Did merchants use trust when they used negotiable instruments of credit?
Merchant networks frequently operated with reputation at the forefront of transactions. If a merchant had a weak reputation or was unestablished, any credit he obtained is likely to have been at a higher rate of interest, to reflect potential risk. Altruistic trust didn't feature in any prominent sense in these networks; there was inevitably a large measure of calculation involved based on repeated transactions of the past. In family firms, the reputation of the firm as a whole was paramount, such that any absconding or disreputable actions by agents or representatives of the firm were held as damaging to the firm's overall reputation, even if such parties were not family members.
