The Price of Misfortune Audiobook Libro.fm

This is an autonarrated audiobook version of this book

A history of the struggle for debtors rights from the Civil War to the Great Depression

What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders and what can they keep for themselves The answers to those questions immensely important for debtors creditors and society at large have changed over time The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law

Daniel Platt shows how in the wake of the Civil War a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery imprisonment for debt and the experiences of wage garnishment and property foreclosure He traces the ways those analogies were used to campaign for bold new protections for debtors keeping them secure in their labor property and personhood Yet as Platt demonstrates those reforms tended to assume as their ideal borrower someone who was white propertied and male In subsequent decades the emancipatory promise of debtors rights would be tested as women wage earners and African Americans seized on their language to challenge other structural inequalities the dependency of marriage the exploitation of industrial capitalism and the oppression of Jim Crow By reconstructing these forgotten developmentsand recovering the experiences of indebted farmwives sharecroppers and wage workersThe Price of Misfortune narrates a new history of inequality coercion and law amid the early financialization of American capitalism