Introduction. Women, Credit and the Creation of Opportunity: A Historical Overview

The history of women's roles in past societies is more than a matter of passing curiosity. Their experiences, and the social and economic patterns revealed, speak to the evolving structures in a modernizing world. Discovering the history of women's economic endeavours is not without challenges. Credit was indispensable to labouring men and women in pre-industrial and early industrial societies. The nature of early modern communities varied, and women directed their commercial activities to match the economic niches available. Common community patterns of lending and borrowing are revealed in the surviving records of a shopkeeper based in South London in the later seventeenth century. Risk reduction was a priority for Pope, and the guarantor played a pivotal role in the lending process, bridging the gap between lender and borrower. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries legal and structural changes in the economy also affected the organization of small-scale credit.