Archaic Lending or Precocious Financialization? Spanish American Finance to 1800

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• Regina Grafe (Cambridge)
• Thursday 07 November 2024, 17:15-18:45
• Room 6, Faculty of History.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact gpap3.

Economic Historians have long assumed that colonial Spanish American finance was poorly developed. 19th and 20th century fiscal and financial woes of Spanish American societies were read as part of a colonial legacy that weighed on former Spanish colonies from their moment of Independence (1808-20s). A sizeable theoretical literature has offered possible causal links between colonial rule and poorly developed financial intermediation pointing primarily pointed to a lack of secure property rights and resulting transaction costs issues. This paper seeks to propose an alternative explanatory path. It discusses the existence of a sui generis financial system that provided cheap and ubiquitous public and private credit. It analyses the subscriptions to one particularly large loan to the public purse in the 1770s to zoom in on the functioning of public credit, its link with private finance, the composition of the subscribers, and the role of the merchant corporation. The paper suggests that reading the evidence within a theoretical frame of financialisation may be more helpful than the traditional institutionalist political economy analysis. While the concept of financialisation is at present poorly theorised, it helps to ask important questions about the economic impact of easy credit in colonial Spanish America.

This talk is part of the Core Seminar in Economic and Social History series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Core Seminar in Economic and Social History
• Department of Geography
• Economic and Social History Seminars
• History and Philosophy of Science long list
• Room 6, Faculty of History
• history

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