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The ‘untimely’ demise of a successful institution: the Italian Monti di pietà in the nineteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2019

Mauro Carboni  and
Massimo Fornasari
Mauro Carboni*
Affiliation:
University of Bologna
Massimo Fornasari
Affiliation:
University of Bologna
*
M. Carboni (corresponding author), Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Strada Maggiore 45, Bologna, Italy; email: [email protected]; web page: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/mauro.carboni
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Abstract

Recent literature has clearly charted the growth of pawn credit in nineteenth-century developing countries in Europe. Such expansion has frequently been associated with governments’ concerns to prevent malpractice and promote the establishment of public agencies that mirrored the Italian Monti di pietà. Precisely at the time modernizing European societies adopted the model of Italian public pawn banks, Monti were being dismissed as a relic of a bygone age in their home country. Assembling and comparing data from an 1896 national survey, we conclude that, contrary to traditional assumptions, Italian pawn banks were not obsolete or out of place in the European context of nineteenth-century pawn credit. However, ideology and hostile legislation did hamper the access to credit of those most in need, and the choice hardly assisted the modernizing spurt of Italian society.

Keywords

social aidpawn creditmicrofinancenineteenth-century Italy

JEL classification

G21: Banks • Depository Institutions • Micro Finance Institutions • Mortgages L31: Nonprofit Institutions • NGOs • Social Entrepreneurship N23: Europe: Pre-1913 N33: Europe: Pre-1913
Type
Articles
Information
Financial History Review , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , August 2019 , pp. 147 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © European Association for Banking and Financial History e.V. 2019 

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Footnotes

We are grateful to two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this article. All remaining errors are our own.

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