Jennifer Aston and Catherine Bishop, the editors of Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective, start with the question: “does entrepreneurship get women closer to equality?” (viii). Policy makers today think it does, but the contributions to this volume provide a chance to evaluate this question historically. The result of a 2019 workshop on global female entrepreneurs, the collection features nineteen chapters covering six continents and fifteen countries. Aston and Bishop are interested in a comparative focus on women's entrepreneurship and seek to “examine how differing economies, cultures and legal structures affected” women's participation (3). One important finding is that the nineteenth-century businesswoman was not confined to the anglophone world (and thus cannot be explained by British economics or culture). Aston and Bishop define businesswomen as “women who were making money and business decisions on their own account, either as sole traders, employers, artisans, or by dealing in property or making financial investments” (4). And they propose a “more expansive” definition of entrepreneurship that does not “privilege expansion and innovation” but rather focuses on a woman “who identifies opportunities for business, takes risks (however small they might seem), assumes responsibility for decisions, and seeks to make money” (5).They propose measures of entrepreneurial success based on what the individual women themselves deemed their goals, showing how a focus on women can change definitions of and assumptions about entrepreneurship.

Marie Francois's chapter on Mexico City laundresses is an excellent example of working with a broader definition of entrepreneurship. She reveals the world of lavanderías—commercial laundries run by women who were numerate, served elite clients, and had formal contracts with hotels and hospitals. Business investment, accounting, and risk all figured in these ventures. And lest we think this is a modern-day feminist interpretation of these laundresses, it is notable that contemporary records identified laundering as an industry, just like carpentry or tanning, and that laundresses were thought of as belonging to a profession. Susan Lewis also focuses on the so-called little Gal rather than continuing the historiographic focus on large and international traders. Her essay on US businesswomen illuminates what she terms “penny capitalists,” or women who were worth between $50 and $300 (243). Using credit reports, Lewis finds women who were deemed creditworthy by these institutions and why. She argues that although these women may not have been worth much, it does not mean that they were unimportant in supporting themselves and their families.

The significance of women to family firms is a current theme in Western business history. Mary Louise Nagata shows this was also true for premodern Japan. While modern Japanese business is highly male-centered, in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) women's contributions were common, with women holding a significant intergenerational role in businesses by overseeing inheritance and succession. The importance of women in family firms and in the transfer of multigenerational firms is also apparent in southern Africa. Grietjie Verhoef examines businesswomen in the Cape Colony, which the British took over from the Dutch in 1820. She explains that widows inherited pachts (leases), which they held on to and managed, and that both Dutch and Jewish women were shareholders in companies and banks. These women often inherited their shares, but not all were risk averse investors: a few got involved in the gold mining industry. Vanessa Oliveira looks at the financial standing of Luso-African women in the ports and towns of nineteenth-century Angola. Women of mixed Portuguese and African origin were often the daughters of merchants, who married them off to European merchants to further trade. These wives accessed colonial laws that guaranteed them shared marital property, rights to inheritance as daughters, and the ability to make marital contracts. Marital property laws also figured for women in Spain, where, as Carmen María Hernández-Nicolás and Susana Martínez-Rodríguez explain, laws enabled married women to own property and function as partners in family businesses. Their essay examines female business owners and partners by classifying them as “mirrors” (women who followed family wishes), “bridges” (women who transmitted businesses between generations), and “stones” (powerful matriarchs and pioneers) (338).

Some family businesses and female entrepreneurial activity were not necessarily legal or licit. In a study of four Chinese female pirates, C. Nathan Kwan explains that “partly due to the cultural context of South China and the nature of seafaring there, Chinese women had more involvement in piracy than their English counterparts. Chinese piracy also produced opportunities for women to engage in entrepreneurial activity” because it was a family enterprise (197). One standout, Zheng Yi Sao, managed a massive protection racket, presided over a pirate confederacy of between 40,000 and 60,000 participants, and “managed finances for an organisation comparable in size to the entire Royal Navy at the time of the Opium War” (199).

Several essays feature women who were entrepreneurs out of necessity. For example, Bishop looks at the plight of European women who emigrated to New Zealand and New South Wales and who turned to business when widowed. Common widow-run businesses included schools, boarding houses, and inns, and widows also competed with single and married women in the textile trades. Melanie Buddle also finds that female entrepreneurship in British Columbia was associated with married women who had to juggle work and children. Most wage earning was done by young single women but once they married, women worked for themselves. The gold rush led to demand for restaurants, saloons, and laundries—domestic services women could fulfill. Buddle acknowledges that there are fewer sources for investigating the entrepreneurial activity of indigenous women. This is a theme in the essays focused on settler colonies, and one hopes that new avenues for exploring the activity of indigenous women will begin to equal what historians in this collection have found for African women.

In an excellent reconstruction of women's economic networks across race and class, Alisha Cromwell examines how enslaved women in the American Low Country worked independently as retailers. The case study of white owner Mary Ann Cowper and enslaved sisters Flora and Elsey who lived near Savannah, Georgia, illustrates that this entrepreneurial work not only aided single female and widowed slaveholders but allowed enslaved women a measure of economic autonomy. Cromwell contextualizes the retailing of African American women within the American South and connects the women's retailing to West African traditions of women's work.

Not all women were forced into entrepreneurial roles. Béatrice Craig's essay on businesswomen in nineteenth-century Paris features the example of Madame Commun, a middle-class woman who chose to buy a bronze manufactory and start a business with a male partner even though she did not need to work and could have easily lived off her investments. Craig uses the example of Madame Commun to question Bonnie Smith's argument that bourgeois French women retreated to the parlor in the 1800s. Another city where women were active in business was Moscow. Using the Register of Traders, Galina Ulianova examines Russian female retailers, and she finds that although most businesswomen came from mercantile and artisanal ranks, some were soldiers’ wives.

One of the themes in this collection is that female entrepreneurship was the result of both necessity and opportunity. Carry van Lieshout, Harry Smith, and Robert Bennett note that while women chose to go into business out of necessity, it did offer “opportunities to those who had entrepreneurial capacity” (312). They come to this conclusion through a big data project, the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs 1851–1911. They make a compelling case for using census data to track female economic activity because many more women appear in the census than were represented in trade directories and fire insurance records, which skew toward more highly capitalized businesses.

In the only essay to examine the Middle East and Muslim women, Seven Ağir addresses the lack of research on women's business and financial activities in nineteenth-century Turkey. While business history has come late to the study of Ottoman history, she suggests that moving beyond a public-private divide will help tease out women's roles in profit-making and income-generating activities. Not only were Ottoman women active as social entrepreneurs through their control of waqfs (charitable institutions), but they also stand out as financiers, rentiers, and even speculators. As does Ağir's, Sean Redding's essay reminds readers that not all female entrepreneurs were urban. Redding's examination of African women farmers in South Africa between 1875 and 1930 argues for the inclusion of market farming as a category of entrepreneurship that offered women both economic autonomy and risk.

Female innovators feature in several essays. One of the more unique chapters is Kari Zimmerman's analysis of female patent holders in nineteenth-century Brazil. Several scholars have argued that married women's property laws impeded female patent activity by limiting their control over their own inventions, but Zimmerman posits that in Brazil women had a “modicum of control over personal and conjugal property” (362). Women's patents focused on food and clothing, but most striking was the effect of slavery on women's patents in Brazil, where there were very few patents of housekeeping devices compared to the number of such patents in the United States. Blake Singley also conceptualizes female cookbook writers in Australia as innovative entrepreneurs.

Indeed, this fine collection shows that when you bother to look for female entrepreneurs, you find them everywhere.