Abstract
The Introduction argues that debt operated as a vital connective tissue in the early modern world, linking individuals to one another and to a broader set of economic and social relations. At the same time, debt operated as tool of furthering inequalities, both within long-standing hierarchies and in the nascent arena of colonial enterprise. After exploring the ways in which early modern debts’ legacies resonate today, the Introduction maps the terrain surveyed by the book, with particular attention to the range of disciplines—history, literature and philosophy—represented by its chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye (London, 1573), sig. E6r.
- 2.
Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E6r.
- 3.
Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 128.
- 4.
While many readings note the paradox of debt’s desirability, recent criticism of the ‘Wyll’ tends to focus on other economic structures: utopian communal abundance; urban poverty; emergent forms of private property. See Crystal Bartolovitch, ‘“Optimism of the Will”: Isabella Whitney and Utopia’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32, no. 9 (2009): 407–432; Carolyn Sale, ‘The Literary Thing: The Imaginary Holding of Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll” to London (1573)’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), 431–449; Marilyn Sandidge, ‘Urban Space as Social Conscience in Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll and Testament”’, in Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 595–613. For a reading that locates the poem in the context of Whitney’s authorial program of cultivating social credit (and thereby opening economic horizons) through print, see Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, 116–128.
- 5.
Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E4r.
- 6.
Even non-luxury goods, like the ‘knackes’ sold near the stocks, could be imported. In A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (1549), Thomas Smith expresses concern over the economic consequences of ‘trifles’ that come ‘hether from beyond the sea’.
- 7.
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1968). Citations are by act, scene, and line.
- 8.
Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good (London: Verso, 2011), 28–32.
- 9.
Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 3.
- 10.
For the first point, see Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, 122–128; for the second, see Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 160.
- 11.
Muldrew, Economy, 100–101.
- 12.
Muldrew, Economy, 2.
- 13.
Muldrew, Economy, 3, 123.
- 14.
David Graeber, Debt. The First 5,000 Years (London: Melville House, 2011), 332.
- 15.
Karen Li Xan Wong and Amy Shields Dobson, ‘We’re Just Data: Exploring China’s Social Credit System in Relation to Digital Platform Ratings Cultures in Westernised Democracies’, Global Media and China 4, no. 2 (June 2019): 220–232, 221. Also see Yongxi Chen and Anne Cheung, ‘The Transparent Self Under Big Data Profiling: Privacy and Chinese Legislation on the Social Credit System’, The Journal of Comparative Law 12, no. 2 (2017): 356–378.
- 16.
Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (New York: Columbia UP, 2017); Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017), 55–98.
- 17.
Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); David J. Baker, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009).
- 18.
Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015).
- 19.
See, e.g., Sheilagh Ogilvie, Markus Küpker and Janine Maegraith, ‘Household Debt in Early Modern Germany: Evidence from Personal Inventories’, The Journal of Economic History 72, no. 1 (2012): 134–167.
- 20.
Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, Past & Present 98 (February, 1983): 30–95, 70.
- 21.
See, e.g., A. G. Adebayo, ‘Money, Credit, and Banking in Precolonial Africa: The Yoruba Experience.’ Anthropos 89, nos. 4/6 (1994): 379–400; Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982).
- 22.
Shankar Aswani and Peter Sheppard, ‘The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Exchange in Precolonial and Colonial Roviana: Gifts, Commodities, and Inalienable Possessions’, Current Anthropology 44, no. S5 (2003): 51–78, esp. 67.
- 23.
Joseph E. Inikori, ‘The Credit Needs of the African Trade and the Development of the Credit Economy in England’, Explorations in Economic History 27, no. 2 (1990): 197–231.
- 24.
Ralph A. Austen, ‘Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India Companies and Slave Plantations’, Critical Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 139–177, 173 and passim.
- 25.
R. B. Sheridan, ‘The Commercial and Financial Organization of the British Slave Trade, 1750–1807’, Economic History Review 11, no. 2 (1958): 249–263, esp. 260–263.
- 26.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 102.
- 27.
To give just two examples: (1) Black households in the United States are disproportionately subject to foreclosure; see Bronwen Lichtenstein et al., ‘Cumulative Disadvantage or Beating the Odds? Racial Disparities in Home Foreclosure by Neighbourhood Composition in the American Deep South’, Housing, Theory and Society 36, no. 4 (2019): 489–503. (2) The uncompensated or barely compensated labour of incarcerated Black Americans, made possible by the Thirteenth Amendment, operates as a form of debt peonage and modern slavery; see Michele Goodwin, ‘The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration’, Cornell Law Review 102, no. 4 (2019): 899–990.
