In the framework of the Research Project Transnational Monetary & Economic Alternatives in the Interwar Politics. The 30s Greek Crisis in European Context, hosted by the Academy of Athens and financed by the HFRI is planned to hold seminar meetings on 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 presentation’s theme will focus on the different forms taken by indebtedness in rural societies throughout the modern and contemporary period (between the 15^th  and mid-20^th  centuries). A period marked in Western Europe, by a slow, partial monetisation. It is a growing but irreversible concrete economic life, which affects all populations in Western Europe, and especially the peasantry attached and accustomed to self-sufficiency. This indebtedness in Western Europe is linked to three main causes the rise in the price of foodstuffs, which affected 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 was 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, such as precarious sharecroppers and settlers, and agricultural products intended for marketing. In many regions of the Mediterranean, where these cash crops as wheat, oil and silk are developing, the practice of early sales developing is observed. During the year of future harvests, in exchange for the advances received for seeds, food, taxes, essential expenses, which allowed merchants, but also owners and lords to acquire at a price very favourable for them set by the authorities the very day after the harvest the majority of the production, was concentrated for them all of the profits of its marketing, and deferred two or three months later the balance of the unpaid debt, based on a much higher price. This system, the short term credit tends to be generalised 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 was introduced to frame and moralise the anticipated sales of peasant producers to merchants in the most commercialised sectors of agriculture, thus taking on a new dimension to social categories ("bourgeois" and aristocratic), who were not directly involved in the agricultural production. Denounced in the 18^th century for its negative effects on the economy, which at the same time became increasingly difficult to reform, until its abolition during the first years of the 19^th century.

From this point of view, 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 commercialisation), that of work and that of credit, but also the forms and methods of circulation of money, real or fiduciary.

POSTER

PRESS RELEASE