A Bank for the People: Charitable Credit and the Politics of Finance in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1450–1800

Abstract

This dissertation studies the inception of nonprofit microcredit institutions in the late Middle Ages and their evolution into instruments of early modern state finance. These institutions, called monti di pietà, were initially designed by Franciscan friars in fifteenth-century Italy as sources of low-interest, collateralized loans to the poor and promoted as an alternative to Jewish usury. As they spread throughout Catholic Europe, the Mediterranean, and Latin America, they adopted a wide array of new functions, including managing interest-bearing savings accounts, issuing bonds, and lending to states. Gradually, they became so central to the functioning of the local financial systems that many of them were co-opted by the increasingly centralized and powerful states in which they were based. This dissertation explains how this process unfolded between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, with occasional incursions into the nineteenth century.