Victoria Bateman's Economica is, above all, a great read. It is written for a general audience, and Bateman's gifts as a scholar, writer, and wit are beautifully displayed throughout. Here, she raises the widest of Minervan wings to move confidently across the centuries and the continents. Arguments are conveyed through vivid storytelling, making Economica engaging, enjoyable, pacy, fun, and quite frankly, exciting in many places. Bateman's central contribution is to explode the widely held belief that women's economic liberation was a twentieth-century achievement with its origins in enlightenment and modernity. Academic historians may know that women had economic power at times in history, but beyond the seminar room, many of the educated and successful people running large organizations today may have heard of Claudia Goldin, yet know nothing of the period before 1850 other than the word ‘patriarchy’. Bateman corrects this, telling the stories of women who possessed significant economic roles, wealth, and authority from 500 BC across the globe. In doing so, she offers readers a rethink of some familiar ideas about power, progress, and emancipation. This is a valuable intervention, and one that scholarly economic historians should take seriously, even where they might remain unconvinced by particular claims, approaches, or interpretations. Bateman's grasp of long-run global economic history is impressive and she makes connections that specialists in the field of gender may need reminding of, such as the strong link between an emerging female labour market in late medieval southern Europe and enslavement. As the chapters evolve, a pattern emerges that should be obvious to academic economic historians but is too rarely discussed or analysed. The determinant of how societies have shared economic power and productivity between men and women is a matter fundamentally of property rights. (The recurrent theme of the value of reproduction in creating and maintaining wealth is one that should be of huge interest given current intergenerational inequities). The consistent story is that throughout history, in growing or emerging economies, many women have owned and controlled property, participated in trade and production, and created wealth. However, after a period of growth, women's rights and activities always tend to be eroded rather than expanded. Economica’s narrative suggests that when the distribution of gains from economic activity becomes uncertain – during periods of technological disruption, market expansion, or structural transformation (war) – conservative forces (men and women) emerge to construct institutions that regulate, exclude, and restrict women. Law, custom, professionalization, and moral discourse turn to function as active mechanisms of economic ordering to women's exclusion and ultimately, harm. Academic readers are likely to bristle in places. Bateman's treatment of economic activity can be viewed as conflating wealth, position, agency, leadership, intellectual talent, productivity, scientific knowledge, managerial competence, and entrepreneurialism into a single category of ‘economic power’. Their conflation sometimes weakens the explanatory force of the argument. For specialists, this might be frustrating. Yet casting this off as general interest trade book risks missing a deeper thesis that runs through it. Economica suggests that women's exclusion is not just a legacy of ‘patriarchy’, but a recurring outcome of the process of institutional change that emerge from economic and technological development. If Sheilagh Ogilvie's focus has been on old institutions as exclusionary and discriminatory, the implications of Economica are that it is the new ones we also need to keep an eye on. Although Bateman seeks to make the point that societies should support female economic activity, with a 10-point manifesto for female empowerment at the end, Economica also points beyond itself. The relationship between growth, technological change, and the gendered design of economic institutions remains under-theorized. The similarities or otherwise between the institutions that emerge, whose interests they serve, and how they evolve across cycles of expansion and disruption is work still to be done. Bateman does not resolve these questions, but she places them firmly on the agenda. For that reason, and also because students will probably love it, Economica is a book that economic historians should embrace and probably put on a reading list.
Judy Z. Stephenson (Thu,) studied this question.