This study demonstrates the existence of a private, informal and lively credit
market in rural Sweden during the 1840s, a period that predates the development
of a modern banking system. The market, mainly based on private promissory
notes, was concentrated in the hands of a limited number of wealthy farmers who
specialized in lending, They facilitated access to credit to well-off farmers,
regardless of whether they owned their farms or leased taxed land. By using
information from probate inventories, the article analyses the wealth portfolio
and characteristics of the lending business of the largest creditors
(‘parish bankers’) in a judicial district of southern Sweden in
1841–5. The heart and soul of their business was an intimate knowledge of
borrowers’ creditworthiness and mutual trust, as typical of local credit
networks. The article also explores the existence of an intergenerational
transmission of parish banking business – a dimension of private lending
that opens an original path of research on local credit markets in early modern
Europe.
Parish banking in informal credit markets: the business of private
lending in early nineteenth-century Sweden
