Feeling and Historical Change in Postwar Britain: Linking Emotional Experience to Social and Economic Practices

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How can we reimagine studying the past? One way is to ask how the emotions of people who came before us influenced their social lives and economic behaviour. How do the meanings of things like hope, nostalgia, homesickness, and hate change over time? How does this affect wider social and economic life? And what can this say about our present world, and the challenges it faces today?Take "wanderlust", a relatively new emotion word expressing a yearning to travel. The desire to travel is as old as humanity, but the way we experience and express it has changed. "Wanderlust" isn't just a word, it's an experience that reflects our current world in an age of globalised travel and budget airlines. Its popularity has had serious consequences for the economies of places like Southeast Asia and the social lives of its people. Emotions, economies, and social worlds are all connected, and they change over time.I wish to build my early career around exploring these connections in modern British history - especially around its migration movements. I will begin this during the fellowship, and I will focus on two approaches.a) Publishing my researchWith my publisher, I will transform my PhD thesis into a book. It focuses on the emotions of Caribbean migrants coming to Britain after 1945, and how these emotions affected wider social and economic behaviour. For example, this migration flow is often considered an "economic migration" (people moving country to attain better wages and standards of living). My first chapter argues that this "economic" motivation is actually emotional: the negative feelings that some Caribbean people felt from poverty motivated them to move to Britain. The book, which this fellowship will allow me to complete, argues that it isn't easy to separate "irrational" emotions from "rational" economic life. I will also submit two articles for publication in academic journals.The first will study something called "blues parties". These were parties Caribbean migrants hosted in their homes, often because they were excluded from Britain's nightclubs. I will argue these places were an "emotional refuge" - they acted as safe spaces for migrants to express and feel certain emotions. It will also argue the discrimination Caribbean migrants faced in Britain was based on certain emotions, such as fear and hate.The second article will look at conscription in the British military during the Second World War. So far, research hasn't focused on how military life is about emotional training well as physical training. Militaries have special rules for what emotions are appropriate and how to express them. Because so many British men were enlisted during the Second World War, I will ask how they changed their country's social and economic character after the war.b) Building my network and hosting eventsTo connect with other researchers, I will present a paper at a conference. It will explore how the nostalgia of migrants in Britain led to a demand for consumer goods which reminded them of home. Irish migrants in the nineteenth century, for example, opened shops catering to other migrants which sold Irish newspapers, food, and popular products. They advertised their businesses in Irish community newspapers in Britain, and often used emotional language to do so.I will also organise a symposium where academics, the public, migrants, refugees, and local MPs will be invited to discuss migrant and refugee wellbeing in the local area. This is urgent and highly important, given the current war in Ukraine and the political situation in the UK over Channel crossings. Everyone will discuss what changes can improve the situation, and a list of these will be presented to MPs.Overall, this project will give us a far better understanding of the relationship between emotion, economics, and social behaviour, and how these combined to help make Britain what it is today. This tells us how we got here, and where we might go