Description
Book SynopsisIn the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, historians have turned with renewed urgency to understanding the economic dimension of historical change. In this collection, nine scholars present original research into the historical development of money and credit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore the social and cultural significance of financial phenomena from a global perspective. Together with an introduction by the editors, chapters emphasize themes of creditworthiness and access to credit, the role of the state in the loan market, modernization, colonialism, and global connections between markets. The first section of the volume, Creditworthiness and Credit Risks, examines microfinancial markets in South India and Sri Lanka, Brazil, and the United States, in which access to credit depended largely on reputation, while larger investors showed a strong interest in policing economic behavior and encouraging thrift among market participants. The second section,
Trade ReviewThe essays that explore creditworthiness and credit risks are the most successfully theorized, in part because this section draws on the existing work on honor and reputation, particularly of Laurence Fontaine. . . This volume is rich in historical insights and provides some common themes. * Pacific Historical Review *
Credit, also known as debt, shapes peoples’ lives and social relations in countless ways, and debt crises have enormous unexplored historical significance. Chia Yin Hsu, Thomas M. Luckett, and Erika Vause open a path for historians into this terrain and demonstrate how the world of global economics connects to the worlds of daily life. -- Mark Metzler, University of Texas at Austin
By embedding credit and finance in their political, social, and cultural contexts, this book allows us to make our understanding of the economy much more complex. Together, the diversity of case studies—ranging from nineteenth-century reactions to bankruptcy in Switzerland to the financial crisis in twentieth-century colonial Zimbabwe—and an analysis that pays attention to the social and political stakes and to the nature of the agency actors can mobilized in very different historical contexts, offer ways to understand better the making of economic decisions which, finally, is what truly matters. -- Laurence Fontaine, Centre Maurice Halbwachs, CNRS-ENS-EHESS Paris
Table of ContentsPart 1: Creditworthiness and Credit Risks Chapter 1: Between Promise and Peril: Credit and Debt at the Pearl Fisheries of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1800, Sam Ostroff Chapter 2: Lenders and Borrowers in a Non-Capitalist Economy: Rio de Janeiro in the Early Nineteenth Century, Mônica Martins Chapter 3: Microfinance and the Progressive Generation, David Hochfelder Part 2: The Loan Market and the State Chapter 4: The Boundaries of Debt: Bankruptcy between Local Practices and Liberal Rule in Nineteenth-Century Switzerland, Mischa Suter Chapter 5: Invention Figures and Imagining Shrubs: Bank Bureaucrats’ Lack of Field Experience in Mexico, 1930s–1940s, Nicole Mottier Chapter 6: Consumer Credit as a Civil Right in America, 1968–1976, Enrico Beltramini Part 3: Money, Commercial Exchange, and Global Connections Chapter 7: Philippine Colonial Money and the Futures of Spanish Empire, Allan E. S. Lumba Chapter 8: Dubious Figures: Speculation, Calculation, and Credibility in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Stock Exchanges, Bryna Goodman Chapter 9: Money and Autonomy in a Settler Colony: The Politics of Monetary Regulation in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1930s–1965, Admire Mseba
