Credit and Debt in Eighteenth-Century England

Credit and Debt in Eighteenth-Century England PDF

Author: Alexander Wakelam

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0429647921

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Throughout the eighteenth century hundreds of thousands of men and women were cast into prison for failing to pay their debts. This apparently illogical system where debtors were kept away from their places of work remained popular with creditors into the nineteenth century even as Britain witnessed industrialisation, market growth, and the increasing sophistication of commerce, as the debtors’ prisons proved surprisingly effective. Due to insufficient early modern currency, almost every exchange was reliant upon the use of credit based upon personal reputation rather than defined collateral, making the lives of traders inherently precarious as they struggled to extract payments based on little more than promises. This book shows how traders turned to debtors’ prisons to give those promises defined consequences, the system functioning as a tool of coercive contract enforcement rather than oppression of the poor. Credit and Debt demonstrates for the first time the fundamental contribution of debt imprisonment to the early modern economy and reveals how traders made use of existing institutions to alleviate the instabilities of commerce in the context of unprecedented market growth. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in economic history and early modern British history.

The Poverty of Disaster

The Poverty of Disaster PDF

Author: Tawny Paul

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-10-17

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1108496946

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Examines debt insecurity in eighteenth-century Britain, a period of famously rapid economic growth when many people nevertheless experienced financial failure.

Credit and Debt in Medieval England c.1180-c.1350

Credit and Debt in Medieval England c.1180-c.1350 PDF

Author: Phillipp Schofield

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2002-08-07

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1785704044

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The essays in this volume look at the mechanics of debt, the legal process, and its economics in early medieval England. Beneath the elevated plane of high politics, affairs of the Crown and international finance of the Middle Ages, lurked huge numbers of credit and debt transactions. The transactions and those who conducted them moved between social and economic worlds; merchants and traders, clerics and Jews, extending and receiving credit to and from their social superiors, equals and inferiors. These papers build upon an established tradition of approaches to the study of credit and debt in the Middle Ages, looking at the wealth of historical material, from registries of debt and legal records, to parliamentary roles and statues, merchant accounts, rents and leases, wills and probates. Four of the six papers in this volume were given at a conference on 'Credit and debt in medieval and early modern England' held in Oxford in 2000. The other two papers draw upon new important postgraduate theses. Contents: Introduction (Phillipp Schofield) ; Aspects of the law of debt, 1189-1307 (Paul Brand) ; Christian and Jewish lending patterns and financial dealings during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Robin R. Mundill) ; Some aspects of the business of statutory debt registries, 1283-1307 (Christopher McNall) ; The English parochial clergy as investors and creditors in the first half of the fourteenth century (Pamela Nightingale) ; Access to credit in the medieval English countryside (Phillipp Schofield) ; Creditors and debtors at Oakington, Cottenham and Dry Drayton (Cambridgeshire), 1291-1350 (Chris Briggs) .

Casualties of Credit

Casualties of Credit PDF

Author: Carl Wennerlind

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-11-30

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0674062663

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Modern credit, developed during the financial revolution of 1620–1720, laid the foundation for England’s political, military, and economic dominance in the eighteenth century. Possessed of a generally circulating credit currency, a modern national debt, and sophisticated financial markets, England developed a fiscal–military state that instilled fear in its foes and facilitated the first industrial revolution. Yet a number of casualties followed in the wake of this new system of credit. Not only was it precarious and prone to accidents, but it depended on trust, public opinion, and ultimately violence. Carl Wennerlind reconstructs the intellectual context within which the financial revolution was conceived. He traces how the discourse on credit evolved and responded to the Glorious Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the founding of the Bank of England, the Great Recoinage, armed conflicts with Louis XIV, the Whig–Tory party wars, the formation of the public sphere, and England’s expanded role in the slave trade. Debates about credit engaged some of London’s most prominent turn-of-the-century intellectuals, including Daniel Defoe, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift and Christopher Wren. Wennerlind guides us through these conversations, toward an understanding of how contemporaries viewed the precariousness of credit and the role of violence—war, enslavement, and executions—in the safeguarding of trust.

