Preindustrial Europe was characterized by an expansion of rural, or ‘cottage’ manufacturing for markets, both domestic and foreign. Much was textile processing and manufacture, including silk and flax production, spinning and weaving of various types of thread, knitting, lace-making and painting on cotton (the last to compete with ‘Indian cottons’). But it also extended to metallurgy, tile-making, pottery-works, wicker-working and various kinds of food-preservation. When, in the late 1960s, historians began studying this ‘proto-industry’, the question of surplus labour became key to understanding what was then seen as an initial stage in the industrialization process. Local studies would later show that women and children supplied a large portion of this labour. This chapter reviews the empirical evidence collected in recent decades about the widespread employment of women and children in rural manufactures in early modern Europe. Examining recent scholarship on occupational structure, it confirms that women were indeed the main actors in structural change, forming a disproportionate share of the workforce in some of the most innovative sectors. The chapter also emphasizes the importance of labour demand, rather than labour supply, in accounting for the rising employment of women in manufacturing.

In the decades before the First World War, Europeans developed new institutions and information networks to try to understand and manage a rapidly changing world economy. This was a diffuse organizational web without a clear institutional centre, but it was grounded in an increasingly standardized and professionalized set of treaty practices. This chapter traces Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl as they began to build careers in a globalizing economy that was marked by sharp social and political tensions.

In the long history of international trade politics, the League era was a complex period of transformation. Export growth slowed in the 1920s, especially in Europe, but this was not a straightforward rollback of pre-war globalization. Many functional relations of trans-border economic interdependence remained and many intellectuals, business leaders, and public officials were deeply committed to expanding those linkages even as they embraced more assertive national, regional, and imperial programmes. League collaborators used convergent multilateral methods to pursue sharply divergent visions of international order. Much of their conflict stemmed from the inconclusive 1919 Peace Settlement, which left openings for competing institutional programmes to develop. The regulation of foreign trade became a central platform for world-ordering impulses, but no single individual or government was strong enough to impose a unified vision of the world economy on the League. Llewellyn Smith arguably came closest during his brief period of dominance in the early Economic Committee.

Peace planning intensified starting in 1917, as the Russian Revolution and Wilson’s decision to join the war raised its ideological stakes. There were several competing projects for cooperative control over raw materials and for international free trade, but these plans were undermined by conflicts over resource sovereignty and imperial preference. The final League Covenant included a barebones commitment to ‘equitable treatment of foreign commerce’ In the 1920s, Llewellyn Smith, Harms, Coquet, and Riedl used this legal placeholder to revisit the work that was left undone at the peace conference, drawing on the new organizational structures that developed around foreign trade policy during and after the war.

When war broke out in 1914, both sides initiated elaborate efforts to shift the world economy to a war footing. The war divided trade partners and exposed dependence on imports of strategic materials, prompting efforts to exploit enemies’ commercial vulnerabilities through the tools of blockade and submarine warfare. As the belligerents struggled to secure their supply lines, they also began to devise new legal and institutional safeguards to ensure permanent access to strategic materials in peacetime. Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl participated in the operation of the war economy and helped initiate planning for the future transition from war to peace. Their stories show how the experience of economic warfare was framed by the trade institutions and information networks inherited from the belle époque.

The interwar period marked the end of a dramatic expansion in international trade. The First World War did not destroy the commercial networks that had underpinned nineteenth-century globalization, but it did reroute and repurpose them to serve military ends. It transformed the legal and geopolitical context of international trade by precipitating the collapse of continental empires across much of Eurasia and decentring Europe in global markets.1 From 1913 to 1928, Europe’s share of total world trade dropped by roughly 16 per cent, due to a relative decline in direct imports and exports as well as transit trade.2 In an attempt to give structure to a world economy in flux, many Europeans embraced new multilateral methods in the 1920s, using the League of Nations as their institutional canvas. They disavowed the laissez-faire liberalism of the past, concluding that markets would have to be actively propped open using international rules and institutions.

