The Longue Durée of Finance: New Research on Old Financial Markets

Scholarship on finance has flourished in the aftermath of the Great Recession. While the sociology of finance typically centers developments since the financial turn of the 1970s, a burgeoning body of interdisciplinary scholarship sheds new light on the evolution of financial practices, institutions, and relations in earlier years. This review explores key contributions and themes from the new histories of finance, focusing on works published in the past decade that offer valuable insights for sociologists. We first review new contributions on ancient, medieval, and early modern finance, which illuminate the origins of money and credit, the development of financial thinking, and the relationship between finance and imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. Second, we survey new work on the development of modern financial markets in the long road to the financial turn of the 1970s. Together, these studies reveal how money, credit, and finance are embedded in political and legal institutions, and how financial systems act as tools of social policy, economic growth, war, and racial subjugation. Finally, long-run perspectives on finance provide an important reminder that borrowing, lending, and the management of attendant risks are not new phenomena unique to our neoliberal era.