After surveying the existing historiography on credit, the social order and economic culture, this chapter proposes a new approach to the economic and social history of eighteenth-century Britain. It argues for the centrality of insecurity in its economic, social and corporeal forms to understanding the lives of individuals. It addresses especially the insecurities of the middling sorts, whose lives were intimately tied to processes of commercialisation. The chapter introduces the debtors’ prisons, which generated the records upon which the rest of the book is based.

Financial structures were not the only reason for middling insecurity. Imprisonment was also social and circumstantial. It was the result of decisions made by creditors, based upon perceptions of a debtor’s credibility and reputation. Chapter 3 turns to the perspectives of creditors. The positions and reasoning of those who used the prison as a tool are crucial to understanding insecurity. The chapter considers why creditors chose to send their debtors to prison and how it was in their interests to do so. Imprisonment depended upon how economic failure was perceived, as well as upon creditors’ entangled financial, social and emotional positions. While imprisonment could provide a useful tool for enforcing contracts within an economy that offered little protection to those who lent money, the importance of emotion and social perceptions of failure tempers the weight that we afford to ‘rational’ decision-making within the modernising economy. Like credit, debt was understood as part of a moral economy.

Chapter 1 outlines the legal process of incarceration and the demographics of Britain’s debtors’ prisons, drawing on case studies from London, Edinburgh and Lancaster. It reveals that incarceration for debt was a routine practice rather than an exceptional experience. Britain was home to a substantial population of people living on a thin line between competency and failure. Middling people were especially vulnerable. A middling man in eighteenth-century England had a one in four chance of going to prison during his lifetime. Imprisonment affected their households, neighbourhoods and business networks, so that the impact of incarceration rippled through middling communities. The chapter argues that middling vulnerability was shaped by the legal system, which failed to protect individuals with middle levels of wealth and middle-size debts. While processes of bankruptcy and petty debt courts provided a means of negotiating the largest and the pettiest debts, the population of tradespeople with middle-sized debts, as both creditors and debtors, were underserved by the legal process. Arrest became the most expedient means for creditors to enforce simple debts.