This chapter describes the development of the Tokugawa economy, illustrating how its patterns and shifts were experienced by producers and consumers in a particular place and time. In outlining the framing features of the Tokugawa economic world, we draw attention to how the proportion occupied by manufacturing industries and distribution mechanisms increased steadily in tandem with expansion of the economy’s overall volume. Diverse factors accompanied and further spurred these trends: urbanization (in cities and country towns), greater social mobility, expanding trade and communication networks, rising income, the labor of women as producers for the market, and a popular consciousness increasingly oriented toward ordinary consumption. This economic development can be described in either positive or negative terms. Economic historians in recent decades have pointed more to the positive aspects that raised the standard of living for many, whereas many social historians note the groups who lost out in the commercialization process, such as low-ranking samurai and landless commoners. Evidence can be given for both perspectives, underlining the complexity of what we call economy.

A positive shock to a society’s supply of human capital can come from exogenous and unanticipated immigration. One such case arose from Louis XIV’s precipitous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which forced French Calvinists – Huguenots – to convert or to flee. Many fled to the Protestant regions of Germany, where – owing to the Huguenots’ renowned expertise and entrepreneurship – they contributed greatly to subsequent economic development. Only some of Germany’s many Protestant cities, however, welcomed the refugees. Analysis of sixty cities’ attitudes contradicts the idea that powerful guilds opposed, or that pre-existing human capital favored, the admission of the Huguenots. Rather, a city was likelier to welcome them the closer it lay to a major trade route, or the more of its population it had lost in the Thirty Years’ War. Territorial rulers almost unanimously welcomed the Huguenots and often compelled reluctant cities to admit them. Animated by the ideas of Seckendorff, rulers saw in the Huguenots both a welcome influx of human capital and a way to undermine the craft guilds, which Seckendorff regarded as a major impediment to economic growth.

Much of the research that has been done in the last decades on women’s work and on the role of women in early modern economies deals with the urban context, but has all this production been able to rewrite the history of work in early modern European cities? The urban labour markets of early modern Europe combined two opposite and at the same time complementary features as they were regulated and structured by institutions. Yet they were also flexible and open, offering chances and opportunities to immigrant and non-qualified workers as well as the possibility of earning through activities at the limits of, or beyond, legality. The chapter addresses these observations and these questions first, by presenting the existing quantitative data on women’s work activities in different urban contexts and, secondly, by focusing on the problem of guilds and more generally on different aspects of work organization. The aim of the chapter is to present the state of the field but also to propose a vision of urban economies that integrates the gender dimension and maintains an approach that is as Europe-wide as possible.

Trading in goods such as wheat, flour, salt, fish, eels and sedge, Cambridge was a vibrant market town and river port, receiving its royal charter from King John in 1201. As scholars arrived in 1209, fleeing a major dispute in Oxford, it changed the town for ever: Cambridge was to become a leading university town in medieval Europe. Stephanie Boyd looks at the role of the Church and religious guilds in the town, and the impact of the University as it grew in wealth and autonomy, leading to tensions between Town and Gown. The author explains how and why Cambridge colleges such as Queens were founded, and why they were designed with cloistered courts and imposing gatehouses. She also discusses how colleges were paid for, the importance of chantry prayers, the impact of the Black Death and the fear of heresy, which all contributed to enthusiastic college-building, including the founding of a royal college at King’s.

Chapter 2 sets out the history of the Province from 1348 to 1559 showing first its resilience in the face of the Black Death with new foundations in Ireland and the establishment of the nuns’ convent at Dartford. Its resilence is then shown against theological attack in anti-fraternal literature, including writings by Wycliff, and the rise of Lollardy. The Province’s continuing value to key supporters is shown through the patronage manifest in church decoration, through lay burials and grants of confraternity, while their secure place in civic life before the Reformation is seen in relation to the guilds associated with their churches. The sudden collapse of the Province at the Henrician Reformation is then examined to identify several factors, the most important of which was the crown’s imposition of its agents as Provincials and Priors.

This chapter addresses those social ties beyond the kin-group which seem – to judge from commemorative practices – to have been of most importance for the inhabitants of Roman Hieradoumia. Fellow members of small-scale local cult-associations (phratrai, symbiōseis, speirai, doumoi) are very prominent in funerary commemoration, as are religious officials, neighbours, friends, and (for unfree persons) groups of fellow slaves. At Saittai, men are often commemorated by trade guilds and professional associations, probably reflecting the existence of guild-based burial-clubs; there is some reason to think that these trade guilds were unusually prominent in the civic organization of the polis of Saittai. Finally, civic communities fairly often participate in the commemoration of deceased members of the civic elite; such men and women’s tombstones can include lengthy extracts from post mortem honorific decrees which systematically conflate the deceased’s public and private virtues.

In the seventeenth century, the economic center of Europe shifted from Italy to northwestern Europe, because of technological advances, institutions that promoted capital accumulation, and stronger networks of exchange in a booming Atlantic economy. The lack of all these made eastern Europe the least prosperous part of the continent. In western Europe, new crops and crop rotation patterns, improved livestock breeding, the draining of marshes, and other developments led to significant growth in agricultural productivity, though they were also socially disruptive. Demand for new consumer goods increased, spurring both global trade and local production. With a slight improvement in the climate in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with new food crops, better public health measures, and other factors, the population of Europe began to rise more swiftly than it had beforehand. Many people combined agricultural work with handicraft production, or migrated to cities in search of work, gathering together in manufactories organized by investors. Work increasingly involved the use of machines powered by hand, animals, water, wind, and – by the eighteenth century – coal. This transformation occurred first in cloth production, and then in mining, with negative effects on air quality and the environment.

