Debts facing death: Discovering everyday credit practices through testaments in seventeenth-century Buenos Aires

Abstract

To die in peace, pre-modern Catholics first had to settle their debts. They did so in debt declarations, recorded in testaments, which allowed dying men and women to indicate their creditors and debtors. We investigate a sample of 422 testaments from seventeenth-century Buenos Aires to demonstrate that debts were at the base of the local economy, and to discover some features about credit allocation. Our unique sources allow for a reconstruction of the heterogeneous ways of formalizing debts in the absence of a banking system, and show that non-notarized loans relied on reciprocity. Debt declarations recorded at the end of the life cycle allow for a reconstruction of the use of credit in everyday life.