Beyond Banks

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.

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 TheMaking of a Market: Credit, Henequen, and Notaries in Yucatán, 1850-1900 was published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2012.