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Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America

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  • Hyman, Louis

Abstract

It is difficult to consider debt as having a history, because it seems like debt might be, as one popular historian of money in 1917 described it, a “semi-slavery . . . [which] existed before the dawn of history, and it exists to-day.” People, in a certain sense, have always lent money to one another: to a wayward brother, across a saloon bar, to a coworker. But even by 1917, as that popular history was written in the midst of world war, the ancient personal relationship of personal debt was changing into a modern impersonal one. My dissertation is about how what we call personal debt, that is debt incurred by individuals and not by businesses, went from being owed to other people to being owed to institutions, and what this has meant at the largest level about American capitalism.

Suggested Citation

  • Hyman, Louis, 2008. "Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America," Enterprise & Society, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(4), pages 614-618, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:9:y:2008:i:04:p:614-618_00
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    Cited by:

    1. Lipartito, Kenneth, 2011. "The narrative and the algorithm: Genres of credit reporting from the nineteenth century to today," MPRA Paper 28142, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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