Today as in the past, most often crises take people by surprise. This fact has recently provoked strong criticism of the ability of an economic theory to predict crises, to understand their course and to establish solutions to mitigate their effects. History can thus serve as a reservoir of facts and experiences, and the use of a broad chronological perspective has been recently highlighted as essential to providing a wider, comparative knowledge of past crises.Footnote 1 Recent economic historiography has highlighted the importance of studying financial and commercial crises alongside agrarian and demographic crises, as well as questioning specific aspects of these shocks.Footnote 2 Another important dimension stressed by recent historical studies is the importance of recognising that crises in the past occurred against a background in which uncertainty was the norm. In societies that experienced various forms of ordinary uncertainty (linked for example to the ‘dead’ season in food or textile production), crises constitute peaks of exceptional uncertainty.Footnote 3
In this special issue, our focus is not on causes or types of crisis, but on ‘coping with crisis’, which can be defined as ‘the short-term behaviours adopted in response to economic stress’.Footnote 4 This short-term focus does not mean, however, that we do not take into account the adaptation process over the longer term. The short-term responses to unexpected ‘economic stress’ nevertheless imply a significant change in the usual modes of economic functioning, changes that can be transformed into long-term practices. These responses are significant insofar as the economic or technological shocks in question entail the need for the actors involved to change their habitual choices and behaviour. The working definition of crisis that we use is inspired by a classical debate involving Immanuel Wallerstein and Eric Hobsbawm.Footnote 5 This debate addressed the causes of significant ruptures and their economic consequences for the modern world. Since then, research has also shown the importance of studying smaller-scale, more localised crises, capable of shedding light on aspects that are invisible at the macroscopic scale. In this special issue, we take into account not only major crises but also local crises.
The changes provoked by crises can affect men and women in similar ways, for example, when there is a decrease in the price of some commodities; but most often they affect men and women differently. Moreover, crises can modify gender relations. Recent work, such as that by Sylvia Walby, emphasises the importance of the gender dimension, and the disruptive effect of crises on gender dynamics. Studies that have taken care to adopt a gendered perspective reveal entire areas of the functioning of past economies that have previously remained largely unexplored; especially when we look at regions or periods in which the family economy is or has been important and in which small- and medium-sized family businesses constitute or constituted a significant part of the industrial structure.Footnote 6 One of the most significant contributions of these pioneering studies is the simultaneous consideration of the individual point of view of those affected by the shock of the crisis and the collective point of view of the changing relationships within the family.
Most studies on the historical evolution of living standards have recorded fluctuations in individual incomes but have not addressed in a systematic way the issue of how the contributions of different family members to the household might be reconfigured in times of crisis.Footnote 7 Because of the intensification of family dynamics that it can entail, crisis seems to us to be a key moment to decipher the mechanisms that govern the inner functioning of the family economy. The break with the usual rhythms that it generates imposes a revision of habitual practices, forcing individuals to rethink the ordinary ways of dealing with the environment around them. Admittedly, even in normal times, the possible choices are always multiple, but crisis accelerates decision-making and forces the actors to reflect on alternative paths and unexplored avenues.
If it has been observed that in times of crisis, responses to intertwined shocks involve behaviours that are broadly similar to those of everyday poverty,Footnote 8 although more dramatic; the articles collected here also allow us to highlight some drastically new strategies. This is the case when the intensification or transformation of practices due to the crisis translate into a sustainable shift towards other economic systems, including diversification of economic activities, adaptation to new institutional constraints, or implementation of illegal or informal trades to circumvent the crisis. This shift may happen in the context of individual redeployment or professional retraining or in the framework of family co-operation to achieve certain goals, for example, activities using unpaid or low-paid work of family members.Footnote 9
While it is true that, in general, economists and sociologists interested in crisis have tended to focus on prominent economic subjects or institutions, such as the regulatory state, national authorities, entrepreneurs and economic leaders, in recent years in-depth studies have begun to burrow into the core of the family economy. The ‘black box’ Jane Humphries described a few years ago, referring to the family economy in the British Industrial Revolution, has now been illuminated to some extent.Footnote 10 What is less clear is the extent to which family economies in different historical contexts shared common characteristics, such as the gendered division of roles or the use of child labour in working-class households, or had distinctive, specific features. Northern Europe has been relatively well researched in recent historiography, but other areas are much less well known. Hence, the challenge of comparing Southern Europe and the Mediterranean with Central America in this special issue in the conviction that this unusual comparison will provide us with original keys to understanding the common patterns and specific paths followed by the societies in question in reacting to particular crises. The restructuring of Mexican tortilla production in a context of major technological transformation that affected small manufacturers has parallels in the changes affecting family economies engaged in very different types of production, such as silk production in Lyon or in Barcelona and Manresa, or trafficking in a peripheral but very relevant area for maritime traffic in the Mediterranean such as the Aeolian Islands.
