265
was known to all concerned. As I have said above, it might well have been a dollar or two, but no more than that small sum.
My main reason for favouring the money loan option is the composition of the list. The Shek Pik papers show that the members of the money loan associations listed there were a very mixed bag, and this was even more likely to be the case in town. This variety we have here, as demonstrated above. And whereas membership of a small money loan association was more than likely to include strangers, I doubt whether a moneylender would be willing to loan money to persons who might not be known to him and might well have no guarantors. Thus, I still hold to the view that these persons were linked, and through having come together for a common purpose.
Conclusion
I think the issue remains open.
If the men shown on the list were indeed members of a money-loan association, the trifling amounts are as important as the fact of its existence. For the social and economic historian, the very modest nature of this particular operation is the more intriguing - not to say exciting - since it serves to underline the fact that, large or small, the money-loan association was an important player in the economic life of ordinary folk in pre-modern times, in town and country alike. Its existence is a testimony to both need and enterprise, to the creation and circulation of money for the realization of modest aims. It was also the training ground for the entrepreneurial skills of its organizers, some of whom, in time, might move on to more significant business ventures.
If, on the other hand, the scrap of paper is only a list of defaulters on the full or remaining part of small loans, it still indicates the circulation of money by an enterprising person who was prepared to take risks against the payment of interest. It also shows how some financial needs at the bottom end of society could be met on a petty scale.
Finally, whilst those on the list appear from their names to be men, were the organizers of the money loan associations always males? The Shek Pik papers show that literacy was not always a requirement