{"id":28602,"date":"2019-03-26T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coreblog.prod.adnc.cambridge.org\/?p=28602"},"modified":"2019-10-08T14:46:51","modified_gmt":"2019-10-08T13:46:51","slug":"women-investors-and-the-virginia-company-in-the-early-seventeenth-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2019\/03\/26\/women-investors-and-the-virginia-company-in-the-early-seventeenth-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Women Investors and the Virginia Company in the Early Seventeenth Century"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This blog accompanies Misha Ewen’s Historical Journal<\/em> article ‘Women Investors and the Virginia Company in the Early Seventeenth Century’<\/strong><\/a><\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nMilicent Ramsden, Lady Elizabeth Grey, Lucy Russell, countess of Bedford\u2014these are just some names of the women who invested in the Virginia Company in the early seventeenth century. In my article<\/a>, I explore the role of women who \u2018adventured\u2019 their purses, rather than their person, in New World trade and colonisation. It focuses on two women in particular: Rebecca Romney, the wife of a merchant and merchant in her own right, and Katherine Hueriblock, who was born into a Dutch mercantile household, but who also developed her own independent interests in overseas colonisation and commerce.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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I explore the role of women who \u2018adventured\u2019 their purses, rather than their person, in New World trade and colonisation.<\/blockquote>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nUnfolding the histories of women who invested in the Virginia Company was the starting-point of this research, but as I began tracing Romney and Hueriblock through the archives, I learned that their involvement in the Virginia Company was part of a wider story. Using a range of sources from letters and court cases, to wills and a surviving church memorial tablet in Acton (West London), I pieced together their role in New World ventures more broadly, including activity in the sugar trade, colonisation of Newfoundland, and search for the elusive northwest passage.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nWomen investors have remained hidden. The lives\r\nof women who were involved in the early English empire as settlers are much\r\nmore familiar to historians than those of women who never voyaged to America,\r\nbut instead supported colonial ventures at home through financial means. The early\r\nmodern laws of coverture pose one challenge. When a woman married, if she did\r\nnot have a separate property arrangement, then all that she owned became her husband\u2019s.\r\nWe know that the laws of coverture were flexible and could be circumvented, but,\r\nnevertheless, it makes it difficult to know the full extent of women\u2019s\r\ninvestment in trading companies.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nEven if women had the opportunity to\r\ncircumvent coverture, investing was still not an opportunity that all could\r\npursue. The women who invested in the Virginia Company, as far as I can tell,\r\nwere from merchant, gentry or noble backgrounds, so they had the means and the\r\nexperience to engage in this activity. Buying shares in joint-stock companies,\r\nlike the Virginia Company, was far from a guaranteed investment. Yet, as\r\nscholars of the Financial Revolution have demonstrated, women who wanted to\r\nincrease their fortunes were not necessarily risk-averse. Romney and Hueriblock\r\npursued a range of investment opportunities, showing that they had a good\r\nunderstanding of financial markets and practices. Romney lent on \u2018bond\u2019 to the\r\ncompany, which was a loan with fixed interest, whilst Hueriblock was alleged to\r\nhave defrauded the company\u2019s lotteries, a game of chance that was introduced\r\ninto England from the Low Countries during the late sixteenth century.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nRomney and Hueriblock were not exactly obscure women\u2014they had wealth, status, and privilege\u2014and still, their role in New World colonisation and trade has never been uncovered. If we are to fully understand this period of English overseas expansion, and the building-blocks of empire, then we have to integrate women\u2019s diverse histories too.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nRead Misha Ewen’s full <\/strong><\/a>Historical Journal<\/strong><\/a><\/em> article for free here<\/strong><\/a>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nMain image credit: Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford<\/em><\/a> (n\u00e9e Harington) (1580\u20131627),<\/em> Manner of William Larkin, (1580\u20131619), Nationalmuseum (Photo: NMGrh 569<\/a> )<\/em>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unfolding the histories of women who invested in the Virginia Company was the starting-point of this research, but as I began tracing Romney and Hueriblock through the archives, I learned that their involvement in the Virginia Company was part of a wider story. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":28611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[1307,776,4674,5335,2904,138,2364,6532,3080],"coauthors":[5622],"class_list":["post-28602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-humanities","tag-17th-century","tag-american-history","tag-business-history","tag-colonialism","tag-early-modern-history","tag-economic-history","tag-the-historical-journal","tag-virginia","tag-womens-history"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28602"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=28602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}