1. Changing roles and the place of women
In the framework of this approach to changing gender relations in family economies, the study of women's experiences in situations of sudden upheaval has an important place because of their pivotal role in times of crisis. In development economics, women's resilience has been perceived as a defensive strategy for adjusting to short-term shocks, particularly in studies based on qualitative analysis that allow in-depth insights into specific experiences of crises in specific economic contexts.Footnote 11
The concept of ‘resilience’ originates in geography and ecology, but has taken on a socio-economic dimension in development studies, to become a key term in discussions of recent, twenty-first century crises.Footnote 12 While we acknowledge the usefulness of this analytical category for understanding the experiences of women in the past, we adopt a critical perspective in using it.Footnote 13 Resilience here means not just a passive way to counter the crisis, to provide a shield against it, but also one that requires commitment, energy, and the capacity to be proactive and to adapt quickly. The risk otherwise is of narrowing the ‘coping’ scope, by reducing it to a simple form of resistance: ‘coping is easily misclassified as “resilience”, when in fact it costs (mainly women's) time, effort, health, and wellbeing’.Footnote 14 Two recent studies of intra-household redistributions during economic crises have shown marked similarities between areas as far apart as southern Spain and Indonesia, but with at least one point in common, that is, a lack of public social welfare.Footnote 15 In combination with the decrease in consumption, and the help coming from loans by relatives, in both contexts, there is an increase in women's working hours or in their economic and extra-economic activities. From this point of view, women appear to act as shock absorbers, and they play this role at the forefront of the scene.Footnote 16
It is noticeable that, in times of crisis, women do not withdraw into the domestic sphere, nor do they display a passive attitude towards events.Footnote 17 This gendered resilience, accompanied by its high costs, goes hand in hand with a persistent presence of women in the labour market. As Walby explains, a crisis is supposed to push women from the productive to the reproductive sphere (according to the classical dual sphere dichotomy), but this was not the case during the 2008 crisis. Even if the increase in unemployment was very high among women and cuts in public welfare affected them particularly both as workers and as careers, this did not translate into ‘staying at home’.Footnote 18 This persistent presence in the labour market can be seen as a ‘buffer’ effect, resulting from the use of precarious work by companies (including part-time and self-employment).Footnote 19
In the past, similar dynamics can be observed in contexts where public social services were nearly absent. All the articles in the special issue clearly show this constant presence of women in the formal and informal labour market in very different contexts, whether in the textile industry, food production or salt smuggling. This, of course, does not exclude the fact that forms of occupational segregation may increase, quite the contrary. Although informal trade and smuggling were a major resource for the whole society, in the Aeolian Islands studied by Fazio, large-scale trafficking was monopolised by men, while small-scale trafficking was the prerogative of women. Similarly, the ‘feminisationֹ’ of traditional productive sectors in times of crisis was due to a reallocation of labour. According to Solà et al.'s article, the male workforce of the Manresa silk industry specialised after the crisis in the production of cotton belts and ribbons, while women were mainly employed in spinning and weaving cotton work in more concentrated manufactures. This kind of restructuring entails a cost: structurally difficult working conditions generally worsen in contexts where care work is entirely in the charge of women.Footnote 20
We can also acknowledge as historians that crisis analysis requires a more complex ‘gender relations model’ than the dichotomy between production and reproduction or between market and home. To an extent, the separate spheres dichotomy is useful because it takes into account observable situations, particularly within the family, the central unit of analysis for studying gender relations. Proper historical understanding or explanation, however, requires a more sophisticated analytical framework.Footnote 21 This means, according to Walby, studying the interconnections between the institutions of society and thinking of society as a system. In this perspective, crises can alter gendered patterns in intra-household relations as well as in labour markets or welfare policies, thus blurring the boundaries between separate spheres.
Similar social and economic processes can be seen at work in the past. Interconnected transformations changed the socio-economic system in Manresa and Barcelona, where Solà et al. observed an industrial and social redeployment of male and female workers, and also in Mexico, where Gómez Galvarriato shows how the introduction of mechanisation permanently altered the intra-sector dynamics of tortilla production.
Studies of the past as well as of more recent crises have also alerted us to the fact that, far from being always a winning process, ‘coping’ can mean a lasting loss of living standards and a worsening in terms of more restrictive working conditions that more or less gradually become permanent over time.Footnote 22 This was the case in eighteenth-century Lyon, according to Anne Montenach, where the increase in ‘piquage d′onces’, the workers' silk stealing, reveals a temporary situation that became chronic, or in the Aeolian Islands, where Fazio explains how smuggling became a common way of dealing with changing institutional assets. Governing bodies can show unexpected forbearance during these transformational phases involving heavy social consequences. The local community can set up forms of social assistance or may be more tolerant of infringements of the usual rules governing economic behaviour, such as the toleration by the Lyon authorities of the removal of silk threads to a greater extent than usual. However, as pointed out recently for more contemporary societies, ‘the traditional informal safety nets of the poor became depleted as the crisis deepened, pointing to the need for better formal systems for coping with future shocks’.Footnote 23 Everyday labour conflicts can undoubtedly reveal much, and the fact that women were able to justify illegal practices in eighteenth-century Barcelona and Lyon by using arguments connected to short-term and long-term economic stress is significant from this point of view.
Indeed, in the case studies collected in this special issue, there are many types of exceptional uncertainty, both economic and institutional.Footnote 24 The studies collected here describe not only situations of economic stress due to structural change but also the disruptive effects of socio-institutional changes, including revolutions (Aurora Gómez Galvarriato) and continental blockade during the Napoleonic period (Ida Fazio). Moreover, political and institutional changes are not immune to generating economic upheavals. We have chosen to focus on economic responses, even if they were never the sole form of response. Forms of economic resilience can be effectively carried on through the mobilisation of social relations or the implementation of political lobbying or trade union movements.
2. Reaction to crisis, varieties of responses
The variety of responses to economic crises or exceptional moments of institutional breakdown presented here shed light on two main points highlighted by the recent social science literature on crises: on the one hand, the relative rapidity of responses (coping must be prompt to be effective); and on the other, the complex interaction between the individual and the family in the formulation of these responses. These points hold true for past and contemporary times. The study of economies such as that of the Aeolian Islands at the beginning of the nineteenth century or the silk industry in eighteenth-century Lyon, where the artisanal dimension was predominant, illustrates the complementary nature of the multiple activities engaged in by households. In the first case, pluriactivity was complemented by new forms of illicit trafficking, while in the second case, family micro-activities compensated for decreasing incomes through illicit recycling of silk threads. The approach adopted in both cases by the authors is resolutely micro-historical.
Among the numerous studies that have addressed the issue of coping with crisis in economics, sociology and history, the macro-analytical level is largely predominant. The impact of crises at the micro-analytical scale is much less known. The focus in some of the case studies we present is on the household and on collective responses in regions with different levels of industrialisation and go, as far as possible, in depth into the economic activities of the household. From this perspective, the main goal of the articles is to go inside the family economy ‘black box’ and to observe the choices and organised responses of adaptive families when faced with a radical change in their economic and institutional environment.Footnote 25 Even the contributions that adopt a broader scale, namely those by Gómez Galvarriato and Solà et al., still bring in the micro-level, whether through examples or comparisons with other research.
