The loan for consumption was a central legal form of contract credit transactions in the early modern period. In a typical loan for consumption, one person (the borrower) receives a certain amount or weight of a certain object (e.g. grain, cloth, oil) from the lender on the understanding that he will later return objects of the same kind, quantity, and quality. Already in the early modern period, loans of money were the most common. A loan for consumption (Latin mu…