Electric Signals: Emotional Currents, Cultural Conduits, Social Voltage and Power Generation in Eighteenth-Century Cultural Encounters

Abstract

In the middle of the eighteenth century, natural philosophers began to posit connections between emotion and electricity. The metaphors they explored then have continued methodological implications for scholars today. The electrical concepts of current, resistance, voltage, and power, provide an extended metaphor for conceptualising the history of emotions in ways that usefully bridge the biological and cultural, the individual and social, in order to more fully reveal historical links between emotion and power. By way of example, this article examines cross-cultural negotiations of power made possible through the expression, exchange, and evaluation of grief as recorded in the diary of a British-American Quaker woman who lived among Indians in the Pennsylvania borderlands in the midst of the Seven Years’ War.