Early Modern Debts

1550–1700

Laura Kolb, George Oppitz-Trotman, Laura Kolb, George Oppitz-Trotman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030597689
• eBook ISBN: 9783030597696
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Literature

Early Modern Debts: 1550–1700 makes an important contribution to the history of debt and credit in Europe, creating new transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives on problems of debt, credit, trust, interest, and investment in early modern societies. The collection includes essays by leading international scholars and early career researchers in the fields of economic and social history, legal history, literary criticism, and philosophy on such subjects as trust and belief; risk; institutional history; colonialism; personhood; interiority; rhetorical invention; amicable language; ethnicity and credit; household economics; service; and the history of comedy. Across the collection, the book reveals debt's ubiquity in life and literature. It considers debt's function as a tie between the individual and the larger group and the ways in which debts structured the home, urban life, legal systems, and linguistic and literary forms. 

© The Author(s) 2020

L. Kolb, G. Oppitz-Trotman (eds.)Early Modern DebtsPalgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59769-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Laura Kolb¹ and George Oppitz-Trotman²

(1)

Baruch College CUNY, New York, NY, USA

(2)

Norwich, UK

Laura Kolb (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1.1 Debt Connects

Isabella Whitney’s verse ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573) turns on a seeming paradox: that debt is desirable. For most of the poem, Whitney’s speaker enumerates the goods—from staples like soap and oatmeal, to luxuries like French ruffs, to cheap trifles hawked in the street—she will bequeath to London for the care and feeding of its inhabitants. Allegorizing her departure from the city as death, she describes herself early in the poem as ‘very weake in Purse’. We might think from this that her ‘fatal’ illness is a lack of cash. It turns out to be a lack of debt. In a set of bequests to London’s prisons, she records a failed plan to sequester herself in Ludgate:

When dayes of paiment did approch,

I thither ment to flee.

To shroude my selfe amongst the rest,

that chuse to dye in debt:

Rather then any Creditor,

should money from them get.¹

Her plan could never be realized. Never having come ‘in credit so / a debtor for to bee,’ she remains too poor to be in debt.² Debt turns out to be an enviable state, ‘a prosperity comically beyond the author’s reach’.³ To have debt is to have (or to have had) credit, and credit in turn makes life in the city—life itself, in the ‘Wyll’s’ conceit—possible.⁴

Taken together with the proliferative list of consumer goods in the poem’s first half, the speaker’s self-declared plight—lack of debt, because ‘none me credit dare’—serves as a reminder that debt was, for many early modern people, a basic condition of existence. Not having debt is like not existing at all, a form of social and economic death. Debt is also the lifeblood of the poem’s commercial city, the mechanism underlying the busy circulation of money, goods and people in London’s streets. Debt would grant the speaker entry into the refuge of debtor’s prison, as we have seen. But it would also grant her access to the material goods she ‘leaves’ to London—goods she leaves behind; goods she could never afford; goods whose purchase might drive her deeper into debt, but also into the circuits of consumption and exchange from which, as things stand, she is firmly excluded. Debt would thus also grant her an expanded set of relationships—to creditors, most directly, but also to a long list of named vendors: brewers and bakers by the Thames, mercers and goldsmiths in West Cheap, hosierers in Birchin Lane, even a boy by the stocks hawking combs, knives, glasses and other ‘needeful knacke[s]’.⁵ Beyond them, if indirectly, she would be tied into the broader networks of exchange through which these goods moved before ending up for sale in London’s streets. Given that some wares would have been of foreign manufacture, it is no exaggeration to say that debt would link the poem’s speaker to nothing less than the world.⁶

That link between a single debt and the world is made visible—and tangible—in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1594), which gently fantasizes that world trade might be brought to a halt by a debt too easily granted, and to the wrong person. Whereas credit is lacking and debt is impossible for Whitney’s speaker, both are amply available to Antipholus of Ephesus—and therefore to his lookalike (and long-lost twin), Antipholus of Syracuse. The goldsmith Angelo makes a chain for Antipholus of Ephesus (one twin) but gives it to Antipholus of Syracuse (the other); Antipholus of Ephesus, when presented with the bill, refuses to pay for something he has not received. This is a disaster for the goldsmith, because he needed the money in order to make good a debt owed to a merchant; that same merchant requires prompt payment, because he is ‘bound / To Persia’ and wants money for his voyage there (4.1.3–4).⁷ The missing commodity, the chain, symbolizes the transactions in which it is implicated. The Comedy of Errors can only show parts of the transactional chain at its heart, but hints at a comically extensive series of consequences. Presumably someone is waiting on goods or monies in Persia, and someone else is waiting on goods or monies from Persia. The golden chain thus embodies the chains of debt that bind together a whole mercantile and commercial world, in which the failure of a single link has consequences that resonate far beyond the limits of immediate knowledge. The unreconciled comedy is an economical blockage because every other person in the world is chained to another by a debt that they are unable to pay—until, back down the line, in the staged mart of Ephesus, each twin finds his lost brother and so reclaims his own place in the world, obligations and all.

