World-historical analyses often view the “Asian” empires that survived into the twentieth century (the Russian, Qing, and Ottoman empires) as anomalies: sovereign “archaic” formations that remained external to the capitalist system. They posit an antagonistic relationship between state and capital and assume that modern capitalism failed to emerge in these empires because local merchants could not take over their states, as they did in Europe. Ottoman economic actors, and specifically the sarraf as state financier, have accordingly been portrayed as premodern intermediaries serving a “predatory” fiscal state, and thus, as external to capitalist development. This article challenges these narratives by uncovering the central role of Ottoman sarrafs, tax-farmers, and other merchant-financiers in the expanding credit economy of the mid-nineteenth century, focusing on their investment in the treasury bonds of Damascus. I show how fiscal change and new laws on interest facilitated the expansion of credit markets while attempting to regulate them by distinguishing between legitimate interest and usury. I also discuss Ottoman efforts to mitigate peasant indebtedness and the abuse of public debt by foreigners, amid the treasury bonds’ growing popularity. In this analysis, global capitalism was forged in the encounter between Ottoman imperial structures, geo-political concerns, and diverse, interacting traditions of credit, while the boundaries between public and private finance were being negotiated and redefined. Ultimately, Ottoman economic policies aimed to retain imperial sovereignty against European attempts to dominate regional credit markets—efforts often recast by the latter as “fanatical” Muslim resistance.

The academic imprint of Susan Strange, long considered a pioneer in the field of IPE, no longer resonates with contemporary debates about the organization and structure of the global political economy. We argue that her analytical framework continues to be a productive way to think about important current developments, most importantly in relation to what can now be called the digital age and its emergent form of capitalism. We therefore modify and update Strange’s framework to highlight its unique analytical potential, and to set out the operational principles of what we want to call a ‘neo-Strangean’ framework of authority. We then apply it to what Strange identifies as the finance or credit structure. By focusing on a core domain of political-economic power, we demonstrate our principal claim that a neo-Strangean framework of authority points towards an understanding of how new actors and imperatives are reshaping the global political economy. We close by outlining the analytical benefits that a neo-Strangean research agenda promises for the field of IPE, which for us centre on emphasizing the dynamics and disruptive consequences of a knowledge-infused global political economy in a way that pays sufficient attention to ideational and material factors.

Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in China often struggle to secure loan financing. In response, the government has required banks to increase credit for MSMEs and incorporate digital technologies into traditional credit evaluation models. In 2018, the state introduced “credit easy loan” digital lending platforms under its social credit system to facilitate collateral-free loans for MSMEs in a bid to enhance financial inclusion and social trust. Meanwhile, the actual implementation of these initiatives remains understudied. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how “packaging agencies” act as intermediaries in preparing and “beautifying” bank loan applications. These agencies may manipulate credit data and leverage close relationships (guanxi) to help clients obtain loans, while banks may tacitly approve their practices to fulfil their financial inclusion requirements. Through such processes and in a supposedly digitalized system, a single MSME loan multiplied into ten loans, large companies became small businesses, and one housewife became a creditworthy microentrepreneur.

This study examines the credit market in seventeenth-century Stockholm, a rapidly growing city whose credit market is an early example of a market with both private and institutional actors. Using a sample of 1,500 probate inventories from 1679 to 1708, we focus on the practices and experiences of municipal and state servants, and we examine in detail the probate inventories of employees of the royal court. The latter group had their wages paid by the king in a world where being in arrears was the norm, and their spatial and social proximity to the Bank of the Estates made them potential pioneers in the movement towards an institutionalized and formalized capital market. The credit market has a mixed character, both in terms of the opportunities available to investors and in terms of their behavior. For people with a surplus of cash and good connections, money lending could be a way to increase their income. The court servants and many others moved seamlessly between institutional and private, as well as formal and informal, credit. The article shows that wage earners and state servants were central to the transformation of the early modern credit market. For them, the credit market and the bank offered investment opportunities that matched their skills and circumstances.

