How should one understand the role and significance of unregulated borrowing between private individuals in the economic and social development of early modern Europe (and elsewhere)? This article enters into the well-established debate on this topic by exploring data that has been largely unanalysed: the records of private financial transactions registered in the city of Moscow in 1702. Given the nature of the information available, only peer-to-peer lending can be discussed here—that is, loans made by one individual (or groups of individuals) to another. In 1702, such loans were based on private arrangements that were, for all practical purposes, unregulated by law or by financial oversight.
The analysis provided here has two separate features. Firstly, it identifies some previously unknown traits of Russian social and financial behavior. That is, the various status groups of early eighteenth-century Moscow differed from one another in the ways in which they borrowed and loaned mon...
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