Hoffman, Philip T. <br/><br/>
Revolution and Evolution 

 -  2004.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 69 
<br/><br/> This article seeks to explain how the information technology that is essential for the operation of credit markets is created or destroyed. Information technology of this sort is a form of social capital, and the article also seeks to understand how institutions linked to such social capital arise or disappear. It does so by looking at 67 different credit markets scattered throughout France and examining their evolution both before and after the French Revolution. The aim is to follow the consequences of the great changes that the Revolution brought about. It turns out that the institutions of credit markets were not uniformed across France, but they were not peculiar to each local market either. Rather, there were two distinct institutional patterns – one found in Northern France and the other typical of the South – and in each region the institutions of credit markets evolved in a different way. Institutions were also different in the city and in the countryside, and as a result there were really four distinct systems of credit, each with distinctive types of loans and financial intermediaries, who were trained in dissimilar ways. The existence of such differences implies that institutions depended on the volume of lending in each market and also on the level of inequality.