Preliminary Programme

Jenny Lind (1820-1887) was a giant celebrity soprano in Europe and North America. ”The Swedish Nightingale”, was our nation’s first international musical celebrity. Like ABBA of our time. Equally financially successful. Like the ABBA members she was a modest person. It was probably the memories from her poor upbringing in Stockholm that made her donate such a large part of her fortune to charity. Her tale has been written by a plethora of biographers. A picture emerges of an extremely competent singer who managed her position in the spotlight successfully but who still, generally, disliked the attention – the ‘Lindomania’ - that followed her everywhere. Her goal was to make as much money as possible in a short time in order to retire. However, she believed that she owed God, who gave her the gift of being able to sing, to use her talent to help fellow humans in need. After a very successful and ground-breaking tour of the United States - organized by P. T. Barnum – she continued singing in concerts and oratorios in Europe often for the sole purpose of charity. Information on her earnings and abundant donations to charities appear scattered over many thousands of biography pages. The purpose of this study is to filter out this kind of secondary information and add what has been found as primary information in a few archives in order to create a condensed rendering of incomes and donations. Jenny Lind was thought of as a very wealthy woman. Can this be substantiated by the actual numbers? She was also held as a great benefactor. How did she use her fortune? (Show less)

I discuss the development of ‘modern’ banking in core Ottoman lands during the latter half of the nineteenth century and present evidence showing considerable local financial sophistication prior to European entry around 1856. Drawing on the ‘constitutional commitment’ literature, I maintain its success was related to enhanced security of life and property European financial ties provided to Ottoman decision-makers. I argue international relations substituted missing domestic institutions. I describe the conflictual process ending around 1900, with the domination of Ottoman capital markets by European banks, particularly the Banque Impériale Ottomane, or BIO. The competition pitting the BIO against ethnically based local banking networks opens a different window into the economic and fiscal occurrences of that epoch. I consider the role of London-based ‘South African Gold Panic of Autumn 1895’ and its interactions with the unfolding ‘Armenian Crisis’ of Istanbul and Anatolia in bringing about this final outcome. (Show less)

How did poor people make ends meet in a world of scarce resources, unsecure employment and sporadic income? How to access credit when there was no guarantee to offer? This paper explores credit allocation to the rural poor in pre-industrial France. In rural areas, landed property constituted the main access to credit. Most notarial loans such as annuity contracts were backed with land. In this context, landless dwellers often could only count on their social capital to locate available funds and enter credit markets. Poor borrowers’ reputation and honesty but also other villagers’ solidarity allowed the poorest members of the community to enter the credit market and borrow. In addition, in the absence of charitable institutions such as the Mont de Piété, solidarity between villagers often constituted the only access door to credit for the poorest households of the community.
This paper aims first at identifying and defining the rural poor in pre-industrial France. Secondly, it highlights the rural poor strategies in locating available credit funds in local communities. It aims to analyze the various credit networks the poor entered, as well as the purpose and extent of such loans. Finally, this paper pays special attention to the social norms at work in the allocation of credit to the poor. I am interested in the moral economy mechanisms at work with reference to solidarity, fairness, and cooperation. Notarial loans are used to measure the poor exclusion from institutionalized credit. And probate inventories help to identify the poorest members of the community. But these probates also help us to reconstruct the network of informal and formal lending within the community highlighting the poor’s strategies in credit allocation. (Show less)

Access to capital markets requires an entrance that intermediaries may offer. Intermediaries helped to overcome information asymmetries between potential investors and sovereigns on foreign capital markets. Much less is known about the channels used by smaller domestic players. The Dutch case offers an intriguing hybrid situation due to its federal state structure. The jurisdiction concerning taxation and legal matters remained the prerogative of the Seven Provinces individually. Yet they acted as one country in the international arena. In the eighteenth century, the Amsterdam capital market was served many foreign states in Europe. What its position was for other Dutch lenders, outside of the province of Holland remains largely obscured. This paper analyses how other polities within the Dutch Republic tried to benefit from Holland’s capital abundance. More specifically it studies how borrowers communicated with the market. The Dutch province of Friesland developed a communication strategy about payments with remarkable success during the eighteenth century. This paper scrutinized newspaper advertisements placed by the provincial exchequers throughout that century. This is an important period because the province defaulted in 1711. After a moratorium, the effective coupon was halved. Based on a database 230 newspaper advertisements it shows that from 1720 the province paid the overdue interest consistently slow. By paying it so consistently, albeit overdue for several years, appears to have built some form of trust of the course of the century. This is all too remarkable, because it never settled the default until after the Dutch Republic’s dissolution in 1795. In this process the role of innkeepers was crucial. They developed from facilitators into middlemen providing various services that smoothed the relation between lenders and borrowers. (Show less)