Debt connects. This is a central premise of Shakespeare’s play and Whitney’s poem, where to have no debt is to have no place. It is also the overarching claim of this volume, which explores the links debts created among persons within early modern households and across cities, in merchant diasporas and joint-stock corporations, as codified by law and complicated by bonds of kinship and amity. Even in today’s global, largely depersonalized economy, debt operates as a kind of connective tissue, binding individuals into collectives whether they know it or not.⁸ But in the early modern period, debt’s ability to link persons both to one another and to the wider world was more immediately palpable: a recognized feature of everyday, lived existence. In an age when financial institutions were developing unevenly across Europe and when instruments for mediating credit had yet to gain widespread use, exchange remained largely interpersonal and face-to-face. As Craig Muldrew argues in The Economy of Obligation (1998), such interpersonal transactions formed nodes in the extended ‘chains of credit’ which in England grew ‘longer and more complex’ from the mid-sixteenth century onward, as commercial activity expanded.⁹ Exchange bound people at a more fundamental level, as well, since the development of credit was ongoing and communal, a matter of cultivating a profitable reputation and fostering relationships that could be leveraged in times of economic need. Whitney’s own poem forms part of a broader enterprise designed to obtain for the poet the kind of social credit her ‘dying’ speaker lacks; Antipholus of Ephesus can commission a golden chain—and his brother can receive it—without any cash changing hands, because the first twin’s reputation grants him ‘credit infinite’ within the community (5.1.6).¹⁰

Early Modern Debts looks at the lives and writing of early modern people who found themselves enmeshed in the bonds of debt. In its first two sections, it examines debt as it affected the various social structures from which Whitney’s un-indebted speaker stands apart. Part I, ‘Family, Household, Community’ considers debt both as it shaped relationships within families and between masters and servants, and as it linked the household to the broader community, rendering it subject to neighbourly surveillance and legal action. Part II, ‘Debt’s Networks’, turns to the way debt structured urban life and legal systems, circulated through merchant networks, and became a supple financial tool for joint-stock corporations like the East India Company, and for colonial enterprise. Part III, ‘The Language and Logic of Debt’, looks at imaginative responses to debt, which—like Whitney’s poem and Shakespeare’s play—use complex conceits and paradoxical constructions to express the intricacies of mingled economic and social ties. Part IV, ‘The Indebted Self’, consists of a substantial single chapter, which tracks how the outward-facing practices of debt culture facilitated new mechanisms for conscience-based self-regulation. These in turn changed how individuals related to their debts, and thus to their communities and the world.

In an effort to track debt-driven exchange both as it worked locally and in larger, interconnected networks, the volume spans both national and disciplinary boundaries. Six of the chapters here are by historians; six are by literary scholars; one is by a philosopher. Just over half of the essays were presented at a 2017 conference held at Otto-Friedrich-Universität in Bamberg, Germany in 2017. Bringing together scholars from Europe, the UK and the US, working in social, legal and economic history, literary studies and philosophy, this gathering made apparent the usefulness of an international and cross-disciplinary framework for thinking about borrowing and lending in the early modern world. Early Modern Debts seeks to further the dialogue begun at that conference: a dialogue among varied fields that share a common object of inquiry—even if they approach that object differently—but whose practitioners all too often work in ignorance of one another’s insights and methods. In order to foster cross-disciplinary inquiry, the book is divided by topic rather than by discipline. Each of the first three sections contains essays in both literary studies and history, and in one case philosophy. Each also combines work on England and the continent. Taken together, the essays included here make the case that early modern debts can best be understood through combined historical, literary and philosophical analysis—that is, through careful recovery and interpretation of economic, legal an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Family, Household, Community
• Part II. Debt’s Networks
• Part III. The Language and Logic of Debt
• Part IV. The Indebted Self
• Back Matter