In the research field of the new history of capitalism, two new volumes on the history of credit and debt have been published: The Erfurt historian Felix Krämer examines indebtedness and precarious credit relationships for US history in the book “Life on Credit,” which is based on his habilitation thesis. In his study “On Credit”, which earned him his habilitation at the Université de Fribourg, Matthias Ruoss analyzes installment loans in industrial capitalism in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On Thursday, October 17th, the two books will be presented at an event in the “World Relations” research building and commented on by Jule Govrin (Berlin) and Friedrich Lenger (Gießen). The organizer is the Collaborative Research Center “Structural Change in Property”. The event starts at 6 p.m. and everyone interested is cordially invited.
Living on credit
“I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me, I’ve made a fortune by using debt,” Donald Trump boasted in January 2016. A century and a half earlier, Sojourner Truth wrote to Congress, shortly after the end of slavery: “America owes to my people some of the dividends. (…) I shall make them understand that there is a debt to the Negro people which they can never repay.” Living on credit starts at the point where the most unfree in the USA have a future as freedpeople was promised, but instead of reparations they were repeatedly forced into unbearable debt. With the concept of Debt difference Felix Krämer describes this range of different meanings of debt in the everyday lives of different people, which he has examined throughout US history from the end of slavery to the present. His book examines the history of various forms of debt in the United States. In addition to the structural indebtedness of black sharecroppers in the southern states since the last third of the 19th century, it examines images of loan sharks and anti-Semitism since the 1920s. The study describes the impact of real estate loans and mortgages since the Great Depression of the 1930s. She shows how credit cards and student loans brought neoliberalism into people’s pockets and accounts and the effect the 2007/2008 financial crisis had on debtors and workers. African Americans, working-class women and migrants have consistently faced higher credit risks. Living on credit exposes this production line of socio-economic difference and the “wealth gap” in the USA and thus makes a contribution to the new history of capitalism.
On credit
“Credit gets some people on the horse and some people buried,” was a saying in the 1860s. Credit is therefore both a stirrup keeper and a gravedigger. But what did that mean for those who gave and took credit? In his comprehensive study, Matthias Ruoss asks how individuals deal with credit insecurity and how society understands it. To this end, he focuses on precarious economies in German-speaking Europe and shows how the contemporary processing of contingencies shaped social patterns and social orders. Using the example of sewing machines and furniture, which were most often traded on credit during the period of high industrialization, household-centered production relationships surrounding installment loans are made visible. Work, gender ideology and political power, as Matthias Ruoss explains in his study of capitalism analysis, accelerated and coordinated the expansion of the credit nexus.
