Civilizing Emotions ─ Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very much at the forefront of political debate. Most of these debates proceed as if the meaning of these words were self-evident. This is whereCivilizing Emotions intervenes, tracing the history of the concepts of civility and civilization and thus adding a level of self-reflexivity to the present debates. Unlike previous histories,Civilizing Emotions takes a global perspective, highlighting the roles of civility and civilization in the creation of a new and hierarchized global order in the era of high imperialism and its entanglements with the developments in a number of well-chosen European and Asian countries.

Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century.Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time.

Margrit Pernau is Senior Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She studied History and Public Law at the University of Saarland and University of Heidelberg where she took her PhD in 1991. From 1997 to 2003, Pernau conducted research in Delhi on 'Plural Identities of Muslims in Old-Delhi in the 19th century' and has been research fellow at the Social Science Research Center and the Modern Orient Centre, both in Berlin. Besides the history of emotions, her areas of interest include modern Indian history, the history of modern Islam, historical semantics, comparative studies, and translation studies.

Helge Jordheim is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. His main fields of research and teaching are conceptual history, the work of Reinhart Koselleck, the theory and history of times and temporalities, and eighteenth century intellectual and literary culture in Western Europe. Between 2009 and 2013 he was Academic Director of the interdisciplinary research program Cultural Transformations in the Ages of Globalization (KULTRANS) at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has been a visiting fellow at University of Gothenburg, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and Zentrum fur Literatur und Kulturwissenschaft in Berlin. He was born in Oslo and educated at the University of Oslo and the FU Berlin. In 2006 he received his PhD from the University of Oslo in German Literature, which was awarded His Majesty the King's Gold Medal for best dissertation in the humanities for that year.

Orit Bashkin received her PhD from Princeton University (2004) and her BA (1995) and MA (1999) from Tel Aviv University. She is now a professor of modern Arab history at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her publications include multiple book chapters and articles on the history of Arab-Jews in Iraq, on Iraqi history, and on Arabic literature. She has also edited a book entitledSculpturing Culture in Egypt [le-fasel tarbut be-mitzrayim] with Israel Gershoni and Liat Kozma, which included translations into Hebrew of seminal works by Egyptian intellectuals.

Christian Bailey is a lecturer in history at The Open University, UK. He completed his PhD at Yale University in 2009 before moving on to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, where he was a postdoctoral researcher until 2011. Since then, he has been lecturer in history at Balliol College, Oxford and Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University in New York. His first book,Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950 (2013) focused on German ideas for integrating Europe in the mid-twentieth century. He has since turned to the history of emotions, publishing on the history of honour in Britain and Germany and on changing conceptions of emotions in European encyclopaedia since the 18th century. He is currently writing a book on love between Jews and other Germans from the 1870s to the 1960s.

Oleg Benesch is Anniversary Research Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of York. Before arriving at York, he was Past & Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Benesch obtained his PhD from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He spent a total of six years studying and researching in Japan, including two years conducting research at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. His bookInventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism and Bushido in Modern Japan was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Benesch's research focuses on the historical exchange and development of ideas and concepts across societies, with a focus on interactions between Japan, China, and the West. He tends to take a comparative approach to research, and his work examines the