The journey of humanity from poverty to prosperity is filled with men who have become household names: from Giovanni de Medici, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford to Warren Buffet, Mike Bloomberg, Lakshmi Mittal and Jack Ma. But how many female entrepreneurs, merchants and industrialists can you name? You would be forgiven for thinking that, until very recently, there were none at all. After all, even today, if we gathered in one room all those who have gone from rags to riches, it would be a room full to the brim with men: less than three per cent of the world's self-made billionaires are women.
But what about Phryne, the richest woman in Ancient Athens, who offered to pay to rebuild the walls of Thebes after the city was razed to the ground by Alexander the Great? Or the canny businesswoman Khadijah, better known as the first wife of Muhammad, who, after employing him to look after her troop of trading caravans, proposed to the prophet-to-be? Or Ching Shih, a sex-worker turned pirate who amassed a fleet of ships that controlled trade in the South China Sea?
And, just as importantly, what about the everyday women who, paid only a pittance, laboured for the profit of others - the silk 'draw girls' of seventeenth-century Lyon, the bare-breasted female coal miners of the British Industrial Revolution, the 'convict maids' who laid the foundations of modern-day Australia, the female market-traders of Senegal, and the women who have toiled in many a sweatshop or paddy-field in South and East Asia?
Women have never been 'missing' from economic life - they were simply hidden from view by those writing the history books. In ECONOMICA: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF WOMEN, WEALTH AND POWER, feminist historian Victoria Bateman rescues them from obscurity in a thrilling narrative that retells the economic history of the world from a female perspective.