The eighteenth century is often celebrated as the age of economic growth for the middling sort. Standard of living was on the rise and countless “luxury” goods found their way into their abodes. Tawny Paul's new monograph, The Poverty of Disaster, examines the other side of the coin, when middling people lived through periods of insecurity, fell into debt, and ultimately ended up in debtors’ prisons. The book has evolved from Paul's thesis on credit in Edinburgh and Philadelphia to a comprehensive study of debt in London, Lancaster, and Edinburgh. The research draws from on myriad sources, including litigation records, pamphlets, diaries, and inventories. The originality of the research shines through from Paul's frequent linking of arguments to various early modern historiographical debates. It is truly an excellent piece of research that deserves very high praise and a wide readership.

Chapter 1 examines the types of people who ended up in debtors’ prisons. It starts by outlining how the legal and institutional structures shaped the experience of incarceration, before looking at the actions that creditors and debtors took when money was owed. The chapter offers a plethora of fascinating statistics. It is found that middling men from commercial trades made up around 90 percent of the population incarcerated for debt (44). In fact, it is argued that around one in four middling men would end up in prison for debt over their lifetimes (51–52, 65). The experience of imprisonment is found to depend considerably according to location. In Scotland, for example, the average stay in prisons was less than a month, whereas in England most stayed between one and six months, with one-third for more than a year (43–44). Middling men who lived in towns were almost twice as likely to be incarcerated for debt as were their rural counterparts (56–57).

The next two chapters consider why the urban middling sort often ended up in prison for debt and why debtors generally chose incarceration for perpetrators. It is argued that because the middling sort were often at the center of exchanges between suppliers and consumers, they were affected most when bad debts mounted. Many of the people who saw the inside of a prison were not poor, but did not have enough moveable goods to liquidate and pay their debts. Therefore, people often ended up in a debtors’ prison as a result of endemic structural insecurities and not their own fault. Creditors chose to imprison offenders as it offered them the best chance of getting their money back. Emotional, practical, and social considerations were also at play. Some creditors were simply angry, wanted vengeance on perpetrators, and used prison for this means.

Part two focuses on how people established their reputations and identities in the precarious eighteenth-century economy. Defamation cases from Edinburgh and diaries are analyzed to argue that reputation was constructed through work and along social terms that were often deeply personal and gendered. For men, their reputations were primarily built on their sexual behavior, honesty and fairness in business, occupation, rank, and how they provided for their families. Women's credit was normally based on how they managed their household, their honesty in business, and their sexual honor.

It stands to reason that creditors would be most interested in distraining debtors’ goods and chattels to recoup their money. However, part three of the book argues that middling creditors in England and Scotland generally chose to incarcerate and punish debtors’ bodies. Creditors would use a range of coercive methods, including threatening defaulters’ reputations or even physical violence to recoup their losses. Bodies would be further harmed when they were detained because overcrowding and lack of food was common behind prison walls. Perpetrators had some agency over their own bodies despite the efforts of their accusers. Some, for instance, would deliberately get themselves imprisoned as it meant that creditors could not legally take their goods for payment, or they would migrate to avoid prosecution.

A particular strength of the book is Paul's consideration of differences between England and Scotland. However, at times she is too reliant on evidence from London, and Lancaster is only occasionally analyzed despite Paul's early claims that it is a more central focus of the book (23). This means that some of her findings will inevitably remain tentative until research is conducted on other provincial towns and cities of Britain. This is, however, a relatively minor criticism in a book that is extensively researched, clear, and original throughout. The book will be of interest to a wide range of economic and social historians. Researchers have tended to concentrate on how remarkable and sophisticated the credit system could be when it worked. Paul's book reminds us that it often failed, and that middling people were the most likely to pay the price.