Review of periodical literature for 2023: (iii) 1500–1700

The year 2023 saw many publications in the fields of early modern economic and social history. The articles discussed in this round-up cover topics which have been a mainstay over recent years, including histories of labour (especially women's work), colonialism, and slavery. Agrarian history has lately gained renewed attention, and once again featured in this year's scholarship. A notable cluster of articles focused on what petitions – of which large collections survive – can tell us about the early modern economy, society, and the state. The gender split of authors was roughly equal this year, a testament to the rich and diverse topics that this year's articles cover. Labour history was the focus of several articles. The hiring of over 1000 unskilled workers for the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral in London between 1672 and 1748 is the subject of an article by Paker, Stephenson, and Wallis. Applying econometric analysis to records of labourers hired, the authors find that hiring practices ‘encouraged retention and reduced turnover, giving a core group of laborers more work, priority in rehiring after slowdowns, and access to additional ways to earn.’ (p. 1101). Over time, the share of ‘new’ workers (i.e. those who had not previously worked on St Paul's) fell (p. 1110). Casual, transient work was not the pattern of hiring here at St Paul's; rather, the length of time a worker had been employed was rewarded with additional labour opportunities. A synthesis of recent publications on work and identity is offered in an article by Hailwood and Waddell. In particular, the article draws attention to recent scholarship on the breadth of working identities that moves beyond categorizing people into ‘sorts’. The authors call for future scholarship which comparatively analyses types of sources (e.g. self-created versus indirect evidence) as well as how working identities might intersect with ‘time, place, gender, forms of labour, and race’ (p. 158). An article by McVitty contributes to this growing scholarship on work and identity. She exposes a pre-modern culture of sexual misconduct and gendered violence in the legal profession through close study of a range of legal records (court records, internal records of Inns of Court, and public proclamations) in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. While junior practitioners regularly participated in these behaviours, she argues, senior practitioners were responsible for condoning it (as well as sometimes participating) and shifting the blame to women. Although the legal community punished offenders, prosecution primarily sought to shield reputation and evade public consequences. Sexual misconduct and gendered violence contributed to the forging of tightly bound homosocial bonds that endure and persist within the legal profession today. To understand modern scandals of sexual misconduct within the common law profession, McVitty maintains, we must critically analyse inherited traditions. Articles on women's work have become a strength of early modern economic and social history in recent years. This year, three articles on care work were published. In the first, Shepard traces care work activities of ‘working mothers’ in London from 1675–1800. Identifying incidences of ‘nurse’ (and its variants) in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, Shepard finds that care work was dispersed broadly across a range of women (and sometimes men) in a variety of arrangements. Both a ‘form of pragmatic provision’ and a ‘commercial endeavour’ (p. 18), it was by no means exclusively carried out by the birth mother. In a second article, Mansell also uses court records as a window onto care work. Taking a microhistorical approach, she traces the end-of-life care received by a seventeenth-century unmarried man in Herefordshire. Through the articulations of care work and its value made by the litigant parties and the witnesses who testified on their behalf, she argues that the labour of care – both remunerated and unpaid, and physical and emotional – was economically valued in early modern England. A third article by Fox and Brazier focuses on the profession of midwifery, placing the seventeenth-century oath that midwives were required to swear under the microscope. The authors show that the oaths – a legal instrument of regulation – reveal what was important to both birthing women and to parish authorities. As officeholders themselves, midwives were ‘active participants in state formation’ (p. 248), and the authors note their crucial role in establishing what we might today see as an ethical code of midwifery. A special issue on Scottish women's and gender history in The Scottish Historical Review this year contained three articles of interest to social and economic of the early modern period. The first, authored by Mason, focuses on women's property ownership. According to Scots law, a man could not sell property his wife brought to the marriage nor that jointly acquired during marriage without her consent. This consent was recorded by her signature on the deed and a private examination. Using a sample of approximately 1600 private examinations of seventeenth-century women in Glasgow, Inverness, and St Andrews, Mason questions how far the requirement of married women to consent to these sales constrained their husbands’ power over property. While we cannot know how many women were coerced into the private examination, Mason nonetheless argues that the procedure itself represents the legal importance placed on married women's consent in property transactions and the protection the courts offered them. Women did not hand over their consent freely, she finds. Many exchanged it for other property. Seventeenth-century married women, therefore, were not excluded from legal and economic processes. Sixteenth-century married women were the subject of an article in the same issue by Beattie (with Spence). The article explores the voluminous testamentary archive for sixteenth-century Scotland, finding that around one-third of wills were made by women. Through careful recategorization of those listed in the