In a monetary model based on Lagos and Wright (2005) where unsecured credit and money are used as means-of-payments, we analyze how the cost and quality of the record-keeping technology affect welfare. Specifically, monitoring agents’ debt repayment is costly but is essential to the use of unsecured credit because of limited commitment. To finance this cost, fees on credit transactions are imposed, and the maximum credit limit that is incentive compatible depends on such fees and monitoring level. Alternatively, the use of money avoids such costs. A higher credit limit does not necessarily improve welfare, especially when the limit is high: the benefit from increased trade surpluses from a higher credit limit is offset by the increased cost of monitoring to achieve the improvement. Moreover, under the optimal arrangement, optimal credit limit decreases with the marginal cost of monitoring. When the cost is sufficiently low, a pure credit equilibrium is optimal. When the marginal cost is high, it is optimal to have a pure-currency economy. But when the cost is at an intermediate level, we show that credit is sustainable but not socially optimal. In this range, the implementable credit limit leads to a higher trade surplus than in a pure monetary economy, but owing to the cost of operating the record-keeping system, social welfare in credit equilibrium is lower than the welfare in a pure monetary equilibrium. In addition, we show that there can be a non-monotonic relationship between the optimal record-keeping level and the optimal credit limit.

This article develops a pragmatic theory of finance in which markets are considered to be centres of communicative action in the face of uncertainty. This contrasts with the conventional approach that portrays markets as centres of strategic action in the face of scarcity. The argument follows Habermas and entails that a financial market must address the truthfulness, truth, and rightness of the statements made by its participants (i.e., the prices quoted). I claim that these discursive norms have been implicit in historical financial markets as expressed in the norms of sincerity, reciprocity, and charity. I conclude by proposing that ‘trust’ in commerce is a synthesis of the three discursive norms. The motivation of the article is to address the crisis of legitimacy that the financial system is experiencing, particularly in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US).

This article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky's work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. The article ends with brief reflections on the role of easy credit and hard cash in the surprising survival of neo-liberal economic and political regimes since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis became evident.

Money is neither a thing nor a concept. Rather, as many writers have rightly suggested, money is a relation. But what kind of relation? This articles refuses the now seemingly common-sense notion that money is an ‘institution’ or a ‘public good’. Instead, it insists on specifying money as a concrete relation between creditor and debtor. To grasp money in both its practical and conceptual complexity, we must see it as an array. The money array is comprised of four elements: (1) a token that symbolizes the money relation; (2) a creditor who holds the token; (3) a debtor on whom the token makes a claim; (4) a denomination, i.e., the named quantity of credit/debt. The money array makes clear that no form of the money stuff - as money, i.e., as part of the money relation - ever possesses any positive, intrinsic value. The raison d’être of the money stuff - of any coin, note, bill, check, or digital token - is not to contain, have, or incarnate value. Money has no value. The value element of the money relation never lies in the money stuff, but rather can only be located across the entire money array.

In 1963, a young French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, together with two assistants—Luc Boltanski and Jean-Claude Chamboredon—conducted the first sociological study of the credit practices of a major French bank, entitled “The Bank and Its Customers”. This article discusses the context, the findings and the legacy of this study. First, the article sketches the landscape of the emerging mass credit market in France in the early 1960s. Then, the paper summarizes and analyses the report itself. We also demonstrate how bank-customer interactions and credit continued to be a subject of interest for Bourdieu throughout his subsequent career. Finally, the paper seeks to contribute to comparative research on the varieties of national configurations of private indebtedness in relation to the level of development of the welfare state.

This article identifies new pathways for integrating African perspectives into debates about the historical relationship between slavery and capitalism. It focuses extensively on the work of African historian Joseph C. Miller (1939–2019), whose concept of “ethno political economics” combined ethnographic and quantitative data and offered a new perspective on Atlantic World history. Building on theorizations of early twentieth-century scholars W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, and others, Miller's analysis foregrounded the simultaneously local and global processes of credit expansion, commercialization, and labor exploitation as foundational to the consolidation of early modern capitalism.