Acceso usuarios
Hamburg, Freie und Hansestadt, Alemania
As Fernand Braudel points out, in the Early Modern period, credit as such was ubiquitous, at least if one accounts for the way transactions were undertaken amongst merchants in very specific networks. However, money markets took a bit of time to develop, and their expansion was uneven across Europe, as finance implied radically new ways of understanding value. Braudel points to a north-western dispersion of financial practises in the Early Modern period, beginning around the thirteenth century. “As time went on,” he writes, “the money market moved towards Holland, and later London.” 1 Regarding the development of money markets, “[w]hat was universal […] was the emergence of people willing to advance funds, and of networks of money lenders […]. Every time we come across any information about this, usury appears to be alive and well; and this was true of every civilization in the world” (ibid.). The uneven development of money markets – and the fi- nancial instruments and know-how that accompany them – also comes with different attitudes about what constitutes economic value. In what follows, I will suggest that literary texts are partic- ularly relevant for economic history precisely because they empha- size economic value as a social negotiation.
