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Emotions history in China—Editor’s introduction

It goes without saying that as a new trend in historical study, emotions history, or the history of emotions, is on the rise over the past few decades. Barbara Rosenwein, a noted forerunner of the study, stated in her 2010 article that “the problems and methods of the history of emotions should become the property of history in general.” If this was then a prediction, it has proven to be a correct one. In 2018 when Rob Boddice, a specialist based in Germany, published his general survey of the field, he stated emphatically that “History departments around the world appear to have taken the ‘emotional turn’. In the last decade, an astonishing number of books and articles, as well as centres for research, have appeared specifically to address emotions in history.” Indeed, in addition to the research centers mushroomed around the world listed by Boddice, there have appeared a number of book series in such leading publishers as Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, New York University Press and Routledge, supporting the growing interest among historians in expanding the field with their research and publications. A year later while contributing to Debating New Approaches to History, Piroska Nagy, a Canadian historian from Quebec, concurred by stating that “While twenty years ago such a focus did not exist, the history of emotions, a new approach and domain, has become one of the most dynamic (sub)fields of modern historical research.” The recent boom of the interest in human emotions is certainly not limited to historical research alone; rather, it has represented an interdisciplinary endeavor to explore the role of emotions in shaping human behavior. New advances in neuroscience research have deepened our understanding of brain activities, whereas sociologists and anthropologists have developed new theories and methods in better interpreting human actions driven by emotions. Yet the recent upsurge of emotions history as a new trend in historiography, in my opinion, has more to do with the fact that for a long time, historians tried to stay away from examining emotions as a subject of research in their works. In his 2005 book, Logics of History, for instance, William Sewell observed that social scientists (including historians in his opinion) “seem to fear that if they take emotion seriously as an object of study, they will be tainted by the irrationality, volatility, subjectivity, and ineffability that we associate with the term—that their own lucidity and scientific objectivity will be brought into question.” In her earlier article advocating emotions history, Barbara Rosenwein also acknowledged that “despite a generation’s worth of social and cultural history, the discipline [of history] has never quite lost its attraction to hard, rational things. Emotions have seemed tangential (if not fundamentally opposed) to the historical enterprise.” Of course, there had been pioneering studies that examined social and historical changes from the perspective of emotions. Works of Johan Huizinga, Norbert Elias and Lucien Febvre were notable examples. Yet it was from the late years of the twentieth century that historians began to argue more seriously and systematically that though emotions such as anger, love, hatred and envy exist in all times, their expressions and meanings vary from one period to another. In other words, not only emotions have history but their various expressions as well as their social acceptance also have manifested discernible historical changes. Buoyed by this notion, Peter Stearns and Carole Stearns coined the term “emotionology” in 1985 and William Reddy provided a new interpretation of the French Revolution, a historic event, by introducing such terminologies as “emotive,” “emotional regime,” and “emotional liberty.” While critiquing Reddy’s approach,