Debt and credit in Bath's court of requests, 1829–39

Abstract

Historians have long recognized the central role of debt and credit for producers, retailers and consumers in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Against a background characterized by persistent shortages of specie, limited banking facilities and erratic transport mechanisms, the speculative impulse that fed the expanding economy drew sustenance from a proliferation of instruments of private credit — notably bills of exchange, promissory notes, and accommodation bills — which, together with an increase of trade credit to retailers and their customers, served to promote and intertwine the industrial, commercial and consumer revolutions. ‘At any one time any business owed and was owed many goods caught up in the process of exchange’, Julian Hoppit observes of the later decades of the eighteenth century. ‘All businessmen were creditors and all businessmen were debtors.’ As trade and manufacture increased in English towns and cities, extended chains of indebtedness multiplied the economic links both between individual producers, retailers or consumers and among these sectors of the economy. Thus in Lancashire innkeepers were the debtors of maltsters, brewers and wine merchants, but were the creditors of shopkeepers, who in turn extended webs of consumer credit to sawyers and carpenters, artisans typically indebted (in their capacity as producers) to the master builders for whom they laboured in Liverpool's shipyards. Based on personal faith rather than tangible securities, these varied forms of private credit were notoriously unstable. Broad-based financial crises fuelled by the failure of private credit became commonplace in the last three decades of the century, and persistently disrupted economic life into the Victorian period.