History Workshop Journal Advance Access published February 16, 2016

REVIEWS
Gender, Credit and Rethinking
(Economic) History
by Julie Hardwick

In the last twenty years the expansion of credit has become a major theme in
the meta-narrative of the transformation of the early modern economy.
Credit fuelled long-distance trade, the expansion of commercial enterprises
large and small, the consumer revolution, and state formation. In this narrative, the rise of borrowing is generally regarded as a positive and essential
element of the sets of practices associated with the transition to capitalism
(such as the financial revolution or the legal sureties provided by contracts).
And in this telling, it is traditionally implicitly, although rarely explicitly,
gendered, as historians took it for granted that for legal and other reasons
men rather than women participated actively in these new credit structures.
In the last decade or so, however, gender has emerged as an important
component of the early modern credit revolution as attention to practice has
shown that married and single women as well as men accessed credit in a
variety of forms as borrowers as well as lenders. Historical studies of
England and Spain as well as my own work on France have shown that
married women were able to borrow money independently, despite the legal
restrictions of coverture. While many of these loans were informal and in
many respects extra-legal, even courts upheld this ability and the responsibility of married women as borrowers. Moreover, womens reputations and
their ability to borrow depended not on their chastity but on their standing
as commercial actors, just as mens did. This dynamic has been demonstrated in a wide variety of settings and among many social groups. Craig
Muldrew and Alexandra Shepard have respectively analyzed credit in terms
of women and masculinity in seventeenth-century England while Scott
Taylor has explored the role of borrowing as a key component of honour
for men and women in seventeenth-century Castile. For early modern
France, I have demonstrated that both spouses in working families in
Lyon might mobilize elaborate constellations of credit, while Clare
Crowston has shown the gendering of the economic and political at the

History Workshop Journal

The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University Of British Columbia Library on March 17, 2016

Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime
France, Duke University Press, 2013, 424 pp, ISBN 978-0-8223-5528-1

History Workshop Journal

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University Of British Columbia Library on March 17, 2016

highest levels in Paris, where Queen Marie Antoinette and her fashion designer, Rose Bertin, became embroiled in scandal over their relationship.1
Clare Crowstons Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old
Regime France, an ambitious and impressive intervention that seeks to
expand this debate, argues that the centrality of credit and gender went
far beyond economic matters. We have long known that credit meant reputation as well as ability to borrow in early modern Europe. Crowston extends this to argue that credit was one of the most important concepts
people had in Old Regime France to comprehend the dynamics of their
lives (p. 1). More than simply an indicator of reputation and ability to
borrow, credit for Old Regime subjects marshalled the intertwined domains
of economy, politics, society and culture (p. 2). In framing credit in this
wide-ranging fashion, Crowston builds on the pioneering work of Craig
Muldrew, who in his The Economy of Obligation fifteen years ago emphasized credit as a social and communicative system in early modern England
(p. 2).
Credit, Fashion, Sex explores the world of late eighteenth-century
Parisian fashion merchants as a window into larger questions about the
intertwining of economic, political, social and cultural issues. Crowston in
fact contends that Credit constituted the common sense of the Old Regime
(p. 16): not only was it a ubiquitous register for the way power worked in all
kinds of areas of life but this was so evident to contemporaries of all social
ranks that there was no need to spell it out.
The argument is pursued along two tracks. The first half of the book
interrogates the many uses of the word credit in print, identified through
the now widely available databases of Old Regime material, as a way to
establish the many contexts in which capital was used. The second half
focuses on the Parisian fashion merchants who emerged in the later eighteenth century as makers and signifiers of new styles, primarily through an
exhaustive analysis of their extant financial statements in the form of accounting materials of various kinds. Through this analysis, Crowston not
only rethinks the relationship between gender, credit and economic history,
but also casts credit as a critical paradigm at the centre of the Old Regime.
Crowstons book, like much of the new wave of work on early modern
credit, accepts that economic activity was embedded in many other aspects
of life. This perspective encourages us not only to think about borrowing as
a system in which we can identify participants and patterns, but to unpack
the meanings and practices our historical subjects found and adopted in
their own experiences of borrowing or what anthropologists term as the
distinction between etic and emic in seeking to elucidate the ways in which
people make sense of their own world. In centring credit as the common
sense of the Old Regime world, Crowston claims that for contemporaries
credit was a key by which they understood the complexities of their historical time and place.

