Abstract

"Absence Makes the Balance Sheet Grow Longer"

Hannah Knox Tucker, Copenhagen Business School (htu.bhl@cbs.dk)

This paper examines the entrepreneurial activities of eighteenth-century women with mobile and frequently absent ship captain husbands and sons. Using evidence from letter books, probate records, newspapers, and account books, the paper shows that mobile captains often complemented their stationary wives’ and mothers’ commercial activities. These women frequently operated shops, taverns, coffee rooms, and boarding houses. Captains’ mobility facilitated their independent entrepreneurship by providing them with vial news, imported goods, and patrons. In return, women entrepreneurs provided valuable commercial intelligence including credit reporting, access to networks, and reputational maintenance during the absence of their male relations. While captains enacted violent mastery at sea, their absence facilitated the development of women’s entrepreneurship, which limited their mastery on land. Yet, their male patrons often legitimized women’s entrepreneurship as arising from either need or from a public-minded desire to keep the wheels of commerce turning during captains’ absence.
As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich pointed out, commercial women operated throughout the eighteenth century by acting as their husbands’ deputies during periods of absence or incapacity to serve the public good of keeping commerce running. While she did not explicitly acknowledge this, much of her evidence for her examination of “deputy husbands” came from the lives of ship captains’ wives. Further examination of women entrepreneurs operating during their husbands’ absence demonstrates that captains’ absence created synergistic commercial opportunities for their close women relatives. This broader project shows that nascent capitalist commerce facilitated an uneven extension of mastery for men whose labors required absence.