IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/pseptp/halshs-02491753.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Dark Matter Credit: The Development of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Banking in France

Author

Listed:
  • Philip T. Hoffman

    (CS CALTECH - Computer Science Department - CALTECH - California Institute of Technology)

  • Gilles Postel-Vinay

    (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Jean-Laurent Rosenthal

    (HSS CALTECH - Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences - CALTECH - California Institute of Technology)

Abstract

How a vast network of shadow credit financed European growth long before the advent of banking Prevailing wisdom dictates that, without banks, countries would be mired in poverty. Yet somehow much of Europe managed to grow rich long before the diffusion of banks. Dark Matter Credit draws on centuries of cleverly collected loan data from France to reveal how credit abounded well before banks opened their doors. This incisive book shows how a vast system of shadow credit enabled nearly a third of French families to borrow in 1740, and by 1840 funded as much mortgage debt as the American banking system of the 1950s. Dark Matter Credit traces how this extensive private network outcompeted banks and thrived prior to World War I—not just in France but in Britain, Germany, and the United States—until killed off by government intervention after 1918. Overturning common assumptions about banks and economic growth, the book paints a revealing picture of an until-now hidden market of thousands of peer-to-peer loans made possible by a network of brokers who matched lenders with borrowers and certified the borrowers' creditworthiness. A major work of scholarship, Dark Matter Credit challenges widespread misperceptions about French economic history, such as the notion that banks proliferated slowly, and the idea that financial innovation was hobbled by French law. By documenting how intermediaries in the shadow credit market devised effective financial instruments, this compelling book provides new insights into how countries can develop and thrive today.

Suggested Citation

  • Philip T. Hoffman & Gilles Postel-Vinay & Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, 2019. "Dark Matter Credit: The Development of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Banking in France," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) halshs-02491753, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-02491753
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Patrice Baubeau & Eric Monnet & Angelo Riva & Stefano Ungaro, 2021. "Flight‐to‐safety and the credit crunch: a new history of the banking crises in France during the Great Depression," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 74(1), pages 223-250, February.
    2. Cédric Chambru & Emeric Henry & Benjamin Marx, 2024. "The Dynamic Consequences of State Building: Evidence from the French Revolution," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 114(11), pages 3578-3622, November.
    3. Y. Svetiev & E. Dermineur & U. Kolanisi, 2022. "Financialization and Sustainable Credit: Lessons from Non-Intermediated Transactions?," Journal of Consumer Policy, Springer, vol. 45(4), pages 673-698, December.
    4. Eric Monnet, 2024. "Interest Rates," Springer Books, in: Claude Diebolt & Michael Haupert (ed.), Handbook of Cliometrics, edition 3, pages 1531-1549, Springer.
    5. Amaury de Vicqde & Christiaan van Bochove, 2024. "Lending a hand: help banks in the Netherlands, 1848–1898," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 28(2), pages 163-192.
    6. Philip T. Hoffman, 2020. "The Great Divergence: Why Britain Industrialised First," Australian Economic History Review, Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 60(2), pages 126-147, July.
    7. Oscar Gelderblom & Joost Jonker & Ruben Peeters & Amaury de Vicq, 2023. "Exploring modern bank penetration: Evidence from early twentieth‐century Netherlands," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 76(3), pages 892-916, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-02491753. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Caroline Bauer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.