Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

This introductory chapter makes a case for a gender-inclusive approach to the history of work. The ‘early modern’ period witnessed unprecedented growth in parts of Europe and elsewhere, linked both to the global redistribution of resources and to new ways of organizing labour. This chapter surveys the rich scholarship on the history of women’s work in Europe and its implications for narratives of macroeconomic change and assessments of economic performance. It also discusses the insights brought by feminist economics to the conceptualization of work and highlights new methodologies for analysing divisions of labour in the past. Finally, it lays out arguments for why women’s work was as important as men’s in producing change.

The impact of early modern wars on the gendered division of labour among other topics

This contribution to the forum Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period follows the career of a single late seventeenth-century English East India Company ship and her crew, in order to challenge the claim that long-haul ships were isolated spaces. Specifically, it looks at the many kinds of connections -intimate and otherwise-that characterised early modern ships and their crews. These included connections between and among sailors themselves, between ships at sea, and between ships' crews and the diverse communities from which they came.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new patterns of knowledge, credit, and capital were created by global expansion. These, in turn, created new opportunities for groups of people who previously had little access to global trade. These individuals-women as well as men-increasingly engaged in commercial transactions, some of them relatively autonomous, others challenged and hindered by various forms of institutional control and constraint. Emphasising the intimate nature of networks means examining the quality rather than the quantity of certain networks, which ultimately facilitates a shift away from well-known historical agents such as influential merchants, powerful politicians, and various nobility and royals. The Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period forum seeks to add to our knowledge of the diverse ways that intimate economic networks developed in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, in Europe as well as en route elsewhere, among the well-off as well as the relatively poor, and among free people as well as the enslaved.