Abstract This article explores the ‘great frost’ of 1709 and its impact on economic life in Britain, challenging a popular view that, based on gross domestic product (GDP) estimates, it was catastrophic. It shows that the annual GDP figures for the period have such wide error margins that they cannot establish the scale of the disruption; that the severe winter was felt in southern but not northern Britain; that there were, in any case, means of partially mitigating such disruptions; and that the economic difficulties that were experienced had various causes, not just those of a bad winter. The article then considers the wider role of myths about early modern economic life: as ways of simplifying the complexities with insufficient regard to the facts of the matter. In turn, this raises questions about the relationship between scholarly and popular history and the need to guard against condescending views of early modern economic life that go beyond the example explored here.
Abstract The First World War brought with it many new opportunities for women, amongst them the chance to play football. The game became popular and an important way of raising funds for charity. However, when the war ended, there was a push to return to the pre‐war social order, which ended many of the activities women had enjoyed for the duration of hostilities. Women's football became a focal point for this wider ‘backlash’, as exemplified by press reports emphasizing the inappropriateness of women playing as well as the introduction of a formal ‘ban’ by the governing associations. Nonetheless, many women continued to play. This article explores the challenges faced by those seeking to play the game. By tracing the complex development for women's football in interwar Scotland, it moves beyond the existing literature on the history of the women's game during the interwar period, which has tended to focus on developments in England.
Abstract This article examines an overlooked attempt to colonize the island of Trinidad during the English Revolution of the 1640s. This project was engineered by a consortium of radical puritans, seeking to create a protected enclave in the New World for separatists, anabaptists and other sectaries. ‘New Warwick’, as the colony was called, quickly collapsed, but reconstructing the Trinidad enterprise allows for the examination of important developments in the history of the English Atlantic, including the rise of religious divisions in parliament's civil‐war armies; the interplay between the revolution and events in England's Atlantic colonies; the colonial policy of parliament during the wars; the emergence of pockets of religious toleration in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the English Atlantic; the radical shifts in the political economy of the West Indies during the formative rise of a regime centred on sugar and enslaved labour; and the conflicts that roiled the English Caribbean after the regicide, resulting ultimately in the consolidation of the newly integrated Atlantic empire under the English Republic during the era of the first Navigation Act (1651).
Abstract This article examines the contribution of women co‐operators to international economic thinking between the two world wars through the figure of Emmy Freundlich, founder and president of the International Co‐operative Women's Guild (ICWG). Moving beyond the marginalization of women in the history of international thought and the tendency to privilege formal theorists over practitioners, it argues that Freundlich drew on the everyday experiences of housewives to articulate a distinctive vision that combined consumer representation, maternal feminism and pacifism. Leveraging gendered hierarchies within society and the family, she presented housewives’ agency as a means of democratizing international economic governance, both within and beyond the League of Nations. Beginning with Freundlich's participation in the International Economic Conference of 1927, the article traces how the ICWG pursued its unfulfilled resolutions through informal co‐operative bodies while continuing to lobby within the League framework. In 1937, this trajectory culminated in an ambitious programme for the reform of the League, encompassing trade, disarmament and colonial administration. By recovering this overlooked history, the article shows how women co‐operators brought the perspectives of housewives – among the least visible constituencies of interwar society – into international economic debate, thereby broadening the boundaries of recognized expertise through a bottom‐up approach.
