A Differentiated Access to Credit in a Merchant Network in the 1780s (Philadelphia and Its Region)

Louis Bissières ()
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Louis Bissières: Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, IDHES

Chapter Chapter 7 in Credit Networks in The Preindustrial World, 2025, pp 201-233 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Social network analysis (SNA) offers a powerful set of tools to grasp the systems of credit in which economic actors were involved in the early modern period. It can be applied to transactions recorded in account books. This chapter focuses on Levi Hollingsworth who was one of the many Philadelphia merchants that helped connecting American rural consumers to the Atlantic world of goods, through a massive circulation of credit in the end of the eighteenth century. This paper starts with basic considerations about the shape of a merchant network of credit based on transactions drawn from account books. In the second part, I discuss the fact that the position actors held in a merchant network had decisive implications regarding the credit a merchant like Hollingsworth gave them access to. The involvement in a complex commercial structure was a resource in the early modern period. In the third part, I discuss the differentiated use of means of payment to back credit flows. I show that the position in the network affected tendencies to use one means of payment over the other. I discuss how social networks could affect economic behavior, especially showing how trust facilitated credit flows.

Keywords: Merchant networks; Credit; Trust; Means of payment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-3-031-67117-3_7

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-67117-3_7

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