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.