Since the crisis of 2008, the editors of this volume rightly argue, interest in understanding the “roles played by credit, finance and money in structuring the global economy and cementing the bonds between people” has increased (p. ix). Because economic history has been “increasingly relegated to abstruse quantitative analysis . . . dominated by economists,” the editors seek to contribute to the literature on the history of economic life by putting together a book on the cultural and social nature of credit from a global perspective (p. ix). This volume is the result of a workshop organized in May 2014 at Portland State University called, not surprisingly, “The Cultural History of Money and Credit.” After its general introduction, the book is composed of nine essays divided into three parts.

The first section, “Creditworthiness and Credit Risks,” begins with a chapter by Samuel Ostroff. The author relies on original archival material, mostly from the Tamil Nadu Archives, to investigate the “relationship of credit and debt that coalesced around the pearl fisheries” in South India and Ceylon at the turn of the nineteenth century—when British officials decided to rent them instead of managing them directly (p. 15). The chapter shows how British officials intervened in lending and borrowing practices to bring greater regularity to an uncertain branch of revenue while also producing respectable economic subjects. In the second chapter, Mônica Martins analyzes credit practices in Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century—a time when the city emerged as an independent center in world commerce, during the Napoleonic Wars. The author utilizes the records of public notaries (thus covering only larger transactions) to draw a portrait of the credit practices of that time, finding out that the actors involved in such transactions were more diverse than commonly assumed, with women appearing often not only as debtors but also as creditors. The third chapter of the first section, “Microfinance and the Progressive Generation,” by David Hochfelder, outlines a short history of thrift and credit in the United States during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, from the unsuccessful attempts to create postal banks to the “Morris Plan Banks” and cooperatives to the explosion of personal credit in the wake of the 1929 shock. According to the author, “interesting parallels” exist between the apparent difficulties in convincing Americans to save and today's low propensity to save and to borrow too much (p. 46). According to Hochfelder, in the United States the personal savings rate has “dropped to about 4 per cent, compared to double digits rates in industrialized Asian and European countries” (p. 46). Unfortunately, these numbers do not serve the author well. According to the Economic Outlook of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (November 2015), the household savings rate for the United States in 2015 is 4.8 percent while the average for the Euro-area is 6.5 percent—not a big difference (Japan is 0.6 percent, South Korea 5.3 percent).

The second section of the book is titled “The Loan Market and the State.” Mischa Suter's chapter focuses on bankruptcy procedures in nineteenth-century Switzerland (or more precisely, the Zurich region) to illustrate how bankruptcy moved from simply a practice of shaming the bankrupt—in the case of the Zurich region through the church call, or Kirchenruf—to “a framework of individualized diagnostics” where the bankrupt came to be gradually seen as unfortunate and not exclusively malicious (p. 60). In the second chapter of the section, Nicole Mottier describes how the lack of practical knowledge among the personnel of Banco Ejidal—a rural bank created by President Lazaro Cardenas in the region of Comarca Lagunera in Mexico—negatively affected the lives of ejidatarios, while the inexperience of bureaucrats allowed farmers to “carve out a greater scope for agency than they otherwise would have had” (p. 71). The final chapter of the second part, by Enrico Beltramini, illustrates how consumer rights for the black minority and for women were embedded in the battle for civil rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States. The chapter tells of the discriminatory practices that prevailed in the American credit system during the civil rights era, when black people could be denied mortgages and single, divorced, and widowed women could be asked to identify a male cosigner just to get a credit card. In this chapter, too, numbers are sometimes inexact; Beltramini argues that in order to fight inflation in the post–oil crisis period, the Federal Reserve “raised the interest rate in October 1974, thereby depleting savings” (p. 90). According to publicly available data on the effective Federal funds rate (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS, accessed 3 October 2016), the federal funds rate decreased from 13 percent in July 1974 to around 8 percent in December 1974 and continued to fall until the end of 1976.

The final section of the book, “Money, Commercial Exchange, and Global Connections,” opens with a chapter by Allan E. S. Lumba dealing with the economic turbulence in the Philippines following the crisis of 1890. The chapter also addresses the possible solutions for saving the country's economy by focusing especially on the work of Francisco Godinez, a lawyer and former president of Banco Español-Filipino, who advocated for a stricter political and monetary integration of the country as a province of Spain through a multistage transitional plan. The second chapter, by Bryna Goodman, investigates—often relying on popular Chinese literature—the creation and perception of stock exchanges in China, notably in the Shanghai area where more than 150 exchanges were established in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, a speculative bubble exploded in 1921 and, in the following years, Chinese economists moved from Western liberalism to state-driven economics. In this section's final chapter, Admire Mseba traces the history of Southern Rhodesia's struggle toward monetary independence, from its attempts that followed the Great Depression to its Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. The chapter provides an interesting monetary history of a country often neglected by economic historians relying on new archival evidence from the National Archives of Zimbabwe.

Overall, this short book is a curate's egg—uneven. On the one hand, it has the clear merit of indicating a new path of research in monetary history that will include a cultural and global dimension while also shedding light on several interesting aspects or countries neglected by current literature on money and credit. As such, the volume represents a valuable contribution to historians willing to gain a global perspective on such topics. On the other hand, the volume brings together very disparate contributions without a clear unifying theme; sometimes the reader is left wondering why a certain essay is included in one section and not another. Finally, the inclusion of a concluding chapter and of introductory chapters to each section would have certainly improved the overall clarity of the book.