Washing Away the Sins of Debt: The Nineteenth-Century Eradication of the Debtors' Prison

Abstract

This article seeks to come to terms with the extraordinarily swift demise of the debtors' prison in multiple countries during the nineteenth century. While focusing primarily on the reform debate in England, I argue that the debtors' prison quickly came to be seen as a barbaric aberration within the expanding commercial life of the nineteenth century. By turning to a copious pamphletic literature from the era of its demise, I show how pamphleteers and eye-witnesses described the debtors' prison in the idiom of ritual; it was seen as a dangerous sanctuary that radically inverted all capitalistic economic practices and moral values of the world outside its walls. Reformers claimed that, inside these shrines of debt, citizens were ritually guided and transformed from active members of society into “knaves” or “idlers,” or both. As such, the debtors' prison needed to be eradicated. To do so, reformers mobilized at least three critical discourses, all of which sought to mark the debtors' prison as a zone of barbarism that threatened the civility of the state and its citizenry. By focusing on the debtors' prison as a powerful and transformative ritual zone, the article provides a counterintuitive history of this institution that was so crucial to the regulation of credit and debt relations for centuries. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader literature on the spatiality of debt.

A Clinical Economy of Speculation: Financial Trading and Gambling Disorder in Spain

“…However, compared to Peebles's (, 712) depictions of the debtors’ prison, where “by day, prisoners played squash and gambled, prior to singing and carousing at night,” Silvia's daily life was suffocating, laborious, and lonely. When I met her, she did not have a bank account, which made it impossible for her to manage basic utility bills by herself.…”

“…One shortcoming of Graeber's theorization of debt is that it fails to take into account those whom Gustav Peebles (, 712) calls “inveterate debtors.” In a series of articles about credit and debt regulation throughout Europe and the United States, Peebles (, 431; see also 2013) addresses what he calls “the dialectic development of debt‐evasion and debt‐forgiveness” over a period of two centuries. He examines various legal infrastructures such as the debtors’ prison, bankruptcy law, and offshore havens to show how debt evasion and debt forgiveness feed one another in suspending, or even eliminating, debt liability.…”

“…From a somewhat different perspective, Caitlin Zaloom (2014) juxtaposes trading rooms and casino floors to compare the daily work of financial traders with the experience of machine gamblers. In a rich, cross-pollinating dialogue with Natasha Schüll (2012), Zaloom argues that financial traders, like machine gamblers, seek out the zone-a technologically engineered mind-state of complete absorption through which money becomes temporarily detached from conventional circuits of value. Like casinos, trading rooms constitute an enclosed world where traders "lose any sense of space, time, and self" (Zaloom 2014, 179).…”

“…Recall that Gustav Peebles (2012) conceptualizes debt evasion and forgiveness as zones outside of exchange, where insolvent debtors find a sanctuary from market demands. As Peebles (2012,440) puts it, "debt forgiveness and debt evasion need to be seen as providing the debtor with two different modes of freedom.…”

Whitewashing and leg-bailing: on the spatiality of debt

“…With this understanding of 19th‐century asset protection, we can now probe how things have changed during our own era of globalisation. As I have charted elsewhere, the debtors’ prison was swept away in multiple countries over just a few short decades of the 19th century (see Peebles forthcoming). In Lévi‐Straussian terms, the mythical zone of keeping‐to‐oneself had been eradicated on the home front.…”