A new history challenges the myth that business was “just for men” by uncovering the forgotten stories of powerful female entrepreneurs, bankers, and industrialists who have been crucial to building global prosperity throughout the ages, writes Victoria Bateman

Hidden away inside the British Museum is a little-known collection of women’s business cards dating to the 18th century. It includes the card of Ann Askew, a London-based shoemaker, emblazoned with a large boot and the text “next Door to the Three Tuns and Rummer”. The address might seem unusual to us today, but in a time before street numbers had become widespread, her shop would have been identifiable by the boot symbol which hung above her doorway. Not only does the card tell us that she sold “all sorts of shoes, boots, and slippers” it also tells us that she exported them overseas. Ann Askew was not unique. Historic business cards of female entrepreneurs reveal numerous women fan-makers, hat-makers, toy-makers, printers, jewellers and tea sellers. The economy, it seems, has never been “just for men”.

And yet when we think about the past, we suppose that men were the ones bringing home the proverbial bacon, sustaining their wives and children on the money they earned working in fields and factories or as butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. We imagine that men dealt with money while women dealt in something else entirely – the love that makes the world go around. We assume that business – at least until the second half of the 20th century – was exclusively for men.

In my new book Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, I show how wrong this view of the past really is, and present a new and more accurate economic history of the world – one that journeys through our most glittering civilisations and all of the major economic revolutions – but told, for the first time, from the point of view of not just men, but women as well. I show how women hunted alongside men in the Stone Age, how women wove the cloth that acted as the currency of trade during the Bronze Age, how women built pyramids alongside men in ancient Egypt, how women helped to plumb the ancient city of Rome, how women brewed beer in medieval London, and........

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