Abstract
Tawny Paul’s The Poverty of Disaster is an important corrective to any kind of triumphalist narrative of the impact of Britain’s Financial Revolution on the middling sort. Focusing on the period 1700−1770, Paul shows that Britain’s “polite and commercial” people (as Paul Langford dubbed them) experienced financial insecurity as much as success. Although historians like to say the middle class is always rising, Paul reminds us that downward mobility was the opposite side of the coin. One of the book’s primary contributions —and one that will interest readers of this journal—is that the eighteenth-century economy was not made up of individuals but of families, households, and communities. A business or tradesperson’s economic success or failure did not just affect that one person but all of that person’s economic networks and connections. Paul’s familial and communal approach to financial insecurity in the past may fly in the face of traditional economic theory, although it is probably much closer to the reality of urban, middling life in eighteenth-century Britain.
While historians of the eighteenth century have been interested primarily in financial growth or innovation, Paul is more interested in failure. Studies of bankruptcy do exist, but Paul argues that a better way to study financial failure is through imprisonment for debt, which affected ten times more people than bankruptcy. Paul suggestively argues that a high proportion of the middling sort experienced poverty—or more specifically a “poverty of disaster”—due to financial misfortune or mismanagement (33). Making full use of adjectives such as precarious, fragile, insecure, unstable, and uncertain, Paul presents a picture of middling people fearful of sinking as much as hopeful of success. The Poverty of Disaster is impressively inclusive and comparative without calling attention to her approach. Readers learn as much about the middling sort in Edinburgh as in London, and Paul’s discussions of tradespeople include examples of both genders.
The book is divided into three parts, which explore financial insecurity from economic, social, and corporeal perspectives. Part I is an excellent social, legal, and economic history of middling men and women imprisoned for debt. The three chapters in this section cover the demographics of debtor prisons, the structures of credit and wealth that made the middle class vulnerable to incarceration for debt, and the perspectives of creditors who chose to imprison their debtors. Paul mines the archives of debtor prisons (Edinburgh’s Tolbooth as well as London’s Fleet and King’s Bench prisons), lists of released debtors in the London Gazette newspaper, inventories of released debtors found in Quarter Sessions papers, debt litigation records, and personal papers and diaries.
Linking to the current historiographic interest in incarceration, Paul shows that the majority of people incarcerated and the longest serving prisoners were people of the middling sort who were imprisoned for debt. For instance, in the 1770s John Howard’s survey of English prisons counted a population of 4,084, out of whom 2,437 (or 60%) were incarcerated for debt (33). Paul explains that imprisoned debtors served for long periods of time and were the only prisoners for whom incarceration was punitive until the advent of the penitentiary. The author also provides a very helpful summary of how debts were pursued under both English and Scottish law. Under English common law the procedures to pursue debt were lengthy and many types of property were protected from seizure, incentivizing creditors to consider prison for recalcitrant debtors. Paul shows how this especially hurt middling tradespeople, since rich merchants could resort to bankruptcy and petty debtors had access to the equity courts; those in between, however, were stuck. Parliament chose not to aid the middling class by changing the laws concerning debt. Instead, they periodically issued Insolvency Acts to clear the prisons.
Paul asserts that eighteenth-century prisons were middling institutions. She estimates that in the 1720s just under 2% of England’s middling households had a member who had spent time in debtor’s prison (55). Paul is also able to determine the occupational status of those imprisoned: 44.8% were artisans/manufacturers, 22.3% sold food and drink or offered lodging, and 13.5% were retailers. Women featured among those imprisoned, although they were a minority (7% of listed debtors in the London Gazette were female and 10% of those named in the prison lists were women). Incarcerated female debtors identified themselves by occupational, residential, and marital status. Paul is surprised at the lack of wives among incarcerated debtors, because historians, such as Alexandra Shepard and Cathryn Spence, have documented the role of wives in credit networks. Paul posits that while coverture did not prevent women from buying and selling, it did protect them from incarceration. (It could also be that the women who identified by occupation or residential status might have been married women).
The impact incarcerating adult male tradesmen had on the household will be of especial interest to historians of the family. Much has been made of how women stepped up to head households when husbands were away at war or at sea. Paul’s evidence suggests we should think of wives of incarcerated debtors in the same way. Except in this case male debtors were not away earning like soldiers or sailors; instead, their families had to pay for their lodging, food, and fuel while they sat idle in prison.
A second reason why the middling sort were the ones most likely to be imprisoned for debt was because of how they held their wealth. Using debtors’ schedules (inventories of their assets), Paul shows that middling people held less of their wealth in the form of household goods and stock (which could be pawned) and more in “virtual” forms of wealth, such as credit and financial instruments like stocks and bonds. Paul argues that these middling debtors were not poor per se, they just held less moveable wealth and could not convert their assets quickly or easily when asked to repay. It was precisely their enmeshment in the eighteenth-century credit economy—where specie was rare—that made these credit brokers vulnerable to imprisonment.
