Chapter 7 anchors reputation and individual worth to the body. Debt transformed bodies, from able working bodies to corpses, into forms of transmutable value, placing middling people’s liberty at risk. Though being in debt was a ubiquitous feature of life for most individuals, debt became embodied especially at the moment of default. When a debtor failed to pay, British law gave creditors the power to arrest their debtors’ persons, and during that moment of arrest, the debtor’s body was substituted for the value of the debt owed, temporarily assigning it a cash value. Thus, the confinement of debtors created a conceptual slippage between persons and things, with significant implications for notions of selfhood and independence. The chapter explores the consequences of the embodiment of debt in terms of mobility within the British Atlantic world and argues that imprisonment was part of a much wider cultural transition in which selfhood and objecthood became confused.

Chapter 2 explains why middling people were so vulnerable to imprisonment through analysis of structures of credit and wealth. Drawing on debtors’ schedules, or inventories of wealth generated by the imprisonment process, the credit networks and patterns of wealth-holding of middling households are reconstructed. I argue that the portions of middle ranking wealth bound up in credit, changing structures of credit and middling people’s positions within credit networks rendered them vulnerable to failure. Analysis of how middling people held their wealth suggests that they did not lack assets, but rather faced problems of liquidity. Incarceration was the consequence of endemic structural insecurities.

This chapter reviews the statistical incidence of homicide in Bologna in the seventeenth century. It analyzes the distribution of homicidal relationships, the weaponry used in homicides, seasonal and annual rhythms of homicide, gender breakdowns of killers and victims, and the overall trends in homicide across the century.

This chapter places an outbreak of noble vendetta in the mid-century into the context of the civil war introduced in the previous chapter, arguing that the decline of social and institutional trust in Bologna provided the legal and social space for nobility to practice traditional forms of revenge politics and violence.

This chapter reviews the book's findings and suggests some implications for the history of violence in Europe. It speculates on the continued problems faced by Bologna in the early eighteenth century as elite violence continued to hold a strong place in Bolognese social politics.

The final section of the book turns to the debtor’s body. Experiences of insecurity were profoundly physical, borne out through the threat of confinement and the loss of liberty. Read through the lens of the prison, the life cycle of debt, from contracting credit, to insecurity, to default, was an embodied experience, and the ways in which debtors’ bodies were treated have important implications for the characterisation of economic culture during Britain’s transition to capitalism. Chapter 6 describes the body as a site for negotiated relations of power and obligation. By uncovering how creditors inflicted different forms of harm on debtors, from the denial of liberty to violent physical assault, it reveals the coercive nature of credit. Failure to abide by the rules of credit was dealt with by incarceration and physical punishment. In an era normally characterised by politeness and the decline of violence, the treatment of debtors instead reveals an economy tinged with aggression and even violence.

The second section of the book attends to how notions of worth and failure were articulated and mobilised in a precarious economy. Insecurity is the starting point for understanding how individuals accounted for themselves and judged the debts of others. Chapter 4 attends to how debtors framed their own sense of worth. In the eighteenth century, character was increasingly important in economic settings because a person’s financial credibility depended upon his or her social reputation. A good name constituted a kind of currency. This was an economy of circulating selves. Yet the trappings of selfhood were highly unstable. Default was a function of belief and perception. The chapter draws on defamation litigation from Edinburgh, making use of evidence generated by Scotland’s unique legal context to compare the components of credibility for men and women, and to explore the ways in which reputation was constructed and upheld. It highlights the importance of collective and interdependent notions of reputation and status within households. Strategies for mitigating risk and uncertainty involved the cooperation of husbands, wives and household dependents.

This chapter argues that the economic and environmental crises of the early century ruptured institutional and social trust in Bologna, leading to a resurgence of homicidal violence that ultimately erupted into civil war by the 1650s.

Chapter 5 focuses on constructions of occupational identity, which were central to notions of selfhood. Drawing on the diaries of three middle-rank tradespeople, and applying insights drawn from studies of female work to men’s productive activities, it considers the precariousness of work not only a function of maintenance, but as problem of identity. In an insecure economy, people took on multiple forms of employment in order to make ends meet. This complicated links between masculinity and work, because men were traditionally associated with a single occupation. The chapter investigates how men and their households established stable work identities. It considers the different forms that work took, and how words denoting labour such as ‘employment’ and ‘business’ were actually understood. Work was defined not only as monetised labour, but also as an activity that was productive or generated status and credit. Work’s value and contribution to identity and status changed over the course of the life cycle. It was carried out and understood in relation to others, especially men’s wives, rather than merely supporting notions of power and independence.

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.

This chapter introduces the problem of homicide in early modern Italian history and reviews the literature on European violence.