28 At Gorée, in 1767, Caty Louette, the signare of Captain Aussenac, had twenty-five male and forty-three female domestic slaves, which made her the wealthiest woman on the island.29 According to Le Brasseur, governor of Gorée and Senegal from 1773 to 1777, “The signares will treat negroes at the coast and will not sell any of them. When they saw a negro for a month in their huts, they no longer had the strength to detach themselves from them.”30 Signares lived closely with their slaves, whom, it has been argued, they considered members of their family. Many signares liked to walk with their female slaves adorned with gold jewelry in the streets of Goree or St. Louis on feast days, to show their wealth and high social status. It has also been claimed that the emotional ties between the signares and their slaves were so strong that the company or the royal administration had little hope of redeeming them and turning them into slaves for the American continent. Domestic slaves thus contributed to the enrichment of the signares. The signares of Saint-Louis rented their slaves to the Compagnie des Indes.31 The Company employed the male slaves as laptots (sailors) onboard its boats making voyages to Galam, and in the slave trade along the Senegal River. On board the ships, the women did many tasks such as pounding millet, cooking, and washing clothes.32 The price of a slave rented to the Compagnie des Indes for navigation on the Senegal River, to make lime or to cut wood, was six pounds per month.33 During the voyage to the Galam country, the Company allowed the slaves to bring with them two barrels of salt in the form of a permitted port. The salt was exchanged for gold with the inhabitants of Galam. The slaves could bring back to their mistresses, the signares, “fifteen, twenty and up to thirty large gold barrels.”34 This gold was the basis of the wealth of the signares. It was generally used in the manufacture of jewelry and in the local cloth trade. By 1763, the management of the Senegal concession was in the hands of the French royal administration. Thus, in Gorée, the signares rented their slaves to the French administration, who used them in naval works and as laborers, masons, carpenters, caulkers, or craftsmen for the works on the island.35 In 1769, their owners were paid

Guillaume Vial, Femmes d’influence, 126. Nathalie Reyss, “Saint-Louis du Sénégal à l’époque précoloniale, l’émergence d’une société Métisse originale 1658–1854,” PhD diss., University of Paris I Sorbonne, Centre de Recherches Africaines T.2, 1983, 13–15 29 Knight-Baylac, “La vie à Gorée de 1677 à 1789,” 402–3. 30 Ibid., 404. 31 Pruneau De Pommegorge, Description de la Nigritie (Paris, chez Maradan, 1789), 3. 32 Charles Becker and Victor Martin, “Détails historiques et politiques, mémoire inédit (1778) de J.A. Le Brasseur,” BIFAN, Série B, T.39, no. 1(1977): 110. 33 De Pommegorge, Description de la Nigritie, 2–3. 34 Ibid., 3–4. 35 Abbé David Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises; physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, Atlas (Paris: Karthala, [1853] 1984), 8. 27 28

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two bars per month for each slave.36 In 1783, this wage was increased to three bars, but the Goreans found it too low.37 Thus, the wealth of the signares also depended on the number of slaves they owned. The signares of Gorée and Saint-Louis further developed the local economy thanks to their fleets of cotres, small vessels of up to six meters, equipped with a triangular sail for sea freight and rowing boats for river navigation.38 They traded locally in cloth, gold, leather, ivory, and food. In 1791, free trade was established in Senegal, signaling the end of the commercial monopoly of the trading companies and enriching the signares.39 The latter, holders of many slaves, continued to participate in economic life at least until emancipation. In the composition of their fortunes, real estate and slaves played an important role, but gold and jewelry, ships, and shares of the Compagnie de Galam40 also played their part. It is in Saint-Louis that the largest fortunes were to be found.41 Indeed, the essential commercial activities of the country were concentrated in the valley of the Senegal River, where an important trade of gum, gold, slaves, and food was carried out. The signares and Métis men of Saint-Louis in turn invested their fortune in the gum trade, their main source of income. As for the signares of Gorée, they were the main shipowners for local coastal freight and suppliers of trafficking products. However, the inhabitants of Gorée “do not have, as in Senegal (Saint-Louis), an indigenous trade, such as that of gum. The trade of negroes that they make on the whole coast, in the small river of Saalum, in that of Gambia, and that they then sell to the French batimens who pass by, forms all the trade of the inhabitants of Gorée.”42 In Gorée, as in Saint-Louis, the signares had large warehouses in their houses where they stored their goods43. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna abolished the slave trade in Senegal. The work of their slaves had constituted, as we have seen, the bulk of the signares’ resources. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the “gum century,” the town of Saint-Louis was populated by European and local traders living solely from the gum trade. Many of the signares had invested their fortunes by building or buying houses which they rented to the French administration, civil servants, officers, and merchants.44 The European population of Saint-Louis generated small domestic jobs for the benefit of the signares who controlled the slave labor force. In 1844, Marie Fablot explained that her six slaves, who were engaged in sewing, laundry, and ironing, provided her with an annual The bar is a kind of fictitious currency. It was paid for in goods into which various trade goods such as guinea coins, weapons, gunpowder and brandy were brought. It was the ideal currency for trade in Senegambia. It seems that its face value has hardly changed over time. On the coast, it was estimated in 1723 at £6, both in Senegal (Saint-Louis) and Arguin (Mauritania). 37 Knight-Baylac, “La vie à Gorée de 1677 à 1789,” 404. 38 Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares, 101. 39 Vial, Femmes d’influence, 47. 40 The “Compagnie de Galam” (1824–1848) traded in gum. It was made up of shareholders, most of whom were merchants and traders from Saint-Louis. 41 Roger Pasquier, “Le Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle, la crise économique et sociale,” PhD diss., University of Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV), T. 5 (1987): 2277. 42 Jean-Gabriel Pelletan, Mémoire sur la colonie française du Sénégal: avec quelques considérations historiques et politiques sur la traite des nègres (Paris: Chez la Ve Panckoucke, 1800), 26. 43 Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares, 101. 44 Roger Pasquier, “Les traitants des comptoir du Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle,” in Entreprise et Entrepreneurs en Afrique XIXe et XXe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, T.1 1983), 151. 36

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income of 1,800 francs.45 A slave employed at the gum ports on the Senegal River could earn 600 to 700 francs per gum trade campaign for his master, and a carpenter, joiner, mason, or caulker between thirty and thirty-five francs per month.46 In this way, many signares owed their fortune to the gum trade. We can cite the example of Marie Labouré. She emerges as one of the richest, if not the richest, of the signares. Born in 1802 in Saint-Louis to a European merchant father, she died in 1856. She sent dealers to the gum trade and official documents qualified her as a merchant. Her real estate fortune can be roughly estimated at 35,000 francs, her slaves at 37,000 francs, and she held 139 titles of the Compagnie de Galam, that is to say to the value of 33,800 francs. Her total fortune was estimated at 200,000 francs.47 The fortune associated with the dual culture and racial heritage (European and African) had made the Métis signares a social class in their own right in a society dominated by Blacks.

The Signares: A New Social Class in a Black World The signares occupied an important place in the predominantly Black-populated trading towns from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. They managed to form a social class with a dual culture: Senegalese and French. Wealth was for them a social symbol of success in the pre-colonial capitalist world marked by globalization and Atlantic trade, and the most important economic marker in the eighteenth century. In pre-colonial Senegal, and everywhere in the French colonies (French West Indies and America), the question of race and color was a prominent issue. Racial mixing was a fundamental element that made it possible to distinguish the signares from the free or slave Black women of Gorée and Saint-Louis. The signares become actors in a society in which they combined the characteristics of Senegalese culture with the dominant features of European culture.48 The social characteristics of the signares evolved according to their fortunes. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, they lived in straw huts. In the second half of the century, the fortunes amassed in trade and matrimonial alliances with Europeans were one of the first criteria for distinguishing signare identity. The signares built Provençal-style stone houses with tile roofs and Italian-style staircases. In fact, their personal fortunes, due to the enrichment à la façon du pays,49 and the influence of their families in France and England, allowed them to bring in often enslaved master masons and carpenters.50 These luxurious eighteenth-century French-style stone houses bear witness to the opulence in which the signares lived. They were housed in much the same way as in France; their houses were built of brick or stone, had only one floor and were well ventilated.51

Pasquier, “Le Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle,” T.2, 530–1. Ibid., 531. 47 Ibid., 523. 48 Kane Lo, De la Signare à la Diriyanké sénégalaise, 13–14. 49 Enrichment “à la façon du pays” is an expression that alludes to marriage “à la mode du pays,” meaning all the means used by the signares (trade, marriages with Europeans) to get rich. 50 Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares, 46. 51 Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises, 5. 45 46

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Signare society was divided into an association or assembly called in Wolof52 “mbotaye.” David Boilat explains: All those of the same age, rank and usually from the same neighbourhood belong to the same society. On meeting days, the mbotaye is convened in the house of one of the members, where the ladies must spend the whole day rejoicing. In this case, each member contributes to the cost of meals and refreshments. For weddings, births and funerals of a member or a relative, the “mbotaye” is convened. It is also at these meetings that the ladies consult each other when necessary and give each other advice for their guidance.53

Generally, the mbotaye were not only important decision-making structures and moments of social cohesion, sharing and solidarity, but also an opportunity for the signatories, “richly dressed in embroidered mboubes (African dress) with finesse and art; their necks, ears, arms and feet adorned with gold jewellery,”54 to display their power, vulnerability, wealth, joy of living, anxiety, and sadness. The life of signares was not simple, living under daily pressure due to the fear of losing the support of the Europeans in their economic activities. Thus, it has been argued, they were compelled to be deferent, caring, and cheerful towards the Europeans in order to keep their economic empire. The signares were Catholics. In Gorée, as in Saint-Louis, the numerous Catholic signares’ processions were called fanal, synonymous with carnival. According to JeanLuc Angrand, “at that time, the streets of Gorée and Saint-Louis were frequented by signares who went to mass or weddings accompanied by their numerous richly decorated servants, carrying large decorated lanterns and luminous kites.”55 Such processions were special occasions, but the clothing and lifestyle of the signares had long been the subject of comment among the populations of the Saint-Louis and Gorée trading posts. Indeed, both the European and Senegalese imaginations conveyed stereotypical images of these women. They were idealized and sometimes described as beautiful seductresses, wealthy, powerful, and dominant businesswomen.56 Their status was further signaled by signares balls and receptions they organized, better known as “folkars or folgars,” which they inherited from their Portuguese ancestors, who had founded the leather and cotton trades of Joal, Portudal, Rio Fresco (Rufisque) on the Petite-Côte.57 These celebrations were symbolic moments when the signares displayed their joy of living and other facets of their culture and social belonging through their clothing, headdresses, and adornments. Pruneau de Pommegorge describes the elegant dress of the signares: They wear a white handkerchief on their head, artistically arranged, over which they place a small narrow black ribbon, or coloured ribbon, around their head. A French-style shirt, trimmed, a corset of taffeta or muslin, a skirt likewise, & Wolof is the language commonly spoken in Senegal. It is the “national language” of the country. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises (1853), 5–6. 54 Ibid., 6. 55 Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares, 119. 56 Gueye “Splendeurs et misères des Signares”; Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares. 57 Folkars is translated into French as folklore or festival. Angrand, Céleste ou le temps des Signares, 119; Pruneau De Pommegorge, Description de la Nigritie, 6. 52 53

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similar to the corset, gold earrings, gold or silver foot chains, when they have no other, with red morocco slippers at the feet; over their corset, they wear a piece of two alder trees of muslin, the ends of which are thrown over their left shoulder.58

The signares’ clothing mixed European and African style, for they had very quickly integrated these European contributions into the local clothing fashion, thus creating a new social class, straddling two cultures. The headdress of the signares was influenced by that of the country’s indigenous women, and by the papal tiara, symbol of their power and social rank as Christians, and was thus the result of a cross-fertilization between Europe and Africa (see Figure 5.2). Thus, through their clothing, the signares

Figure 5.2  A signare Source. Courtesy of the artist, Corentin Faye. De Pommegorge, Description de la Nigritie, 4–5.

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sought to create their own cultural identity at the crossroads of African and European cultures within the Black community of trading posts on the coast (Gorée, Saint-Louis, Rufisque, Joal, Portudal) strongly influenced by Wolof culture.

The Signares: The End of Business Emotion or the Decline of a Community of Successful Businesswomen The Treaty of Vienna of 1815, which prohibited the slave trade, reduced Senegal to the status of a poor region—at the very least it had a negative impact on some individuals and groups within the community. Generally speaking, the economic situation of the trading posts that were the pride of the Senegambian region could be summarized as follows: in 1817, Gorée was reduced to the coastal trade of leather, gold, and morfil in small quantities, whilst Saint-Louis could no longer count on its gum trade, which was in steep decline.59 It has been claimed that the people of Senegal had difficulty adapting to legitimate trades following the prohibition of the traditional “object” of trade, the enslaved. The only remaining profitable economic activity was rubber. The traders all rushed into the gum trade, the main object of exchange, which was losing more and more of its value.60 Indeed, in the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a considerable increase in the number of contractors in Saint-Louis, precipitating the gum crisis in the early 1840s, which profoundly affected economic activity. According to Roger Pasquier, “all Senegalese with capital have suffered very severely from the consequences of the crisis. Traders have been swamped with debts and some of them have been forced into bankruptcy. For them, as for others, their real estate assets have been mortgaged or sold.”61 Naturally, many signares were also affected. Subsequently, slavery was abolished in France and its colonies by the Decree of April 27, 1848, which considered slavery to be “an attack on human dignity … by destroying the free will of man, it suppresses the natural principle of right and duty … it is a flagrant violation of the republican dogma: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”62 These twin events made the economic situation of the signares, who lived on domestic slavery, difficult. This challenging economic context created a sense of fear, anger, and sadness within the signare community, which had a strong emotional and economic attachment to the role of slavery in their lives. The report of the president of the commission of inquiry on the emancipation of slaves, dated April 20, 1844, emphasizes that the signares affected by the gum crisis who had to pay debts preferred to sell jewelry, furniture, and even real estate, rather than part with their slaves.63 The ongoing impoverishment of the signares initially provoked bitterness and Georges Hardy, La mise en valeur du Sénégal de 1817 à 1854 (Paris: Emile Larose, 1921), 9. Ibid., 34. 61 Pasquier, “Le Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle,” T.2, 560. 62 Decree of April 27, 1848, see http://expositions.bnf.fr/montesquieu/themes/esclavage/anthologie/ decret-du-27-avril-1848-abolition-de-l-esclavage.htm [accessed September 20, 2022]. 63 Pasquier, “Le Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle,” 512. 59 60

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discouragement, then when the crisis became more and more acute, ruining some, forcing them to give up the gum trade, there was an explosion of anger.64 Embarrassed by the fall in their income, the signares, allied with their brethren, the Métis traders and Senegalese slave owners, were strongly against the emancipation of the slaves, which would mean their economic decline. The French administration, fearing the consequences of a possible popular uprising that would jeopardize the security of the French of Saint-Louis and Gorée, refused to strictly enforce the decree of the emancipation of slaves in Senegal. France, experiencing rapid industrial expansion, needed raw materials and new markets to sell its products. It therefore sought stable countries where security and peace prevailed so that people could engage in agricultural activities.65 This new economic policy, based on peanuts, rubber, cocoa, and cotton, had not formed part of the economic vision of the signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée, who depended on the old trading economy, where slaves and gum formed “cash crops.” The signares disappeared from the economic chain as the main activity of the Senegalese economy, which had been based on gum, became dominated by groundnuts. By 1850, colonial authorities and the Bordeaux lobby (Maurel and Prom, Deves) had succeeded in reorienting the export economy to the burgeoning peanut basin south of Senegal River.66 This economic change brutally upset the world of the mixed-race bourgeoisie, of which signares were a part. The Muslim merchants, who knew the Senegalese hinterland better, were now used as relays for the French trading houses to the detriment of the signares and others in Saint-Louis and Gorée. The official founding of the city of Dakar in 1857 was a fatal blow to Gorée and Saint-Louis. These two cities, strongholds of the signares, were gradually losing their strategic interest and privileged status. At the end of the nineteenth century, the era of the comptoirs gave way to that of colonization. The signares of the end of the nineteenth century, and especially their descendants in the twentieth century, lived from renting property in the four communes of Senegal (Dakar, Gorée, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis) where a strong French and mixed-race community still lived. Moreover, colonial executives, who now more frequently arrived with their wives, stopped mixing with Métis women in Senegalese cities, contributing further to the decline of the signares, who no longer drew the attention of wealthy Europeans.

Conclusion Initially referring to the Black women of the Petite-Côte who fraternized with Portuguese traders in the fifteenth century, the term signare came to be used to refer to mixed-race women from unions between Portuguese men and Black women. In the second half of the eighteenth century, into the nineteenth, the word signare was Ibid., 593. Gueye, “Splendeurs et misères des Signares,” 34. 66 Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 60. 64 65

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more often applied to Métis women from mixed-race relationships between French or English men and Black women. The liaisons between Europeans and signares were based on economic motivations as much as love, complicating conventional narratives, often founded on European cases, of love and marriage sometimes supporting, but always remaining essentially distinct from, economic activity and success. At the same time, these relationships undoubtedly allowed the signares to amass large fortunes which they invested in local commerce. The signares were genuine entrepreneurs, businesswomen who traded in gold, ivory, cloth, and gum.67 They owned slaves whom they rented to the Compagnies des Indes in the eighteenth century and, in the nineteenth century, to the French royal administration, and traders and dealers in gum along the Senegal River. Frequently described at the time as beautiful, coquettish, and refined, the signares possessed a unique socio-cultural status influenced by European and Senegalese culture, particularly Wolof. However, shifting economic interests and the expansion of French colonial rule in Senegal impacted the economic life of this urban community. Métis habitants bore the brunt of Gum Fever’s end because of the extent of their investments in the trade, especially as gum was replaced by groundnuts. The abolition of slavery in the colonies led to further greater insecurity for signares and Métis women holding large numbers of domestic slaves. The signares were slowly disappearing from the economic life of Senegal, increasingly dominated by European trading houses and Muslim traders from Saint-Louis. Today, the signares are present in the collective memory of the Senegalese people, forming a kind of emotional legacy. The former President Léopold Sédar Senghor, a follower of cultural cross-fertilization, wrote poems dedicated to the signares. Artists and musicians like to remember the signares in their works, even going so far as to exaggerate their beauty or to consider them as a symbol of Senegalese beauty and “the representation of the Senegalese feminine ideal.”68 During national holidays, young girls dress in signare fashion to show the face of Senegalese culture in the era of the trading posts. The signare fashion (fabric, jewelry, headdresses, bracelets) flourishes in Senegal, especially in Gorée and Saint-Louis, the two historical cities of the signares, which today attract many tourists. Fanal, nocturnal parades to the sounds of percussion and singing, and to the light of lanterns made by the inhabitants, are often organized in Saint-Louis in the last week of December to remember the signares. These lanterns were carried by the slaves to illuminate the route taken by the signares on their way to Midnight Mass. However, in the Senegalese imagination, the signares were also women of light sexual morals, soft, joyful, and sensitive. At the same time, the signares were businesswomen who took advantage of their status as women favored by Europeans to develop their trade networks. They certainly seized opportunities to manufacture a social status and “signare identity” of their own, an identity that must itself have brought emotional rewards. Thus, the imaginary in which the signares are housed is sometimes biased and certainly complicated, including emotionally.

Brooks, “The Signares of Saint Louis and Gorée,” 19–44. Gueye, “Splendeurs et misères des Signares,” 35.

67 68

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Bibliography Angrand, Jean-Luc. Céleste ou le temps des Signares. Paris: Anne Pépin, 2006. Becker, Charles and Victor Martin, “Détails historiques et politiques, mémoire inédit (1778) de J.A. LE Brasseur.” Bulletin de l’I.F.A.N, Série B, 39, no. 1 (1977): 81–132. Becker, Charles and Victor Martin. “Mémoire d’Adanson sur le Sénégal et l’île de Gorée.” Bulletin de l’I.F.A.N, Série B, 42, no. 4 (1980): 722–79. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Dominic Thomas, and Christelle Taraud, eds. Sexe, race & colonies. La domination des corps du XVe siècle à nos jours, Paris: La Découverte. Boilat, Abbé David. Esquisses sénégalaises: physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, Atlas. Paris: P. Bertrand, Libraire-éditeur, 1853. First edn. Boilat, Abbé David. Esquisses sénégalaises. Paris: Karthala, 1984. Second edn. Brooks, George E. “The Signares of Saint Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal,” in Women in Africa, ed. J. H. Nancy and G. B. Edna, 19–44. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. Cariou, Pierre. Promenade à Gorée. Paris: BNF, 1966. Unpublished manuscript. Cornevin, Robert. Histoire de l’Afrique, L’Afrique précoloniale 1500–1900, Tome 2. Paris: Payot, 1966. De Benoist, J. R., A. Camara, and Francois Deschamps. “Les signares: de la représentation à la réalité,” in Histoire de Gorée, ed. A. Camara and J. R. De Benoist, 59–84. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003. De Benoist, J. R., A. Camara, and X. Ricou. “Les menaces sur le patrimoine goréen et mesures de sauvegarde,” in Histoire de Gorée, A. Camara and J. R. De Benoist (eds), 131–7. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003. De Pommegorge, Pruneau. Description de la Nigritie. Paris: Chez Maradan, 1789. Delcourt, André. La France et les Etablissements Français au Sénégal entre 1713 et 1763. Dakar: I.F.A.N, 1952. Delcourt, Jean. La turbulente histoire de Goree. Dakar: Editions Clairafrique, 1982 Descamps, François. “Les signares: de la représentation à la réalité,” in Histoire de Gorée, A. Camara and J. R. De Benoist (eds), 59-84. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003. Durand, Jean-Baptiste-Leonard. Voyage au Sénégal ou Mémoires historiques, philosophiques et politiques sur les découvertes, les établissemens et le commerce des Européens dans les mers de l’Océan atlantique: depuis le Cap-Blanc jusqu’à la rivière de Serre-Lionne inclusivement; suivis de la Relation d’un voyage par terre de l’île saint-Louis à Galam, et du texte arabe de trois traités de commerce faits par l’auteur avec les princes du pays. Paris: Henri Agasse, 1802. Guèye, Ndeye Sokhna. “Splendeurs et misères des Signares: du rôle des femmes dans la traite transatlantique et l’esclavage à Gorée (XVIIe-XIXe siècles),” in Pratiques d’esclavage et d’asservissement des femmes en Afrique, Les cas du Sénégal et de la République Démocratique du Congo, ed. N. S. Guèye, 21–39. Dakar: NENA/ CODESRIA, 2017. Golberry, Silv. Meinrad Xavier de. Fragmens d’un Voyage en Afrique fait pendant les années 1785, 1786 et 1787. Paris: Chez Treutell et Würtz, 1802. Hardy, Georges. La mise en valeur du Sénégal de 1817 à 1854. Paris: Emile Larose, 1921. Jones, Hilary. The Métis of Senegal. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013. Kane Lo, Aïssata. De la Signare à la Diriyanké sénégalaise: Trajectoires féminines et visions partagées. Sénégal: Harmattan, 2014.

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Knight-Baylac, Marie-Hélène. “La vie à Gorée de 1677 à 1789.” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 57, 4e trimestre, 209 (1970): 377–420. Pasquier, Roger. “Les traitants des comptoir du Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle.” Entreprise et Entrepreneurs en Afrique XIXe et XXe siècle, 141–63, Paris: Harmattan, 1983. Pasquier, Roger. “Le Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle, la crise économique et sociale,” PhD diss., Université Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV), 1987. Pelletan, Jean-Gabriel. Mémoire sur la colonie française du Sénégal: avec quelques considérations historiques et politiques sur la traite des nègres. Paris: Chez la Ve Panckoucke, 1800. Reyss, Nathalie. “Saint-Louis du Sénégal à l’époque précoloniale, l’émergence d’une société Métisse originale 1658–1854,” PhD diss., Université de Paris I Sorbonne, Centre de Recherches Africaines, 1983. Roche, C. Histoire de la Casamance. Conquête et résistance: 1850–1920. Paris: Karthala, 1985. First edn. Sinou, Alain. Comptoirs et villes coloniales du Sénégal. Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar. Paris: Karthala-Orstom, 1993. Vial, Guillaime. Femmes d’influence: les signares de Saint-Louis du Sénégal et de Gorée, XVIIIe-XIXe siècle: étude critique d’une identité métisse. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, Hémisphères éditions, 2019.

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“the commerce of affection”: Masculinity and Emotional Bonds Among Boston Merchants Laura C. McCoy, independent scholar

Introduction Joseph Coolidge was a dreamer. Alone in Canton, China in March 1840, Coolidge wistfully wrote to his friend and fellow merchant, Augustine Heard, in Boston. The pair had just launched a new China trade firm, Augustine Heard & Co. From halfway around the world, Coolidge laid out his dream for their shared future: My friend, it is one of the great blessings of my life to have known you; and I look forward to joining you again, with the same pleasure and happiness that I do to once more being with my children … [Y]ou I hope will feel as [my wife and I] do that, without binding ourselves never to part for a day, our happiness will be promoted by living with each other as the members of one family.1

The profound emotional expression at the heart of Coolidge’s letter is striking— though likely unsurprising to historians of masculinity who have documented the loving language circulated among male friends in the early American republic.2 That male business partners exchanged such tender sentiments raises questions about the emotional networks that structure business. Why would a merchant expect that reuniting with his business partner would induce the same “pleasure and happiness” as rejoining his own children? What advantages, emotional or Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, March 6, 1840, Heard Family Business Records [HFBR], Baker Library at Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. 2 On affectionate friendship between men, see Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Karen V. Hansen, “‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other’: Masculinity and Intimate Friendship in Antebellum New England,” in Men’s Friendships, ed. Peter M. Nardi (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, Inc., 1992); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Donald Yacavone, “‘Surpassing the Love of Women’: Victorian Manhood and the Language of Fraternal Love,” in A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender, eds. Laura McCall and Donald Yacavone (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 1

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economic, did colleagues seek in fantasizing about “living with each other as the members of one family”? This chapter contends that many mid-nineteenth-century American merchants like Coolidge and Heard treated affective professional relationships as a critical resource enabling them to navigate the emotional rollercoaster of commercial life. Historian Scott Sandage has noted the increasing popularity in the 1840s and 1850s of a false statistic; that ninety-seven out of one hundred merchants failed—a figure that reverberated, Sandage contends, “because it conveyed not the economic but the emotional magnitude of ubiquitous failure.”3 Fear of loss and failure persisted even if that was not a trader’s material reality. To merchants, business was seductive and capricious, ripe with fortune and peril. Their work was inherently speculative. Ships could sink, taking profit—and lives—with them. War and politics could interrupt trade, and repeated financial panics ensnared many a merchant’s fortune. As one writer in The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review put it in 1839, a merchant “can scarcely move without danger. He is beset on all sides with disappointments, with fluctuations in the current of business, which sometimes leave him stranded on an unknown bar, and sometimes sweep him helpless into the ocean.”4 Amidst such stormy seas, affectionate professional relationships—a reliable and reciprocal exchange of hope, optimism, and sympathy with men who shared affective professional experiences—could be a lifeline. Indeed, the constant, nagging specters of uncertainty, risk, and failure led many to encourage merchants to forge a commerce of affection that could keep them afloat in the volatile capitalist marketplace.5 Masculinity was at the heart of this venture. Merchants’ supportive emotional economy rested partly on the language of compassionate brotherhood. “Home” guided the market as merchants constructed professional networks through familial affection, going into business with either male relatives or friends they thought of as “brothers.” In speeches, magazines, and countinghouse chatter, merchants heard warnings that if they failed to cultivate bonds of affection that could be mobilized in the economic realm, they might not be able to withstand the economic and emotional volatility of the profession. Merchant masculinity thus formed not just around independence and creditworthiness, but also the ability to provide emotional support to one’s “fallen brothers.”6 Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 7–8. On merchants, see Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Rachel Tamar Van, “Free Trade & Family Values: Kinship Networks and the Culture of Early American Capitalism” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011). On the “gloom” and “melancholy” expressed by the commercial class during the financial panics of the early nineteenth century, see (among others) Sandage, Born Losers, esp. Chapters 1–3; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. chapter 5. 4 Judge Joseph Hopkinson, “Lecture on Commercial Integrity.” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, Conducted by Freeman Hunt 1, no. 5 (1839): 372. 5 “Commerce of affection” is borrowed from Massachusetts lawyer Daniel Webster, who in 1807 referred to both wives and male friends as the “bank[s], in which [men] deposit [their] tender sentiments.” “Mr. Webster to Mr. M’Gaw,” January 12, 1807, in The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, vol. I, ed. Webster Fletcher (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1857), 223–4. 6 John Sergeant, “Mercantile Character,” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 3, no. 1 (July 1840), 17. 3

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Merchants were not alone in laboring to produce and exchange sentiment alongside goods and credit. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, many Americans understood that attempts to procure credit and escape debt could produce fear, anger, guilt, and sadness. Major financial panics regularly brought the nation’s financial system to its knees, and a credit-based economy meant that individuals faced sudden loss or failure at any time. The expansion of credit, banks’ inability to maintain enough specie to fulfill that credit, widespread speculation, sudden debt and bankruptcy—each of these factors made the early decades of the new nation fraught with emotional anxiety across region, profession, and class.7 Consequently, many Americans relied on affective—not just financial—strategies to mitigate the unsettling consequences of an expanding capitalist economy.8 For many men, not just merchants, male friendships helped assuage the anxieties and disappointments of economic endeavor. The best support often came from understanding friends in the same profession. For instance, historian Anya Jabour has unearthed a dynamic network of emotional support among young lawyers in antebellum Virginia, who turned to each other for professional advice and affectionate relief when their professional and social status got them down.9 These bustling emotional economies should complicate how historians understand separate spheres ideology. The ideal of separate spheres encouraged men to venture into the competitive and potentially corrupting public sphere of politics and business, and then recuperate at home—in women’s peaceful and loving domain.10 To combat nineteenth-century middling-class socio-economic fears, home and family thus became idealized corrective and protective buffers against growing moral threats. It is not news that separate spheres was more ideology than reality, more prescriptive than descriptive. Scholars of women’s history have been making this clear since the 1970s at least, focusing on the many and varied ways that women acted as

On failure and fears of downward mobility in the early republic, see Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North  Carolina Press, 2001); Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Sandage, Born Losers. 8 Though this chapter focuses on free White men, it was not only White or only free or only male Americans who used affective strategies to navigate the nineteenth-century capitalist landscape. See, for instance, Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 9 Anya Jabour, “Male Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends.” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 1 (2000): 83–111. For another example of men’s professional affectionate networks in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Samuel J. Watson, “Flexible Gender Roles during the Market Revolution: Family, Friendship, Marriage, and Masculinity among U.S. Army Officers, 1815–1846.” Journal of Social History 29, no. 1 (1995): 8–106. 10 On separate spheres, see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9–39. On women’s emotion work as a key resource for mitigating capitalism’s ill effects, see Laura C. McCoy, “In Distress: A Marketplace of Feeling in the Early American Republic” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2020), esp. chapter two. 7

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economic agents.11 However, historians have not yet accounted for another blurring of supposedly gendered spheres of labor. The ideology of separate spheres suggested palliative emoting was women’s duty, but the commerce of affection documented here was constituted through men’s emotional labors and transactions. Documenting the emotional structures of American business makes clear that both men’s and women’s emotion work enabled the growth of early American capitalism. This chapter documents the commerce of affection among Boston’s China traders in the 1830s and 1840s, building to a close reading of the affectionate business partnership of Joseph Coolidge and Augustine Heard.12 The study begins by exploring how prescriptive literature such as Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine called for merchants to produce and exchange emotion, especially sympathy. Interwoven throughout are examples of China traders’ lived experience building and embodying this commerce of affection, providing a glimpse into the emotional community in which Joseph Coolidge and Augustine Heard lived and worked. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how emotions enabled the pair’s successful business partnership, which began in 1840 when Coolidge was ousted as partner from Russell & Co., one of the leading American firms in China. Humiliated, Coolidge capitalized on longstanding bonds of kin-like affection to draw Heard into a new joint venture, despite Heard’s reluctance to return to business in China. Augustine Heard & Co. thus provides a provocative example of how the United States’ economic empire could be shaped—and frequently remade—by embodied emotions. If emotion provided the motivation and means for what became one of the most profitable American China trade firms in the mid-nineteenth century, it is imperative that historians of American business consider the fundamental role emotion played in early American capitalism.

See Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Alexandra J. Finley, An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Katie M. Hemphill, Bawdy City: Commercial Sex and Regulation in Baltimore, 1790–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Serena Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 12 On Augustine Heard & Co., see Stephen Lockwood, Augustine Heard & Co., 1858–1862: American Merchants in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Tim Sturgis, Rivalry in Canton: The Control of Russell and Co., 1838–1840 and the Founding of Augustine Heard and Co, 1840 (London: The Warren Press, 2006); Thomas Franklin Waters, Augustine Heard and His Friends (Salem: Newcomb and Gauss, 1916). On American trade in China, see Jacques M. Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784–1844, 2nd edn (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2015); James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Paul van Dyke, ed., Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling, and Diplomacy on the South China Coast (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2012); Paul Van Dyke and Susan Schopp, eds., The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700–1840 (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2018).

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Networks of Sympathy and Brotherhood Merchants provide a particularly rich archive for understanding how and why certain professions intentionally cultivated a commerce of affection. As voluntary associations rose in popularity in the early decades of the nineteenth century, mercantile libraries and societies emerged in northeastern cities to provide education, culture, and community to young men embarking on commercial careers. The Mercantile Library Association of Boston—established in 1820—was, according to its own records, the first of its kind in the United States, though others soon followed in port cities like New York and Philadelphia.13 Mercantile library associations hosted distinguished speakers to lecture on a wide variety of topics, from necessary commercial skills and knowledge, to slavery, to patriotism. These lectures were frequently printed in commercial magazines such as popular New York-based Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine. Sources written in the years surrounding the panics of 1819 and 1837 reveal a determined effort to normalize the idea that it was manly and professionally responsible to sympathize with fellow merchants during financial duress. Popular commercial magazines such as Hunt’s frequently urged merchants to build affective professional bonds that could help them overcome any financial hardship they might encounter. In 1840, for instance, an article on “Mercantile Character” encouraged readers to overcome any feelings of resentment or scorn when another trader needed help, urging them to be “compassionate, not cruel”: [L]et us beware how we suffer charity to be stifled by indignant feelings and harsh judgment against a fallen brother … [I]f a brother has sunk under trials which we have been permitted to escape, or have had strength given us to resist, we should be thankful, not proud; compassionate, not cruel; see only the signal of distress, and incline to its relief, rejoicing that we are enabled to give succor.14

By asking men to stifle indignation and harsh judgment when fellow merchants requested help, publications like Hunt’s established compassion as a valued emotional exchange within business networks. By referring to struggling men as “brothers,” the essay emphasized that fraternal feeling should guide compassionate engagements. For many merchants, this terminology was literal. Since the colonial era, many Massachusetts firms had been structured around kinship ties.15 Even as men’s labor moved further outside the home in the early nineteenth century, family remained an important resource for navigating commercial business—from partnering with brothers or cousins to “History of the Mercantile Library Association,” in Catalogue of Books of the Mercantile Library Association, of Boston, Together with the Acts of Incorporation and the By-Laws and Regulations Adopted January 1848 (Boston: Dickinson Printing House, 1848), 3–6. 14 Sergeant, “Mercantile Character,” 17. 15 Among others, see Bernard Farber, Guardians of Virtue: Salem Families in 1800 (New York: Basic Books, 1972); Betty G. Farrell, Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Kenneth Wiggins Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees: Two Generations of Massachusetts Merchants, 1765–1844 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937).

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relying on an uncle’s capital (economic and social) to enter trade. Many nineteenthcentury American firms in China formed around kin relationships and depended on generational succession. Historian John Haddad has termed this strategy “meritocratic nepotism”: China traders preferred to hire family and friends but only kept them in the firm if they proved themselves to be trustworthy and beneficial to business.16 Trust was enormously important when conducting business at great distances, so China trade firms drew on pre-established networks of familiar relationships to pursue financial interests abroad. In the words of China trade expert Jacques Downs, “Quite naturally when an early American businessman needed an agent to operate at some distance from the countinghouse, he chose first a relative and second a friend.”17 Carefully cultivated and expressed familiarity also enabled men to build economic partnerships with men to whom they were not related by either blood or marriage.18 Joseph Coolidge tried to cultivate this brotherly relationship with Augustine Heard. “If you are not a Brother in the usual sense of the term,” Coolidge once told him, “you are more than one in deed and trust—and dearer to [my wife and I] both than any other who bear that name.”19 Indeed, Coolidge repeatedly chose not to go into business with his biological brother Thomas, whose idleness and poor judgment kept Joseph at arm’s length. In an era that fostered fraternal feelings in many contexts outside the family, Coolidge believed the true significance of brotherhood was not in blood but in action (“deed”) and psyche (“trust”).20 Other merchants made the same distinction. Paul Siemen Forbes defined “brother” as one who shares the same profession and is willing to “extend a helping hand.” Forbes compared his relationship with his preacher brother unfavorably to his connection with his merchant cousin, John Murray Forbes: “John’s pursuits & my own bringing us so often in contact & affording him daily opportunities of extending a helping hand he appears more like a brother, than my own of N. York with whose efforts to save the soul of the wicked I have little sympathy.”21 For his part, John Forbes echoed John R. Haddad, America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 36. Also see Downs, The Golden Ghetto; Van, “Free Trade & Family Values”; Thomas H. Cox, “‘Money, Credit, and Strong Friends’: Warren Delano II and the Importance of Social Networking in the Old China Trade,” in Van Dyke and Schopp, eds., The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700–1840, 132–47. Downs’s extremely detailed volume describing the American China trade in Canton even contains an appendix entirely dedicated to “commercial family alliances.” 17 Downs, The Golden Ghetto, 367, 233. 18 On familiarity, see Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 19 Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, July 2, 1838, HFBR. Two years later, when trusting Heard to decide whether his teenage daughter should join her parents in China, Coolidge emphasized the deep faith he and his wife had in Heard by informing him that Ellen “relies on you like a Brother.” Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, January 29, 1840, ibid. 20 On the importance of fraternity to the political, economic, social, and cultural identity of the early American republic, see Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Amy Pflugrad-Jackisch, Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). 21 Paul Siemen Forbes to Robert Bennet Forbes, June 10, 1839, Forbes Family Business Records [FFBR], Baker Library at Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.

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this fraternal sentiment in ways that show how the familiarity, trust, and affection connoted by the word “brother” had special meaning in the China trade. In 1842, John used the language of brotherhood to recommend his cousin Paul to Houqua, the leading Chinese merchant in Canton. Despite the fact that Paul had never worked in the China trade and had recently failed in the South American trade, John asked that Houqua favor Paul because John felt for him “the same regard as for a Brother.”22 Houqua acquiesced. In claiming friends and cousins as even closer kin relations, merchants like Coolidge and the Forbes made clear that for them, the true value of “brotherhood,” both economically and emotionally, lay in “deed and trust”—in short, in a reliable commerce of affection with like-minded men. The drive to establish a commercial brotherhood is especially clear in a speech lawyer William Sullivan gave to the Boston Mercantile Association in 1832. Sullivan presented a vision of mercantile fraternity that explicitly used the commerce of both capital and affection to knit Boston businessmen together in a mutually supportive and profitable class. He argued that businessmen “can do what no legislature can do”—namely, save one another from losing everything (especially social status and reputation) if one of their own encountered financial failure. Sullivan did not merely consider the financial side of this mutual support. He also highlighted the emotional effects. If a fellow merchant failed honestly and honorably, Sullivan urged his audience, “You can pour a precious balm on his wounded spirit, and carry sympathy and consolation to the innocent hearts of the wife and of the children, who must be partners in his sorrows.”23 Sympathetic men could, of course, administer that “precious balm” by offering financial relief. But the primary image Sullivan conjured was of men trading in emotion, not just capital. Sullivan did not present sorrowful or sympathetic merchants as feminized. Instead, he grounded his vision of merchant solidarity and power—and thus effective merchant masculinity—in mutual emotional support. An honorable man of business must know how to soothe his fellow merchants’ “wounded spirits.”24 Indeed, after experiencing the trials of merchant life—from long familial separations to sudden and unexpected financial losses—many traders felt that the commerce of affection was most valuable when it involved a man who had himself run the mercantile gauntlet and could offer both sympathy and practical advice. In 1843, N. M. Beckwith wrote to his fellow merchant and brother-in-law Paul Siemen Forbes about their individual commercial struggles—Forbes in the process of bankruptcy in John Murray Forbes to Houqua, December 31, 1842, ibid. William Sullivan, A Discourse, Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Association, and Others, Assembled on Their Invitation, on Tuesday Evening, February 7, 1832 (Boston: Carter & Hendee, 1832). For more on Sullivan’s speech, see Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 175. For more on the meaning of failure for nineteenth-century American capitalists, see Sandage, Born Losers, chapter 2 “A Reason in the Man,” 44–69. 24 On merchants and masculinity, see Toby L. Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” The Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (1994). On masculinity and the rising class of clerks (including merchants’ clerks, the position in which Joseph Coolidge began his career in the China trade) in the early nineteenth century, see Brian P. Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Michael Zakim, Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 22 23

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South America, and Beckwith having just lost many trading clients in Canada and the West Indies. Beckwith revealed that despite the physical distance between them, he found solace in writing to Forbes. “In my distress I thought often of you and what you must have suffered,” he mused: “there is alw[ays] that in you that makes me lean to you, therefore I write freely: it is alw[ays] some relief.” Beckwith confessed that he had thought of confiding in Forbes’s brother but demurred because he was a preacher, not a merchant, and thus could not have offered the particular sympathetic relief Beckwith sought. Beckwith quipped, “he could tell me the way to Heaven much better than how to pay my notes!”25 Paul Siemen Forbes turned to other merchants for solace when he struggled with the emotional sacrifices of working far from home for extended periods. During a long stay in Rio de Janeiro, he urged his cousin, China trade merchant Robert Bennet Forbes (brother of John Murray Forbes), “Do let me hear oftener from you—you who can so readily appreciate the misfortunes of involuntary expatriation should be the last to withhold your sympathy and add to their bitterness by continued silence.”26 Over time, Bennett delivered a commerce of both affection and capital to his struggling cousin. In 1839, he assured Paul that “all the affectionate and Brotherly expressions are fully reciprocated,” and a few years after that, facilitated Paul’s entry into the China trade to try to claw back financial stability after Paul’s failures in the South American market.27 Bennett’s brother and business partner John Murray Forbes also provided Paul with both hope and reminders that he must fight despondency. “Pray keep your spirits up,” John urged Paul in 1842. “Believe that if you continue to struggle … you will at last catch [Fortune’s] wheel at the right turn.”28 As these letters suggest, networks of male relatives were crucial sources of invigorating sympathy, especially when that affection was accompanied by financial relief. Hope and cheer were valuable commodities, especially when offered by sympathetic male relatives or friends bound to one another in an emotional community of mutual financial and emotional support. Being able to express cheerfulness in the face of financial anxiety was important for merchants receiving sympathy as well as those offering it. Literature advertised bucking up under misfortune as a central tenet of merchant masculinity. Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine regularly urged merchants to be cheerful despite financial or social trials. An 1839 piece entitled “What Constitutes a Merchant,” noted, “A cheerful disposition, says [David] Hume, is worth ten thousand a year. With decision of character and a cheerful disposition, our merchant will be enabled to ward off envy and hatred.”29 Another article the next year advised, “An hour’s industry will do more to beget cheerfulness, suppress evil rumors, and retrieve your affairs, than a month’s moaning.” Explicitly tying manhood to the ability to repress sadness, the article warned anxious indebted merchants, “Beware of feelings of despondency. Give not place for an hour to useless N. M. Beckwith to Paul Siemen Forbes, April 4, 1843, FFBR. Paul Siemen Forbes to Robert Bennet Forbes, July 1837, ibid. 27 Robert Bennet Forbes to Paul Siemen Forbes, April 2, 1839, ibid. 28 John Murray Forbes to Paul Siemen Forbes, April 8, 1842, ibid. 29 Charles Edwards, Esq., “What Constitutes a Merchant,” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 1, no. 4 (1839): 292–3.

