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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Poverty of Disaster
  • Cited by 11
  • Tawny Paul, University of California, Los Angeles
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2019
Print publication year:
2019
Online ISBN:
9781108690546
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108690546
Subjects:
Social and Population History, British History after 1450, History
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
Information

Book description

Eighteenth-century Britain is often understood as a time of commercial success, economic growth, and improving living standards. Yet during this period, tens of thousands of men and women were imprisoned for failing to pay their debts. The Poverty of Disaster tells their stories, focusing on the experiences of the middle classes who enjoyed opportunities for success on one hand, but who also faced the prospect of downward social mobility. Tawny Paul examines the role that debt insecurity played within society and the fragility of the credit relations that underpinned commercial activity, livelihood, and social status. She demonstrates how, for the middle classes, insecurity took economic, social, and embodied forms. It shaped the work that people did, their social status, their sense of self, their bodily autonomy, and their relationships with others. In an era of growing debt and the squeeze of the middle class, The Poverty of Disaster offers a new history of capitalism and takes a long view of the financial insecurities that plague our own uncertain times.

Reviews

‘… a vital contribution to study of eighteenth-century England and Scotland. This bold and conceptually wide-ranging study is focused broadly upon the lived experience of the transition to capitalism. … essential reading for all those concerned with this period or the history of capitalism more broadly.’

Alexander Wakelam Source: Journal of Modern History

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