2 - Contracts, debts and debtors

Summary

Contracts are to the market what oil is to an engine. Without contracts, markets would be frozen institutions, structures without actions, frameworks without content. Contracts allow parties in a market to interact, to put their ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange’ into effect. As the legal theorist Charles Addison noted in 1845:

There is scarcely an individual of any property or station in the country who does not every week, nor any mercantile man who does not every day of the week, nay every hour of the day, contract obligations, or acquire the rights, of a buyer or seller, or a hirer or letter to hire, of a debtor or creditor, of a borrower or lender, of a depositor or depositary, of a commissioner or employer, of a receiver or agent, or trustee.

The nature of contract law, and its development over the course of the nineteenth century was, therefore, a vital element in the making of the Victorian market economy. As economic exchange multiplied in scale, extent and character with the development of Britain's domestic and colonial economies, so the law of contract – which by 1700 was already a large and complex body of doctrine and precedent – continued to expand and adapt to new circumstances, in part through legislation, in part through judicial interpretation. Many of the details of this expansion and adaptation have been traced by Patrick Atiyah.