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and enervating melancholy. Be a man.”30 Sullivan’s entreaty that Boston merchants should “pour a precious balm” on each other’s “wounded spirits” gained even greater significance when tied to manhood in this way. The commerce of affection was all the more critical if it helped stave off feelings of both melancholy and emasculation to which aspiring capitalists were vulnerable. Merchants’ manhood and financial success depended on this network of mutual sympathy and emotional support.

The Emotional Enabling of Augustine Heard & Co. The business partnership of Joseph Coolidge and Augustine Heard provides an enlightening example of how merchants forged, maintained, and relied on a commerce of affection to support their business efforts. The pair had become friendly when both worked for the prosperous and influential Russell & Co. in the early 1830s—Heard as a partner and Coolidge, thirteen years his junior, as a clerk. Though the men were not related by blood, the Coolidge family used the language of kinship to include Heard in their emotional community. Heard himself was unmarried and childless, though he kept close paternal watch over his nephews (with whom he allied professionally when they came of age). When Coolidge began an extended trip abroad for Russell & Co. in 1834, he beseeched Heard to serve temporarily as his family’s patriarch. “My friend,” Coolidge warmly requested, “I commend my family to your kind attentions … I like to think of my oldest Boy walking by your side, with his hand in yours.”31 Anxious about leaving his young family without a male head of household, Coolidge soothed his fears by imagining Heard taking his place as a father figure, guiding and protecting Coolidge’s children during his long absence. The Coolidge children did indeed associate Heard with paternal affection. When Heard left Boston on a long voyage in 1838, Coolidge’s twelve-year-old daughter Nell wistfully informed him, “I shall think very often of you and wish for your return, for next to my father and mother and my little brothers I love you better than any-body else.”32 Both Joseph and his wife Ellen believed that the family feeling—the affection, trust, and loyalty—they ascribed to Heard was enough to bind his financial interest to theirs. This became especially clear in 1840, when Joseph found himself at loose ends professionally after being expelled as partner from Russell & Co. Jacques M. Downs has characterized Coolidge as “a mediocre merchant at best  … rather lazy, presumptuous, and sometimes tactless.”33 Coolidge had only become a partner in Russell & Co. through Heard’s good graces. When Heard had fallen ill in China and had to return home to Massachusetts, he recommended the firm promote Coolidge to take his place. Russell & Co. partner John Murray Forbes remembered Coolidge as “a gentleman in his manners, but had very crude ideas about commerce, believing in show rather than in substantial management.” Forbes reported that, “wishing only “Advice to Men in Debt,” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 2 (1840): 526. Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, October 10, 1834, HFBR. 32 Ellen (Nell) Randolph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, October 1, 1838, ibid. 33 Downs, The Golden Ghetto, 192–5. 30 31

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peace,” he and the other partners “did the best [they] could to place [Coolidge] where he would do the least mischief.”34 Beyond struggling to build trust with his Russell & Co. partners, Joseph Coolidge also failed to join the wider emotional community of American merchants in Canton. Augustine Heard’s nephew John, who accompanied his uncle to China as a clerk in 1841, remembered the merchant community in Canton as one of “kindness and good feeling” where “residents were always ‘hail fellow, well met.’” But John pointed to his uncle’s partner as an odd man out: “Some were unpopular and among them was my respected ‘Taepen’ Mr. Coolidge. I never quite understood why, for, though rather stiff, he was a very agreeable man.”35 By late 1839, the other Russell & Co. partners had entirely lost faith in Coolidge, who had made unauthorized investments with funds from a crucial Chinese business partner. Attempting to justify his mistake, Coolidge erred again by showing clients some of the firm’s confidential documents. Any faith the partners had in him evaporated. The partners determined that Coolidge was no longer an appropriate member for the firm in either economic or emotional terms. They wanted him out—of both the firm and its emotional community. Several partners began a campaign to remove him as partner when the firm re-organized for the new year. On January 1, 1840, Coolidge found himself in Canton without a firm to represent. Coolidge had suspected he might be forced out even before heading to China in 1839. Before leaving Boston, Coolidge had secured Augustine Heard’s permission to establish a new trading firm with both men as partners. Heard himself had no need or desire to return to international trade. His finances were secure, and he certainly had no inclination to return to China again at age fifty-five, after having left six years earlier due to declining health. Heard even once told Coolidge that he “would rather live on $300 a year, than come again to China.”36 Heard’s primary motivation in offering to partner with Coolidge in a new firm was emotional: he wanted to support his friend. Economic and emotional support often melded in Heard’s mind, and he appears to have valued money for the emotional impact it might have for others. “Money was worth acquiring,” Heard’s nephew John reported his uncle advising, “from the amount of good which could be done by it, & he said that if I ever become worth a fortune, I should find that I should derive more pleasure from being able to aid and aiding others, than in any selfish gratification.”37 For Heard, financially supporting loved ones was a valued emotional transaction that produced relief in friends and pleasure in oneself. Emotional and economic concerns mingled when Heard got word that Coolidge had announced a new firm, Augustine Heard & Co. Heard wrote to his friend to express both frustration and resignation. He made it known that he would have much preferred if Coolidge had either reconciled with Russell & Co. or simply joined another existing firm. He was especially irritated that Coolidge had used only Heard’s name John Murray Forbes, Reminiscences of John Murray Forbes, vol. I, ed. Sarah Forbes Hughes (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1903), 194. 35 John Heard, “An Account of His Life and the History of Augustine Heard & Co.,” (1891), 31–2, HFBR. 36 Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, November 29, 1839, HFBR. 37 John Heard to Elizabeth Heard, November 6, 1841, Elizabeth Heard Papers, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. 34

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for the new concern, a complication that made Heard feel he had to head to Canton despite Coolidge’s repeated declarations that Heard was free to simply lend his name to the firm and remain in Boston.38 With Heard’s name on the figurative marquee, his reputation was now on the line. His forbearance with Coolidge came in part from a need for self-protection. Coolidge apologized for the sacrifices he asked his friend to make, but assured Heard that he had acted according to what he believed to be Heard’s best financial and emotional interests. Coolidge explained that he had had “some vague idea” that Heard’s property had diminished. More importantly, he insisted that he had been sure Heard would approve of the new joint venture because Heard “had a sincere regard for my wife, an interest in my children, and kindness for myself.”39 These words pressured Heard, implying that any professional disapproval on his part would betray the affection he shared with Joseph and his family. Coolidge’s wife Ellen explained her husband’s motivations in similarly affective terms, confessing to Heard, I fancied your interests so identified with ours that they had become one and the same thing. Your attachment to Mr Coolidge and myself of which you had given such noble, generous, touching proofs, your affection for our children and all that you have done for them, your whole course in fact from the commencement of your friendship for us gave me the ideas that your destinies were linked with ours not to be separated.40

Joseph and Ellen believed that the emotional connection between their family and Heard also bound together their financial interests, paving the way for their partnership in Augustine Heard & Co. Emotion provided the means for establishing the new firm: the Coolidges capitalized on familiar feeling between Heard and the entire Coolidge family to justify uniting their financial interests. The couple revealed that emotion provided the motivation for the new firm by explaining Joseph’s actions through his emotional, not financial, needs. Being ousted from Russell & Co. was a blow to Coolidge’s pride, manhood, and professional reputation. He explained that his motivation for forming a new firm was not financial: “I have yet 200,000 dls [dollars], but if I came home I should never be able to hold up my head among business men,” he told Heard. “I must be true to myself, and notwithstanding my own feelings, do that which is just to my own character.”41 Coolidge could easily have returned to Boston comfortably with that amount, but he chose not to. Overwhelmed with frustration and indignation, he felt his reputation was at stake, and wanted revenge. So, he used affective language to mobilize Heard’s respected reputation (not to mention financial assets) for his cause. Coolidge wrote lengthy, impassioned letters designed to evoke sympathy in Heard, casting himself as unfairly emasculated and in need of his “Brother’s” help to recoup his 40 41 38 39

Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, November 29, 1839, HFBR. Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 22, 1840, ibid. Ellen Coolidge to Augustine Heard, January 30, 1842, ibid. Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 19, 1839, ibid.

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manhood and professional reputation. Both Joseph and Ellen reported that his former partners had acted in an unmanly manner, far from the model merchant masculinity that Coolidge saw as grounded in honor, integrity, and transparency (the very qualities, it should be noted, that his Russell & Co. partners accused him of lacking, and not without evidence). Coolidge labeled his former partners as “wanting  … in common courtesy,” and the ringleader of his ousting, John C. Green, as “a clever scoundrel” whose devious plots against Coolidge showed “proofs of his injustice, meanness, and dishonesty.”42 Coolidge depicted the other partners as fearful and cowed by Green, unmanly in their inability to act independently of him.43 The only former partner with whom Coolidge remained on fairly good terms was Robert Bennet Forbes, whom Joseph repeatedly described as “manly,” “gentlemanlike,” and “honourable.”44 Ellen supported her husband’s unfavorable depictions of his Russell & Co. partners. She cast Joseph as “a man of honour” going up against “treacherous” and “vain” men of “deadly malice” and “cold ingratitude” who made him feel “ill-used in a most unfair and ungentlemanly manner.”45 The Coolidges claimed that these ungentlemanly men had unjustly attacked Joseph’s merchant manhood. They had stamped him with “the brand of incompetence,” treating him with pity and disdain, like “a poor creature” who “never ha[d] been good for any thing.”46 Highlighting his feelings of emasculation, Coolidge worried that returning to Boston after being expelled from Russell & Co. would make him look like “a whipped schoolboy.”47 He also feared that his former partners publicly challenged his industry and independence—two cornerstones of early nineteenth-century masculinity. Several partners claimed that Coolidge was lazy and disruptive, and that he had not earned the small fortune his partnership terms accrued to him. Such jabs at Coolidge’s parasitic relationship with the firm created, in Ellen’s words, “his determination to prove to the world that he is not the useless do-little that his partners represent him [as], fattening on their labours.”48 Both Joseph and Ellen thus deployed gendered language to capture his emotional state of embarrassment and shame, as well as anger and vindictiveness. Lacking a commerce of affection with his former partners, Coolidge sought an investment of sympathy and trust from Heard. Historian Toby Ditz has argued that eighteenth-century merchants humiliated by financial failure used letter-writing to try to reconstitute a more respectable self, “to use the transaction between writer and reader to recuperate a fragile masculinity.”49 Though Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, January 5, 1840, ibid. Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 19, 1839 and January 5, 1840, ibid. 44 Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 10 and 19, 1839, ibid. Also see Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, November and December 15, 1839, ibid. 45 Ellen Coolidge to Augustine Heard, January 31 and 2, 1840, ibid. 46 Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 19, 1839, ibid.; Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 10, 1839, ibid.; Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 15, 1839, ibid. 47 Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 10, 1839, ibid. 48 Ellen Coolidge to Augustine Heard, January 2, 1840, ibid. 49 Ditz, “Shipwrecked,” 79. Several of the gendered patterns Ditz identified among eighteenthcentury Philadelphia merchants also ring true in Coolidge’s conflict with Russell & Co. partners in the 1830s, suggesting that gender (and manhood) remained an important character qualifier in nineteenth-century merchant culture. This continuity suggests that emotion and manhood cannot be disentangled when studying the business history of merchants. 42 43

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he had not failed financially, Coolidge felt unmanned by his former partners’ actions and accusations, and his letters to Heard similarly reflected an effort to reconstitute manly qualities. He described his plans for Augustine Heard & Co. as a means of convincing people that he was hard-working, independent, and creditworthy—a competent merchant as well as an autonomous, respectable man. He wrote in militaristic terms of preparing to “do battle” and “make a fight” against his foes at Russell & Co.50 Ellen used similar language, writing that she tried to advise her husband “like a soldier’s wife, trembling and cowardly, but not daring to advise an act of cowardice in her husband.”51 For a brief moment, Coolidge even vengefully dreamed of creating a rival firm with exactly the same name that would surpass his former partners in wealth and influence. The spite behind this idea is clear in a letter he sent to Heard explaining why he ultimately decided not to name their new firm “Russell & Co.” “[I]n a little time,” he explained to Heard, “it would be known who was in each house, and the business would be given to the men, and not to the name.”52 Despite this evidence of rash, foolhardy impulses, Joseph and Ellen took pains to assure Heard that, notwithstanding Coolidge’s “impetuous” temper, his decision to establish a new firm was not an unmanly fit of passion, but a reasoned and calm attempt to recoup his manhood.53 Coolidge repeatedly assured Heard that during his negotiations with Russell & Co., “I have never once lost my temper, or treated anyone otherwise than in a gentlemanlike manner,” and “I have never for one moment, by word or look, acted otherwise than with perfect calmness, respect, and temper.”54 Such assurances show Coolidge’s understanding that manly power—even, or perhaps especially, when preparing to “do battle” with one’s professional enemies—was rooted, in part, in emotional control. A fit of passion was not a sign of the honorable man he so desperately wanted to prove himself to be. Coolidge’s insistence also underscores a crucial point made by the editors of this volume: claims to reason and rationality in the business realm are often affective performances in and of themselves. Joseph Coolidge also took pains to demonstrate to Heard that he understood the foolhardy emotional and economic consequences of his abandoned plan to create a rival Russell & Co. He acknowledged, “it would produce bitter feelings of jealousy and animosity” such that “a spirit of rivalry which would be injurious in a business point of view, would exist where I wanted to have a friendly feeling, if possible.”55 To further his business prospects, Coolidge knew he had to temper his anger and cultivate some semblance of a commerce of affection with his former partners. Indeed, Coolidge’s letters to Heard reveal he sought to prove that he belonged in the emotional economy that publications such as Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine insisted merchants needed to succeed professionally. Coolidge was not just starting a new firm with Augustine Heard, he was constituting a new commerce of affection after being cast out of Russell & Co.’s circle of trust. 52 53 54 55 50 51

Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 19, 1839, HFBR. Ellen Coolidge to Augustine Heard, January 2, 1840, ibid. Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 19, 1839, ibid. Ellen Coolidge to Augustine Heard, exact date illegible, ibid. Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 10 and 19, 1839, ibid. Joseph Coolidge to Augustine Heard, December 29, 1839, ibid.

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Ellen and Joseph Coolidge believed that evidence of the “unfair and ungentlemanly” treatment Coolidge received at the hands of his former partners justified his choice to strike up a new business in China, dragging Heard with him. How could Coolidge bear to return to Boston if it meant living in anxiety and embarrassment, every day facing people who believed he was not only an incompetent merchant, but a weak and dependent man—“a whipped schoolboy,” no less? No friend and fellow businessman could allow him to accept such a miserable fate. So, Coolidge asked Heard to “pour a precious balm on his wounded spirit” by joining him in China—partners in business and, Joseph hoped, life. Augustine Heard & Co. was thus born out of two gendered emotional factors: Joseph Coolidge’s anger and anxiety over his wounded manhood, and his affectionate, brotherly bond with Augustine Heard, which he mobilized to gather the capital—both material and social—to begin a new firm. Without considering masculinity and emotion, we cannot understand how and why Augustine Heard & Co., one of the largest American firms in China in the nineteenth century, existed at all.

Conclusion Most historians treat Augustine Heard & Co. as a family firm, founded by Augustine Heard and passed on to his nephews. While Joseph Coolidge is typically mentioned as a founding partner, the extent of his early influence is almost always underplayed, if not ignored—perhaps because he left the concern after only four years and, of course, the firm did not bear his name. However, this means that historians have neglected the firm’s roots in Coolidge’s emotional world, particularly his gendered anxiety. The emotional roots of Augustine Heard & Co. suggest we need to consider the extent to which emotion could be an enabling factor in early American capitalism. Augustine Heard & Co. operated in Asia between 1840 and 1877, becoming one of the most influential American firms in the region and, during its peak, turning profits of $200,000 per year. Much of this came from trading opium to Chinese merchants in exchange for tea, silk, porcelain, and other products that could be exported to the United States. Historians must reckon with the fact that emotion—both masculine anxiety and fraternal affection—was a fertile seed from which these ventures sprouted, bringing profit and commodities to Americans but exacerbating the damaging effects of opium on Chinese society.56 The particulars of Coolidge’s and Heard’s professional experience are certainly not representative of all merchants in the 1830s and 1840s. Not all merchants faced the On the United States and the opium crisis in China, see (among others) Downs, The Golden Ghetto; Jacques M. Downs, “Fair Game: Exploitative Role-Myths and the American Opium Trade,” Pacific Historical Review 41, no. 2 (1971); Fichter, So Great a Proffit; Haddad, America’s First Adventure in China; John Lauritz Larson, Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America’s Railway Age (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Thomas N. Layton, The Voyage of the “Frolic”: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Dael A. Norwood, “Trading in Liberty: The Politics of the American China Trade” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012).

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specific kind of humiliation Coolidge felt when he was cast out of Russell & Co. Not all merchants ventured to the far side of the globe to serve a friend’s emotional needs. And yet, the emotions that drove Coolidge’s business strategy (anxiety, anger, shame, fear of loss) and Heard’s support (brotherly affection, sympathy) were precisely those that the Boston merchant community’s commerce of affection was cultivated to address. Coolidge’s decision to turn in his time of need to a man whom he cared for like a brother—and Heard’s choice to help his friend out of affection, not personal financial need—reflect the same logic other merchants followed in less extreme situations. The pair’s actions in fact reveal just how powerful ideals of merchant masculinity and the need for a commerce of affection were, if merchants grasped for them to navigate seemingly unusual situations. The pair’s relationship tellingly exemplifies what was possible within the conventions of business, emotional expression, and manhood in the first half of the nineteenth century. Even more, the affective roots of Augustine Heard & Co. provide a compelling example of how emotion, not just the unfeeling laws of supply and demand, drove early American capitalism. As Mandy Cooper and Andrew Popp put it in the introduction to this volume, “reason and rationality do not have borders beyond which lie the disordered wilds of feeling.” Emotion in its prescriptive and embodied forms structured early American business. Merchants were not alone in understanding emotional entanglements as economic resources, and emotional production as economically significant. Many Americans relied on emotions to understand the expanding economy and their place within it.57 To see early American capitalism through the eyes of the people who lived it, historians of business and capitalism must pay careful attention to the complex and vibrant emotional economies that underpinned the material market with which modern scholars are more familiar.

Bibliography Archival and Manuscript Sources Elizabeth Heard Papers, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. Forbes Family Business Records, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. Heard Family Business Records, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.

Published Sources “Advice to Men in Debt.” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review. Vol. 2, 1840. Balleisen, Edward J. Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. For more on these economies of emotion, see McCoy, “In Distress.”

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Carnes, Mark C. Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Catalogue of Books of the Mercantile Library Association, of Boston, Together with the Acts of Incorporation and the By-Laws and Regulations Adopted January 1848. Boston: Dickinson Printing House, 1848. Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Cox, Thomas H. “‘Money, Credit, and Strong Friends’: Warren Delano II and the Importance of Social Networking in the Old China Trade,” in The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700–1840, ed. Paul Van Dyke and Susan Schopp, 132–47. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018. Ditz, Toby L. “Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia.” The Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (1994): 51–80. Doerflinger, Thomas M. A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Downs, Jacques M. “Fair Game: Exploitative Role-Myths and the American Opium Trade.” Pacific Historical Review 41, no. 2 (1971): 133–49. Downs, Jacques M. The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784–1844. 2nd edn. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. Dwyer, Erin Austin. Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Edwards, Charles. “What Constitutes a Merchant.” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review. Vol. 1, no. 4 (1839). Farber, Bernard. Guardians of Virtue: Salem Families in 1800. New York: Basic Books, 1972. Farrell, Betty G. Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Fichter, James R. So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed AngloAmerican Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Finley, Alexandra J. An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Forbes, John Murray. Reminiscences of John Murray Forbes, vol. I, ed. Sarah Forbes Hughes. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1903. Godbeer, Richard. The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Haddad, John R. America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Hansen, Karen V. “‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other’: Masculinity and Intimate Friendship in Antebellum New England,” in Men’s Friendships, ed. Peter M. Nardi, 35–58. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, Inc., 1992. Hartigan-O’Connor, Ellen. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Hemphill, Katie M. Bawdy City: Commercial Sex and Regulation in Baltimore, 1790–1915. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Hopkinson, Judge Joseph. “Lecture on Commercial Integrity.” The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, Conducted by Freeman Hunt. Vol. 1, no. 5 (1839).

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Jabour, Anya. “Male Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends.” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 1 (2000): 83–111. Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Kann, Mark E. A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Kerber, Linda K. “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History.” The Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9–39. Larson, John Lauritz. Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America’s Railway Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001. Layton, Thomas N. The Voyage of the “Frolic”: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Lepler, Jessica. The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Lockwood, Stephen. Augustine Heard & Co., 1858–1862: American Merchants in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Luskey, Brian P. On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Mann, Bruce. Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. McCoy, Laura C. “In Distress: A Marketplace of Feeling in the Early American Republic.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2020. Nelson, Dana D. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Norwood, Dael A. “Trading in Liberty: The Politics of the American China Trade.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012. Pearsall, Sarah M. S. Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pflugrad-Jackisch, Amy. Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Porter, Kenneth Wiggins. The Jacksons and the Lees: Two Generations of Massachusetts Merchants, 1765–1844. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937. Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Sandage, Scott. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Sergeant, John. “Mercantile Character.” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine. Vol. 3, no. 1 (July 1840): 2–22. Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Sturgis, Tim. Rivalry in Canton: The Control of Russell and Co., 1838–1840 and the Founding of Augustine Heard and Co, 1840. London: The Warren Press, 2006. Sullivan, William. A Discourse, delivered before the Boston Mercantile Association, and Others, assembled on their Invitation, on Tuesday Evening, February 7, 1832. Boston: Carter & Hendee, 1832.

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Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990. van Dyke, Paul, ed. Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling, and Diplomacy on the South China Coast. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. van Dyke, Paul and Susan Schopp, eds. The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700–1840. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018. Van, Rachel Tamar. “Free Trade & Family Values: Kinship Networks and the Culture of Early American Capitalism.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011. Waters, Thomas Franklin. Augustine Heard and His Friends. Salem: Newcomb and Gauss, 1916. Watson, Samuel J. “Flexible Gender Roles during the Market Revolution: Family, Friendship, Marriage, and Masculinity among U.S. Army Officers, 1815–1846.” Journal of Social History 29, no. 1 (1995): 81–106. Webster, Fletcher, ed. The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, vol. I. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1857. Yacavone, Donald. “‘Surpassing the Love of Women’: Victorian Manhood and the Language of Fraternal Love,” in A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender, eds. Donald Yacavone and Laura McCall, 195–221. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Zabin, Serena. Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Zakim, Michael. Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

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From Scotland with Love: The Creation of the Japanese Whisky Industry, 1918–1979 Alison J. Gibb, University of Glasgow, and Niall G. MacKenzie, University of Glasgow

Introduction This chapter tells the story of Rita and Masataka Taketsuru, a couple who through a remarkable international marriage helped establish what we now know as the modernday Japanese whisky industry in the early twentieth century. From marrying against the wishes of their parents, to becoming known as the mother and father of Japanese whisky, their story has been subject to various popular treatments—a television series, a play, numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and the basis of global marketing campaigns for Nikka Whisky. Central to their story is an analysis of Rita’s experience of life in Japan during a period of significant global upheaval, including the Second World War and the advent of atomic warfare, when she found herself, in effect, behind enemy lines in a country that had only relatively recently opened to Westerners. Letters exchanged between Rita and her family throughout this period reveal the until now hidden story of both the emotional rewards and trials of her marriage to Masataka and the enabling role she played in the establishment and growth of Nikka Whisky and the Japanese whisky industry. Business historians have written extensively on business growth but have paid less attention to the sometimes hidden factors that facilitate such growth, including the personal costs, challenges, and relationship dynamics involved in establishing and growing a business, family and non-family. As well as revealing insights into emotions and personal relationships, these hidden dimensions also open up other areas of enquiry. In related areas, such as family business studies, scholars have identified the role of family members (particularly women) not officially employed within the business as being critical to success,1 and social labor in the form of “unseen work” has become a significant feature of many feminist critiques of economics and Leona Achtenhagen, Kajsa Haag, and F. Welter, “The Role of Gender in Family-Business Research: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” in Women Entrepreneurship in Family Business, ed. Vanessa Ratten, Leo-Paul Dana, and Veland Ramadani (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 16–45.

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work. However, business historians have been slow to pick up on these challenges.2 Similarly, the role of gender and feminist studies have in the past been identified as underdeveloped in business history.3 In our analysis we address some of these issues through the prism of emotions and offer insights into areas that business historians have hitherto largely neglected. Based on archive materials held at the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Business Archive, including letters from Rita to her family in Scotland, we analyze the private side of the Taketsurus’ relationship, uncovering how it affected and was affected by Masataka’s business ambitions. In doing so, we demonstrate how, through her work and the social connections she forged in her adoptive homeland, Rita was key to the story of Nikka Whisky’s establishment and the development of the Japanese whisky industry.  Her support of Masataka in the early days of his Scotch whiskymaking apprenticeship in Scotland continued on their move to Japan where, despite significant challenges of ill health and cultural adaptation, Rita provided her husband with financing, employment opportunities, social connections, and emotional encouragement. Rita’s role went beyond that of the encouraging wife. Instead, she was a central character in enabling the early development and eventual success of Nikka Whisky in what was, and remains, a heavily male-dominated industry.

A University Love Story In December 1918, Masataka Taketsuru traveled to Scotland to enroll at the University of Glasgow and the Royal Technical College (now the University of Strathclyde). Masataka was working as a graduate chemist for Kihei Abe of the Settsu Shuzo company (then the largest drinks company in Japan) and was dispatched to Scotland to learn how Scotch whisky was made. At the age of twenty-four, he arrived in cold, dark Glasgow, having visited several wineries in San Francisco en route. The son of a sake brewer, Masataka was expected to follow into the family business, but he had other ideas. Mr. Abe wanted Masataka to learn how to make Scotch whisky so he could develop the company’s portfolio of offerings in Japan. Shortly after arriving in Glasgow, Masataka met Ella Cowan, a medical student enrolled at the University of Glasgow and Rita Cowan’s sister. The Cowan family had recently experienced the death of the patriarch, who had run a medical practice in their hometown of Kirkintilloch and were facing straitened financial circumstances as a result. By March 1919, Masataka was lodging with the Cowans to help with their finances. Mastaka later wrote of his and Rita’s meeting, saying: “I was attracted to Rita immediately. In Rita’s case, she later told me that at first she felt compassion for me, studying on my own. Compassion which later turned into romance.”4 During this time, Masataka enrolled in the University of Gabrielle Durepos, Alan McKinlay, and Scott Taylor, “Narrating Histories of Women at Work: Archives, Stories, and the Promise of Feminism.” Business History 59, no. 8 (2017): 1261–79. 3 Angel Kwolek-Folland, Incorporating Women: A History of Woman and Business in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1998). 4 “Masataka Taketsuru: Rita and Campbeltown,” www.nomunication.jp [accessed September 20, 2022]. 2

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Glasgow’s 1919 summer chemistry program, as well as at the Royal Technical College, studying part-time in organic and inorganic chemistry. Masataka spent much of his time in the university library and the Mitchell Library translating into Japanese J. A. Nettleton’s The Manufacture of Spirit as Conducted in the Distilleries of the United Kingdom, which he would later use as an aid in developing whisky-making in Japan. In the spring of 1919, whilst waiting for the summer course to start, Masataka traveled to Elgin in Northern Scotland to seek an apprenticeship with Nettleton (the author of the book he was translating) but found the cost too prohibitive. Instead, he secured a five-day apprenticeship at Longmorn Distillery in Speyside, near Elgin, to learn malt whisky production, as well as an apprenticeship at Bo’ness Grain Distillery, in the Central Belt, with James Calder (a contact of Professor Forsyth Wilson, of the Royal College of Technology) and at Gartloch Grain Distillery, to learn Coffey grain whisky production.5 It is important to note that at the time Scotch whisky producers were not particularly concerned about sharing the secrets of their production with a foreigner—blended whisky was (and remains) the dominant category in the industry, so learning how to make that was therefore off-limits to Masataka as a commercially sensitive undertaking. Masataka attempted to secure apprenticeships at several blending houses but was roundly rejected by each. The individual single malts that were being produced on the other hand were still subject to the skill of the blender in creating the final product and were not a product of particular economic value in themselves at that time. Thus, his apprenticeships at individual distilleries became the way he learned how to make single malt Scotch whisky and directly informed his approach when he moved back to Japan. In November of the same year, he journeyed to France to visit wineries, before returning with a gift for Rita of a bottle of perfume. Rita reciprocated with a copy of Robert Burns’ poetry, with an inscription reading “to my dearest Japanese friend, my favourite poetical works.” Around the same time, Rita confided to Masataka that her boyfriend, who had been posted to the Middle East during the First World War, had died in Damascus.6 It is unclear whether this had any bearing on their relationship, but the exchange of gifts and recognition of friendship in the letters suggests that if not a couple at that point, they were certainly on the cusp of becoming so. Shortly after the gift exchange, at Christmas, Masataka proposed to Rita. International marriages were rare at this time, and even more so in Japan, where Masataka’s parents had arranged several potential brides for him. Upon learning of his intention to ask Rita to marry him, his mother sent him a letter: No matter what happens, DO NOT marry a blue-eyed English. We quit the sake business and passed it to relatives for you, and let you go to England. Now it’s time to accept our request. There are plenty of decent choices for wives here, let me know and I can immediately send omiai [matchmaking] pictures if you like.7 Masataka Taketsuru, On the Production Methods of Pot Still Whisky (Edinburgh: Zeticula Books, 2021), xii. 6 Olive Checkland, Japanese Whisky, Scotch Blend (Newbattle: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998), 21. 7 “Masataka Taketsuru: Grain Whisky & Marriage to Rita,” www.nomunication.jp [accessed September 20, 2022]. 5

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At the ages of twenty-five and twenty-three respectively, Masataka and Rita eloped and married in the Calton registry office in Glasgow on January 8, 1920.8 Whether it was youthful impetuousness or something else, their decision would change both their lives in ways that neither likely foresaw. Their wedding was not particularly well received and parents on both sides were surprised and disappointed by this decision. The new couple did, however, receive support from Ella, Rita’s sister, and Mr. Abe, who were both in favor of the union. Indeed, Mr. Abe sought out Masataka’s parents and spent some time persuading them to support the marriage, eventually succeeding. While Masataka’s parents were concerned about him marrying a foreigner, Rita’s mother was concerned about losing her eldest daughter to a life overseas. Such concerns and anxieties would later characterize much of the correspondence between the two. Very soon after marrying, Rita accompanied Masataka on another internship, at Campbeltown, on the west coast of Scotland. In Campbeltown, Masataka apprenticed with Peter Margach Innes, manager of the Hazelburn Distillery, who also taught him blending skills that were to be critically important to his eventual approach to whisky distillation in Japan. During this time Masataka spent most of his days at the distillery whilst Rita stayed at home— later in her life Rita would look back on this time as the carefree early days of their adventure together and as a relief from the negativity surrounding their wedding.9 In Campbeltown, Rita and Masataka stayed in a small apartment next to the distillery until May 1920, when they set off for their new life together in Japan, via the USA, arriving in November of the same year.

Early Days in Japan When Rita and Masataka disembarked in Kobe in late 1920, Japan was in a period of modernization. Emperor Taisho had ascended to the throne in 1912 and was driving a modern, more democratic agenda. In the university cities, like Tokyo, Western-style clothes, café culture, music, film, and theater had taken hold, but many places still held to centuries of tradition. The dinner held in their honor and to welcome them back to Japan was Rita’s first experience of this evolving Japanese culture. Only one other woman was present, wearing the traditional kimono. The rest of the attendees were male, most wearing Western suits, but with some in traditional Japanese dress. The dinner was held in a room of Western styling and a mix of Japanese and Western food was served. Rita found the experience exhausting. At the time she spoke no Japanese and the only other English speaker in the room was Masataka.10 Mr. Abe, who had traveled back to Japan with Rita and Masataka, arranged, via telegram from the ship, a house for them in Tezukayama, Osaka. The house had traditional Japanese features, but a Western-style toilet.11 On settling in Osaka, Rita immediately began attempting to adapt to Japanese life, including changing her GUAS ACCN 2102/2/28. Checkland, Japanese Whisky. 26. 10 Ibid., 44. 11 Masataka Taketsuru, My History, trans. Graeme McNee (Tokyo: Nikkei, 1968). 8 9

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behavior to become a Japanese wife. As advised by Masataka, she learned how to cook Japanese food and immediately enrolled for and attended conversational Japanese lessons, eventually becoming a very good Japanese speaker (albeit with a thick Osaka dialect), although she could never read or write in Japanese.12 Over the years she would often wear the kimono and she also quickly adopted a version of the Japanese tradition of adding “san” as a polite ending to names, referring to Masataka as Massan from then on and throughout their relationship. Shortly after arriving in Osaka, Rita set about looking for work. She handwrote her curriculum vitae, dated March 20, 1921,13 with the intention of teaching English and/or piano at one of the local international schools. Not long thereafter she started working at St. Andrews Middle School (now Momoyama University) and Tezukayamagakuin (now Tezukayama Gakuin University) in Osaka, teaching English, a result, probably, of connections she had already made with other British ex-patriates. Whilst in Osaka she had regular contact with British missionaries and the wives of wealthy Japanese businessmen to whom she taught English. These social connections to wealthy businessmen would prove critical to the development of what was to become Nikka Whisky. In his autobiography, Masataka details how he began working for Mr. Abe and Settsu Shuzo, but the economic downturn led the company to reconsider its plans to make authentically produced Scotch whisky in Japan, forcing Masataka to instead produce a range of artificially flavored spirits. Moreover, Settsu Shuzo no longer had the appetite to invest in a new venture to make malt whisky, meaning Masataka would not be able to realize his dream with the company. Disappointed with this decision, in 1922 Masataka resigned his position, with no job to go to and no plan.14 In his autobiography, Masataka remembers this as a happy time, despite having given up his dream of making malt whisky, adopting what he called the life of a “ronin”—an old feudal Japanese term referring to a wandering samurai with no lord or master.15 Directionless and nursing what seemed to be a lost dream, Masataka relied on Rita’s emotional and financial support during this period. Masataka recalls his decision to resign as being “reckless,” as he had no other job arranged, but that Rita was his “salvation,” in that she was still happy to be with him and supportive of his ambition.16 Rita had already taken work as an English teacher, as well as giving private piano lessons, and it was through her close relationship with the wife of the principal of St. Andrews school, where she taught, that Masataka secured a job as a chemistry teacher. Rita’s enabling of Masataka’s ambitions was a consistent feature of their relationship. In 1923 Masataka was approached by Shinjiro Torii, the president of a drinks company called Kotobuki-ya that would later become Suntory. Kotobuki-ya was enjoying a fertile period of growth thanks to its popular Akadam Port Wine, but much like Settsu Shuzo before him, Torii had plans for diversifying into malt whisky production. Torii had heard of Masataka’s training in making Scotch and wanted to produce a Japanese equivalent. Masataka was excited at the prospect and signed a ten-year contract with Checkland, Japanese Whisky, 50. GUAS ACCN 2102/2/57. 14 Taketsuru, My History. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 12 13

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Torii on an annual salary of 4,000 Japanese yen (around $2,000 in 1923 prices).17 Tasked with the job of building the first whisky distillery in Japan, Shinjiro and Masataka eventually settled on Yamazaki, halfway between Osaka and Kyoto, after Masataka had investigated the location and water quality. Masataka was charged with every aspect of the development of the new distillery, from sourcing equipment to the design of the building. Masataka’s dream of being able to make Japanese whisky according to Scotch principles was closer to being realized than ever before. 1924 was a year of mixed fortunes for the young couple. The ground-breaking ceremony for the new distillery took place in April that year. During the planning and construction of the new distillery, Masataka had been responsible for everything himself, relying heavily on the notebooks he kept whilst studying in Scotland. This was the start of many long hours he would spend making whisky, leaving Rita at home. Rita and Masataka were to have no children of their own, and she experienced a miscarriage in 1924, reportedly caused by the teaching work she was undertaking.18 Shortly thereafter she quit her job to become a full-time housewife, supporting Masataka in his endeavors to establish the new distillery. Rita returned to Scotland only twice after she moved to Japan. First in 1925, when she initially traveled alone, remaining with her family for eight months, before being joined by Masataka, who was in Scotland quality testing his Japanese whisky with his Scottish tutors. Shortly after visiting Scotland both Rita and Masataka wrote to her family in Scotland upon the news of her sister Lucy’s wedding. Masataka recounted how hectic life had become for him, saying, “I am so busy just now and my mind can’t settle for writing. That’s the reason I didn’t write till now since I came back. Tell Mother that I’ll write nice letter soon.”19 In 1929 Masataka’s dream of releasing his own Japanese whisky made according to the same principles of Scotch became a reality with Suntory’s first whisky Shirofuda [White Label]. In 1930, Rita and Masataka adopted a baby girl, Fusako, who was given the name Rima. Rita returned to Scotland for the final time in 1931, when she traveled with Rima and introduced her to her Scottish family. Family photographs show a happy Rita with her Japanese daughter sitting amongst her family in a traditional Scottish living room, which must have been both familiar and yet also now alien to Rita, who had immersed herself in Japanese culture over the previous ten years.

Taking Risks and Starting Again By 1930 Masataka had been asked to run Kotobuki-ya/Suntory’s brewery operations in Yokohama, which he considered a demotion from being a distiller. He and Rita, with a shared clarity of purpose, decided Masataka was not a brewer but a distiller. By 1934 he had decided he had met his obligations in the ten-year contract he had signed and quit to start his own business. This was yet another critical moment in the Taketsurus’ David Challis, Archival Currency Converter 1916–1940, https://canvasresources-prod.le.unimelb. edu.au/projects/CURRENCY_CALC/. 18 Checkland, Scottish Whisky, 50. 19 Rita and Masataka to Lucy. 26/01/26, GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. 17

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lives together. The initial leap of getting married, moving across the world to Japan together, then very quickly leaving the position with Settsu Shuzo, before getting the opportunity to start again with Suntory, followed by the apparent demotion, might have put off many from taking any further risks. It seems Rita and Masataka drew considerable strength from their togetherness at this time. Conscious of the risk of offending Shinjiro by too quickly attempting to become a direct competitor, Masataka decided to start an apple juice/wine company in Hokkaido on the North Island of Japan, where there was a plentiful supply of cheap apples (and a remarkably similar climate to Scotland). The goal was to be able to sell the apple juice products and, in the meantime, develop the business on its way to producing whisky. Masataka established the Dai Nihon Kaju Kabushiki Kaisha (the Great Japan Juice Company) in 1934, which would be renamed Nikka Whisky in 1952. The name Nikka was derived from Ni-hon Ka-ju Ka-bushiki. Rita’s social connections were extremely important to the new venture; her time teaching English to wives of wealthy Japanese businessmen put her in contact with potential sources of investment capital—two of three businessmen who initially invested in Masataka’s new venture were husbands of the wives to whom Rita had taught English.20 Recognizing Masataka’s training, talent and drive, they invested in his new business, granting him access to the capital needed to establish a factory in Hokkaido, and helping him secure a loan of one million yen from the Sumitomo Bank. Masataka later recognized Rita’s social connections in his autobiography and wrote of how critical they were to getting Nikka Whisky off the ground.21 The boundaries between business and personal lives were further erased with the starting of the new venture. Working long hours to establish the new factory, Masataka was often absent from home, which soon became the norm in their relationship. Rita also faced the challenge of being a foreigner raising a Japanese daughter, often by herself. Rita regularly wrote to her family in Scotland about her life in Japan and the difficulties she faced integrating into a foreign culture and supporting her husband and family. From a young age Rima became very aware that her foreign mother was different, and this affected their relationship. In July 1938 Rita’s mother wrote to her: “Rita, I’m not happy when I hear that you listen to uncomplimentary remarks when with Rima … I suppose in all countries the foreigner has to suffer.”22 Such sentiments were to become a feature of many of the letters Rita exchanged with her family about her experience of living in Japan. In her letters, Rita talked about cooking Rima both Japanese and Western food, which Rima enjoyed, and how she hated sending Rima to school in the deep snow in winter. Rima lived with Rita and Masataka in Yoichi until 1950 when, aged twenty, she left to train as a nurse. The strain in the relationship manifested itself after this in increasing distance—Rita reported that Rima only contacted her and Masataka when she needed money.23 They would reconcile towards the end of Rita’s life, and Rima lived with Rita when she was in Zushi. Checkland, Scottish Whisky, 60. Taketsuru, My History. 22 Checkland, Scottish Whisky, 53. 23 Ibid., 50. 20 21

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War broke out in Europe before Asia. Nonetheless, from 1939, Rita’s family were very concerned. In late 1940 Rita received a letter from her younger sister, Lucy, urging her to come home: And what of you? It looks as if the whole world will be mixed up soon … I want to tell you this that if you can possibly come home do; but come alone. You have more than kept your side of the bargain. I admire you terribly but you say yourself that Rima does not feel proud of you and so I want you to know that if you ever feel you want to and you can manage it, come here. I am making enough now to support you and anyway you would not need to be idle, you could help me.24

However, Rita remained, only to be cut off from her Scottish family completely when the war reached Japan. Naturally, the outbreak of war was a particularly stressful time for Rita. Still, despite being an alien from a belligerent nation, she was not subject to the internments that many faced, probably due to a combination of being a naturalized Japanese citizen, and Masataka being able to establish his company as a key industrial partner of the Japanese army by providing them with spirits. However, she was subjected to restricted movements. During this time Rita was allowed to stay at the family home but was not allowed to send letters to her family in Scotland. As a result, her principal connection with the outside world was a radio, which then became an item of suspicion to Japanese authorities, who raided their home in Yoichi suspecting she was using it to communicate with British intelligence services, much to both Rita and Masataka’s horror.25 The suspicion of Rita as a foreigner in Japan was not confined to wartime, however. She recounts being shunned in shops, followed by the police when she went out, and having xenophobic abuse shouted at her for being a white westerner. She bemoaned that she did not look Japanese enough, despite strenuous efforts to fit in: “What’s wrong with me? I became Japanese in my heart, I do wish that my hair and eyes were dark and that my nose was smaller.”26 Rita faced much of this very largely alone. Masataka was busy with his new business, which, after an initial false start with apple juice products, soon began to grow in size. In 1940 he released his first whisky as a business owner—calling it Nikka Whisky. This marked the first phase of the growth of Masataka’s whisky business into what would become the second largest whisky company in Japan, after Suntory.

