The Circulation of Codes and Commerce

Abstract

This chapter uses the Bado family’s commercial activities to capture how local actors engaged with the increasingly diverse array of commercial instruments in use in the globalizing economy. Through the use of state-sponsored institutions to secure and promote their investments, local actors built these institutions into meaningful and durable parts of the economy. Making use of running tabs at general stores, small short term loans registered at the local court, advance contracts for coffee, and long term mortgage-backed loans, people across the economic spectrum came in contact with and made use of liberal commercial reforms. In so doing, they created a liberal economic vernacular to govern quotidian transactions. The chapter also emphasizes the increasing material and institutional integration of the region into the global economy and shows how the expansion of the global economy relied on local actors’ engagement with and interpretation of its essential institutions.