Why this focus on family production units in specific and localised areas? If we consider crisis not as a simple reversal of the economic cycle, but as a moment of systemic change, the importance of a micro-analytical approach in the study of this phenomenon becomes evident.Footnote 26 Normal compensation mechanisms and usual forms of redistribution become inadequate in times of crisis, forcing actors to rethink economic assets and adapt or develop new economic activities in the face of huge changes to economic and social systems. From this micro-level perspective, the analysis of reactions to crisis covers the whole range of actors, including the ability of those at the bottom of the social ladder to cope with crisis. The activities analysed by Ida Fazio for Lipari in Sicily, Aurora Gómez Galvarriato in Mexico, Angels Solà et al. in Manresa and Barcelona or Anne Montenach in Lyon are often those at the lowest rung of the productive and social ladder. In this way, it is possible to closely observe women in particular as individuals with entrepreneurial agency in the family systems in which they operate. The gender perspective in observing the consequences of crisis helps to pay a renewed attention to the inner workings of household-based economies. The ability of both individuals and families to adapt to economic and systemic changes is under scrutiny. This perspective does not, however, imply a return to the notion of separate spheres, quite the contrary. Households are at the heart of the analysis because family businesses lie at the core of the local economies studied here. Of course, macro-economic dynamics affect these micro-level socio-economic contexts. For this reason, this special issue takes a long-term perspective by studying crises over a period from the second half of the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It includes articles which deal with issues related to the globalisation of trade and exchange, as with smuggling in the Mediterranean, or the technological changes affecting tortilla production in Mexico. It also aims, however, to study the micro-systemic crises due to changes in technology, energy sources, communication routes and more in specific economies and local labour markets, as in the case of Manresa, for example.
The questions this special issue aims to address thus connect the individual, family and socio-economic environment levels at which actors operate. What is the impact of these crises on localised household economies? How do their dynamics contribute to constructing, and deconstructing, labour relations in the economies in which they occur? In what ways do the social dynamics that crises create affect the relationships between men and women in the labour market, and within families?
The articles provide fresh answers to these questions, thanks to the wide comparative framework we have adopted, and open up other unforeseen questions about different changes in economic activities or labour organisation, innovation in the forms of remuneration, the emergence of social conflicts such as everyday resistance to guilds and general institutional rules. By taking as case studies a very wide range of urban, rural and island economic spaces, we are able to focus both on institutional responses and the agency of different social groups in coping with crisis. In some ways, we could say that crisis could also be conceived by some actors as an opportunity. To an extent, this was the case in Manresa and Barcelona. While the silk crisis led to an intensification of women's work, it could also be argued that women took advantage of this market opportunity.
Finally, it should be noted that adaptive strategies, showing active resilience, were implemented by large enterprises, but also by small employers and self-employed workers whose independence increased during crises. The emergence of new activities implies a reframing of labour markets due to new supply and demand at different productive scales. The decrease in the number of occupied workers or the dislocation of silk industrial and commercial networks in Catalonia generated multiple and different responses depending on the initial context: large-scale cotton production in Barcelona or niche small-scale ribbon manufactures in Manresa. While in other contexts individual, family or collective migration has been a form of response to crisis, in the articles presented here, other forms of adaptation to breakdown are evident. Illicit practices during crisis introduce a form of flexibility into highly regulated economies. In Mexico, responses to crises involved the adaptation of the family economy and the mobilisation of new resources, but at considerable cost in terms of working time and family exploitation in the small-scale production of tortillas.
While it is clear that actors' responses to these crises varied according to the local institutional framework and economic development (but also according to human capital and education; personal qualifications and skills, age, marital status, individual and family income levels), it is also clear that family and parental networks have played a crucial counterbalancing function. Significantly, even today in developing countries, it has been noted that ‘crises' impacts and coping responses impose severe hardship, and the main safety nets for most people are relatives, friends and mutual solidarity groups.Footnote 27 Not only do parents or relatives help in economic activities, but they can also provide care support for women who continue to be active and are forced to work longer hours or even to leave for long-distance migrations.Footnote 28 Assistance from spouses or children, especially girls, was crucial in silk and tortilla family workshops in response to institutional upheaval and in a phase of technological transition that was slow in being implemented effectively. What is clear is that the changes induced by the crises, including illicit coping activities, could have a long existence and eventually transform themselves into established economic practices, albeit in ways that were not always predictable.