Letters Home from Post-War Japan, 1945–1961 As the war ended, Masataka was fifty years old, and Rita was forty-eight. Recognizing that there was no immediate heir to the business, in 1945 they adopted Masataka’s nephew Takeshi—a twenty-year-old engineering student and the son of Masataka’s older sister.27 The adoption made a significant difference to Rita’s situation. Her Ibid., 55. Taketsuru, My History. 26 Checkland, Scottish Whisky, 78. 27 Ibid., 81. 24 25

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relationship with Rima was strained at the best of times, but Takeshi adored her, and she him. He was a doting son who, whilst working with his father to grow the whisky company, also took time to attend to his mother in ways that Masataka increasingly did not. In an interview conducted in 1993, Takeshi recalls Rita as being a very kind mother and telling him that they should have adopted him earlier.28 Rita’s mother passed away in 1956, which begat a series of insights into her reflections on her life decisions via letters to her sister. She wrote in one letter that: “Of course I said goodbye in my heart years ago but still I feel the world lonely without her.”29 She talked longingly of missing her mother and of letters from her, and of how she retained a trunk full of them. Rita keenly felt the distance from home in this period and became more conscious of how disconnected she was from home, perhaps prompted by facets of her life in Japan, including her health and the expectations of her as a Japanese housewife. She wrote in one letter: I have every letter she has written me since I came to Japan. She really was a wonderful letter writer. She always wrote as if we were talking together and had such a way of telling the small news which means so much when so far away. If only I could have come home once more. Just there was the difficulty of a Japanese family going to England and then the exchange made it impossible. The planes are so expensive and boats not much better with tips added and so on. I did make several attempts to save up but it is no good. Any how it is too late in this world.30

Towards the end of her life Rita was beset by a multitude of health problems, including liver disease, tuberculosis, and a benign tumor in her throat. In and out of hospital in different locations in Japan, she wrote regularly to her sister on a series of matters, from her thoughts on the political situation in Poland to her grandchildren. Her health problems were serious, but not always given sufficient attention by Masataka, whose focus was firmly on his rapidly growing business. Not only was Rita often left alone with her health problems, but Masataka retained expectations of being served by Rita when he was at home, with no thought to her illness: Massan is expected home on 22 or 23 November [1956]. He has only been here for ten days since Spring. Takeshi is worrying as I may have to get up as his cooking is special and he makes no allowances for illness.31

And: I was hoping to go to Zushi this month [April 1956] for more treatment and Massan promised to take me. However he phones to say he was leaving on that Interview with Takeshi Taketsuru, 24/09/93. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Letter from Rita to her sister Lucy, 20/11/56. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 28 29

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evening’s plane and would bring me next time. It is always next time with him. It makes Takeshi so mad. Last year the doctors said if I had gone 2 years sooner I had a big chance of being cured.32

There was a stoic acceptance on Rita’s part of her health situation and lot in life, but an acute sense of loneliness was ever present in the letters: Thank you for your letter written on my birthday. I spent it here in hospital … it was pickling season that finished me … doctors managed an x-ray here of my worst lung was bad since 4 years ago [sic]. Now it has spread right down my back so here I am. Today is Christmas and I have not heard from my family. I was foolish enough to hope for a phone[call] but it is too late now.33 I had been in Zushi for my chest treatment since June but I always feel dog tired and then I am alone. I am always alone. Massan was in Hokkaido. He was in Hokkaido all August because of the heat here. It is a lonely business getting old, but I try to remember that I made my own life. I am mainly always cheerful so don’t imagine me down in the dumps. I am so thankful for Takeshi. He really is a dear son.34

The loneliness Rita felt is clear from the above excerpts, but she was also contending with a marriage that was increasingly strained. International marriage was a rare occurrence when Rita and Masataka first met. However, on moving to Japan their relationship started to settle into a highly patriarchal pattern, typical of Japan, but also of many Western cultures and societies, with Rita occupying an increasingly domestic role within the home in Yoichi, where she was expected to attend to Masataka’s food and keep house while he worked across Japan developing and growing his business. They spent a great deal of time apart, with their son Takeshi similarly busy but still attentive to Rita. Rita, in the meantime, spent increasingly more time with Takeshi’s wife, Utako, and the grandchildren. Rita wrote lovingly about Utako, and in one letter discussed how the latter discovered Masataka’s apparent infidelity: She has to help Massan pack when he travels and lately when unpacking she found a lady’s set of cream not new. It must have got in by mistake and Utako was quite upset. I told her to put it back in and say nothing and it would land with the owner next time Massan went on a trip … It’s so funny I know how things are and he almost seems to hate me at times … Such is life. Do write when you can, even ½ a page. I get so many letters that my heart always gives a jump when I see your writing.35 34 35 32 33

Rita to Lucy, 26/04/56. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 25/12/56. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 17/10/1957. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 17/10/1957. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15.

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Rita accepted the discovery, more so than did Utako, who was upset on her behalf. Again, Rita’s stoicism became apparent. By now her health was declining quite rapidly and she appears to have become accustomed to Masataka’s absences. She was largely unsurprised at the discovery of probable affairs, and instead focused on her health and the challenges it brought her: All doctors last two years say I do not have cancer … only it has gotten bigger and is a nuisance when I swallow. The pains of the x-ray burns have gone off now and I look and feel fine. Talking of an operation now before it gets bigger. Massan is the nut in the machinery. He won’t agree to have it out. Massan has put a stop to all visits so believe me the days are quite long and dull … Just now Massan is in Hokkaido, enjoying himself with Takeshi, Utako, and the children.36

It is unclear why Masataka did not allow visitors while Rita was in hospital, but it is clear that she was not in charge of her healthcare arrangements. The relationship with Masataka appears to have become quite strained. She talked at length about how he was rarely present, and when he was, how unhappy she was. For most of the later stages of their relationship Masataka was an absentee provider. Rita wanted for very little materially, but the more quotidian elements of a loving relationship were not present. Massan has been home since the beginning of this month and I wish it were not so but he upsets me always. His room is off mine and he bangs in and out and yells things all the time. He plays mahjong nearly every evening and does not come home until midnight and always drunk. He sleeps until late in the morning and when he wakes he yells “stove” for us to light it … I can’t rest in peace. Since Massan came home I have to be in the kitchen as he wants things which Utako hasn’t cooked yet but she is learning. I am glad your home is so nice. Wish I could see it. I always did hope to see mum’s [home] again but I never could manage.37 Just now Massan is in Hokkaido. My doctor is a very quiet man but he is so surprised at the way I get left on my own. He wanted me to have a nurse and was quite upset at Massan’s going off just now and not talking things over with him. Just Massan is in a hurry.38

The year 1959 was an eventful one for Rita. Her aunt passed away, leaving her and her siblings a sum of money that Rita used to open a local kindergarten in Osaka (which still exists today and is known as Rita’s Kindergarten). In May her sister Lucy visited her in Japan, having used her share of her aunt’s estate to buy a plane ticket to Tokyo. This was the first time the sisters had seen each other in twenty-eight years and Rita was delighted to be reunited. Rita recalled Lucy’s stay in a letter in November that year Rita to Ella and Lucy, 14/11/1957. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 26/03/57. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. 38 Rita to Lucy, 21/03/58. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15.

36 37

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and how she enjoyed it, but that things had returned to normal since: “That is with all the meals here and me in the kitchen.”39 It is unclear if Masataka was present during Lucy’s visit, but he was not after she left. Rita wrote to her sister in December saying: I have not seen Massan for two months. He phoned me on my birthday however. He is very busy with his new factory in Osaka; last week they had 3 days of entertaining notables from all over Japan. It is a very modern building.40

By 1960, Rita’s health was in serious decline and her suspicions about Masataka’s affairs with other women had been confirmed. She found out via a friend that he had a mistress whom he had brought to their house in the past. Again, she reassured her sister not to worry about her and said it was something she had gotten used to. By now she had been unwell for a long time and likely felt like she had no option but to stay in Japan. She had talked in the past about not being able to save and being too unwell to travel. I haven’t been very happy recently as I have found out that Massan really has taken Mr. Miyazaki’s sister. She is divorced as I told you. I always felt uncomfortable when she came to our room and she and Massan drank and got rather chummy or teased each other in a familiar way. Of course I know he has women but in the same house it makes me feel worse. I am quite accustomed to this kind of thing so don’t worry but I do wish it had not been so near home.41 This time I got a cold in February after [Masataka] left in January and was quite ill until middle of March. Then on 20 March a phone came from Massan as he was having an operation for piles in St. Luke’s Hospital and to bring Utako and the children as he wanted to see them. He was the first patient to have whisky in hospital, but the doctors said he was unmanageable and they let him have it. I felt so lost when they had left especially Utako who had acted as a go between when Massan had his fits of temper and help [sic] me a lot.42 There have been times when I keep telling myself to keep my head up and my shoulders back  … He doesn’t stay here much however. He stays somewhere in Tokyo. If he catches a cold or feels ill we have the benefit of his company … This time Takeshi was so busy that he didn’t have one supper even together. He had parties every night and left at 7.30am most mornings. He got here nearly every night at 12 o’clock. However he always came back so happy to be home and full of love for his old Ma. We ate strawberries and ice cream every night, mainly at 1am.43

Rita intimated that Takeshi and Utako provided the emotional support she undoubtedly needed during this time, with the latter in particular acting as a buffer between her and Masataka in his fits of anger. Takeshi clearly doted on his mother throughout and in 41 42 43 39 40

Rita to Lucy, 04/11/59. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 16/12/59. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 27/01/60. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 08/05/60. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 17/06/60. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15.

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many respects provided the love and affection she would otherwise have gone without, given the condition of her marriage. The last few letters that Rita sent to her sister provide further detail on Rita’s health and the nature of her relationship with Masataka. She was demonstrably unwell and told her sister that Masataka had bought an apartment in Tokyo after rejecting her recommendation to do so for years. She talked about how nice the apartment was and how it was exactly what she had been hoping he would do for them. It seems clear from her writing that Masataka was able to compartmentalize their relationship and that he now seemed to perceive her as more of a hindrance to him rather than as a loving wife, even if he still felt loyalty to her. However, he did not tell her he had the apartment. She again found out from a friend. I was in St. Luke’s Hospital for 3 weeks before I came home as I had lost 2 stone and was looking a fright. I was x-rayed and punched and pummelled. I swallowed rubber tubes 3 times for tests on tummy … I have cut down on drinking. No more beer for lunch and only two weak high balls in the evening. Massan of course stayed in Sapporo Hotel for 2 nights. Did I tell you he has rented an apartment in Tokyo? He says he is going to live alone there … I have been trying to get him to get such a place for a long time as I would love to live in a more convenient place [she is in Yoichi at this point], where one can go to a picture once in a while or dine out without a long train journey. He always said it was impossible to get an apartment … He took it without saying anything. I heard about it from Mr. Takeda.44

In what appears to be her last letter to her sister, Rita talked about her home help and how Masataka had taken a dislike to her, which she assumed was because she observed something while Rita was in hospital: Tsunecham is still here but there is some talk of her getting married. Massan has taken a dislike to her for some reason … Sometimes I think Massan thinks she knows too much as she seems to have heard and seen something when I was ill in hospital.45

Rita Taketsuru died in Yoichi on January 17, 1961, aged sixty-four, from cirrhosis of the liver. Masataka was not at her bedside when she died. By now he was more successful than ever—the Crown Prince of Japan had visited his operations and Nikka had become the second largest whisky producer in Japan. The day before Rita died, Masataka wrote to Lucy, letting her know that her sister was close to death. He mentions that he had got her the best care, but there was nothing more they could do: I am very sorry to mention about Rita’s ill. She is very serious. First of all liver trouble, inflamed. This morning she does not speak and all the time she sleeps. Rita to Lucy, 10/10/60. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Rita to Lucy, 10/10/60. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15.

44 45

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I tried my best to recover, called the best doctor, but say that there is no more treatment. If something happen [sic] I’ll telegram.46

It is clear from this letter, and Rita’s correspondence, that by this point in time Masataka viewed his role in their relationship as a non-emotional provider—Rita was financially secure, had support around the house, and the best medical care available. It was a far cry from the lovestruck twenty-year-old partners who traveled together from Scotland, chasing a dream of making Scotch whisky in Japan and of making their lives together. However, he was not unaware of the situation Rita found herself in. In his autobiography, Masataka was acutely aware of the personal cost Rita bore for her decision to accompany him to Japan and her attempts to integrate herself into Japanese society. He recounts her passing thus: In 1961, Rita died suddenly. She married me while studying in the UK and came all the way to Japan, an unknown country, and I could feel sorry for my wife’s fate, she was younger than me and died before me. Nobody knows how deeply I feel sorry for her. The thought that if she had been married to an Englishman, her destiny would have been on a different path, squeezed my heart.47

In some respects, it might be hoped that a relationship that survived such tumultuous conditions and challenges, underpinning the beginnings and growth of a very successful company, might have warranted a happier ending. Certainly, the existing narrative surrounding their relationship, developed and communicated around the world by Nikka Whisky and many whisky writers, largely focuses on the early days and happier outcomes of their marriage—the successful whisky company and brand, the streets and nursery named after Rita, their graves side by side overlooking the distillery in Yoichi, and the allure of an unusual couple’s love winning against the odds. Whilst Rita’s social labor and connections in supporting Masataka in his quest to start a whisky company are recognized by the Nikka Whisky company in its archival holdings and corporate story, the personal correspondence that Rita had with her family members sheds light on the personal relationship challenges and emotional toll Masataka and Nikka’s success took on Rita. Her letters reveal that towards the end of her life they had little meaningful relationship together, with Masataka firmly focused on his business and Rita alone in their homes in Yoichi or Zushi. An undated poem she had neatly written out in her cookbook (held in the Nikka museum), likely towards the end of her life, captures her thoughts on her life and situation in Japan: I used to be brave I used to be bold I used to be pretty At least so I’m told Masataka to Lucy, 16/01/61. GUAS ACCN 2102/1/15. Taketsuru, My History.

46 47

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But now I don’t want to be young It’s good to be old I want to be happy That’s all.48

Conclusion Running through our analysis of Rita and Masataka’s story is the emotional, social, and cultural contexts in which an economic pursuit was undertaken. By looking at the Taketsurus’ story in this way we seek to contribute to a more holistic approach to business history that encompasses the rarely talked about emotional side to business, and a more in-depth appreciation of transnational differences in business and the social milieus in which it operates. In doing so, we demonstrate how, through her own work and social connections in a foreign country, Rita was key in the story of the early stages of Nikka Whisky’s development into the successful brand that it is today. Her emotional and financial support at key junctures in their relationship enabled Masataka’s business success, especially when it looked like hope was lost. However, by the end of her life, her letters reveal the cost she had borne because of her life choices, where she was emotionally constrained by the burden of her circumstances. The emotional distance from her husband and detachment from her family back home, whilst facing serious health challenges, underpinned all of Rita’s later years, resulting in the clear stoicism present in her letters. The loneliness Rita talked of throughout her letters had two manifestations. One was her stoic refusal to return to Scotland, despite the exhortations of her sister and mother. The other was how she threw herself into Japanese culture, embracing dress, cooking, and lifestyle. Rita worked hard behind the scenes supporting Masataka’s efforts to first establish the Yamazaki distillery, then when he struck out on his own, forming what would become Nikka Whisky. It is vital to recognize the importance of Rita’s emotional and social labor to the success of Nikka, as the company itself does in its marketing and archival materials in its museum. It is unclear when their initial closeness subsided, but the travails of life together were particularly pronounced for them—living out an international relationship in a foreign country (for her) must have been extraordinarily difficult, even more so when their countries were at war with each, capped by the horror of the nuclear attacks on Japan. Nevertheless, Rita accepted her situation and did not complain, act with bad temper, or seek revenge; her patience and acceptance of loneliness, spousal infidelity, and poor physical health later in life demonstrate how she faced these challenges alone and with no little courage. Rita’s personal thoughts and challenges remain largely outside the prevailing narrative of the Taketsurus. Rita’s letters offer key insights for our understanding of business growth and its impact on the lives of those supporting and pursuing it. Folded within the story and analysis presented in this chapter are the emotional, social, and Checkland, Scottish Whisky, 90.

48

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cultural contexts in which an unusual couple created a life, first together and then, increasingly, apart. Rita’s thoughts reveal the emotional challenges of an outsider confronting loss and homesickness while also still being in love with her husband and wholly committed to their relationship at almost any cost. She moved across the world, supported her husband’s business endeavors, lived through a world war, and remained in a relationship that was increasingly distantly removed from its early promise. Whilst Rita moved to Japan from Scotland with love, it was stoicism that kept her there until the end of her life.

Archive materials Collection reference: ACCN 2102. The Papers of Olive Checkland. Glasgow University Archive Service, Scottish Business Archive.

Bibliography Achtenhagen, Leona, Kajsa Haag, and F. Welter. “The Role of Gender in Family-Business Research: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” in Women Entrepreneurship in Family Business, ed. Vanessa Ratten, Leo-Paul Dana, and Veland Ramadani, 16–45. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Checkland, Olive. Japanese Whisky, Scotch Blend. Newbattle: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998. Durepos, Gabrielle, Alan McKinlay, and Scott Taylor. “Narrating Histories of Women at Work: Archives, Stories, and the Promise of Feminism.” Business History 59, no. 8 (2017): 1261–79. Holt, Robin and Andrew Popp. “Emotion, Succession, and the Family Firm: Josiah Wedgwood & Sons.” Business History 55, no. 6 (2013): 892–909 Kwolek-Folland, Angel. Incorporating Women: A History of Woman and Business in the United States. New York: Twayne, 1998. Nomunication website. www.nomunication.jp. Popp, Andrew. Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Management and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Taketsuru, Masataka. My History. Translated by Graeme McNee. Tokyo: Nikkei, 1968. Taketsuru, Masataka. On the Production Methods of Pot Still Whisky. Translated by Ruth Ann Herd. Edinburgh: Zeticula Books, 2021.

8

Malone’s on the Southside: Hearing a Telling of Their Story Andrew Popp, Copenhagen Business School

Malone’s1 Oh my gosh! My dad and mom used to stop at Malone’s, and we would fill brown paper bags with rolls out of the bins. The rolls would still be warm and they could not be in plastic, or my mom would have a fit because she liked them crispy! Once we got in the car, I would grab a long roll, bite off the end, and start hollowing all the fluffiness out of it. My mom would always say a mouse got at the rolls when she found my handiwork later.2 They would load us up in the back of the third seat of the station wagon and head south to visit our aunt and uncle in the city. My dad was raised in South Allentown and moved us out to the country, when I was 9 months old in 1963. Going to the city was a big deal for us. He would stop at Malone’s. Come walking out with a couple sheets of pizza and a case of smaller rolls. Warm, fresh rolls out of Malone’s ovens and break one off for each of us to enjoy for the next few blocks. Our family would grill, eat, play board games, go to the park across the street to play the sport of the season. Spend an entire weekend, visiting, laughing and enjoying the magic the city always instilled in us.3 I’m the same, we are a family that used to live in Allentown and moved about 100 miles away and every time that we would come back we would take Malone’s bread and rolls with us. My father died years ago but I can remember him making his famous hamburgers with those fantastic Kaiser rolls, they were the best.4 That’s true, some remember the pizza and some remember the rolls, like how when my mother The first two sections of this paper are a composite of comments made in reply to posts on the Facebook page of Phillip Malone and Sons. Most of the words are those of the commenters, stitched together with new short linking phrases and words. Some minor edits have been made to align it with the style adopted in the rest of this book. Authors are acknowledged in a footnote at the end of their words. The Malone’s Facebook page is open and all posts are public. Permissions have not been sought. All three posts were accessed by the author on January 10, 2019, though time had been spent reading the page before and subsequently. The page remains active. https://www.facebook. com/MalonesBakery/?epa=SEARCH_BOX. 2 Susan Kohuth. 3 Stephanie Gerhardt. 4 Mike Lenner. 1

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was in her last years we would have cheesesteak lunches around once a month. We would get Landis steak meat, Tallaricos sauce, and I would always go direct to Malone’s Bakery that day for rolls. I liked that weird little alley. I’d take all the stuff to her home. She would make a perfect cheesesteak. The woman was talented. It always had to have pickles, which set it off. They were some great moments in the midst of some difficult days.5 I remember the alley too; parking in the alley for easy pick up. Always loved seeing the geese waddling around in the front yard from S. 4th St. When you think of the South Side you think of Malone’s!6 I also remember how we would wait in line in the alley. The wooden bins on the wooden saw horses. The picture of Mr. Malone above the cash register. The old, smooth concrete floors.7 My husband, on the other hand, remembers when Frank and his friends from Wilson Elementary would walk down to Basin Street to fish. On the way back home to Emaus Ave they would walk thru the alley behind the bakery and a roll would be given or bought for a nickel.8 He remembers the whole family well. They’d sit in the kitchen with Phillip and the boys eating cheese and bread and, of course, Phillip’s great wine. The pizza was a duplicate to what my Nonna made and in her 70s when she became ill, we replaced hers with Malone’s great pizza.9 I wish I could still run in that store.10 And I’m old and my memories go back to the ’40s. We would stop on the way home from mass, pick up bread and head to Nonna’s to dip in sauce.11 Me? I just remember Saturday family pizza day. Loved the big sheet size, all day long. With a bottle of A-treat soda.12 I on the other hand remember how Grandmother would attend late night bingo and bring home your pizza. We always had “bingo” pizza when we visited. It was not just fantastic pizza, it was our childhood. After she passed we would order your pies for our family functions to help bring back that taste.13 And pizza made the same way all those years, never changing or skimping on the ingredients. We all enjoyed it and made it a part of both our daily lives as well as some personal family events.14 Some people talk about bingo pizza but we, on the other hand, ate Malone’s pizza every Friday night. My family were immigrants and it was the Italian way of eating that kept us all alive. It is also the Italian way to always take care of others. We never were starving because good Italian people eat wholesome food without spending a lot of money and we always share and help others when unfortunate events happen. Never turn away an uninvited quest, always have enough pasta to add to a meal in case someone shows up. Extend a healthy meal by adding some pasta sprinkled with a little cheese. We were all starving during 7 8 9 5 6

12 10 11



13 14

Al Zuzic. Teresa Lond Szajkovics. David Emrich. Mary Chapman Donchess. Ronald Caciolo. Tanya Sojtori Edelman. Ronald Caciolo. Dani Seip. A-Treat is another Allentown staple, founded in 1918. The announcement of its closure in 2015 provoked a similar reaction on social media. The brand was rescued by another local family business. Sean M. Lamb. Sherry Elias.

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the Depression except for the Italians. We all joined forces and helped each other. God is always with us. Italians stand by each other and feed those who are hungry. Imagine if the whole world could flourish the way Italians do, food, love for one another, comradery [sic], helping each other, keeping it simple and always showing compassion for each other.15

Malone’s Closing We are losing so many of our “institutions,” places that bonded the valley together, or that identified you as a valley resident even if you moved away, places like Yoccos, Malone’s, Brass Rail, King George Inn, Tasty Kakes, Charles Chips, Snyder’s pretzels, Mrs. Ts Pierogies, Gus’s etc. I’m so sad to be losing so many of these wonderful old establishments, though I’m thankful for the ones that remain.16 But still, stuff like this really depresses me. It was a blessing to have enjoyed you but terribly sad to see a little piece of Americana fade into the forgotten corners of our past.17 That’s right, first the Emmaus Bakery, now this one. Aren’t many left; Egypt Star and Vallos maybe?18 Still, I can hold onto the memories: the memories I have of going there with my dad are some of my favorites! It’s amazing how just walking in there I can feel my dad is with me, watching me eat pizza and fresh bread and cheese sandwiches with uncle Ernie! There really is no better place! I can’t wait to bring Max and Sofia!19 I too could go on forever with my great memories of Malone’s, their family and fun I’ve had visiting the bakery for the last seventy years.20 You say that but I’m a little younger and it still matters to me. In fact, I was introduced to Malone’s rolls and pizza by my Nan and Pop-Pop in the seventies. My grandparents owned The Hotel Grand. Nan made the best cheese steak sandwiches with Malone’s rolls. The Grand had an excellent lunch business back in the day when downtown Allentown businesses thrived.21 I know exactly what you mean, we in the Lehigh Valley have grown up with Malone’s. It is not just pizza; it is the flavor of the valley! It is not just pizza, it is a constant and for a single moment we are taken back to our childhood.22 And now Brass Rail steak sandwiches will never be the same.23 And the Super Bowl won’t be the same without a Malone’s!24 It’s the simple things, isn’t it? I will treasure the memory of the aroma of your bread baking on the South Side, walking to St. Paul’s school, and as a child staring at the blind man bagging bread at the wooden table after church.25 Another childhood

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 15 16

Nancy D’Annibale. Lori Sheirer. Thomas Mantore. Lori Sheirer. Jillian Jenkins. Ronald Caciolo. Mike Wiest. Sean M. Lamb. Peggy Burnet Yorgey. John Henning. Sue Sesko.

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business, now a lifetime memory.26 To lose an icon business that actually cared about there [sic] workers, customers and neighbors.27 I don’t know what to say. So, I just want to say thanks for being a member of every South Side family.28 For now though, tears are running down my face. The Allentown that I know has changed so dramatically. I’m sure this next generation coming up will think that it’s for the better but there was nothing like growing up in the sixties, seventies and eighties, in Allentown Pennsylvania NOTHING NOWHERE NO HOW!!!!!!29 Finally then, I just want to say thanks, Malone’s, for all the wonderful memories of those loving family days and ways.30 I refuse to believe this is the end.31

The Southside Until it closed in 2018, after a little over a hundred years, Malone’s Bakery stood on South Fourth Street, Allentown, PA. Out back of a modest white clapboard home, a series of low buildings lining an alley formed the bakery. Even before the bakery closed the Malone family began collecting memories. In a Facebook post of September 5, 2015 they asked: What are some of your memories of the Bakery, the Family and anything associated with our Pizza & Rolls? This could be as simple as why you buy, who you knew, gatherings you’ve had or friendships with the family you made! We hope to keep this post going, strike up some conversations, hear a telling of our history from those that have kept us going!32

The clinching question was deceptively simple: “What has Malone’s meant to your life, big or small?!”33 In a post of June 29, 2018 Malone’s announced their closure. The announcement paid tribute to the business, to the family, and to the community: The Southside of Allentown has been our home since the beginning and we want to thank its residents for allowing us to touch your lives like you touched ours … The 40s, 50s 60s and 70s was a booming time for us when businesses relied on our Italian bread and pizza to feed their hungry customers … while making new memories with others who made our product a staple in their lives.34 Susanne Marie. Chuck Deprill. 28 Anthony Amici. 29 John Crevin. Crevin acknowledged that he had never been to Malone’s. 30 Stephanie Gerhardt. 31 Robert Singley. 32 Phillip Malone and Sons. 33 Accessed by the author January 10, 2019. 34 Accessed by the author January 10, 2019. The bakery was already temporarily closed, due to bereavements and ill health. This announcement confirmed that the closure was permanent. A subsequent post, of July 31, announced that “As promised, this page will become a repository for the History of Malone’s Bakery! Please feel free to message us stories you would like us to share and photos you have of the Bakery and Malone family!” 26 27

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The Southside of Allentown is a working- and middle-class neighborhood. South Fourth Street is lined with chain and local businesses, fast food outlets, Mexican restaurants, and auto repair shops. There’s a shopping plaza, where most of the units are occupied. To the east of South Fourth Street are quiet streets of modest one- and two-storey family homes. Mostly they are decent and well maintained, the streets tidy and trim. Allentown was first laid out in 1762, but the Southside is a creation of the twentieth century. Initially Malone’s was located outside the city boundaries, in a semi-urban area demarcated to the west and north by the Little Lehigh Creek, separating the emerging Southside from the historic heart of Allentown.35 To the south, the neighborhood was and remains hemmed in by South Mountain. Growth was driven by industrial development. Mack Trucks, founded in Brooklyn, NYC, in 1900, opened their first Allentown works in an old foundry on the Southside in 1905. Two years later the Brooklyn facility was closed, and production concentrated in Pennsylvania, the Southside becoming indelibly associated with Mack. Emmaus Avenue led over the mountain and down into the southside of Bethlehem, home of Bethlehem Steel, where many Southside residents made a good living. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw dramatic population growth, from a little over 25,000 in 1890 to nearly 52,000 in 1910 and 73,500 in 1920. Malone’s was born in this upswing as the city pulled in newcomers—American and immigrant— attracted by economic opportunity. Earlier generations of German immigrants had played a prominent role in colonizing this part of Pennsylvania, but they were now joined by new ethnic groups: Irish, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and others. Population growth continued across the twentieth century, but also experienced periods of decline. Indeed, in the 1970s the population contracted a full 5 percent as a wave of deindustrialization hit. By 2020, the population of the state’s third largest city stood at a relatively modest 125,845. The city not only grew but changed. As late as the 1970s Allentown was an overwhelmingly White city; now non-Hispanic whites barely make up a third of the population. Whereas the city’s downtown is overwhelmingly Hispanic, the Southside is still in the process of undergoing demographic change and doorbells display a wide mix of names: German, Polish, and Italian but also Spanish and others. The demographics of the neighborhood and of the commenters are now only a partial match and many commenters also noted they no longer live on the Southside. Meanwhile, Bethlehem Steel closed for good in 2001. As for Mack, though manufacturing still takes place in the region, the company is now foreign owned and headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina. Like a lot of places in America, you can do ok and lead a good life here, but it is changing too. Increasingly, there might be disagreements about what a good life looks like. Nicholas Dames argues that as the study of nostalgia has moved “past an inquiry into Hurley describes “a pronounced shift in diner geography as new diners gravitated to a zone of transition between inner-city neighborhoods and mass-produced suburbs: residential communities on the fringe of cities that were experiencing an influx of upwardly mobile, middle-income families of recent European extraction.” This well captures Malone’s location. Andrew Hurley, “From Hash House to Family Restaurant: The Transformation of the Diner and Post-World War II Consumer Culture.” Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (1997): 1292.

35

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essences—what nostalgia is—toward studies of uses, purposes and circumstances,” it increasingly demands that we confront the “complex emplotment of nostalgic yearning in discrete historical and political circumstances.”36 Malone’s closure took place one and a half years into the presidency of Donald Trump. Trump had won in 2016, in part, by leveraging divisions over who had a right to the American good life.37 It was a campaign saturated in a nostalgic call to “Make America Great Again,” a slogan containing both an implicit critique of America today and a yearning for an America past, rooted in a nagging sense that things had somehow gone wrong. The “MAGA” slogan, and its performance at rallies and embodiment in merchandise, lacked specificity, but that gave it an emotional capaciousness that perhaps made it even more effective. Your neighborhood bakery closing might be part of what was going wrong. At the same time, in reaction, many liberals found themselves looking forward to getting back to “normal,” explicitly framed as a time before. The emotional heft of the call to “Make America Great Again” (and counter-responses to it) undoubtedly formed an important element of the emotional climate that summer.38

A History of Nostalgia Nostalgia has been positioned as “coeval with modernity.”39 Nostalgia might also have a geography. Susan Matt has painted American nostalgia as a permissible emotion, as against homesickness. In such a vast, mobile country, to desire or attempt to return home carries a “social stigma,” attracting “shame and disapproval. What earlier Nicholas Dames, “Nostalgia and its Disciplines: A Response,” Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 270. Lehigh County, which contains Allentown, gave Hilary Clinton a winning margin of nearly 5 percent over Donald Trump in 2016, and Joe Biden a winning margin of nearly 8 percent in 2020, but is bordered by counties that voted for Trump in both elections. 38 Evidence of support for Trump (such as yard signs) can be found across the southside, a socially, racially, and politically mixed neighborhood. However, overt politics are effectively absent from posts on the Malone’s page. For reasons of space, complexity, and sources this chapter cannot deeply engage the politics of this case. Nostalgia is often seen as “prone to instrumentalization by conservative strata of the society, striving to legitimate their privileges and to impede social changes” (Olivia Angé and David Berliner, “Introduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia—Anthropology as Nostalgia,” in Anthropology and Nostalgia, ed. Olivia Angé and David Berliner (NYC: Berghahn, 2015), 4). That belief can be easily transmuted into an assumption that all nostalgia is inherently politically reactionary and conservative, with all nostalgias “reified into an essentialized object with a given and stable content” (ibid., 7). As Angé and Berliner observe, some scholars have argued against “the idea of retrospective yearnings as politically regressive and emotionally disturbed” and “that similar forms of longing carry very different meanings depending on the political agendas in which they were enmeshed” (5, 7). Thus, Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko warn us that contextual “resemblances” can too easily “facilitate key misrecognitions of nostalgic practices” (Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko, “The Politics of Nostalgia in the Aftermath of Socialism’s Collapse: A Case for Comparative Analysis,” in Anthropology and Nostalgia, ed. Olivia Angé and David Berliner (NYC: Berghahn, 2015), 63). Critically, they argue, analyses of “nostalgia must thus guard against two temptations: reading politics into nostalgia (that is, assuming inherent political meaning or implications to specific nostalgic practices) and reading nostalgia into politics (assuming that every reference to the past is indeed a nostalgic one)” (63). I have sought to avoid both of these temptations. Nonetheless, my silence here about politics does not mean I believe the case is devoid of politics. 39 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi. 36 37

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generations interpreted as a love of home and family, contemporary Americans consider dysfunctional.” Nostalgia, perhaps because it carried the “recognition that it is impossible to turn back time,” has settled into a role as a “less potent and socially disruptive emotion.”40 Matt dates this divide to the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, a period of intense processes of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, driving a “a tempo of change so rapid and inexorable that it made the past utterly different from the present.”41 Nonetheless, this leaves open the questions of how and under what conditions nostalgia is experienced Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies argue that “Nostalgia is always suspect,” requiring we keep “a sceptical distance from its illusions.”42 Nostalgia acts as a seduction; inauthentic or sentimental. In diagnostic mode, scholars of nostalgia (first named by a physician) have sought to isolate its essence, often characterizing it as a peculiarly modern disease, as in Peter Fritzsche’s exploration of nostalgia in Europe following the rupture of the French Revolution.43 However, scholarship has now moved past what nostalgia is and toward what it does. I derive three functions from the literature: bridging; binding; and as critique.44 Bridging is temporal. Nostalgia has always represented a “desire to bridge past experience and present conditions.”45 Atia and Davies emphasize how “nostalgia serves as a negotiation between continuity and discontinuity: it insists on the bond between our present selves and a certain fragment of the past, but also on the force of our separation from what we have lost.”46 In doing so, nostalgia “correlates place, time, and desire.”47 This bridging is often rooted in a collective or communal voice, becoming “a form of cultural identity.”48 Dames too identifies an “appeal to a communal sharing of nostalgic recollection.”49 Nostalgia has been charged with enervating political energies, spreading a “gangrenous passivity throughout our sense of the past.”50 However, emphasizing the bridging function of nostalgia might reveal it as a “way of shaping and directing historical consciousness,” and a “a potent form of … subaltern memory” that is “more mobile, more active, and more self-aware” than typically allowed.51 More than simply highlighting its critical potential, reframing nostalgia thus reveals how it can function “in productive, surprisingly therapeutic ways.”52

Susan Matt, “You Can’t Go Home Again: Homesickness and Nostalgia in U.S. History.” Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2007): 471. 41 Ibid., 497. 42 Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies, “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History.” Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 181. 43 Peter Fritzsche, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity.” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1587–618. 44 Angé and Berliner note that “nostalgic discourses” can “bond diverse categories of actors and constitute a source of mnemonic convergence.” Anthropology and Nostalgia, 9 45 Matt, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” 471. 46 Atia and Davies, “Nostalgia,” 184. 47 Ibid. 48 Dames, “Nostalgia and Its Disciplines,” 273. 49 Ibid., 270. 50 Ibid., 274. 51 Atia and Davies, “Nostalgia,” 182, 181. 52 Dames, “Nostalgia and its Disciplines,” 274. 40

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Food is a frequent focus of nostalgia. Observing the United States, Matt notes how “Foreign immigrants and internal migrants surround themselves with a variety of consumer goods—from tamales and tortillas to sushi and soul food—that remind them of home.”53 But though the relationship between food, memory, and nostalgia may begin in the sensual world, beyond that initial visceral moment there extends a more far-reaching set of connections. Specifically, we can discern elements of bridging, binding, and critique in studies of food-centered nostalgia. Several studies of the relationship between food and nostalgia focus on the diner, perhaps because of the “melancholy, luminous and utterly precise vision of Americana that only a diner can signify.”54 Bridging is prominent in Andrew Hurley’s history of the diner and US consumer culture, with the diner positioned at several junctures: geographic; ethnic; scale; and class. Hurley argues “purveyors of consumer commodities finessed and exploited emergent social dislocations in the drive to expand and diversify markets.” However, at the same time, in “transforming the diner, builders and proprietors created a borderland, a place where cultures intersected, clashed, and sometimes fused.”55 They also created temporal bridges, being “transitional institutions … between the corner saloon and the fast-food restaurant.”56 Moreover, because they “cultivated a constituency from varied ethnic backgrounds,” diners were “sites of cultural amalgamation.” Elizabeth Hirschman also characterizes the diner as a “simultaneously communal, yet liminal, space.”57 Stacey Denton identifies similar concerns in Richard Russo’s depiction of the (fictional) Empire Grill in his novel Empire Falls.58 Rather than capturing some “regressed return to some idealized past,” the “diner represents the history, perseverance, decline and even the hopes of the town; it is a place of community.”59 Lily Kelting uncovers in the “new” Southern cooking a cultural movement that “creates identity and solidarity based on a sense of regional trauma, insularity, or loss.”60 In considering the nostalgia that grew up around New Orleans’ foodways, Ashley Young likewise identifies the catalyzing effect of experiences of “remembrance, loss, and spectacle.” However, she also analyzes this “codification” of Creole cuisine as “an act ripe with power” in which often wealthy, White New Orleanians “had the power to influence the identities of the people who imagined themselves in relation to it.”61

Matt, “You Can’t Go Home,” 497. Elizabeth Hirschman, “Foodsigns on the Highway of Life: the Semiotics of the Diner.” Advances in Consumer Research 33 (2006): 609. 55 Hurley, “Hash House,” 1283–4. 56 Ibid. 57 Hirschman, “Foodsigns on the Highway of Life,” 609. 58 Acknowledging the fictionality of the Empire Grill, I argue that it is the cultural discourse around food, diners, and nostalgia that matters. Stacy Denton, “Nostalgia, Class and Rurality in Empire Falls.” Journal of American Studies 45, no. 3 (2011): 503–18. 59 Ibid., 514–5. 60 Lily Kelting, “The Entanglement of Nostalgia and Utopia in Contemporary Southern Food Cookbooks.” Food, Culture & Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 19, no. 2 (2016): 7. 61 Ashley Young, “Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in Nineteenth-Century America” PhD diss., Duke University, 2017, 209, 199. 53

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However, Kelting claims, “New Southern food is uniquely concerned with an imagined future that transcends the political exigencies of the present.”62 Denton argues, in Empire Falls, that nostalgia “helps this working-class small town assert its perspective in relation to the postwar and present mainstream that places it in some nostalgic past,” opening up “larger cultural norms to criticism through its very difference.”63 Likewise, Hurley has argued that “class remained the fundamental social category around which the diner oriented its appeal,” fostering a male, blue-collar solidarity.64 The intersections of nostalgia, class, and politics are complex then and the democratizing potential of nostalgia vulnerable to co-optation. Still, Matt has suggested that “today Americans take the fast pace of change for granted. The past is past, and by and large, contemporary Americans do not … mourn it, as earlier generations did.” If this is so, where do we place the story of Malone’s in the history and geography of nostalgia?65

Locating Malone’s As a public, retail business, Malone’s operated as a bridging space, theoretically democratic and open to all, where differences of race, religion, gender, class, and politics were absent. Everyone’s money is good when you have enough to buy bread or pizza.66 Yet this was also a family home, and the public spaces carried with them much of the intimacy of the home, for family members, employees, customers, and neighbors. The lines separating neighborhood, from street, from alley, from bakery, and from home, seem faint and blurred, constantly crossed by members of the community as they moved around the city and the neighborhood. People entered not simply to buy bread, but also to talk, to sit, to eat, and to share homemade wine. The life and world of the bakery also spilled outwards—not least in the form of the smell of baking bread— and you could enter its space simply by passing through the alley to the rear, where children would often be handed a warm roll for free. However, space is structured by more than its physical elements. It was not simply the material structure of the bakery that had endured through time, but also the multitude of memories and associations that circulated around it. These too had shown remarkable durability, and commenters shared memories that went back almost eighty years, to the 1940s. The bakery thus bridged time.67 However, whilst open and public, not everyone could share the intimacies associated with the bakery to the same degree. Several posters noted direct, if sometimes distant, connections 64 65 66

Kelting, “Entanglement,” 4. Denton, “Nostalgia, Class and Rurality,” 506, 510. Hurley, “Hash House,” 1286. Matt, “You Can’t Go Home,” 497. As Young says, “Everyone [eats] regardless of demographic categories of age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or socio-economic status.” “Nourishing Networks,” 191. 67 Young argues that the history of New Orleans’ public markets “reveals the organizing power of food distribution—a force that not only served as a catalyst of community development, but also sustained a sense of belonging over generations.” “Nourishing Networks,” 133. 62 63

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between the Malone’s and their own families, whether through marriage, cousinhood, or similar. These posters quite often used just first names in writing about past members of the Malone family, even when familial links appeared quite tenuous. It is hard not to read some posts as claims to an intimacy with the family and the space of the bakery not afforded to all, even though the Malone family appears to have been prodigious in its friendships. But the bakery was also accommodating enough to contain other intimacies, particularly those of friendship, and beyond that, of ethnicity and of belonging to the neighborhood, city, or region. As an emotional space, the bakery contained many nested circles, structuring the gradations between open and closed, public and private, inclusive and exclusive. Thus, though located in a physical environment, locatable on a map, Malone’s was also subject to processes of mental and emotional mapping.

