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Welcome to the History Extra podcast.
Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine.
Across some 12000 years of history, Prosperity has flourished in societies where women could fully participate and faltered when they were pushed to the margins.
That's what Dr Victoria Bateman argues in her new book, Economica.
From Stone Age big game hunters to Roman traders, Renaissance brewers and pirate queens.
She explores how women's economic power has shaped civilisations, but also how, how bias, law and culture have erased these contributions.
Speaking to Danny Bird, Victoria challenges myths about the rise of capitalism and warns that ignoring women's crucial role in humanity's prosperity risks repeating one of history's most common mistakes.
Victoria, welcome to the History Extra podcast, and we're here today to discuss your new book Economica, which is a broad sweep of over 12000 years of history right around the world, focusing on the significant contribution made by women and their frequent erasure from the story of humanity's economic development.
Firstly, how did the idea for this book come to you?
And how did you go about researching such an ambitious project?
Well, thank you so much for inviting me to begin with.
It's a real pleasure to be talking to you today.
Having taught economic history for 20 years, I really wanted to pull together the different threads of economic history and combine them into a single narrative that can take us through from the Stone Age to the present day, immersing us in all of those glittering civilizations and taking in the major economic revolutions, whether that's the birth of farming or the modern day computer age, but to do so in a way that includes the lives of women as well as men.
And I would say that history, in economic terms is is a long and repeated story of rise and decline of one civilization after another, amassing great wealth, doing great things, before ending up in a ditch ready to be found by some unsuspecting archaeologists centuries or even millennia down the line.
But you cannot tell that story without including women.
So, as I show in Economica, the most successful economies of their day, whatever period of history we're looking at, have always been those where women are invisibly or visibly at the heart of the economy.
And And similarly, whether you're talking about the Roman Empire, Abbasid Islamic Empire, Imperial China, when you look at the decline of civilizations, and again as I show in Economica, there is a very strong correlation between economic decline and the sidelining, the marginalisation of women.
So I wanted to present a new global economic history, one that yes is, on the one hand, telling economic history through the eyes of women, but that is, At the same time, I don't want to commit the same error of sidelining the other half of the population.
So this is about everyone.
It is an economic history of everyone that really tries to show that once you add women and stir, it changes your understanding of history forever.
And you open the book with this striking image of a Stone Age woman hunting big game and innovating with textiles.
Why do you think that part of history has been overlooked for so long?
And what does that say about archaeology and economics and the politics behind those sort of modern biases?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
So if we think about the Stone Age, for example, I mean, we think about stone tools.
Stone tools are things that we can find in archaeological digs.
They have survived.
But so much of our past is perishable.
You know, in the past, we really were organic going back millennia.
So much of what as early society, so much of what we produced, whether it was baskets or fishing nets or some of the earliest forms of clothing.
These are things that have disintegrated with time.
They really haven't survived in archaeological digs in the way that things like metalware or stone tools have.
And the reality is that women were heavily involved in manufacturing those rather perishable goods.
But because they haven't survived, I think there is an extent to which we have really sidelined women's contribution and assumed that they were, you know, sitting in their caves looking after infants whilst men were out there with their stone tools or producing the early copperware or bronzeware.
And then when it comes to hunter's Again, something else that does survive from the past are skeletons and the types of hunting equipment that they had with them.
And the assumption has long been in the archaeological community that if someone is buried with hunting tools then they must be male.
Because we do, I think, tend to assume that men were the hunters and women were the gatherers, that there was this division of labour from very early on in human history.
And it's only...
Really, in the last couple of decades or so, the archaeologists have started to using the latest technology DNA technology and sometimes bones are too worn to be able to use DNA technology.
So more recently, it's examining teeth and what we can tell from people's teeth.
It's only really very recently that archaeologists have started to find out that some of these hunters that they presumed were male actually female.
And we're talking about up to 40 of big game hunters in the early Americas, for example, being female, all of whom had just been assumed to be men, because the default assumption was men were the hunters.
And you know that idea that very early on in history there was, you know, men and women were taking on different roles in their community is one that has very much shaped, I think, the way that we see men and women in the modern world today.
As you've mentioned, one of the core arguments of your book is that women's economic freedom has often gone hand in hand with society's overall progress or prosperity.
