Over the last few years, the idea that some of the central problems of Latin American development are a consequence of the excessive power of the elites has regained influence. Nevertheless, this neoinstitutionalist approach has been criticized because of its excessive determinism and the fact that it doesn’t pay enough attention to the periods when elite’s power was eroded. The present paper analyzes one of these cases, which occurred in Chile between 1913 and 1973. The income share of the top 1% is used as a proxy for the elite’s power. New quantitative evidence on incomes for different groups –the 1% and wage earners– is integrated into an analytic narrative on the conflictive relation between the elite and other political and social actors.

We analyze a network of 3,590 interpersonal credit ties among Renaissance Florentine elite households to determine how Florentine personal credit was socially structured. We assess the network in light of various social and economic motivations Florentines might have had to exchange credit with each other. We explore the extent of participation by people from different categories, such as neighborhoods, factions, and guilds, and we determine whether loans flowed primarily within or between such groupings. We observe considerable homophily within families and neighborhoods, but also extensive circulation of credit among the most commercially and politically active Florentines. The overall connectivity of this network of interpersonal credit transactions resembles the social structure of other contemporaneous Florentine networks, such as marriage and business, suggesting that interpersonal credit was an important and distinct domain in which elite membership was confirmed and elite social solidarity achieved.