A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• The evolution of credit networks in pre-industrial Finland

  2021. Elise M. Dermineur. Scandinavian Economic History Review

  Article

  This paper examines the specificities of interpersonal credit networks in both a rural and an urban setting in pre-industrial Finland. To analyse peer-to-peer lending, the article studies a sample of 1047 probate inventories from the town of Kristinestad and its surrounding rural area, the parish of Lappfjärd. These probate inventories feature more than 5000 credit relations between households for the period 1850–1855 and 1905–1914. This paper also concerns itself with the changes pertaining to the advent of banking institutions in the mid-nineteenth century. Traditional behavioural sciences argue that formal institutions replaced informal ones because they are more efficient, more inclusive, or both. No longer needed, informal institutions are supposed to have disappeared when formal ones emerged. But this argument does not consider the social context – or embeddedness, a term coined by Granovetter – and the individuals evolving in it. Embeddedness does not disappear. Therefore, one may ask how banks penetrated communities and the credit networks that were already in place in order to supplant private lending. Tools from social network analysis help to draw insights into the features and changes pertaining to credit networks.

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• The Wealth of the Swedish Nobility: The Case of Never-Married Women, 1850-1910

  2022. Elise Dermineur. Gender, Materiality, and Politics

  Chapter

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• Banking Before Banks: The Making of Credit and Debt in Preindustrial France

  2025. Elise Dermineur.

  Book

  This innovative work delves into the world of ordinary early modern women and men and their relationship with credit and debt. Elise Dermineur focuses on the rural seigneuries of Delle and Florimont in the south of Alsace, where rich archival documents allow for a fine cross-analysis of credit transactions and the reconstruction of credit networks from c.1650 to 1790. She examines the various credit instruments at ordinary people's disposal, the role of women in credit markets, and the social, legal, and economic experiences of indebtedness. The book's distinctive focus on peer-to-peer lending sheds light on how and why pre-industrial interpersonal exchanges featured flexibility, diversity, fairness, solidarity and reciprocity, and room for negotiation and renegotiation. Before Banks also offers insight into factors informing our present financial system and suggests that we can learn from the past to create a fairer society and economy.

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• Credit Networks in The Preindustrial World: A Social Network Analysis Approach

  2024. .

  Book (ed)

  This open access book examines the formation and sustainability of private credit networks in past societies, gathering a global range of case studies from Europe and the Americas. The book represents a fi rst attempt to coordinate the work of different scholars working on credit networks and aims to explore the possibilities offered by social network analysis for the study of past fi nancial markets and networks.

  Each contribution offers new perspectives for the comprehension of past fi nancial networks, with a broad chronological and geographical scope. The chapters are arranged thematically and study both rural and urban networks, each employing a network perspective to facilitate an increased understanding of the relational dynamics of preindustrial credit transactions. This book models the various ways that SNA can be utilized by economic and fi nancial historians, as well as discusses its limitations and ways in which it can be combined with qualitative archival research. The book is of interest to a broad audience of scholars in the fi elds of economic, fi nancial and social history.

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• Credit, Solidarity Networks and the Rural Poor in Preindustrial France

  2024. Elise Dermineur. Different Forms of Microcredit and Social Business, 265-288

  Chapter

  This chapter examines how and why the rural poor used credit in preindustrial France. The absence of landed guarantees to secure loans did not exclude the poor from the local credit market. In the eighteenth century, they could borrow to alleviate a shortage of cash and defer payment for the purchase of foodstuffs, items of necessity and services. This chapter uses a sample of probate inventories collected in the south of Alsace for the period 1770–1790. Probates allow for a reconstruction of credit patterns and networks. Far from being excluded from credit, the poor were fully part of a network of solidarity.

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• Mutual Aid and Informal Finance: The Persistence of Stokvels

  2023. Elise M. Dermineur, Unathi Kolanisi. The Thinker 95 (2), 35-43

  Article

  This paper focuses on stokvels in contemporary South Africa. It examines the resilience and persistence of mutual aid in a modern setting. It seeks to build a qualitative model to understand the persistence and adaptation of the stokvels in a modern society wherebanking institutions coexist with informal credit practices. The concept of cooperation is key to the analysis. We argue that stokvels continue to persist in modern society, despite the rise of banking institutions, because of their cooperative nature.

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• Financialization and Sustainable Credit: Lessons from Non-Intermediated Transactions?

  2022. Y. Svetiev, Elise Dermineur, U. Kolanisi. Journal of Consumer Policy 45 (4), 673-698

  Article

  Does increasing access to finance promote human flourishing? And if so, are there pathways to sustainable credit and finance in the face of the perceived excesses of financialization? Can we reform or regulate the financial sector to promote sustainable credit and avoid over-indebtedness? These and similar questions have attracted considerable scholarly and public debate in the aftermath of the 2007 global financial crisis, with a growing focus on institutional alternatives to market exchange in finance and beyond. In this article, we study the persistence of non-intermediated credit, whereby lenders and borrowers engage in transactions directly and without financial intermediaries. Peer lending was a mainstay source of credit prior to the emergence of financial intermediaries and our benchmark case study outlines common features of credit relationships before modern banking in Europe. The other two case studies come from jurisdictions where non-intermediated credit persists on a broad scale, despite parties having formal access to modern finance. The aim of our contribution is threefold. First, we identify features of non-intermediated transactions that are consistent with a notion of sustainable credit, in the sense that they are not destabilising for the transacting parties (or the broader community). Secondly, we highlight the normative mechanisms that support non-intermediated credit across different settings to identify the scope conditions and limits for such transactions. Third, we evaluate such credit transactions along a set of normative benchmarks to draw out lessons for contemporary finance and financial regulation. We argue that even if non-intermediated credit cannot provide an alternative to modern finance, such transactions can help financial institutions tailor products to the needs of specific consumers or outsource credit assessment and repayment, while also allowing policymakers and regulators to identify and resolve concrete credit access problems for disadvantaged communities.

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Show all publications by Elise Dermineur Reuterswärd at Stockholm University