Can you walk us through an example of a civilisation that perhaps arose or fell on the basis of how it treated women economically?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
So let's think about the Romans.
I'd love to talk about the Romans.
Don't we all love to talk about the Romans?
And of course, before then, the ancient Greeks.
And We think about the ancient Greeks as being where European civilization began.
But ancient Greek society was, it was really like modern day Afghanistan.
This was a place where women were expected to completely cover their bodies, to be restricted to the home.
There was a a very strict legal guardianship system that meant that women didn't have legal autonomy to start their own businesses or even to earn their own money.
And I do think actually, if you think why ancient Greece, despite achieving so much culturally and in the arts and politically, why economically it was nowhere near as successful as the Romans.
I do think the fact that it was firing on one cylinder of Men rather than two cylinders has a lot to do with it.
Whereas the Etruscans over in Italy were much more women friendly and they really lay behind or helped to ignite, in a sense women, the Roman civilization, which was much longer lasting, much more economically successful.
And you look at what women were doing in ancient Rome.
They could own shops and ships and They were trading cloth, wine and olive oil across the Mediterranean.
Not only did they not have to cover their whole bodies, you know, their hairstyles were a feast for the eyes.
You know, they were very much visible.
Now, of course, there was still a lot of patriarchal elements in the Roman world.
There were still remnants of a kind of guardianship system in theory, less enforced in practice.
But women really were out there.
I mean, you look at, say, one of my female characters from the book, Julia Felix.
So she was a property developer in Pompeii.
And she had her own property empire.
She had an apartment building.
She had a bathhouse and a restaurant.
And historians very much think that she was derived from a free slave family.
But what happened over time was Roman emperors.
I mean, we know that the Roman Republic morphed into the Roman Empire as you start to flip over from BC to AD.
And particularly really starting with the Emperor Augustus.
Augustus really buys into this rhetoric that is anti-immigration rhetoric, that sees the Roman Empire as being overwhelmed by foreigners and decides that women should be spending less time engaging in paid work and more time engaging in unpaid work, breeding for the good of Rome.
And so Augustus manipulates marriage laws, inheritance laws, in order to try to compel women to marry young and to have lots of children.
And he even makes, for example, their husband's career prospects depend on how many children their wives have.
And so This combination of anti-immigration rhetoric, a very kind of pronatalist rhetoric, really sidelines the contributions of half of the population and, i think, leaves the roman economy in a much more precarious position.
And initially that didn't matter too much, because other things were on the sides of the romans you know the weather conditions and so on and so It was something that they could get away with.
But underneath those fields of flourishing wheat and the olive groves and the wine and so on, the Romans were really undermining the basis.
You know the thing that had made them great in the first place and therefore leaving their economy very fragile and ultimately poor.
It shouldn't really be a surprise that they ended up you know, going from rise to decline, I think.
And just on that basis, you've mentioned, of course, the introduction by Augustus of inheritance laws, changing them, but also the rise of new technologies and how that shifted power, perhaps from women to men.
Do you think that was an unintended side effect of economic development?
Or was that more intentional about controlling women's lives, essentially?
Yes.
So I would say that you know, women have typically been seen as a really important economic resource, as a source of wealth throughout human societies.
But that has led to two very different outcomes.
One is for women to have freedom, and freedom within their communities, even ownership of land and homesteads, and being able to pass that on to their daughters.
And so matrilineal as opposed to patrilineal succession and inheritance that takes place through women.
So we have, for example, in Native American communities, that idea of women really being at the heart of not just society but economy, the source of wealth because of the reproductive power that they have, but also what they can do with their hands.
But women being seen as an important economic resource can also lead to them being captured and controlled, being seen as a threat to men in their societies.
And I think a lot of societies have therefore seen controlling women as a get rich quick scheme.
If you can control what women are doing, whether with their bodies or with their hands, you can try and exploit the value of what they create and get rich quick.
And the problem with that is that you eventually hit a ceiling, because any society that tries to succeed through exploitation, in the end it's only going to go so far.
So I think that is... certainly a mistake that civilization after civilization has committed.
