Book Extract | Economica: A global history of women, wealth and power by Victoria Bateman

Book Extract

Excerpted with permission from the publisher Economica: A global history of women, wealth and power, ‎ Victoria Bateman, published by ‎ Headline Press/ Hachette India.

*****
How Women Cut their Cloth

‘Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton.’ Those were the words of the historian Eric Hobsbawm. The cotton industry was at the heart of Britain’s industrial transformation, leading the way in the modernisation of the process of production and the development of new technology. Given the centrality of cloth manufacture to economic history, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. In almost every one of history’s economic golden ages, the production of cloth – whether silk, linen or cotton – has been of prime importance. The world’s leading economies depended on it. In the eighteenth century, Chinese cloth was still the most prized across the world. From exquisite silk curtains to the beautiful gowns that were tended to by an army of domestic servants, Britain’s finest country homes were filled with the delicate cloth produced by women across Asia. The Chinese state promoted the motto ‘Men plough, women weave,’ and, in order to keep their daughters metaphorically chained to their spinning wheels, some families – as we have seen – chose to bind their feet. In the Chinese region of Jiangnan, a woman’s weaving could generate more money for a family than a man’s agricultural exertions. In neighbouring Korea, women made a similarly sizeable contribution to their households; so much so that Korean law forbade men from divorcing wives whose earnings were central to the survival of the family. But, perhaps more than anywhere else in the eighteenth century, India was fast becoming known as the land of ‘chintz’, producing brightly and tastefully printed cotton cloth to suit all tastes and all budgets. In Nagpur, younger women harvested raw cotton and older women spun it into yarn. Chintz was taking Europe by storm.

English cloth makers had long struggled to compete not just with Asia but with their own European neighbours, including Italy. Britain was better known for farming the sheep that supplied the raw wool used by foreign cloth makers than it was for producing its own high-quality fabric. But by the nineteenth century, the tables had turned. Britain was no longer a covetous importer of foreign cloth; it was clothier to the world. By the 1830s, cotton cloth constituted half of all of Britain’s exports. Quarry Bank Mill, on the outskirts of Manchester in northern England, was one of the cotton mills that helped to lead the way. It was the product of a joint husband- and-wife team, Samuel and Hannah Greg.
Hannah had benefited greatly from the educational and literary seeds sown by the women we met in the last chapter. In 1783 she was sent from her family home in Liverpool to boarding school in Stoke Newington, London. Her school was run by two sisters – Elizabeth and Sarah Crisp – and occupied a grand building in the middle of large gardens, which appealed to Hannah’s love of nature. Mary WollstonecraR’s own school for girls would have been close by. As a hotbed of intellectual thought, Stoke Newington was well suited to Hannah’s academic temperament. While she didn’t much enjoy her classes in ‘deportment’ (which involved learning how to walk like a lady), she was a star pupil when it came to the arts and sciences.
The same year that Hannah leR Liverpool, Samuel Greg – originally from Belfast – was scouring the wet and windy countryside in northern England for a suitable location in which to build a cotton mill. Since the age of eight, Greg had lived with an uncle in Manchester, who ran a cloth-merchant business, importing yarn from Belfast and organising for it to be woven into cloth by cottagers in the farming communities in and around Manchester. Greg inherited the family business after his uncle died, and saw the potential in moving from cottage production to factory production. His inspiration was Richard Arkwright, who had just built a successful cotton-spinning mill equipped with his own patented spinning machine – powered by a waterwheel – that transformed raw cotton into spun yarn at a rate never previously seen. With the patent on Arkwright’s spinning technology due to lapse, Greg was keen to find a fast-flowing river along which he could build a duplicate mill. On the River Bollin – in a wooded valley just outside Manchester – Greg found a farm up for lease, on whose land he set to work building his cotton mill and offering jobs as spinners to the local farming workforce. It was a doubly good time for Greg to begin his business venture, as the cessation of hostilities with the newly independent ‘United States of America’ brought an end to the war-related trade embargoes: raw cotton could now be imported into Britain via the port of Liverpool.
Liverpool was Hannah’s home town and, just as Greg’s business was starting to turn a profit, and after four years of being away at boarding school, she was returning to the port city, ready to build her life as an independent young woman. Meeting Greg over supper at the home of a mutual friend, Hannah was entranced by his conversation, and in her diary writes of how she ‘sat by him all the evening’. Over the weeks and months that followed, they danced, attended musical recitals together and sat side by side to read the latest books on philosophy. Their developing relationship would have been impossible in China, India and the Middle East. In November 1783, a year after their first meeting, they tied the knot. It was, perhaps, a miracle that the wedding festivities took place at all, as Hannah and Samuel had spent the previous weeks arguing over his (lack of) attendance at chapel. Theirs was a spir- ited relationship. Hannah’s diary entries veer between recounting long, happy conversations and ‘disputes’ about everything from Greek plays to the purpose of charity. Hannah was a humanitar- ian and believed in using her middle-class privilege to help others – and in bringing Greg on board with the idea. This was clearly a relationship of equals, one in which Hannah was able to have her voice heard. As well as connecting on an intellectual level, both bride and groom had cloth-making in their blood.

