Beyond Banks: A Global History of Credit Markets and Intermediation

by Christiaan van Bochove (Editor), Juliette Levy (Editor)

Overview

Scholars of credit markets have long focused on banks, but pre-modern as well as modern economies often relied on non-bank credit. This edited volume brings together international examples from across history that highlight how guilds, innkeepers, moneylenders, notaries, networks of family members and friends, and religious institutions – among others – mobilized credit before and even along banks. The volume operationalizes a common terminology and set of questions to allow for comparisons between the wide range of bank and non-bank credit arrangements across the globe and across time.​ It will be of interest to financial and economic historians, economists, and many other scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031758188
Publisher:	Springer Nature Switzerland
Publication date:	03/31/2025
Series:	Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance
Edition description:	2025
Pages:	379
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Christiaan van Bochove is associate professor of economic and social history at Utrecht University. He is interested in how financial markets provided their functions when banks were either absent or not serving the majority of society. His research focuses on early modern and modern financial markets in the Netherlands and has been published, among others, in The Journal of Economic History and The Economic History Review.

Juliette Levy is associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside and affiliated faculty at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE) in Mexico, where she co-directs MX.digital, a data digitization project of historical Mexican statistics. Her research explores pre-banking forms of finance and credit in Latin America. Her book The Making of a Market: Credit, Henequen, and Notaries in Yucatán, 1850-1900 was published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2012.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Beyond Banks: An Introduction Christiaan van Bochove, Juliette Levy.- Chapter 2: The Decline of a Great Financial Intermediary: Notaries in France, 1851-1934 Philip Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal.- Chapter 3: Financial Intermediation in Colonial 17th- and 18th-Century Buenos Aires: Credit, Trust, and Asymmetric Information Martín Wasserman.- Chapter 4: A Network Analysis of Credit Transactions at the Cape Colony During the 18th Century Christie Swanepoel.- Chapter 5: An Enslaved Credit Market: Slavery, Deeds, and Litigation in 19th-Century Rio de Janeiro’s Financial Landscape Clemente Penna.- Chapter 6: From Peer-to-Peer Credit to Banks: A Study of Credit Networks in Uppsala (1810-1910) Elise M. Dermineur.- Chapter 7: Consumer Credit in Early Modern Venice: The Lending Activity of Innkeepers and Bastioneri Matteo Pompermaier.- Chapter 8: Lender Classifications and Contracts: Categorization in The All-India Surveys (1951-2012) and Evidence From the Account Books of a Moneylender in Rajasthan (1982-2015) J. Howard M. Jones.- Chapter 9 : Sacré Crédit! The Rise and Fall of Ecclesiastical Credit in Early Modern Spain Cyril Milhaud.- Chapter 10: Banking Before Banks in Early Modern Japan: Buddhist Temple Finance Matthew Mitchell.- Chapter 11: Ottoman Guilds as Credit-Providing Institutions From the Late 17th to the Early 19th Century Konstantinos Giakoumis.