Why read The Economy of Obligation?

Book cover of The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England

Book description

This book is an excellent work of scholarship. It seeks to redefine the early modern English economy by rejecting the concept of capitalism, and instead explores the cultural meaning of credit, resulting from the way in which it was economically structured. It is a major argument of the book that…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Economy of Obligation as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Henry C. Clark

Author

By the sixteenth century, the desire for exchange had only grown, but the money available for it had not kept pace. In this classic study, the English historian Craig Muldrew uses sources such as probate inventories and borough courts to show how resourceful people at all income and wealth levels were at pursuing their deals—for labor, services, or goods of all kinds. People, it turns out, coped largely with a lick and a promise. Debt, sometimes formal but often based on oral reckoning, was far more central to daily transactions than we might imagine. And even the humblest people could…

From Henry's list on understanding where “capitalism” came from.