And different civilizations have come up with different means of trying to control women, whether that is through, for example, Marriage laws, inheritance laws, whether it is through marriage bars say, for example, in the late 19th century, 20th century America and Britain, you know, literally banning married women from marriage, working in skilled jobs, whether it is through denying women access to universities, to learned societies, which of course was very common, or denying women access to guilds, such that women couldn't participate in skilled work.
So I think the very fact that so many societies have tried to sideline women shows that how much of a threat women have been seen and also how much value they can create that societies do want to try and control them.
So good, so good, so good.
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I think one of the most shocking things in your book was the fact that I think women who married were expected to resign from the British Civil Service in 1946.
And that's still the case in the Foreign Office until the 70s.
And the fact that, you know, women were being denied credit cards, being denied mortgages until yes really, towards the end of the latter half of the 20th century.
Well really, latter quarter of the 20th century.
I mean, one of the things I do try to show with the book is that I think sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that history is one long upward march to some utopia.
You know that we haven't yet quite reached, but we're hoping we're kind of on this upward march towards it.
And of course we know as historians perhaps economists are less familiar, but we know really as historians that the pendulum swings and that things were sometimes better in the past.
Okay, there have been times when they've been a lot worse, but sometimes they've been better in the past.
So if you look at say Afghanistan, if you look at Iran today, if you look at Egypt, these are places where women's lives were dramatically different, if you go back millennia.
In ancient Persia, there was no gender pay gap.
Men and women received equal pay.
In ancient Egypt, women were working alongside men.
Afghanistan such a kind of dynamic place, part of the whole Silk Route that connected China with the rest of the world.
So sadly, there are cases where women's lives have got worse rather than better.
I think in the case of Britain and the West more generally, perhaps we've moved in the opposite direction.
But at the same time, that means that we need to be humble.
And we need to be a little bit on guard and not take too much for granted, I think.
Let's talk about bride prices and dowries.
How did they shape the way families and even whole societies thought about power, status and women's value?
So even today, when a woman gets married, it really is common looking across the world.
In more cases than not, money changes hand, whether that is from the bride's family to the groom's family or in the other direction.
So with bride price. the husband or the husband's family is making a transfer to the bride's family.
So some might think of that as, in a sense, buying a wife.
And then with dowry, it happens in the other direction that a woman is bringing into marriage from her family side of things, a pot of money on which she and her new spouse can draw.
So these financial transactions in one or other directions are common in the modern day.
As I say more often than not, it still happens in the modern day and historically were also very common.
I think what's interesting though is, whilst in popular culture, we like to talk a lot about dowries and bride, price has actually been much more common.
So the idea of buying a wife That's actually quite a common practice throughout history.
And I think that does to some extent, show that women have long been seen as a valuable resource, something that you need to pay for, that.
You need to compensate a girl's family for her loss if you're going to marry her.
So on the one hand it's of course, to the minds of British society, it would seem a really unthinkable practice.
But I do think historically what it does help to show is just how much value has rested in women.
But it also shows how just because value rests in women doesn't mean that the women themselves benefit from it.
And you spotlight women working in the so-called informal economy during the Renaissance, such as brewers, dairy maids and textile workers.
How crucial were these women to economic life, even though they're mostly left out of the official histories of that period.
And we remember great figures like...
Leonardo da Vinci, for example.
We do, don't we?
We do.
And one of my favourite periods of history is, of course, the whole era of the Peasants' Revolt.
So, as an economic historian, it's such an interesting time because it plays into the whole discussion of transitions from feudalism to capitalism and the economy shifting away from being comprised of knights and their castles and serfs working the land and shifting towards a more urban, more market-oriented economy and so on, and the whole peasants' revolt and the fight for ordinary people to really have rights, so that they can farm the land in a way that benefits themselves rather than local lords, and set up their own businesses in urban centres and so on.
And one of the things I really talk about in the book is how important women were in that Peasants' Revolt and how that Peasants' Revolt, how with that you get not just a shaking of the class basis of the economy at the time, this division between serfs and lords but also a shaking of the patriarchal basis.
So a changing power balance between men and women.
So this is a period, really the late 14th century, when you've been through the ravages of the Black Death.
And is of course a third to a half of the population have been wiped out.
