Rural credit in Procida over the 19th century. Linking a small island’s needs to city financial elites

We study the rural credit in Procida in the 19th century through the experience of the Banca Agricola e Commerciale di Procida, a cooperative bank founded in 1890, at the height of the financial crisis that swept through the local and national banking and financial system. We focus on the business relationships that linked the island’s credit environment to the financial system of Naples that, since the 1880s, experimented an efflorescence of cooperative banks. Consider that Procida Procida is the first outpost in the formation of cooperative banks in the South of Italy with the Banca Popolare di Procida (1873) then followed by the Banca Agricola Commerciale di Procida (1890) Using the approach of the Social Network Analysis, we study the business ownership structure and the corporate boards’ network of the cooperative banks to analyze the role that these institutions had in the support of the island’s economy. Ultimately, we aim to understand if cooperative banks really operated in a mutualistic and welfare direction in the island. More specifically, we analyze the ability of Procida rural banks to stay away from the dominant role of the Neapolitan financial elites, to respond to their real mission of "being of help for workers and farmers" and to detach themselves from the “banking carnival” that would have overwhelmed the whole Italian banking system at the end of the 19th century.