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Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on September 17, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(4):614-618; doi:10.1093/es/khn083
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America

Louis Hyman

LOUIS HYMAN is a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Contact information: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: lhyman@fas.harvard.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

It is difficult to consider debt as having a history, because it seems like debt might be, as one popular historian of money in 1917 described it, a "semi-slavery ... [which] existed before the dawn of history, and it exists to-day."1 People, in a certain sense, have always lent money to one another: to a wayward brother, across a saloon bar, to a co-worker. But even by 1917, as that popular history was written in the midst of world war, the ancient personal relationship of personal debt was changing into a modern impersonal one. My dissertation is about how what we call personal debt, that is debt incurred by individuals and not by businesses, went from being owed to other people to being owed to institutions, and what this has meant at the largest level about American capitalism. In the dissertation, Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America, . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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