The Moral Economy
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, And Trust In Early Modern Europe is a 2014 economic history book by Laurence Fontaine.
Summary
There were according to Fontaine two conflicting economic cultures in the period: the gift-based "aristocratic culture" in rural areas and the contract-based bourgeois economy (or "merchant culture") in urban areas. According to reviewer Steven M. Beaudoin, the first six chapters address the range of practices and experiences associated with debt and credit. Fontaine in the first chapter explains "the mechanisms that made debt, and thus credit, a ubiquitous experience, common to aristocrats, merchants, and peasants". Chapters two and three center on rural debt, and chapters four through six center on urban economies.
The remaining chapters feature greater focus on the values associated with each economic culture. Chapter nine, according to Philipp Robinson Rössner, "closely studies bargaining in markets as a form resembling the modern bazaar, a somewhat logical behaviour in markets whose products were marked by a lack of standardisation, uncertainty about quality and the value of currencies."
According to Jon Stobart, the secondary material largely discusses the situation in France, but " there is also an impressive array of reading on Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and, to a lesser extent, Germany."
Reception
Anne E. C. McCants lauded The Moral Economy as a "magisterial overview of the social context of money-lending and poverty before the industrial age". Jon Stobart called it "a book of considerable scope and ambition". He claimed that Fontaine's analysis is "rich with the granular detail of individual stories". Stobart also praised Fontaine for "drawing on a wide range of secondary material.
“The Moral Economy” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Moral, Economy and Open-knowledge can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Moral Economy” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Moral, Economy and Open-knowledge provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104867365. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The Moral Economy”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The Moral Economy primary sources, The Moral Economy archive and Moral research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Moral Economy”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “The Moral Economy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.