8 December 2025, 16:15-17:45 (in person)

FU Berlin, FMI, Room A336, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin

In this presentation, she will present her project, which is an exploration of the relationship between markets and society. More specifically, it retraces the history of the moral economy and analyzes the transformations and developments it has undergone over time. By moral economy, she means the non-economic norms that affect commercial interactions, such as fairness, cooperation, flexibility, and other-regarding norms.

The project illustrates how, within premodern communities, exchanges were governed by the norms of the moral economy in a context where efficient institutional structures for contract enforcement and coercion were lacking. However, these very norms served a dual purpose: they not only guided transactions, but also strengthened community cohesion. They established a strong system of mutual insurance, offering support and security to members long before the emergence of modern welfare states.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, when industrialization, urbanization, and demographic expansion coalesced to form the tenets of modernity, the norms of the moral economy waned. The welfare state replaced community support. Cities loosened previously dense ties between people. Changes in work, and especially the rise of wage labor, altered the meaning of communality. Yet the norms of the moral economy have not disappeared altogether. They have evolved, adapted, and even persisted in modern societies. This project seeks to explain how and why.

Elise M. Dermineur is an associate professor of economic history at Stockholm University and currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (WIKO). Trained in Strasbourg and holding a PhD in History from Purdue University, she specializes in early modern Europe, with a focus on the history of finance, and everyday economic life. She has published widely on the social and economic history of early modern Europe and is the author of Before Banks: The Making of Credit and Debt in Preindustrial France (2025, Cambridge University Press).

Please see our Code of Conduct that applies to all Global History Events: