Jessica Collins

My doctoral project, Female Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century London, is a Collaborative Doctoral Award partnership between the University of Cambridge and London Metropolitan Archives, supervised by Professor Amy Erickson and Sharon Tuff.

In this study, I will undertake a prosopographical study of businesswomen in a prestigious, commercial area of the City of London to reconstruct family situations, size and longevity of operation, occupational training and social and credit networks. In so doing I will establish how women created and maintained businesses in the long eighteenth century, what shared characteristics (if any) enabled their success and how the situation changed over time.

By focusing on a specific geographic location, I will bring together a wide variety of archival sources – trade cards and directories, apprenticeship registers, rate books, insurance records etc to build a collective ‘whole career’ picture of a cohort of businesswomen across a variety of trades for the first time. As few case studies have been undertaken to date, this research will inform our understanding of female entrepreneurialism and address an underappreciation of its importance within the wider fields of business and economic history.

After a BA in History (Bristol, 2001), I trained and worked as an archivist in a London livery company, whilst moonlighting in research in my spare time. My PhD builds on my previous research on female apprentices and businesswomen – with a particular focus on those in millinery and the textiles trades – in two such livery companies.