American Predatory Lending and the Global Financial Crisis

American Predatory Lending and the Global Financial Crisis, a website with data visualizations, oral histories, and policy analyses, is now live, under the rubric of the Bass Connections project within Duke University.  It is the creation of a multidisciplinary team, including fifteen Duke and two University of North Carolina students under the leadership of Edward Balleisen, Professor of History and Public Policy andVice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies; Lee Reiners, Director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law School; Joseph Smith, former North Carolina Commissioner of Banks, and Debbie Goldstein, Director of the Duke North Carolina Forum.

--Dan Ernst

Boyd, Ramsay and Ali on Imprisonment for Debt in Colonial Victoria

Jodie Boyd, RMIT University, and Ian Ramsay and Paul Ali, Melbourne Law School, have posted "Contrary to the Spirit of the Age": Imprisonment for Debt in Colonial Victoria, 1857–90, which appears in the Melbourne University Law Review 42 (2019): 737-779:

The reintroduction in 1857 of imprisonment for debt in colonial Victoria flew in the face of international momentum for its abolition. In its criminalisation of debt and poverty, the Fellows Act 1857 (Vic) (21 Vict, No 29) also defied the rapid advancement of democratic and egalitarian principles in the fledgling colony. Frequently referred to as ‘gross class legislation’, the law was used unabashedly to target poor small debtors, leaving ‘mercantile men’ with significant debt untroubled by the prospect of a debtors’ gaol. Despite consistent and broad opposition to the Fellows Act, its advocates resisted repeated attempts to abolish or meaningfully amend it. It is argued here that the law, and its survival against the ‘spirit of the age’, can be understood as part of a broader story of conservative resistance to the democratic innovations that threatened the power of the Victorian mercantilist establishment.

--Dan Ernst

Thank You, Anne Fleming

We wanted to thank Anne Fleming, Georgetown Law, for guestblogging on LHB this month and to collect her interesting and thought-provoking posts on the challenges of writing City of Debtors.  In addition to our welcome, the posts were:

The Challenge of Writing for Two Audiences
One Way to Write for Two Audiences
Balancing Narrative and Analysis
The Meanings of Presentism
Policy-Relevant History

Muir on Debt in 18th-c. Nova Scotia

This past fall, James Muir, University of Alberta, published Law, Debt, and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of 18th Century Halifax with the University of Toronto Press. From the publisher:

In the early history of Halifax (1749-1766), debt litigation was extremely common. People from all classes frequently used litigation and its use in private matters was higher than almost all places in the British Empire in the 18th century.

In Law, Debt, and Merchant Power, James Muir offers an extensive analysis of the civil cases of the time as well as the reasons behind their frequency. Muir’s lively and detailed account of the individuals involved in litigation reveals a paradoxical society where debtors were also debt-collectors. Law, Debt, and Merchant Power demonstrates how important the law was for people in their business affairs and how they shaped it for their own ends.

Praise for the book:

"This book is admirably accurate about the ways the law actually worked in practice, and refreshingly careful to avoid anachronism and over-reach. Muir demonstrates an impressive knowledge of eighteenth-century judicial procedures, and he offers a persuasive analysis of colonial legal culture." -Jerry Bannister

"Law, Debt, and Merchant Power is a path breaking analysis of how civil law was used in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Muir’s meticulous analysis of civil suits illustrates how important the law was and how bourgeois merchants shaped the administration of law to their needs." -Elizabeth Mancke

“At the higher methodological level, the work both fascinates and provokes… Muir’s book is an interesting, original, and important work, part of the new wave of regional scholarship that integrates greater Nova Scotia into the history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic.” -Barry Cahill

Full information is available here.