On Christmas Day in the year 800 CE, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks and the Lombards, and father of at least eighteen children, was crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans’ by Pope Leo III at Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Charlemagne thereby united most of Western Europe under his rule, a vast area home to between 10 and 20 million people.1 Almost all of these people lived in the countryside.

The reason for this was that, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, Western Europe was characterised by conflict, population decline and de-urbanisation (the movement of people from the cities to rural areas). The Romans, of course, were known for their prosperous cities. A visitor to Rome today can still see the impressive ancient architecture of the Palatine Hill, the Forum, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon.

In this chapter we will examine how key institutions were mobilized to shape China’s early modern business practices under weak state engagement of the economy, and a growing foreign presence. Business practices in the late imperial period rested on four pillars, each a fundamental part of the institutional framework that structured social and economic life. The first, family, provided templates for the utilization of capital and labor and the mobilization of trust, tools that proved as useful for China’s late imperial commercial economy as for the early modern economy of industrial enterprise and global engagement. The second might be termed the system of private ordering that served generations of Chinese merchants and others in combining capital and establishing the terms of economic interaction, often through written contracts whose provisions established highly flexible forms of partnership that continued to form the basis of most Chinese business until the early PRC. The third, native place, in significant ways mirrored the intangible assets provided by ties of kinship, offering a predetermined basis for co-operation, nurturing and protecting group interests and skills and, like the fourth, grounding these intangibles in very tangible organizations catering to inhabitants of a particular city, region, or province.

This is an account of the veneration of Insular saints as found in the kalendars of surviving Irish Sarum antiphonals and breviaries from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In accordance with a number of Dublin episcopal constitutions, these kalendars reflect the devotional practices of their users through the inclusion of Irish saints, ranging from those of national significance to a growing number of diocesan and more local figures. In addition, the presence of non-Sarum English saints reflects the regional practices of Anglo-Norman settlers from different parts of England, notably the West Country (Chester, Bristol), as well as connections with Canterbury, Winchester, London, and East Anglia. Comparison of these sources reveals how patterns of devotion could vary between English communities in Ireland and those that were more mixed or perhaps predominantly Irish, according to which saints were included in the kalendars, and how they were ranked.

Chapter 3 traces, for the first time, the role of women as mistresses of apprentices, using their membership of the freedom to set up businesses and train girls in them. Some became free after apprenticeship themselves and went on to establish generations of female artisans stretching into the eighteenth century: as single women, they had a unique and characteristic pattern of business. Others, as wives and widows, gained their role through and after marriage, producing an interesting position where they were training girls without formal training themselves, in a system that ran effectively parallel to that of male apprenticeship. The particular features of female apprenticeship fit flexibly around women’s lives, as well as reflecting the contingency of women’s economic autonomy. The last section of the chapter reconstructs the kinship and friendship networks through which mistresses and apprentices were bound together, creating a capillary system of skills, favours and credit.

Chapter 4 recovers what girls in apprenticeships learned, the range of trades they practiced and how they were taught. Treating apprenticeship as a training system, operating in parallel to that of boys, this chapter uses the mass of information in legal disputes to reconstruct tasks like starching, binding petticoats, using patterns and making lace; keeping shop; and the wider world of training in housewifery, literacy and working in schools. Gentry apprentices were particularly concerned with learning the right level of skills and avoiding ‘drudgery’, aiming at running their own shops and pressing for independence, while apprentices through the rest of the social spectrum followed a highly differentiated set of occupations making textiles and clothes, very few of which were entirely sex-specific. Training involved watching and copying, but also included a keen regulation of appearance and the risk of physical correction.

A carefully adapted indenture, made for a boy and rewritten for a girl, shows the ambivalence with which young women were bound into London’s Livery Companies, or guilds. Chapter 2 uses new data to estimate for the first time the numbers of London’s female apprentices, which were considerably higher than they appear from the formal record. The complex relationship between women, work and guilds across early-modern Europe often excluded and marginalised women, whilst in some places providing a parallel route to recognition. London’s distinctive customs presented particular opportunities as well as constraints for women. Within the companies, both officially and unofficially, and alongside them, the female apprenticeship sector was growing, prompted in part by economic and social dislocations and by family ambitions. Apprenticeship for girls was coming to be a significant and familiar option through the social spectrum.

traces how health concerns informed good governance of the urban food trades. Urban authorities, in negotiation with food-related guilds and traders, established, intervened in, and physically altered food markets in order to expel wares deemed unsafe for consumption. The central position of food in Galenic medical theories of health preservation was reflected in an urban context especially in the policies around three highly regulated products: meat, fish and grain. Market inspectors, and likely also vendors and buyers, applied medical knowledge on preservation and disease risks. The extensive regulation of grain and bread provision closely related to issues of urban order and threat of shortages. Finally, butchering in particular was also targeted as a source of environmental pollution through coordinating the disposal of offal.

This chapter visits sketches the contours of an “Ottoman lighting system,” that is, a centrally regulated network that procured lighting materials from the provinces and channeled them to Istanbul and other crucial points in the imperial power grid and set lighting priorities in line with its political needs. The main argument is that lighting was considered a basic commodity and its regular supply therefore concerned the state. Yet, access to light was extremely unequal, which, as shown in the next chapter, made light a shiny index of power.