Chapter three is where Paul answers the question we all have: why would a creditor imprison a debtor and render them unable to work to pay off their debt? From the standpoint of the individual creditor, it made sense to imprison a debtor, because doing so gave them first claim to the debtor’s assets (vs. a bankruptcy proceeding where all creditors were equal). In comparison, pursuing a debtor in court was a lengthy process that would cost more than incarcerating them. The threat of imprisonment was also part of the negotiation process; it might well make the debtor realize that the creditor was serious and add some urgency to finding the funds to repay. Family and friends might also be more likely to help an indebted person threatened with imprisonment. Paul also considers the macro level: imprisonment for debt ensured credit and commerce functioned as needed. Without the ability to enforce payment, who would lend? and how would commerce survive? Lastly, imprisonment for debt also seemed to work. Many imprisoned debtors in Edinburgh were released after partially paying off their debts. Prison time does seem to have made debtors pay back at least some of the money they owed.
In an interesting aside, Paul assesses debtor imprisonment in the context of the history of emotions, positing that some creditors chose this option out of anger or revenge. Other creditors, however, may have chosen to imprison a debtor out of anxiety over their own financial position. The anxious state of creditors can be seen as another example of the larger context of financial insecurity in eighteenth-century England, much like other documented concerns, such as fraud, forgery, and stockjobbing.
In Part II, Paul moves away from the prison and focuses on the debtors and creditors themselves. Chapter four examines the significance of reputation to credit networks and how debtors represented their own worth. Paul uses defamation cases from Edinburgh’s consistory court between 1700−1770 to examine “constructions of honour, reputation, and credit” by the middling sort (139). Paul adds to the historical research on slander cases in the church courts by focusing on a later period (the eighteenth century), on Scotland instead of England, and on insult as it affected the economic worth of men and women. Unlike London, in Edinburgh men pursued cases of slander because of how they affected their economic worth and credit. Weighing in on debates about gender and credit or reputation, Paul argues that while insults did vary by gender, there was also a lot of overlap. While women in Edinburgh also commonly faced sexual slanders as in the English courts, in Scotland the second most common insult against a woman was calling her a “thief,” “robber,” or “cheat,” economic slanders rather than sexual ones (151).
Paul also persuasively argues that slander was not just aimed at individuals. If, as Craig Muldrew says, the household and not the individual was the unit of credit, then why Paul asks is the household not also the unit of reputation? When looked at this way, Paul finds not only did insults to female and male honor overlap, but they were also intertwined. Just under 10% of defamation cases in Edinburgh’s courts were brought jointly by married couples. The slandering of one could hurt the other, the reputation of their household, and their business. Paul’s evidence nuances the debate on gender and credit, showing that for women as well as men credit could be defined economically.
In chapter five Paul examines worth from a different angle: by looking at how occupational identity affected men’s worth. Paul confirms Alex Shepard’s theory that worth was becoming defined less by what one had and more by what one did in the eighteenth century. In this context, Paul asserts that men who engaged in various types of employment or who failed to climb the ladder from apprentice to master, might experience what is called in today’s gig economy “failed occupationality” (167). Paul changes her source base in this chapter; relying on the diaries of three lower middling tradesmen to show how they defined work, which included labor for an income, as well as “employment” in scientific, scholarly, and artistic pursuits. (Here more discussion of the eighteenth-century definition of “employment” is needed). Paul’s point that office holding, while unpaid, was crucial to male status and identity is an important one. Paul also argues for examining how work altered across the male lifecycle (an approach that is usually applied only to women) and how the adult male thought of the work of his household dependents, especially his wife. Paul points out that a wife’s labor was perhaps best acknowledged by her husband when she died and hiring a housekeeper became a priority.
Those interested in the history of the body will want to read Part III, which focuses on the corporeal experience of debt and prison. As Paul avers, “debt, credit, reputation were not just abstract social concepts in the past; they were “anchored to the physical self” (191). Chapter six examines the punishment of the debtor’s body through arrest, violence, and imprisonment. While it might seem that such violence stands in contrast to the world of “polite and commercial people,” Paul reminds us that brutality was always simmering just beneath the veneer of politeness. This was credit’s “hard edge.” And when credit structures broke down, harm could come not only to a debtor’s reputation but also to his or her body. Arrests turned violent, prison conditions were abhorrent, and some forms of torture (thumbscrews) may have been used on debtors. Last but not least, the debtor lost his or her liberty when detained. Paul sees imprisonment for debt as similar to dueling, both were polite forms of violence. But dueling was not legally condoned or facilitated like the imprisonment of debtors was. A better analogy would be slavery. When Paul speaks of the debtor’s body as a “mobile repository of value” (217), when Paul argues that imprisonment for debt conflicted with “eighteenth-century ideals of selfhood” (222), and when Paul asserts that “the assignment of imaginary and temporary monetary values to people had significant consequences” (218), one cannot help but think of the bodies of enslaved persons. The Anglo-Atlantic world of the eighteenth century was one in which credit and debt were always embodied in various individuals: the African slave, the indentured servant, and now thanks to Paul we can add, the imprisoned debtor.