In an article which recently appeared in Social History, Craig Muldrew
has argued that ‘the culture of the early modern market was explicitly
“moral” and not only in “severely dysfunctional years”“.
During the sixteenth century, population growth brought with it a shortage of
currency and a significant increase in trade through barter; moreover, the
scarcity of currency produced an increase in debt or credit relations, which
were based mostly on agreements that were verbal rather than written.
Both tendencies were possible because the parties to credit agreements
knew each other personally, and consequently believed that they could
trust each other; thus, the system was held together by confidence and
trust. In the course of the century, however, the increasing complexity of
the market and the enlargement of exchange areas placed a strain on the
ethical foundations of the market. The alteration can be demonstrated by
the rapid increase in litigation over contracts and debts. Muldrew argued
that markets expanded due to population growth in the sixteenth century,
and that ‘increasingly complex networks of credit transactions were
created’ with the result that ‘the need to maintain trust … [was]
emphasized even more strongly’. But during the period the maintenance
of trust occurred more and more through the intervention of a legal
tribunal, while the cultural norms that directed creditor–debtor relations
altered.According to Muldrew, without more complex arrangements, credit
transactions can spread only in limited social environments in which the
participants share some basic moral principles: people know one another,
they know who can be trusted and who cannot, and they grant extensions
for payments from others because at times they request them for
themselves. Credit relationships are thus ‘embedded’ in a moral economy
that relies on trust, and which rests on respect for agreements guaranteed
by the logic of reciprocity. A growth in the number of transactions and the
development of credit networks, together with the fact that these
agreements are mostly oral ones, however, tends to undermine the
traditional system of trust, forcing the parties to turn to civil justice more
and more frequently.On the basis of the records from Roman archives (where commercial
development occurred early but in a milieu in which the papacy influenced
the economic culture), this study aims to show that the extension and the
very existence of credit networks have to be viewed not only in the
context of currency scarcity but also with regard to the peculiarities of the
pre-industrial economy. To be more precise, in early pre-consumer
societies where transactions were largely unwritten, litigation occurred as
a way of establishing the terms of transactions.
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