| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bruce H. Mann. Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. viii, 344. $29.95.
Debt creation and collection provide a keyhole, or, rather, a wide window, through which one can learn much about the values and power relations of a society. The United States, with its current consumer, corporate, and public debt amounting to thousands of billions of dollars, and the number of bankruptcies annually crossing an unparalleled 1.5 million, is remarkably suited to the study of the history of debt and bankruptcy.	1
Bruce H. Mann's book deals with a crucial period in this history, one that runs from late colonial times to the early nineteenth century. This perplexing period saw upheavals in the formal legal framework—the bankruptcy clause of the Constitution, the passage in 1800 of the Bankruptcy Act and its repeal in 1803—that reflect fundamental societal and political tensions. Bankruptcy scholars and conventional legal historians aim to capture these by directing their attention to high legal texts and their framers' original intentions. But for Mann, such documents serve only as points of reference on a journey whose aim is to understand contemporary cultural conceptions. Mann wisely identifies debtors' prisons, rather than legal texts or political discourse, as the path into his world. The prevailing religious-based view of non-payment of debt as a moral vice was challenged by the reality of the debtors' prison, where moral condemnation encountered the impoverished, imprisoned debtors surrounded by disease and death, subject to worse conditions than those of criminal prisoners and arguably also of slaves. Mann uses the correspondence, memoirs, and pamphlets written by inmates to portray not only their miserable daily lives but also their cries for help.	. . .

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