Nostalgia’s Coordinates Nostalgia is typically characterized as a longing for a lost past or a lost somewhere. As such it is organized around two inseparable coordinates: time and place. We can see these as intersecting axes: running from here (this place) to there (that place), and from now (this time) to then (that past time). Their interactions demarcate four zones: there/then; there/now; then/here; and here/now. There/then, in which we are severed from both here and now, is a zone of loss. It was into this zone that those commenting on Malone’s social media posts crowded most readily, their voices a babble of laments. There/now is a zone of uncanny, unsettling dislocation, in which the here in the present is rendered strange and unfamiliar. Then/here is a zone of desired or longed for persistence—to bring the then we have lost back into the here we still inhabit. Here/now is a zone of realized and satisfying persistence, most often through deliberate acts of remembering, as when Malone’s elicited their customers’ memories. It is, after the experiences of loss, dislocation, and longing, a space of recovery. Individual commentators found themselves occupying multiple zones simultaneously, or transiting through them. Moreover, the comments also revealed the existence of a fifth zone—the future, albeit a future defined by absence, by what it would not be. Expressions of loss dominated reactions to news of Malone’s closure in the summer of 2018. In a curious act of double removal, one commentator was startled to find that “Another piece of my past is gone.”68 Another found it “terribly sad to see a little piece of Americana fade into the forgotten corners of our past.”69 It seemed the bakery was passing not only from life but from memory, experiencing a kind of second death, capturing the emotions experienced within this zone, as made clear in the statement that the closure meant that “Another icon of childhood and Allentown [is] gone.”70 Rendered as iconic, Malone’s came to stand for an era and an entire city, both now unreachable. People felt things coming apart as they experienced the process of “losing Mark Kennet. Thomas Mantore. 70 Glenn Geist. 68 69

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so many of our ‘institutions,’ places that bonded the valley together, or that identified you as a valley resident.”71 Identity stood uncertainly on shifting sands, the bridging and binding functions the bakery had performed falling away. If there/then is a zone colored by the loss of place and time, there/now performs peculiar operations, in which the here of now is rendered into an unrecognizable there.72 Place is lost to the present, so that “Brass Rail steak sandwiches will never be the same.”73 These are emotions driven by processes of dislocation, warping apparently solid geographic continuities: the “Allentown … I know has changed so dramatically,” noted one poster.74 Malone’s themselves observed that that the Southside, the whole valley, “won’t be the same without Malone’s Bakery.”75 There was an uncanniness to this zone, a sense of the haunted. One commenter admitted “I still find myself looking for the steak rolls”76 in a restless search for that which was no longer to be found. In comparison, the past had been a better place, “when it was so simple back then.”77 Then/here is a space of yearning. It possesses some consolations, but largely goes unrequited. Posters craved for the bakery to reopen and often seemed puzzled that this was not going to happen. Many of these pleas to bring the then into the here, bringing about an impossible reconciliation of temporal discontinuities, were quite straightforward, such as the simple “a holiday didn’t pass, without Malone’s bread and pizza. It’s still something I miss every day.”78 Others believed they could help make it happen, proclaiming “Please come back!! I would do anything to help you get back on your feet.”79 Some, however, recognized the impossibility of their desires, exclaiming, “Oh how wonderful a Malone’s pizza would be right now,”80 whilst others hankered for one, final piece—“Sad I can’t have a slice.”81 But the time had passed, leaving Patrice Illigasch lamenting, “It’s hard to believe I’ll never have another Malone’s roll.”82 Nonetheless, for some, remaining traces lingered in consoling ways. Thus, one was “so sad to be losing so many of these wonderful old establishment,” but still managed to be “grateful for the ones that remain.”83 Steve Milinchuk was sad to know he would never have another slice, but he was also “happy I’ve had hundreds in my life.”84 Some of the bridges held.

Lori Sheirer Ketling describes the “Southern culinary ethos [as] ‘homesick for the place in which we still live’” (“Entanglement of Nostalgia and Utopia,” 7). Young captures the same process when she argues that “Time … played a crucial role in making New Orleans feel foreign” (“Nourishing Networks,” 244). Nadkarni and Shevchenko suggest that under modernity “remaining in one’s native place could no longer prevent the experience of displacement” (“The Politics of Nostalgia,” 64). 73 Peggy Burnet Yorgey. 74 John Crevin. 75 Phillip Malone and Sons. 76 Ilona Golden. 77 Donna Barbara Ammaray. 78 Ronald Caciolo. 79 Aidan Quinn Tapler. 80 Paula Barron. 81 Steve Milinchuk. 82 Patrice Illigasch. 83 Lori Sheirer. 84 Steve Milinchuk. 71 72

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Finally, here/now is a more positive realm in which deliberate acts of remembering were able to provide consolation. Indeed, this had been Malone’s intention in soliciting memories, acknowledging that “We know this is sad, but we hope you can remember the good times  … the best times  … that we had over these long, beautiful and of course delicious 100 years.”85 The effect was deeply felt. Douglas Kellogg, for example, recounted how “I worked at the bakery for about 8 years & on and off … Great people, wonderful food, tough and rewarding work. Malone’s will always be a part of who I’ve become.”86 Another poster confessed that though “this post made me cry,” they were “so thankful for the flood of memories!”87 Thankfulness was the dominant emotional note in this zone: to have experienced Malone’s, to have tasted the bread and the pizza, to have worked there, to have known the Malone family, and, most of all, thankfulness and well wishes to the remaining members of the family. In the end, it was a “blessing to have enjoyed you.”88 And the absent future? This was a future denied to the “so many people [who] will never know the joy of having the wonderful products that they poured their hearts and souls into,”89 and to those who “never imagined it would stop being made.”90 This imagined future had been timeless, never changing. Now, it had been cut off, so that the “ABSOLUTELY UNMATCHED” pizzas of Malone’s “will sadly remain so.”91

Nostalgia’s Contents Time and space structured the memories and nostalgia around Malone’s. Time and space also provide some, but far from all, of their content. The post announcing the final closure of the bakery contained many important elements of the content of the nostalgia: Many members of our family have worked at the bakery at one point during their lives, whether it was their first job, helping out during holidays or a way to get back up on their feet. They thanked their lucky stars that they always had a place to go, bread to eat, and pizza to devour! We, as many of you, included our family’s pizza and bread at parties, baptisms, picnics, Fridays during Lent and virtually at any gathering we could think of where others needed food. This food was the lifeblood of many of our happiest moments, childhood memories and brought us so many wonderful friends and customers over the years.92

87 88 89 90 91 92 85 86

Phillip Malone and Sons. Douglas Kellogg. Kristy Kratzer Strobl. Thomas Mantore. Barry Kuntz. Ilona Golden. Robyn Achey. Phillip Malone and Sons.

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We have encountered much of the emotional content of the memories that flowed in response to the closure in the opening sections of this chapter. Here I briefly consider that content thematically. Often the stuff of people’s nostalgia gave greater consolation than did reflections on time and place because it tended to focus on happy, positive memories. Unsurprisingly, many respondents’ most powerful and important memories originated in childhood and were anchored to family. Memories of family and childhood carried particularly strong positive associations, casting a flattering light across the past, captured in one recollection of how “Our family would grill, eat, play board games, go to the park across the street to play the sport of the season. Spend  an entire weekend, visiting, laughing and enjoying the magic the city always instilled in us.”93 Malone’s spoke explicitly of “our community.” Thus, family was encircled by community.94 Here the bridging and binding functions were very strong. For some, it may simply have been that “the family friendly atmosphere of the folks at the bakery was always warm & welcoming.”95 The Malone family were “part of the history I grew up with,”96 or that the Malone family “will always have a special place in my heart!”97 For some, it was literally true that “The Malone family has been part of my family my whole life.”98 Malone’s, family, and community were further bound together by rites, rituals, and ceremonies, both public and private, shared and individual, religious and secular. Buying, sharing, and consuming Malone’s bread and pizza marked time, whether that was bingo night, monthly steak sandwich dinners, or annual events such as religious events, sporting spectacles, birthdays, or periodic trips to enjoy the magic of the city. For some, Malone’s became integral to how they counted off the days, the weeks, the months, the years. It did so in ways that were both profound and mundane: “I ordered endless amounts of pizzas for baptisms, holiday parties” and “just lazy Saturday’s [sic] at home.”99 But whatever the occasion, in their use to mark time, Malone’s products bound family member to family member, and family to community. Making Malone’s part of your life and your family’s life confirmed you as a Valley resident, even for those who had long ago left. Malone’s products most often were consumed in very mundane ways, grabbed in a hurry when hungry, consumed unthinkingly as part of a steak sandwich at Zandy’s or the Brass Rail, but it was not only in remembering that there occurred a process of sacralization.100 Stephanie Gerhardt. We recall Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities. See Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 95 Kathy Marushok Hoffman. 96 Rocco Galluci. 97 Nancy Baier. 98 Jody Thomas. 99 Kristy Kratzer Strobl. 100 Young places a similar emphasis on the importance of the ritualistic nature of even the most ordinary food provisioning, purchasing, and consumption, arguing that “daily interactions between vendors and customers forged bonds among community members, who then solidified those bonds through rituals of consumption” (“Nourishing Networks,” 7). 93 94

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Of course, this sacralization involved an act of consumption. Unsurprisingly, the world of Malone’s, in real life and in memory, was heavily sensory and embodied— aroma, taste, touch. Remembering the taste and smell of Malone’s products was a prominent theme. Time and again, posters proclaimed Malone’s “the best.” At the same time, posters seemed to relish the ordinariness of what they were remembering; just pizza. The sensory—texture and sound as well as aroma and taste—were part of the process by which family was bound to community, to place, to region, to time, to identity. We have encountered Nancy D’Annibale’s extended meditation on food and Italian culture and identity. Robyn Achey compressed so much of this into two short sentences: “The love, tradition, and feeling of familia that you put into your baking shone even above the magic of the taste. One’s heart became as full as one’s belly.”101 Finally, memories also situated Malone’s as part of a landscape of other businesses— “Yoccos, Malone’s, Brass Rail, King George Inn, Tasty Kakes, Charles Chips, Snyder’s pretzels, Mrs. Ts Pierogies, Gus’s etc.”102 Together they formed an ecosystem of local enterprises that provided an important source of valley identity and pride. In terms of making sure provisioning and consumption took place, many of these businesses also relied on each other in sating residents’ appetites. Thus, the Brass Rail103 and Zandy’s104 steak shop were the most prominent in this roll call; both restaurants had for decades bought Malone’s bread for their sandwiches. The Brass Rail and Zandy’s remain open, but many others were already long gone—Paulie’s, Palladino’s, The Hotel Grand. Nor was Malone’s the only bakery in the region to have closed; Emmaus Bakery also shuttered in the summer of 2018, after more than eighty years in operation, the Easton Baking Company followed in fall of the same year, after close to fifty years. For now, Vallos and Egypt Star Bakery survive. Feelings of loss amongst residents were not ill-founded; this was something they were experiencing. They could no longer get the bread or the pizza their families had for years enjoyed. Their world was changing.

Conclusions: Malone’s and Life on the Southside As Hurley argues, something “as prosaic as eating lunch has rarely been considered important by historians.”105 What had Malone’s meant in people’s lives? It is evident that it meant a great deal to many people, even if parts of that meaning, the weight of it, were constructed in retrospect, in the aftermath of closure. Amidst processes of change, Malone’s and memories of Malone’s anchored people in a sensory and material world; of the smell and texture of warm bread, the sensation of smooth concrete floors; the sight of a blind man bagging rolls on Sundays, the bells of mass fading away in diminishing echoes. Malone’s took their money, in an exchange of pennies for

Robyn Achey. Lori Sheirer. 103 The Brass Rail was founded by Italian immigrant Philip Sorrentino in 1931. It is currently run by the founder’s grandchildren. 104 Zandy’s, also family owned, was founded in 1940. 105 Hurley, “Hash House,” 1283. 101

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pizza (generating profit), but in doing so it anchored them to the generations of their families, and of the families they knew, including the Malones themselves. Indeed, that it was a monetary exchange may even have reinforced the bond, for the “power to purchase … created a fairly egalitarian economic environment [in which to] exercise agency and foster community through economic transactions.”106 In turn, Malone’s anchored residents to the rituals and routines of those families, their communities, and their city: Friday night pizza, Saturday night pizza, Kaiser rolls for Dad’s cookouts, and steak rolls for aging mothers to make cheesesteak with. Rolls on the way home from school or mass or on the way to fish or to go to the park on rare trips back into the city. It anchored them to other local businesses and to the whole of the Southside, to Allentown, to the Lehigh Valley. And it was nothing much really; an Italian bakery that made rolls and square trays of pizza that people enjoyed. If memories of Malone’s located people in a place it also anchored them in time. The good times were located in the same place, but before, often at several decades remove from the present. Malones themselves framed the 1950s–1970s as the good years, the boom times, economically as much as culturally, tapping into a disillusionment with the present that continues to propel developments in American culture and politics. Malone’s anchored posters amidst processes of loss and change—personal and communal—that evoked and framed the nostalgia they felt and expressed. As Atia and Davies argue, nostalgia “insists … on the force of our separation from what we have lost.”107 In doing so, memory and nostalgia reinserted Malone’s back into lives as a source of meaning. As Malone’s and other local businesses had helped construct lived everyday experience in the past, so it now helped construct emotions in the present. Malone’s had been a constituent part of the life-worlds of the residents of the Southside of Allentown. In both the past and in memory, Malone’s formed part of an affective landscape of the everyday, one traversed physically and emotionally. Mannur has described nostalgic narratives as creating a “form of affective citizenship.”108 Thus, memories of Malones were part of a process that reconfirmed membership of this affective citizenry. Belonging to an affective landscape was integral to claims to affective citizenship. Atia and Davies argue that to indulge nostalgia is to “run the risk of constricting our ability to act in the present.”109 But, perhaps, to express nostalgia is to act. In memory and feeling, Malone’s continued to bridge and bind. To express an emotion is to make a claim, not only on the past but also on the present and the future. It is to propose alternatives, even if they are no longer accessible, cut off from us by the flow of time, but nonetheless still reflecting a “an imaginative … radical subjectivity.”110 Critique lies in the acknowledgment of loss, an acknowledgment that may also deliver resilience.111

Young, “Nourishing Networks,” 141. Atia and Davies, “Nostalgia,” 184. 108 Anita Mannur, “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora.” MELUS 32, no. 4 (2007): 13. 109 Atia and Davies, “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History,” 181. 110 Fritzsche, “Specters of History,” 1589. 111 Young argues that food could be a “mode through which disenfranchised Americans participated in the political culture: those without the vote claimed a voice through their role in the country’s food culture and economy” (“Nourishing Networks,” 2). 106 107

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Nostalgia is often condemned as inauthentic, vulnerable to manipulation by the powerful, a script to be performed. This might be especially true regarding business, which, being driven by profit motives (or so it is believed), can be suspected of producing simulacra of “real” emotions. But on what grounds should we distrust the connections—across time, space, and community—enabled by the emotions generated around Malone’s closure? And so, if not strictly subaltern, the memories and emotions around Malone’s were certainly memories and emotions from below, unironically conscious of their ordinariness, celebratory in their thrust, and redeeming amid loss.

Bibliography Angé, Olivia and David Berliner. “Introduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia— Anthropology as Nostalgia,” in Anthropology and Nostalgia, ed. Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 1–16. New York: Berghahn, 2014. Atia, Nadia and Jeremy Davies. “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History.” Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 181–6. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Dames, Nicholas. “Nostalgia and its Disciplines: A Response.” Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 269–75. Denton, Stacy. “Nostalgia, Class and Rurality in Empire Falls.” Journal of American Studies 45, no. 3 (2011): 503–18. Fritzsche, Peter. “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity.” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1587–618. Hirschman, Elizabeth. “Foodsigns on the Highway of Life: The Semiotics of the Diner.” Advances in Consumer Research 33 (2006): 607–12. Hurley, Andrew. “From Hash House to Family Restaurant: The Transformation of the Diner and Post-World War II Consumer Culture.” Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (1997): 1282–308. Kelting, Lily. “The Entanglement of Nostalgia and Utopia in Contemporary Southern Food Cookbooks.” Food, Culture & Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 19, no. 2 (2016): 361–87. Mannur, Anita. “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora.” MELUS 32, no. 4 (2007): 11–31. Matt, Susan. “You Can’t Go Home Again: Homesickness and Nostalgia in U.S. History.” Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2007): 469–97. Nadkarni, Maya and Olga Shevchenko. “The Politics of Nostalgia in the Aftermath of Socialism’s Collapse a Case for Comparative Analysis,” in Anthropology and Nostalgia, ed. Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 61–95. NYC: Berghahn, 2014. Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Young, Ashley. “Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in Nineteenth-Century America.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2017.

Part Three

Unruly Emotions Conventional wisdom states that change in a capitalistic system is driven by innovative firms and entrepreneurs. The market, meanwhile, has occasional bursts of irrationality whose tentacles reach into the corners of society and culture, generating change as they move along. The only place for emotions, then, is in the individual and collective responses to these market-driven transformations, evolutionary and revolutionary. If, for example, a bubble bursts, then people react with fear and anxiety. Right? This is a compelling and common narrative; shuffling emotions off to the margins of the business realm, keeps things within the margins. And, people, communities, businesses, and society in general do typically have emotional responses to changes that occur within the business realm. After all, a rise in the market generates feelings of happiness and joy, just as a drastic fall generates anxieties and fears. However, it is not that simple. This section deconstructs that narrative, showing that even in the most dramatic of circumstances, through bursts of seeming irrationality and amidst a plethora of crises, emotions are neither marginal responses nor marginal stimuli to the economic sphere. Emotions discipline and constrain our engagement with the market while also enabling us to enter the market and gather resources to successfully compete. If emotions are present in the market in these formative ways, then what about moments of change and crisis? Can the urgency of fear shape strategy? Or can pride be used to create a market, as with many “Made in the USA!” strategies? What about feelings of solidarity? Can they not influence consumers to support particular endeavors over others? Might not emotions themselves lead to those moments of change and crisis, just as they so clearly respond to them? Emotions do not simply respond to the market’s sporadic bursts of irrationality, as this section clearly shows. Rather, they rush in, creating, manipulating, and, yes, responding to the volatility and change in the market. Wild and disturbing, riotous and anxious, fearful, and prideful, emotions intrude (sometimes quite dramatically, sometimes more quietly) into the very heart of the market, shaping and driving economic, political, social, and cultural change.

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The Worst Business in the World? The Emotional Historiography of the Arms Industry Catherine Fletcher, Manchester Metropolitan University

Introduction In John Le Carré’s 1993 novel The Night Manager, the villain Richard Roper, an arms dealer, is characterized as “the worst man in the world.”1 The arms industry attracts strong emotions. From sixteenth-century descriptions of guns as diabolical to presentday campaigns against the arms trade, the production and circulation of lethal weaponry has been highly contentious. Many businesses engage in unethical practices, whether misleading marketing, environmental destructiveness, or exploitative labor relations. Arms companies, however, fall into a category of firms the very existence of which is subject to criticism on ethical grounds. Underpinning these critiques are cultural ideas such as the description of the last days in the Book of Isaiah, in which people “shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”2 These have had a deep impact in Christian societies. In the sixteenth century, papal governors objected vehemently to the impiety of weapons.3 From the seventeenth century, albeit somewhat inconsistently, Quakers held that their members should reject war, though many participated in arms production and trading until the issue came to a head in the late eighteenth century.4 This is, however, a case of divided “emotional communities.” Arms manufacturers have argued that their business is no different from any other. In 1895, amid a dispute on the supply of weapons to India, the trade publication Arms and Explosives observed, “We cannot look on trade in munitions of war as being specially reserved from the general conditions of ordinary trading.”5 More recently, states have actively sought John Le Carré, The Night Manager (London: Penguin, 2013), 36. Isaiah 2: 4. 3 Robert C. Davis, “The Renaissance Goes up in Smoke,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin, 398–411 (London: Routledge, 2008), 404–7. 4 Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Richmond, UK: Duckworth, 2018), 303–15. 5 Arms and Explosives, May 1895, cited in Philip Noel-Baker, The Private Manufacture of Armaments (3 vols., London: Gollancz, 1937) vol. 1, 108. 1 2

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to reduce both governmental and personal arms purchasing. Nonetheless, the arms industry remains a significant sector with the top 100 arms-producing and military services firms securing global sales of $531 billion in 2020, even in pandemic conditions a year-on-year increase of 1.3 percent.6 This chapter will investigate the variety of emotions that have attached to the arms industry and its products over five hundred years. These include unruly, negative emotions such as fear, hatred, and contempt, but also more positive ones such as affection, pride in local industrial achievements and patriotic attachments in the context of civic and national defense. Early modern historians are in general wary of assuming that business relationships were strictly “rational.” In his study of price formation in sixteenth-century Ferrara, for example, Guido Guerzoni made clear that commercial transactions “must be analysed as part of the complex tangle of the personal ties, social connections, political implications and mutual obligations in which they were embedded.”7 By taking a longue durée approach, it is possible to see how premodern emotions about the sale of arms and armaments have persisted over time and, furthermore, how these emotions continue to influence scholarly research on this topic. Drawing on a wide range of sources, ranging from fiction and drama to travel narratives and government documents, the chapter begins with an exploration of guns and emotions in early modern Europe, the context in which small arms first became a significant technology for both military and civilian use. It then turns to investigate how, from the nineteenth century, studies of arms production have engaged with questions of emotion. Building on these discussions, the chapter assesses the challenges of writing a business history of the arms industry, paying particular attention to researcher positionality and questions of objectivity. Scholarly writing has often (though not invariably) avoided emotion in favor of “objective” interpretation. Yet in the case of the arms industry, an absence of emotion may be perceived to disregard the understandable passions provoked by this contentious subject. The chapter concludes by considering how future research might best approach emotion in the history of the arms industry.

Guns and Emotions in Early Modern Europe It is rare to hear directly from designers of weapons about the emotions their creations might provoke, but important testimony comes from a letter of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Although Leonardo is now predominantly known for his art, in his lifetime he was also a sought-after military engineer. In the 1480s, pitching his services to the duke of Milan, he wrote: “I have also plans of mortars most convenient

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, https://sipri.org/media/press-release/2021/ business-usual-arms-sales-sipri-top-100-arms-companies-continue-grow-amid-pandemic [accessed January 10, 2022]. 7 Guido Guerzoni, “The Social World of Price Formation: Prices and Consumption in SixteenthCentury Ferrara,” in The Material Renaissance, ed. Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 85. 6

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and easy to carry with which to hurl small stones in the manner almost of a storm; and with the smoke of this cause great terror to the enemy and great loss and confusion.”8 Here is evidence not only that the potential to evoke terror was a key element of what a designer of armaments could offer, but that this featured in the promotion of services. Leonardo gave an even more emotionally evocative account in his prophecy Of Metals: These shall come forth out of dark and gloomy caves; that which will put the whole human race in great anxiety, peril, and death. To many that follow it, after many sorrows it will give delight, but whosoever does not side with it will die in want and misfortune.9

Whether Leonardo is speaking of money or weapons is ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. They are linked in his prophecies by their common emergence from below ground. In a prophecy on money and gold Leonardo described how “Out of cavernous pits a thing shall come forth which will make all the nations of the world toil and sweat with the greatest torments, anxiety and labor, that they may gain its aid.”10 Discussing “great guns, which come out of the pit and mold,” he described “that which with its terrific noise will stun all who are near and with its breath will kill men and destroy cities and castles.”11 It is clear that in relation to metal, money, and weapons the associated emotions for Leonardo were anxiety, sorrow, and terror. Their underground origins also associate them more subliminally with the classical Underworld or Christian Inferno, and thus with another contemporary idea about guns: that they were, in Erasmus’s phrase, “weapons of hell.”12 More than the arms industry, from the early days of firearm proliferation, it has been guns themselves to which historians and writers have attributed emotion or the ability to provoke emotional states: among these the fear and terror of the battlefield predominate. Benvenuto Cellini wrote (in the context of war) of the “fury of the guns”; and also of how (in the context of a dispute over an apartment) by attacking the property with “rocks, pikes and arquebuses” he had “put so much fear in them that noone was willing to come and help him.”13 Miguel de Cervantes summed up the literary hostility, contrasting the “happy” times of the past with the “horrifying fury of the diabolical instruments of artillery.”14 However, other emotions may also be discerned

Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, selected by Irma A. Richter, ed. Thereza Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 276. 9 Ibid., 236–37. 10 Ibid., 237. 11 Ibid. 12 Desiderius Erasmus, “The Complaint of Peace,” in The Essential Erasmus, trans. J. P. Dolan (New York: New American Library, 1964), 187, cited in Paul Chilton, “Humanism and War in Rabelais and Montaigne,” in War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Margaret Shewring and J. R. Mulryne (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 120. 13 Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1998), 62, 297. 14 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 332–33, cited in Sheila J. Nayar, Renaissance Responses to Technological Change (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 113. 8

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in the sources. Blaise de Monluc, a sixteenth-century French military commander, described guns and bullets as “unhappy” or “wretched.”15 The German soldier Leonhard Fronsperger, later captain of the ducal armory in Munich, commented on a more mundane emotion attached to firearms: worry. Even when we don’t have the enemy in our lands any more, no one can think that he is safe from the horrible firearm on his own field or land, but he must always worry that someone will shoot at him from inside a bush.16

Michel de Montaigne wondered if familiarity with small arms might temper the threat, leading the pistol (which given its unreliability was only really useful for threatening people) to become “a weapon of small effect.”17 On the other hand, some gun users discussed their weapons with affection. In 1538, Francesco Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino, thanked the duke of Mantua for the gift of a gun barrel, which, he said, was “very dear.”18 Cellini, in his customarily provocative style, referred to the “music of the guns”19 as he shot from the besieged Castel Sant’Angelo during the 1527 Sack of Rome; described “a splendid little gun that I kept for hunting”; and referred to the “great pleasure” he took in fowling.20 Not all references to pleasure in guns, however, were complimentary. An English proclamation of 1528 referred to the “newfangle[d] and wanton pleasure that men now have in using crossbows and handguns.”21 Family and dynastic pride were evident in the decoration of firearms. Among the weapons of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence in 1561 was a handgun worked with gold and silver, with an ivory and black stock featuring the ducal arms.22 A later combination ax-pistol, first recorded in the 1589 inventory of Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici, also incorporated the family’s arms in its decoration.23 Dynastic images were likewise to be found on the Emperor Charles V’s double-barreled pistol, which featured the double-headed eagle and the Pillars of Hercules, as well as his motto “Plus Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires et lettres, ed. Alphonse de Rable (5 vols., Paris: Renouard, 1864–1872), vol. 1, 52. 16 Leonhard Fronsperger, Kriegsbuch (3 vols., Frankfurt, 1573), vol. 1, CLXXIIa, cited in Brugh, Gunpowder, 77. 17 Michel de Montaigne, “XLVIII. Of Steeds, Called in French Destriers,” Florio’s Translation of Montaigne’s Essays, Book 1 (1603) (Eugene: University of Oregon Renascence Editions, 1999), cited in Nayar, Renaissance Responses, 127. 18 Antonio Bertolotti, “Le arti minori alla corte di Mantova nei secoli XV, XVI e XVII.” Archivio storico lombardo ser. 2, vol. 5, year 15 (1888): 583. 19 Cellini, Autobiography, 66, cited in Stephen Bowd, Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 188. 20 Cellini, Autobiography, 36, 42. 21 Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations (3 vols., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964–1969), vol. 1, 121, cited in Lois G. Schwoerer, Gun Culture in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 48. 22 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Guardaroba Medicea 43, fol. 23. Possibly a similar weapon to the gun dated 1544 now in the collection of the Konopiště castle outside Prague. Le armi degli Estensi: La collezione di Konopiště (Milan: Fabbri, 1986), 115. 23 Metropolitan Museum of New York, accession no. 2002.174a, b, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/25098 [accessed May 30, 2022].

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Ultra.”24 Other weapons displayed imagery aimed at inspiring courage or religious devotion. A pistol belonging to Ferdinand II, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, for example, was adorned with a depiction of the Crucifixion and one of Mucius Scaevola (a Roman youth famed for his attempt to assassinate an Etruscan general and bravery when captured), alongside more prosaic imagery of foliage and hunting.25 A 1548 German wheellock pistol now in the Odescalchi collection featured the prayer, “Lord God protect me and save me from my enemies.”26 Hale argues that the imagery of gunpowder weapons played a role in “domesticating” them among the elite.27 It did so in part through the evocation of emotion. Presented as gifts, these guns might have been intended to inspire affection towards the giver; they may also have engaged givers and recipients in a process of competitive oneupmanship. As we will see, participants in contemporary civic shooting contests were encouraged to train with a spirit of pride, and so the inclusion of coats-of-arms and family mottos on these weapons served as a prompt for dynastic pride. They also drew attention to more routine courtly activities, such as hunting, in which the user might be expected to take pleasure. While rather little is known about the specific commissioning processes for these weapons, or the extent to which producers had an input into the design, it is reasonable to infer that in a context where their products were often objects of suspicion or hostility, they had an interest in promoting more positive emotional responses to firearms. Emotional effects were also discussed by European observers in early imperial contexts. Pieter de Marees, a traveler to the West African coast (possibly a Flemish migrant to the Netherlands), observed in the 1570s that while “[the Africans] are greatly afraid of the shooting of big Guns or Muskets, nevertheless they enjoy hearing gunfire”; this was in the context of shipboard gun salutes.28 Samuel Brun, another European traveler to West Africa, observed that the people of the Congo were “terribly frightened of muskets or guns.”29 We should be wary, however, of assuming that the ability to inspire terror was the primary reason for gun use: as David Silverman observes in relation to Native American adoption of firearms, users were well aware of their relative lethality when compared with other weapons.30 Still, in combination with lethality, fear was a particularly important emotion in relation to certain gun uses: the highway robber’s threat “your money or your life” functions by inculcating the fear of

Metropolitan Museum of New York, accession no. 14.25.1425, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/22387 [accessed May 19, 2022]. 25 Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Hofjagd- und Rüstkammer, A 525, https://www.khm.at/objektdb/ detail/372927/ [accessed May 19, 2022]. 26 Antiche armi dal sec. IX al XVIII già Collezione Odescalchi, ed. Nolfo Di Carpegna (Rome: De Luca, 1969), p. 76: Cat. No. 466, Inv. No. 1518. 27 Hale, “Gunpowder,” 131–2. 28 Pieter De Marees, Pieter de Marees: Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602), ed. and trans. Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones (Oxford: British Academy for the Oxford University Press, 1987), 92. 29 German Sources for West African History, ed. and trans. Adam Jones (Wiesbaden: Frankz Steiner, 1983), 63. 30 David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), 8. 24

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death into the victim. It is not necessary for the gun to be fired for the emotion to be evoked: the inherent threat of lethality is sufficient. A rare sixteenth-century reference to emotion relating to the arms trade comes in an anonymous Italian treatise, datable to the mid-1570s, which addressed the question of arms control. Proposing the death penalty for arms producers, the author argued that customs and border controls should be implemented to prevent “any foreign merchant” bringing illegal weapons into the Papal States, “placing them under pain of death in such a way that they fear to cross us.”31 On the whole, the early sources have significantly less to say about the industry than about its end product. We can, however, glean something of how early firearms manufacturers were understood in emotional terms from the contemporary reports of the Venetian rectors of Brescia on the people of Gardone Val Trompia (the single most important arms-producing area of Italy, then as now, and a subject territory of Venice on which the Venetians relied for a regular supply of guns). The Gardonese are typically discussed as a group, which was in part a matter of convention in these reports (which often include comment on national or civic character) but also reflects the fact that in their negotiations with the Venetian rulers the representatives of the valleys appear (from the limited sources) to have operated collectively.32 In some cases the language used focuses on temperament rather than emotion, reflecting contemporary humoral theory that characterized individuals as sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic, and thus predisposed to different emotional states.33 Writing in 1554, Marino Cavalli observed that the people of Gardone were “reckoned more ferocious and more bellicose than all the rest,” while the year before Cattarino Zen, in the context of concerns about both firearm proliferation and religious radicalism, had them down as “a bad breed, untameable, overbearing Lutherans.”34 Cavalli also, however, raised an important point about Gardonese loyalty towards Venice, characterizing the people of the valley as “most affectionate” towards the ruling city.35 An earlier report, from Marc’Antonio de Mula, in 1547, had described Val Trompia, along with two other valleys, as “most devoted” to Venice.36 For Venice, which relied on the Gardone producers for a secure supply of firearms, these feelings of affection and devotion mattered. A disaffected arms industry might opt to sell its products elsewhere; its individual masters might migrate to other cities (Venice tried to limit both exports to hostile states and emigration, but was not always successful). This was not, at least in Cavalli’s view, purely a matter of financial interest or Venetian power: it was a relationship between state and industry with an emotional element. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Miscellanea Medicea 39, inserto 15. The proposal was not far distant from actual legislation that provided in some circumstances for producers to be sent to the galleys. Davis, “The Renaissance Goes up in Smoke,” 406. 32 For further discussion see Catherine Fletcher, “Agents of Firearms Supply in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Rethinking the Contractor State,” in Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond, ed. Stephen Bowd, Sarah Cockram, and John Gagné (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). 33 Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 104–6. 34 Relazioni dei Rettori Veneti in Terraferma. XI, Podestaria e Capitanato di Brescia, ed. A. Tagliaferri (Milan: Giuffrè, 1978), 49, 41. 35 Relazioni, 49. 36 Ibid., 34. 31

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The Firearms Industry and Its Historiography That emotional element of patriotism was also to be found, albeit in a somewhat different form, in subsequent historical accounts. The earliest modern study of the arms industry in Gardone, a short pamphlet published in 1845, was written by Marco Cominassi [Cominazzi], who described himself as an artisan in the Gardone arms factory. Cominassi gathered together recollections and notes on the industry’s history, hoping “to contribute to this aspect of the glory of the fatherland and to make even better known the fame that the Fabbrica d’armi in Gardone enjoyed at all times.”37 This was, then, an early and promotional business history, written by an insider with a selfdeclared sense of patriotism and an implicit pride in his work and, moreover, in the context of the Italian Risorgimento (the political and social movement that led in the nineteenth century to national unification). In the years following Italian unification, Angelo Angelucci, whose book on the history of shooting contests was published in 1865, dedicated his volume to Italians who did not like to seek the origins of national institutions in foreign countries, explaining that he had collected his documents “for the glory of the fatherland.”38 Its title page proclaimed his credentials as a captain of artillery. Following up, in 1869, with the first of what was intended to be a series of volumes collecting together documents on the history of firearms, Angelucci was still more explicit: he wanted “to show the world how great our Italy has been in all manner of firearms inventions since the most distant times.”39 Cesare Quarenghi, described on the title page of his 1880 book as an official of the Italian army, likewise produced a self-consciously patriotic account of the history of Italian firearms for the newly unified  nation, asserting Italian mastery and precedence over other nations in the production of guns.40 There was no pretense at Rankean objectivity here. Yet if the Italian national context was new, the patriotic sentiment was not: from the earliest days of firearm production these weapons, even while being condemned as diabolical and unchivalrous, had been associated with civic pride in the Italian citystates. In Lucca, for example, shooting contests aimed at improving the citizens’ skills for civic defense were heralded in 1520 with rhetoric about the risk to their “dear liberty and the reduction of their fatherland to servitude.”41 These broad associations of the industry, its product and its history with ideas of civic and national pride continued. Skipping forward to the twentieth century, an anthology of essays on the history and culture of Gardone Val Trompia opened its chapter on “The Citadel of Arms” with a discussion of the present-day state of this “luminous tradition,” noting the spectacular expansion of the industry in the twentieth century as well as the “crises, difficulties” of reconverting to production for hunting and defense in the aftermath of wars. By 1968, Marco Cominazzi, Cenni sulla fabbrica d’armi in Gardone di Valtrompia (Milan: Sentinella, 1845), 16. 38 Angelo Angelucci, Il tiro al segno in Italia dalla sua origine sino ai nostri giorni (Turin: Baglione, 1865), unpaginated dedication. 39 Documenti inediti per la storia delle armi da fuoco italiane, ed. Angelo Angelucci (Turin: Cassone, 1869), xiii–xiv. 40 Cesare Quarenghi, Tecno-cronografia delle armi da fuoco italiane (2 vols., Naples: Nobile, 1880–1881), 4. 41 Angelucci, Il tiro, 43–4. 37

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the Gardone area was producing 62 percent of Italy’s hunting weapons and 80 percent of its pistols.42 The book listed the “famous names” of the industry and their dates of operation, including two, Beretta and Bernardelli, that were still in business.43 The twentieth century, however, had seen much wider criticism of the arms industry across the Western world, with a growing characterization of arms traders as “merchants of death.”44 (Manufacturers, as opposed to traders, were sometimes conceded a necessary role in national defense.) The archetype of this image was the character of Andrew Undershaft, villain of George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 play Major Barbara, which addressed the question of whether charitable institutions like the Salvation Army (of which Barbara, Undershaft’s estranged daughter, is a major), should accept philanthropic gifts from the industry. Undershaft characterizes the “true faith of an Armorer” as: To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.45

Undershaft, moreover, regards himself as “the government of your country  … you will  do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t.”46 If Major Barbara set the tone, the major interventions on the evils of the industry came in the period following the First World War, and especially from the 1930s.47 Shortly before the war, Fenner Brockway had written his own play critical of the arms trade, The Devil’s Business. (Even in this more secular society the diabolical associations of early firearms had not disappeared.) He found it first subject to cuts, then banned and destroyed on the order of a magistrate.48 In 1933 Brockway returned to the topic with a book called The Bloody Traffic, a blunt indictment of the trade against the background of the “horror,” “tragedy,” and “slaughter” of the First World War. Acknowledging that some may object to his title, he wrote: “I mean it to be nasty. The traffic is nasty. It’s the filthiest and bloodiest of trades.”49 It was deliberately emotional language but, according to its critics, the arms industry was also engaged in the manipulation of emotion. Engelbrecht and Hanighen claimed: “They excite governments and peoples to fear their neighbors and rivals, so that they may sell more Antologia gardonese (Brescia: Apollonio, 1969), 170. Antologia gardonese, 174. 44 H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armaments Industry (1934. Reissued Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). 45 George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (1905), available online at https://standardebooks.org/ ebooks/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara/text/single-page [accessed January 10, 2022]. 46 Shaw, Major Barbara. 47 Cindy Cannizzo, ed., The Gun Merchants: Politics and Policies of the Major Arms Suppliers (New York: Pergamon, 1980), 1. 48 Fenner Brockway, The Bloody Traffic (London: Gollancz, 1933), 11–12. 49 Ibid., 13. 42 43

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armaments.”50 Basil Zaharoff, an arms dealer whose career prompted some of the most speculative and lurid writing of the 1930s, was alleged to have said: “I make wars so that I can sell arms to both sides.”51 Among the more scholarly works of these years was Philip Noel-Baker’s The Private Manufacture of Armaments. Making the case for a government monopoly on arms production,52 Noel-Baker noted the significance of emotion to the arms industry. “The agents of Armaments Firms,” he wrote, “have on occasion started panics by the dissemination of false rumors … as the result of which armament orders have been increased.”53 Concluding, he observed: “As long as [private armament interests] foment unrest in other countries, inflame passions and nourish fears, so long shall we be menaced by the genuine dangers which these fears and passions themselves create.”54 In other words, arms manufacturers depended on emotion for sales. For much of the later twentieth century, the historical profession was working in the political context of first an arms race and then debates about arms proliferation, albeit focused initially on nuclear weapons rather than small arms. The first Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was signed in 1968. Some scholars addressed this environment directly. Carlo Cipolla began the preface to his Guns, Sails and Empires (1965) with the words “I am an inveterate pacifist since while I recognize that wars and revolutions are one way of settling human affairs I am inclined to believe that they are neither a rational nor a polite one.”55 John Hale, writing on “Gunpowder and the Renaissance” observed that it was natural for modern historians, sickened by the arms race of their own day, to look back in nostalgia to an age when there is literary evidence to suggest that the race could be slowed by an appeal to men’s better nature. This nostalgia, alas, is misplaced.56

Cipolla and Hale diverge in their rhetoric, the former appealing to rationality, the latter conceding more emotion with the idea that historians might be “sickened.” What is evident, however, is that for both the fraught context was worthy of comment. The 1970s saw several studies of the arms industry and trade, including that of Basil Collier, who sought to debunk what he argued was the “erroneous belief ” that underpinned the interwar critiques.57 Journalist Anthony Sampson, in a more popular Engelbrecht and Hanighen, Merchants, unpaginated online edition, ch. 1. For examples of the Zaharoff biographies, see Guiles Davenport, Zaharoff: High Priest of War (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1934); Robert Neumann, Zaharoff: The Armaments King, trans. R. T. Clark (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935). The quotation is in Neil McKendrick, “General Introduction: In Search of a Secular Ideal,” in Clive Trebilcock, The Vickers Brothers: Armaments and Enterprise, 1854–1914 (London: Europa, 1977), xxxiii. 52 Noel-Baker, Private Manufacture, vol. 1, 15–17. 53 Ibid., vol. 2, 390. 54 Ibid., vol. 3, 559. 55 Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion 1400–1700 (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 5. 56 Hale, “Gunpowder,” 136. 57 Basil Collier, Arms and the Men: The Arms Trade and Governments (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980), xii. 50 51

