Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2025
Chapter 6 focuses specifically on the last two decades of the Ancien Régime. The traditional local credit market featured norms of solidarity, fairness, and cooperation and allowed its agents considerable input regarding the terms of their agreement either before contracting and/or afterwards. But structural changes in the 1770s, such as an increase in credit activities, drawing on the power and profitability of such exchanges, and especially the appearance of new investors, affected the social and legal norms and nature of these markets. The gradual and massive resort to external parties to handle and manage financial transactions remodelled these institutions into specialized and incontrovertible experts. Embedded in society, the local court system traditionally responded to the demands of its users and their input shaped the form of the institution. When a new category of investors emerged, their requests, in turn, tended to shape the judicial institution, serving their interests first and above those of other users, allowing the evolution of the judicial institution into a more specialized one. These institutions became more efficient in debt conflict resolution.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.