Over the past thirty years historians have increasingly emphasized the role of credit and debt in medieval, early modern, and modern Britain. This began with a concern to understand the financing of economic developments, both among producers and consumers. But it has long been recognized that credit and debt could not be understood solely in economic terms, and gradually their legal, political, ideological, and social dimensions have been explored. And now, in an innovative, impressive, and important book, Margot Finn uses the umbrella of cultural history to bring most of these concerns together, while adding much that is new and striking.

The book is divided into three parts. The first explores representations of credit and debts in novels, diaries, and autobiographies. Though it takes its lead from literary scholars, especially their concern with developing ideas of the self, its importance rests on relating credit and debt to concepts of the gift developed by anthropologists. It is, indeed, a central theme of this book that so ubiquitous yet fraught was the practice of lending and borrowing on personal security in this period that ideas of exchange predicated on models of rational and self-interested actors working through the cash nexus need to be treated with considerable skepticism. Finn powerfully argues that the sale and purchase of goods involved questions not only of price, but of justness, fairness, equity, reciprocity, and, crucially, status (especially of class and gender).

Parts 2 and 3 explore how broken relations between borrower and lender were handled legally and, as such, are distinct from the first part of the book. Part 2 considers changes in the law and practice of imprisonment for debt after 1780. It focuses on the classic “age of reform” period when the power creditors had to imprison debtors was criticized as a classic example of vexatious, irrational ancién regime authority. Though central to the book and never less than cogent, this section lacks some of the breadth and contextualization of its neighbors—periodic “amnesties” to clear the gaols that were common for much of the eighteenth century are given too little weight, the extensive evidence in the blue books is not used as much as it arguably merits, and the links made to the politicization of the cultures of middle-class commerce, so well explored by Hilton and Searle, seem underdeveloped.

Part 3 looks at how changes in the nature of local courts influenced small debt claims and the practice of lending across the whole period covered by the book. There are many exceptionally important aspects to this discussion. For example, Finn challenges conventional accounts of the arrival of county courts from 1846 as milestones on the road to centralization and conformity by pointing out the scope for judicial discretion in pursuit of pragmatically formed ideas of equity. Another part of her discussion looks at associations that developed to strengthen the hands of tradesmen when faced on the one hand by overwhelming demands for credit from consumers but on the other by legal arrangements that remained unpredictable at best and impregnable obstacles to repayment at worst.

This is a rich book. It rests on considerable original research, and Finn has an eagle eye for telling detail. She is, indeed, highly adept at squeezing significance from the particular and the discrete (in both senses of the word), not least because her interests are broad. This is truly a book of interest to historians of culture, broadly conceived, social structure, ideas, law, and local government. And it has at its heart a big idea, that relations between seller and buyer were not “modernized” by the early nineteenth century. Cash did not sweep all before it. Credit and debt, where power was exercised on both sides of the relationship, remained vitally important until 1914. Here, though, there is a doubt. Finn pays little attention to economic history. In particular, changes in the extent of credit (of the proportion of consumer transactions that were settled immediately in cash and the proportion that were not) and the terms of credit (length, security, and interest) are not considered head on. The history of retailing and of the wage has only a small part in her account. And it is the problems encountered with credit and debt that provide most of her evidence, not the majority experience of its benefits. In large part this relative inattention to the economic history of credit and debt is a product of Finn's methodology, which is preoccupied with the experiences of individuals. And that methodology undoubtedly allows a golden harvest to be reaped. This is an ambitious and challenging book, and, like the very best books, in answering questions it reconfigures the initial problems so prompting further debate. Indeed, as the first book in the new Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories series it sets an impressively high standard.