Reviews

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University Of British Columbia Library on March 17, 2016

Crowston generously acknowledges the by now well established issues

about credit that the first half of her project reaffirms in the context of
late eighteenth-century Paris and its female fashion merchants. Her use of
the databases makes possible a thorough review of an enormous amount of
contemporary published material. As she notes at various points, These
comments will not be terribly surprising to those familiar with early
modern society (p. 3), Any historian familiar with the world of work
would be unsurprised to learn that . . . (p. 11), or This study draws on
and seeks to contribute to a growing literature . . . (p. 14). Nevertheless,
her discussion is immensely valuable and useful. The centrality of credit,
while well embraced in specialized work, has not yet fully affected the wider
audience of early modern historians. Even readers who have read much of
the specific existing literature will find the discussion here stimulating as it
synthesizes the case for the centrality of credit and its multiple valences
across many registers.
Crowstons assertion that the centrality of credit was part of an essential
Old Regime world view, in which credit was not simply a minor matter of
borrowing and reputation, invites her fellow historians to think more comparatively and engage with change over time. Might we find national, regional or local differences (or urban versus rural perhaps) in this credit-asculture approach, since gender distinction seems to be less important across
a wide range of early modern places according to current work? Or might we
find that a broader early modern moment in these regards gave way to
different subjectivities later? On the issue of religion and credit, for instance,
Muldrew argues for a culture of competitive piety around credit in seventeenth-century England. In contrast, I found the language of credit to be
resolutely secular in France even in the seventeenth century and Crowstons
many dimensions of credit in Old Regime Paris seem likewise to indicate
that for whatever reason religion had virtually no currency for credit matters. If credit was a pivotal structuring device for Old Regime power relations of all kinds, when had that change occurred?
Second, credit was also a practice, as Crowston observes, and in fact a
practice of work. The second half of the book focuses on the fashion industry as a case study, ground Crowston has brilliantly made her own. While
some work on the rise of fashion has appeared in the last few years, none
comes close to her sophistication and insight, both in analyzing the evolution of the industry itself and in unpacking the broader questions (including
but not limited to credit) which the history of fashion illuminates. She casts
fresh light into a variety of historiographical thickets, among them the
much-debated history of information systems. The nature of information
is explored here in fascinating and very nuanced ways, both in terms of the
role of expanding print media and in the continued importance of oral
communication. Crowston also offers a new and very persuasive chronology
of the consumer revolution (one of the most important topics to emerge in
the last thirty years). The discussion of how debts were handled is

History Workshop Journal

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University Of British Columbia Library on March 17, 2016

groundbreaking. Although we often assume interest was key in loans, here

Crowston convincingly demonstrates that discounting on debts rather than
charging interest on arrears was the common strategy. The analysis based on
the receipts of Madame de Bercy (pp. 1719) is a microscopic masterpiece,
using very challenging source material to untangle the issues that are at the
heart of the book.
Indeed one of the most impressive and original elements of Credit,
Fashion, Sex is its exploration of the account keeping of the marchandes
de mode. Pre-modern account books can be offputtingly difficult sources,
and as a consequence remarkably little work has been done with them despite their tantalizing promise for a wide range of critical topics. Crowstons
painstaking and creative analysis of the accounting records that her subjects
kept indicates the potential great rewards for historians. Like the accounts
of the seventeenth-century Hereford spinster, Joyce Jeffries, whose business
activities included moneylending and a wide variety of other commercial
transactions, and like accounts kept by women involved in a variety of
small commercial enterprises in early modern Lyon, these Parisian accounting records foreground a common form of early modern womens work that
has thus far received little attention.2 Crowston models an approach that
should inspire a new generation of historians to work seriously and fruitfully
on this kind of source material and use it to explore many themes.
The fashion merchants account records also suggest that even while we
have come to take for granted the role of credit in undergirding changes in
the economy, the work of borrowing has been often elided, perhaps because
so much of what we know about credit comes from debt litigation. We have
examined issues like the role of notaries as credit brokers and the influence
of printed how-to-write contract letters in regularizing letters of exchange.
The work of borrowing usually appears as dominated by men in these
forms.3 Historians have also explored how financial/commercial failure
was gendered in terms of masculinity in specific contexts, as with Toby
Ditzs work on Philadelphia merchants in the late eighteenth century,
Scott Sandages Born Losers about nineteenth-century American bankrupts
or Dominique Godineaus recent book which claims that male suicides in
late eighteenth-century France were far more likely than female to claim
financial ruin as the reason.4
However, if we explore the gendered history of credit and finance and
examine the day-to-day work of financial transactions, a different picture of
credit in practices of everyday economic life and commercial activity
emerges. In fact, both notarized credit and letters of exchange were very
unusual forms in the overall volume of early modern credit transactions.
Book debt in various forms was on the other hand common and mundane.
In many early modern enterprises women kept the account books, whether
for the commercial activity they undertook with their husbands or for their
own occupations. This practice raises elementary but nonetheless critical
questions about skill acquisition (how women learned the commercial

