In Hock: Pawning in Early America

Woloson, Wendy A.

doi:10.1353/jer.2007.0018

Cited by 26 publications

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“…To begin, pawning in the United States dates back to the seventeenth century and has served as an important credit source for citizens locked out of mainstream banking options since the eighteenth century (Woloson 2007(Woloson , 2012Marron 2009;Caskey 1994;McCants 2007;Tebbutt 1983). But even today, with expanded alternative loan options, pawnshops are the most commonly used form of alternative credit, with just under 3% of all US households using a pawnshop at least once in 2013 3 (FDIC 2014).…”

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“…The collateral thereby enables the pawnshop to forego the use of credit scores, bank account balances, and employment status-the primary tools mainstream banks use to help mitigate risk when extending loans (Marron 2009;Caskey 1994;Karger 2005). It is therefore unsurprising that pawnshop customers are disproportionately poorer, people of color, women, and with lower education (FDIC 2014(FDIC , 2012, all groups who have traditionally faced greater barriers to economic success than their higher SES, white, male counterparts (Massey 2007;Woloson 2007;Marron 2009). …”

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Degenshein_Strategies of Valuation

Degenshein¹

2018

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This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations.Keywords Cultural objects . Discursive strategies . Fringe banking . Pawnshops . Pricing . ValuationA discursive formation will be individualized if one can define the system of formation of the different strategies that are deployed in it; in other words, if one can show how they all derive (in spite of their sometimes extreme diversity, and in spite of their dispersion in time) from the same set of relations.-Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (2010, p. 68) A sign in the window of Second City Pawn, 1 a pawnshop on the North Side of Chicago, proclaims that the store deals in BAnything of Value.^To the average passerby Theor Soc (2017) 46:387-409

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Degenshein_Strategies of Valuation

Degenshein¹

2018

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“…Reliance on pawning was a distinctive function of credit in the port cities of the Atlantic world, where the personal nature that had characterized relationships of debt in the early modern period were unmade by the transient nature of the populations. 67 But especially in the economies of Saint-Louis and Gorée, where there was little cash to exchange, credit (and credit in consumer goods and commodities) was essential. 68 Company records kept track of debts owed and creditors, and bills of exchange were issued by the military governments, but cash and specie were difficult to come by.…”

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“All the baubles that they needed”: “Industriousness” and Slavery in Saint-Louis and Gorée

Everill¹

2017

Early American Studies

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All the baubles that they needed" 'Industriousness' and Slavery in Saint-Louis and Gorée In 1768, the will of John Pfeffinger, a British merchant in Saint-Louis, made Marie Bedone "of the island of Senegal" the main heir to his estate. 1 He also left her "one hundred bars of Merchandise of my property," and all of his furniture, as well as two slaves. Signares like Bedone-African and Eur-African women married into the European and increasingly metis mercantile classes of the islands of Gorée and Saint-Louiswere responsible for provisioning the slave traders who entered these ports, but also for hiring out the enslaved and family labor that made possible the slave and gum trades that dominated Senegambian commerce. 2 These women's efforts were rewarded not only with an abundance of consumer merchandise from the Atlantic world, but also an accumulation of heritable property, in the form of real estate and slaves. In thinking about the rise of Atlantic consumer culture in the development of capitalism, slavery has played an increasingly important historiographical role. Studies have taken into account the enslaved labor on the plantations producing the new staple luxuries like sugar and cotton, or the role of the slave trade in developing more 1 The National Archives, UK (TNA) PROB 11/941, August 17, 1768 John Pfeffinger Esquire. There are numerous examples of this in the Wills and Probates of the British merchants resident at Senegambia and

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“… 38 Pawnbroking has been a part of everyday financial life in economies that have attained more than a rudimentary level of marketization, especially (though not exclusively) among the poor and the working classes [Becker 1957; Beezley 2008; Bouman and Houtman 1988; Caskey 1991; Tebbutt 1983; Woloson 2007]. …”

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God’s Technicians: Religious Jurists and the Usury Ban in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Calder¹

2016

Arch. eur. sociol.

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At the heart of the $2 trillion Islamic-finance industry is a ban on interest. But why is there only anIslamicban on interest today? After all, for over a millennium, interest was also gravely sinful in Judaism and Christianity. While scholars have addressed the evolution of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic economic morality in isolation, very few since Weber have tackled the interest question directly and comparatively.I argue that the fate of the religious interest ban has always depended on the fate of religious jurists. When religious jurists are absent, no systematic interest ban emerges. When religious jurists emerge as technical experts, the interest ban appears and thrives. And when religious jurists come under attack or lose their traditional role in society, the interest ban withers and dies.To conclude, I call for a reconstruction of Weber’s theory of religion and economic morality that dissolves the tradition-modernity binary.

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In Hock: Pawning in Early America

Cited by 26 publications

References 28 publications

Degenshein_Strategies of Valuation

Degenshein_Strategies of Valuation

“All the baubles that they needed”: “Industriousness” and Slavery in Saint-Louis and Gorée

God’s Technicians: Religious Jurists and the Usury Ban in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

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