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history, acknowledged that his was “an emotive subject,” but also stressed that it had been his “special aim to convey the feel of the business, as experienced both by the dealers and the makers of arms, and by those charged with controlling them.”58 One of the most striking discussions of emotion in his book comes from Dany Chamoun, who purchased arms for Lebanese Christian militia in the early years of the civil war of 1975–1990. Chamoun, son of the country’s former president, told Sampson: “The Lebanese love to buy guns. They buy guns to impress each other, and they take pride in their guns, more than in their nation. People here will never give up their personal weapons—it’s like losing their wife.”59 True or not, Chamoun’s observation provides important testimony of his own perception, as an arms buyer, of the feelings that might attach to firearms. Published the same year, 1977, but rather less engaged with questions of emotion was Clive Trebilcock’s business biography of Tom and Albert Vickers, the founders of a major British armaments firm. In an introduction, the series editor, Neil McKendrick, argued that the attention accorded to Basil Zaharoff had inhibited serious study of the company: “What attention they did get tended towards the sensational and unsavory. The popular emotional response was predictably hostile, and the academic response predictably cool.”60 McKendrick was not the only scholar of this generation to imply that public emotion was a problem when it came to serious study of the arms trade. Cindy Cannizzo hoped that current limited policies of restraining arms sales might “buy time” to persuade “governments, publics and industries alike … that something must be done to control the trade at the arms bazaar.” She added: “Let us hope such a point will be reached before there is another major war using transferred arms that would usher in an emotional hysteria like that of the ‘slander and control’ period,” that is, the interwar years in which arms manufacturers came in for so much public criticism.61 Here, the gendered word “hysteria,” with its links to women’s supposed irrationality, is used to contrast a supposedly excessive public response to Cannizzo’s implicitly more rational approach. A rare historical perspective with the explicit endorsement of an arms manufacturer arrived in 1980. The Beretta firm had expected to mark its 300th anniversary that year, but research for a commemorative history book revealed that the firm was, in fact, more than 450 years old. The authors, Marco Morin and Robert Held, were given access to the private family archive. In an opening dedication to the volume they produced, Giuseppe and Carlo Beretta observed that the collaboration of Marco Morin and Robert Held has proved invaluable: they have condensed in this book their researches and experiences of decades, reaching conclusions we feel to be all the more respectworthy for being authored by historians, not by hagiographers.62 Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar. The Companies, the Dealers, the Bribes: From Vickers to Lockheed (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 8. 59 Ibid., 21. 60 McKendrick, “Introduction,” in Trebilcock,Vickers, xxv; see also xxxiii–xxxiv. 61 Cannizzo, Gun Merchants, 190. 62 Marco Morin and Robert Held, Beretta: The World’s Oldest Industrial Dynasty (Chiasso: Acquafresca, 1980), 7. 58

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Perhaps in line with that attempt to present the firm as willing to engage with expert historical scrutiny (implicitly, of the traditional, objective variety), there was relatively little discussion of emotion in the text. The exceptions are at the start and finish. The dedication by the Berettas refers to the firm enjoying “health and vigor—and a flare of youthful spirit too, in spite of its venerable age,” and places this in the context that a “long life is a happy life only if accompanied by good health.”63 The idea that a firm, like individuals, might in the right circumstances be “happy” gives an intriguing insight into internal perceptions of the company. Morin and Held’s conclusion refers to the “traditions that harken back nearly five centuries … and that are now daily reaffirmed with pride in every quarter of the globe.”64 The firm’s very longevity thus becomes a source of emotion and, perhaps not coincidentally, one that echoes the sentiments of civic and national pride in earlier Italian histories. In contrast stand studies of the contemporary arms trade emerging from the context of Peace Studies. Jurgen Brauer and J. Paul Dunne’s 2002 collection was dedicated “with appreciation and affection to our activist friends in the worldwide peace movement.”65 Here by expression of positive sentiment towards opponents of the arms trade, the editors implicitly convey their hostility towards their subject: this is later made more explicit via the inclusion in the collection of an essay from Tony Kempster, an antiarms trade campaigner, characterized in the introduction as a “research user,”66 who situates the issue in emotional terms: The two flames of anger and hope which historically brought social justice and democracy to the Western world are at work today in developing countries. People in these countries are striving to escape poverty, dependency, and insecurity. We are morally obliged to assist them by removing the burden of arms purchases our society places on them.67

Such an emotional engagement with research was a clear negative for some scholars. Paul Levine and Ron Smith, introducing a 2003 collection, noted that “The ultimate driver of demands for arms is war or the fear of war.”68 Yet their contributors Keith Hartley and Stephen Martin observed that their topic was “an area dominated by myths, emotion and special pleading,” implicitly contrasting this to “sensible, informed debates and public choices.”69

Morin and Held, Beretta, 7. Ibid., 243. 65 Jurgen Brauer and J. Paul Dunne, eds. Arming the South: The Economics of Military Expenditure, Arms Production and Arms Trade in Developing Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), v. 66 Ibid., 3. 67 Kempster, “Arms sales,” 415. 68 Paul Levine and Ron Smith, eds. The Arms Trade: Security and Conflict (London: Routledge, 2003), 2. 69 Keith Hartley and Stephen Martin, “The Economics of UK Arms Exports,” in Levine and Smith, The Arms Trade, 5. 63 64

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New Approaches More recently scholars have begun to engage in more detail with the culture of firearms and, sometimes, with the emotions that attach to them. Different brands of firearms carry with them their own connotations. Christopher Carr’s Kalashnikov Culture provides testimony to the persistent emotional associations of firearms, citing the “aesthetic pleasure” taken in guns by young men in Hyderabad, and a description from Baluchistan of rifles as “dearer than a son.”70 These emotional attachments have policy implications for disarmament campaigns: “Even when a high level of autonomy and security can be guaranteed … the attachment to the gun may override any confidence in a peaceful existence that the owners of the arms might have at that time.”71 Matthew Ford has shown how the marketing of small arms, particularly to elite regiments in a position to shape taste, plays to soldiers’ sense of status and professionalism. Manufacturers target their efforts on Special Forces (which typically have more independence to select their weapons) as a means of influencing the influencers.72 The emotions at work here include pride, but also anxiety, and specifically status anxiety. Other work has explored the conceptualization of guns as relatively unemotional, impersonal objects when compared with weapons used in close fighting such as knives. Priya Satia has argued that in the eighteenth century, guns allowed for “less emotionally motivated violence,” precisely because they could be fired from a distance (and were more accessible to the unskilled than bows).73 This made them attractive for use in the defense of property, which prompted less emotional engagement than the defense of life. In the years after the French Revolution, which had “pivotally exposed the dangers of a cult of feeling and grounded British national character in the practice of emotional restraint,” guns could be socially acceptable for gentlemen, because they functioned “outside the domain of the passions.”74 There were critiques that sought to highlight the cruelty of guns, but they were few.75 Emotion came into it in the sense that guns prompted (as they had from the start) fear and terror, while allowing the user to remain relatively calm. Whether this shift in attitudes to firearms entailed a complete loss of the sense of pleasure that earlier users reported (or were accused of taking) remains an open question. If so, it seems to have revived later. That said, the focus of Satia’s study is the role of firearms in the making of the Industrial Revolution, and not the emotional engagement of regular gun users with their weapons, nor the deployment of emotion in the marketing of arms. That last issue, however, seems crucial to understanding how users, both contemporary and historical, engage with guns. Smith et al., treating firearms violence as a public health problem, found a relationship between the type Christopher Carr, Kalashnikov Culture: Small Arms Proliferation and Irregular Warfare (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 4, citing Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 128. 71 Ibid., 5; see also discussion, 106. 72 Matthew Ford, Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation (London: Hurst, 2016), chapter 7, especially 169. 73 Satia, Empire, 234–5. 74 Ibid., 255. 75 Ibid., 257–9. 70

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of guns sold in a given year and those recovered in the context of crime the following year; their study noted, however, that “Further research is needed to determine whether industry marketing is contributing to a change in the demand for firearms and the cultural perception of guns in society.”76 In so far as this question has been addressed, it has often been by investigative journalists, whose professional conventions concerning off-the-record discussions grant them more freedom to engage with anonymous sources, albeit at the cost of other researchers subsequently being able to check facts. The Hollywood Reporter and Economist have explored the industry’s engagement with Hollywood film-making. It is commonplace for firearms in the movies to be given real brand names, whether or not product placement is paid for. (A 2016 article in the Economist judged that direct payment was relatively rare.77) Even while arms dealers and/or manufacturers remain popular movie villains, from superhero movies (Iron Man, 2008), through drama (Jackie Brown, 1997), to more direct explorations of the industry (Lord of War, 2005, loosely based on a real individual), the industry has a “lucrative relationship” with US movie makers.78 While research remains scarce, there is certainly a perception that association with the film industry can help sales: the Economist cites Clint Eastwood’s on-screen use of a Smith & Wesson pistol and the expansion of Glock following the appearance of one of their weapons in Die Hard 2.79 Similar promotional tactics were visible in the 2020 Olympics. In the men’s trap shooting final, three of the six finalists (Jorge Martin Orozco Diaz, Mexico; Yu Haicheng, China; Jiri Liptak, Czech Republic) displayed Beretta logos on either clothing or guns, while Mark CowardHolley (Great Britain) shot with a gun from another Brescian firm, Perazzi.80 Through this sponsorship, arms companies associate themselves with sporting success, victory, and national pride.

Conclusion Emotion matters to the arms industry. Key to the practical use of firearms is their ability to inspire fear, and the same is true on a larger scale too: the ownership of the latest weapons or arms systems may inspire fear in rival nations (or among rival gangs) that if they do not obtain similar, they will be vulnerable to attack. Yet fear and terror are not the only relevant emotions here. National and civic pride are significant and so, Victoria M. Smith, Michael Siegel, Ziming Xuan, Craig S. Ross, Sandro Galea, Bindu Kalesan, Eric Fleegler, and Kristin A. Goss, “Broadening the Perspective on Gun Violence: An Examination of the Firearms Industry, 1990–2015.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 53 (2017): 590. 77 B. H., “How Guns Get Into Films: More Bang for Your Buck,” The Economist, October 19, 2016, https://www.economist.com/prospero/2016/10/19/how-guns-get-into-films [accessed January 5, 2022]. 78 Gary Baum and Scott Johnson, “Locked and Loaded: The Gun Industry’s Lucrative Relationship with Hollywood,” Hollywood Reporter, 2015, https://features.hollywoodreporter.com/the-gunindustrys-lucrative-relationship-with-hollywood/ [accessed January 7, 2022]. 79 B. H., “How Guns Get Into Films”. 80 Observed in broadcast July 29, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09pjvnj?seriesId= b00cmh07–431-day-2 [accessed August 8, 2021]. 76

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across time, has been affection. From 1530s Italy to twenty-first-century Baluchistan, guns can be “dear” to their users. Strategies of influencing and sponsorship help to reinforce such positive emotional attachments. On the other hand, there have been contexts in which the unemotional character of guns has come to the fore in public discussion: this is equally a characterization of interest. While this chapter has cited multiple examples, often these are mentioned in passing in broader studies of firearms, their production and associated cultures. Future research might explore the change (or lack of change) in the emotional dynamics of weaponry, assessing how and why certain emotional associations have changed, or become contentious, while others have not. It might investigate the emotions of different actors in the industry (producers, buyers, traders) or the emotions of state actors and their publics. It might analyze the emotions of weapons users, in both military and civilian contexts: some who may be choosing to use guns, some of whom may have little option but to do so. In terms of understanding attitudes and emotions within the arms industry, the source base is often a challenge. Chris Corker’s doctoral thesis on the early twentiethcentury Sheffield armaments industry noted that many of the key sources were only partially cataloged at best.81 Public commemoration of the individuals involved often emphasizes their philanthropy rather than potentially controversial business interests.82 Contemporary historians, meanwhile, have often depended on government or judicial inquiries for their sources, especially in relation to arms trading of questionable legality, including in the UK the Scott Inquiry into arms sales to Iraq (which began in 1992 and reported in 1996) and a 1999 parliamentary investigation into civil servants’ complicity in embargo-breaking activities by British mercenaries in Sierra Leone (the so-called “Arms to Africa” affair). These inquiries gave an unusual degree of publicity to an often-secretive industry and provided detailed documentary evidence that could be scrutinized by experts. As Davina Miller observed, the papers were “carefully crafted or sanitized,” and excluded informal elements of the processes described; although they gave an “unprecedented” level of access to the industry’s decision-making processes, that did not necessarily include the nuance that might most interest a historian of emotions.83 The difficulties of the source base should also be a warning to historians of the need to read between the lines, or to look creatively, beyond industry archives, for material that might provide clues to its emotions. Equally important to the study of emotions and the arms industry is the role of emotion in debates about the industry’s place in society, including scholarly ones. Here, critics of the arms industry or trade frequently deploy emotionally evocative imagery, while on the other side of the argument the idea that some arms production is necessary or inevitable in human society is presented as rational, pragmatic, or sensible. The idea that historical study should be objective and dispassionate, however, has long been the subject of critique. It is possible to be emotionally engaged with one’s

Christopher Corker, “The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry 1900–1930,” PhD diss., Sheffield Hallam University, 2016, 7. 82 Christopher Corker, “The Armaments Past of Mark Firth.” History Matters, 2018, http://www. historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/armaments-mark-firth/ [accessed May 19, 2022]. 83 Davina Miller, Export or Die: Britain’s Defence Trade with Iran and Iraq (London: Cassell, 1996), 2. 81

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subject and still write good analysis. I would also suggest, however, that historians of armaments production, and of weapons more generally, need to engage thoughtfully with the positive emotions that attach to the industry, whether the pride of arms factory workers in their skilled production, or the enthusiasm of gun users. These emotional communities sustain the arms industry: to understand it, we need to understand them.

Bibliography Angelucci, Angelo. Il tiro al segno in Italia dalla sua origine sino ai nostri giorni. Turin: Baglione, 1865. Antologia gardonese. Brescia: Apollonio, 1969. Bertolotti, Antonio. “Le arti minori alla corte di Mantova nei secoli XV, XVI e XVII.” Archivio storico lombardo ser. 2, vol. 5, year 15 (1888): 491–590. Bowd, Stephen. Renaissance Mass Murder: Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Brauer, Jurgen and J. Paul Dunne, eds. Arming the South: The Economics of Military Expenditure, Arms Production and Arms Trade in Developing Countries. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Brockway, Fenner. The Bloody Traffic. London: Gollancz, 1933. Brugh, Patrick. Gunpowder, Masculinity, and Warfare in German Texts, 1400–1700. Melton: University of Rochester Press, 2019. Cannizzo, Cindy, ed. The Gun Merchants: Politics and Policies of the Major Arms Suppliers. New York: Pergamon, 1980. Carr, Christopher. Kalashnikov Culture: Small Arms Proliferation and Irregular Warfare. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. Cellini, Benvenuto. Autobiography. Translated by George Bull. London: Penguin, 1998. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Chilton, Paul. “Humanism and War in Rabelais and Montaigne,” in War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Margaret Shewring and J. R. Mulryne, 119–43. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Cipolla, Carlo M. Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion 1400–1700. New York: Pantheon, 1965. Collier, Basil. Arms and the Men: The Arms Trade and Governments. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980. Cominazzi, Marco. Cenni sulla fabbrica d’armi in Gardone di Valtrompia. Milan: Sentinella, 1845. Corker, Christopher. “The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry 1900–1930.” PhD diss., Sheffield Hallam University, 2016. Davenport, Guiles. Zaharoff: High Priest of War. Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1934. Davis, Robert C. “The Renaissance Goes up in Smoke,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin, 398–411. London: Routledge, 2008. De Marees, Pieter. Pieter de Marees: Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602). Edited and translated by Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones. Oxford: British Academy for the Oxford University Press, 1987. Documenti inediti per la storia delle armi da fuoco italiane, ed. Angelo Angelucci. Turin: Cassone, 1869.

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Engelbrecht, H. C. and F. C. Hanighen. Merchants of Death, A Study of the International Armaments Industry. 1934. Reissued Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Essential Erasmus. Translated by J. P. Dolan. New York: New American Library, 1964. Fletcher, Catherine. “Agents of Firearms Supply in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Rethinking the Contractor State,” in Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond, ed. Stephen Bowd, Sarah Cockram, and John Gagné. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming. Ford, Matthew. Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation. London: Hurst, 2016. Fronsperger, Leonhard. Kriegsbuch. 3 vols. Frankfurt, 1573. German Sources for West African History. Edited and translated by Adam Jones. Wiesbaden: Frankz Steiner, 1983. Guerzoni, Guido. “The Social World of Price Formation: Prices and Consumption in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara,” in The Material Renaissance, ed. Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, 85–105. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Hale, John. “Gunpowder and the Renaissance,” in From the Renaissance to the CounterReformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly, ed. C. H. Carter, 113–44. London: Cape, 1966. Hartley, Keith and Stephen Martin. “The Economics of UK Arms Exports,” in Paul Levine and Ron Smith, The Arms Trade: Security and Conflict, 5–20. London: Routledge, 2003. Hughes, Paul L. and James F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964–1969. Kempster, Tony, “Arms Sales and Development: The Role of the Peace Movement,” in Jurgen Brauer and J. Paul Dunne. Le armi degli Estensi: La collezione di Konopiště, 405–16. Milan: Fabbri, 1986. Le Carré, John. The Night Manager. London: Penguin, 2013. Leonardo da Vinci. Notebooks. Selected by Irma A. Richter, ed. Thereza Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Levine, Paul and Ron Smith, eds. The Arms Trade: Security and Conflict. London: Routledge, 2003. Miller, Davina. Export or Die: Britain’s Defence Trade with Iran and Iraq. London: Cassell, 1996. Monluc, Blaise de. Commentaires et lettres de Blaise de Monluc, Maréchal de France, ed. Alphonse de Rable. 5 vols. Paris: Renouard, 1864–1872. Montaigne, Michel de. “XLVIII. Of Steeds, Called in French Destriers,” Florio’s Translation of Montaigne’s Essays, Book 1. 1603. Eugene: University of Oregon, Renascence Editions, 1999. Morin, Marco and Robert Held. Beretta: The World’s Oldest Industrial Dynasty. Chiasso: Aquafresca, 1980. Nayar, Sheila J. Renaissance Responses to Technological Change. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Neumann, Robert. Zaharoff: The Armaments King. Translated by R. T. Clark. London: Allen & Unwin, 1935. Noel-Baker, Philip. The Private Manufacture of Armaments. 3 vols. London: Gollancz, 1937. Quarenghi, Cesare. Tecno-cronografia delle armi da fuoco italiane. 2 vols. Naples: Nobile, 1880.

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Relazioni dei Rettori Veneti in Terraferma. XI, Podestaria e Capitanato di Brescia, ed. A. Tagliaferri. Milan: Giuffrè, 1978. Sampson, Anthony. The Arms Bazaar. The Companies, the Dealers, the Bribes: From Vickers to Lockheed. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977. Satia, Priya. Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Richmond, UK: Duckworth, 2018. Schwoerer, Lois G. Gun Culture in Early Modern England. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Shaw, George Bernard. Major Barbara. 1905. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/georgebernard-shaw/major-barbara/text/single-page [accessed January 10, 2022]. Silverman, David J. Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016. Siraisi, Nancy. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Smith, Victoria M., Michael Siegel, Ziming Xuan, Craig S. Ross, Sandro Galea, Bindu Kalesan, Eric Fleegler, and Kristin A. Goss. “Broadening the Perspective on Gun Violence: An Examination of the Firearms Industry, 1990–2015.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 53 (2017): 584–91 Trebilcock, Clive. The Vickers Brothers: Armaments and Enterprise, 1854–1914. London: Europa, 1977. Verkaaik, Oskar. Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

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Making Sense of Financial Crises in the Netherlands: The Emotional Economy of Bubbles (1637–1987) Inger Leemans, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Joost Dankers, Utrecht University Ronald Kroeze, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Floris van Berckel Smit, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Introduction: The Role of Emotions in Financial Sensemaking What the devil is he doing? This question might have occurred to people at the Amsterdam stock exchange in 1720, bumping into a New Year’s Gift pamphlet that presented a satyr as the “prince of stock jobbing” making love to goddess of money, Pecunia (Figure 10.1). Their courtship is explained: the Scottish “tail man”—obviously a reference to John Law, the presumed architect of the 1720 South Sea Bubble—has arrived from hell without money. With horse turds covered in rolled gold he has seduced nymph Pecunia, bewitching her calculating eyes. Through her love, a treasure of coins rains down upon the satyr. Sex between this investor prince and his money nymph is, financially, a very fertile affair. As the poem beneath the cartoon states, the affair attracts new “lievelingen” (“lovers,” as well as amateurs) to the stock market, who will probably soon fall into despair. The anonymous engraver and poet of this cartoon thus presented the speculation wave of the 1720s in terms of emotions: love, sexual desire, hope, and despair drive the stock market forward. While the cartoon characters perform these economic emotions, the emotional economy of the reader probably entailed balancing curiosity and joy (satire) with concern. How do societies cope with financial crises and what role do emotions play in these processes? The banking crisis of 2007–2008 and the consecutive Euro-crisis of 2010 caused a global outcry, followed by an intensive, ongoing sensemaking process. International news coverage, but also cartoons, movies, theater plays, infographics, tweets, and other cultural sources tried to explain the crisis, pondering the economic, political, social, and moral causes and consequences. Emotions ranged from excitement to anxiety, fear, rage, and shame. This is a historical phenomenon. Since Tulipmania in 1637, financial bubbles have been accompanied by cultural bubbles.

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Figure  10.1  Nieuw-Jaars Geschenk / Lauwmaand herdenking, in Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid (1720). Courtesy of Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-83.573.

In these sensemaking processes emotions played an important role. News articles, poems, plays, cartoons, and later also movies covered and commented upon what was happening in the stock market, describing market dynamics in terms of the passions: excited traders, wishes and hopes, irritable markets, greedy merchants in love with money, the sadness of the losers. This chapter describes the sensemaking processes of financial bubbles, analyzing the role passions and feelings played in the stock market and how this was perceived

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by the public.1 Our work aligns with the recent cultural-history approach to financial and business history, paying more attention to cultural sources to understand the role of narratives and sentiments in sensemaking processes.2 We build on a growing body of literature that has broadened the scope of economic theory and the history of finance and business to the cultural realm. Since Schumpeter it has been acknowledged that capitalism is a highly dynamic system in which change is a constant and volatility is never very far away. Studies of the long history of financial manias have underlined that bubbles should not be perceived as independent, “freak” events, but as “evergreens,” “natural” occurrences, symptomatic of the irrationality of (financial) markets.3 Recent studies have focused on the devastating consequences of bubbles for different groups and sectors of society, viewing bubbles and the unruly emotions they were accompanied by in their social context and global connectivity.4 Relatedly, the history of finance has taken more interest in media coverage of financial crises and other economic events, observing an increase in press coverage during such periods. Moreover, we subscribe to recent pleas to take a comparative and long-term approach (moving away from the emphasis on specific moments), as well as to broaden the scope beyond the question whether press coverage was correct or (un)critical.5 Furthermore, recent studies showed that the cultural coverage of financial bubbles should not (solely) Research for this chapter was conducted in the context of the project “Banking on Financial History,” supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). A pilot paper was presented at the 23rd Annual EBHA Congress, Rotterdam, The Business History of Creativity, August 29 and 31, 2019. News is covered through https://17202020financialcrises.wordpress.com. 2 Per Hansen, “Business History: A Cultural and Narrative Approach.” Business History Review 86, no. 4 (2012): 693–717; Ronald Kroeze and Jasmijn Vervloet, “A Life at the Company: Oral History and Sense Making.” Enterprise and Society 20, no. 1 (2019): 33–46; Ronald Kroeze and Sjoerd Keulen. “Leading a Multinational is History in Practice: The Use of Invented Traditions and Narratives at AkzoNobel, Shell, Philips and ABN AMRO.” Business History 55, no. 1 (2013): 1–23; Inger Leemans, “Verse Weavers and Paper Traders: Speculation in the Theatre,” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, ed. William N. Goetzmann, Catherine Labio, K. Geert Rouwenhorst, and Timothy G. Young, 175–190 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 3 Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Comp, 1939); Robert Z. Aliber, and Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises 7th edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Marius van Nieuwkerk and Cherelt Kroeze, Bubbles: Spraakmakende Financiële Crises uit de Geschiedenis (Amsterdam: Sonsbeek Publishers, 2007); Cihan Bilginsoy, A History of Financial Crises: Dreams and Follies of Expectations (New York: Routledge, 2014); The concept of “bubbles” has long been a topic of debate in economic theory, see e.g. Eugene F. Fama, “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work.” The Journal of Finance 25, no. 2 (1970): 383–417; J. Tirole, “On the Possibility of Speculation under Rational Expectations.” Econometrica 50 (1982): 1163–82; Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Markus K. Brunnermeier, “Bubbles,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, ed. L. Blume and S. Durlaug, 578–82 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Peter Garber, Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 4 Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); William Quinn and John D. Turner, Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Anne L. Murphy, The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5 Anya Schiffrin, “The Press and the Financial Crisis: A Review of the Literature.” Sociology Compass 9, no. 8 (2015): 639–53; Julien Mercille, The Political Economy and Media Coverage of the European Economic Crisis: The Case of Ireland (New York: Routledge, 2015); Steve Schifferes and Richard Roberts, The Media and Financial Crises (London: Routledge, 2014). 1

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be regarded as responses after the fact, but that they often played a significant role in bubble processes and should be considered essential sources for studying the dynamics of finance as an integral part of society.6 With regard to emotions, traditionally passions were considered to play an important role in sensemaking processes. However, for a long time, as also explained in the introduction to this volume, the history of business and science of financial bubbles have either ignored the passions, or described emotions in one-dimensional terms as irrational, highlighting the “madness of crowds” to draw a sharp line between the rational, efficient market and the heated passions of the “greater fool.”7 On the other side of the spectrum, historians of emotions have started to pay more attention to the economics of emotional culture. The concepts of emotional or affective economies are used to describe the variety and balancing of emotions in individuals (seeking for instance to balance hatred with joy), and communities (for instance with the “rise” of empathy in the eighteenth century, connected to the demise of honor as an essential emotion),8 and to analyze the role emotions play in commercial practices, and in the history of capitalism.9 This chapter is informed by these developments, showing that cultural bubbles played an important role in financial processes through representation and analysis of the stock market as an emotional economy. We underline the proposal made in the introduction to this volume to remove the conceptual boundaries between rationality and sentiment. In former centuries emotions could be perceived as important components of assessment and action taking, and as essential (although sometimes too unruly) drivers of market behavior. For our research, we focus on the Netherlands, known for its vibrant stock market going back to the seventeenth century, offering an exemplary case and ample source-material. Moreover, we take a long-term approach (1637–1987), focusing on three case studies: the early modern bubbles (specifically 1720 and 1763), the crisis of 1929, and the crisis of 1987, considered among the most serious financial crises before 2008, but never studied in a comparative way with a focus on sensemaking. For the crises of the early modern period, we study a range of cultural sources, including cartoons, poems, theater plays, and pamphlets. For the twentieth-century crises, we focus on the dominant form of financial sensemaking: newspaper coverage. We show how journalists and the general public made sense of Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); William N. Goetzmann, Catherine Labio, K. Geert Rouwenhorst, and Timothy G. Young, eds., The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, the Crash of 1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Arnaud Orain, La politique du Merveilleux: une Autre Histoire du Système de Law (1695–1795) (Paris: Fayard, 2018); Hansen, “Business History”; Florence Magnot-Ogilvy, “Gagnons sans Savoir Comment: Représentations du Système de Law du XVIIIe Siècle à Nos Jours” (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017); Inger Leemans, “The Amsterdam Stock Exchange as Affective Economy,” in Early modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies, ed. Inger Leemans and Anne Goldgar, 303–30 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021); Robert J. Shiller, Narrative Economics. How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017). 7 Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Oxford: Infinite Ideas Ltd., [1841] 2009). 8 Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). 9 Inger Leemans and Anne Goldgar, Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). 6

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speculation and crises, and that emotions played an important role throughout the entire period, in a much more sophisticated way than traditional narratives of the “irrational” stock market suggest.

Cultural and Financial Bubbles in the Early Modern Dutch Republic The Netherlands provides an interesting case study for the relationship between financial and cultural bubbles and the perception of stock trading in terms of emotional economy. After the invention of share trading in the Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth century, the stock market evolved rapidly, showing recurring instances of speculation and price fluctuations.10 The Dutch financial market was relatively open, one in which citizens from different layers of society could participate. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, thousands of people were involved in share trading.11 This may help to explain the extraordinary public interest for share trading in the Dutch Republic.12 From the outset, the Dutch public and the press showed ample interest in the new financial developments. Not only did the Dutch press cover the world of trade through news articles, plakkaten (edicts), and listings of prices, it also produced a more general cultural coverage through engravings of the stock exchange building, cartoons of stock jobbers, and poems that praised the virtues of commerce. Sharp price fluctuations were often accompanied by series of pamphlets, in which traders, politicians, and other interested parties expressed their opinion about the matter.13 In 1688 the now famous “investor hand book” Confusión de confusiones was written by the Spanish-Jewish-Dutch author Joseph de la Vega.14 De la Vega combined different knowledge domains—physics, theology, mythology, and meteorology— to grasp the natural laws of the stock market. Many “laws” De la Vega describes consider the passions analyzed as essential, albeit also disturbing, drivers of the stock Lodewijk Petram, The World’s First Stock Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); M.  F. J. Smith, Tijd-affaires in effecten aan de Amsterdamsche beurs (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1919); Ludwig Samuel, Die Effektenspekulation im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Börsengeschichte (Berlin: Spaeth & Linde, 1924); Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 11 On first issuing shares, the VOC joint stock company attracted 1,143 tenderers, who almost immediately started to sell their shares to third parties. The success of the undertaking (VOC shares rose from 180 points in 1630 to 470 in 1643 (more than 250 percent)) attracted new investors looking for a secure investment, or an easy gain. Petram, The World’s First Stock Exchange. 12 Extensive public interest in finance should be understood against the background of the booming Dutch creative industries, providing a fruitful ground for a diverse, constantly innovating cultural production. Claartje Rasterhoff, Painting and Publishing as Cultural Industries: The Fabric of Creativity in the Dutch Republic, 1580–1800 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017); Leemans, “Verse Weavers and Paper Traders.” 13 For example, N. Muys van Holy, Relaes en Contradictie op de motiven, om het kopen en verkoopen van Oost- en West-Indise actien, die niet getransporteert werden  … te bezwaeren met een Impost (Amsterdam, S.l., s.n., s.a. [1687]). 14 Smith, Joseph Penso de la Vega; Jonathan I. Israel, “Een merkwaardig literair werk en de Amsterdamse effectenmarkt in 1688: Joseph Penso de la Vega’s Confusión de confusiones.” De zeventiende eeuw 6 (1990): 159–64. 10

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market. Trading is regarded as a system of affective checks and balances.15 No wonder that the 1720s cartoons—like the one reproduced at the beginning of this chapter (Figure 10.1)—picked up on the idea of love and lust as commercial driving forces.

Bulbs, Wind Trade, and Bankruptcies Although the three most famous early modern crises—1636/37, 1720, and 1763—can be viewed as financial bubbles showing heightened trade activity, a steep price rice and sudden collapse, they were actually quite different in nature. The Tulipmania bubble was based on the trade in goods (tulips) sold through term contracts.16 The trade scene was limited to a few Dutch cities. The “Windhandel” (Wind Trade, the “Dutch South Sea Bubble”) of 1720 was part of an international wave of financial speculation, with Paris and London as the major centers. It was primarily a “paper trade”: speculation in shares and derivatives of joint stock companies. In the Netherlands, option trading seems to have gained momentum from the 1650s onward. Because options were cheaper than shares, more people could participate, causing much anxiety with the public: who were all these people, trying to get rich overnight?17 To add to this, the phenomenon of mushroom companies dealing in fairly new financial products, such as insurances, caused anxieties and concerns.18 Like the 1720 crisis, 1763 was a transnational phenomenon occurring specifically through the interlinking markets of Holland, Hamburg, and Berlin. This crisis was partly based on financial innovations that provided new opportunities for market development, but also encompassed risks. The crisis of 1763 was focused more on banking, triggered by political events (the Seven Years’ War), credit shortage, weak balance sheets, and the contagious effects of failing banks. The impact of the three crises also varied. Tulipmania and the 1720 Windhandel seem to have had a limited economic impact. Most rich merchants and skilled craftsmen could take a blow.19 The banking crisis of 1763, however, had a high impact De la Vega discussed the “caresses” of Fortuna, seeing prudent traders get caught by traders heated by desire, like the wife of Potifar who threw herself upon Joseph: “Shares indicate evil lust, for those who have begun to enjoy her favors, cannot untangle themselves from her embrace.” 16 Goldgar, Tulipmania; Garber, Famous First Bubbles; Arie Ruysch, De tulpenhandel of de dwaasheid der 17e eeuw (Middelburg: J. C. & W. Altorffer, 1846); Earl A. Thompson, “The Tulipmania: Fact or artifact?” Public Choice 130, no. 1–2 (2007): 99–114; Rik G. P. Frehen, William N. Goetzmann, and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, “New Evidence on the First Financial Bubble,” NBER Working Paper No. 15332 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009); Joost Jonker and Oscar Gelderblom, “Mirroring Different Follies. The Character of the 1720 Speculation in the Dutch Republic,” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, ed. William N.  Goetzmann, Catherine Labio, K. Geert Rouwenhorst, and Timothy G. Young, 121–40 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 17 For an overview of the techniques in use in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, and a glossary of terms, see Petram, The World’s First Stock Exchange; Inger Leemans and Wouter de Vries, “Why Wind? How the Concept of Wind Trade Came to Embody Speculation in the Dutch Republic.” Journal of Modern History 94 (2022). 18 Christiaan Hendrik Slechte, “Een noodlottig jaar voor veel zotte en wijze”: de Rotterdamse windhandel van 1720 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982); Frehen, Goetzmann, and Rouwenhorst, “New Evidence on the First Financial Bubble.” 19 For 1720, no convincing evidence exists for a profound bubble crisis with a marked rise in bankruptcies of the established firms and merchant families. Gelderblom and Jonker, “Mirroring Different Follies.” 15

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on the Dutch economy. Some major trade houses went bankrupt, drawing smaller firms with them in the fall. The episode was also instrumental in the waning position of Holland as an international center of finance.20 Although their structure and impact differed, all three financial bubbles were accompanied by waves of media attention, which were so significant that we could call them cultural bubbles. The largest cultural bubble in terms of quantity was clearly 1720. Tulipmania and 1763 each produced around forty pamphlets.21 In 1720 the cultural production skyrocketed. The famous compilation of jobber broadsheets, The Great Mirror of Folly (1720), holds around seventy-five cartoons, and several letters and songs, testifying to the quantity of the cultural response: the public apparently needed guidance in keeping up with the number of publications on the topic.22 In the meantime, the Amsterdam theater had attracted a sizable number of visitors (merchants, policy makers, and the general public) by staging stock jobbing plays. In total ten stock jobbing plays were performed.23 The diversity in the reactions to all three crises is stunning: consolation letters, mock share price lists, catechisms, burial scenes for stock jobbers, theater plays (farces, tragedies, and allegorical plays), bawdy songs, paintings, cartoons, emblems, logos, satirical dialogues. Again, 1720 produced the most diverse output, inventing new visual concepts, stock jobbing plays, bubble playing cards, porcelain plates with mocking stock jobber scenes, and a stream of cartoons with clever combinations of image and text. The 1763 bubble continued this line of production with cartoons, theater plays, and a series of satirical letters, bundled in a compilation: a marketing strategy the printers learned from The Great Mirror of Folly.24 In 1763, we begin to see rising newspaper coverage. In 1720 newspapers mostly limited their coverage to factual news and (occasionally) price lists. In 1763, national and regional newspapers wrote more comprehensively about the world of finance, adding leaflets with satirical texts.28 A couple of years after the crisis, a journal De Koopman [The Merchant] was founded, specifically for business news coverage. In the nineteenth century, the serial press would become dominant in covering the world of finance. By the twentieth century, newspapers covered financial news on a daily basis. Although financial journalism seemed to become more factual and objective, emotions were never far away in times of crises. Isabel Schnabel and Hyun Song Shin, Foreshadowing LTCM: The Crisis of 1763 (Mannheim: Universitätsbibliothek Mannheim, 2002). However, the Amsterdam notary archives do bear witness to dozens of complaints from nonprofessional investors (some of them women) who tried to recover their money from trades they had engaged in in Holland, England, and France. 21 Frans Mensonides, http://www.fransmensonides.nl/tulp/; Posthumus 1926, Krelage 1942, Goldgar, Tulipmania. 22 In 1721 a new compilation with a different selection was put on the market: Verzameling tot waarschouwinge voor de nakomelinge. 23 Some of these plays were also included in the Great Mirror of Folly. Inger Leemans, “‘New Plays Resemble Bubbles, We Must Own’: Staging the Stock Market—1719/1720,” in Pieter Langendijk’s Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders and Harlequin Stock Jobber, ed. Joyce Goggin and Frans De Bruyn, 181–203 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2020). 24 [Anonymus], Het Wissel- en Wondertoneel, van den Jaare 1763. Of Verzameling der Geschriften, Welke over de Veelvuldige Bankroeten zyn in ‘t Licht gekomen (S.l.: s.n., 1763); Sautijn Kluit, De Amsterdamsche Beurs. 20

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The Affective Roadmap of Financial Bubbles These early modern cultural bubbles should not be regarded as “comments after the fact.” Historians have shown that the Tulipmania pamphlets started before the peak of the financial bubble.25 Also, the cartoons and texts did more than satirize and shout out in dismay. They were, for instance, actively involved in heightening trader enthusiasm. They did so by explaining the complex elements of stock jobbing in lay terms (for instance in a song in a theater play), so new players could enter the game. The public was kept informed by new print runs of updated cartoons.26 The famous Bernard Picart print Monument consacré à la postérité en mémoire de la folie incroyable de la XX. année du XVIII. siècle (Figure 10.2) went through several print runs, adapting the information contained. At a certain point, mushrooms appeared, with the names of the new joint stock companies. The text named these mushrooms “bubbels.”27 Thus, the cartoon helped the public understand the new concept of mushroom companies,

Figure  10.2 Mushrooms (“Bubbels”) 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.

Goldgar, Tulipmania. Two cartoons The Wind Sellers Paid in Wind and The Wind Buyers Paid in Wind are very similar, but the first print presented a list of twenty-one joint stock companies that people could invest in, the second version updated the list to twenty-seven companies. 27 Rijksmuseum Amsterdam RP-P-OB-51.222. 25 26

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indicating that these joint stock companies could grow through the “lust en drift’” (enthusiasm and desire) of the traders. The cartoon, showing an exited, mixed, international crowd, men and women, of different social classes and cultural backgrounds, is a display of market tensions and unruly emotions, seeking to depict the affects that drive the traders (Figure 10.3a–e). It is important to note that emotions are depicted as embodied: we read them from

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Figure  10.3a–e The emotional economy of the 1720 Wind Trade. Details 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.

facial expressions, signs and bodily movements. Investors raise their hands in hope and expectation; embracing others intimately. Again, trading and love making seem to be connected. The heightened passions spiral out of control, leading to agony, despair, and pure rage. This analysis of the stock market in terms of emotions continued in the crisis of 1763. Then, theater plays were a more dominant medium than cartoons for cultural

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sensemaking.28 These plays presented a fine-grained understanding of trading as an emotional process, displaying certain patterns. First, the severity of the crisis was “measured” in terms of its emotional impact: merchants are in tears, households are in disarray, widows and orphans (who relied on charity and a prosperous economy) in despair, the stock exchange weeps, Mercury complains. The plays described how self-interest, which was considered to be a positive market driver as long as it was controlled and socially embedded,29 could develop into a more passionate desire. This desire was still an impulse with market value, as it could help to prevent volatility spiraling out of control into lust (with more sexual undertones), greed, and vulturine excesses (stopping at nothing to get personal profit).30 Elsewhere, traders—specifically their families—moved from a mild state of worry, to a more dejected state, described in terms of weight on the soul, and expressed through exclamations (och! ach!), and sighing. Here, denial stops the characters from facing the truth (ik twyfel daar ook aan, ik kan het naauwelyks gelooven—I doubt it, can hardly believe it), but will probably be followed by depression and despair.31 The level of (de)pression was used to show the state of the market and the awareness of what is going on.32 We could continue, describing the transition from being moved to sadness, from concern to alarm, wonder to joy, anxiety to fear, fright, and shock, expressed through the shaking, freezing and collapsing of the body. The texts provide an emotional “roadmap” to provide the general public with means how to “read” the market. While this perception of emotions as important drivers of financial processes and crises might have been discredited in the dominant economic theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would find new interest, as the bubbles of 1929 and 1987 show.

Affective Reactions to the 1929 Crisis and Its Aftermath The crash that hit the New York stock exchange in October 1929 made a deep and lasting impression on public memory. Pictures of mobs frantically trying to enter the Stock Exchange, of stockbrokers and jobbers on the floor watching the prices tumbling in despair, and the myth of traders committing suicide by jumping from skyscrapers, all testify to the serious and broad wave of emotions this crash caused.33 After years of economic euphoria, on October 24 the rise of stock prices came to a sudden halt. Trade Some examples: [Anonymous], De Duizend Vreezen, of De eerlykheid onder de voeten: Blyspel der Bankroetiers (S.l.: s.n., 1763); [Anonymous], De Makelaar of het ontmomde wisselcongres. Kamerspel (S.l.: s.n., 1763); [Anonymous, “A.B.C.D.”], De Bankbreeker door List. Kamerspel (“Cuilenborg”: “Fop Fopper,” 1763); Cornelis van Hoogeveen, De misleide Kooplieden, of De gewaende rijkaerts: Blijspel (Leiden: Cornelis van Hoogeveen, 1763). 29 Inger Leemans, “Commercial Desires in a Web of Interest,” in Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World: A Plea for Ego?, ed. Christine Zabel, 141–63 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). 30 One play describes a merchant “die zeer gierig en schraapzuchtig was, en niemand verschoonde als hy hem trektrekken kon.” 31 “O Droevige tyd! wie drommel kan men hedendaags vertrouwen? ydereen bedriegt me, ik weet geen raad och, och, ik ben een bedorve Man!” 32 “Ik geloof aan u zugten dat gy ‘t al zoo goed weet als ik.” 33 Galbraith stated that it was uninformed and greedy speculators that caused this crisis. J. K. Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 28

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was running so fast the ticker could not catch up and traders panicked on what was called “Black Thursday.” When, after the weekend, the five largest US banks made clear that they would not back up the prices by buying stocks, the stock market crashed on “Black Tuesday,” October 29.34 Symbolically these days of grave crisis on the market were referred to with the color of death, bereavement, and mourning. In the months that followed the crisis spread to Europe. For several years, economic activity declined worldwide and unemployment peaked everywhere. Because the Dutch economy was strongly connected to international trade and finance, it did not take long for the crisis to hit the Netherlands.35 On the Amsterdam stock exchange, prices reacted strongly. Although they had hardly profited from the boom in the US, stock prices were nevertheless dragged down in the months after the crash in the New York, which was widely commented on in Dutch newspapers and was compared to preceding events that shocked the markets.

