Stockholm university

Elise Dermineur ReuterswärdAssociate Professor

About me

 

I am an associate professor of economic history.

After studying history at the Université de Strasbourg, I received a Ph.D. in History in 2011 from Purdue University for the thesis ‘Women in Rural Society: Peasants, Patriarchy and the Local Economy in Northeast France, 1650–1789’. In 2011, I was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. Between 2011 and 2013, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at Umeå University. From 2013 to 2015, I worked as a Research Fellow at Lund University on the project ‘Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500–1800’, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA). Between 2015 and 2022, I was a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow. In 2016, I was promoted to Associate Professor at Umeå university. I spent the academic year 2018-2019 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Since 2019, I am directing the research initiative Human Economy Lab.

My research interests range widely, from the history of justice and economics to gender and women’s history. Above all, I am deeply interested in the study of traditional communities. My publications include articles published in the Journal of Social History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Financial History Review and Social Science History, among others. In 2017, I published Gender and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Sweden, a political biography of the Swedish queen Lovisa Ulrika (1720–1782). In 2018, I published a collection of essays titled Women and Credit in Preindustrial Europe available in open access and I co-edited Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400-1800.

I am currently revising a book manuscript tentatively titled Banking Before Banks, dealing with early financial markets. Additionally, I am also revisiting the concept of the moral economy in modern societies.

Publications

Recent Publications

Dermineur E., Gender and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Sweden, Queen Louisa Ulrika (1720-1782). Farnham: Routledge, 2017. 254p.

Dermineur E., Before Banks: Credit and Debt in Preindustrial France, currently under review.

 

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Dermineur E., Svetiev Y. Kolanisi U., “Financialisation and Sustainable Credit: Lessons from Non-Intermediated Transactions?”, accepted for publication, Journal of Consumer Policy. 2022

Dermineur E. & Pompermaier M., “Credit Networks in Renaissance Florence: Revisiting the Catasto of 1427. A Research Project in the Making”, currently under review. 2022

Dermineur E., “The Evolution of Credit in pre-Industrial Finland”, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 70:1, 2022, pp 57-86.

 

 

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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Show all publications by Elise Dermineur Reuterswärd at Stockholm University