In the framework of the Research Project Transnational Monetary & Economic Alternatives in the Interwar Politics. The 30s Greek Crisis in European Context, hosted in the Academy of Athens and financed by the HFRI is planned to hold seminar meetings under the general thematic Currency, crises, representations of money and of economy, in order to discuss the research results as well as to include new perspectives, which will enrich the research hypothesis. TransMonEA seminar meetings are also conducted in correlation to the project’s milestones. 

Maurice Aymard, Research Director, CRH - EHESS

Money, credit and debt in rural world: brief description
The theme of the presentation will focus on the different forms taken by indebtedness in rural societies throughout the modern and contemporary period (between the 15th and mid-20th centuries): a period marked in Western Europe, by a slow, partial monetization, growing but irreversible concrete economic life which affects all populations, but especially the peasantry attached and accustomed to self-sufficiency. This indebtedness is linked to three main causes in Western Europe: the rise in the price of foodstuffs, which affects the purchases of food products, the growing fiscal pressure of States to face the costs of the war, and the costs of generations reproduction (settlement of dowries, inheritance). It is further aggravated by the multifaceted usurious practices of creditors. These practices relate to three main factors: peasant land, through mortgages and foreclosures, work itself through the aggravation of the work obligations required, for example, from precarious sharecroppers and settlers, and agricultural products intended for marketing. In many regions of the Mediterranean where these cash crops such as wheat, oil and silk are developing, we see the practice of early sales developing during the year of future harvests, in exchange for the advances received for seeds, food, taxes, essential expenses, which will allow merchants, but also owners and lords to acquire at a price very favorable for them, set by the authorities the very day after the harvest, the majority of the production, to concentrate for them all the profits of its marketing, and to defer two or three months later the balance of the unpaid debt, on the basis of a much higher price. This system, the short term credit, even tends to be generalized to serve as a basis, in the middle and upper strata of society, for all operations: six months for wheat, followed by six months for oil, and so on. Consequently, the price of these products the day after the harvest actually sets the current interest rate for this type of credit. The system introduced to frame and moralize the anticipated sales of peasant producers to merchants in the most commercialized sectors of agriculture thus takes on a new dimension to extend to social categories ("bourgeois" and aristocratic) not directly involved in the agricultural production. Denounced in the 18th century for its negative effects on the economy, at the same time it became increasingly difficult to reform, and remained as a necessary ‘’evil’’, until its abolition during the first years of the 19th century.
Seen from this angle, the peasant debt appears as a key to understanding, from the inside, the functioning of the different markets: that of land (to buy or sell, or to rent), that of products (according to their degrees of commercialization), that of work and that of credit, but also the forms and methods of circulation of money, real or fiduciary.

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