BANKING BEFORE BANKS: FINANCIAL MARKETS, INTERMEDIARIES AND NETWORKS IN A GLOBAL HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Organizers & Chairs (also presenting papers):
Juliette Levy (University of California, Riverside)
Christiaan van Bochove (Radboud University)
Discussant: Gale Triner and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal

This session asks how non-bank financial intermediaries and social networks have contributed to the development of financial activity across history. The scholars in this session all study financial intermediaries and social networks that, that solved similar financial problems in the absence, or alongside, banks across time and place,. This exploration into the alternatives to formal banking practices is still very new and highly regionalized – this session will allow an important conversation across fields.

The work presented here will demonstrate how financial intermediaries helped solve problems that we now associate with the fundamental functions provided by banks, challenging in this way the historical literature on financial markets that has privileged banks as a prerequisite for economic development. This session will show how different local contexts, such as the type of government (absolute or representative), religion (e.g. Christian or Muslim), legal context (e.g. Common Law, Roman Law, Shari’a), and level of urbanization, ethnic homogeneity and wealth inequality underscore the logic of a variety of financial arrangements in history.

This session invites scholars from a wide spectrum of disciplines and regions to participate in exploring these issues. The session as it stands already brings together scholars on Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East from institutions in the Americas and Europe to understand who became an intermediary and why; what different intermediaries had in common with each other; what overarching incentives and mechanisms drove their participation in markets; and how and why their services changed over time. Our intention is to bring to light cross and trans-regional patterns in historical financial development.

The following scholars have already committed to the session:

Christiaan van Bochove (Radboud University) and Ewout Hasken (Radboud University), Matching supply and demand on the Dutch mortgage market during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Elise Dermineur (Uppsala University / Umeå University)
Informal Credit Networks in Pre-Industrial France

Juliette Levy (University of California, Riverside) and Graciela Márquez Colín (Colegio de México)
Unexpected interest: credit unions in nineteenth century Mexico

Casey Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Community Accountability: Municipal Courts and Micro-lending in 19th Century Mexico

Cyril Milhaud (Paris School of Economics)
Interregional flows of long-term mortgage credit in eighteenth-century Spain. To what extent was the market fragmented?

Sofia Murhem (Uppsala University) and Göran Ulväng (Uppsala University)
Church Endowments used for Credit in 18th and 19th century rural Sweden

Maanik Nath (London School of Economics)
A Legal Approach to Moneylending: Credit Contracts in Rural Madras 1930-1960

Kirsten Wandschneider (Occidental College)
Rural Credit in Nineteenth Century Prussia: Comparing Pfandbrief Prices

Christie Swanepoel (University of Western Cape) and Aaron Graham (University College London)
Imperial banks in South Africa in the nineteenth century: Did networks affect the success of these banks?