This is a period of labour shortage which, of course, is driving this feeling amongst ordinary people that they are valuable, that they deserve better rewards, better rights, better treatment, erupting in the Peasants' Revolt.
But at the same time, because there are real shortages of men, there is also a drive for farms and the skilled trades to look to women to do the types of jobs that might have historically been done by men.
And brewing farming, clothmaking these very much become sectors in which women feature very highly.
So if we look at say brewing, you see the shift from traditional home brewing to the bigger breweries.
Of course, after the ravages of the Black Death, people really want to treat themselves to some good nights out.
And women brewers are there, ready to quench the thirst of pub goers.
Pubs really are exploding at this time, you know, coming on to the scene in the medieval period after the Black Death, with all of their wonderful, fantastically quirky names.
And by the early 15th century, London brewers have formed their own guild and around 40 of their members are female.
It was very common for married couples to run breweries jointly.
So women very much involved in brewing.
Also, it's when you get the stereotypical dairy maid.
So in addition to buying more beer after the back death, people are eating more meat.
You know, they can afford meat rather than bread for breakfast, bread for lunch, bread for dinner.
Now you can afford bread beef, and so roast beef becomes the national dish.
And so women are out there in the fields looking after cattle, milking cattle, looking after cattle before sadly, it heads to you know where.
And then cloth making as well, Britain just starting to really emerge and it hasn't yet, at this point challenged, of course, the big Italian cloth producers.
I mean, this is a time when places like Genoa and Venice were really the economic height of sophistication.
And Britain hasn't yet got there, but it's starting to head in that direction.
So yeah, the medieval period, it's one that excites me the most.
And bringing to light the contribution of women at that time has been a really fun part of the book.
Just shifting from the Women by that point were everywhere.
They were in factories, they were in markets, they were in farms from New England to West Africa.
Yes.
And yet their labour is rarely ever spotlighted in the traditional economic narratives.
Why do you think that work has been so invisible and what changes when we bring it to light?
I mean, economic history has been written by men, for men, about men.
And certainly if we think about all of the heroic figures of the Industrial Revolution, people like Watt or the steam engine, if we think about Arkwright and Gregg.
You know the cotton factories.
Or if we think about on the American side, J.P.
Morgan, Rockefeller, these are these heroic men.
When we think more generally about merchants, bankers, industrialists, it's men that come to mind.
And I certainly don't want to diminish the contribution of men.
All of those men I've just mentioned feature in the book.
But at the same time there were plenty of women that were just as important, that have sadly been left out of economic history.
And perhaps this is in part because economic history is something that is worked on by historians and also by economists.
And I think historians certainly are more open to what women have been doing in history, whereas economists, I think, come at this from a more a historic point of view.
And if you open the Average Economics textbook, you will find a section somewhere hidden perhaps you know towards the back on how women entered the economy in the 20th century.
And you'll find a couple of pages like a feature on how women's labour force participation rate shot up from 6 at the start of the 20th century up to more than a half of women working by the end of the century, almost creating this impression that before then women spent millennia of history as housewives.
And so I think, certainly when economists have got in on economic history, naturally the lives that they have tended to focus on are men, rather ignoring the contribution of the other half of the population.
And that's such a shame, isn't it, really?
And if you look at how that idea of women as housewives is now being politicized a whole kind of pronatalist rhetoric that really gives this impression that really the idea of women engaging in paid work out there in the economy, that that is the rarity, that women's natural place is in the home, that historically women have been housewives and that society's functioned better and were more stable if kind of women accepted their rightful place in the home.
And that goes back to this idea of men as hunters.
That you know we shouldn't be aiming for equality, we should be aiming for complementarity.
You know, men doing their thing, women doing their thing, and that society will work a whole lot better if we just all run with that.
And increasingly you see on social media alt-right commentators saying you know why would a woman want to, you know, work in a supermarket when she could be holding her babe in arms, you know, in the comfort of her own home?
This is where, you know, this is a woman's natural place.
So this idea that women only supposedly entered the economy in the 20th century, I think that idea not only is it historically false, I think it's potentially politically quite dangerous.
I think it's only by realising that the economy is not, and never has been, just for men that we can put women's position in on a much more stable footing.
I think otherwise.
