Informal rural credit markets and interlinked transactions in the district of late Ottoman Haifa, 1890–1915

Abstract

By examining the acts of the Public Notary of Haifa (1890–1915), this article shows that it was the traditional informal market of credit, run by local notables, which financially supported the development of the small-landholding-based agricultural sector of the Haifa district in late Ottoman Palestine. In seeking to ascertain what led to the success of the informal rural credit market as compared with the formal credit market, the article finds that the local notables, who acted as financial intermediaries for small landholders, enjoyed an information advantage over the banks stemming from the establishment of interlinked credit market transactions connected to the stipulation of bay' wafā, salam and muzara‘ah contracts. In a context of land privatisation and growing commercialisation of agriculture, these contracts became the instruments used by notables to invest in peasants' landholdings and to manage a sales network for agricultural products on a local and international scale, hence representing an efficient financial institution to support the ‘agricultural export-led growth’ of late Ottoman Palestine.

Credit networks and business dynamics in a viceregal capital: Santafé de Bogotá in the age of Charles III

“…Recent research has also focused on the structure and size of non-ecclesiastical sources of credit, evidencing how, during the late colonial period, there was an expansion of merchant credit flows and the sophistication of financial tools (Ibarra 2017; Cascavita 2021; Gutiérrez and Torres 2021; Torres 2014, 2021). In line with new research on European and Asian economies, the literature has also shown that pre-industrial credit markets were more dynamic and larger in GDP than previously thought (Hoffman et al 1999, 2015; Ito 2013; Ecchia 2014).…”

Transgressive moderns: social relations and cultural institutions in Middle Eastern History

“…Recent works argue that legal and cultural institutions are only properly understood in conjunction with the political economy in which they formed. Examples include Barakat 2019; Kostopoulos 2016; Svetla Ianeva, Guild and non-guild labour in the Central Balkans during the nineteenth century, in Papastefanaki and Potamianos 2021, 131–153; Ecchia 2014; and Christos Hadziiosif, The invisible army of Greek labourers, in Papastefanaki and Kabadayı 2020, 113–148.…”

Land ownership, tax farming and the social structure of local credit markets in the Ottoman Balkans, 1685–1855

“…26–9; Ianeva 2009). In her study on the credit market of nineteenth-century Haifa, Ecchia (2014) also shows that local notables were able to strengthen their position in the loan market through informal connections despite the expansion of banking institutions in the region. Interestingly, a number of reports on moneylending in the Ottoman lands prepared by imperial bureaucrats in the 1830s reached the same conclusion.…”