Antonio and Shylock: Credit and Trust in France, C. 1680-C. 1780

Abstract

Previous work has shown how credit permeated society from top to bottom and in Ancien Regime dictionnaires, definitions of the word credit insist on the fact that credit was based on power, gift, or obligation (with the exception of the relationship between merchants), more than on a fair recompense for the time and risk involved. Taking examples from different social groups, the article attempts to analyse the economic and social logic behind credit in order to understand better the way in which social relationships impacted upon credit and affected how trust was established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.