The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe by Laurence Fontaine (review)

At its heart, Laurence Fontaine’s The Moral Economy, which first appeared in French in 2008, is an effort to rescue the past from both those who would dismiss it in a whiggish tale of economic progress and those who would romanticize it in a general critique of capitalism and globalization. Integrating her own extensive work on Europe’s early modern economy with new data from eighteenth century Paris and a comprehensive collection of secondary sources, Fontaine argues against the classic interpretation of a Europe that underwent Karl Polanyi’s “great transformation.” Instead of a progression from an “embedded” moral economy that privileged a host of extra-economic relationships to a capitalist (and later industrial) economy that rejected anything but profit, she uncovers significant and meaningful overlap. Early modern Europe experienced “two economic cultures, each one upholding different values, which existed together, came close to and clashed with each other but also influenced and merged in each other, emerging transformed from these encounters” (6). In the process, she privileges an experience-near approach to poverty and need without sacrificing the insights such data offer to our understanding of a wide array of much larger economic, social, political, and religious structures and practices. The result is a thorough and nuanced representation of the early modern European economy.

Fontaine begins this exploration of the two interacting economic cultures, which she labels “aristocratic” and “merchant,” by explaining the mechanisms that made debt, and thus credit, a ubiquitous experience, common to aristocrats, merchants, and peasants. Chapters two and three then lead the reader through different “debt logics” with a primary focus on rural debt. Among aristocrats and peasants, debt and credit cemented social relationships, arising from and uniting each in a nexus of obligation. Though rational calculation was rarely absent from these arrangements, the dominant logic was never purely economic in nature. This changed, however, as the bourgeoisie entered into rural circles of credit, thereby spreading their own economic culture. This frequently meant using credit as a means of entering new markets with an eye toward increasing personal wealth. In some instances, aristocrats themselves began to adopt these new economic values in order to meet their own debt obligations, in others the bourgeoisie replaced the aristocrats and imposed their values directly. The next three chapters focus on urban economies, where credit often made up for shortfalls of specie and developed into a favored mechanism for building trust in an environment plagued by instability and a lack of solid information. This attention to urban economies leads Fontaine to address two more related topics. The first is pawnshops, which were often torn between a necessity to make a profit, and thus retain capital reserves, and an obligation to provide charity. As she notes in the chapter’s title, this placed them somewhere between banks and assistance, a position that commonly led to failure. The second spotlights the varied roles of women in urban economies, emphasizing their reliance on an informal economy to combat widespread discriminatory practices. Throughout these chapters, Fontaine carefully acknowledges significant variations while deftly constructing the foundations and habits associated with each economic culture.

While the first six chapters address the range of practices and experiences associated with debt and credit, the remaining chapters develop more overtly the values that pervaded each economic culture. Among the topics that Fontaine addresses are usury and the practices that lenders used to circumvent legal and cultural restrictions; the auction and circulation of art and collector’s objects, which aristocrats manipulated to interact with an otherwise demeaning market; and the sundry means of building the trust that merchants relied upon for their more profit-centered endeavors. The most intriguing chapter in this section explores the outlines of the two conflicting economic cultures, which Fontaine constructs via a stimulating reading of three principal sources, Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice and the Duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs. While using...