National Records for Scotland catalogue as ‘sometimes spouses’ from widows to married women, the authors show that wives made up the largest proportion of female testators. A sample of married women's wills shows that they rarely mentioned a husband's consent, were regularly able to bequeath their half or third portion of household goods, and that the clothing and jewellery they left could be extremely valuable. Significantly, the authors find that the women used language of community of property between husband and wife. A third article by Spence examines 2000 wills produced between 1560 and 1600. She argues that women who made wills were well aware of what was theirs to bequeath and that these documents should be read not just as formulaic or prescribed. Rather, they offer something of women's ‘voices’. Spence argues for three distinct ways in which these voices can be heard: firstly, in women naming their executors; second, in their instructions of how to care for children and stepchildren; and thirdly, through the items they left to others in the latter will and legacy sections of their testaments. Using wills from this perspective, she argues, shifts the focus away from other studies that show how women used their voices for ill to those who used their authoritative voices to advance the family position. An article by Brock sheds new light on women's relationship to early modern trade and empire in Asia. The article focuses on the mercantile activities of one woman – Martha Parker – who operated as a merchant with the East India Company (EIC) in the second half of the seventeenth century. She was not alone. Over 1300 women had commercial interactions with EIC between 1600 and 1757, Brock shows. Women's commercial networks and practices within the EIC were key in shaping the Company's structure. Particularly upon their husband's deaths, women were agents in expanding their personal and household economies, accessing networks and using their existing knowledge of trading companies and mercantile business. This was one of several articles this year that expanded our understanding of trade, mercantilism, and the global economy. An article by Bromley shifts our focus from ideas of the ‘centre city’ to the ‘centre country’ in thinking about transnational mercantile networks and global knowledge. Through a close study of trading company debates in the 1690s, the article positions mercantilism as ‘a process of interaction between private interests that stretched beyond London across England and the wider world’ (p. 748). Global knowledge, Bromley finds, was not limited to England's port cities, or domestic/overseas sites held by colonial administrators or Companies. Contribution to public interest, he argues, was asserted ‘by drawing links between private interests and national employment’ (p. 771) and a trade's capacity to support domestic employment. He draws attention to the importance of the middling sorts’ economic beliefs, expressed through the documents they left behind and particularly petitions (a source which we will see attracted great attention this year). The 1604 Treaty of London and the ending of the Anglo-Spanish War was the subject of an article by Gajda. In this article, Gajda sheds light on the importance of merchants’ economic concerns scaffolded in the treaty. She points to the multi-layered and often competing interests of different mercantile groups. Some sought to recover finances lost through war, while others had directly benefited from war. Gadja closely analyses the manuscript tracts produced in making way for peace and is attentive to the lobbies made on both sides to the commissioners for peace negotiations by both individuals and companies. She argues that their attempts to influence the terms of the treaty ‘heralded a new and highly significant indicator of the wider public and central role that commercial concerns now held and would continue to play in the mainstream political life of the nation’ (p. 466). Merchants were also the subject of a piece by Papini. Her study of the accounts of Italian portraitist Antonio Franchi concentrates on the high volume of business he received in the late seventeenth century from British merchants and captains living and working in the port city of Livorno and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. She finds that, despite being notoriously expensive in Livorno, Franchi charged more favourable rates for his portraits than English painters. Meanwhile, the swelling British maritime community in Livorno and Tuscany encouraged artists to move to and work there. The navigation and operation of trade was also the subject of several articles. Jopling questions the usefulness of the term ‘Jamaica discipline’ to describe a set of ideas followed by Anglo-American privateering and pirate groups in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Jopling contests the received narrative that these groups were egalitarian and anti-authoritarian, highlighting instead fragmentation and core differences amongst privateers and pirates. He points to evidence of their intentions to embed themselves within colonial society to legitimize their activities. The social norms these groups adhered to were flexible and inconsistent, rather than constituting any kind of Jamaica discipline. In an article for a forum titled ‘Risk and Uncertainty in the Early Modern World’ published in the same journal, Reid focuses on ideas of risk and profit in British Atlantic merchant shipping. Evolutionary – rather than revolutionary – shifts in shipping technology characterize the British Atlantic maritime economy, he argues. The size of ships, for example, remained consistent throughout the period 1600–1800 due to risk associated with large ships travelling at speed. Instead, fleets grew to ensure the maritime economy remained buoyant. Reid argues for technological conservatism in explaining productivity of British merchant shipping. An article by Ruderman and van Waijenburg explores the revocation of the Royal African Company's (RAC) monopoly in 1698, and particularly the Company's response to its loss in trading privileges. 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