One of the latest in a series of studies to explore the cultural and economic history of credit in America, Wendy A. Woloson's In Hock is a sympathetic treatment of the pawnbroker and his customers between the Revolution and the Great Depression. Taking on the popular image of the pawnbroker as a rapacious parasite, she suggests instead that those plying the trade played a vital and often welcome role in easing the nation's transformation to industrial capitalism.

Woloson persuasively argues that our view of the pawnbroker is still framed through the racial lens of the nineteenth century. As pawnbroking emerged as a specialist form of credit in the early republic no ethnic group predominated, but as the nineteenth century progressed, and the tendency to equate the trade with Jews increased, it was all too easy for Gentile Americans to affix the Shylock stereotype – a trope that had migrated from Europe and was easy to find in the illustrated magazines of the Gilded Age – to the proprietors of pawn shops.

In a period in which consumption was becoming a mark of status and respectability, a line of work which alienated people from the goods that defined them struggled for ideological legitimacy. But in perhaps the most important contribution of the book she insists that the practice of pawning actually enabled the nation's capitalist transformation as working-class pawners used their material possessions with impressive strategic acumen to augment inadequate wages. Through putting their Sunday best in hock during the week, for example, they were able to acquire the cash they needed to reproduce their labour power. Americans turned to the shops frequently for credit. At the height of the antebellum Market Revolution one broker in New York recorded nearly 30,000 transactions in just six months.

Pawnbrokers themselves are presented here as capable shopkeepers who needed to master a range of skills to prosper. Judging the value of goods and the reliability of their clientele was vital if they were to make money. So too was keeping on the right side of the law, and Woloson ably shows how brokers' ties to the new police forces of urban America were often far stronger than their links with the underworld. Subject to careful regulation by municipal and state laws put forward by middle-class reformers and as vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the economy as their clients, however, few brokers were able to become wealthy. Instead they remained rooted as petty entrepreneurs in marginal neighbourhoods: condemned by the elite but providing an essential service to the poor.

Woloson is clearly more sympathetic to the private pawnbroker than to the “semiphilanthropic” pawnshops organized by progressive-era businessmen. As early as the 1820s reformers impressed by nonprofit pawnshops operating in Europe had urged the creation of similar public institutions in America to drive supposedly disreputable operators out of business. By 1900 wealthy gentlemen in major cities had organized loan societies along similar lines that served as rivals to the Jewish and Irish proprietors. Managers of these institutions sought economies of scale in an acute division of labour that presented a very different way of doing business to the generalist private operator. But working-class customers, wary of the bureaucratic hassle and moralizing judgments of the new ventures, often preferred their old neighborhood brokers. In the 1930s, the independents held roughly eight times more in outstanding loans than their more respectable competitors.

While the author does not try to mask the inequities of pawnbroking as a trade, she argues its existence has helped to ameliorate the hardships inflicted by other forms of capitalist enterprise. Woloson concludes, indeed, by suggesting that the tightly regulated industry offers more reasonable prospects for those in financial difficulty today than the payday lenders and title loan companies that dominate the poverty economy. The book as a whole, though, is much more than an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of a scapegoat for capitalism's failings. By blending social, economic, and cultural history in eloquent prose, it suggests how much a study of the margins of economic life can tell us about the workings of the American economy as a whole.