Economic historian Victoria Bateman on the flourishing of the women-friendly Persian Empire

By the middle of the first millennium bce, there was a new player on the Mediterranean stage, one that popularised the tradition of celebrating birthdays and introduced desserts after dinner (for which I am personally very thankful). It was woman-friendly Persia (modern-day Iran), and it succeeded in building an empire larger than any the world had previously known, bringing three of the world’s oldest civilisations – Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley – under one umbrella.

And Persia did not stop there. As Persian armies marched towards the Mediterranean, they also swallowed up Lydia and Phoenicia. Phoenician harbours were turned into shipyards for the Persian military, and in around 546 bce King Croesus of Lydia was captured and put to work as the economic advisor to King Cyrus of Persia, rolling out coinage across the Persian Empire. Key to Persia’s success was that it was humble enough to recognise and adopt superior tools, knowledge and ideas. It assimilated the best bits of every society it conquered: not just coinage and seafaring techniques, but also Egyptian dress, which was considered more practical for military uniforms.

Persia’s ‘iron fist’ was contained in a ‘velvet glove’. Rather than expunging local rulers, the Persian king saw himself as the ‘king of kings’, something which enabled a degree of local autonomy. According to the historian Tom Holland, Persian occupation ‘could be compared to a light morning mist … you were aware of it, but it was never obtrusive’.

Altogether, this greater flexibility, compared with previous empires, made the Persian Empire a seemingly unstoppable force. So too did the fact that Persia was not a place in which the talents of half the population were sidelined. Women in Persia lived lives that were much freer than those of Iranian women today. They could own land, start businesses and travel alone. Since its economy was thereby firing on two cylinders, Persia had the financial wherewithal to support its imperial dreams. And, by the fifth century bce, it was at the heart of this empire that King Darius and his son – Xerxes – made plans to conquer Greece.

The Athenians knew that they faced a formidable enemy, leaving them with little choice but to evacuate their beloved city. Women and children – travelling by foot, by ox-cart and by boat – were sent to safety fifty miles away. All able-bodied Athenian men were ordered to make their way to a fleet of new naval vessels, fresh out of the shipyards and paid for – in one of the greatest flukes of history – by a newly discovered silver mine.

As the Persians entered an abandoned Athens, where they sacked the Acropolis and burned the city to the ground, the Greeks waited patiently on their boats as smoke and flames billowed into the night sky. Their hopes were pinned on a desperate but ingenious plan: lulling the Persian fleet into the narrow straits between mainland Greece and the island of Salamis, where the smaller but also more agile Greek boats would have at least some chance of taking on the larger – and more numerous – Persian vessels.

This is an extract from Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power (Headline, £25) by Victoria Bateman. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Victoria Bateman (below) is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday, when she’ll be talking about the history of women in economics.

Thursday 27 November, 6-7pm. Click here to book – it’s FREE to subscribers.

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