Everyone in an eighteenth-century urban commercial community would have known someone who had gone to prison for debt because, as the author of this book demonstrates, incarceration was a routine practice. The subjects of The Poverty of Disaster are a familiar social type. They are the middling sort, independent retailers and artisans, often with positions of civic responsibility and whose households testified to their role as consumers. When they were unable to pay debts of between 40 shillings and £100, the insolvency laws gave their creditors broad powers to put and hold them in prison. This book is not, however, the familiar story of imprisonment and imprisoned debtors. Instead, it uses the experiences of debtors’ prisons to explore failure as a feature of commercial culture and business practice. Failure extended beyond those who were made bankrupt, whose experiences have been explored by Julian Hoppit and others. For smaller debtors facing the possibility of imprisonment, the operation of the credit market engendered insecurity and shaped their social experience of commerce.

The book is organized clearly in three sections. ‘The structures of insecurity’ sets out the scale and demographics of imprisonment and the profile of imprisoned debtors. It also considers the perspectives of the creditors. The second section, ‘The insecure self’, takes a more narrative approach using the concept of insecurity as a basis for understanding how individuals articulated their own sense of self-worth and judged the debts of others. In the final section, ‘The debtor's body’, the author considers how the experience of imprisonment and occasional physical violence challenges the perception of Langford's ‘polite and commercial people’.

Paul has drawn on records from debtors’ prisons in London, Lancaster and Edinburgh seeking to illustrate how the urban experience was increasingly unified in this period and how reliance on credit facilitated a common economic culture across Britain. Differences between the English and Scottish treatment of debtors are noted. This comparative approach is welcome as it draws out many common features at least within urban settings. It also suggests how records from other locations might be interrogated to broaden the basis of comparison. Apart from the Scottish sources, these records are familiar from other studies of credit and debt. Tawny Paul has, however, approached them from a different perspective, reading them from the author's point of view. She argues that this reveals the ‘coercive apparatus’ that generated the records. Combined with diaries, contemporary commentaries and references to pamphlet literature, the result is a well-structured analysis drawing out similarities between the gender and social and occupational background of debtors, and their shared experiences.

The Scottish records are particularly rich in individual narratives of distress. They also provide better insights into the perspectives of the creditors responsible for incarceration. This enables this book not only to enrich the history of debt and debtors but to put the creditors alongside. They were of a broadly similar social status to the debtors. Unpaid debts represented a significant loss of wealth and threat to their financial solvency. As such, creditors were subject to the same economic insecurity as debtors. Paul argues that it was this financial anxiety which led them to the decision to imprison rather than it being a rational decision offering the best hope of being repaid.

This book uses a combination of analysis and narrative to show how the urban middling sort encountered debt and responded to it. That response was shaped by an insecurity resulting from their economic location within extensive, and widening, chains of credit. The very real threat of imprisonment for debt created a fear of the prospect of downward mobility, loss of reputation and, inevitably, position within the credit exchange. Tawny Paul has painted a vivid picture of the impact of failure in the urban financial world.