Indicating the Atmosphere at the Stock Market In the 1920s, Dutch newspapers could build on a long tradition of financial specialism in which newspapers provided information on the movements of the financial market. However, in general, reporting on finance was still rather detached, limited to factual information. The same was true for the first stages of the crisis in 1929. Most Dutch newspapers, especially those connected to the world of finance and business like Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, Algemeen Handelsblad, and De Telegraaf, limited themselves to factual reports in which the calmness of the Amsterdam market was stressed. For international news the journalists mostly relied on press releases of international offices. Only a small number of newspapers had reporters in international markets, and it was only when these reporters started to cover the events in New York and London that descriptions became more vivid. In the first days of the crisis in New York, Dutch news coverage expressed relative calm. This is not surprising because the London and Amsterdam stock exchanges were not immediately impacted after Black Thursday. On Monday October 28, four days after Wall Street had been closed, the London correspondent of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf wrote: “the force that ended the prolonged boom at Wall Street has not for a second deafened the London exchange.”36 The London market even seemed somewhat proud that the crisis was triggered by the British decision to raise the interest on discount loans. This decision, according to Dutch journalist in London, was seen as the direct cause for “the burst of the bubble that was blown up too far by speculation.”37 In fact, this was the only example of a newspaper referring to the crisis as a “bubble.” Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2014); Ali Kabiri, The Great Crash: A Reconciliation of Theory and Evidence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Maury Klein, “The Stock Market Crash of 1929.” Business History Review 75, no. 2 (2001): 325–51. 35 For an overview of the development of the Dutch financial sector in this period see J. L. van Zanden, “Old Rules, New Conditions, 1914–1940,” in A Financial History of the Netherlands, ed. Marjolein ‘t Hart, Joost Jonker, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, 142–51 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 36 De Telegraaf, October 28, 1929. 37 Ibid. (“het uiteenspatten van de te ver opgeblazen speculatie-zeepbel”). 34

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This term, and similar expressions such as the Dutch word windhandel, were apparently earmarked for more distant crises, such as Tulipmania or the South Sea Bubble. Even more remarkably, words like “crash” only occurred in a couple of articles, and “bankruptcy” was only used when foreign cases of swindle or falsehood were covered. However, as in the early modern period, a meteorological metaphor was used to measure the pressure of the stock market. In 1927 the newspaper De Telegraaf innovated in its financial news coverage with the Beursbarometer (Figure 10.4a–b), published as a weekly infographic to analyze the atmosphere of the stock market. The barometer captured the prices for goods (e.g., tobacco, textiles, rubber), sectors (e.g., shipping, oil, banks), and countries (e.g., America). Stable or rising prices were listed as “Firm,” “Very firm,” or “In demand.” When they went down, the market was described as “Divided,” “Weak,” or “Under pressure.” “Depressed” was the most negative indication on this weatherglass. There were no categories for “Disappointing,” “At a loss,” or “Sell!” nor did the barometer have a scale for the panic with which the stock market met in October 1929. The barometer was not only inaccurate, it was also quite slow in capturing the pressure of the stock market. While a barometer is expected to predict the weather, the Beursbarometer actually took quite some time to adapt to changing market conditions. Two days after Black Tuesday, the Dutch barometer still indicated that the American motor company Ford, and business sectors such as oil and margarine were “firm” and “in demand.” It was only after nearly two weeks that the barometer started to show

Figure 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.

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that stock prices were not performing optimally and “America” was listed as “divided.” However, important sectors of the Dutch economy such as tobacco, oil, and sugar still were “Firm”; only margarine was listed as “Faint.” While in 1720, the stock market was depicted as stormy, in 1929, for some time the barometer kept listing the financial atmosphere as “Firm,” “Steady,” or—at worst—“Faint.”

A Delayed Debacle on the Stock Exchange While most Dutch newspapers were displaying calm weather, both for the international and national markets, this positive mood was not shared by all. The social-democratic newspaper Het Volk [The People], for instance, wrote in its headlines on October 30, 1929: “Death bell tolls for Damrak.” The Damrak, home of the Amsterdam stock exchange, was, according to this paper, not the safe haven of the financial world the Dutch press projected. According to Het Volk, the Damrak was in shock at the news of the debacle of New York, and traders were panicking. The reporter gave a vivid description of traders anxiously waiting at the entrance of the stock exchange for the opening hour. Inside, on the bourse floor, they were busily gesticulating, chewing their cigarettes, with stunned faces, their eyes bewildered. The spacious hall of the stock exchange was filled with people running, yelling and tossing about, no one walking calmly. They pop out of a telephone box and start to yell as if they had a terrible accident. At once others gather around and for one moment they seem to start fighting, their screams resounding in the building. Suddenly as if they were naughty boys, caught by a police officer, they run off and ten meters away a new uproar begins. People shout and roar like madmen.38

This description of panic at the exchange might be caused partly by the fact this reporter was not experienced with the usual habits of trade. But his description of the chaotic scenes at the stock exchange formed a clear exception to the largely detached news coverage in these hectic days. Most Dutch newspapers copied press releases from the German Reuters office on declining stock prices, rising unemployment, insolvent banks, and even suicides in New York. The situation was mostly described in a rather quiet way: London was in a “weak mood,” Amsterdam took a “firm position,” and exchange rates were “offering resistance” when the stock exchange opened.39 While the general reaction in Amsterdam, according to most newspapers, seemed to be rather composed, the events on Wall Street were tracked with awe and disbelief. The crash was considered to be “excessive” and Wall Street seemed to be “completely demoralized.”40 It was only when the crisis continued, that newspapers started to express more concerns. On November 10 the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant depicted the events as “days of huge catastrophe,” with prices that were “incessantly crumbling.” Nearly two weeks after Black Tuesday, the newspaper concluded that it had been “a debacle.”41 Het Volk, October 30, 1929. Algemeen Handelsblad, October 30, 1929. 40 Ibid. 41 Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, November 10, 1929. 38 39

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The newspapers then also started to look for preceding crises that might give more context. In a historical overview of historical financial crises, published by Algemeen Handelsblad, the South Sea Bubble was given a prominent role. The 1720s crisis, known for its bubble companies, was described as caused by “excessive speculation” and “spoilage of means.”42 De Telegraaf referred to 1720 to remind the public that there had been severe crises before. The article also relived some of the older terminology and imagery, such as the early modern expression: he (a stock jobber) is “on the bankruptcy wagon to Vianen” (traders who used to flee to the free city of Vianen, to avoid bankruptcy and settling debts).43 The 1720s saying “Wind is the beginning, wind is the end” was printed in this article along with one of the old cartoons of the Great Mirror of Folly (Figure 10.5).

Figure 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). Algemeen Handelsblad, November 3, 1929. De Telegraaf, November 6, 1929. Citations in Dutch: “Op den bankroetierswagen naar Vianen”; “Wind is ‘t begin, wind is ‘t end.”

42 43

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Dutch newspapers in general perceived the crisis as caused by excessive speculation on the American stock exchange. Already on October 29 Algemeen Handelsblad pointed to the banks in the US being happy to finance every expansion in industry and in that way contributing to heavy inflation. This became even more dangerous because most of the stocks were bought by the public with borrowed money. A minor decrease of the prices could thus cause a panic on the stock market, forcing many to sell their shares. A week later, chief editor Heldring published his explanation of what had gone wrong.44 Heldring, descendant of a famous family with roots in banking and business, pointed out the crisis was not caused by speculation. Speculation, in his view, was an essential element of the stock market. It was the “people that threw themselves on the market recklessly” that caused the crisis. They did not take the necessary precautions, but were “led by the spirit of the gambling table.”45 This was an old and well-known trope also used, as we saw, in earlier crisis. In the eighteenth century, stereotyping others as speculators, gamblers, and courtiers was a powerful way of stigmatizing people as unreliable, while at the same time enhancing the standing and integrity of the author.46 This morally tainted message was echoed the same day in a Roman Catholic newspaper. It explained the crisis by emphasizing psychological factors: a growing number of people were seduced to take risk by the rising prices on the stock market, and by the appealing stories of high gains. People did not listen to warnings, and when the prices started to go down, panicked easily, and were forced to sell, in order to pay their debts.47 This explanation led to scapegoating the inexperienced, rent-seeking speculators in the US who gave the boom on Wall Street its unprecedented swing.48 They were facilitated in their speculative behavior by banks and other financial institutions which had extended their credits. Consequently, the financiers also were to be shamefaced for the crisis. However, although most newspapers agreed that it was the amateur speculators who caused the crash, these gamblers were also seen as the victims of the crisis. Thus, it was only after it became clear that Amsterdam would also be hit hard, and the market would not recover shortly, that the press started to look for causes. As in previous crises, this resulted in “emotional othering,” mocking rent-seeking amateurs who were seduced and outplayed by greedy bankers. The wave of emotional sensemaking, however, seems to have been relatively short lived, and quite limited to the newspapers. As Anbeek has shown, both the 1929 crash and the economic crisis which followed, causing enormous unemployment and social stress in the Netherlands, hardly echoed in novels or other literary texts.49 The article was not signed but it was probably written by the chief editor A. Heldring himself. Algemeen Handelsblad, November 4, 1929. Koji Yamamoto, Taming Capitalism Before Its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust and Projecting in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Stefan Condorelli and Daniel Menning, Boom, Bust, and Beyond: New Perspectives on the 1720 Stock Market Bubble (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019). 47 Het Centrum, November 4, 1929. 48 De Telegraaf, October 28, 1929: “de kleine volstrekt onervaren en speculant die een ongekenden omvang aan den boom in Wallstreet heeft gegeven.” 49 Anbeek concludes that the scarce literature depicting these frugal years did not become part of the canon of Dutch literature. Only the gloomily titled In de schaduwen van morgen [In the shadows of tomorrow], by the historian Johan Huizinga, caught the spirit of the times. It sold widely and was translated into several languages. The crisis did inspire artists, such as painter Carel Willink, to depict the world in a gloomy and threatening atmosphere. Ton Anbeek, “Doemdenken in de Jaren Dertig. De Crisis in de Nederlandse Literatuur.” De Spectator 22 (1993): 249–59. 44 45 46

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Black Monday: The Crisis of 1987 The crisis of 1987 encompassed an immense and sudden drop in stock prices on October 19, 1987 (“Black Monday”), and in the days thereafter.50 In financial history studies, 1987 is generally described as having the characteristics of a bubble, the years before witnessing a sharp increase in stock prices,51 part of a longer history of “ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes.”52 The crisis of 1987 witnessed collapse in multiple markets, testifying to the fact that share trading had become ever more of a global phenomenon.53 Other specificities relate to the macro level, especially how the growing trade deficit of the US, in particular with Japan and West Germany, pushed interest rates and lowered trust in the value of the dollar, making money more scarce and more expensive, creating distrust in the potential of the economy and undermining trust in the stock market. This “psychological factor” is often contrasted with the highly technical and supposedly “impersonal” character of the stock market, accelerated through the use of computers and algorithms.54 At the time, the risk-hedging algorithm called “portfolio insurance” was rather new but had become popular rapidly. It was promoted as insurance against expected future drops in prices: when markets started to decline, the algorithm required selling assets to prevent losses. So, in 1987, once prices started to drop, investors “automatically” began selling stocks on a massive scale, as they all made use of portfolio insurance strategies.55 In Dutch newspapers, the events of 1987 were widely debated in an urge to make sense of this “shock,” “drama,” “bubble,” and “crisis,” but—strikingly—1987 has received little attention from historians so far.56 The following analysis of 1987 confirms findings established above, supporting claims that a long-term analysis shows how emotions and narratives play recurrent roles in sensemaking in financial crises.

“Self-Evident” Fundamentals versus “Irresponsible” Passions? In the Netherlands the stock price started to drop late on Monday October 19, 1987. The next day, the Dutch stock market was in full crisis. “Rational” explanations informed by American press coverage were dominant at first in clarifying the crisis. Newspapers listed macro developments, with much emphasis on the US, suggesting “things were different there,” as in 1929. They pointed at the panic caused by the increase of interest Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 165. 51 Aliber and Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes, 18; Aliber and Kindleberger do not regard 1987 as a real bubble, for it was too “small” and the recovery too soon. 52 Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, 342. 53 Aliber and Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes, 44. 54 Ibid. 55 See Berekeley Haas, https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/prof-emeritus-mark-rubinstein-financialengineering-pioneer-passes-away/ (Accessed October 2022). 56 “Experiment wijst uit: onervaren handelaren schuld aan beurscrisis,” Trouw, November 20, 1987. 1987 is not mentioned at all in the overview of the development of the Dutch financial sector in this period by Jaap Barendregt and Hans Visser, “Towards a New Maturity, 1940–1990,” in Financial History of the Netherlands, ed. Marjolein ’t Hart, Joost Jonker, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, 152–94 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 50

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rates in the US, failed attempts to reduce the US trade deficit, and the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988), which raised concerns about the oil supply. These problems of supposedly predominant American origins had “dragged Amsterdam down” too.57 Besides American and macro developments, the psychological and passionate behavior of traders, including in Amsterdam, was seen as a cause. “Crash is Result of Psychological Factors. Words Can’t Describe What is Happening,” as one newspaper noted on October 21.58 Computers contributed to the psychological stress as they “haunted” traders and seemed to have taken over the floor.59 The unexpected role of algorithms in trading, as well as the psyche and passions of the trader were contrasted with the presumed predictability and rationality of the economic fundamentals and statistics. As one financial expert claimed, there was no material basis for the huge drop in prices, as the “economic fundamentals” looked good. But as one newspaper stated, “as psychological arguments play an important role next to economic arguments, it is difficult to predict how serious the consequences will be.”60 This difference was further emphasized by suggesting that institutional financial specialists, such as banks, operated on facts (“the fundamentals”) while amateurs and, especially, traders acted upon irrational passions. The response of traders was often characterized in the media as one of “panic,” that showed they were “nervous,” resulting in “bloodshed,” emotions traders also used for self-description. “It was yelling  … it was one big mess,” according to trader Arie van Os in an interview looking back on 1987. It was shocking for him that fourteen billion guilders were lost on the Dutch stock market, that many computers crashed because of the volume of transactions, that the screens could not provide up-to-date trade information, and that there was a delay of two hours to take care of every order.61 But Van Os also stressed that inexperienced, “hot-tempered” traders and irresponsible “cowboys” on the Dutch trading market had aggravated the crisis.62 Another Dutch newspaper, referring to American research, suggested that it was young inexperienced traders who had “panicked,” while more experienced traders could fall back on their knowledge of past events.63 At first sight, it seemed as if indeed everyone was panicked immediately and made no efforts to calm down. However, those active on the stock exchange also expressed how they tried to stay “calm.” After the first shock, small improvements in stock prices were embraced as signs that things were not too bad after all. But when the stocks continued to drop, even those who had tried not to panic suffered dramatic losses and had to sell. The picture that accompanied the article portrayed three traders in different dramatic positions and the caption stated: “Desperation (‘wanhoop’), joy (‘vreugde’) and despair “Beurskrach Wall Street sleurt Amsterdam mee,” De Volkskrant, October 20, 1987. “Crash is het resultaat van psychologische factoren. Woorden kunnen niet beschrijven wat er gebeurt,” Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, October 21, 1987. 59 De Volkskrant, October 20, 1987. 60 “Dit is klap waar markt op zat te wachten,” Nederlands Dagblad, October 21, 1987. The analysis of psychological arguments was based on comments provided by AMRO-bank. 61 Andere Tijden, https://anderetijden.nl/aflevering/534/De-beurskrach-van-1987 [accessed September 21, 2022]. 62 Interviews with former Dutch traders: Andere Tijden; See also Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, 165. 63 “Experiment wijst uit: onervaren handelaren schuld aan beurscrisis,” Trouw, November 20, 1987. 57 58

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Figure 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.

(‘vertwijfeling’) have alternated in recent weeks on the stock exchange. And it will be some time before the nail-biter can switch to a pair of scissors”64 (Figure 10.6). As in the early modern period, the emotion analysis of the trade floor focuses on stages of emotional anxiety, taking the temperature of the stock market through the affective responses of the investors.

Taking Lessons From the Past: The “Hit” That Could Be Expected? Another way contemporaries tried to make sense of what happened was by taking lessons from the past. Whereas in 1929 people referred to the seventeenth-century crisis, in 1987 Dutch newspapers made ample comparison between 1987 and 1929. A reader in an open letter in the Dutch daily Trouw stated: “the panic of the last few days reminded us all of the panic of 1929.”65 Initially, the stock price drop in 1987 was perceived as even more devastating than in 1929, but soon the analogy served to restore trust and optimism.66 After several weeks the Dutch minister of Finance, Onno Ruding, in public debates and interviews, tried to (further) calm investors, traders, politicians, and the Dutch public by arguing that Black Monday 1987 was not as severe as 1929. But there were other differences between the twentieth-century crises. In September 1986 an article in a Dutch daily on the American stock market had “Rotterdamse studenten op beurs ervaring rijker.” “Na de krach wilden we een kroeg beginnen.” Het Vrije Volk, November 14, 1987. 65 Trouw, October 24, 1987. 66 “Woorden schieten bijna tekort.” Nederlands Dagblad, October 21, 1987. 64

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warned that computerization in combination with “rumour” (geruchten) could easily “scare” (doen schrikken) traders, make them “nervous” (nerveus), and cause them to massively sell their stocks. This was “not the only paradox” the newspaper noticed. For example, good economic forecasts that one would expect to lead to optimism on the trading floor, strikingly caused stress as analysists and traders feared inflation and thus decline. Although the article started by optimistically stressing the great improvements since 1929, its conclusion expressed uncertainty: “Indeed, it is a double paradox and something is not right. What exactly is wrong and what relations can be established between the paradoxes mentioned and the program trade, the future will have to tell.”67 This narrative that “something had been wrong for long” was recalled once the crisis broke out. For example, on October 21, a representative of the Dutch AMRObank argued: this was “the hit the market had expected”—the increase in stock prices just could not continue.68 Emotional othering remained a powerful strategy of sensemaking.

Conclusion Emotions played a major role in sensemaking processes around financial bubbles in the Netherlands, and in a more subtle way than the one-dimensional depictions of financial crises as irrational behavior might suggest. By taking a long-term approach to the Dutch case, we uncovered recurring trends and differences. Major financial crises were accompanied by sensemaking processes, cultural bubbles that, just as the financial bubbles themselves, varied in intensity, duration, and diversity. There is no one-on-one relationship between the two: for instance, while the economic impact of 1720 seems to have been limited, the cultural outcry was extensive, while for 1929 it seems to have been the opposite. Over the run of the centuries the media diversity of cultural bubbles was limited, with newspapers becoming dominant instruments of sensemaking in the twentieth century. We found that emotions played an important role in the recurrent scripts and imaginaries of cultural bubbles over the centuries. To describe processes of sensemaking through emotion narratives we used the concept of “emotional economies,” highlighting  the fact that emotions were often perceived not as disconnected from the market, but as essential driving forces. Describing the stock trade as an emotional realm  helped the general public relate to the phenomenon and understand its dynamics. This could be done in binary oppositions (emotional othering of “the greater fool”), or through more fine-grained emotion scales and imaginative “infographics,” such as the Beursbarometer, used to measure pressure on the market. The rise of economics as an academic discipline pushed the passions out of the ideal of the efficient market. This dominant economic model also impacted public interpretations. We see this in the 1929 crash, when emotions were mostly perceived “Beurs houdt beter koers dan in 1929.” Algemeen Dagblad, September 20, 1986. “Dit is klap waar markt op zat te wachten.” Nederlands Dagblad, October 21, 1987.

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as disturbances to the market, and journalists reported calm weather as long as possible. Interestingly, it seems to have been the 1987 crash, when computers and algorithm trading started to interact with human trading, that revived a more nuanced interpretation of the market as an emotional economy. Hence, this chapter has underlined the fruitfulness of taking a long-term perspective with a focus on emotions when researching stock markets in their cultural-historical context.

Bibliography Periodicals, Newspapers, and Websites Documentary “De-beurskrach-van-1987,” Andere Tijden, https://anderetijden.nl/ aflevering/534/De-beurskrach-van-1987. Frans Mensonides, http://www.fransmensonides.nl/tulp/. Digitized newspapers consulted via www.delpher.nl.

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Leemans, Inger and Anne Goldgar. Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Leemans, Inger and Wouter de Vries, “Why Wind? How the Concept of Wind Trade Came to Embody Speculation in the Dutch Republic.” Journal of Modern History 94, no. 2 (2022): 288–325. https://doi.org/10.1086/719448. Mackay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Oxford: Infinite Ideas Ltd., [1841] 2009. Magnot-Ogilvy, Florence. “Gagnons sans Savoir Comment: Représentations du Système de Law du XVIIIe Siècle à Nos Jours.” Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017. Mercille, Julien. The Political Economy and Media Coverage of the European Economic Crisis: the Case of Ireland. New York: Routledge, 2015. Murphy, Anne L. The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation before the South Sea Bubble. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Muys van Holy, N. Relaes en Contradictie op de motiven, om het kopen en verkoopen van Oost- en West-Indise actien, die niet getransporteert werden … te bezwaeren met een Impost. Amsterdam 1687; Relaes en Contradictie op de motiven, om het kopen en verkoopen van Oost- en West-Indise actien. Amsterdam, S.l., s.n., s.a. [1687]. Nieuwkerk, Marius van and Cherelt Kroeze. Bubbles: Spraakmakende Financiële Crises uit de Geschiedenis. Amsterdam: Sonsbeek Publishers, 2007. Orain, Arnaud. La politique du merveilleux: une autre histoire du Système de Law (1695–1795). Paris: Fayard, 2018. Penso de la Vega, Joseph. Confusion de confusiones by Joseph de la Vega 1688. Portions descriptive of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. 1688. Reprinted and introduced by Hermann Kellenbenz. Boston, MA: Baker Library, 1957. Peterson, P. G. “The Morning After.” The Atlantic 260, no. 4 (1987): 43–69. Petram, Lodewijk. The World’s First Stock Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Quinn, William and John D. Turner. Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Rasterhoff, Claartje. Painting and Publishing as Cultural Industries: The Fabric of Creativity in the Dutch Republic, 1580–1800. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Reinhart, Carmen M. and Kenneth S. Rogoff. This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Ruysch, Arie. De tulpenhandel of de dwaasheid der 17e eeuw. Middelburg, 1846. Samuel, Ludwig. Die Effektenspekulation im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Börsengeschichte. Berlin: Spaeth & Linde, 1924. Scheyen, S. van. “Financiële crises in de media. Framingonderzoek naar berichtgeving over financiële crises in de Nederlandse dagbladen.” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 14, no. 1 (2011): 114–39. Schifferes, Steve and Richard Roberts. The Media and Financial Crises. London: Routledge, 2014. Schiffrin, Anya. “The Press and the Financial Crisis: A Review of the Literature.” Sociology Compass 9, no. 8 (2015): 639–53. Schnabel, Isabel and Hyun Song Shin. Foreshadowing LTCM: The Crisis of 1763. Mannheim: Universitätsbibliothek Mannheim, 2002. Schumpeter, Joseph. Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Comp, 1939. Shiller, Robert J. “Portfolio Insurance and Other Investor Fashions as Factors in the 1987 Stock Market Crash.” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 3 (1988): 287–97.

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11

Waiting for Fevers to Abate: Contagion and Fear in the Domestic Slave Trade Robert Colby, University of Mississippi

Introduction As the year 1848 closed, the slave trader Samuel Browning helplessly watched his business prospects collapse. In the preceding weeks, he had traveled to Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana—a plantation community nestled in a curve of the Mississippi River— anticipating that its aspiring cotton nabobs would clamor for the men and women he brought with him for sale. Though inoculated by avarice against the moral disorder of slavery, enslavers remained highly susceptible to another kind of pestilence, one capable of stymying Browning’s traffic altogether, and one at that moment making its way up the river: a devastating outbreak of cholera. Steamboat landing by steamboat landing, the disease ascended the Mississippi, driving before it a wave of fear bordering on panic. Already, enslavers were avoiding Browning, possibly seeing him and the people he drove before him as agents of contagion. Others, suspecting that newly purchased human property would prove particularly vulnerable to the sickness, were disinclined to buy. And business was likely to get worse. Once the cholera actually “gets in the country,” Browning worried, “it will be impossible to sel[l] a negro at any price.”1 The mania for cotton and slaves that antebellum Southerners had long exhibited—a “fever dream,” in one scholar’s phrasing—had been arrested by an epidemic and its emotional externalities.2 Even as they paralyzed apprehensive Southern communities, such outbreaks also brought opportunity for those unscrupulous enough to exploit them. Once the cholera had passed, Browning swiftly returned to his old game. During the ensuing summer, he urged his North Carolina purchasing partner to acquire “likely young fellows” and “stout girls the same and black”—young, conspicuously healthy people for whom enslavers would pay the highest premiums. He did so knowing that slaveholders would Samuel R. Browning to Archibald Boyd, December 19, December 29, 1848, Archibald H. Boyd Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University (Duke). 2 Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 1

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have the previous year’s outbreak fresh in their minds. For, having “lost a great many negroes” to cholera, they would “have to replace them,” and would do so with an eye to their perceived resistance to disease. Browning was not alone in comprehending this reality; a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia (the Upper South’s largest slave trading hub) encouraged its readers to withhold enslaved people from the market for the moment. By doing so, the Examiner argued, they could ensure that they entered the slave trade at a moment when “the price … must be very high for two reasons: first, the  ravages of the cholera; and secondly, the high price of cotton.”3 Both Browning and the Examiner knew the devastating effect epidemic diseases could have on the enslaved; both also sensed that enslavers’ greed would eventually overcome their fear. For, as Browning put it “cotton was arising,” all but guaranteeing that slave capitalism’s siren song would issue forth again.4 Both contemporary witnesses and scholars of American bondage have long emphasized the crushing emotional toll slave commerce inflicted upon the enslaved. Relatively few historians, however, have probed the broader emotional history of this traffic; instead, they have focused on the essential rationality of its practitioners. That they have done so is unsurprising. For nearly a century, historians of American slavery depicted the institution more as a set of semi-feudal race and class relations than as a modern business enterprise. In response, students of the slave trade—who have been in the vanguard of those critiquing this interpretation—have centered its profitability, its rationality, and its market-oriented nature.5 To the degree that they have pressed the emotional components of the business of slavery, they have focused on the role of exuberance and the (often literal) rapacity of slave dealers as market capitalists (most notably in Edward Baptist’s treatment of slave dealers’ routine sexual abuse of enslaved Quoted in Alrutheus A. Taylor, “The Movement of Negroes from the East to the Gulf States from 1830 to 1850.” The Journal of Negro History 8, no. 4 (1923): 377. 4 “Extract from a Letter to the Editor,” Mississippi Free Trader, May 23, 1849; Samuel R. Browning to Archibald Boyd, August 23, 1849, Boyd Papers. 5 John David Smith, A New Creed for the Old South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865– 1918 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). Dominant works emphasizing slavery as a pre-capitalist enterprise include Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1918) and Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). Proponents of an economically rational slavery include, among others, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (2 vols., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974); James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World.” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (Aug. 2009), 627–50. On the slave trade, see, among others, Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Robert Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Books, 2017); Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Joshua D. Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (New York: Basic Books, 2021). 3

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women as emblematic of commodity fetishism).6 But other emotions shaped slave dealers’ practices, and fear stood salient among them.7 The anxieties slave brokers weighed were myriad. They feared their captives, who could rise against them at any moment. They feared credit crunches and economic collapses. And—constantly, persistently—they feared the unseen maladies that permeated their jails, inhabited their vessels, and stalked the coffles in which they marched the enslaved South.8 As William Wells Brown, a formerly enslaved man forced into serving a slave dealer, noted, those bound for the slave entrepots of the Deep South could “look  … for the appearance of the yellow-fever, small-pox, or cholera” with “as much certainty  … as the Londoner does for fog in the month of November.”9 Diseases not only menaced slave traders’ lives and persons as they transited the South’s epidemiological landscape but required them to gamble with the human property they had purchased at such great expense. Contagions also shaped Edward E. Baptist, “Cuffy, ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States.” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (Dec. 2001): 1619–50; Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams. See also Alexandra Finley, An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 7 The literature on the history of fear in the United States focuses most extensively on the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. See Peter Stearns, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2006); Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005); Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 8 While little literature exists exploring disease in the domestic slave trade, there is expansive discussion of sickness and mortality in Atlantic slave commerce. See Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade.” Political Science Quarterly 83, no. 2 (1968): 190–216; Joseph Miller, The Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977): 314–442; Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “A Note on Mortality in the French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry S. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 261– 72; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Guinea Surgeons on the Middle Passage: The Provision of Medical Services in the British Slave Trade.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 14, no. 4 (1981): 601–25 and Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Manuel Barcia, The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020); Jim Downs, Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). A growing literature highlights health and medicinal practices of enslaved people in the US and the Caribbean. See Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 161–201; Rana A. Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 9 William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1853), 203. 6

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the ways in which prospective clients received them. In the wake of an epidemic, slave coffles could be welcomed by enslavers who had lost portions of their workforces. They could also, however, be rejected as potential vectors for infection. Fear of disease, in short, profoundly shaped the business of human trafficking. Slave brokers confronted their fears of disease in ways shaped by their cultural and temporal contexts. As Peter Stearns and Timothy Haggerty have noted, while “fear is an intrinsic human response to certain stimuli and the emotional basis for flight,” it must also be understood as “a cultural construct.”10 In the nineteenth century (James Farrell has argued), a growing scientific mindset made death seem more rational, even more predictable, than it had in previous eras.11 Neither traders’ fears over the toll diseases took on the enslaved nor concern for their own wellbeing led them to question their dealings in humanity. But it did lead them to pursue mitigation measures in a manner they deemed rational. In a moment when slave traders were modernizing their own businesses, they applied similar impulses to the problem of disease. For, as numerous studies of the domestic slave trade have revealed, the traffic was indubitably a highly efficient business, one populated by entrepreneurs who exploited an array of innovative tactics and easily adopted new technologies and practices.12 Prominent among these practices were a web of tightly integrated trading networks, alliances of agents and brokers bolstered by personal and professional ties that helped traders navigate often volatile slave markets. As Calvin Schermerhorn notes, “Success as an interstate slave trader meant leveraging knowledge of local and distant markets”; successful dealers were “nimble in response to changing conditions of markets, technology, and routes of travel, from which they sought to gain competitive advantages.”13 These changing conditions also included the presence and movement of diseases, both among the chattels borne southward for sale and in the urban markets where traders purchased and sold them. In a practice both functional and emotive, dealers in different cities and traders on the move exchanged information regarding on-the-ground health conditions—down to the level of specific slave trading facilities—that kept market makers in major hubs abreast of the epidemiological and emotional state of individual localities and itinerant traders informed about where Peter Stearns and Timothy Haggerty, “The Role of Fear: Transitions in American Emotional Standards for Children, 1850–1950.” American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (1991): 63–94. 11 James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). Jean Delumeau makes a similar argument in Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). On slavery and scientific knowledge, see Eric Herschtal, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 12 See Kenneth G. Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 80–3; William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 32–6; Steven Deyle, “Rethinking the Slave Trade: Slave Traders and the Market Revolution in the South,” in The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress, ed. L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 104–19; Calvin Schermerhorn, “Capitalism’s Captives: The Maritime United States Slave Trade, 1807–1850.” Journal of Social History 47, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 897–921 and The Business of Slavery; Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery; Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain. 13 Tadman, Speculators and Slaves; Deyle, Carry Me Back; Baptist, “Cuffy, ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘OneEyed Men,’” 1619–50; Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery, 12 (quotation). 10

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to proceed next. While providing specific information, these letters also implied an ability to mitigate the emotional distress disease-based uncertainty created.14 Slave traders thus relied on their networks to create a sense of proximate knowledge of the epidemiological terrain, deploying the information they obtained (however imperfect) to manage their own fears of disease and to exploit the emotional states of their potential clients. In doing so, they built emotion into their business methods, implicitly weighing in their letters and ledgers the feelings of all involved in their trade except for those upon whom it centered: the men and women whose hopes and fears were held as captive as their bodies.

Sickness and Slave Trading in the Antebellum United States As enslavers expanded cotton and sugar cultivation in the early nineteenth century, they forced more and more enslaved people into a region and a labor regime rife with infectious diseases.15 While never sufficient to stifle the impulses of Mammon, the existence of endemic and contagious disease exercised a profound effect on all their decisions. Enslaved people represented an enormous capital investment; as a result, enslavers weighed exposure and (perceived) susceptibility to disease heavily in determining when, where, and whether to purchase. Indeed, per some proponents of scientific planting, doing so was absolutely essential.16 In contemplating the acquisition of a plantation, for example, one Mississippian noted that while a site in a swampy lowland would likely prove exceptionally fertile, “if there is much fatal sickness there is some probability that we may loose [sic] more in negroes than the difference in the cotton crop would justify.”17 This was hardly an unfounded fear. On one Louisiana plantation, an outbreak reportedly killed thirty-nine out of forty enslaved inhabitants; on another, whooping cough and cholera carried off twenty-one people, including at least eleven children. In Texas, a planter reported the loss of thirty more enslaved individuals to an unnamed malady.18 Even the threat of an outbreak could ruin a crop; one enslaver reported that On emotives, see William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 105–11. 15 See, among others, John Duffy, “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 32, 40; Savitt, Medicine and Slavery, 2, 219–46; Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 87–118; Benjamin H. Trask, Fearful Ravages: Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1796–1905 (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2005): 8–9, 39; Kathleen Olivarius, “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019): 425–55 and Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022). 16 “Agriculture,” The Sunny South (Aberdeen, MS), August 5, 1858. 17 J. W. W. Kirkland to William Otey, October 29, 1860, Wyche and Otey Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (SHC). 18 “Fearful Mortality,” The Mississippi Creole, May 25, 1849; Report of James Wilson, undated [1854], John Bisland and Family Papers, Series I: Selections from the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU, Part 4, RASP; “From Texas,” Lancaster Gazette (OH), August 23, 1850. 14

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when cholera appeared in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, many others fled their holdings, “leaving there [sic] crops and camping out in the Pine woods with what negroes they have left alive.”19 Such a threat, in turn, shaped enslavers’ and traders’ purchasing patterns. Some slaveholders targeted enslaved people they considered more likely to survive the Lower South’s disease regime. Upon acquiring a cotton plantation near Natchez, for example, John Knight desired to “buy some ten or a dozen prime hands from the traders” as soon as he could to ensure that they could “get used to” the diseases endemic on his holdings. In the coming fall he hoped to add “some fifty or more” brought from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “As I learn,” Knight proclaimed, “negroes from that quarter are much more valuable for the swamps of Louisiana, being more easily acclimated, and with less sickness and danger, than those from the more healthy regions of Maryland or Virginia.”20 Such tactics ultimately proved of limited effect; within a short time after their arrival, Knight reported that a large number of the people he had purchased had been “very sick,” and that at least three had died.21 A Louisiana planter seeking enslaved people in Richmond, meanwhile, accounted for the cycles and presence of diseases in his purchasing strategy. He sought, for example, to determine from friends at home when and whether “the cholera [had] done much damage in New Orleans?” Having purchased a group of enslaved people, he made plans for their removal South. On the one hand, he hoped to avoid the riverine ports in which diseases flourished; on the other, he aimed to ensure that, on account “of diseases of all sorts,” the men, women, and children he had purchased would not have to linger for an extended period in a trader’s jail.22 Another enslaver even had agents transfer an arriving cargo of enslaved people directly from their ocean-going vessel to a steamboat so that they would spend as little time as possible in New Orleans’ deadly disease climate.23 While not as deadly as its Atlantic counterpart, the conditions traders created in the United States’ domestic slave trade were extraordinarily virulent. In the Upper South, where traders hoarded human property in dank, crowded jails, poor sanitation, close quarters, and substandard nutrition paved the way for outbreaks. In 1859, for example, the trader Philip Thomas arrived in Richmond flush with cash, but after several days of successful trading, disease brought his endeavors to an abrupt halt. “I tell you,” he wrote a fellow dealer, “that no one cannot conceive the amo[un]t of sickness here.”24 Robert Lumpkin’s jail, a sodden, creek-bottom facility nicknamed Rachel O’Connor to David Weeks, June 16, 1833, David Weeks and Family Papers, Series I: Selections from LSU, Part 6, RASP. 20 John Knight to William Beall, January 27, 1844, John Knight Papers, Series F: Selections from the Manuscript Department, Duke University Library, Part 1, RASP. To increase his likelihood of success, Knight was willing to not only shatter families (rejecting the oldest and youngest slaves), but to target “jet black” enslaved people in a bid to capitalize on racialized understandings of health. See Knight to Beall, February 7, 1844 in same. 21 John Knight to William Beall, August 12, 1844, John Knight Papers, RASP. 22 David O. Whitten, “Slave Buying in 1835 Virginia as Revealed by Letters of a Louisiana Negro Sugar Planter.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 11, no. 3 (1970): 238–9. 23 John Knight to William Beall, May 9, 1844, John Knight Papers, RASP. 24 Philip Thomas to William A. J. Finney, January 30, 1859, William A. J. Finney Papers, Series F, Part 3, RASP. 19

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“the Devil’s Half Acre,” proved particularly deadly. Only a few years earlier, the famous fugitive Anthony Burns had found this Shockoe Bottom jail “more foul and noisome than the hovel of a brute,” filled with “loathsome creeping things” that “multiplied and rioted in the filth.” Captives were regularly “immured  … in a narrow, unventilated room beneath the heated roof of the jail,” with only “the nauseating contents of a pail that was replenished only once or twice a week” to drink.25 It is little wonder, then, that Burns himself fell ill, nor that by the time of Thomas’s arrival, at least five people had perished in Lumpkin’s jail, with dozens more suffering from an unspecified malady. Thomas halted his purchasing to allow the plague to pass, but such outbreaks regularly menaced Southern slave jails.26 In 1863 alone, for example, twelve children perished in Robert Clarke’s Atlanta facility.27 Even after departing these carceral facilities—whether by land or sea—enslaved people remained susceptible to sickness. They traveled, ate, and drank in close quarters even as the physical hardships of the journey weakened them.28 As one observer who encountered a coffle on the march reported, the “coarse provisions,” inadequate shelter, and fatigue involved in a journey covering several hundred miles rendered “the slaves … subject, while on their journeys, to severe sickness.” Traders tried to offset this reality, he conceded, “but even sickness does not prevent them from hurrying their victims to market. Sick, faint, or weary, the slave knows no relief.”29 And when the enslaved reached the Cotton Kingdom, slave brokers again installed them in slave prisons, exposing them once more to the diseases that proliferated therein—a change compounded by the shift in climate, which traders and planters alike understood to be deadly.30 As one New Orleans paper noted, “the large majority” of those lost to cholera in an 1849 outbreak “were unacclimated persons—immigrants recently arrived,” including “many negroes … coming from other States.”31 When an enslaved boy died of dysentery near Natchez, a judge suggested that the “change of climate” stemming from her recent sale from Virginia “might have produced a more rapid development of a disease which had previously been lurking in the system, or it might have produced the disease which occasioned the death.”32 Indeed, many enslavers Charles H. Corey, A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, with Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Work Among the Colored People of the South (Richmond: J.W. Randolph Company, 1895), 75–7; Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns, A History (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856), 189–90. 26 Philip Thomas to William A. J. Finney, January 30, 1859, William A. J. Finney Papers, Series F, Part 3, RASP. 27 Wendy Hamand Venet, A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 96. 28 Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery, 138–43, 146–8; Deyle, Carry Me Back, 106–7, 110–11. 29 Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the United States of America; Being Replies to Questions Transmitted by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society, for the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade throughout the World (London: Thomas Ward and Co., 1841), 58. 30 “Mississippi Intelligence,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, May 24, 1859. 31 “New Orleans Board of Health-Cholera,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, March 12, 1849. 32 James v. Herring, W. C. Smedes and T. A. Marshall, eds., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Errors and Appeals for the State of Mississippi. Volume XII. Containing All the Cases for January Term, 1849 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1849), 341. 25

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saw susceptible enslaved people caught up in both the domestic and international slave trades as potential vectors for the introduction of disease into a community. One widely circulated report warned that trans-Atlantic slavers might bring plague to American waters from an outbreak in the Canary Islands.33 Similarly, what little information circulated about illegal slavers like the Echo or Wanderer highlighted the sickness rampant aboard those vessels.34 The lone, meager grace given those ensnared in the domestic slave trade was that its seasonal rhythm skirted the peak of the South’s disease cycle. Traders generally sold slaves from the Upper South during the late fall and winter, with Deep South planters looking to purchase them in the winter and very early spring. As a result, they largely avoided being sold during the summer, when yellow fever and malaria generally peaked. The agricultural cycle dictated this pattern (with slaves dealt after one harvest concluded and purchased before planting for the subsequent season began) more than did consideration for enslaved people’s health; had summer slave trading brought traders greater returns, they certainly would have seized them.35 Prices, however, stagnated in the same months when disease escalated; one slave trader testified in 1839 that “the prices of negroes … vary very little during the summer,” erasing the margins on which traders depended.36 Some traders institutionalized further measures against the risk of disease. New Orleans’ Walter Campbell (who, with his brother Bernard purchased slaves in Baltimore for sale in New Orleans) not only had a physician examine people before purchasing them but held them on his Mississippi farm to acclimate (or “season”) them to the Deep South’s disease climate before offering them for sale—measures which, he hoped, maximized their market value.37 Slave dealers became infamous for their focus on infectious disease and their desire to minimize its effects on their business. They placed such an emphasis on this end that hawkers of patent medicines frequently targeted them with their wares. One cure claimed to cure “scrofum, foul humors, secondary syphilis, or any mercurial taint … by purifying the blood” even as it allegedly improved the appearances of enslaved people offered for sale. “No negro trader should be a day without this article,” its sellers argued, for it would “advance their value fifty per cent.”38 Other planters sought additional quack remedies, including heavy doses of red peppers.39 Promoters of miracle cures, meanwhile, regularly touted their ability to raise the value of enslaved people by restoring them to soundness.40 Some dealers were confident, moreover, in their ability “The Plague,” Semi-Weekly Camden Journal (SC), October 21, 1851. “The Rescued Africans of the Echo,” Holmes County Republican (Millersburg, OH), December 23, 1858; “A Bad Speculation,” Richmond Daily Dispatch, February 12, 1859. 35 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 57; Duffy, “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” 32–3. 36 William Rice, Reports of Cases at Law, Argued and Determined in the Court of Appeals and Court of Errors of South Carolina, From December 1838 to May 1839, Both Inclusive (Charleston: Burges & James, 1839), 186. 37 Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 317; “Sale of Negroes,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, May 8, 1861; Deyle, Carry Me Back, 136. 38 “Planters, Look to Your Negroes,” Clarksville Chronicle, January 11, 1861; “Planters, Look to Your Negroes,” Memphis Daily Appeal, January 8, 1862. 39 “Pepper,” Canton Madisonian, May 16, 1850. 40 See “Special Notice to the Afflicted,” Fayetteville Observer (TN), April 7, 1853; “The World never before saw,” Lynchburg Republican, December 30, 1852. 33 34

