This article documents and analyses monetary reform in Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Romania from 1815 (Serbian autonomy within the Ottoman Empire) to 1910, when Greece became the last country in the region to join the gold standard. It explains the five key steps towards monetary reform which the four countries took in the same chronological order, and asks why national coinage and the foundation of a bank of note issue came late in the reform process. The South-East European countries tried to emulate West European prototypes, yet economic backwardness meant such institutions were often different from the outset, remained short-lived or both.

Both states that constituted the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy issued considerable amounts of perpetual bonds from the 1870s to World War I. These bonds constituted the greater part of the state debt, which was relatively larger in Hungary than in Austria. Movements in bond prices were not uniform for different kinds of securities such as gold bonds, paper bonds and bonds of the common debt of the pre-1867 era. Price movements and movements in the spread between Hungarian and Austrian bond yields followed a stochastic trend. Most fiscal factors such as the share of the state debt, and of state expenses, in GDP, the share of state consumption in overall state expenses, the relation between the debt service and the tax revenues, or the deficit in the state budget, had little or no impact. The conversion of debt instruments reveals a high degree of efficiency on the part of investors. Political crises affected relative price movements in the short run but were unimportant in the context of the middle- and long-term development. Throughout the period, Hungarian bonds as compared to Austrian bonds had lower prices in the Vienna Stock Exchange, suggesting a preference of Viennese investors for domestic securities independently from economic and political circumstances.

This article studies how the emergence of new political elites and changes in land tenure relationships shaped the socio-economic profile of local credit markets in the Ottoman Balkans between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. By using probate inventories and court records for the cities of Salonika (including Karaferye), Vidin and Ruse, I compare how the expansion of tax-farming institutions and the concentration of land ownership influenced the social characteristics of lending activities. I find that, in spite of institutional and political similarities, the evolution of local credit markets did not follow a homogeneous pattern. Contrary to the consensus view in the existing literature, local political and military elites, which most tax farmers and large landowners belonged to, did not play a dominant role as moneylenders. Civilians (such as merchants and artisans) together with other social groups, including janissaries and religious functionaries, provided the bulk of informal credit to local communities (including elites) in the three urban areas.

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.

This article examines perceptions and practices of habitual usury, a crime consisting of lending above the legal rate of interest on multiple occasions, in early nineteenth-century France using descriptions of usury trials found in the popular legal periodical the Gazette des Tribunaux. Following the French Revolution, French law legitimized lending at interest in principle, but punished ‘habitual usurers’ who ‘made a profession’ from lending above the legal limit. The decades that followed witnessed striking growth in banking, joint-stock companies and other financial institutions. Highlighting the connections between cultural constructions of the usurer and the actual processes deemed usurious, this article seeks to understand a paradox: that usury was deemed omnipresent in French society yet it was rarely prosecuted. By examining how habitual usury was defined and prosecuted in French courtrooms, this article shows how habitual usurers both validated and undermined stereotypical notions of predatory lending behavior found in popular culture of the time. Habitual usury trials also reveal the actual practices that allowed those excluded from formal financial networks to participate in the growth of capitalist relations. This article argues that the nineteenth-century obsession with the usurer can be explained by the crucial role played by usurious practices in the credit economy of the period. As such, prosecution of usury tended to focus on the character of the usury rather than the actual practice of illegal lending. This article suggests that by occasionally prosecuting particularly egregious ‘immoral’ moneylenders, the legal system and journals like the Gazette des Tribunaux worked to keep credit accessible to the ‘underbanked’.