A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business

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. In the process, a business system based largely on information circulating through personal networks became dependent on more formalized methods and institutions. First to appear in the 1830s was the credit repo...