Central bank collateral frameworks and the liquidity transformation they allow for play important roles for financing long term economic projects (and thereby economic growth) while preserving financial stability. To shed light on early central bank collateral frameworks, this note analyses a document of the Riksens ständers lånebank of 1682 which pledges real estate to serve as collateral for a loan of the Riksbank to the farmer Olof Olofsson. A transcription and translation are provided and the document is analyzed in the context of the 17th century operations, balance sheet, and mandate of the Riksens ständers lånebank and the related literature. We recall the role of central bank credit to private debtors in early central banking, and that, contrary to some prominent views, government financing was more the exception than the rule as key reason to establish and operate central banks before 1700. We also derive lessons for today's central bank collateral frameworks and their role in liquidity transformation.

This study examines the credit market in seventeenth-century Stockholm, a rapidly growing city whose credit market is an early example of a market with both private and institutional actors. Using a sample of 1,500 probate inventories from 1679 to 1708, we focus on the practices and experiences of municipal and state servants, and we examine in detail the probate inventories of employees of the royal court. The latter group had their wages paid by the king in a world where being in arrears was the norm, and their spatial and social proximity to the Bank of the Estates made them potential pioneers in the movement towards an institutionalized and formalized capital market. The credit market has a mixed character, both in terms of the opportunities available to investors and in terms of their behavior. For people with a surplus of cash and good connections, money lending could be a way to increase their income. The court servants and many others moved seamlessly between institutional and private, as well as formal and informal, credit. The article shows that wage earners and state servants were central to the transformation of the early modern credit market. For them, the credit market and the bank offered investment opportunities that matched their skills and circumstances.

This chapter discusses the ways in which households were connected to the expanding labour market in the period 1720 to 1880 and, vice versa, the ways in which the labour market was deeply dependent on the paid and unpaid work of households. The chapter does not use verb data and instead builds on four case studies: the Sala silver mine, the linen factory at Kättsta, the Västerås steam brewery, and the stud farm at Strömsholm (all in Västmanland, Sweden). The chapter points out how the worksites combined elements from the modern labour market (e.g., set working hours, contracts, fixed wages) with elements from early modern working life (e.g., patriarchal labour relations, worksite hierarchies modelled on the household, blurred boundaries between working for an employer and self-employment). The chapter discloses that the two-supporter model could take many forms and suggests a new terminology to accommodate this diversity and facilitate the analysis of ‘the total social organisation of work’ (Miriam Glucksmann).

This article aims to analyse credit as a core element in the political changes and processes of state formation that took place in Sweden in the second half of the seventeenth-century. The study focuses on discussions within the Council of the Realm and at the Diets about how to use the two Swedish seventeenth-century banks as creditors to the state. The two banks were essential parts of an elaborate attempt to shift public debt regime from one based on private creditors and the personal credit of the king and the men in the government to a regime based on institutional creditors and the credit of the Estates of the Realm. The outcome of the procesess was contingent upon some of the core topics of early modern Europe’s political and financial discourses: the nature of the sovereign, the relationship between private interests and the public good, and the role and functioning of representative assemblies. This process was the beginning of a development in which sovereign borrowing became a public concern, which eventually strengthened the Estate’s position vis-à-vis the government, and is a significant example of the interconnectedness of politics and credit.

In 1657, Sweden saw the creation of its first bank, the private royal-chartered Stockholms Banco. It crashed a few years later and was reconstructed as the Bank of the Estates of the Realm. The intention here is to show how a bank could (re)open so soon after a disastrous crash and to point at some key factors in its success. The main argument posits not only that the principals of the new bank required an adequate institutional framework to make a credible commitment, but also that the prosperity of that bank depended upon said principals’ ability to control the narrative of the crashed bank and to recruit a good staff with strong personal credit, whose self-interest it could harness and credit it could use.

I denna artikel undersöks Ständernas banks (senare Riksbanken) första tid som aktör på den svenska kreditmarknaden. Genom att gå bortom ständernas beslut om att grunda en bank visar denna artikel att bankens kredit inte ansågs vara fast och avslutad vid riksdagens slut 1 oktober 1668. Tvärtom var personliga relationer och ständiga bedömningar av trovärdighet i handlingar och uppträdanden avgörande. Banken arbetade kontinuerligt med sin kredit i samspel med konkurrenters och kunders önskemål i en ”public economy of information”. Bankens praxis för kreditgivning uppstod i dialog med det omgivande samhället; vad som teoretiskt var bäst för bankens kredit var inte nödvändigtvis kompatibelt med kundernas behov. Kredit och trovärdighet behövde upprätthållas i en pågående process för att banken skulle fungera. Till skillnad från vad som diskuterats av tidigare forskning angående tidigmodern materiell kultur verkar kredit i detta sammanhang inte ha uttryckts genom utformningen av bankbyggnadens fasad eller interiördekorationer. Viktigare var tegelvalv och säkra lås, bredden på diskarna, personalens sätt att dagligen möta klienter och kompetensen att ekonomisera bankens resurser och därigenom signalera trovärdighet.

By going beyond the Swedish Riksdag’s decision to create Riksens ständers bank (the Bank of the Estates of the Realm), this article shows that the bank’s credit was not seen as fixed and set when the Riksdag was adjourned on October 1, 1668. On the contrary, in a credit market characterized by a weak institutional framework, personal relationships and assessing credibility on the basis of manners and appearances were essential for private and institutional actors alike. The bank constantly had to work on its credit withregard to competitors and customer wishes and based on the conception of credit in a ”public economy of information.” The bank’s practices in terms of building credit did not materialize in isolation but occurred in a constant dialogue with society at large. What was best for the bank’s credit in theory was not necessarily compatible with the customers’ needs, and the bank’s practices came to be defined by a relationship based on dialogue. Credit and credibility needed to be maintained in an ongoing process for the bank to function. Moreover, it does not seem as if credit was primarily expressed through the design of the bank building’s exterior or interior decorations such as when the Bank of England built its house in the eighteenth century. What mattered more were brick vaults and secure locks, the width of the counters, how the staff behaved in their daily encounters with the clients, and the ability to be frugal with the bank’s resources and thereby prove to be credible.

We use a unique source from the Swedish royaldemesnesto examine the work and relative wages of women insixteenth-century Sweden, an economic laggard in theearly modern period. The source pertains to workers hiredon yearly contracts, a type more representative of histori-cal labour markets than day labour on large constructionsites, and this allows us to observe directly the food con-sumed by workers. We speak to the debate on the ‘littledivergence’ within Europe, as women’s work and genderdifferentials in pay is a key indicator of women’s relativeautonomy and seen as a cause for the economic ascen-dency of the North Sea region during the period. Wefind small gender differentials among both unskilled andskilled workers, indicating that Sweden was a part of the‘golden age’ for women. We argue that despite superficialequality, women’s economic outlooks were restrained inmany other ways – including their access to higher-skilledwork and jobs in the expanding parts of the economy –adding important nuance to the discussion about the rela-tionship between women’s social position and economicgrowth in the early modern period