Goods at Pawn
Anne E. C. McCants
The pawnshop was a critical component of urban credit networks in early modern Europe, serving as source ready cash an era before there widespread access to deposit banking and formal consumer loans. This article examines the use pawnshop, among other financial strategies, such shop loans between kin neighbors, by sample poor middling citizen households eighteenth-century Amsterdam. It also evaluates multiple links behavior acquisition either savings or debt. Petty from came at high price, its presumed prior goods suitable for pawning. Thus we find that poorest did not rely on often extensively their better-situated peers whom collateral more easily obtained. Better-situated enjoyed easier credit, terms which were favorable consumer. None these households, however, positions save extent necessary participation larger capital markets Amsterdam world.
Social Science History