Gender, Credit and Rethinking (Economic) History

In the last twenty years the expansion of credit has become a major theme in the meta-narrative of the transformation of the early modern economy. Credit fuelled long-distance trade, the expansion of commercial enterprises large and small, the consumer revolution, and state formation. In this narrative, the rise of borrowing is generally regarded as a positive and essential element of the sets of practices associated with the transition to capitalism (such as the financial revolution or the legal sureties provided by contracts). And in this telling, it is traditionally implicitly, although rarely explicitly, gendered, as historians took it for granted that for legal and other reasons men rather than women participated actively in these new credit structures.

In the last decade or so, however, gender has emerged as an important component of the early modern credit revolution as attention to practice has shown that married and single women as well as men accessed credit in a variety of forms as borrowers as well as lenders. Historical studies of England and Spain as well as my own work on France have shown that married women were able to borrow money independently, despite the legal restrictions of coverture. While many of these loans were informal and in many respects extra-legal, even courts upheld this ability and the responsibility of married women as borrowers. Moreover, women’s reputations and their ability to borrow depended not on their chastity but on their standing as commercial actors, just as men’s did. This dynamic has been demonstrated in a wide variety of settings and among many social groups. Craig Muldrew and Alexandra Shepard have respectively analyzed credit in terms of women and masculinity in seventeenth-century England while Scott Taylor has explored the role of borrowing as a key component of honour for men and women in seventeenth-century Castile. For early modern France, I have demonstrated that both spouses in working families in Lyon might mobilize elaborate constellations of credit, while Clare Crowston has shown the gendering of the economic and political at the highest levels in Paris, where Queen Marie Antoinette and her fashion designer, Rose Bertin, became embroiled in scandal over their relationship.¹

Clare Crowston’s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France, an ambitious and impressive intervention that seeks to expand this debate, argues that the centrality of credit and gender went far beyond economic matters. We have long known that credit meant reputation as well as ability to borrow in early modern Europe. Crowston extends this to argue that ‘credit was one of the most important concepts people had in Old Regime France to comprehend the dynamics of their lives’ (p. 1). More than simply an indicator of reputation and ability to borrow, credit for Old Regime subjects marshalled the intertwined domains of economy, politics, society and culture (p. 2). In framing credit in this wide-ranging fashion, Crowston builds on the pioneering work of Craig Muldrew, who in his The Economy of Obligation fifteen years ago emphasized credit as a social and communicative system in early modern England (p. 2).

Credit, Fashion, Sex explores the world of late eighteenth-century Parisian fashion merchants as a window into larger questions about the intertwining of economic, political, social and cultural issues. Crowston in fact contends that ‘Credit constituted the common sense of the Old Regime’ (p. 16): not only was it a ubiquitous register for the way power worked in all kinds of areas of life but this was so evident to contemporaries of all social ranks that there was no need to spell it out.

The argument is pursued along two tracks. The first half of the book interrogates the many uses of the word ‘credit’ in print, identified through the now widely available databases of Old Regime material, as a way to establish the many contexts in which capital was used. The second half focuses on the Parisian fashion merchants who emerged in the later...