T awny P aul . The Poverty of Disaster

When discussing credit historically, much of the focus has tended toward the positive, the successes, and particularly how credit provided access to capital and therefore fueled economic development and growth. But there was another side to the story—those for whom access to credit spelled increased insecurity rather than success. In The Poverty of Disaster, Tawny Paul masterfully brings the experiences of these people to the fore, focusing on Britain in the period between 1700 and 1770. Paul analyzes the experiences of members of the “middling sort” of society—that is, individuals who did not go bankrupt but were committed to debtors’ prisons because they defaulted on their debts or were insolvent. This group, Paul states, may have been as much as ten times larger than those who suffered bankruptcy. Indeed, eighteenth-century Britain saw significant numbers of the middle classes imprisoned for debt, and Paul argues convincingly that the “ubiquity of...

Ancient history · Bankruptcy · Capital (architecture) · Debt · Default · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Insolvency · Political economy · Political science · Poverty · Sociology · Underclass · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Finance · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law