- 28.
See, among others, Shepard, Accounting and Cathryn Spence, Women, Credit, and Debt in Early Modern Scotland (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016).
- 29.
See A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Common Law of Contract: The Rise of the Action of Assumpsit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
- 30.
Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘Fictions of the Early Modern English Probate Inventory,’ in The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51–81.
- 31.
The quotation is from Muldrew, Economy, 157.
References
Adebayo, A. G. ‘Money, Credit, and Banking in Precolonial Africa. The Yoruba Experience.’ Anthropos 89, nos. 4/6 (1994): 379–400.
Aswani, Shankar, and Peter Sheppard. ‘The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Exchange in Precolonial and Colonial Roviana: Gifts, Commodities, and Inalienable Possessions’. Current Anthropology 44, no. S5 (2003): 51–78.
Austen, Ralph A. ‘Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India Companies and Slave Plantations’. Critical Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 139–177.
Bailey, Amanda. Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Baker, David J. On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.
Bartolovitch, Crystal. ‘“Optimism of the Will”: Isabella Whitney and Utopia’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32, no. 9 (2009): 407–432.
Chen, Yongxi, and Anne Cheung. ‘The Transparent Self Under Big Data Profiling: Privacy and Chinese legislation on the Social Credit System’. The Journal of Comparative Law 12, no. 2 (2017): 356–378.
Dienst, Richard. The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good. London: Verso, 2011.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
Goodwin, Michele. ‘The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration’. Cornell Law Review 102, no. 4 (2019): 899–990.
Graeber, David. Debt. The First 5,000 Years. London: Melville House, 2011.
Gregerson, Linda. ‘Life Among Others’. Virginia Quarterly Review, 83, no. 1 (2007): 204–217.
Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Inikori, Joseph E. ‘The Credit Needs of the African Trade and the Development of the Credit Economy in England’. Explorations in Economic History 27, no. 2 (1990): 197–231.
Kea, Ray A. Settlements, Trade and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
Lauer, Josh. Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.
Lichtenstein, Bronwen et al. ‘Cumulative Disadvantage or Beating the Odds? Racial Disparities in Home Foreclosure by Neighbourhood Composition in the American Deep South’. Housing, Theory and Society 36, no. 4 (2019): 489–503.
McClanahan, Annie. Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017.
Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.
Ogilvie, Sheilagh, Markus Küpker, and Janine Maegraith. ‘Household Debt in Early Modern Germany: Evidence from Personal Inventories’. The Journal of Economic History 72, no. 1 (2012): 134–167.
Orlin, Lena Cowen. ‘Fictions of the Early Modern English Probate Inventory.’ In The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry Turner, 55–81. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Perlin, Frank. ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’. Past & Present 98 (1983): 30–95.
Sale, Carolyn. ‘The Literary Thing: The Imaginary Holding of Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll” to London (1573)’. In The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. Lorna Hutson, 431–449. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017.
Sandidge, Marilyn. ‘Urban Space as Social Conscience in Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll and Testament”’. In Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, 595–613. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009.
Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes. London: Methuen, 1968.
Shepard, Alexandra. Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.
Sheridan, R. B. ‘The Commercial and Financial Organization of the British Slave Trade, 1750–1807’. Economic History Review 11, no. 2 (1958): 249–263.
Simpson, A. W. B. A History of the Common Law of Contract: The Rise of the Action of Assumpsit. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
Spence, Cathryn. Women, Credit, and Debt in Early Modern Scotland. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.
Strier, Richard. The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Whitney, Isabella. A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye. Contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosophicall Flowers. London: Richard Jones, 1573.
Wong, Karen Li Xan, and Amy Shields Dobson. ‘We’re Just Data: Exploring China’s Social Credit System in Relation to Digital Platform Ratings Cultures in Westernised Democracies’. Global Media and China 4, no. 2 (June 2019): 220–232.
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Kolb, L., Oppitz-Trotman, G. (2020). Introduction. In: Kolb, L., Oppitz-Trotman, G. (eds) Early Modern Debts. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59769-6_1
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