Land, Finance, Technology: Perspectives on Mortgage Lending

What is it about?

Land has served as a primary means of sustenance, but also as a vehicle for wealth and power throughout the ages. Lending against land has taken diverse forms in different societies and time periods. Oftentimes a risky practice, mortgage has been treated in scholarly literature primarily as an economic or legal contract. This book calls for a fuller, culturally sensitive, and human-centered exploration of this age-old, but continuously reinvented institution. This introductory chapter argues that the ambiguous and uneasy partnerships of the formal and informal, public and private have resided in mortgage and titling institutions throughout history. With a focus on the evolution of legal norms and institutions for mortgage credit and land titling in the non-Western and Western world, it relates these continuities to new practices and technologies in the mortgage space. In an era of intensifying population mobility, resettlement, and political transitions in many parts of the world, these questions carry broader social and political import. Setting out to study mortgage lending from a human economy perspective, this chapter contends that the impact of new financial technologies should be evaluated within the particular historical and socio-cultural contexts of mortgage institutions. Land and the mortgage are frequently central to broader struggles over belonging and identity, calling attention to an increasing plurality of real property forms, entitlements, and calculative practices in the Global South and North—as well as the historical continuities in broader, racialized relations of inequality shaping the mortgage lending. The institutional and technological advances in global mortgage markets continue to intersect with interpersonal networks of reciprocity and expectations of mutuality among mortgage borrowers—while building on the social imaginaries and public representations of housing credit as a safeguard of one’s biological survival and social continuity.

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Photo by Sardar Faizan on Unsplash

Photo by Sardar Faizan on Unsplash