Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England by Amanda Bailey (review)

Amanda Bailey’s Of Bondage begins with two key claims: 1) more people are incarcerated for debt than for crime in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, so much so that debt suits swamped the legal system (2–3); and 2) the period is more obsessed with debt bondage and the legal apparatus that turns bodies into collateral than it is with the problem of proscribed usury (11). Yet this book is much more expansive and provocative than a careful adjudication of early modern England’s changing legal conceptions of debt and its impact on early modern drama. It also hints at the ways in which debt bonds could create the conditions for the conception of slavery (145–46), as well as a conception of time and investment that would make modern finance capital possible (138). As such, it not only offers interesting readings of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century plays concerned with debt—Timon of Athens, The Merchant of Venice, Middleton’s Michaelmas Term and A Trick to Catch the Old One, Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and Fletcher and Massinger’s The Custom of the Country. It also suggest that we should revisit some of our basic assumptions about the nature and genesis of debt and money, perhaps in light of David Graeber’s magisterial anthropological account of debt and the creation of markets (Bailey, in fact, characterizes her project as an historical examination of Graeber’s more sweeping claims [x]).

Bailey’s account of the distinction between the legal conceptions of debt and usury is especially crisp and timely. Debt bonds in Renaissance England grow out of property law and rest on the assumption that money itself is a nonfungible property, like land. Usury, in contrast, treats money as something that can be expended or wasted. Thus, debt is different than usury in that the latter can keep charging and accumulating interest even after the borrowed sum is used up:

In essence, a usurious loan entailed giving away one’s property so that another could consume it. Aquinas and the scholastic thinkers objected to charging interest since the lender was, in effect, asking the borrower to pay for something that by definition the borrower would use up. Unlike the one-time payment of a luxury tax, for instance, the establishment of a perpetual, escalating charge for the right to use that which at a certain point no longer existed seemed patently immoral.

(54)

Debt bonds are of a decidedly different sort. They anchor value in the body of the debtor, but do not allow the bondholder to use or use up her body, precisely because credit and debt are a transfer of nonfungible property (42–43). Thus, they allow for the indefinite imprisonment of the debtor but not her execution because the bond does not convey to the lender “absolute ownership,” conceived as the right to destroy or waste that which one owns (55). The theory is that one cannot use up the property of another and, therefore, one cannot kill a debtor because he has property in himself:

Technically, a creditor could not abdicate ownership over the money he lent, which according to debt jurisprudence could not be wasted or used up as a fungible, like food or wine. In reality, however, debtors spent the coins they borrowed. At the same time, the law allowed an unsatisfied creditor rights in his debtor’s person, which as collateral was considered a form of property like the original loan. This meant that while a creditor could not use or destroy his debtor, for instance by forcing him to perform labor or by murdering him, he could detain his debtor indefinitely.

(30)

Bailey remarks not just a pivotal legal and historical insight here, with ramifications for interpretations of plays and other literature focused on debt and economics, but also emphasizes the period’s complex opposition between...