The Economy of Obligation

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… show more.