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Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Louis Hyman
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Extract

It is difficult to consider debt as having a history, because it seems like debt might be, as one popular historian of money in 1917 described it, a “semi-slavery . . . [which] existed before the dawn of history, and it exists to-day.” People, in a certain sense, have always lent money to one another: to a wayward brother, across a saloon bar, to a coworker. But even by 1917, as that popular history was written in the midst of world war, the ancient personal relationship of personal debt was changing into a modern impersonal one. My dissertation is about how what we call personal debt, that is debt incurred by individuals and not by businesses, went from being owed to other people to being owed to institutions, and what this has meant at the largest level about American capitalism.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 614 - 618
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2008. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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References

1. Hayward, William R. Money: What It Is and How to Use It (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1917),20.Google Scholar

2. See for instance Mann, Bruce Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),Google Scholar Mann, Bruce “Tales from the Crypt: Prison, Legal Authority, and the Debtors’ Constitution in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 51 (April 1994): 183–202;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sandage, Scott Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Daniel, Pete The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).Google Scholar