Women and Credit in the area of Santiago de Compostela at the end of the Old Regime (1770-1805)

Abstract

This chapter gives a general overview of the role of women in the Old Regime economy of Galicia, based on previous available studies and adding my own contribution and examples from my dataset. Thus, this section is focused on women and their access to money, through inheritance, salary, and savings. The second section discusses conditions and types of mortgage credit in Santiago de Compostela and its hinterlands, with subsections on the census and the obligations market, with special attention on mechanisms of female alienation from the census markets. After this analysis, the volume of women’s participation in urban and rural credit is determined, and in the third section and conclusion a first overview of women’s role in credit in this region of Galicia (Spain) is presented. Finally, some hypotheses are proposed to understand their increasing participation in credit at the end of the century.