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to offset the deleterious effects diseases had on the prices offered for the enslaved. In at least one case, a slave trader actively sought out less healthy slaves, including those who had endured bouts with a range of diseases. If purchased cheaply in Kentucky, he hoped, these could be quickly sold for substantial profits in New Orleans.41 In 1841, meanwhile, a Richmond doctor advertised for “diseased negroes, such as are considered incurable”—presumably for the purpose of medical experimentation.42

Mobilizing Networks, Mitigating Fears As men who constantly moved with large groups of people between the Upper and Lower Souths, slave dealers were particularly well acquainted with the ravages the region’s epidemiological landscape could inflict. They were also adaptable businessmen, eager to adopt the latest technological and organizational strategies to maximize profits. In the 1830s, this manifested itself in the emergence of a growing class of professional traders located in larger Southern cities. These men cultivated expansive networks of agents; their proxies fanned out into the hinterlands of cities like Baltimore, Richmond, Alexandria, and Charleston, purchasing people for sale in urban markets. These traders also, however, developed partnerships with colleagues in Lower South slave depots, connections that provided them with up-to-date information on the demand for and prices of enslaved people in these markets. These links also provided a readymade conduit for other information shaping traders’ actions, including local disease conditions—information that could (if deployed correctly), either allay traders’ fears or alert them to prospective opportunities.43 Such a network can be seen clearly at work in the response of Franklin & Armfield— the largest extant American slave trading firm—to the catastrophic cholera epidemic that broke out in the early 1830s. Upon arriving in New York in the summer of 1832, the disease spread from the city along the arteries of trade—eventually including the Mississippi River.44 By November, a Tennessee enslaver braced himself for its arrival in Nashville; given the disease was ascending the Big Muddy even as it descended the Ohio, its arrival was only a matter of time.45 A “terrible panic,” meanwhile, pervaded New Orleans, with many fearing that “all the boats from there have more or less sickness aboard.”46 The deadly consequences were soon apparent. Some downplayed the risk (a paper attributed one enslaved woman’s death to a longer history of illness), but such

J. Winston Coleman, “Lexington’s Slave Dealers and Their Southern Trade” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1938): 17–18. 42 “Botanico Medical Practice,” Richmond Enquirer, March 26, 1841. 43 Deyle, “Rethinking the Slave Trade: Slave Traders and the Market Revolution in the South,” 104–19. For an example, see Joshua D. Rothman, “The American Life of Jourdan Saunders, Slave Trader.” Journal of Southern History 88, no. 2 (May 2022): 227–56. 44 Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 15–39. 45 Robert Woods to Henry Edmundson, November 17, 1832, Correspondence of Henry Edmundson, Series C: Selections from the VHS, Part 2, Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries. 46 John Knight to Frances Beall, June 11, 1833, John Knight Papers, RASP. 41

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illusions soon proved fleeting.47 “The cholera is bad at the landing,” one Louisiana enslaver reported. “Several negroes has died within a few days with it.”48 The panic sent shockwaves through the domestic slave trade, and the partners in Franklin & Armfield dispatched letters across the country to determine the best course of action. In doing so, they not only weighed their own fears of the disease against the opportunities it created but sought to assess the deterrent effect it might have on their clientele. Rice Ballard, head of the firm’s Richmond outpost, wrote to Isaac Franklin (a founding partner and their man in Mississippi) advising the latter against panicking. “My opinion,” Ballard stated, “is that we had best hold on the more negroes lost in that country the more [enslavers] will be wanting if they have the means of procuring them.”49 But even as Ballard’s letter sped south, Franklin reported dire news. Not only were Louisiana and Mississippi planters “so much alarmed that they would not purchase,” but cholera had struck the firm’s Natchez slave jail—and the people held there were dying at an alarming rate. To hide the effects of the plague from the local citizenry, Franklin had begun smuggling out corpses under the cover of darkness and burying them in shallow graves in a nearby ravine. “The way we send out Dead Negroes at night and keep dark,” he mused, “is a sin to Crocket.”50 When horrified Natchez residents discovered this, they forced the city’s slave dealers to remove to a location on the outskirts of town at what would become known as the Forks of the Road.51 Perhaps watching the cholera’s ravages on Franklin’s jail, many other traders exited the business; Franklin reported that they were so “alarm[ed] that they sold out at cost.” For his own part, he remained unwilling to “give up the ship,” and as “the alarm begins to subside I am in hopes we will be able to do something soon.”52 Like Franklin and Ballard, traders throughout the South turned to networks of colleagues to allay their fears and to navigate the unpredictable outbreaks that devastated the region. Such networks provided essential advance intelligence of the epidemiological landscapes into which they bore their human property. In late 1833, for example, R.C. Puryear had congratulated his partner, Isaac Jarratt, on a successful trading season. “Fortune,” he lauded Jarratt, “seems to have prospered your designs and undertakings and nothing but a strange riverse [sic] can prevent you from enjoying all that a man can reasonably ask in this world.” At the same time, Puryear signaled Jarratt as to one potential source of such a setback. Rumors of “Pleurisy, Scarlett fever, Measles, and bad colds” circulated in his vicinity, and had inflicted “considerable losses” on the enslaved people awaiting sale.53 By keeping Jarratt informed of local disease “Cholera Report,” Woodville Southern Planter, November 3, 1832. Rachel O’Connor to David Weeks, June 9, 1833, David Weeks and Family Papers, RASP; Paul Kelton, “Pandemic Injustice: Irish Immigrant, Enslaved African American, and Choctaw Experiences with Cholera in 1832.” Journal of Southern History 88, no. 1 (February 2022), 73–110. 49 Rice Ballard to Isaac Franklin, December 2, 1832, Rice C. Ballard Papers, SHC. 50 Isaac Franklin to Rice Ballard, December 8, 1832, Rice C. Ballard Papers, SHC. 51 “Outrage,” Natchez Weekly Courier, April 26, 1833; “The Public Meeting,” Natchez Free Trader, April 26, 1833; Robert Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 93–6; Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain, 1–2. 52 Isaac Franklin to Rice Ballard, December 8, 1832, Rice C. Ballard Papers, SHC. 53 R. C. Puryear to Isaac Jarratt December 29, 1833, Jarratt-Puryear Family Letters, Series F, Part 3, RASP. 47 48

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conditions, Puryear projected knowledge and a sense of control, aiming to mitigate what fears his partner might possess while simultaneously protecting the pair’s fortune against just such “sudden reverses.” Similarly, in 1834, the year following the outbreak of 1832–1833, a Halifax County, Virginia, trader urged his traveling counterpart to sell the slaves in his possession speedily based on reports that cholera was once again “raging in Louisiana & Miss. and destroying a great number of negroes belonging to traders.” Failure to do so, he warned, meant “you will certainly lose upon them.” On what this outbreak, or these forced sales meant for the enslaved, he was silent—as were virtually all traders virtually all the time.54 As the slave trade professionalized during and after the 1830s, such communications proliferated. By the time a trader operating in Mississippi in 1858 wrote back to Virginia that there was “some sickness throughout the state” (including cases of yellow fever in Vicksburg and Jackson), he could count on that information shaping the actions of other traders following in his wake.55 Long-term partnerships spawned clear communications. In order to ensure ongoing shipments of slaves, for example, New Orleans’ John B. Smith assured his Richmond contacts that he had “only one case of measles on hand,” which he believed would be the last of the 1855 trading season.56 Approaching the disease-ridden Crescent City more cautiously, an itinerant trader warned Virginia’s A. J. Finney that “if I went to New Orleans I certainly would have the Negroes insured.”57 Meanwhile, Richmond’s E. H. Stokes urged his nephew, who was out trading in the Deep South, to avoid remaining in any one place too long, as he considered doing so responsible for the disease that had claimed many slaves the previous trading season.58 Correspondence networks, then, kept slave traders aware of the risks diseases posed to their human cargoes. Slave traders also kept colleagues informed of outbreaks of disease within their coffles. Even minor illnesses among slaves in transit did not escape traders’ notice; one operating in the fall of 1857 reported a handful of colds amongst his chattels, but nothing more.59 Another repeatedly wrote back to Virginia to assure others that the enslaved in his hands remained “all well” despite the journey.60 Lynchburg, Virginia’s Seth Woodroof recorded venereal disease in slaves he was shipping and on that basis advocated delaying their sale; N. C. Trowbridge wrote from Augusta, Georgia reporting the presence of mumps.61 Such assessments abounded in slave traders’ correspondence, Francis Royall to Abner C. Shelton, April 3, 1834, Halifax County (VA) Chancery Causes, 1753–1913. (Admx. Of Abner C. Shelton, etc. vs. Francis L. Royall, etc., 1857–010). Local Government Records Collection, Halifax County Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. 55 A. L. Brown to John M. Hooker, September 2, 1858, Dickinson, Hill & Co. Records and Correspondence. Digital Collections and Archives, Tufts University. 56 John B. Smith to Dickinson, Hill & Co., March 5, 1855, Slavery in the United States Collection, American Antiquarian Society (AAS). 57 Philip Thomas to Jack Finney, November 26, 1859, William A. J. Finney Papers, Duke. 58 E. H. Stokes to “Dear Thad,” November 1, 1859, Slavery in the United States Collection, AAS. 59 John M. Hooker to “Dear Raj[?],” October 25, 1857, Dickinson, Hill & Co. Records and Correspondence, Tufts. 60 William Waller to “My Dear Son,” October 19, 1847, William M. Waller Papers, Virginia Historical Society (VHS). 61 Seth Woodroof to Richard H. Dickinson, February 28, 1850; N.C. Trowbridge to R. H. Dickinson March 26, 1850, Dickinson, Hill & Co. Records and Correspondence, Tufts. 54

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and served to keep their correspondents abreast of localized disease outbreaks and of the effects of the trade on the health of their investments. This correspondence could not help but stoke many traders’ fears; simultaneously, however, it offered concrete information about outbreaks in progress, thereby imposing a sense of rationality onto a fundamentally unpredictable situation. Doing so offered some insulation against that which they feared, alleviating their concerns and affirmatively shaping future business decisions. Commission merchants similarly kept traders informed about outbreaks within the Upper South markets where slaves accumulated for sale South. When E. H. Stokes journeyed south in the winter of 1859–1860, his colleagues assured him that the slaves aggregated in Richmond enjoyed “uninterrupted good health.”62 Shortly thereafter, however, an associate at Dickinson, Hill & Co. warned a New Orleans trader that there was “plenty of small pox in Richmond.”63 In 1836, Richmond’s Bacon Tait reported a possible case of measles in his slave jail and inquired of a trading partner as to whether the exposed slaves should be dispatched with the rest of those he had purchased.64 In the winter of 1854, South Carolinian A. J. McElveen, responding to rumors of smallpox in Charleston, sought direction from commission merchant Ziba Oakes on whether to risk recently purchased slaves there. Months later, McElveen again sought information from Oakes, this time after hearing of a yellow fever outbreak. The disease raged into October 1854, forcing McElveen to alter his trading patterns and sell to a Richmond trader instead of to Oakes. These disease-driven changes, however, cost him money against what he had hoped to make in Charleston, and led him to complain, “I hope the fever will soon Abate and business commence.”65 Information thus allowed traders to tailor their operations in response to epidemics as well as to individual cases, and while its imperfections demonstrate the illusory nature of the control it allegedly offered, such emotive practices nevertheless underpinned their business. If slave brokers feared the impact infectious diseases might have on their profits, the enslaved experienced fears of an entirely different kind upon hearing reports of diseases circulating in their intended destination. As Joanna Bourke has argued, “the ability or inability to ‘neutralize or flee’” the source of one’s fear “is a question of power relations within historical communities—not a fundamental difference between the object or state causing an emotional response.”66 Lacking autonomy over their movements— and, in most cases, their bodies—the enslaved could neither insist upon treatment nor dictate the course of any remedies applied to them. If, as scholars have suggested, fear of disease broadly diminished in the nineteenth century due to an emerging sense of

John Fraser to E. H. Stokes, December 30, 1859; J. J. Price to E. H. Stokes, February 10, 1860, Cornelius Chase Family Papers, Library of Congress (LC). 63 Thomas E. Matthews to S. R. Fondren, March 9, 1860, Cornelius Chase Family Papers, LC. 64 Bacon Tait to Rice Ballard, August 2, 1836, Rice C. Ballard Papers, SHC. 65 Edmund L. Drago, ed., Broke by the War: Letters of a Slave Trader (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 66, 92, 96–9, 129. 66 Joanna Bourke, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History.” History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 127. 62

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control over outcomes, the enslaved people caught up in the trade lacked whatever small comfort this might have lent them.67 Cut off from their communities, abstracted from traditional and communal sources of healing, and placed under the lash of men who saw them only as property, their options were severely limited.68 It is unsurprising, then, that when Solomon Northup learned of an outbreak of smallpox on the vessel carrying him from Richmond to New Orleans, he reported that he and his fellow captives were “panic-stricken.” The death of one enslaved man— Robert—combined with the “presence of the malady,” he recalled, “oppressed me sadly,” not least because their occurrence at a critical juncture helped foil an escape attempt. Upon reaching Theophilus Freeman’s slave pen, Northup helped diagnose a little girl with smallpox, which, when confirmed by a doctor, caused “much alarm throughout the yard.” Northup himself caught the disease, at which point Freeman had him and other enslaved people—including Eliza, Emmy, and Harry—removed from his facility and taken to a hospital on the city’s exterior, where they joined a host of other sick captives (perhaps a quarter of those sent to the city’s slave hospitals were people imported by slave dealers, who sought to preserve their investments). When they had recovered, they returned to the pen bearing smallpox scars on their persons. Northup believed these marks depreciated their value; it is possible, however, that in the perverse logic of the slave trade, these emblems of natural immunity might actually have enhanced it.69 Enslaved people confronting the epidemiological dangers of slave commerce certainly felt fear. But outbreaks of disease could stir other emotions as well. Watching as the initial waves of cholera broke over the United States in the early 1830s, Henry Box Brown and Frederick Douglass found them terrifying, but also potential harbingers of hope. Brown took the epidemic to be evidence that “the day of judgment was not far off ”; in response, he focused on strengthening his faith. Douglass shared Brown’s interpretation of the cholera’s cosmic significance but followed it to a strikingly different conclusion. Viewing the disease’s advance through the lens of Nat Turner’s recently suppressed uprising, Douglass determined “that God was angry with the white people because of their slaveholding wickedness, and therefore his judgments were abroad in the land.” He drew encouragement from this reality, which he saw as paralleling the emergence of a militant anti-slavery movement in the United States; “it was impossible,” he recalled, “for me not to hope much for the abolition movement when I saw it supported by the Almighty and armed with DEATH.”70 Delumeau, Sin and Fear. On enslaved people’s attitudes toward healthcare, see Fett, Working Cures and McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. 69 Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Auburn: Derby & Miller, 1853), 72, 83–4; Stephen C. Kenny, “‘A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy’? Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65, no. 1 (2010): 32–43. 70 Henry Box Brown, Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself (Boston: Brown & Stearns, 1849), 40; Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Boston: DeWolf & Fiske, 1892), 110. 67

68

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In the end, neither God’s impending judgment nor the cholera would halt the domestic slave trade—not, at least, until three more decades had passed, decades in which Brown lost his wife to the slave trade and Douglass only narrowly avoided sale.71 In the meantime, slave brokers refined the means by which they confronted their fears of cholera and the host of other deadly diseases that haunted slave commerce, threatening the lives of the enslaved and the investment slave brokers had made therein. Through robust communication networks, strategic sales, and other measures, slave brokers addressed and channeled fear by limiting their risk and exposure, even as their participation in the slave trade continued to endanger the lives of their human chattels.

Conclusion In her recent book, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Daina Ramey Berry details the multitude of ways in which enslavers wrung value from the bodies of those they enslaved. Noting that even death did not end their commodification, she coins the term “ghost values” for compensation paid on the lives and bodies of the enslaved who perished under the peculiar institution.72 “Ghost values” were not the dividend slave traders preferred; attuned as they were to money markets and slave prices, they knew the enslaved were always far more valuable to them alive than dead. But their constant attention to the disease climate of the South, and their careful recordkeeping regarding the ailments suffered by the enslaved reveals their knowledge of how quickly a slave’s market price could become a “ghost value” as well as their willingness to risk the latter to gain the former. More than anything else, then, their correspondence reveals the mortal peril in which slave trading always placed the enslaved. However much slave brokers feared the South’s endemic diseases, and whatever measures they undertook to limit their effects, to constrain exposure to the omnipresent risks they posed, and to mitigate the stresses they faced as a result, in the end, traders remained undeterred from risking enslaved lives to line their own pockets.

Bibliography Archival and Manuscript Sources American Antiquarian Society Slavery in the United States Collection David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University Archibald H. Boyd Papers William A. J. Finney Papers Library of Congress Brown, Narrative of Henry Box Brown, 48; Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 213–17. Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, 7.

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Cornelius Chase Family Papers Library of Virginia Halifax County (Va.) Chancery Causes, 1753–1913 Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution to the Civil War Series F: Selections from the Manuscript Department, Duke University Library Jarratt-Puryear Family Letters John Knight Papers Series I: Selections from the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University John Bisland and Family Papers David Weeks and Family Papers Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries Series C: Selections from the Virginia Historical Society Correspondence of Henry Edmundson Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Rice C. Ballard Papers Wyche and Otey Family Papers Digital Collections and Archives, Tufts University Dickinson, Hill & Co. Records and Correspondence Virginia Historical Society William M. Waller Papers

Periodicals, Newspapers, and Websites Canton Madisonian (Canton, MS) Clarksville Chronicle (Clarksville, TN) Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, TN) Holmes County Republican (Millersburg, OH) Lancaster Gazette (Lancaster, OH) Lynchburg Republican (Lynchburg, VA) Memphis Daily Appeal (Memphis, TN) Mississippi Free Trader The Mississippi Creole (Canton, MS) Natchez Free Trader (Natchez, MS) New Orleans Daily Crescent Richmond Daily Dispatch Richmond Enquirer The Sunny South (Aberdeen, MS) Semi-Weekly Camden Journal (Camden, SC) Woodville Southern Planter (Woodville, MS)

Published Sources Bancroft, Frederic. Slave Trading in the Old South. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996 [1931]. Baptist, Edward E. “Cuffy, ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States.” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (Dec. 2001): 1619–50.

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Barcia, Manuel. The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Berry, Daina Ramey. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. Bourke, Joanna. “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History.” History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 111–33. Bourke, Joanna. Fear: A Cultural History. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. Brown, Henry Box. Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself. Boston: Brown & Stearns, 1849. Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. London: Partridge & Oakey, 1853. Coleman, J. Winston. “Lexington’s Slave Dealers and Their Southern Trade.” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1938): 1–23. Corey, Charles H. A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, with Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Work Among the Colored People of the South. Richmond: J.W. Randolph Company, 1895. Curtin, Philip D. “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade.” Political Science Quarterly 83, no. 2 (1968): 190–216. Delumeau, Jean. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries. Translated by Eric Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Deyle, Steven. “Rethinking the Slave Trade: Slave Traders and the Market Revolution in the South,” in The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress, ed. L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, 104–19. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Boston: DeWolf & Fiske, 1892. Downs, Jim. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Downs, Jim. Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Drago, Edmund L., ed. Broke by the War: Letters of a Slave Trader. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Duffy, John. “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, 29–54. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the United States of America; Being Replies to Questions Transmitted by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society, for the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade throughout the World. London: Thomas Ward and Co., 1841. Farrell, James J. Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Fett, Sharla M. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Finley, Alexandria. An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

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Fogel, Robert and Stanley Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974. Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Gudmestad, Robert. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Herschtal, Eric. The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Kaye, Anthony E. “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World.” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (2009): 627–50. Kelman, Ari. A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Kelton, Paul. “Pandemic Injustice: Irish Immigrant, Enslaved African American, and Choctaw Experiences with Cholera in 1832.” Journal of Southern History 88, no. 1 (2022): 73–110. Kenny, Stephen C. “‘A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy’? Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65, no. 1 (2010): 1–47. Klein, Herbert S. and Stanley L. Engerman. “A Note on Mortality in the French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry S. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, 261–72. New York: Academic Press, 1979. Kiple, Kenneth F. The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1999. McCandless, Peter. Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. McNeill, J. R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Miller, Joseph. The Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. Noe, Kenneth G. Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of NewYork, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853. Auburn: Derby & Miller, 1853. Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Olivarius, Kathryn. “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019): 425–55. Olivarius, Kathryn. Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022. Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1918. Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Rice, William. Reports of Cases at Law, Argued and Determined in the Court of Appeals and Court of Errors of South Carolina, From December 1838 to May 1839, Both Inclusive. Charleston, Burges & James, 1839. Roberts, Justin. Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Rosenberg, Charles E. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Rothman, Joshua D. Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Rothman, Joshua D. The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America. New York: Basic Books, 2021. Rothman, Joshua D. “The American Life of Jourdan Saunders, Slave Trader.” Journal of Southern History 88, no. 2 (2022): 227–56. Savitt, Todd L. Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Schermerhorn, Calvin. “Capitalism’s Captives: The Maritime United States Slave Trade, 1807–1850.” Journal of Social History 47, no. 4 (2014): 897–921. Schermerhorn, Calvin. The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Seth, Suman. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Sheridan, Richard B. “The Guinea Surgeons on the Middle Passage: The Provision of Medical Services in the British Slave Trade.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 14, no. 4 (1981): 601–25. Sheridan, Richard B. Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Smedes, W. C. and T. A. Marshall, eds. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Errors and Appeals for the State of Mississippi. Volume XII. Containing All the Cases for January Term, 1849. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1849. Smith, John David. A New Creed for the Old South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865–1918. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Stearns, Peter. American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 2006. Stearns, Peter and Timothy Haggerty. “The Role of Fear: Transitions in American Emotional Standards for Children, 1850–1950.” American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (1991): 63–94. Stevens, Charles Emery. Anthony Burns, A History. Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856. Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Taylor, Alrutheus A. “The Movement of Negroes from the East to the Gulf States from 1830 to 1850.” The Journal of Negro History 8, no. 4 (1923): 367–83.

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Thomas, William G. The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Trask, Benjamin H. Fearful Ravages: Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1796–1905. Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2005. Venet, Wendy Hamand. A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Whitten, David O. “Slave Buying in 1835 Virginia as Revealed by Letters of a Louisiana Negro Sugar Planter.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 11, no. 3 (1970): 231–44.

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Selling Out or Staying True? Fear, Anxiety, and Debates About Feminist Entrepreneurship in the 1970s Women’s Movement Debra Michals, Merrimack Collage

Introduction In 1973, a group of self-identified feminist entrepreneurs published a collection of essays defending their role as business owners. Entitled Dealing with the Real World: 13 Papers by Feminist Entrepreneurs, the booklet was a response to the hostility these women experienced months earlier at the National Association for Women (NOW) National Conference in Washington, DC. According to the essays in the booklet, other feminists at the event promoting women’s equality had ostracized the entrepreneurs, questioning whether their engagement with capitalism made them disloyal to feminism. Frustrated and hurt, the women held a retreat where they decided to respond in print to the “shoddy treatment” they received, and to later share their booklet with other feminists and feminist entrepreneurs.1 Each of the essays not only defended the connection between feminism and business but also, importantly, discussed the emotional impact of having to defend being business owners—seemingly not the only time they had to do so. What happened at the NOW convention, the feminist entrepreneurs noted, “pointed up what each businesswoman had heretofore been suffering alone: the ambivalence and frequent hostility of movement women toward feminist business.”2 Because of such anger toward them by other members of the women’s movement, the booklet’s authors said, feminist entrepreneurs were “plagued by self-destructive fear and guilt about making profits.”3 Their experience was hardly unique. When Gloria Steinem and colleagues launched Ms. Magazine in 1972, they—especially Steinem—were similarly skewered by other feminists for being co-opted, and for potentially co-opting feminism for their financial

Dealing with the Real World: 13 Papers by Feminist Entrepreneurs (New York: Feminist Business Association, 1973), 1. 2 Ibid. 3 Susan Sojourner, “Profit—That Nasty, Ugly Word,” in Dealing with the Real World, 1, 4. 1

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gain.4 Members of the Detroit-based Feminist Economic Network faced heated criticism when they bought a building in 1973 and three years later launched the largest and most publicly visible feminist venture to date, the Feminist Women’s City Club.5 Worse, members of the lesbian feminist recording collective, Olivia Records, received angry letters in 1976—including death threats—from other feminists when they hired a transwoman as a recording engineer.6 Critics not only felt entitled to shape policy at Olivia, but they justified their outraged and violent response in the name of feminism, claiming that a transwoman was not a “real” woman and therefore her hiring was anti-feminist.7 Feminists, including many lesbians and lesbian separatists and socialists, launched thousands of businesses across the US in the late 1960s and 1970s as cooperatives, partnerships, or individual ventures in a wide range of categories from health to publishing to restaurants and bookstores. As feminist entrepreneurship grew and became highly visible within the movement and in the mainstream media, beginning around 1973, it elicited a range of emotional responses and ultimately angry infighting within the women’s liberation movement. On one side were those elated by the revolutionary potential of women’s ventures for both those involved and the wider feminist movement. Champions of business ownership were excited by what they saw as feminist enterprises’ collective ability to produce social change by bringing feminist and woman-centered products and services to the commercial market. “For the first time, we would be able to put out good quality products that were non-oppressive and non-sexist,” wrote one feminist.8 On the other side were critics who angrily denounced feminist forays into enterprise, arguing that business and feminism were fundamentally incompatible. They saw engagement with capitalism as a betrayal of feminist principles and women’s liberation as a movement. Why did the notion and practice of feminist entrepreneurship provoke deeply passionate emotional responses, pro and con, within the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s? While business has often been regarded as entirely rational and devoid of emotions, in reality and historically, the engagement with business has produced an array of emotions for those involved and for those observing from the outside. That has especially been true for women entrepreneurs throughout history, where business

Mary Thom, Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the Magazine and the Feminist Movement (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1997). 5 Joshua Clark Davis offers a detailed account of the controversy about the Feminist Women’s City Club. Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 129–30. 6 Bonnie Morris, “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 299–300; Sandy Stone, discussion with author, September 29, 2020. 7 Eli R. Green, “Debating Trans Inclusion in the Feminist Movement: A Trans Positive Analysis.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 10, no. 1/2 (2006): 231–48. Kai Lukas Samuel Schweizer, “A Criticism of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism.” https://www.academia.edu/29755063/A_Criticism_of_Trans-Exclusionary_Radical_Feminism [accessed September 25, 2019]. 8 Helaine Harris and Lee Schwing, “Building Feminist Institutions.” The Furies: The Final Issue 2, no. 3 (1973): 2. 4

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ownership often conflicted with societal expectations and gender norms, as Mandy Cooper’s essay on civil war businesswomen in this volume clearly shows. Feminist entrepreneurs of the 1970s likewise struggled with notions of gender roles—even as they sought to defy them—but these stresses were compounded by questions from within the movement about whether such ventures aligned with movement goals and ideals. To be sure, not all women who identified as feminist linked their ventures to social revolution; for some, it was about exerting a right to be self-supporting or to follow a personal dream. But for activist entrepreneurs, the hope was to 1) launch ventures that promoted feminist ideals, 2) infuse cash from the ventures into the movement, 3) help individual feminist women earn a living doing meaningful, potentially activist, work, and 4), probably most optimistically, use business as a means to transform capitalism from within and create a feminist culture. No matter where their motivations fell on the political spectrum, however, feminist business owners increasingly faced angry responses, harsh criticism, and monitoring of their ventures from within the movement. Carried out on the pages of feminist magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, and at meetings like the NOW event, debates about business ownership conveyed anxiety about the future of feminism, suspicions about the motives of those starting ventures, disappointment with and a sense of betrayal by those seen to be “sell-outs” to movement principles, and even jealousies about the financial successes of some feminist entrepreneurs. At the core, however, were tensions among feminists about the need to safeguard a kind of ideological purity, to control who would speak for and represent the feminist movement and guide the course of the revolution. Related to this were fears about engagement with capitalism, specifically the potential for co-optation and “starmaking” of some feminist entrepreneurs by patriarchal capitalism and the dilution of whatever revolutionary potential might exist for feminist ventures once they engaged with and attempted to survive and thrive within the broader economic system and its emphasis on the profit motive. While activist entrepreneurs believed their ventures advanced the movement, feminist critics saw business as a distraction from politics and activism, and they were highly skeptical of feminist businesses’ power to change society. Rather, they confidently and angrily averred, it was far more likely that capitalism would transform feminist entrepreneurs—and possibly feminism (the movement) as well. The debates became so intense that feminist entrepreneurs like those at the NOW conference began to internalize shame about their endeavors, while at the same time, joining their critics in surveilling the motives of other women entrepreneurs.9 Most of the thirteen essays in the Dealing with the Real World addressed the emotional issues of guilt, self-defensiveness, and self-deprecation that the authors experienced as a result of movement disavowal of entrepreneurship. Their essays conveyed their

Several of the essays in Dealing with the Real World discuss the motives of feminist entrepreneurs and the way even the authors in this collection wanted to make sure that other feminist entrepreneurs had ethical and activist intentions for their ventures. See Anne Pride, “Underpricing Our Own Work—Devaluing Women’s Work,” and Marjory Collins, “Why Do We Feel Guilty Doing Work We Enjoy? Why Do Other Women Resent or Envy Us?” in Dealing with the Real World.

9

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belief that business enterprise was an act of feminism because, collectively, they were staking a claim for all women, and especially feminists, in the traditionally male realm of business ownership—and had to overcome their own inexperience and insecurities to do so.10

The Economic History of 1960s Feminism This growing tension aside, in truth, the feminism that emerged in the 1960s had always focused on the economy as the visible site of inequality. The President’s Commission on the Status of Women, assembled by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, not only comprised leading women’s rights proponents, but the groundbreaking report they produced two years later, The American Woman, also addressed the discrimination that blocked women from advancing in the workplace.11 Even Betty Friedan’s 1963 bestselling tome, The Feminine Mystique, with its declaration of women’s imprisonment behind suburban white picket fences, was angrily pointing to the lack of opportunities available to women—particularly educated White, middle- and upper-class women like herself—and the economic dependence such a state created.12 The first piece of legislation to come out of the PCSW was the 1963 Equal Pay Act, a landmark law that sought to guarantee equal pay for equal work, even if at the time few women held the same jobs as men.13 A year later, when Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed with the word “sex” added—a move women’s rights activists and allies in Congress ensured was successful—that, too, spoke to women’s quest for greater economic parity. Title VII barred discrimination in employment on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to keep tabs on business compliance. And in 1966, when Friedan, lawyer and civil rights activist Pauli Murray, and union organizer and activist Aileen Hernandez formed the National Organization for Women (NOW), the impetus was to ensure enforcement of Title VII and to end sex-segregated and discriminatory “help wanted” employment advertising in major newspapers.14 NOW became the leading women’s organization in rapid time, growing from fourteen chapters and one thousand members in 1967 to three hundred chapters with more than forty thousand members in 1974.15 While NOW promoted itself as an The following essays in Dealing with the Real World address the inexperience and insecurities feminist entrepreneurs had to overcome when they launched businesses. Nancy Borman, “Being Afraid to Owe Money”; Mary Jane Walters, “Why Can’t Women Decide?”; Jane O’Wyatt, “Work Image Identity Problem”; Joyce Hartwell, “Woman as the Martyred Mother in Economic Exchange”; and Nancy Borman, “Haunted by General Negativity.” 11 American Women: Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963); Jo Freeman, “Political Organization in the Feminist Movement.” Acta Sociologica 18, no. 2/3 (1975): 222. 12 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Dell, 1983), 15–16, 282. 13 Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), 68, 71. 14 Ibid., 75, 78–9. 15 Freeman, “Political Organization,” 229. 10

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organization for all women—and women of color were NOW founders and members— its agenda was driven by what White educated women defined as equality, specifically gaining the rights and privileges that White men in US society enjoyed. NOW’s Statement of Purpose promised to “break through the silken curtain of prejudice and discrimination against women in government, industry, the professions  … the labor unions, in education, science, medicine, law … and every other field of importance in American society.” NOW took aim at the “double discrimination” of race and sex that women of color faced.16 Later defined by those on the left as “liberal feminists,” these women wanted access to the existing system; they had no critique of its structure and no desire to overturn it. That vision would come from the younger, more radical feminist contingent that would emerge in 1967.17 Harshly critical of the system, radical feminists created thousands of small groups nationwide to address their and other women’s experiences of inequality—among them, New York Radicalesbians, Cell 16, Redstockings, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, and The Furies.18 Many leftist feminists had been students; some were lesbians who had been shunned by mainstream society and liberal feminists like Friedan, who disdained them as the “lavender menace”19 and a destructive force within her White, middle-class, heteronormative feminism. The majority of radical feminists were also White, a large percentage from middle-class backgrounds. Some attacked economic oppression via street “zap” actions, as when WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) put a hex on Wall Street as the site of patriarchal power.20 While groups varied strategically, their members found in radical feminism a powerful sense of community, identity, and purpose. Collectively and individually, radical feminists were prolific and passionate writers who produced manifestoes about social revolution, which for some included embracing collectivism and socialism and for many meant replacing patriarchy and capitalism with a new, more humane and empowering system for those on the margins, particularly women. A good deal of their writing focused on the perils of capitalist patriarchal oppression and pointed to the promise of socialist feminist models. Published in feminist newsletters, magazines, or as pamphlets, their work addressing capitalism— or capitalism and socialism—included such titles as, “Class and Feminism,” “Socialist National Organization for Women, “Statement of Purpose,” 1966. https://now.org/about/history/ statement-of-purpose/ [accessed January 13, 2021]. 17 Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed., Feminist Revolution: An Abridged Edition with Additional Writings (New York: Random House, 1978); Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 85, 382–3; Alice Echols, “Nothing Distant about It: Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 149–74. 18 Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 19 Karla Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Stephanie Gilmore and Elizabeth Kaminski, “A Part and Apart: Lesbian and Straight Feminist Activists Negotiate Identity in a Second-Wave Organization.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 1 (2007): 95–113; Anne M. Valk, “Living a Feminist Lifestyle: The Intersection of Theory and Action in a Lesbian Feminist Collective.” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 307. 20 Robin Morgan, Saturday’s Child: A Memoir (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), 258–9. 16

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Feminism,” and “Sex and Caste.”21 Socialist feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s, as historian Linda Gordon has pointed out, saw capitalism and sexism as sites of women’s oppression and therefore stressed the need for a class consciousness among women (women as a class or caste) and the creation of alternative institutions.22 “What we as socialist feminists need are organizations which can work for our particular vision, our self-interest in a way that will guarantee the combined fight against sexism and capitalism,” wrote the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in 1972. That included, CWLU noted, both “wresting control of the institutions which now oppress us” and creating “counter-institutions” that could “provide services which meet the needs of women now” and prove what was possible in a future feminist world. At the same time, they feared that these “institutions” could “foster false optimism about change” and become a distraction from activism.23 And herein lay both the opening for what would become feminist activist entrepreneurship as well as the anxieties and anger that feminist ventures would come to inspire.

Feminist Business as a “Counter-Institution” For feminists, “counter-institutions” was a broad term, open to interpretation, and could be anything from health centers (an example CWLU specifically gave) to legal aid, domestic violence crisis centers, and alternative child care.24 So, as they began to seek ways to create the world they envisioned, some feminists went into business, often in the form of collective, cooperative, or communal ventures. Both liberal and radical feminists started businesses, but those on the left understood their ventures as part of creating a new culture, one inspired by feminist—and sometimes socialist—ideas that provided goods and services they believed women needed or wanted and that were produced in a non-capitalist way. The definition of “non-capitalist” would vary but for almost all, it ultimately centered on eliminating the profit motive. Coupled with this were differing interpretations of how to end women’s oppression. Ginny Z. Berson noted

Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron, eds., Class and Feminism: A Collection of Essays from THE FURIES (Baltimore: Diana Press, 1974); Casey Hayden and Mary King, “Sex and Caste” (1965), in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 21; Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, “Socialist Feminism” (1972), in Dear Sisters, ed. Baxandall and Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 96–7; Zillah R. Eisentein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); Evelyn Reed, “Women: Caste, Class or Oppressed Sex” (1970); https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed-evelyn/1970/caste-class-sex.htm [accessed November 20, 2020]. 22 Linda Gordon, “Socialist Feminism: The Legacy of the ‘Second Wave’,” New Labor Forum: A Journal of Ideas, Analysis and Debate (September 2013), https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2013/09/30/socialistfeminism-the-legacy-of-the-second-wave/#_edn11; Baxandall and Gordon, Dear Sisters, 273. 23 Hyde Park Chapter, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, “Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Liberation Movement,” 1972, http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/chisocfem. html [accessed January 21, 2021]. See also Barbara Ehrenreich, “What is Socialist Feminism?,” 1976, https://www.cwluherstory.org/classic-feminist-writings-articles/what-is-socialist-feminism [accessed January 21, 2021]. 24 Harris and Schwing, “Building Feminist Institutions,” 3. 21

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that her group, The Furies—whose members would launch several feminist businesses in the 1970s—believed that “sexism is the root of all other oppressions. Lesbian and woman oppression will not end by smashing capitalism, racism, imperialism, and all other forms of domination.”25 These viewpoints, too, made ideological space for engaging with entrepreneurship, albeit in a distinctly feminist way. With revolutionary zeal, feminist entrepreneurs launched thousands of businesses.26 They started feminist presses that published women’s works and lesbian themes when mainstream publishers did not, among them, the path-breaking Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown. In fact, one source reported that from 1968 to 1973, there were 560 new feminist publications.27 Activist entrepreneurs created feminist credit unions—ultimately eighteen across the country and a few in Canada with deposits of upwards of $3 million28—that would lend money to women when traditional lenders were legally free to, and typically did, discriminate against them (before and even after passage of the 1974 Equality Credit Opportunity Act, and for women business owners, as late as 1988). There were feminist galleries, art centers, and bookstores (as many as 130 nationwide) that doubled as community and education centers for women who wanted to know more about women’s issues, feminism, or who sought feminist connections.29 Many of the feminist businesses were cataloged by scholars Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie in a popular 273-page 1973 book that spent a week on the New York Times’ best-seller’s list, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog. In their introduction, they shared their observations about the excitement and immense potential of the

Ginny Z. Berson, Olivia on the Record: A Radical Experiment in Women’s Music (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2020), 38. 26 Lois Gould, “Creating a Women’s World,” New York Times, 2 January 1977, 141, https://www. nytimes. com/1977/01/02/archives/creating-a-womens-world-the-feminists-behind-daughtersinc-a.html [accessed July 19, 2020]; Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog: A Woman Made Book (New York: Primary Information, 1973). 27 Anne Mather, “A History of Feminist Periodicals, Part One.” Journalism History 3, no. 3 (1974): 82–85, as cited in Thom, Inside MS., 4; Martha Shelley, “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project,” Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, interview with Kelly Anderson, October 12, 2003, San Francisco, CA. 28 Debra Michals, “The Buck Stops Where? 1970s Feminist Credit Unions, Women’s Banks, and the Gendering of Money.” Business and Economic History Online 16 (2018), https://thebhc.org/buckstops-where-1970s-feminist-credit-unions-womens-banks-and-gendering-money\; “Feminist Credit Union.” Her-Self, 2, no. 5 (1973): 3, as cited in Enke, Finding the Movement, 202, 319; “Feminist Theory and Economic Practice.” Sistershares: The Newsletter of the Massachusetts Feminist Federal Credit Union 2, no. 3 (1976): 3; Janis Kelly, Fran Moira, and Tanya Temkin, “Money on the Line.” off our backs 6 no. 1 (1976): 10–11. A collection of primary sources on women and credit can be found in the NOW papers at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. See NOW papers, #72–25–79-M262; m106, Carton 21, Folder “General – Old Credit Stuff.” Cynthia Harrison Papers, Carton 2, 83-M238 Folders 7, 13, and 25. Pamphlets and other material from the Feminist Federal Credit Unions exist among the papers of the Feminist Economic Alliance at the Special Collections Department, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University. 29 Jill Diane Zahniser, “Feminist Collectives: The Transformation of Women’s Businesses in the Counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s,” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1985, 34–6; Kristen Hogan, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), xv, 33–45. 25

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businesses they encountered “which, unlike women’s businesses and enterprises that have existed all along, are aimed explicitly at the development of an alternative women’s culture.”30 Feminists saw business as a tool, and they were joyful about its potential, noted Grimstad.31 “Heaven is earning your living as a feminist,” wrote Paula Kassell, founder and editor of New Directions for Women in New Jersey, a feminist newspaper that existed from 1972 to 1993 and grew to a circulation of 65,000.32 For feminists who had been shunned by the mainstream movement, such as lesbians, or who left because of its acceptance of the system as is, business-as-counterinstitution provided a way to create community and jobs for a group who experienced widespread employment discrimination. In fact, lesbian feminists were a major force behind the notion of business-as-vehicle for creating a feminist culture. According to Grimstad, many of the approximately five hundred businesses in The New Woman’s Survival Catalog were owned by lesbians or lesbian collectives.33 Some expected that not only would these “institutions” be controlled by members of the movement, but that “preference in hiring would be given to lesbians, lower and working-class women, Third World women, and women in need.”34 That was part of the utopian dream that made activist entrepreneurs swoon. “We decided to do a record company because we thought we could change the world through music,” noted Judy Dlugacz, cofounder of Olivia Records, adding that she saw herself as an activist first; entrepreneur second. The “world” she was changing was one in which women’s music—and themes women cared about—were recorded and readily available at affordable prices.35 As a lesbian collective, Olivia’s members lived and worked together in Los Angeles and later Oakland, California. Olivia’s founders had belonged to The Furies, a lesbian collective that began in Washington, DC. The Furies published a newspaper during the DC years (1971–1973); afterward, some members moved west to start Olivia, and others, notably Charlotte Bunch and Coletta Reid, remained on the East Coast, launching a new feminist publication, Quest: A Feminist Quarterly (1974–1984) and a publishing collective, Daughters, Inc.36

Grimstad and Rennie, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, 7. Alix Nelson, “Including a Pink Male Chauvinist Pig Pillow: The New Woman’s Survival Catalog,” New York Times, January 6, 1974, 354, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/01/06/archives/the-new-womans-survival-catalog-a-womanmadebook-edited-by-kirsten.html [accessed July 29, 2020]. 31 Kristin Grimstad (co-author of The New Woman’s Survival Catalog), discussion with the author, March 18, 2021. 32 Paula Kassell, “The Feminist Movement as a Business—Earning One’s Living as a Feminist,” in Dealing with the Real World, 6; Betsy Wade, “Paula Kassell Always Took Women in New Directions,” Women’s eNews, December 6, 2002, https://womensenews.org/2002/12/paula-kassell-always-tookwomen-new-directions/ [accessed March 18, 2021]. 33 Grimstad, discussion with author. 34 Harris and Schwing, “Building Feminist Institutions,” 3. 35 Judy Dlugacz, Interview, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fsjXsw4NJY[accessed February 16, 2021]. 36 Julie R. Enzer, “The Whole Naked Truth of Our Lives: Lesbian-Feminist Print Culture from 1969 to 1989,” PhD diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2013, 55; Berson, Olivia on the Record, 33–35; Davis, From Head Shopts to Whole Foods, 137–8; Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 272–3; Gould; “Creating a Women’s World”; Papers of Charlotte Bunch, 1967–1985; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/5025. 30

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Feminist entrepreneurs recognized that business itself could only be the “counterinstitution” CWLU discussed if entrepreneurs never lost sight of the larger revolutionary purpose of their ventures. Not surprisingly, such lofty goals triggered constant anxiety among feminist entrepreneurs and movement observers that they prove they were in it for the revolution and not for personal gain. Furies member Coletta Reid, a proud proponent of activist entrepreneurship and owner of Diana Press, explained it this way: “Feminist businesswomen are those who see their business as part of a multi-faceted strategy for gaining economic power for women as a group … They are different from female capitalists who accept basic structures of capitalism as good but want women to be involved at higher levels.”37

Running a Business, Feminist Style Feminist observers shared their expectations for and anxieties about feminist businesses in women’s liberation newsletters, magazines such as off our backs, and other movement literature. Even mainstream publications such as the New York Times picked up the question of feminism and enterprise. For starters, feminist entrepreneurs believed that the profit motive must be suspended, replaced with socialist feminist and communitarian ideals about everything from how work was organized (non-hierarchically) to salary structures to the prices charged for the goods they produced. Feminist businesses disdained job titles and the ranking of assignments; members shared equally the creative and the mundane tasks.38 Some also eliminated the boundaries between home and work, with children a welcome presence in the workplace. Children were often at the offices at Ms. In its early years, so much so that they were dubbed “Ms. Kids.”39 Even what constituted a legitimate work week was reshaped: “business meetings (were) on Tuesdays; political discussions on Thursdays,” noted one collective.40 Salaries, when these small and struggling ventures were able to offer them, were based not on education or experience but on the needs of the individual women.41 Women with children earned more than single women, for example, and collectives pooled their income from all sources to ensure everyone’s economic survival.42 The issue of prices and profits went hand-in-hand for feminist entrepreneurs. With an anti-profit ethos, the goal was to keep prices low enough so that the widest number of potential female consumers could afford to purchase their books, record

Coletta Reid, “Taking Care of Business.” Quest 1, no. 2 (1974): 8, 16. I discuss this in my dissertation. See  Debra Michals, “Beyond Pin Money: The Rise of Women’s Small Business Ownership, 1945–1980,” PhD diss., New York University, 2002. 38 Bill Hieronymus, “For Some Feminists, Owning a Business Is Real Liberation.” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1974, accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 39 Thom, Inside Ms., 52, 53. 40 “Olivia Records Talks About Collectivity—Part II,” in the records of the Lollipop Power Press, Special Collections Department, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University. 41 Harris and Schwing, “Building Feminist Institutions,” 2–3. 42 Grimstad and Rennie, The New Woman’s Survival Catalogue, 23. 37

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albums, foods, or whatever else was being sold—thereby expanding their outreach and ultimately creating a feminist culture. For many of those involved with these ventures, the commitment to the feminist mission often meant working for little or no money and picking up a part-time job on the side to pay the bills.43 It also meant not only selfscrutiny but swift rebuke by other feminists when prices seemed high or profit seemed to be generated. Olivia Records faced questions about the prices they charged for their records; the issue of pricing publishers and other feminist businesses also came up for. “There’s always somebody who says you shouldn’t profit from doing good—it should be pure, not tainted by money,” said Stephanie Marcus, owner of Liberation Enterprises, which produced feminist clothes, jewelry, and novelty items.44 The more profitable a feminist venture was, the more observers questioned the true motives of entrepreneurs—i.e., did they deep down want to be capitalists and gain acceptance from the larger system?

