Shopkeepers and Credit Allocation. Consumption Credit in an Old Regime Economy (Buenos Aires, 17th to 19th centuries)

During the Old Regime and until 1822, different mechanisms of credit delivery counterbalanced the absence of banks in Buenos Aires. While notarial credit was useful to match the necessities of merchants linked to long distance commerce, shopkeepers filled the demand of credit to daily consumption. In the rural environment, pulperías (grocery stores) and their shopkeepers (pulperos) provided food, money, means of production or clothes on credit to local neighbors for their daily necessities. Cases and information taken from the Buenos Aires’ agrarian society during the seventeenth and eighteenth century will allow to shed light on these kind of credit mechanisms for consumption at the micro level, explaining the pulpero's microcredit challenge: sustaining an imbalance between credits and liabilities.