Programme FSP Global History Colloquium 2025/26 (pdf)
 
Gabriele Marcon: Timeless outsiders? The Flickering Visibility of Mining Women in the Early Modern World

Mines rank among the most populated workplaces in the modern world. Both men and women engage in mining activities. Yet historians have traditionally framed women’s participation in mining as a consequence of industrialization and colonial exploitation, portraying women’s roles in premodern mining as either scarcely documented or irremediably lost. This talk challenges this linear narrative by examining a range of early modern mining sites across Europe and Spanish America. Its aim is twofold. First, it offers a reinterpretation of solidified temporal divisions that have shaped our understanding of women’s work in industrial workplaces. Secondly, it reconfigures the highly gendered profile of the male miner by analysing the cultural, social, and economic foundations of women’s exclusion from the mines, thereby proposing an additional analytical framework for the study of global history.