Between Conflict and Negotiation. The Loan on Pawn in the Kingdom of Naples: Birth, Evolution and Establishment

The evolution of financial mechanisms in the long run explains structural aspects of capitalist economic performance. Discretion in the allocation of credit resources by financial institutions, stimulated by certain institutional contexts, limit access to credit to few economic actors as part of networks of relational resources with financial capacity. The resulting concentration of economic activity, as well as its consequently unequal distribution of resources, can therefore be interpreted as a correlate of discretionary financial mechanisms. Many scholars and politicians have often considered microfinance as the last possibility offered to people with low income and therefore excluded from the traditional banking system. But now it is known that some ways of implementing these mechanisms not always alleviate poverty. But history helps us with today's mechanisms. Financial exclusion is not, in fact, a product of the contemporary world. The Monti di Pietà played the role of pawnbrokers in the Italian peninsula from the second half of the fifteenth century, replacing first the Jews and then the Christians who practiced usurious rates. In Southern Italy, microcredit in the form of pawnbroking is found later than in the central areas of the Italian peninsula. The objective of our paper will be to highlight an economic model that saw the service of loans on pawn as forerunner of microcredit concentrated in a few institutions. From the birth of the Monti di Pietà in Naples and their evolution into public banks alongside other welfare institutions which had the real privilege of being allowed to open banks, we will try to understand why at a certain point all the banks in the city were authorized to lend on pawn. We will then focus on a case-study, that is, analyzing the accounts of the pawnshops opened in the public banks in order to understand the trend of "poverty" in an important moment for Southern Italy, when the Kingdom of Naples finally became autonomous with its own King: Charles of Bourbon.