Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance
Power, Ethics, and Social Capital across the Last Millennium
By (author) James B. Greenberg University of Arizona, Thomas K. Park
Publication date:
20 September 2017Length of book:
330 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
235x161mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781498545785
In this book, James B. Greenberg and Thomas K. Park take an anthropological approach to the economic history of the past one thousand years and define credit as a potentially transformative force involving inequalities. Traveling through the Mediterranean and Europe, from the medieval period to the modern day, Greenberg and Park reorient financial history and position social capital and ethical thought at its center. They examine the multicultural origins of credit and finance, from banking to credit cards and predatory lending to the collapse of global credit markets in 2007–2008. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, history, economics, religion, and sociology.
This compelling account of the long history of credit and its animating ideas over the past thousand years convincingly shows that the symbolic, moral and social entailments of finance have always sat alongside its abstraction. Excavating the former provides a necessary perspective on the obscurantism and often dangerous persuasiveness, particularly in the present era, of the latter.