Conservatives Versus Wildcats: A Sociology of Financial Conflict

Abstract

Explores the dynamics between conservative and transgressive bankers in the banking system and considers the effect of this conflict on finance, focusing on examples from the economic and social history of nineteenth-century United States and Italy. Discusses money, banks, and creditworthiness--three myths?; banking and finance as organized conflict; institutions and the struggle over creditworthiness in the nineteenth-century United States; wildcats, reputations, and the formation of the Federal Reserve; Italian elites and the centralization of creditworthiness; and Italian creditworthiness--from central to national. Polillo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Index.