The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Tawny Paul (review)

Reviewed by: The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Tawny Paul Michael Genovese Tawny Paul, The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 285; 25 b/w illus. 99. 99 cloth; 33. 99 paper. Tawny Paul's The Poverty of Disaster takes on two assumptions common in British studies of the 1700s and 1800s: the generally increasing prosperity and solidity of the aspiring middling classes, and the unjust, economically self-defeating persistence of debtors' prisons. Perhaps our image of the latter has been overly influenced by the rhetoric of prison reform and the Victorian imagery of Charles Dickens. Likewise, our image of the former has probably been shaped by the mythology of Robinson Crusoe and the eighteenth-century rise of luxury consumption and global trade. Paul adjusts our understanding of both by revising the very premise behind the middling classes of the 1700s: what if, instead of being upwardly mobile people working their way into secure futures, these folks were defined by a persistent anxiety of plummeting into the shame of debtors' prison? Paul's study of the structural economic insecurity that defined the eighteenth-century middling classes reveals that the period's tradespeople and professionals did not equate rising British wealth with the promise of a better life for them and theirs. Instead, the imprecise and uncertain credit and debt relations without which everyday business could not function left these classes of workers and owners in a perpetual state of End Page 390 near-disaster. How they attempted to handle that state is where the debtors' prison fits in, and the importance of Paul's book lies in how it reframes the insecure status of the middling classes as inescapably entangled with the legal, economic, and social utility of imprisonment for debt. As Paul argues persuasively, eighteenth-century economic history has not paid enough attention to contemporary experiences of downward mobility and how the middling classes' perception of this descent led to "struggles over fine gradations of status" (14). In the first few chapters, Paul establishes the ubiquity of debtors' prisons in the lives of tradespeople in England and Scotland, whose differing legal frameworks Paul examines nicely. Armed with an impressive archive of prison lists, records of debt relief from publications such as the London Gazette, court records, household inventories, and personal diaries, Paul establishes that approximately "one in four middling men experienced the debtors' prison during their lifetimes, " and that, over any given generation, almost half of the middling households would send a member to debtors' prison (238). Such widespread debt had consequences not only on finances but on identity itself, and Paul stresses how nascent ideas of masculinity, family, and autonomy were shaped by cooperative practices of credit that frequently and disastrously were negotiated via seizure and imprisonment. Ironically, middle-class insecurity often arose from illiquidity caused by unpaid debts from other debtors and the difficulty of selling moveable goods, which were still useful as a store of wealth (76). Many solvent debtors could just not raise the cash to remain free. Early chapters also walk readers through the legal mechanisms governing debt (there were minimums below and maximums above which debtors' prison would not have applied) and the differences between Scottish and English debt law as well as how women and men were differently subjected to that law. The court systems available to debtors and creditors are clearly laid out in ways that allow Paul to argue for the strategic importance of debtors' prison to the economic activity of the period. Far from being bugs in the system, arrest and litigation for debt were central to structures of borrowing and lending that were not supported by strong legal protections. Courts and prisons served whichever creditor launched a complaint or seized a body, whether it be based on an immediate need for repayment, a more general desire to coerce repayment, or nothing more than the whims of personal irritation. As Paul puts it, debtors' prisons and the legal proceedings that supported them resulted from economic and social structures of insecurity for which there were no consistent, national solutions being posed. Furthermore, she gives. . .