State credit and foreign debt in the early nineteenth century: contradictory representations of a renovated scenario

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article aims at presenting the main elements of a cultural transformation concerning debt and credit that took place in Europe and the Americas in the early nineteenth century. It describes the main changes in the international financial institutions and mechanisms, and connects them to the development of a new literature that discussed old and new concepts concerning finances. It introduces positive and negative discourses in relation to credit and debt, and their political meaning, that were born and popularised mainly in the British, French and Spanish public spaces, between the 1820s and the 1850s.