Credit-Rating, Risk and Financial Exclusion: R.G.Dun in Mexico, 1890s-1920s
When the Banco Nacional de México (Banamex) opened its doors in 1884, it engaged a credit-rating agency, the American company R.G. Dun, to appraise the creditworthiness of people and businesses. The bank needed clients, including people and businesses to whom it could lend money, and it used Dun’s services to find these potential debtors. Banamex’s archive has a collection of the reports that Dun prepared for the bank, which is complementary to the Dun collection at The Baker Library at the Harvard Business School. I analyze a sample of 125 reports from the 1890s through the 1920s (about 10 percent of the data universe) to examine how middle-class people and people with modest wealth were excluded from financial services. The documents provide intimate financial and social details about a wide array of people and businesses, and close readings and quantitative analysis address questions about risk and trust: Who was deemed a good credit risk and why? Which criteria (gender, wealth, reputation, and so on) were connected to positive and negative evaluations? Did assessments change after the Mexican Revolution? I address these questions with social science methods, especially statistical analysis of relationships between variables, and humanities methods, especially close readings of individual reports that do not fit the mould (the richest person to receive a negative evaluation, the poorest to receive a positive one, and so on), and I show how financial exclusion was created by Dun and Banamex. I also show how the Dun reports represent a liminal world, a moment of transition in economic history, when new techniques such as verifying details in public records blended with a long-standing practice of relying on gossip for credit information.
I can present in English, Spanish, or both.
