Description
Book SynopsisA history of the struggle for debtors' rights from the Civil War to the Great Depression What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay? What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders, and what can they keep for themselves? The answers to those questions, immensely important for debtors, creditors, and society at large, have changed over time. The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors' rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law. Daniel Platt shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery, imprisonment for debt, and the experiences of wage garnishment and property foreclosure. He traces the ways those analogies were used to campaign for bold new protections for debtors, keeping them secure in their labor, property, and personhood. Yet, as Platt demonstrates, those reforms tended to assume as their ideal borrower som
Trade Review"A detailed account of debtor rights in the 'Age of Capital.' Platt brilliantly weaves together legal, political, social and economic history into a truly interdisciplinary narrative of how some Americans in the red received legal protection from their creditors--while others did not. At a time when debt forgiveness has gone from theory to practice, this book is more important than ever." -- Eli Cook, author of The Pricing of Progress
"Daniel Platt has written a remarkably rich, meticulous, and illuminating book about debt in the United States. Platt's wide-ranging study employs the techniques of intellectual, legal, labor, and cultural history to explore the transformation of debt in the period from the Civil War to the New Deal. In addition to offering a refreshingly original narrative of the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, this book offers a learned meditation on how conceptions about debt shaped the very meaning of slavery, citizenship, and freedom. With attention to the bottom up and the top down,
The Price of Misfortune highlights how debt structured the lives of freedpeople, women, and workers, alongside the history of capitalists and politicians reconsidered and remade the politics and economics of debt in modern America." -- Lawrence B. Glickman, Cornell University
"The Price of Misfortune combines distinctive historical imagination, analytical power, and extensive, penetrating research. In exploring the dilemmas posed by poverty in the American democratic polity, Daniel Platt sheds new light on inequality, coercion, dependence, and differences of race and gender as he traces how notions of moral and dangerous debtors became pervasive amid the development of capitalism and state formation. This is a terrific book; standing at the intersection of legal, cultural, and economic history, it will surely become a leading contribution to all of these fields."
-- Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago
Table of Contents Introduction
1. Jubilee
2. The Debtor’s Wife
3. Accounting for Freedom
4. The Wages of Credit
5. A New Deal for Debt
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