Hannah’s father – who had died when she was only eleven –came from a family of Scottish cloth merchants who moved to the booming port of Liverpool, where ships were constantly coming and going, creating new opportunities for trade. While Liverpool had ballooned in size in response to Britain’s growing involvement in the world economy, nearby Manchester – which Greg had made home – saw itself as the future. Hannah’s brothers-in-law had, like Greg, spotted their own opportunities in this budding ‘cotton- opolis’, which gave them plenty to talk about over family dinners. Their marriage brought not only potential business contacts but also a sizeable injection of cash from Hannah’s side, which allowed Quarry Bank Mill to transform itself into one of the most profitable cotton-spinning mills in the country.

Standing five storeys tall, with each storey consisting of numerous multi-paned Georgian windows, the mill was filled with the thundering sound of the latest spinning machines. Each machine could spin at least fifty threads at a time, and the spinning was automated on such a scale that a single spinner could look after two machines at once. This meant that productivity was a hundred times that of traditional spinning, which in Britain, as elsewhere, consisted of women at their spinning wheels in their own homes. Compared with this ‘cottage industry’, the cotton mill – built on a scale that could accommodate the sizeable new machines – created a stark separation between work and home. Working life became much less flexible and much more intense. Since the rivers that drove waterwheels were faster flowing in the winter, the working day was – ironically – longest in the dark, cold winters. People worked six days a week – for twelve hours a day – leaving one day of rest for attending church, playing sports or gardening. Inside, mills were noisy places – filled with the clunks and clangs of machinery. The noise was so loud that if spinners needed to talk to one another – perhaps to ask a fellow spinner to look aRer their machines while they took a toilet break – they had to use sign language. The air was thick with cotton dust and the atmosphere was wet and humid, which had the advantage that it prevented the cotton from splitting. The rain for which the north of England is well known helps explain why it was in that part of the country that the cotton mills first began to develop.

For many of the workers at the Quarry Bank Mill, home life centred around the nearby village of Styal (which translates as ‘the place of the secret’ in Anglo-Danish), home to cottages and cobbled streets. Greg’s first spinner – about whom we know little aside from her name – was a local woman called Penny Chapman, who had likely spent her former days spinning from her home. By the early nineteenth century, the mill had expanded to the point that it needed a workforce that went beyond local residents. So, to attract workers from further afield, the Gregs converted farm buildings – barns, thatched cottages and farmhouses – into additional homes and built rows of red-brick, two-storey, ‘two-up, two-down’ terraced houses to house families, with basements below for singles or couples. Each house had its own allotment – enabling every family to grow their own vegetables – and its own outside toilet. The village had its own butcher, baker and brewer, and even its own shoemaker. Situated even closer to the mill itself was a sizeable Apprentice House for child labourers, who constituted half of the mill’s workforce. Some of the children were apprenticed to the mill by an impoverished parent or guardian. Two teenage girls – Elizabeth and Hannah Worrall – were apprenticed after their father, a shoemaker, had passed away. Another three girls – Sarah, Mary and Hannah Bowden – were apprenticed after the death of their mother. Baptismal records reveal that many other children were ‘illegitimate’, or what were called ‘base daughters’.

