Online conference: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88697973598
The paper discusses the credit practices of savings banks and credit cooperatives in the Habsburg Monarchy (primarily in Hungary and in the Czech Lands) and their role in furthering capitalist modernity. The original goal of savings banks was to promote thriftiness among the lower classes while spending their profit on charity; in turn, credit cooperatives were founded to ease the credit needs of small producers (both industrial and agricultural) and to teach them how to use credit productively. The paper surveys the patterns of credit distribution by the two types of institutions after 1880 and explores how they managed to accommodate the logic of benevolence with capitalist rationality in the meantime.
