Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance - by James B Greenberg & Thomas K Park (Hardcover)

About the Book

Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance takes an anthropological approach to the roots of Western finance and credit in ancient societies from early Mesopotamia to eleventh-century Islam. The authors reveal that credit is not just an economic transaction but also a social relat...

Book Synopsis

Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance takes an anthropological approach to the roots of Western finance and credit in ancient societies from early Mesopotamia to eleventh-century Islam. The authors reveal that credit is not just an economic transaction but also a social relationship and a technology of power.

Review Quotes

This monumental work reminds us that credit and debt are social and personal relationships made up of mutual dependency, ethical obligations, and the distribution of benefits. Park and Greenberg integrate a masterful study of the deeply religious dimensions of economic thought and practice in the Mediterranean and northern Europe over the last two millennia with granular treatments of merchants in Morocco, the Atlantic slave trade, consumer debt in England, and the 2008 financial meltdown. The result is piercing anthropological brilliance that eliminates any shadow of a doubt that social inequality is a social and cultural construction, and provides a range of tools for understanding the particular and general forms that it takes, past and present. The argument that ethical social relations are at the heart of our economy charts a path to a more human engagement with each other and with our planet.

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.

About the Author

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.