Frustrated by the “stubborn contention of mainstream economic history that we can generalize about economic performance by focusing solely on the work of adult men”, the editors of The Whole Economy: Work and Gender in Early Modern Europe “count and account” for the work of men and women, ultimately arguing (and proving) that women were active agents in the early modern economy. The collection grew out of the Leverhulme International Network on Producing Change: Gender and Work in Early Modern Europe, which held workshops in Cambridge, Leiden, Uppsala, and Cordoba between 2015 and 2018, and a conference in Glasgow on Invisible Hands: Reassessing the History of Work. The essays are written by the network’s main participants; specifically, Maria Ågren, Anna Bellavitis, Amy Louise Erickson, Margaret Hunt, Carmen Sarasúa, Ariadne Schmidt, and Alexandra Shepard, who each, with the addition of Jane Whittle and Hilde Sandvik, examine a different form of “work” – household, care, agriculture, rural manufacture, urban markets, migration, and war. The chapters are universally clear and benefit not only from the substantial research carried out by their authors as part of these historians’ individual research projects, but also from the volume of information this network has been able to bring together. As a result, all chapters employ a gender-inclusive approach to the concept of work, exploring the contributions of men and women, paid and unpaid work, and the various dynamics of the early modern economy. Preceding these chapters is an introduction by Margaret Hunt and Alexandra Shepard laying out the purpose of the book, providing a masterful (mistressful?) historiographical examination of the development of scholarship on early modern women’s work in the twentieth century, the work women in the early modern period did, how this work influenced economic change, and what this volume contributes. “A ‘whole economy’ approach is”, Hunt and Shepard argue, “not just more faithful to the breadth of scholarship. It is also a better way to understand early modern society and to comprehend change over time” (p. 25). Each chapter fulfils this promise admirably, and the resulting volume is a truly pan-European examination of early modern work – one that provides an excellent base from which to form an understanding of early modern work for those new to the topic and, at the same time, serves to challenge and reorient the established attitudes toward early modern work.

Chapter One, “Household”, written by Maria Ågren, confronts the long-held assumptions related to the home, including that women’s work was primarily attached to the home and that men did not perform domestic labour because they instead pursued one specific occupation. Key to Ågren’s argument is evidence showing that early modern households were not private spaces, but rather more public spaces where production and sale took place, and that all members of the family – male and female – were expected to contribute to the economy of the home one way or another. For most households, this meant that women and men engaged in multiple employments and pluriactivity, and these were not phenomena more often engaged in by women, as has previously been argued. Complementing Ågren’s contribution is Chapter Two, written by Alexandra Shepard, on “Care” and, specifically, on “Making Care Count”. Shepard argues persuasively, and sensibly, that “[p]roductive labour and reproductive labour are interdependent and we cannot fully count one without exploring the other or the relationship between them” as, she argues, “[c]are comprises part of ‘capitalism’s economic subsystem’, without which the market economy could not function” (p. 53). As part of this argument, Shepard uses fascinating care dependency ratios to quantify the necessity of care and how it was administered, to the young and old (in direct contrast to the current West’s ageing population, a quarter to a half of early modern Europe’s population were children or teenagers, despite a high infant mortality rate), but also to the sick and infirm. It also took the form of education, training, and medical care. However, as Shepard notes: “While the bulk of care work was carried out by women, it certainly did not exclude men. And, although the distribution of care work largely consolidated gender hierarchies, the delegation of care work also compounded inequalities between women and between households” (p. 81).

The following three chapters deal, in turn, with “Agriculture”, “Rural Manufactures”, and “Urban Markets”. Chapter Three, “Agriculture”, by Jane Whittle, laments historical studies of women’s work in agriculture as a “static form of traditional work” (p. 85). As Whittle demonstrates, the reality was anything but, and “there was a great deal of variation between countries, regions and even farms, which in turn reveals the flexibility of both agricultural systems and the gender division of labour” (p. 87). To illustrate this, Whittle provides an overview of European experiences by region, before discussing two detailed case studies, one from Norway and the other from southwest England, ultimately showing how women were involved in all types of agriculture, although to varying degrees depending on the activity. Chapter Four, by Carmen Sarasua, builds on the discussion of agriculture by examining what women manufactured in their rural homes either for household consumption or for exchange in local markets. This included textiles, as has been well documented, but also metallurgy, brickmaking, pottery and porcelain, food preservation, and more (p. 123). While Sarasua argues against these developments being linked to proto-capitalism, since these cottage industries were normally not located in areas where large-scale factories were ultimately established, they do note how women’s specialization in rural manufactures led to the improvement of household incomes and living conditions, increases in connections of local economies to distant markets, technological and organizational innovations, greater understanding of population growth and changes to the family, and the relationship between the pre-industrial manufacture of goods, women’s role in that area, and the increased gender segregation of labour markets after the eighteenth century (pp. 132–135). Sarasua’s work dovetails nicely with Chapter Five, on “Urban Markets”. In this chapter, Anna Bellavitis confronts the difficulty of defining and discussing early modern urban labour markets, noting that they were, simultaneously, highly regulated and structured by guilds, councils, and institutions, but also open and flexible (p. 137). Nevertheless, Bellavitis uses the first half of her chapter to provide quantitative evidence for women engaged in work in urban environments across Europe, using data collected from censuses, tax registers, court records, and archives of charitable institutions. The variation of records across Europe makes this difficult, but Bellavitis convincingly demonstrates the strong presence of women in urban labour markets. In the second half of her chapter, she confronts the issue of whether or not the growing presence and control of guilds – mainly run by and for men – contributed to the decline of women in urban work, ultimately arguing for a contradiction: “the necessity of women’s work for the market and at the same time the will to keep it in a state of subordination” (p. 163). However, Bellavitis does note that this experience could also extend to men in urban labour markets, and they too could find themselves in uncertain, precarious, and violent work situations.

The final two chapters, on “Migration” and “War”, might seem tangential to a consideration of gendered work, but are, in fact, deeply entwined with the concept. As Amy Louise Erickson and Ariadne Schmidt point out in “Migration”, the “great majority of migration [in the early modern period] was for work” (p. 164). Further, while the authors acknowledge that gender has seldom been a category of analysis in migration studies, available data from a range of sources shows that women moved for work at least as often as men did, and perhaps more (p. 198). Erickson and Schmidt highlight the necessity of further research on this topic and make the tantalizing point that: “People migrated in response to economic change, but the movements of women as well as of men also produced economic change” (p. 199). In the final chapter, “War”, Margaret Hunt confronts assumptions based around the theoretical paradigms of the military revolution and rise of a fiscal military state to challenge the idea that war and other military activities were male events. Rather, women’s work, both voluntary and coerced, played a key role, as did the monies raised to fund wars, and Hunt rightly calls for more “holistic” analyses of war (p. 219) to shed light on these understudied areas. Helpfully, the collection closes with a list of “Select Further Reading” to further ground and inspire the reader on the wide-ranging concept of gender and work.

Overall, given the breadth of research and synthesis this collection provides, this is a volume that will be read with great interest both by those seeking an introduction to the topic of gendered work and those who are familiar with the topic but who are keen to conceptualize work not in the traditional male-centred, money-centred view, but through a more holistic one and, as a result, one that engages more completely with the reality of “work” in the early modern period. As a historian of early modern women’s work in Scotland, I found much to challenge and alter my own understandings. The book’s varied and pan-European approach will engage undergraduate and graduate students seeking an introduction to the topic of work and its relation to the economy of early modern Europe (as well as provide inspiration for further research) and also engage and challenge historians of early modern Europe, economics, work, and gender.