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SUMMARY:Archaic Lending or Precocious Financialization? Spanish American F
 inance to 1800 - Regina Grafe (Cambridge)
DTSTART:20241107T171500Z
DTEND:20241107T184500Z
UID:TALK222193@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:116791
DESCRIPTION:Economic Historians have long assumed that colonial Spanish Am
 erican finance was poorly developed. 19th and 20th century fiscal and fina
 ncial woes of Spanish American societies were read as part of a colonial l
 egacy that weighed on former Spanish colonies from their moment of Indepen
 dence (1808-20s). A sizeable theoretical literature has offered possible c
 ausal links between colonial rule and poorly developed financial intermedi
 ation pointing primarily pointed to a lack of secure property rights and r
 esulting transaction costs issues. This paper seeks to propose an alternat
 ive explanatory path. It discusses the existence of a sui generis financia
 l system that provided cheap and ubiquitous public and private credit. It 
 analyses the subscriptions to one particularly large loan to the public pu
 rse 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 th
 e traditional institutionalist political economy analysis. While the conce
 pt of financialisation is at present poorly theorised\, it helps to ask im
 portant questions about the economic impact of easy credit in colonial Spa
 nish America.
LOCATION:Room 6\, Faculty of History
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