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 2017

Length of book:

330 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

235x161mm
6x9"

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.

Chapter 1: Finance in the Middle Ages and the Scholastic Tradition
Chapter 2: Credit and Faith in Medieval Iberia: The Road not Taken
Chapter 3: Early European Finance 1050–1650
Chapter 4: Transcending Feudal Finance in Western Europe
Chapter 5: Mercantile Credit and the Atlantic Slave Trade
Chapter 6: Chayanov, Marx, and hidden interests in Rural Morocco
Chapter 7: Ethnicity and Social Capital in 1970s Sefrou
Chapter 8: Problematizing Modern Consumer Credit
Chapter 9: An Anthropology of the 2008 Credit Crisis
Conclusion: Hidden Interests and the Development of Finance

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.