Reviews

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University Of British Columbia Library on March 17, 2016

arithmetic of accounting), about the decisions they made in formulating

those accounts, and about the significance that work held in their lives.
Focusing on accounting as a form of work, and as gendered, also raises
larger issues about early modern transitions. The importance of accountkeeping practices in the transition to capitalism is a hoary historiographical
trope. But despite this reification of double-entry accounting as essential to
economic transformation, most commercial enterprises even by the late
eighteenth century did not in fact use that form of book-keeping. The account books kept by female Parisian fashion merchants in the last two
decades of the eighteenth century are entirely usual in that regard, and
provide another reminder of the need to re-examine that assumed relationship. How does it change our view of the credit revolution when we notice
that the ubiquity of women as account-keepers in commercial enterprises
placed them at the centre of legal and commercial responsibility for the
management of credit? Were the patterns Crowstons work indicates
among this group (like discounting rather than interest-charging) more generally applicable to early modern enterprises in other parts of France or in
other parts of Europe? Was the discounting of debts to get them redeemed
gendered? This new sensitivity to the practices of credit certainly suggests
that understanding the relationship between credit and capitalism in all its
complexity requires us to embrace a more variegated interpretative framework than the widely accepted scenario (here oversimplified for the sake of
clarity) in which Italian male clerks exported the double-entry book-keeping
that made capitalism possible.
Credit as a practice and a practice of work and of gender occurred in
other sites and forms too that are inevitably beyond the scope of Credit,
Fashion, Sex or any one study. Early modern men and women were involved
in elaborate networks of credit that utilized many forms of borrowing and
lending, formal and informal. Pawning is one example: a form of work
women did to support themselves, to transfer credit and to make ends
meet. Before the institutionalization of pawning in the eighteenth century,
much of this took place between individuals and between networks of
women using personal property of all kinds, including the bed linens that
wives brought as part of their dowries and other moveables.5
While these forms of borrowing deserve scrutiny in their own right, a
focus on gender and credit highlights the importance of family property law
in relation to the economic changes involved in the transition to capitalism.
We have long established that brides dowries were critical sources of capital
for working families no less than the aristocracy. Renaissance Italian merchants, for example, saw wives dowries as key sources of capital inflow.
Guido Ruggerio noted, tongue in cheek, the uncanny prescience of the
now-famous example of the Florentine merchant Gregorio Dati, in co-ordinating business downturns with the deaths of his wives.6 The dowries of new
wives repeatedly re-floated his proverbial commercial boat.

History Workshop Journal

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University Of British Columbia Library on March 17, 2016

The dowry-as-capital-influx was in fact embedded in family property law,

and Amy Erikson has argued that coverture (a particular form of family
property law) should be considered a central element in the history of capitalism. This conceptualization is a very important intervention in thinking
about the history of the transition to capitalism. I have argued that the
concept of lineage property in French family law provided a bulwark against
creditors that did limit the expansion of a free market in borrowing because judges systematically saw wives lineage property claims as trumping
the ability of creditors to collect on their legitimate unpaid debts. Francesca
Trivellatos work on Jewish merchant practices across the Mediterranean
and indeed from the Atlantic coast to India likewise shows how embedded
family property law was in merchant practice around borrowing.7
What women did in this realm is often very difficult for historians to
recover, but the embeddedness of family property law with access to
credit offered important opportunities. For instance, many notarial contracts for loans show apparently unrelated men co-signing for each other
to borrow money. But when we align those records with family reconstitution, we see that the men were often married to sisters and this sister-sibling
relationship was the glue for the credit relationship between men.8
Interesting and elusive questions of agency lie behind such credit arrangements. What if any roles did the sister-wives involved have in fostering or
negotiating borrowing contracts for which brothers-in-law were each others
co-signers? This pattern was probably also linked to lineage property as well
as kinship solidarity, and it had the potential for raising capital as well as
defensive goals. By co-signing, male kin guaranteed that the sisters lineage
property imperilled by the loan could be called on if necessary and brothersin-law supervised the risk to which their wives lineage property could be
exposed. However, these sibling loan alliances fostered by common interests
in protecting lineage property could also have the effect of pooling resources
in ways that in turn could allow more credit and capital to be accumulated.
Similarly the intersection of the early modern criminalization of bankruptcy with family property law positioned wives as central actors in managing the legal investigations into possible frauds that were at the heart of the
early modern definition of bankruptcy. In France, for example, bankruptcy
became a capital offence in the late sixteenth century. Since husbands were
legally responsible for debts and thus liable to the capital penalty if found
guilty, they routinely left town ahead of the proceedings, leaving their wives
to deal with the legal process and the aggrieved creditors. If (as was usually
the case), the legal process found the debt arrears involved only a simply
failure and not the fraud inherent in a criminal bankruptcy by early
modern standards, wives came to terms with creditors about repayment
plans and husbands returned.9
Credit, Fashion, Sex brilliantly makes the case for why centralizing credit
in all its complexity and multiple registers as an analytical category transforms our understanding of early modern French society in important ways

