2 - Debt restructuring

Summary

To say that credit relations permeated most layers of early modern English society is but another way of saying that most contemporary production was founded upon debt. Given the chronic shortage of specie, what currency there was, was in seemingly constant circulation. While one certainly might have been victimized by a usurer, it is probably more likely that one would have been enabled by a creditor. The ubiquity of credit relations meant that one and the same person was often at one and the same moment both a borrower and a lender. “Credit was so common,” writes Craig Muldrew, “that most people eventually accumulated numerous reciprocal debts over time.” It appears increasingly to occur to early modern English people that a theologically opprobrious nomenclature suited to others, to “not us,” would no longer serve a population forced to recognize some version of themselves in these others. “He” is a prodigal, but “I” am a debtor. “He” is a usurer, but “I” am a creditor. Such confident and normative distinctions begin to break down in the early seventeenth century. When we are all borrowers and lenders, what Kenneth Burke calls a religious psychology is converted by credit into a commercial psychology. In such circumstances, any successful remoralization of accreditation and indebtedness would have to respond to historical change. Muldrew's revisionist account of seventeenth-century market relations entails an explicit rejection of Marx's conviction that credit relations are founded upon distrust and estrangement.