Most of the child apprentices came not from their families but instead from workhouses – the austere institutions that housed the poorest members of society, known as paupers. At a time when death and disease were commonplace and orphanages and work- houses were overflowing, local authorities paid mill owners to take children aged as young as nine off their hands, to ‘train them up’ to be productive workers. With contracts that committed them to the mill through to their eighteenth or twenty-first birthday, these orphaned and paupered children were known as ‘parish apprentices’. By 1800, ninety child apprentices worked at the mill. Seventy percent of them were girls. In total, the names of almost a thousand children can be found in the record books for Quarry Bank, including in stoppages ledgers (which contain details of any fines imposed on them), wages books (which include any payments for overtime) and the doctors’ prescription books (which dealt with any illnesses amongst the children housed at the mill).

Mechanisation lent itself to unskilled child labour. Children were allocated to simple repetitive tasks, including preparing the raw cotton, cleaning under and oiling the machines, changing bobbins and working alongside the spinners as ‘piecers’, tasked with twist- ing back together any threads that snapped in the process of being spun, all ideally while the machine continued to run at a fast pace. In return for working late from six in the morning, six days a week, the child apprentices were housed in dormitories and provided with clothing and meals. A breakfast of porridge was served in the mill – in a ten-minute morning break – and the main meal of the day, usually consisting of potatoes, seasonal vegetables and bacon, was served in a half-hour aRernoon break. Overtime was paid, at one pence an hour. While Sunday was in theory a day off, it was occupied with lessons in the schoolroom of the Apprentice House, along with two trips to the church in nearby Wilmslow, where the rest of the congregation would have been used to seeing rows of neatly dressed apprentices in their Sunday best: straw bonnets, tied under their chins with green ribbon, and long cloaks that provided protection from the cold. Hannah Greg made herself responsible for the education and medical care of the children, ensuring that a local doctor made regular visits – along with his leeches and laudanum – and that the apprentices were properly schooled on Sundays and after work on a weekday. Hannah tasked her own sons and daughters – starting with her eldest daughter, Bessy – with giving many of the lessons and, by the 1820s, employed two teachers. On Christmas Day, the Gregs held a prize-giving, handing out awards (such as a Bible) for the best schoolwork and best behaviour, which formed the centrepiece of the children’s Christmas party.
The child apprentices were drawn not only from nearby northern districts but also from further afield, including from London and the south. In fact, in 1784, Manchester authorities had ordered that no child pauper in their care should be apprenticed to a mill where children were expected to work more than ten hours a day. The workhouses of Liverpool and London were, however, happy to provide children. Many would no doubt have suffered from home- sickness, and some walked all the way back to London. The fate of these child runaways – one hundred in total from 1785–1847 – features in the records of Quarry Bank.

The Day Books of the mill include payments for advertisements for runaway children, along with travel expenses for retrieving them. Once apprehended and brought back to the mill, they were expected to pay for the costs of their own search, which could wipe out many months’ worth of overtime earnings. The ledgers also reveal other occasions on which children were fined, including for stealing apples from local orchards, for midwife expenses in the case of one girl who became pregnant, and even for their own funeral expenses, as was the case with Ellen Williams, who died from an infection and was buried on 1 June 1828 aged only fiReen. As an alternative to monetary fines, girls are also known to have had their long hair cut off.

