Port, a fortified wine produced in the Douro Valley in northern Portugal, is the country’s most famous wine. First shipped to England in the late seventeenth century, port swiftly became the “Englishman’s wine” dominating British wine imports until the mid-nineteenth century. British merchants migrated to Porto, to establish and run businesses as producers and shippers. Historians have largely overlooked this transnational community of merchants, or “Portocracy”, which still exists today. Women associated with the Portocracy can be found in archives, but they have not been the subject of sustained research. They were wives, sisters, daughters, mistresses, and servants to both British businessmen and those crucial to the maintenance of Anglo-Portuguese trade. My research considers ten firms, encompassing some 80 families. I am particularly interested in how the concept of ‘marital economy,’ that is the privileging of the marriage partnership as a fundamental economic relationship, operated in a transnational setting. Historians have not yet studied the effect of migration and legal plurality on the marriage economy. My research goes behind a comparative legal study, considering the economic and legal agency of women when early globalisation imposed plural legal systems.

Fleur Goldthorpe is a PhD Candidate in the School of History and the Centre for Early Modern Studies at ANU. Her research reveals the role of women associated with the British port wine trade from the beginning of the trade to the eve of the Peninsular war in 1807. During her candidature, Fleur’s research earned the 2018 National Council of Women (NSW) Australia History Award and her teaching saw her nominated for a CASS Award for Tutoring Excellence in 2021. An essay on Catherine of Braganza will appear in Later Stuart Queens, 1660–1735: Religion, Political Culture and Patronage (ed. E. Gregory and M. Questier for the Palgrave Macmillan Queenship and Power series).

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