In the growing and dynamic economy of nineteenth-century America, businesses sold vast quantities of goods to one another, mostly on credit. This book explains how business people solved the problem of whom to trust--how they determined who was deserving of credit, and for how much. Rowena Olegario traces the way resistance, mutual suspicion, skepticism, and legal challenges were overcome in the relentless quest to make information on business borrowers more accurate and ...
In the growing and dynamic economy of nineteenth-century America, businesses sold vast quantities of goods to one another, mostly on credit. This book explains how business people solved the problem of whom to trust--how they determined who was deserving of credit, and for how much. Rowena Olegario traces the way resistance, mutual suspicion, skepticism, and legal challenges were overcome in the relentless quest to make information on business borrowers more accurate and available.
With great originality, Rowena Olegario brings together a wide variety of sources and weaves them into a compelling story about embedding trust and transparency in American business. All in all, this is a superb contribution to business history.
1 Mercantile Credit in Britain and America, 1700-1860 13
2 A "System of Espionage": The Origins of the
Credit-Reporting Firm 36
3 Character, Capacity, Capital: How to Be Creditworthy 80
4 Jewish Merchants and the Struggle over Transparency 119
5 Growth, Competition, Legitimacy: Credit Reporting in the Late Nineteenth Century 139
6 From Competition to Cooperation: The Birth of the
Credit Man, 1890-1920 174
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