Clare Haru Crowston. Credit, Fashion, Sex

Clare Haru Crowston's Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France deploys the varied methods of cultural, social, and economic history to argue that “credit” is an important analytical lens for viewing the interrelationship of aspects of Old Regime society often treated as distinct. These include, among others, the royal court and noble patronage, an expanding consumer market, the rise of new modes of information dissemination, the growing crisis in public debt, and intensifying anxiety about the role of women in public life. As Crowston demonstrates, the word “credit” was widely used, not only among elites but also in literature intended for the lower classes, to describe relations of power and influence in which individuals deployed their reputation (or credit) for various forms of material and nonmaterial gain. A key finding is that notions of credit extended well beyond the familiar realms of commerce and finance, on the one hand, and aristocratic patronage, on the other. The term was also used to make sense of (and to structure) such diverse arenas as familial, religious, and intellectual life. Moreover, these various forms of credit (ranging from commercial instruments to patronage ties to the appearance of fashionability) were regularly exchanged against one another. Indeed, Crowston suggests, the effort to sever economic relations from other aspects of the social experience—epitomized by the rise of political economy—was itself a contingent product of the growing critique of credit (especially in relation to public debt and the role of women at court) that she traces in the book. Pointing to the persistence of non-economic modes of credit into the nineteenth century and even today, Crowston thus concludes by arguing that the “discovery of the economy” was “a construct in its own right rather than an inevitable result of economic and political modernization” (p. 324).

Debt · Economics · Economy · Market economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Product (mathematics) · Reputation · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Finance · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law