Women are in a precarious position where we could be easily knocked off that position of equality with men and pushed back into the home in a way that happened, as we've discussed, in the Roman world or in so many civilizations.
And I do think that is the Probably the biggest mistake of human history is for societies to try to downplay the contribution of women and to then think that it's OK to marginalise and sideline them because they don't fully recognise how much we can achieve as a society simply through equality.
You also include stories of women we don't usually see in economics textbooks, like sex workers, concubines and even pirates.
What role did they actually play in shaping economics?
And how does including them change our sense of what counts as value or economic contribution?
Such a good question.
And it relates very much to another female figure in my book, Priscilla Wakefield.
So Priscilla Wakefield we're talking about.
She was born in the middle of the 18th century and lived through to the 19th century.
She was a banker and a writer.
She wrote 17 books.
One of her most famous was an introduction to botany.
She also established the first English bank for women and children.
Her first saver was a 14-year-old orphan girl who deposited just two pounds.
And she was a feminist of her day.
She wrote a whole book on how women's work should be recognised and rewarded.
And she very much argued that poverty is a result of women not being given opportunities to hone their skills and to take on skilled work.
And she set out a whole table of educational advice on what different women should be trained in and I'm afraid to say it was very class-based so if you were a working class woman she felt you should be trained as a tailor or a hairdresser and she felt that those types of jobs should be reserved for women and to keep them safe for women and so that male hairdressers or male tailors should give way to women.
But then if you're a middle class woman, something as she was doing, writing or, like her, setting up a bank but that you could do with a little bit more distance, that that was a kind of more proper thing to do.
But the interesting thing was, while she really made the case for women engaging in paid work, she didn't think that things like sex work counted as paid work.
She felt that these were immoral ways of engaging in paid work.
And certainly through the 18th and 19th century, there was a real push in terms of charitable activity.
Female benefactors, using the wealth that they had either inherited or created to try and save women who they saw as doing types of work that they considered unrespectable types of work.
And this resulted in really women being divided into two camps the respectable woman and the unrespectable woman.
And this was something that was then exported really across the British Empire.
And I think that's Very sad.
I mean, I am someone who does believe that women should be able to make their own choices about how they use their body and their brain.
And what's important is that they're able to make their own free choices.
So whilst I would certainly not support the idea of women being forced into areas of work, whether that was with their body or with their brain or both, I think that for Priscilla Wakefield, even if a woman was choosing to engage in sex work, she had a problem with that.
That that was something that diminished the reputation of all women and that women should be forcibly saved from that.
So I think, even where feminists, for example, have tried to push the agenda of women's paid work being made respectable and being valued and being encouraged, there's always been a but.
And did you want to talk a little bit about women's involvement in piracy?
Oh, yes.
So my favourite female pirate in history is Ching Shih.
So she started life as a sex worker, working at a floating brothel on the South China coast.
So again, we're talking about the 18th, early 19th century.
And this was a time when British captains and sailors were very active in the South China Sea.
This was a time when, of course, the British East India Company was shipping opium out to China in return for its tea, to quench the thirst of us back at home in Britain.
And Ching Shih.
She was working at a brothel that serviced the needs of sailors that were passing in and out of China.
And she, one of her regular clients was a pirate and she married him and then they sailed off into the sunset together.
And they oversaw an explosion in pirate activity in the South China Sea.
Her pirate husband sadly passed away.
One thing that they couldn't control was the weather.
And so in a bad storm, he fell overboard.
And so she was left taking charge of this fleet.
And she grew this fleet.
This fleet was three times the size of China's navy in the early 19th century.
She was a remarkable woman.
She instituted a whole new pirate code for her hundreds of pirate ships.
She implemented a kind of socialist system, piracy style, where anything that was looted had to be shared between the whole of the pirate confederacy.
She also implemented a code of better treatment for captives, including female captives.
A remarkable woman.
And she was a real thorn in the side of British shipping in the South and Portuguese shipping, European shipping in general, and also a thorn in the side of the Chinese emperor who was trying to stop this opium trade that was going on.
And despite multiple battles to try and tackle her pirate confederacy, she succeeded, lived to a ripe old age.
Eventually, the emperor gave in and had to incorporate her as part of the Chinese navy.