For many girls, having their heads shaved was the worst form of punishment.
Despite their difficult start in life, many of the child apprentices chose to continue working at Quarry Bank as adults, often trans- ferring from the Apprentice House into the basement apartments in Styal village. Hannah Fluett and James Henshall – who went on to marry – climbed the career ladder to become, respectively, ‘spinner’ and mill manager. Henshall had come to the attention of the Gregs for excelling during his lessons in the Apprentice House, and they paid for him to undertake additional schooling. He became the Gregs’ bookkeeper and, according to his obituary, eventually ‘rose to the proud position of Manager’. Two female apprentices – Mary Magin and Sarah Eaton – went on to become ‘overlookers’, supervising the spinning rooms in the mill. Neither Mary nor Sarah married, perhaps an indication that – unlike Henshall – they faced the choice of a family or a career.
In response to cotton mills like the Gregs’, the population of Manchester quadrupled in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, from only 22,500 people to 84,000 people. By 1825, Manchester was home to 104 cotton-spinning mills. Women were central to Manchester’s cotton industry, constituting sixty percent of the workforce.61 Cloth-making had – as we have seen in previous chapters – long been the business of women and girls, but before the emergence of cotton mills, it was often a family affair and production mostly took place within the home. As spinning – and then weaving – moved into the mechanised workplace, opportunities for women in the ‘cottage’ industry sharply collapsed, leaving many in hardship.62 Through industrialisation, women had been transformed into wage labourers.

**********

Victoria Bateman, Economica: A global history of women, wealth and power,‎ Headline Press/ Hachette India, 2025. Pb. Pp.432

Economica: A global history of women, wealth and power by Dr. Victoria Bateman charts the course of women’s contribution to their national economy and acknowledges work done as being within and without the house too. Quite contrary to what Adam Smith believed that only paid work outside the home was construed as a contribution to the economy. Whereas Dr Bateman shows through empirical evidence marshalled from as far as the Stone Age to the present, the AI age, that women’s contribution, paid or unpaid was an essential part of the economy. Her book is packed with facts, anecdotes, histories, archaeological evidence, data sets etc. For instance, marriage contracts signed between the 11C and 15C included a clause wherein the woman could state she had the right to work after marriage. There are so many bits and pieces of information to share but the most enlightening was her use of the word “overlooked”. To use it constantly in the context of new evidence that confirmed the value of a woman’s work in the past is very empowering use of a simple word. It gives the reader the opportunity to reflect upon situations that they themselves may have been, where their evidence and work is overlooked whereas they are on the right path. It is new evidence so others cannot see it, recognise it, value it, or understand it. Developing faith in oneself and growing from there is what this book helps to achieve. It is not just a revisiting of inherited economic history narratives.

Humanity's journey from poverty to prosperity is filled with men who have become household names. But how many female entrepreneurs, merchants and industrialists can you name?

Economica places women at the centre of the story of economic growth. Starting in the Stone Age and continuing to the present day, it takes the reader through the key economic milestones of the past twelve millennia — from the birth of farming to the advent of computing — all told through the experiences of women as well as men.

Historian Victoria Bateman weaves a thrilling, globe-spanning narrative that proves women weren't 'missing' from economic life, they were merely hidden from view. We discover the female workers who helped to build the Great Pyramid of Giza, and to plumb the city of ancient Rome; the silk weavers who made a vital contribution to the development of the Silk Road and global trade; the women who dominated London's brewing trade during medieval times; and the brave twentieth-century pioneers who fought to make our economies not just richer but fairer.

Dr Bateman is an economic historian, author and historical consultant. Her latest book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, is the first major economic history of the world to be told from the perspective of female wealth creators.

Victoria has twenty years of experience teaching macroeconomics and economic history at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, including as Director of Studies in Economics at Gonville and Caius College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is currently a visiting academic at Gresham College, London. Victoria has spoken extensively on radio and television, providing historical context for current events, including as resident economic historian for BBC Radio 4’s “Understand: the economy”. In addition to her writing and speaking, Victoria also works as a historical consultant for period dramas on TV and screen. Victoria is passionate about communicating economic history and believes in using our knowledge of the past to inform the present and to build a better future.

Victoria has been profiled by The Times, has written for the Guardian, The Telegraph and Bloomberg, and has appeared on numerous occasions on the BBC and ITV. Her previous books include the acclaimed Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty (2023) and The Sex Factor: How Women Made the West Rich (2019). In her spare time, you can find Victoria enjoying tea and cake after a walk in the countryside.