This session explores financial help as a key analytical category for understanding how past societies responded to conflict, inequality, and economic vulnerability. Positioned at the intersection of credit, charity, and welfare, financial help encompasses a wide range of practices and institutions through which resources were mobilised, redistributed, and regulated in times of crisis.
From the late medieval period to the twentieth century, mechanisms such as pawn credit, charitable loans, grain funds, mutual aid societies, cooperative finance, public banks with welfare functions, and early insurance schemes played a central role in managing structural stress, including war, famine, epidemics, forced migration, and processes of state formation.
These instruments were not merely economic responses to scarcity, but also forms of social governance, shaping access to resources, defining eligibility, and structuring relationships between authorities, communities, and vulnerable groups. By conceptualising financial help as a distinct mode of governance, the session moves beyond teleological interpretations that frame such practices as precursors of modern welfare systems. Instead, it highlights their embeddedness in specific historical contexts marked by power asymmetries and conflict, where financial assistance could simultaneously mitigate hardship and reproduce social hierarchies.
The session adopts a comparative and global perspective, welcoming contributions from different regions and periods, including Europe, the Mediterranean, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Particular attention is given to transnational and connected histories, as well as to experiences from the Global South, in line with the Congress’s commitment to broadening the geographical scope of economic history.
Methodologically, the panel encourages dialogue between economic, social, and institutional history, and promotes the use of diverse sources, including archival records, quantitative data, legal frameworks, and digital tools. By foregrounding financial help as a central historical phenomenon, the session contributes to ongoing debates on inequality, sustainability, and the long-term foundations of financial inclusion, directly engaging with the theme World Powers and Conflicts.

Organizers:
Paola Avallone (CNR-ISEM)
Mauro Carboni (University of Bologna)
Tanja Skambraks (University of Graz)

Interested participants are invited to submit a 300-word abstract and a short bio by 31 August to
Paola Avallone paola.avallone@cnr.it
Mauro Carboni mauro.carboni@unibo.it
Tanja Skambraks tanja.skambraks@uni-graz.at