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008			231003b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
040			_aMSU _cMSU _erda
100			_aPEEBLES, Gustav
245			_aWashing Away the Sins of Debt _bThe Nineteenth-Century Eradication of the Debtors' Prison
264			_aCambridge _bCambridge University Press _c2013
336			_2rdacontent _atext _btxt
337			_2rdamedia _aunmediated _bn
338			_2rdacarrier _avolume _bnc
440			_aComparative Studies in Society and History _vVolume , number ,
520			_aThis article seeks to come to terms with the extraordinarily swift demise of the debtors' prison in multiple countries during the nineteenth century. While focusing primarily on the reform debate in England, I argue that the debtors' prison quickly came to be seen as a barbaric aberration within the expanding commercial life of the nineteenth century. By turning to a copious pamphletic literature from the era of its demise, I show how pamphleteers and eye-witnesses described the debtors' prison in the idiom of ritual; it was seen as a dangerous sanctuary that radically inverted all capitalistic economic practices and moral values of the world outside its walls. Reformers claimed that, inside these shrines of debt, citizens were ritually guided and transformed from active members of society into “knaves” or “idlers,” or both. As such, the debtors' prison needed to be eradicated. To do so, reformers mobilized at least three critical discourses, all of which sought to mark the debtors' prison as a zone of barbarism that threatened the civility of the state and its citizenry. By focusing on the debtors' prison as a powerful and transformative ritual zone, the article provides a counterintuitive history of this institution that was so crucial to the regulation of credit and debt relations for centuries. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader literature on the spatiality of debt.
650			_adebt _z19th century
650			_adebtors prison _veradication
856			_uhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417513000297
942			_2lcc _cJA
999			_c163411 _d163411