Early modern Europe was predominantly rural and agriculture was the most common form of production. Yet women’s contribution to agricultural work is relatively neglected in studies of women’s work and remains an area of discussion and disagreement among historians. This chapter sets out to tackle misconceptions around women’s agricultural work. It does so first by critically examining the main areas for debate; secondly by offering a survey of women’s work in different parts of Europe; and finally through two detailed case studies (of Norway and south-west England). The case studies not only highlight women’s contribution to agricultural work in detail but also suggest a range of research approaches to uncovering women’s work. We find that women’s work in agriculture was often substantial and was varied and adaptable. For instance, in coastal Norway and some mountainous regions women did the majority of agricultural work because men were absent working elsewhere; in eastern Europe women’s labour was as important as men’s; in south-west England women contributed about a third of labour required in agriculture; while in some economies, such as central Spain in the eighteenth-century, women were largely absent from agricultural work because they could earn more from rural textile production.

Early modern Europe was a mobile society, but migration has primarily been described in terms of men seeking work, as labourers, apprentices, journeymen, soldiers or sailors. Long-distance migration was primarily male, but the much more common shorter-distance migration from countryside to town or from town to town was predominantly female. Men came to cities and often left again; women moved to cities and stayed. In most cities in Western Europe by 1700 women outnumbered men. This imbalance most likely resulted from women immigrating or men emigrating. Women, like men, moved primarily at younger ages and overwhelmingly in search of work. Women moving to towns are commonly associated with domestic service, but we show that only around half of all female immigrants worked as servants, and even these worked mostly for artisanal and trading households, assisting in the household business. The other half worked in institutions such as hospitals, as labourers in transport and as apprentices and journeywomen in manufacturing and the rapidly growing retail opportunities. We survey existing findings on female migration and the economic significance of marriage and lay out the territory for future research, challenging current theories on migration and showing the impact of gender.

After Llewellyn Smith initially set the League Economic Committee on a cautious course, Franco-German conflict helped stimulate the development of a more ambitious trade agenda that found expression in the League’s 1927 World Economic Conference. Bernhard Harms participated by demanding a more broadly institutionalized international economic regime that would include the United States and would cover sensitive issues skirted by Llewellyn Smith, including reparations, raw materials, and colonial markets. Harms had a prominent bully pulpit from which to promote this vision, as the director of the IfW. He used his position to facilitate ongoing policy dialogue among a large community of League collaborators and critics. He helped establish a novel think-tank environment that spanned business, academia, and government and became an important base of support for the League. In recognition of his pivotal role in international information networks, Harms was asked to coordinate a massive economic bibliography for the League at the end of the 1920s, with backing from US philanthropic societies. This abortive project revealed the limits of Harms’s strategy of transatlantic outreach.

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.

This chapter maps the effects of war on economies and on women’s work. First, it surveys the role of women both as an official and unofficial part of armies and other military support operations. Second, it looks at the way that military conscription of young men affected the work of women who stayed home, especially given that many of these men would never return or would return unfit for work. Third, it examines the strain that armies, whether engaged in hostilities or simply passing through a region, placed on the local resource base and the way this affected the structure of work, including, at times, amplifying its coercive character. Fourth, war encouraged women in garrison and port towns to engage in new forms of commercialized service work, while giving rise to a large body of people, including many women, to which the state owed wages or pensions. Finally, war generally went along with rising taxes, most often upon commodities and often on staples, such as salt. One result was a sharp increase in smuggling, which, in turn, altered both women’s and men’s relationship to consumption and to the State.

In the early 1920s, Hubert Llewellyn Smith took the lead in developing a new framework for multilateral trade policy in the Economic Committee of the League of Nations. He integrated the existing bilateral treaty regime into the League by imposing new forms of international oversight and standardization – most notably by codifying the most-favoured-nation norm. He also crafted a new rule-making routine to support the development of standalone multilateral agreements on key topics such as customs administration. Llewellyn Smith worked hard to preserve the status of the British Empire as an autonomous but segmented sub-unit within the League but he also understood that doing so would constrain Britain’s leadership capacity. Consequently, he aired on the side of caution, seeking consensus, working incrementally, and avoiding bold provocation. His limited ambitions allowed him to focus on crafting a new multilateral process, with important consequences for the subsequent history of international trade policy in the interwar period and beyond.