Rural Microcredit in the Sharecropping Northern Provinces of the Papal States (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

Access to credit was indispensable to laboring people in Pre-Modern societies, and social forms of microcredit had been central to the experience of Italian communities since at least the XVI century. When there was no immediate solution to low and irregular income, debt could provide an escape from temporary financial distress. Historians and economists have devoted considerable attention to the development of complex systems of microcredit in urban areas – from shop credit to pawn-broking – but limited attention has been paid to rural communities. Yet, recent studies have documented the development of early forms of socially responsible credit in rural areas of the Italian peninsula, mostly grain stores and pawn banks. The northern provinces of the Papal States (the Legazioni of Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna) provide a fascinating case. They cut across a large swath of the eastern Po valley, and similar communities, productive patterns, and farming (sharecropping) are associated with a broad presence of microcredit institutions that met local credit needs from the XVI century to the XIX century. This essay has three main objectives: first, it wishes to document and explain the diverse diffusion and resilience of microcredit agencies in the three provinces. For instance, grain stores thrived in the rural communities in Romagna, but were rare in the neighboring provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, where urban pawn banks held a dominant position. Secondly, the paper aims to discuss if and how the different availability of microcredit services was related to farming and the needs of rural families. Thirdly, it intends to discover the role of different property patterns, agri-environmental contexts, and the pattern of prevailing crops in shaping credit services and their availability in rural communities.