To Her Credit

To Her Credit PDF

Author: Sara T. Damiano

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1421440563

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A transformative look at colonial women's pivotal roles as lenders and debtors in shaping the economic and legal systems of Newport and Boston. Winner of the Berkshire Women Historians Book Prize by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians In colonial Boston and Newport, personal credit relationships were a cornerstone of economic networks. During the eighteenth century, the pace of market exchange quickened and debt cases swelled the dockets of county courts, institutions that became ever more central to enforcing financial obligations. At the same time, seafaring and military service drew men away from home, some never to return. The absences of male household heads during this era of economic transition forced New Englanders to evaluate a pressing question: Who would establish and manage consequential financial relationships? In To Her Credit, Sara T. Damiano uncovers free women's centrality to the interrelated worlds of eighteenth-century finance and law. Focusing on everyday life in Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island—two of the busiest port cities of this period—Damiano argues that colonial women's skilled labor actively facilitated the growth of Atlantic ports and their legal systems. Mining vast troves of court records, Damiano reveals that married and unmarried women of all social classes forged new paths through the complexities of credit and debt, stabilizing credit networks amid demographic and economic turmoil. In turn, urban women mobilized sophisticated skills and strategies as borrowers, lenders, litigants, and witnesses. Highlighting the often-unrecognized malleability of early American social hierarchies, the book shows how indebtedness intensified women's vulnerability, while acting as creditors, clients, or witnesses enabled women to exercise significant power over men. Yet by the late eighteenth century, class differentiation began to mark finance and the law as masculine realms, obscuring women's contributions to the very institutions they helped to create. The first book to systematically reconstruct the centrality of women's labor to eighteenth-century personal credit relationships, To Her Credit will be an eye-opening work for economic historians, legal historians, and anyone interested in the early history of New England.

Genres of the Credit Economy

Genres of the Credit Economy PDF

Author: Mary Poovey

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-04

Total Pages: 523

ISBN-13: 0226675327

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money - in other words, participating in the modern financial system - seem like routine activities of everyday life. This book looks at how this came to be the case by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of finance in 18th and 19th century Britain.

The Financial Revolution in England

The Financial Revolution in England PDF

Author: P.G.M. Dickson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 1351889729

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Peter Dickson's important study of the origins and development of the system of public borrowing which enabled Great Britain to emerge as a world power in the eighteenth century has long been out of print. The present print-on-demand volume reprints the book in the 1993 version published by Gregg Revivals, which made significant alterations to the 1967 original. These included a new introduction reviewing recent work, and, in particular, 33 pages of detailed annotations and corrections, which, taken together, justified its status as a second edition.

Casualties of Credit

Casualties of Credit PDF

Author: Carl Wennerlind

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-11-30

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0674268318

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Modern credit, developed during the financial revolution of 1620–1720, laid the foundation for England’s political, military, and economic dominance in the eighteenth century. Possessed of a generally circulating credit currency, a modern national debt, and sophisticated financial markets, England developed a fiscal–military state that instilled fear in its foes and facilitated the first industrial revolution. Yet a number of casualties followed in the wake of this new system of credit. Not only was it precarious and prone to accidents, but it depended on trust, public opinion, and ultimately violence. Carl Wennerlind reconstructs the intellectual context within which the financial revolution was conceived. He traces how the discourse on credit evolved and responded to the Glorious Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the founding of the Bank of England, the Great Recoinage, armed conflicts with Louis XIV, the Whig–Tory party wars, the formation of the public sphere, and England’s expanded role in the slave trade. Debates about credit engaged some of London’s most prominent turn-of-the-century intellectuals, including Daniel Defoe, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift and Christopher Wren. Wennerlind guides us through these conversations, toward an understanding of how contemporaries viewed the precariousness of credit and the role of violence—war, enslavement, and executions—in the safeguarding of trust.

Penurious Payments

Penurious Payments PDF

Author: Nicholas Valvo

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781321023961

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This dissertation analyzes literary misrepresentations of economic life in eighteenth-century Britain. Following recent work in early-modern social and economic history, we can no longer see credit as an expedient used to navigate a cash economy. Just the opposite: cash was the expedient used to navigate an economy primarily based on credit. Yet in much of the literature of the period, from novels to sermons, credit is presented as an exceptional phenomenon laden with grave moral significance, a troubling expedient to be avoided except in emergencies. This is a pattern of representation that fails to capture the economic reality faced by people of any class. Instead, eighteenth-century Britons saw their use of credit as expressive of the boundaries and status gradations of the organic, hierarchical communities to which they belonged. The utility of credit as a category in moral argument came at the expense, I suggest, of its descriptive potential, and this distance from economic-historical verisimilitude provides new openings for literary and historical interpretation. I read texts by Defoe, Wesley, Tillotson, Mackenzie, Goldsmith, Johnson and Walpole to argue that key aspects of eighteenth-century literary history (formal realism, sentimentalism, and the putative decline of literary patronage) and political theology (toleration and anti-enthusiasm) responded to imperatives originating in informal credit economies based in Anglican parishes. I further argue that the late-century decline of this parish communal form prompted a reorganization of social thought which brought swift and simultaneous changes to contemporary understandings of the economic and literary alike.

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes