- 6 x 9.
- 336pp.
- Hardcover
- 2021
- Available
- 978-0-472-13252-2
Add to Cart
- $85.00 U.S.
Related Products
- Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism
- Ebook
- 978-0-472-12885-3
- View Options
Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.