Abstract: This article reconstructs Norway's mortgage market and produces the first national series for 1820–1920 using 3,729 mortgage loans from Christiania’s land registers (pantebøker) with Ministry of Finance historical mortgage statistics. By the 1890s, individuals and non financial firms accounted for more than three quarters of outstanding mortgage debt, while the aggregate mortgage stock amounted to 65,1 percent of historic GDP. I argue that this financial deepening was not driven by formal financial intermediaries, but rather by public legal infrastructure. Compulsory property registration (tinglysing), mandated state fire insurance for urban properties (established 1767), publicly accessible tax records reduced search and verification costs, enabling peer‑to‑peer mortgage credit to scale. Norway's experience parallels the non-bank credit systems of France (Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, Rosenthal 2019) and the Netherlands (Gelderblom et al. 2023) but illustrates a distinct path to modernisation rooted in state-provided information infrastructure rather than private notaries.

Work in Progress:

• Norwegian Bankiers and their networks – Peer-to-Peer lending and Early Credit Markets longevity (WIP). 

• Money Makers – Northern European Banking Network: from Trondheim to Hamburg (WIP).