Female Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century London: a Prosopographical Study of Businesswomen in Lombard Street, Gracechurch Street and Cornhill in the

This project will investigate businesswomen in a variety of trades in a wealthy geographic area in the historic City of
London, in close proximity to the Royal Exchange, considered its commercial heart. This prosopographical study will
trace their occupational training, family circumstances, kinship and credit networks and measure the size and longevity of
their business operations. In so doing, it will answer the question: how did women create, maintain and grow businesses
at a time when prevailing narratives suggest women's declining economic participation? It will seek to identify any
notable characteristics in these individuals' lives and backgrounds and assess whether these may have changed over
time, for example as one's marital status and family situation changed or in response to external factors. This project
seeks to provide a more comprehensive picture of female entrepreneurship in the capital over a greater span of time and
utilising a wider range of sources than other studies undertaken to date. It will contribute to scholarship in the field of
women's work, but also inform our understanding of business history and metropolitan history and address the relative
absence of women in the historiography of both.