Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance

Power, Ethics, and Social Capital across the Last Millennium

By (author) James B. Greenberg, Thomas K. Park

Not available to order

Publication date:

20 September 2017

Length of book:

331 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498545792

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 monumental work reminds us that credit and debt are social and personal relationships made up of mutual dependency, ethical obligations, and the distribution of benefits. Park and Greenberg integrate a masterful study of the deeply religious dimensions of economic thought and practice in the Mediterranean and northern Europe over the last two millennia with granular treatments of merchants in Morocco, the Atlantic slave trade, consumer debt in England, and the 2008 financial meltdown. The result is piercing anthropological brilliance that eliminates any shadow of a doubt that social inequality is a social and cultural construction, and provides a range of tools for understanding the particular and general forms that it takes, past and present. The argument that ethical social relations are at the heart of our economy charts a path to a more human engagement with each other and with our planet.