She was given a title Lady by Imperial Decree, died at a happy old age and she now lives on in the myths told to Hong Kong schoolchildren.
Quite a character.
Quite a character.
One of the big ideas in your book is that the West's economic success actually depended on expanding freedoms for women.
How does that challenge the usual stories we hear about capitalism or nationalism?
And do you think that link between gender equality and prosperity is still holding up today, or is it under threat?
Europe and in particular a country like Britain become great.
It was by supposedly embracing the capitalist spirit, the idea that we work hard and we save hard and we invest hard and we start new businesses and so on.
And, of course, for Max Weber, that was driven by Protestantism, the Reformation that we have, this mental shift away from valuing hermits who go off and live in the desert and live a life of poverty, valorizing them, to instead thinking actually it's okay to make money and to build a business.
And actually you can still get into heaven by doing that, that working hard saving, building a business is something to respect and you can live a good life by doing that.
That's not going to stop you getting into heaven.
So I think that that whole narrative, really that puts the rise of the West and the rise of capitalism down to a shift away from Catholicism, the Reformation, That's something that I really challenge in the book.
And I argue really that it goes back to the peasants revolt and ordinary women being free to make their own decisions about their lives and, in particular, being able to take control of the marriage decision.
Because one of the things that has most affected a woman's life throughout history is whether, when and who she marries.
And in many societies, still today, women married young and have no choice as to who they marry.
And then once they are married, are producing one child after another.
And live in a way that they have to suffer.
They see the poverty of their children and really have no ability to do anything about it.
You know, no escape from it.
And so I think one of the most important, one of the most liberating things for women in British history was for young women, teenage girls, to be able to take control of their lives, to go out to work and, And with it, being able to stand up to child marriage, stand up to their fathers marrying them off at the age of 13 or 14, going to work as dairy maids, going to work as apprentice cloth makers and then, because they're earning their own money, being able to live an independent life and, with it, being able to choose for themselves whether, when and who to marry.
And the result of that was that, first of all, fewer women got married and secondly, When they did marry, they married later in life, in their mid-twenties.
So that we know from.
I mean, if we look back at parish records 1500 1600, 1700 the average age at which a woman got married in Britain was 25 or 26.
Remarkably modern, actually.
This wasn't a period of child marriage in Britain.
And that, I argue in the book, had a number of positive effects as far as the economy was concerned.
One because fewer women were getting married and they were getting married later.
It helped to stop population growth getting completely out of control.
And so meant that the economy was a higher wage economy than it otherwise would have been.
And those higher wages in turn encouraged people mechanisation.
It also meant, because the average family was smaller and that it was a relatively higher wage economy, that the average family was better able to afford to teach their children to read and write or to apprentice at least one of their children.
And it also meant that families were more likely to be able to save because they had fewer mouths to feed.
And so you have greater mechanization, you have greater skills, you have greater savings.
And also at the level of tough love.
If you are a young woman taking charge of your life, deciding whether or not to marry, who to marry, once you set up your own home, you don't want to be under the watchful eyes of your parents-in-law.
You want to set up your own independent nuclear household.
To do that, you have to work hard, you have to save.
And so that whole what Weber calls this kind of capitalist or Protestant work ethic, I think really originates in young women going out into the economy, being free to work and taking charge of their life.
That is, I think, what puts the economy in moving in the direction of higher savings, higher skills, higher mechanisation, a more entrepreneurial, more consumerist, more capitalist economy.
And what are the prospects of that going forward into the future, do you think?
So...
We're on a knife edge, aren't we, in terms of women's lives right now?
And I think what's really important is that we don't repeat what has been that greatest mistake in human history, which is to undo the progress that we have made.
We have made a great deal of progress in terms of making up for the ground lost, particularly in the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century, when women were being sidelined as housewives and mothers.
The idea of the housewife, it is a Victorian invention, an invention of Victorian society.
And We've come a long way in terms of making up the ground lost that happened at that time.
But we need to make sure that we hold on to the progress that we've made and continue to make progress, and that we don't go back to square one and repeat the mistakes that have been made throughout history.
That was Dr Victoria Bateman, fellow and college lecturer in economics at the University of Cambridge.
Victoria's book, Economica, A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, is out now.
And she was speaking to Danny Bird.
