Abstract
Before banks rose to dominate credit markets, ordinary people raised credit themselves or through alternative intermediaries. However, obtaining a comprehensive overview of the size and functioning of the non-bank segments within the credit market has been a great challenge for historians. Notarial deeds are widely available, but typically shed light on the borrowing of relatively well-to-do members of society. Probate inventories and insolvency records do provide insight into the modest loans of ordinary people, but only haphazardly and not for the overall stock of loans. This article exploits an exogenous shock, the Discipline Act introduced in the Netherlands in 1856, which forced lenders to record all unredeemed loans they had provided to a particular group of borrowers: seafarers. Thec.14,000 loans that were recorded, in combination with several additional sources, provide a unique insight into the overall size, composition and functioning of a particular segment of the non-bank credit market.
Highlights
Before banks rose to dominate credit markets, ordinary people raised credit themselves or through alternative intermediaries
This article exploits an exogenous shock, a law introduced in the Netherlands in, which forced lenders to record all unredeemed loans they had provided to a particular group of borrowers: seafarers.[2]
As the water bailiff was responsible for settling the estates of deceased seafarers, his archive holds many of the original IOUs presented by lenders to claim repayments from the seafarers’ estates
Summary
Before banks rose to dominate credit markets, ordinary people raised credit themselves or through alternative intermediaries. One of the large lenders, Cas Spijker, kept account books and provided receipts for the goods that seafarers purchased.[17] The IOU was pivotal, as it had to be presented to the water bailiff to collect wage payments and to record repayments on.
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