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.
ISBN: | 9780472132522 |
Publication date: | 30th June 2021 |
Author: | Mischa Suter |
Publisher: | The University of Michigan Press |
Format: | Hardback |
Pagination: | 336 pages |
Series: | Social History, Popular Culture, And Politics In Germany |
Genres: |
Centrist democratic ideologies Economic history |