Silent Partners Women As Public Investors During Britain's Financial Revolution, 1690-1750 1st Edition Amy M. Froide Available Full Chapters
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SILENT PARTNERS
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/9/2016, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/9/2016, SPi
Silent Partners
Women as Public Investors during Britain’s
Financial Revolution, 1690–1750
AMY M. FROIDE
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/9/2016, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Amy M. Froide 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016934361
ISBN 978–0–19–876798–5
Printed in Great Britain by
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/9/2016, SPi
Acknowledgments
I have invested just over a decade of my career to these women capitalists and
in the process I have become happily indebted to many scholars, archivists,
and institutions. I would like to thank the archivists and librarians who have
assisted me with this project, most notably the staff of the Henry E. Huntington
Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the British Library, the National
Archives at Kew, the Bank of England Archives, the London Metropolitan
Archives, and the Nottinghamshire County Archives.
I very much appreciate the monetary investments some have made in me
and my research. Much of the research for this book was funded by a Peter and
Helen Bing Endowed Fellowship in 2007–8 and another short-term fellowship
in 2010–11 from the Henry E. Huntington Library, as well as a short-term
fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2013–14. UMBC’s History
department provided me with funds for research trips to archives in Britain,
as did the Herbert Bearman Foundation, which awarded me the Bearman
Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship for 2007–10. UMBC’s College of Arts,
Humanities and Social Sciences provided me with a semester off from teaching
to finish writing a draft of this book in 2013.
I have had the pleasure of working at UMBC for the duration of this project.
I could not wish for better colleagues and a better department in which to
practice history. I especially want to thank the chairs of the History depart-
ment while I have worked on this book: John Jeffries, Kriste Lindenmeyer, and
Marjoleine Kars. All three have championed my scholarship, been supportive
of sabbaticals and leaves, and helped me seek out funding for my research.
I hope I do them credit. I am also fortunate to have had a number of student
research assistants who have helped me find and analyze many of the sources
I used in this book. Thanks in particular go to Jenny Parish, Teresa Foster, and
Vicki Heath, who have all done UMBC and the History profession proud.
I have had the opportunity to present my research to many audiences and
I want to thank the many scholars who provided ideas, suggestions, and
advice. In particular, I would like to thank Ann Carlos, Anne Laurence,
Margaret Hunt, Anne Murphy, and Rosemary O’Day for their support and
assistance with this project over the years. I am grateful for the feedback
I received from the USC-Huntington Seminar on Early Modern British
History, the History department seminar at Johns Hopkins University,
the Early Modern History workshop at Princeton University, and the
Women’s History seminar at the Institute for Historical Research at the
University of London. I would like to thank the History department writing
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/9/2016, SPi
vi Acknowledgments
group (a.k.a my friends Kate Brown, Christy Chapin, Marjoleine Kars, Susan
McDonough, Andrew Nolan, Meredith Oyen, and Dan Ritschel) for their
careful reading of the drafts of two chapters. I am grateful to Cynthia Herrup,
who at my first presentation on this topic told me I had found my next book.
And I appreciate the time taken by the three anonymous readers for Oxford
University Press, who suggested ideas for revision and saved me from a
number of mistakes. Lastly, thanks to OUP editors Stephanie Ireland, Terka
Acton, and Cathryn Steele for their excitement about and assistance on this
project.
Some of my biggest debts are to those who have provided me with friend-
ship, love, and moral support. Thank you to my mother and stepfather, Diana
and Mike Oliver, my sisters, Holly and Amber, and their families. Continuing
thanks and appreciation to Cynthia and Judith. And to my friends Ann, Anne,
Mary Beth, Michelle, and Tristan, thanks for getting me through the rough
spots. Lastly, much love to my little dividend, my daughter Sophie.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/9/2016, SPi
Table of Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Bibliography 213
Index 223
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/9/2016, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 1/9/2016, SPi
List of Figures
List of Tables
It is the heady years of the Financial Revolution in London. Men sit in the
coffeehouses of Exchange Alley, perhaps Garraway’s or maybe Jonathan’s,
eagerly trading pieces of paper that promise a share in the East India Company
or some other joint-stock venture. Look a little further through the haze of
pipe smoke and you will notice a woman or two talking to a broker or handing
over coin for a share. Next, head to Grocer’s Hall in Princes Street, now home
to the Bank of England. A number of carriages pull up in front of the building
and when you stop to examine the passengers you note that every third or
fourth one is female. One of the women enters the Bank to collect her
quarterly dividend payment, while another sends in her maidservant. Follow
the second one’s coach. Its next stop is South Sea House. This time the
mistress emerges and goes inside to transfer some stock. Stroll away from
South Sea House and head toward one of the many lottery offices in the City.
