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.

Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England assesses the contribution of the business press and the publication of print to the economic transformation of England. The impact of non-book printing has been long neglected. A raft of jobbing work serviced commerce and finance while many more practical guides and more ephemeral pamphlets on trade and investment were read than the books that we now associate with the foundations of modern political economy. A pivotal change in the book trades, apparent from the late seventeenth century, was the increased separation of printers from bookseller-publishers, from the skilled artisan to the bookseller-financier who might have no prior training in the printing house but who took up the sale of publications as another commodity. This book examines the broader social relationship between publication and the practical conduct of trade; the book asks what it meant to be 'published' and how print, text and image related to the involvement of script. The age of Enlightenment was an age of astonishing commercial and financial transformation offering printers and the business press new market opportunities. Print helped to effect a business revolution. The reliability, reputation, regularity, authority and familiarity of print increased trust and confidence and changed attitudes and behaviours. New modes of publication and the wide-ranging products of printing houses had huge implications for the way lives were managed, regulated and recorded. JAMES RAVEN is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College Cambridge.

How do the stories we tell about money shape our economies? Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as constant growth became the economic norm throughout Europe, fictional stories involving money were overwhelmingly about loss. Novel after novel tells the tale of bankruptcy and financial failure, of people losing everything and ending up in debtor's prison, of inheritances lost and daughters left orphaned and poor. In Downward Mobility, Katherine Binhammer argues that these stories of ruin are not simple tales about the losers of capitalism but narratives that help manage speculation of capital's inevitable collapse. Bringing together contemporary critical finance studies with eighteenth-century literary history, Binhammer demonstrates the centrality of the myth of downward mobility to the cultural history of capitalism—and to the emergence of the novel in Britain. Deftly weaving economic history and formal analysis, Binhammer reveals how capitalism requires the novel's complex techniques to render infinite economic growth imaginable. She also explains why the novel's signature formal developments owe their narrative dynamics to the contradictions within capital's form. Combining new archival research on the history of debt with original readings of sentimental novels, including Frances Burney's Cecilia and Camilla, Sarah Fielding's David Simple, and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Downward Mobility registers the value of literary narrative in interpreting the complex sequences behind financial capitalism, especially the belief in infinite growth that has led to current environmental crises. An audacious epilogue arms humanists with the argument that, in order to save the planet from unsustainable growth, we need to read more novels.

This book explores the economic factors that led to Britain forfeiting its North American colonies. Placing discussions within both a historical and political context, the development of the colonial economy is examined in relation to both slavery and the industrial revolution. In turn, changes to British tax policy post-1760 and the increased burden placed on American taxpayers are detailed, alongside the resentment and resistance to them. These factors, as well as nonimportation agreements and boycotts, are highlighted as the major motivations for the American Revolution. This book aims to provide an accessible foundation to the economic and political issues central to Britain’s colonial activities in North America. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in the political economy and economic history.

In 1770, tavernkeeper Abigail Stoneman called in her debts by flourishing a handful of playing cards before the Rhode Island Court of Common Pleas. Scrawled on the cards were the IOUs of drinkers whose links to Stoneman testified to women's paradoxical place in the urban economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Stoneman did traditional women's work—boarding, feeding, cleaning, and selling alcohol—but her customers, like her creditors, underscore her connections to an expansive commercial society. These connections are central to The Ties That Buy. Historian Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor traces the lives of urban women in early America to reveal how they used the ties of residence, work, credit, and money to shape consumer culture at a time when the politics of the marketplace was gaining national significance. Covering the period 1750-1820, the book analyzes how women such as Stoneman used and were used by shifting forms of credit and cash in an economy transitioning between neighborly exchanges and investment-oriented transactions. In this world, commerce reached into every part of life. At the hearths of multifamily homes, renters, lodgers, and recent acquaintances lived together and struck financial deals for survival. Landladies, enslaved washerwomen, shopkeepers, and hucksters sustained themselves by serving the mobile population. A new economic practice in America—shopping—mobilized hierarchical and friendly relationships into wide-ranging consumer networks that depended on these same market connections. Rhetoric emerging after the Revolution downplayed the significance of expanding female economic life in the interest of stabilizing the political order. But women were quintessential market participants, with fluid occupational identities, cross-class social and economic connections, and a firm investment in cash and commercial goods for power and meaning.

Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Gambling permeated the daily lives of eighteenth-century Britons of all classes. This book explicates the relationship between the rampant gambling in eighteenth-century England, the new forms of gambling-inspired capitalism that transformed British society, and novels that interrogate the new socio-economy of long odds and lucky breaks.

"Prominent in building Britain's maritime empire in the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy also had a significant impact on politics, public finance and the administrative and bureaucratic development of the British state. The Navy was the most expensive branch of the state, and its effective funding and maintenance was a problem that taxed the ingenuity of a succession of politicians, naval officers and bureaucrats. The Navy, in many ways a victim of its own success, grew faster than the infrastructure that supported it and the public purse that funded it. By the middle of the century the difficulties this growth created had become critical, and the challenge this presented was taken up by Admiralty Boards led by Anson, Egmont, Hawke and Sandwich. Resolving these problems introduced administrative reforms and innovations in the Navy's administration and in public finance, some of which pre-figured later bureaucratic development. There was however a political price to pay, when the management of the Navy and its apparent unpreparedness for the War of American Independence made the Earl of Sandwich and the Navy a focus for political opposition to an unpopular government and a disappointing war."--BOOK JACKET.

Based on extensive primary-source research, this historical account considers the changing identity of 18th-century Colchester from the perspective of its "middling sort"--a section of society often attached to cultures of politeness and to the practices of consumption and production that helped shape economic change. Painstakingly reconstructing 18th-century social networks along lines of family, kinship, gender, spatiality, religion, and politics, this study examines the relationships between individual and family biographies while reflecting on provincial urban society and culture. The guide explores how Colchester capitalized on growth in agriculturally based industries--such as brewing, milling, and malting--and its role as an east-coast port and its participating in the urban renaissance and commodification of polite culture.