The Seeds of Financialization: Some Social and Economic Considerations from the Past Elise M. Dermineur “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations
Since the crisis of 2008, there has been an academic and even a public interest in capitalism, its functioning – or rather its malfunctioning – its ethics and its future. Many since Adam Smith have attempted to define, explain and justify capitalism.
In this presentation, I would like to discuss one aspect of capitalism – financial capitalism and its origins. I focus especially on the eighteenth century, a period characterized by both an intensification in financial exchange and the development of financial markets. We know that medieval and Renaissance bankers and merchants used financial instruments – and credit in particular – in order to make a profit. The Medici in Florence or the Fugger in Augsburg, to cite only but a few, could be labelled capitalists. Here, I am interested in the growing early “financialization” of the economy, that is when men and women began to change their attitudes and practices towards financial markets on a huge scale.
At that time, the norms of the moral economy began to transform and subsequently changed into a more individualistic form of exchange. The anthropologist David Graeber suggests that men and women in preindustrial communities practised “everyday communism”. This concept refers to the solidarity and norms of cooperation existing among agents when it comes to the structure and organization of traditional communities before financial capitalism, from the management of common lands to neighbourly and daily mutual assistance. For Graeber, loans between private individuals obeyed rules of fairness, solidarity and
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