The Main Purpose: Bargaining, Wages, and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Piedmontese Silk Manufacture

In the last few years, economic and gender studies have offered new perspectives of analysis on the history of labor. However, there are still great blanks to be filled, among which the wages, the precariousness, and the gender issues stand out. By presenting a case study on the Kingdom of Sardinia in the eighteenth century, I would like to give my contribution to those open questions. At the end of the seventeenth century, the innovative reeling process “alla piemontese” allowed the raw silk produced in Piedmont to become “thin and rounded”, as Carlo Poni said, appointing the Piedmontese silk industry as the chief provider of raw silk and yarn to the main textile producers in Europe. But what was behind this supremacy? This contribution intends to question the socio-economic dynamics involved in the composition of women workers’ wages in a historical perspective, problematizing the classic definitions of skilled and unskilled labor. Approaching this case study from a micro-historical perspective will also allow us to highlight remuneration dynamics and workplace issues that a quantitative study could hardly highlight.