Preindustrial Europe was characterized by an expansion of rural, or ‘cottage’ manufacturing for markets, both domestic and foreign. Much was textile processing and manufacture, including silk and flax production, spinning and weaving of various types of thread, knitting, lace-making and painting on cotton (the last to compete with ‘Indian cottons’). But it also extended to metallurgy, tile-making, pottery-works, wicker-working and various kinds of food-preservation. When, in the late 1960s, historians began studying this ‘proto-industry’, the question of surplus labour became key to understanding what was then seen as an initial stage in the industrialization process. Local studies would later show that women and children supplied a large portion of this labour. This chapter reviews the empirical evidence collected in recent decades about the widespread employment of women and children in rural manufactures in early modern Europe. Examining recent scholarship on occupational structure, it confirms that women were indeed the main actors in structural change, forming a disproportionate share of the workforce in some of the most innovative sectors. The chapter also emphasizes the importance of labour demand, rather than labour supply, in accounting for the rising employment of women in manufacturing.

Late medieval Europeans extended exploitation of fish stocks to marine frontiers previously little affected by intense human predation. Driven by demand since the twelfth century and supported by waves of innovative capture and preservation methods, herring fisheries in the North Sea and Baltic fed millions of northern Europeans with the largest medieval catches known. Stockfish (naturally freeze-dried cod) from arctic Norway went from a regional subsistence product c.1100 to an export trade profiting fishers and merchants alike. Elsewhere entrepreneurs caught, preserved, and exported pike and other fish from the eastern Baltic, hake and conger from the Channel approaches and Bay of Biscay, and migratory bluefin tuna off Sicily and the Gulf of Cadiz, all for consumption a thousand and more kilometers away. Transforming local abundances for distant tables at unprecedented scale drove new capitalized forms of organization and market behaviour. Consumers, merchants, and fishers saw fish as economic objects disconnected from any familiar nature and free for competitive exploitation. Yet besides prospects of infinite abundance the new frontier fisheries posed risks, and not simply those of hazardous access or human conflict. Heavily fished local stocks of herring successively crashed to commercial insignificance when further stressed by environmental changes in the pulsating arrival of the Little Ice Age. But the almost accidental discovery of virgin cod stocks off Newfoundland in the 1490s confirmed the mythic belief that abundance always lay over the next horizon. Thoughts of limits vanished at the eve of modernity.

As the Middle Ages drew to a close, however, a rising share of Europeans were eating fish from systems other than their natural local waters. By 1500 around Paris, for instance, elite menus featured carp and headless codfish, while lesser folk made do with herring and haddock. Beside the Mediterranean, Valencia was receiving millions of Atlantic sardines and hake, while Romans could get herring from the North Sea, Norwegian cod, and tuna from Sicily. Both cultured carp and fishes from Europe’s economic frontiers changed Europeans’ relations with aquatic nature.

Carp aquaculture colonized nature, creating artificial habitats to rear an organism alien to western Europe. Late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century financial records and instructional manuals from east-central Europe detail an original and distinctive European mode for farming fish. Those practices provide a benchmark to identify and trace their creation in twelfth- to thirteenth-century France – where the carp was a late invader – and subsequent spread eastwards of the innovation. Human-controlled aquaculture created thousands of local ecological revolutions across interior Europe, providing inland elites with a steady source of live fresh fish, serving as a vehicle of elite power over subjected nature and people, and replacing indigenous ecosystems with private anthropogenic habitats tailored for domesticated, soon also feral, invaders. For contemporary writers fish had become objects of human agency.