Insiders and Outsiders Scholars have written about the protectiveness that social movements develop about insiders and outsiders and retaining the purity of ideology and mission, particularly among the social movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.45 Jo Freeman, a member of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, in 1976 published a now famous essay about the “trashing” that existed within the movement whenever women seemed to fall short. She, and other feminists such as Anselma Dell’Olio, exposed the ways such intensive criticism and shaming led them and others to feel ostracized and in response, to turn away from the movement. Shared Freeman, “I learned … years ago that women had always been divided against one another, self-destructive and filled with impotent rage  … I never dreamed that I would see the day when this rage, masquerading as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism would be used within the Movement to strike down sisters singled out.”46 The insider/outsider question led to a rigidity many did not expect when they joined movements that promised liberation. While neither Freeman nor Dell’Olio were speaking about feminist entrepreneurs, their words addressed what many feminist business owners were experiencing. In a resignation letter from the movement that Dell’Olio read publicly at the 1976 Molly Lovelock and Shane Snowdon, “In Celebration of New Words Bookstore’s First Decade.” Sojourner: The Women’s Forum 9, no. 8 (1984): 18. 44 Joshua Clark Davis, “Liberation Enterprises: We Were Giving Visual Voice to Women: Stephanie L. Marcus,” The VFA Pioneer Histories Project, Veteran Feminists of America, https://www. veteranfeministsofamerica.org/vfa-pioneer-histories-project-stephanie-marcus/ [accessed March 30, 2021]. 45 Joshua Gamson, “Messages of Exclusion: Gender, Movements, and Symbolic Boundaries.” Gender & Society 11, no. 3 (1997): 178–99; Suzanne Staggenborg, Social Movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 31–8; Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobilization,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol M. Mueller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 104–29. 46 Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” Ms., April 1976, 49–51, 92–8, https://www. cwluherstory.org/classic-feminist-writings-articles/trashing-the-dark-side-of-sisterhood. 43

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Congress to Unite Women, she pointed out, “And who do they attack?  … If you are in the first category (an achiever), you are immediately labeled a thrill-seeking opportunist, a ruthless mercenary, out to make her fame and fortune over the dead bodies of selfless sisters who have buried their abilities and sacrificed their ambitions for the greater glory of Feminism.”47 Given their visibility and growing numbers, feminist entrepreneurs were easy targets for the trashing Freeman and Dell’Olio described. The critiques could get quite hostile and addressed everything from racism and classism to profiting from the movement or being infiltrated by outsiders. For example, feminist credit unions were often angrily accused of being classist and racist, even as their mission was to provide access to loans for women who mainstream banks would typically reject. Their only criteria: borrowers and members had to join a feminist group and pay $5 per year in membership dues to the credit union.48 They funded many feminist ventures, including bookstores such as Old Wives Tales in San Francisco, as well as legal fees for women who wanted a divorce or needed the money for other personal reasons.49 The criticism: credit unions were more aligned with middle-class women who could be their largest depositors, and middle-class women were more likely to receive loans as well, especially when, after a large number of loan defaults, some credit unions, such as the Detroit Feminist Federal Credit Union, changed their lending policies to ensure women had the ability to repay.50 Other criticisms, particularly those about issues of race and the invisibility of women of color to White feminists, uncovered a blind spot to be sure. Barbara Smith launched Kitchen Table Press in 1980 because, as she said, “As feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published except at the mercy or whim of others—in either commercial or alternative publishing, since both are white dominated.”51 Activist entrepreneurs—especially those who focused on instilling feminist, antiracist and anti-classist values in their businesses—buckled under the unrelenting pressure and scrutiny of other feminists. As Olivia founder Ginny Berson wrote in a letter to the feminist publication off our backs, “Sometimes we feel that oob holds Olivia responsible not only for being perfect at all times, but also for making everyone else in the world perfect. We are doing our work—which we have defined Anselma Dell’Olio, “Divisiveness and Self-Destructiveness in the Women’s Liberation Movement,” in CWLU Newsletter via: Linda Quint, and Joreen “CWLU NEWS,” CWLU NEWS (July 1, 1970), 1–8, https://jstor.org/stable/community.28035359. See also Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial, 1999). 48 Celine, “fen, credit unions, & the capitali$t system,” off our backs 6, no. 6 (1976): 4; Tanya Tempkin, “Chicagoland Credit Union,” off our backs, 6, no. 1 (March 1976), 11, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/25784160 [accessed February 2, 2018]; Michals, “The Buck Stops Where?” 49 Elizabeth Sullivan, “Carol Seajay, Old Wives Tales, and the Feminist Bookstore Network: Historical Essay,” https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Carol_Seajay,_Old_Wives_Tales_ and_the_Feminist_Bookstore_Network&scrlybrkr=cf51fd4e; Hogan, The Feminist Bookstore Movement, 70–5. 50 Celine, “fen, credit unions, & the capitali$t system,” 4. 51 Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10, no. 3, Women and Words (1989), 11–13; Julie R. Enszer “‘The Black and White of It’: Barbara Grier Editing and Publishing Women of Color.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 18, no. 4 (2014): 362–3.

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very clearly over and over again, in the feminist press, in concerts, in articles, on records, in radio interviews.”52 One of the more visible and successful feminist enterprises, Olivia was often the target of criticism, but the group, like most feminist entrepreneurs, was self-critical too. As a collective comprised largely of White, educated women, they embraced lesbian separatist anti-racist, anti-classist politics and sought greater inclusivity in both their music and their membership. While the label did record some women of color, the collective itself lacked diversity and, to remain true to their politics, they recruited more working-class women and women of color to join them.53 Their openness to welcome women who shared their revolutionary vision and feminist ideology also sparked the ire of other feminists when they hired Sandy Stone, a transwoman, as a recording engineer. Stone had an impressive resume, having worked with such musicians as Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, and the Grateful Dead, and as Olivia was planning more ambitious recording projects, the collective needed someone with her experience.54 As they did with all new members, Olivia was deliberative in deciding whether to include Stone—whether her politics and experiences aligned with those of this lesbian collective. Stone later recalled that they had several meetings over the course of a year before finally inviting her to join Olivia. In 1976, however, transwomen were often cast to the margins of gay liberation and feminism. Radical feminists embraced lesbians as woman-identified-women but many were not as accepting of transwomen and instead recognized as “women” only those assigned so at birth (so-called “biological women”).55 They argued that if the point of feminist entrepreneurship was to provide jobs for lesbians and other women, then Olivia betrayed the movement by hiring Stone, who they insisted was not and in their eyes could never be a woman. The attacks on Sandy Stone and Olivia also conveyed feminist fear of infiltration of the movement by “men” who might then work to ensure its demise.56 Olivia, and especially Stone, began receiving an influx of angry letters from other feminists urging her firing, including death threats. The debate about Stone’s hiring also played out on the pages of feminist publications. One woman wrote: “I feel raped when Olivia passes off Sandy … as a real woman. After all his male privilege, is he going to cash

Berson, Olivia on the Record, 211–12; Letters, off our backs (April 1978), 16. Berson, Olivia on the Record, 210–12. 54 Ibid, 181. 55 Radicalesbians, “The Woman Identified Woman” (Pittsburgh: Know Inc., 1970). Hogan describes a debate about exclusion of transwomen at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in 1973, The Feminist Bookstore Movement, 2. Jerome Rodnitsky, Feminist Phoenix: The Rise and fall of a Feminist Counterculture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999) 62, 70–71. Bonnie Morris, “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 290–304; “The Michigan Womyn’s Festival: The Historic Radfem vs. Terf vs. Trans Fight,” The Terfs, September 2, 2014, http://theterfs.com/2014/09/02/the-michigan-womyns-music-festival-the-historic-radfem-vsterf-vs-trans-fight/ [accessed October 2, 2019]; Green, “Debating Trans Inclusion,” 231–48; Sally Hines, “The Feminist Frontier: On Trans and Feminism.” Journal of Gender Studies 28 no. 2 (2019): 145–57. 56 Robin Morgan, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?,” in Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Random House, 1977), 174. 52 53

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in on lesbian feminist culture too?”57 In response, Olivia defended its decision in a 1977 article in Sister: Because Sandy decided to give up completely and permanently her male identity and live as a woman and a lesbian, she is now faced with the same kinds of oppression that other women and lesbians face … If she is a person who comes from privilege, has she renounced that which is oppressive in her privilege?  … Is she open to struggle around class, race, and other aspects of lesbian feminist politics? … We felt that Sandy met those same criteria that we apply to any woman with whom we plan to work closely.58

Ultimately, faced with ongoing hostility, Stone resigned rather than put the collective at risk or distract it from its core work of recording women’s music.59

Co-optation, Infiltration, and Feminist Anxiety Issues of co-optation remained a major source of anxiety regarding feminist entrepreneurship and also revealed tensions about who would represent the movement and jealousies about success. When Gloria Steinem and a group of feminists in New York decided to launch a mass media feminist magazine called Ms., the venture raised more than a few eyebrows. Feminists feared that a million dollars of start-up money for Ms. came from Warner Communications, a major corporation that in exchange would own 25 percent of Ms., a worrisome sign that what might follow in the magazine would be watered down feminism. It made critics dubious that the entire venture was merely to enrich its founders. Steinem, who some feminists dubbed “a wimpy moderate,” also suffered from the critique that she had been named a feminist leader by mainstream (male-controlled) media and not by the movement itself, a charge leveled rather visibly in major newspapers and notably by Betty Friedan.60 In addition, as the popularity and visibility of Ms. grew—and with it Steinem’s—feminists who embraced the notion of “leaderlessness” (that in egalitarian movements, there are no leaders; everyone is a leader) were increasingly uncomfortable. The fear was that the patriarchy, which controlled all social institutions, would make stars of women they found least objectionable, and these stars could be used to undermine the movement.61 Joanne Parrent and members of the Feminist Economic Network (FEN) suffered from similar accusations with their endeavor to launch a feminist hub of sorts in Raymond as quoted in Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” (1987), Creative Commons, 4. 58 Cristan Williams, “TERF Hate and Sandy Stone,” Trans Advocate, August 16, 2014, http://www. transadvocate.com/terf-violence-and-sandy-stone_n_14360.htm [accessed November 12, 2018]. 59 Sandy Stone, discussion with the author, September 29, 2020. Stone contributed to Olivia’s importance as a pioneer of the women’s music movement. In its history, Olivia produced forty albums, and sales in 1988 hit $250,000. The company transformed itself in the 1990s into Olivia Travel, a lesbian cruise/travel company with Judy Duglacz, the remaining founder at the helm. 60 Thom, Inside Ms., 33, 41, 51–2. 61 Valk, “Living a Feminist Lifestyle,” 317, 319. 57

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the Feminist Women’s City Club in Detroit in 1976. The 1924 building had formerly been a women’s club, and Parrent and her cohort saw potential to not only restore it but also bring together in one space women’s businesses and services, as well as a club—complete with swimming pool—where feminists and feminist entrepreneurs could meet, share resources, and find community. FEN was originally established as a sort of umbrella organization for feminist credit unions, where they could combine as necessary and establish policies for or provide assistance to individual members. Some critics saw the purchase of a building beyond the scope of FEN’s mission and questioned the ethics of FEN principals such as Joanne Parrent and Valerie Angers who were also the building’s owners. Criticisms were swift: some labeled it elitist because of the $100 annual membership fees for the club facilities, others accused its founders of co-opting the mission of FEN and using it to enrich themselves.62 What’s more, when Parrent and Angers ended their relationship, their breakup became entangled in the very public debates in feminist magazines. Parrent was emotionally wounded by claims that she was co-opting the movement, which she also believed were motivated by jealousies about the scale and success of the Feminist City Club and the attention its founders received.63 Ultimately, Parrent left FEN and the DFFCU, and FEN dissolved.

In Defense of Feminist Entrepreneurship Feminist entrepreneurs on the receiving end of criticism, however, did not always remain silent, despite the deep rejection, defensiveness, and insecurity many felt. They fired back in the feminist press and elsewhere. Some challenged the idea that they were supposed to accept a “vow of poverty” (i.e., not make money from their businesses) to be loyal feminists—and that, like Dell’Olio—they saw this as devaluing women’s work and achievements, much as the patriarchal capitalist system had.64 But feminist entrepreneurs’ defenses also revealed the more complicated emotional struggle of juggling two worlds and worldviews, feminism and business. “We are torn by our two positions,” wrote Susan Sojourner, owner of First Things First. “As businesswomen, we’re tired of constantly being questioned about our profit (dirty, ugly word) motivations and our ‘credentials’ (how much free movement work are we doing?) Yet, as feminists we often look at other businesswomen with the same movement-protective attitudes: Why is she in this? Is she a movement woman? Or just in this for the money?”65 They worried, too, that the disavowal of profit was merely a reflection of the devaluation of women more broadly, leading to missed opportunities for both the Fran Moira, “FEN: Do the Facts Speak for Themselves?” off our backs 6 no. 6 (1976): 5, 15; Kathie Barry, “F.E.N,” off our backs 6 no. 10 (1977): 16–17. See also Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, 129–30; C. Corday, Kana Trueblood and Sonny Tufts, “Feminist City Club: FEN Fatale,” Fifth Estate no. 272 (May 1975), https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/272-may-1976/feminist-city-club/ [accessed March 18, 2018]. 63 Joanne Parrent, discussion with the author, July 9, 2021. 64 Pride, “Underpricing Our Own Work,” 9. 65 Sojourner, 4. 62

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entrepreneurs and the movement. “Were we truly pricing our material at a price every woman could afford,” wrote Anne Pride, principal of the Pittsburgh feminist publishing company, Know Inc., “or are we purposely keeping our prices as low as possible because we, in fact, were not completely convinced that anything we, as women, could produce was worth a higher price?”66 Put more definitively, Marjory Collins, another feminist entrepreneur, noted, “The only way to turn these attitudes around is for us, as feminist entrepreneurs, to present ourselves to the movement and the rest of the world for what we really are: the cutting edge of economic independence for all women. We are the pioneers.”67

Conclusion In 1979, Ginny Z. Berson, one of the original members of the Olivia Records collective, decided to leave the business. After years in an activist enterprise, Berson determined, “We could not be a revolutionary political/cultural organization and a successful business.”68 Many feminist businesses similarly struggled not only with balancing revolutionary ideals and the pressures of a capitalist marketplace but also with a complex web of unruly emotions that increasingly shaped and added new layers of difficulty to how they approached their ventures. These emotions ranged from the joy feminist activist entrepreneurs experienced in their mission to create an alternative, woman-centered economy to the anxiety, guilt, defensiveness, and self-doubt triggered by growing criticisms from within the women’s movement. Even as they linked their ventures to ideals beyond the business realm, feminist entrepreneurs were nonetheless surprised to see how much emotions (their own and those of others) crept into and infused their businesses and decisions. Ultimately, the combined pressures pushed many to rethink their ventures. Most of those who held fast to socialist, feminist, antiprofit imperatives ultimately failed or decided that the pressure to conform to the marketplace was not for them. Those who remained in business became nonprofits or, as with Olivia’s shift to a lesbian travel company, reinvented themselves in ways that tempered the rigid political fervor, keeping core ideals (i.e., serving a lesbian clientele and donating large sums of money to support lesbian and feminist causes) while also seeking the profits needed to sustain and grow a business. Although feminist entrepreneurs did not see their vision of using business to create a new womancentered culture materialize, their ventures nonetheless provided energy, excitement, and visibility for the movement. As such, the study of feminist activist entrepreneurs reveals much about not only the intersection of the movement and the marketplace but also about the ways in which business and emotions are always intertwined. Feminist businesses and the debates about them raised important questions about whether business can be about more than enriching its founders—ideas that continue to infuse social entrepreneurship today. Pride, 9. Collins, 5. 68 Berson, Olivia on the Record, 249. 66 67

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Index Italic page numbers indicate figures. accounting practices boundaries of 38–40 as cause of conflict 39–40 charitable giving 41–3 community relations and 41–4 credit and debt relationships 42–3 as daily ritual 36 as ethical practice 35–6 family relations and 38–40 gift giving and 41–3 hybrid forms of 40 importance to middling families 32 negotiations between family members 39 perfect equality, marriage and 31–2 quantified self as enabled by 33, 34–7 research sources 33–4 selectivity of 36–7 texts on 34–5 variety of 36 Adanson, Michel 112 Adolphs, Ralph 71n16 advertisements Americanization of in Cold War Turkey 91–5, 93, 94 emotional strategies shown in 57–9 families, use of in 92–5, 94 fear, anxiety and pride in Cold War Turkey 85–90 multi-emotional 92 political parties 93, 93–4 Advertising Council 91 affective economies 198 Netherlands, financial bubbles in 202, 202–5, 203, 204 New York stock exchange 1929 crisis 205–10, 207, 209 affective professional relationships see emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders

affect theory 50 ­Aikman, Margaret 38–9 Allentown 162–3 Americanization of advertising in Cold War Turkey 91–5, 93, 94 Angé, Olivia 164n38 Angelucci, Angelo 183 Angrand, Jean-Luc 117 antebellum service sector attitudes towards services 66–8 black-run barbershops 74 buying and selling trust 74–8 confidence as obsession 75–6 emotional labor 68–71 emotional strategies used 59–60 hotels and restaurants 72–4 trust 66–8, 72–5 see also Civil War era of US, businesswomen in anxiety in advertising 85–90, 87, 89 credit and debt and 127 feminist entrepreneurship in the 1970s 251–2 arms industry arms control 182 Beretta firm 186 brands, connotations associated with 188 contemporary 187 disarmament campaigns 188 early modern Europe 178–82 fear 189 film industry, association with 189 future research 190 guns 179–82, 188–9 historiography 183–7 imperial contexts 181–2 knives compared to guns 188 manufacturers, attitudes towards 182

Index as merchants of death 184 patriotism 183–4 place in society 190 pride 183–4, 189 source base for research 190 sports events, association with 189 strong emotions as attracted to 177–8 unrest excited by 184–5 Atia, Nadia 165, 173 Balleisen, Edward 72 Barrett, Lisa Feldman 71 Beattie, James 39 Beckwith, N. M. 131–2 Bell, Daniel 67 ­Benson, Susan Porter 69–70 Beretta firm 186 Berliner, David 164n38 Berson, Ginny Z. 244–5, 249–50, 253 black-run barbershops 74 Blight, David 55 boarding house keepers emotional strategies of 57–9 Boddice, Rob 1, 2–3, 16 Boilat, David 117 bonds among Boston’s China traders see emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders bookkeeping see accounting practices Boorstin, Daniel 72 Boston’s China traders, emotional bonds among anxiety re. credit and debt 127 building 129–33 Coolidge, Joseph, business partnership with Augustine Heard 125–6, 130, 133–9 as critical resource 126 drive for 131 family as important resource 129–32 fear of loss and failure 126 library associations 129 masculinity and 126, 132–3 separate spheres ideology 127–8 Bourke, Joanna 230 Brauer, Jurgen 187 Braverman, Harry 67, 70, 70n11 Bremmer, Fredrika 54 Brockway, Fenner 184

261

brotherly business relationships see emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders Brown, Henry Box 231 Brun, Samuel 181 burnout 14 business communities 5 business history/historians literature 3–15 view of emotions 1–3, 2 business strategy, love as 113–16 buying and selling, trust and 74–8 Cailluet, Ludovic 1, 7 Cannizzo, Cindy 186 capitalism 29 Carr, Christopher 188 Cavalli, Marino 182 Cellini, Benvenuto 179 Cervantes, Miguel de 179 Chamoun, Dany 186 charitable giving, accounting practices and 41–3 Cipolla, Carlo 185 Civil War era of US, businesswomen in ­advertisements 57–9 boarding house keepers emotional strategies of 57–9 couverture 50n4 cries used by in the market 49–50 emotional communities 52 emotional labor 59–60 emotion as business strategy 50 emotives 52 era defined 50 finding emotional strategies 53 literature on women’s work 50–1 mantua-makers, emotional strategies of 57 market women, emotional strategies of 54–6 milliners, emotional strategies of 56–7 non-emotion as emotional strategy 60 nostalgia, trading on sense of 54–6 praline vendors 55–6 schools and academies emotional strategies of 59 services industries, emotional strategies used 59–60

262

Index

similarities and differences 53 stock investment 60 see also antebellum service sector class, signares as new social class 116–19, 118 Cobble, Dorothy Sue 70 Cold War Turkey advertising 85–99, 87, 89, 93, 94, 97, 99 American goods, advertising of 96–9, 97, 99 Americanization, advertising and 91–5, 93, 94 consumption of American goods 95–9, 97, 99 families, use of in advertising 92–5, 94 fear, anxiety and pride in advertising 85–90, 87, 89 political parties, advertisements for 93, 93–4 Soviet threat 85–90, 87, 89 Colinson, Robert 35 Colli, Andrea 15 Collier, Basil 185 Collins, Marjory 253 Cominassi, Marco 183 community relations, accounting practices and 41–4 competencies, emotions as 7 conflict, accounting practices as cause of 39–40 consumers, firms’ relationships with 7–9 contractual marriages between signares and Europeans abolition of slavery 119–20 associations of signares 117 balls/receptions given by 117 clothing of signares 117–19, 118 conditional love 110–13 decline of signare community 119–20 ­freedom, signares and 113 gum trade 115–16 houses lived in 116 new social class, signares as 116–19, 118 origin of signares 109–10 processions of signares 117 signares, background to 107–8, 109 slaves of signares 114–16 strategy, love as 113–16

Coolidge, Joseph, business partnership with Augustine Heard 125–6, 130, 133–9 Corker, Chris 190 counter-institution, feminist business as 244–7 courage in advertising 85–90, 87, 89 couverture 50n4 creativity paradox 13–14 credit and debt, anxiety and 127 cultural analysis 16 cultural bubbles 195–6 Dutch Republic 201–5, 202, 203, 204 New York stock exchange 1929 crisis 205–10, 207, 209 sensemaking of financial bubbles 201–5, 202, 203, 204 cultural scripts 16 Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth 73 Curti, Merle 13 Damasio, Antonio 71n16 Dames, Nicholas 163–4 Davidoff, Leonore 32 Davies, Jeremy 165, 173 debt, anxiety and 127 decision-making 13 De la Vega, Joseph 199 Delcourt, André 111 Dell’Olio, Anselma 248–9 Denton, Stacey 166, 167 De Pommegorge, Prunella 117–18 de Vries, David 12 disciplinary emotions 17, 18–19 capitalism and 29 see also accounting practices; antebellum service sector; Civil War era of US, businesswomen in; Turkey during the Cold War Ditz, Toby 136 Dlugacz, Judy 246 Douglass, Frederick 231 Downs, Jacques 130 Dunne, J. Paul 187 Durand, Jean-Baptiste-Leonard 111 Dutch Republic early modern, financial bubbles in 199–205, 202, 203, 204 see also Netherlands

Index ­economic history of 1960s feminism 242–4 Edwards, Laura F. 50n4 Ehrenreich, Barbara 67, 69n10 Elias, Norbert 3n8 emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders anxiety re. credit and debt 127 building 129–33 Coolidge, Joseph, business partnership with Augustine Heard 125–6, 130, 133–9 as critical resource 126 drive for 131 family as important resource 129–32 fear of loss and failure 126 library associations 129 masculinity and 126, 132–3 separate spheres ideology 127–8 emotional communities 5, 21 Civil War era of US, businesswomen in 52 emotional economies 198, 214–15 Netherlands, financial bubbles in 202, 202–5, 203, 204 New York stock exchange 1929 crisis 205–10, 207, 209 emotional expression 5 emotional labor 6, 10–11, 51–2 antebellum service sector 68–71 Civil War era of US, businesswomen in 59–60 distinguished from emotion work/ management 68–9 emotional regimes created by 75 trust 66, 74–5, 77 emotional marketing Americanization of advertisements in Cold War Turkey 91–5 consumption of American goods in Cold War Turkey 96–9, 97, 99 families, use of in advertising 92–5, 94 gender and 98 political parties, advertisements for 93, 93–4 Soviet threat in Cold War Turkey 85–90, 87, 89 emotional refuge 21

263

emotional regimes 4–6, 21 created by emotional labor 75 emotional strategies see Civil War era of US, businesswomen in emotionology 4 emotion(s) as constructed term 5 defined 3–4 link to other forms of knowing 6 as neurologically constructed 71, 71n15 and reason as intertwined 6 emotion work/management, distinguished from emotional labor 68–9 emotives 4 Civil War era of US, businesswomen in 52 employees, emotional enlistment of 10–11 ­enabling emotions 17, 19–20, 105 see also accounting practices; contractual marriages between signares and Europeans; nostalgia; Taketsuru, Rita and Masataka Engelbrecht, H.C. 184–5 entrepreneurs emotion and 11 of trust 66 see also feminist entrepreneurship in the 1970s entrepreneurship of trust 77 equality, marriage and 31–2 Eustace, Nocole 6 failure, fear of, Boston’s China traders and 126 family/families as important resource for Boston’s China traders 129–32 relationships, accounting practices and 38–40 use of in advertising 92–5, 94 family firms 11–12, 14–15 see also accounting practices fear about feminist entrepreneurship in the 1970s 241–2 in advertising 85–90, 87, 89 arms industry 189

264 of loss and failure, Boston’s China traders and 126 see also slavery/slave trade Febvre, Lucien 3, 3n8 feminist entrepreneurship in the 1970s anxiety over co-optation and infiltration 251–2 counter-institution, feminist business as 244–7 defense of 252–3 economic history of 1960s feminism 242–4 emotional responses to 239–42 fears about 241–2 hostility of women’s movement towards 239–42 insider/outsider question 248–51 lesbian feminists 246 motivation of 241 radical feminists 243–4 running a business 247–8 transwomen 250–1 types of businesses 245 unruly emotions, dealing with 253 Feminist Women’s City Club, Detroit 252 Fiedenson, Patrick 2 financial sensemaking cartoon 195, 196, 200 1987 crisis 211–14, 213 cultural bubbles 195–6, 201–5, 202, 203, 204 cultural-history approach 197–8 Dutch Republic, early modern 199–205, 202, 203, 204 ­emotions and 196, 198, 199–200, 202, 202–5, 203, 204, 208, 210, 212–14, 213 New York stock exchange 1929 crisis 205–10, 207, 209 firearms industry see arms industry Forbes, John Murray 130–1, 132, 133–4 Forbes, Paul Siemen 130–2 Forbes, Robert Bennet 132 Ford, Matthew 188 fraternity, mercantile see emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders Freeman, Jo 248 Frigidaire Appliance Company 98, 99

Index Fronsperger, Leonhard 180 future research 22 gender emotional marketing and 98 emotions and 9–10, 11 see also Civil War era of US, businesswomen in; contractual marriages between signares and Europeans; feminist entrepreneurship in the 1970s gift giving, accounting practices and 41–3 Grimstad, Kirsten 245–6 Gross, Daniel 71n16 Guerzoni, Guido 178 guns see arms industry Habermas, Jurgen 72–3 Haddad, John 130 Haggerty, Timothy 222 Hale, John 181, 185 Hall, Catherine 32 Hanighen, F.C. 184–5 happiness, consumption of American goods in Cold War Turkey and 95–9, 97, 99 Hartley, Keith 187 Heard, Augustine, business partnership with Joseph Coolidge 125–6, 130, 133–9 Held, Robert 186–7 Heywood, George 31–2, 34 Hirschman, Elizabeth 166 history/historians of business literature 3–15 view of emotions 1–3, 2 history of emotions 16 contribution to 3 framework for 4 literature 3–15 theoretical approaches 3–5 Hochschild, Arlie Russel 51–2, 68–9, 70n11 hotels, trust and 72–4 Huizinga, Johan 3n8 Hunt, Margaret 32 Hurley, Andrew 163n35, 166, 167, 172

Index identity, accounting practices and 33 Innes, Gilbert 33–4, 36, 39–40 ­insider/outsider question in feminist entrepreneurship 248–51 Jabour, Anya 127 Japanese whiskey industry, creation of emotional and social labor by Rita Taketsuru 149, 157 first whisky 150 new distillery 147–58 training in Scotland 144–5 see also Taketsuru, Rita and Masataka Kassell, Paula 246 Kelting, Lily 166, 167 Kempster, Tony 187 Koç, Vehbi 96 Lauer, Josh 72 leadership, reason and emotion and 11 Leonardo da Vinci 178–9 lesbian feminists 246 library associations 129 Lipartito, Kenneth 2, 15–16 loss, fear of, Boston’s China traders and 126 Lost Cause narrative 55 love as strategy 113–16 see also Taketsuru, Rita and Masataka Major Barbara (Shaw) 184 “Make America Great Again” slogan 164 Malone’s Bakery closure of 161–2 contents of nostalgia 170–2 coordinates of nostalgia, time and place as 168–70, 173 locating 167–8 memories of 159–62, 167–8, 172–3 management burnout 14 Mannur, Anita 173 mantua-makers, emotional strategies of 57 Marcus, Stephanie 248 Marees, Pieter de 181 market as disciplining force 29 marketing Americanization of advertisements in Cold War Turkey 91–5

265

consumption of American goods in Cold War Turkey 96–9, 97, 99 emotional, Soviet threat in Cold War Turkey and 85–90, 87, 89 emotions and 8–9 families, use of in advertising 92–5 market women, emotional strategies of 54–6 marriage perfect equality and 31–2 see also contractual marriages between signares and Europeans; Taketsuru, Rita and Masataka Martin, Stephen 187 ­masculinity, emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders and 126, 132–3 Matt, Susan 3n8, 164, 165, 166, 167 McKendrick, Neil 186 Mihm, Stephen 72 Miller, Davina 190 milliners, emotional strategies of 56–7 Monluc, Blaise de 180 Montaigne, Michel de 180 Morin, Marco 186–7 Ms. (magazine) 251 Muldrew, Craig 33 multi-emotional advertisements 92 Nadkarni, Maya 164n38 National Organization for Women (NOW) 242–3 Netherlands 1987 crisis 211–14, 213 early modern, financial bubbles in 199–205, 202, 203, 204 New York stock exchange 1929 crisis and 206–10, 207, 209 networks, business 12 slavery/slave trade 222–3, 227–30 see also emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders New York stock exchange 1929 crisis 205–10, 207, 209, 213–14 Nikka Whisky see Japanese whiskey industry, creation of Noel-Baker, Philip 185 Northup, Solomon 231

266 nostalgia affective citizenry 173 changes in study of 163–4 closure of Malone’s Bakery 161–2 contents of 170–2 coordinates of, time and place as 168–70, 173 diners 166–7 food as focus of 166–7 functions of 165–7, 171 locating Malone’s Bakery 167–8 “Make America Great Again” slogan 164 Malone’s Bakery, memories of 159–62 memories of Malone’s Bakery 167–8, 172–3 politics and 164n38 Southside of Allentown 162–3 stigma of 164–5 as suspect 165 trading on sense of 54–6 objectivity, affectation of 1 Oldenburg, Ray 73, 73n22 Olegario, Rowena 72 Olivia Records 246, 249–51 organizational forms and behaviors, emotions and 11–13 Parrent, Joanna 251–2 ­Pasquier, Roger 119 patriotism, arms industry and 183–4 perfect equality, marriage and 31–2 Pfefferman, Talia 12 political parties, advertisements for 93, 93–4 Pope, Susanna 34 praline vendors 55–6 pride in advertising 85–90, 87, 89 arms industry and 183–4, 189 Pride, Anne 253 professional relationships see emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders; networks, business quantified self, accounting practices as enabling 33, 34–7 quantitative self 37

Index radical feminists 243–4 rationality/reason as affect 16, 18 as borderless 16 as chosen 29 and emotion(s) as intertwined 6 reason see rationality/reason Reddy, William 4, 52, 70 Reid, Coletta 247 relationships accounting practices and 33 see emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders; networks, business; Taketsuru, Rita and Masataka Rennie, Susan 245–6 research future 22, 190 sources 21–2 resources emotions as 7 needed for business 105 restaurants, trust and 72–4 Rosenwein, Barbara 5, 70 safety, Americanization of advertisements in Cold War Turkey and 91–5, 93, 94 Sampson, Anthony 185–6 Sandage, Scott 126 Satia, Priya 188 Schermerhorn, Calvin 222 schools and academies, emotional strategies of 59 Schumpeter, Joseph 105 Scranton, Philip 2 security, Americanization of advertisements in Cold War Turkey and 91–5, 93, 94 selling emotions and 7–9, 10 trust 74–8 Senegal, contractual marriages between signares and Europeans ­abolition of slavery 119–20 associations of signares 117 balls/receptions given by 117 clothing of signares 117–19 conditional love 110–13 decline of signare community 119–20 freedom, signares and 113

Index gum trade 115–16 houses lived in 116 new social class, signares as 116–19, 118 origin of signares 109–10 processions of signares 117 signares, background to 107–8, 109 slaves of signares 114–16 strategy, love as 113–16 sensemaking of financial bubbles cartoon 195, 196, 200 1987 crisis 211–14, 213 cultural bubbles 195–6, 201–5, 202, 203, 204 cultural-history approach 197–8 Dutch Republic, early modern 199–205, 202, 203, 204 emotions and 196, 198, 199–200, 202, 202–5, 203, 204, 208, 210, 212–14, 213 New York stock exchange 1929 crisis 205–10, 207, 209 separate spheres ideology 127–8 services industries, emotional strategies used 59–60 see also antebellum service sector share trading see financial sensemaking Shevchenko, Olga 164n38 signares, marriages with see contractual marriages between signares and Europeans Silverman, David 181 slavery/slave trade abolition of 119–20 agricultural cycle and 226 cholera epidemic, impact of 219–20 decision, impact of disease on 223–4 domestic trade, impact of disease on 224–6 emotional components of 220–1 fear of disease, slave traders’ 221–3 networks and alliances of trade 222–3, 227–30 patent medicines offered 226–7 purchasing patterns, impact of disease on 224 signares as slave owners 114–16 slaves, fear of disease and 230–2 Smith, Victoria M. 188–9 socio-emotional wealth 15

267

Sojourner, Susan 252 Southside of Allentown 162–3 Spring, Dawn 91 Stearns, Carol 3–4, 70 ­Stearns, Peter 3–4, 70, 222 Steinem, Gloria 251 stock markets 12 see also financial sensemaking Stone, Sandy 250–1 strategy, love as 113–16 strategy in business, emotion as see Civil War era of US, businesswomen in Sullivan, William 131 Taketsuru, Rita and Masataka adaptation by Rita to Japanese ways 146–7 apple juice business 149 arrival in Japan 146–7 challenges of being a foreigner 149, 150 death, Rita’s 155–6 death of Rita’s mother 151 early relationship and marriage 144–6 emotional and social labor by Rita Taketsuru 149, 157 health problems, Rita’s 151–7 impact of successful business on relationship 156 infidelity, Masataka’s 152–3, 154 new distillery 147–58 post-war Japan 150–7 Rima, adopted daughter 148, 149 Second World War 150 set-back for whisky ambitions 147 social connections of Rita 149, 157 strains in the marriage 152–7 Takeshi, adopted son 150–1 training in Scotland 144–5 visits to Scotland by Rita 148 Tranel, Daniel 71n16 transwomen 250–1 Trebilcock, Clive 186 Trump, Donald 164 trust ability to trust 65 as an emotion 71n16, 74–5 antebellum service sector 72–5 buying and selling 74–8 decline of government’s policing role 76

268

Index

emotional bonds among Boston’s China traders 130 emotional labor 66 entrepreneurship of 77 entrepreneurs of 66 failures of 65–6 hotels and restaurants 72–4 service sector 66–8 theories of 71–5 ways to build 77, 77n37 ­Turkey during the Cold War advertising 85–99, 87, 89, 93, 94, 97, 99 advertising of American goods 96–9, 97, 99 Americanization of advertising 91–5, 93, 94 consumption of American goods 95–9, 97, 99 end of WWII 83 families, use of in advertising 92–5, 94 fear, anxiety and pride in advertising 85–90, 87, 89 political parties, advertisements for 93, 93–4 Soviet threat 85–90, 87, 89 Turner, Thomas 41–4 Undershaft, Andrew (fictional character) 184 United States Americanization of advertisements in Cold War Turkey 91–5, 93, 94

consumption of American goods in Cold War Turkey 95–9, 97, 99 see also Civil War era of US, businesswomen in; slavery/slave trade unruly emotions 17, 20–1, 175 see also arms industry; feminist entrepreneurship in the 1970s; sensemaking of financial bubbles; slavery/slave trade weapons see arms industry whiskey industry in Japan, creation of emotional and social labor by Rita Taketsuru 149, 157 first whisky 150 new distillery 147–58 training in Scotland 144–5 see also Taketsuru, Rita and Masataka Whyte, William 13 Wickberg, Daniel 5–6 Wilson, William Julius 67 women see Civil War era of US, businesswomen in; gender women’s movement see feminist entrepreneurship in the 1970s Woods, Michael 6 Young, Ashley Rose 54, 166, 171n100 Zaharoff, Basil 185

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271

272

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