Rowena Olegario is Senior Research Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Rowena Olegario has filled an important gap in American business history. A Culture of Credit is a straightforward, clearly written study of an important and understudied question: how did creditworthiness come to be determined in American mercantile trade? In this fascinating and informative history, Olegario illuminates much that was unknown about the workings of nineteenth-century commercial credit. Even more interestingly, she draws our attention to a difficult cultural problem that is often taken for granted by people with little business experience but is always of immense importance to creditors—the problem of "trust" and "transparency" in business dealings.

• Introduction 1 Mercantile Credit in Britain and America, 1700-1860 2 A "System of Espionage": The Origins of the Credit-Reporting Form 3 Character, Capacity, Capital: How To Be Creditworthy 4 Jewish Merchants and the Struggle Over Transparency: A Case Study 5 Growth, Competition, Legitimacy: Credit Reporting in the Late Nineteenth Century 6 From Competition to Cooperation: The Birth of the Credit Man, 1890-1920 Epilogue: Business Credit Reporting in the Twenty-First Century Notes Index

Rowena Olegario is Senior Research Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Rowena Olegario has filled an important gap in American business history. A Culture of Credit is a straightforward, clearly written study of an important and understudied question: how did creditworthiness come to be determined in American mercantile trade? In this fascinating and informative history, Olegario illuminates much that was unknown about the workings of nineteenth-century commercial credit. Even more interestingly, she draws our attention to a difficult cultural problem that is often taken for granted by people with little business experience but is always of immense importance to creditors—the problem of "trust" and "transparency" in business dealings.

• Introduction 1 Mercantile Credit in Britain and America, 1700-1860 2 A "System of Espionage": The Origins of the Credit-Reporting Form 3 Character, Capacity, Capital: How To Be Creditworthy 4 Jewish Merchants and the Struggle Over Transparency: A Case Study 5 Growth, Competition, Legitimacy: Credit Reporting in the Late Nineteenth Century 6 From Competition to Cooperation: The Birth of the Credit Man, 1890-1920 Epilogue: Business Credit Reporting in the Twenty-First Century Notes Index