In 1927, when Coquet launched his movement for a European customs union, Riedl initiated an elaborate programme to use the League to bring about Anschluss gradually by embedding Austro-German bilateral economic integration in a multilateral system. He sought to bypass the formal treaty constraints that prevented the Austrian and German governments from pursuing this course by facilitating low-level administrative rapprochement through business organizations, using the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). By the time Riedl arrived in the ICC in 1927, it had already become an important organizational auxiliary to the League. Up to that point, the ICC’s engagement in League trade policy had focused on specific areas of business regulation, such as commercial arbitration and trade credit. Riedl pushed the ICC into a more political role by intervening in debates about the fundamental architecture of trade treaties. In the process, Riedl provoked new debate about the League’s authority to mediate relations between national governments and international business.

As Bernhard Harms pushed demanded a more global League trade policy, Lucien Coquet tried to establish firmer European substructures. Coquet embraced regional trade policy as a means to address unresolved Franco-German tensions over security. In effect, he was trying to reimpose the temporary constraints that had been placed on German commercial rights through the Treaty of Versailles by applying them to the rest of Europe as well. To advance this goal, he helped rally French politicians and business leaders in a new organization that was simply called the European Customs Union (Union Douanière Européenne, or UDE). Working in close partnership with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Coquet built out national branches of the UDE across Europe. Coquet and Riedl joined forces in 1929 to promote a proposal for European federation from the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aristide Briand, and a parallel plan for a League-sponsored tariff truce. This marked a brief moment of unity when diverse League collaborators tried to work together to respond to the onset of the Great Depression through concerted European tariff reduction. This cooperation quickly lost momentum as the Great Depression advanced, however.

This chapter demonstrates the need for new and more precise concepts to make sense of early modern households. First, it questions the usefulness of the three-sector model with the argument that many households were active across sectors and their main employment can be hard to identify. Second, with the help of early modern letters, it shows that reliance on several sources of income was not necessarily a sign of vulnerability as it applied to both wealthy and less wealthy households. Third, using work activity data it indicates that the male breadwinner model does not fit with early modern realities. Married women and men were active in most types of work and their authority and responsibilities made them similar to each other and different from the unmarried. Fourth, it argues that it is misleading to conceptualize the household as a closed unit characterized by patriarchal hierarchies. Households had to be open to the surrounding society. Fifth, it demonstrates that, to take advantage of the many links to the outside world, household heads were prepared to delegate and deputize. As a result, economic agency was more dispersed in the population than is usually acknowledged.

This introductory chapter makes a case for a gender-inclusive approach to the history of work. The ‘early modern’ period witnessed unprecedented growth in parts of Europe and elsewhere, linked both to the global redistribution of resources and to new ways of organizing labour. This chapter surveys the rich scholarship on the history of women’s work in Europe and its implications for narratives of macroeconomic change and assessments of economic performance. It also discusses the insights brought by feminist economics to the conceptualization of work and highlights new methodologies for analysing divisions of labour in the past. Finally, it lays out arguments for why women’s work was as important as men’s in producing change.

Care work is both a pre-condition for economic activity and a form of economic activity in its own right. Its extent, character and distribution has varied from place to place and over time in ways which suggest it is erroneous to assume that care was either a constant or somehow external to the economy. Indeed, rather than presuming that, historically, women’s work was determined by and shaped around the care burden, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the organization of care in early modern Europe was designed to enable women’s (as well as men’s) productive work. This chapter explores the variation in the extent and character of the care burden and the complex distribution of care between familial, commercial, voluntary and state-sponsored domains. Such variation and complexity suggest that women’s – and men’s – contribution of unpaid care work was anything but constant. The burgeoning market for paid care services in early modern Europe allows assessment of the monetary value of unpaid care and the ways in which the allocation of care was part of family strategies to maximize married women’s productive work. Care, therefore, is a necessary variable for the assessment of early modern economic performance.

The two failed Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 launched a new phase in the history of Sino-Japanese trade, during which religious institutions played an even more important role. This chapter shows that despite the occasional conflicts between Chinese officials and merchants from Japan, Sino-Japanese trade continued on a large scale with the direct participation of prominent Japanese monasteries in both Kyoto and the newly developed political and religious center of Kamakura. Monasteries directly sending trade ships to China, often in the name of financing monastery construction, constituted a further development in the integration of religious and trade networks predating the Mongol invasions. In the mid-fourteenth century, increasing piracy and the changing political environment in both China and Japan prompted monasteries to adopt precautionary procedures to secure their profit, including signing contract-like documents with the merchants they commissioned.

After the suspension of tribute missions, Japanese pilgrim monks actively sought assistance from Chinese merchants for their travel and for acquiring scriptures and objects from the continent. Using two sets of private records written by merchants, which have never been explored in Western scholarship, this chapter shows how the pilgrim monks and sea merchants started to build a network both for transmitting Buddhist teaching and for profit-making. Correspondence between monks and merchants suggests that certain Chinese merchants traveled on a regular basis between the continent and the archipelago, and they therefore formed a close relationship with monks in Japan. The monks designated the merchants as their envoys, sending gifts and letters containing Buddhist-teaching inquiries to Chinese monks, while the merchants hoped to gain access to Japanese authorities via the monks’ introductions.

This chapter focuses on three Japanese pilgrim monks who visited Northern Song China (960–1127) and had extensive interactions with Chinese emperors, court officials, and merchants. Monks’ diaries and other court records indicate that by the eleventh century, the authorities in both China and Japan were aware of the collaboration between monks and merchants and were even taking advantage of the newly formed network. Japanese aristocrats hoped to acquire desirable continental commodities via the monk-merchant cooperation, and Emperor Shenzong of the Song asked a Japanese pilgrim monk to bring his gifts and letter to the Japanese authorities.