-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Alexandra Shepard, Amy M. Froide. Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690–1750., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Page 301, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.301
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690–1750, restores women to the history of financial capitalism in Britain at a moment of decisive change. Although the activities of women investors have been noted in passing by historians of the Financial Revolution (and often rather condescendingly dismissed), or partially explored through particular case studies (most notably the South Sea Bubble of 1720), this is the first comprehensive study of women’s investment activities from the early stages of England’s Financial Revolution until the mid-eighteenth century. It also represents a welcome addition to the history of women’s lending activities, bridging the gap between work that has focused on the lending practices of early modern single women in the seventeenth century, on the one hand, and the “gentlewomanly capitalism” that was intrinsic to British economic expansion in the nineteenth century, on the other hand. Exploring two generations of women’s contributions to a period of rapid capitalist development that underpinned British colonial and imperial projects as well as economic growth, this book demonstrates conclusively that the history of capitalism is problematically partial when it neglects women’s economic agency.
