This volume surveys the role women have played in various types of business as owners, co-owners and decision-making managers in European and North American societies since the sixteenth century. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship, it identifies the economic, social, legal and cultural factors that have facilitated or restricted women's participation in business. It pays particular attention to the ways in which gender norms, and their evolution, shaped not only those women's experience of business, but the ways they were perceived by contemporaries, documented in sources and, partly as a consequence, viewed by historians.

This volume surveys the role women have played in various types of business as owners, co-owners and decision-making managers in European and North American societies since the sixteenth century. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship, it identifies the economic, social, legal and cultural factors that have facilitated or restricted women's participation in business. It pays particular attention to the ways in which gender norms, and their evolution, shaped not only those women's experience of business, but the ways they were perceived by contemporaries, documented in sources and, partly as a consequence, viewed by historians.

For centuries, almost all economic activity was family-based. The family business rested on the division of labor among family members. Therefore the family was both socially and economically the foundation of the family business. Families were not only production units, but also education and consumption units that conveyed norm structures, values and professional identity to next generation. Although female family members have always been active participants in family businesses over the centuries, their role has often been neglected in previous studies. Women in Business Families: From Past to Present presents both conceptual and theoretically informed empirical papers addressing three related themes relevant for family business and gender in past and in present: heroic women entrepreneurs; invisibility / visibility of women in businesses; and business succession. The book Women in Business Families: From Past to Present balances between both historical and contemporary analyses. The chapters integrate the notions of time and gender in focusing on family businesses or business families in past and in present. This volume will be of vital reading to researchers and academics in the fields of Gender Studies, Family Business, Organizational studies, Entrepreneurship and the various related disciplines.

Women, fashion, consumption, luxury, and education are the main subjects of our researchers. The contributors of this volume accompanied women and objects in their travels across Modern Europe and offered thorough and diverse analyses connecting the circulation of people with the circulation of ideas. Making use of archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors point out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. This will help the public to better know and understand the importance of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business draws together a wide array of state-of-the-art research on multinational enterprises. The volume aims to deepen our historical understanding of how firms and entrepreneurs contributed to transformative processes of globalization. This book explores how global business facilitated the mechanisms of cross-border interactions that affected individuals, organizations, industries, national economies and international relations. The 37 chapters span the Middle Ages to the present day, analyzing the emergence of institutions and actors alongside key contextual factors for global business development. Contributors examine business as a central actor in globalization, covering myriad entrepreneurs, organizational forms and key industrial sectors. Taking a historical view, the chapters highlight the intertwined and evolving nature of economic, political, social, technological and environmental patterns and relationships. They explore dynamic change as well as lasting continuities, both of which often only become visible – and can only be fully understood – when analyzed in the long run. With dedicated chapters on challenges such as political risk, sustainability and economic growth, this prestigious collection provides a one-stop shop for a key business discipline. Chapter 31 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This volume explores the role of women in business in nineteenth-century Northern French textile centers. Lille and the surrounding towns were then dominated by big and small family businesses, and many were run by women. Those women did not withdraw into the parlour as the century progressed and the ‘separate ideology’ spread. Neither did they become mere figure heads - most were business persons in their own rights. Yet, they have left almost no traces in the collective memory, and historians assume they ceased to exist. This book therefore seeks to answer three interrelated questions: How common were those women, and what kind of business did they run? What factors facilitated or impeded their activities? And finally, why have they been forgotten, and why has their representations in regional and academic history been so at odd with reality? Indirectly, this study also sheds light on the process of industrialization in this region, and on industrialists’ strategies.

Women in World History brings together the most recent scholarship in women's and world history in a single volume covering the period from 1450 to the present, enabling readers to understand women's relationship to world developments over the past five hundred years. Women have served the world as unfree people, often forced to migrate as slaves, trafficked sex workers, and indentured laborers working off debts. Diseases have migrated through women's bodies and women themselves have deliberately spread religious belief and fervor as well as ideas. They have been global authors, soldiers, and astronauts encircling the globe and moving far beyond it. They have written classics in political and social thought and crafted literary and artistic works alongside others who were revolutionaries and reform-minded activists. Historical scholarship has shown that there is virtually no part of the world where women's presence is not manifest, whether in archives, oral testimonials, personal papers, the material record, evidence of disease and famine, myth and religious teachings, and myriad other forms of documentation. As these studies mount, the idea of surveying women's past on a global basis becomes daunting. This book aims to redress this situation and offer a synthetic world history of women in modern times.