Stop in Stationer’s Alley, Ludgate Street, at the one that advertises in the
London papers their discrete premises for “gentlemen and ladies.” You see
both male and female customers bustle in and out buying tickets as well as
groups of women purchasing shares of tickets together. Next head to one of
the State lottery drawings at the City’s Guildhall. Blue coat boys from the
Christ Church charity school stand on the stage and draw the prize-winning
tickets. The crowd holds its breath, waiting for the lucky numbers. Scan the
assemblage and you will see many women watching the proceedings with rapt
interest. Some are elegantly dressed and attended by servants, while others pop
in between running errands for their mistresses, or selling goods on the Royal
Exchange. While these women are distracted by the spectacle, other women
move in close, deftly picking their pockets. Some people will leave the Lottery
drawing as double losers. What you are viewing are the sites and opportunities
of England’s Financial Revolution. At first glance this may seem a masculine
world, but look a little closer and you will see women—the silent partners of
this revolutionary period in finance. If you stop to listen perhaps these women
are not so silent after all. And in this book they are no longer silenced.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/8/2016, SPi
2 Silent Partners
This book sets out to explore Englishwomen’s relationship to and role
within financial capitalism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. A whole generation of Marxist feminist historians taught us that
Britain’s transition to capitalism had a negative, if not downright pernicious,
effect on the economic (and overall) status of women.1 While most scholars
now favor a more nuanced version of this story, early modern women’s
relationship to capitalism still has not undergone a total reassessment. Until
the last decade or so we have viewed capitalism as something that acted on or
affected women, and not vice versa. Women’s historians have been reluctant
to consider that women participated in and were agents of capitalist enter-
prises, as much as capitalism was something that acted on them. We have not
fully interrogated how some women may have benefited from capitalism and
even sought out and welcomed the opportunity to participate in the capitalist
economy. Women not only “adapted to capitalism,” in the words of Pamela
Sharpe, they also actively sought out the new financial opportunities it brought.2
This book posits that the financial independence of unmarried women, as
well as married women’s rights to separate property, allowed women to
participate in and further England’s Financial Revolution. When convenient,
capitalism could be “gender blind”; all money was welcome in London’s
Exchange Alley. In her 2005 article “Coverture and Capitalism,” Amy Erickson
made a similar argument, positing that the legal freedom of spinsters and
widows allowed them to swell the numbers of prospective investors during
England’s Financial Revolution and beyond.3 This book will provide some of the
evidence to strengthen Erickson’s assertion that English financial markets were
open to female capital, especially the money of femes soles. But we will also see
that it was not just unmarried women who participated in the Financial
Revolution, for married women circumvented coverture to engage in investing
alongside their unmarried sisters.
This book seeks to show how Englishwomen’s participation in early modern
capitalism fits into, as much as it challenges, the economic history of women.
Scholars have shown that women were active participants in the early modern
English economy but often marginalized in low pay, low status jobs.4 Women
were not equal participants in the guild structures of English towns and were
1
An overview of the pessimistic view of capitalism’s effect on women in England and a
discussion of the work of Alice Clark, Eric Richards, Keith Snell, and others, can be found in
Janet Thomas, “Women and Capitalism: Oppression or Emancipation? A Review Article,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 30:3 (1988), 534–49.
2
Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy,
1700–1850 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
3
Amy Louise Erickson, “Coverture and Capitalism,” History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), 3.
4
This pessimistic view of women’s economic role over time is best represented by the work of
Judith M. Bennett. Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World,
1300–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); “ ‘History that Stands Still’: Women’s Work
in the European Past,” Feminist Studies 14 (1988), 269–83.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/8/2016, SPi
Introduction 3
exceptions rather than the rule in high status, lucrative trades. This meant that
by necessity women took advantage of new sectors of the economy that had not
yet been formalized and dominated by men. Add to this the social stigma
against genteel women working and those who needed to maintain themselves
were faced with a dilemma.5 How to retain their status and still support
themselves? In this economic context, women’s investment in the newly emer-
ging market for stocks and shares makes a lot of sense. Women sought out
investment opportunities because they needed more economic options and were
smart enough to take advantage of new opportunities. Women adapted to, even
embraced, the changes brought by the Financial Revolution in the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries because of their somewhat marginalized
status in the English economy of the time.
The heart of this book is a socio-economic study of the women who placed
their money into the new public funds that began to emerge in Britain during
the 1690s; a period dubbed by P. G. M. Dickson the “Financial Revolution.”
The key elements of England’s new financial system were the establishment of
the Bank of England and the long-term national debt in the 1690s, as well as
an active secondary market in securities.6 This book will examine female
investors in these new public investment opportunities including the Bank
of England (chartered in 1694), public corporations such as the East India
Company and the South Sea Company and lesser-known ones like the Mine
Adventurers Company and the York Buildings Company, as well as the
national debt. It is this latter area that has not yet seen much sustained
investigation. One of the findings of this book is early modern English-
women’s embrace of government funds and growing role as public creditors.
Another of this book’s contributions is to nuance the notion of a “female
investor,” showing that historically not all women have followed the same
investing behaviors. The main stereotype about female investors in the present
day is that they are risk averse but in the past this was not necessarily the case.7
This study will show that there was no such thing as a generic “female
5
For the difficulties of middling class women going into trade, see Margaret R. Hunt, The
Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, CA: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1996).
6
Anne L. Murphy, The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation before
the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2; Carl Wennerlind, Cas-
ualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011), 7: Larry Neal, “How it All Began: The Monetary and Financial Architecture of Europe
during the First Global Capital Markets, 1648–1815,” Financial History Review 7 (2000), 123.
7
Tahira Hira and Cäzilia Loibl, “Gender Differences in Investment Behavior” (Aug. 31, 2006)
<www.finrafoundation.org> (accessed June 2015), Catha Mullen, “Real Data Suggest Gender
Biases in Investing” (Feb. 5, 2014), and Suba Iyer, “Overcoming Gender Irrationality for Better
Investing” (March 5, 2014), <blog.personalcapital.com> (accessed June 2015). These recent
studies show that men take more financial risks than women, but authors also acknowledge
that other factors such as marital status, age, education, and income level may be more important
predictors of economic behavior than gender.
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