Loan Sharks

The Exchange, the blog of the Business History Conference, posted a list of new books of interest, and I noticed Loan Sharks: The Birth of Predatory Lending by Charles Geisst, published by the Brookings Institution. I hadn’t heard about the book before, but I was curious since there has been a lot of interesting work on loan sharks in the last decade or so. I was particularly interested to see if he cited my work with Mary Eschelbach Hansen ("The evolution of garnishment and wage assignment law in Illinois." Essays in Economic & Business History 32 (2014): 19-46). I looked Geisst’s book up on Google books and did a quick search. Our paper did not show up in the search.

I assumed he must cite Anne Fleming ("The borrower's tale: a history of poor debtors in Lochner Era New York City." Law and History Review 30, no. 04 (2012): 1053-1098 or "City of Debtors: Law, Loan Sharks, and the Shadow Economy of Urban Poverty, 1900–1970." Enterprise & Society 17, no. 4 (2016): 734-740.)  But she did not show up in the search either.

Michael Easterly ("Your Job is Your Credit: Creating a Market for Loans to Salaried Employees in New York City, 1885-1920." The Journal of Economic History 70, no. 2 (2010): 463-468).

Bruce Carruthers, Timothy Guinnane and Yoonseuk Lee ("Bringing “honest capital” to poor borrowers: The passage of the US Uniform Small Loan Law, 1907–1930." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42, no. 3 (2012): 393-418).

Louis Hyman (Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink).

Lendol Calder (Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit).

I couldn’t find any mention of any of them.

I was beginning to think that the search function must not be working, then I searched for Geisst and there were numerous hits.

Perhaps the search in Google books is flawed. I hope that is the case. Maybe it only finds the name of the author. If the search is not flawed, I am puzzled how someone can write a book that does not cite any of the recent research on the topic. I assume from the low price that the book is aimed at something wider than a purely academic audience, but I’m not asking for a detailed historiography, just some references to relevant work.