James B. Greenberg is professor of anthropology and senior research anthropologist at the University of Arizona.Thomas K. Park is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.

This compelling account of the long history of credit and its animating ideas over the past thousand years convincingly shows that the symbolic, moral and social entailments of finance have always sat alongside its abstraction. Excavating the former provides a necessary perspective on the obscurantism and often dangerous persuasiveness, particularly in the present era, of the latter.

• Chapter 1: Finance in the Middle Ages and the Scholastic TraditionChapter 2: Credit and Faith in Medieval Iberia: The Road not TakenChapter 3: Early European Finance 1050–1650Chapter 4: Transcending Feudal Finance in Western EuropeChapter 5: Mercantile Credit and the Atlantic Slave TradeChapter 6: Chayanov, Marx, and hidden interests in Rural MoroccoChapter 7: Ethnicity and Social Capital in 1970s SefrouChapter 8: Problematizing Modern Consumer CreditChapter 9: An Anthropology of the 2008 Credit CrisisConclusion: Hidden Interests and the Development of Finance

James B. Greenberg is professor of anthropology and senior research anthropologist at the University of Arizona.Thomas K. Park is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.

This compelling account of the long history of credit and its animating ideas over the past thousand years convincingly shows that the symbolic, moral and social entailments of finance have always sat alongside its abstraction. Excavating the former provides a necessary perspective on the obscurantism and often dangerous persuasiveness, particularly in the present era, of the latter.

• Chapter 1: Finance in the Middle Ages and the Scholastic TraditionChapter 2: Credit and Faith in Medieval Iberia: The Road not TakenChapter 3: Early European Finance 1050–1650Chapter 4: Transcending Feudal Finance in Western EuropeChapter 5: Mercantile Credit and the Atlantic Slave TradeChapter 6: Chayanov, Marx, and hidden interests in Rural MoroccoChapter 7: Ethnicity and Social Capital in 1970s SefrouChapter 8: Problematizing Modern Consumer CreditChapter 9: An Anthropology of the 2008 Credit CrisisConclusion: Hidden Interests and the Development of Finance

James B. Greenberg is professor of anthropology and senior research anthropologist at the University of Arizona.Thomas K. Park is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.

This compelling account of the long history of credit and its animating ideas over the past thousand years convincingly shows that the symbolic, moral and social entailments of finance have always sat alongside its abstraction. Excavating the former provides a necessary perspective on the obscurantism and often dangerous persuasiveness, particularly in the present era, of the latter.

• Chapter 1: Finance in the Middle Ages and the Scholastic TraditionChapter 2: Credit and Faith in Medieval Iberia: The Road not TakenChapter 3: Early European Finance 1050–1650Chapter 4: Transcending Feudal Finance in Western EuropeChapter 5: Mercantile Credit and the Atlantic Slave TradeChapter 6: Chayanov, Marx, and hidden interests in Rural MoroccoChapter 7: Ethnicity and Social Capital in 1970s SefrouChapter 8: Problematizing Modern Consumer CreditChapter 9: An Anthropology of the 2008 Credit CrisisConclusion: Hidden Interests and the Development of Finance