"Economists studying history tend to focus on men, overlooking the contributions of half the population"

VICTORIA BATEMAN speaks to Danny Bird about the crucial roles women played in historical economies - and how recognising those contributions transforms our understanding of the past

- By Danny Bird

Danny Bird How did you go about uncovering women's central – and obscured – role in economic history?

Victoria Bateman I've taught economic history for 20 years, and I wanted to bring together the many strands of economic history into a single narrative that spans the period from the Stone Age to the present, taking us through glittering civilisations and major economic revolutions, from the birth of farming to the digital age.

Crucially, I wanted to tell this story in a way that includes the lives of women as well as men. Economic history is a repeating cycle of rise and decline: civilisations amass great wealth and achieve extraordinary things before falling into ruin, only to be rediscovered centuries later by archaeologists. You cannot tell that story without including women.

As I show in Economica, the most successful economies, regardless of era, have always been those in which women were central to economic life, visibly or invisibly. Likewise, when civilisations decline – whether we’re talking about the Roman empire, the Islamic world or imperial China – there’s a strong correlation between economic deterioration and the marginalisation of women.

So I set out to write a new global economic history: one that views the past through the eyes of women without excluding men. This is a history of everyone – an economic history that shows how, once you add women and stir, your understanding of the past is transformed.

You open with a woman hunting in the Stone Age. Why has that image been overlooked, and what does that reveal about modern biases in archaeology and economics?

When we think of the Stone Age, we often picture stone tools – items that survive in archaeological digs. However, for millennia early societies produced things that were largely perishable – objects such as baskets, fishing nets and clothing – which have long since disintegrated.