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  • In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression
  • Cory Davis
Wendy A. Woloson . In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. xiii + 233 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-94664-1, $35.00 (cloth).

In the introduction to her study of pawnbroking, Wendy Woloson argues that she seeks to respond to economic historians who have [End Page 703] "ignored the lives of ordinary individuals" (p. 3). In that sense, she is quite successful. In Hock is a "bottom-up" history of capitalism, exploring the intersection of capitalist development in the United States with the lives of (mostly) working-class citizens who made up the grist for the capitalist mill. By focusing on pawnbroking, a well-known and, according to Woloson, completely misunderstood economic activity, Woloson joins such scholars as Edward Balleisen in exploring the edges of capitalism, where legitimate and illegitimate economic activities are debated and defined. Pawnbroking existed in the shadow of larger and more respected financial institutions of the nineteenth century, dogged by ethnic stereotypes and the condescension of urban reformers. By examining the function of pawnbroking, and the attempts to hide or delegitimize such activities, Woloson argues for the importance of pawning as a necessary corollary to the rise of industrial capitalism.

Pawnbroking, according to Woloson, served mainly to provide capital for an industrial underclass that was cut off from the financial networks of the elites. By taking advantage of what working-class consumers possessed, namely consumer goods, pawnbrokers provided the loans that allowed for the day-to-day and week-to-week existence for the underpaid and overstretched of urban America. Pawnbrokers also served as a conduit for the recycling of consumer goods through secondary and tertiary markets, a process accelerated by the rapid progress of industrial manufacturing as the nineteenth century wore on. Because they served mainly working-class urban dwellers, however, pawnbrokers were subjected to a whole host of attacks from civic reformers and "legitimate" financiers, the most common of which were anti-Semitic in origin and which stemmed from the desire to "promulgate ideas about 'proper' and 'improper' ways to make money" (p. 52). The "proper" standard of commercial activity that was asserted by the middle and upper classes, normalized in retail establishments and mainstream banking activities, marginalized pawnbroking in order to, as Woloson asserts, marginalize working-class economic activity. Pawnbroking was not immune to the drives of professionalization and systemization of the early twentieth century, and Woloson argues that the process of making pawning "respectable" destroyed the social relationship between pawnbroker and customer that had made pawning an essential part of the urban working-class experience.

Woloson is most successful in illuminating a world of economic activity which, she quite rightly asserts, most historians have largely ignored. Foregoing a chronological structure, she uses her chapters to thematically explore different aspects of the world of pawnbroking. Each chapter uses a different historical style, including ethnic history, [End Page 704] the history of material culture, and institutional history. For example, one chapter is devoted to a detailed examination of the prevalence of Jewish stereotyping in pawning in the popular imagination, while another explores the connections between pawnbroking and criminal activity. In perhaps her most revealing chapter, Woloson uses the ledgers of a number of prominent pawnbrokers to detail the daily grind of economic life in the nineteenth-century American city. Pawnbrokers processed a startling number of transactions, and despite the relatively low monetary value of most loans, it is clear that their services were crucial to the continued existence of many a family. Pawning was a social, coordinated, regular activity for certain segments of the population, and Woloson makes it clear that the working classes were clever and resourceful in adapting to the burgeoning consumer culture. Taken as a whole, this is a fascinating and multifaceted social history of working-class economic culture.

There are, however, a number of areas that will disappoint historians looking for a complete picture of pawnbroking's place in American history. The decision to structure the study thematically instead of chronologically allows for conceptual depth, but it also hinders the analysis of change over...

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