Reviews

Julie Hardwick (jhardwick@austin.utexas.edu) is Professor of early modern

European history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of
two books as well as many articles and essays. She is currently working on
books about young peoples intimate partnerships and emerging legal practices (such as lotteries, account-keeping and bankruptcy) associated with the
expansion of credit/debt.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
An earlier version of this piece was presented at the workshop Womens work across time and
place: foundations for comparison in pre-census Europe, Centre for Gender History,
University of Glasgow, September 2014. I thank all the participants for comments and suggestions throughout the workshop.
1 Craig Muldrew, A Mutual Assent of Her Mind, History Workshop Journal 55, spring
2003; Alexandra Shepard, The Meaning of Manhood in Early Modern England, Oxford, 2003;
Scott K. Taylor, Credit, Debt, and Honor in Castile, 16001650, Journal of Early Modern
History 7: 12, 2003; Julie Hardwick, Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of
Daily Life in Early Modern France, Oxford, 2009; Clare Haru Crowston, The Queen and her
Minister of Fashion: Gender, Credit, and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, Gender and
History 14: 1, April 2002. See also Alexandra Shepard, Crediting Women in the Early Modern
English Economy, History Workshop Journal 79, spring 2015, which was published after this
review essay was completed.
2 Judith Spicksley, The Business and Household Accounts of Joyce Jeffries, Spinster of
Hereford, 16381648, Oxford, 2012. For Lyon, see Hardwick, Family Business, pp. 14852.
3 Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and Household Authority in Early
Modern France, University Park PA, 1998, pp. 1749; Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of
Strangers: the Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern
Period, New Haven, 2009.
4 Toby L. Ditz, Shipwrecked: Imperiled Masculinity and the Representation of Business
Failures among Philadelphias Eighteenth-Century Merchants, Journal of American History
81: 1, June 1994, pp. 5180; Scott Sandage, Born Losers: a History of Failure in America,
Cambridge MA, 2006; Dominique Godineau, Sabreger les jours. Le suicide en France au
XVIIIe sie`cle, Paris, 2012.

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University Of British Columbia Library on March 17, 2016

that have often eluded us. What was common sense about credit to them
often baffles us, but Crowston demonstrates how it made sense from the
perspective of the Old Regime Parisian actors at the heart of her book.
Region and rank may turn out to be important variables that could affect
the specifics of the dynamic laid out here, but subsequent work will have to
engage with this pioneering effort to explore the transformative potential of
putting credit and gender at the centre of our thinking. Indeed, in integrating
social and intellectual history as approaches to a nominally economic topic
like credit, Crowstons book fits with a genre often called the new histories
of capitalism. Although she does not engage explicitly with the debate over
capitalism, her evocation of the world of Old Regime Paris demonstrates
how sophisticated scholarship can illustrate the processes by which, as
Jeffrey Sklansky recently observed, that particular regime evolved to produce ways of being, of seeing and of believing that encompassed matters far
beyond the financial/economic realm.10 In historicizing those emerging ways
of being, seeing and believing, however, gender and credit need to be at the
centre.

History Workshop Journal

doi:10.1093/hwj/dbw004

Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University Of British Columbia Library on March 17, 2016

5 Hardwick, Family Business.

6 Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime, and Sexuality in Renaissance
Venice, New York and Oxford, 1985, p. 13.
7 Amy Erikson, Coverture and Capitalism, History Workshop Journal 59, spring 2005;
Hardwick, Family Business; Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers.
8 For examples of these borrowing patterns in which kin co-signed as guarantors for loans,
see Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy, pp. 18191.
9 Hardwick, Family Business, pp. 16878 and Banqueroute: la faillite, le crime et la transition vers la capitalisme dans la France moderne, Histoire, Economie & Societe 2, 2011.
10 Jeffrey Sklansky, The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of
Capitalism, Modern Intellectual History 9, 2012, pp 23348. Sklanskys excellent article nevertheless neglects to mention gender as a key issue.