Abstract
Certain consumer credit businesses have historically been associated with distinct groups. This has been particularly true of working-class communities throughout the industrialized world since the late nineteenth century. This chapter uses a case study approach to explore a number of the themes around which this volume of essays is organized. Via an examination of the history of Provident Financial PLC, it provides examples of both transnational similarities in credit provision and details of how cultural and political patterns in individual countries led to sharply divergent historical pathways.
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Notes
Donncha Marron, Consumer Credit in the United States: A Sociological Perspective from the 19th Century to the Present (New York, 2009), 134–35.
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Sean O’Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1896– 1939 (Manchester, UK, 1998), 28.
The football pools were an enormously popular form of working-class gambling, with large financial prizes available to gamblers who could correctly predict the outcome of soccer matches. The largest company, Littlewoods, was launched in 1923, and it subsequently deployed its knowledge of working-class communities and their weekly disposable income to achieve equal success in mail-order retailing. Ten million people were speculating on the pools each week by 1939. Mark Clapson, A Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, c. 1823–1961 (Manchester, UK, 1992), 162.
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See Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, UK, 2003);
O’Connell, Credit and Community; Avram Taylor, Working Class Credit and Community since 1918 (Basingstoke, 2002).
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Theodore Zeldin, History of French Passions, vol. 2, Intellect, Taste, and Anxiety (Oxford, 1979), 628.
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Lenard R. Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914 (Baltimore, MD, 1984), 49.
Jan Logemann, “Americanization through Credit? Consumer Credit in Germany, 1860s–1960s,” Business History Review 85 (2011): 529–50;
see also Jan Logemann, “Different Paths to Mass Consumption: Consumer Credit in the United States and West Germany during the 1950s and ‘60s,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (2008): 525–59.
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Monopolies and Mergers Commission, Trading Check Franchise and Financial Services: A Report into the Supply of Trading Checks in the United Kingdom (London, 1981), 23–40.
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Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge, UK, 2003), 292.
Karen Rowlingson, Moneylenders and Their Customers (London, 1994), 4.
Janet Ford, Consuming Credit: Debt and Poverty in the UK (London, 1991), 7;
David Vincent, Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, 1991), 202–4.
Janet Ford and Karen Rowlingson, “Low-Income Households and Credit: Exclusion, Preference and Inclusion,” Environment and Planning 28 (1996): 1346.
Sharon Collard and Elaine Kempson, Affordable Credit: The Way Forward (Bristol, 2005), 1.
European Commission, Financial Services Provision and Prevention of Exclusion (Brussels, 2008), Table 4.
Monopolies and Mergers Commission, The Littlewoods Organisation PLC (London, 1997), 121.
Department of Trade and Industry, The Effect of Interest Rate Controls in Other Countries (London, 2004), 40–41.
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O’Connell, S. (2012). The Business of Working-Class Credit: Subprime Markets in the United Kingdom since 1880. In: Logemann, J. (eds) The Development of Consumer Credit in Global Perspective: Business, Regulation, and Culture. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137062079_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137062079_5
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