Finished research projects

The Hurricane of Passion. Popular Politics and Emotion in Late Georgian England 1790-1812.

This project casts new light on the struggle over reform in Britain following the French Revolution by studying how Georgians from across the social spectrum sought to enlist popular passions, either in defence of the established order – or to subvert and challenge it. Inspired by the history of emotions, practice theory, and social movements theory it introduces the concept of ‘emotional tactics’, defined as the language, material objects, and practices used to encourage emotions for political purposes. Using a wide range of source material including controverted election cases, campaign material, newspapers, letters, ballads and prints, this project analyses events of political mobilisation in three English cities: the rapidly industrialising textile town of Nottingham, the imperial capital of London, and Liverpool, Europe’s largest slave trading port. It asks what emotional tactics were used to encourage or discourage political mobilisation, and how they were adapted and deployed depending on local context.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• 'Shew Yourselves as Men': Gender, Citizenship and Political Propaganda in the 1773 and 1774 Worcester Election Contests

  2017. Alvar Blomgren. Parliamentary History 36 (3), 346-360

  Article

  This case study of the 1773 and 1774 election contests in the city of Worcester investigates how members of the local oligarchy, and the political opposition to that oligarchy, drew on contemporary discourses on citizenship to convince the electorate that their candidate would become a worthy representative of their city in parliament, and to refute the claims of their opponents. Since independence was absolutely essential to the voters' identities as male householder citizens, this became the main issue of conflict. The candidate of the opposition interest, Sir Watkin Lewes, sought to establish himself as the guardian of the independence of the citizens of Worcester against the corrupt corporation. The candidates of the corporation, Thomas Bates Rous and his successor, Colonel Nicholas Lechmere, instead claimed that Lewes was the real threat, as his anti-corruption campaign deprived the voters of the usual fruits of the election. While such claims also entailed an appeal by the local elite to the financial interest of the voters, the need to justify this incentive ideologically, and the high portion of voters who turned their backs on their patrons, does suggest the power embedded in the concept of citizenship in the political life at the level of the localities. Gendered and classed conceptions of citizenship, furthermore, were employed as offensive weapons in the political propaganda surrounding the elections, as each faction sought to discredit the other by claiming that they were neither manly enough, nor of the proper social status, to qualify as worthy political subjects. Thus, citizenship was not only fundamentally gendered in the masculine, but also highly hierarchical and equally intertwined with contemporary notions of class.

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• The Hurricane of Passion: Popular Politics and Emotion in Late Georgian England 1792-1812

  2022. Alvar Blomgren.

  Thesis (Doc)

  This book casts new light on the struggle over reform in Britain following the French Revolution by studying how Georgians from across the social spectrum sought to enlist popular passions, either in defence of the established order – or in order to subvert and challenge it. Inspired by the history of emotions, practice theory, and social movements theory it introduces the concept of ‘emotional tactics’, defined as the language, material objects, and practices used to encourage emotions for political purposes. Using a wide range of source material including controverted election cases, campaign material, newspapers, letters, ballads and prints, this book analyses events of political mobilisation in three English cities: the rapidly industrialising textile town of Nottingham, the imperial capital of London, and Liverpool, Europe’s largest slave trading port. It asks what emotional tactics were used to encourage or discourage political mobilisation, and how they were adapted and deployed depending on local context. 

  The results of this analysis are organised into four ideal types of emotional tactics that were crucial to late Georgian popular politics: 1) Tactics fostering anger; 2) terror tactics; 3) shaming tactics; and 4) tactics fostering loyalty, love and community. 

  This book shows that people in Georgian England were aware that emotions could be manipulated for political gain. It was an established part of the political game. For those who engaged in politics, knowledge about how to influence feelings and passions was a crucial skill, as was the ability to adapt their emotional tactics to the demands of the local community. To the persons studied in this book, contemporary understandings of emotionality were the go-to frame of reference to make sense of the political convulsions of their time. Radicals and government loyalists alike viewed the struggle over reform as a fight to control the hurricane of passions unleashed by the French Revolution. 

  While emotional tactics could achieve powerful results, the persons studied in this book also grappled with the challenge of sustaining emotions over time as a mobilising force. This study finds two ways that Georgians sought to overcome this difficulty: 1) The creation of memory cultures in which the re-telling of stories of past abuses was used to evoke their emotional charge; and 2) the use of re-occurring events of mobilisation to sustain the emotional energy of the participants of a movement. 

  Rather than a history of top-down repression or bottom up protest, this book maps the emotional interaction that linked the national and regional levels of politics, that united and divided socially and ideologically diverse groups of people, and upon which all political mobilisation depended. By bringing passion back into politics in a more balanced and nuanced way, it changes the narrative of popular mobilisation in the Age of Revolutions. It shows both elite and plebeian actors as rational actors who consciously and calculatingly appealed to emotion. Yet it also casts them as driven by emotion and shows examples where people from both spheres were caught up in escalating spirals of radicalisation with unintended consequences.

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Show all publications by Alvar Blomgren at Stockholm University