Bodies, Objects, and Obligations: Imagining Wealth in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The ‘worth’ or wealth of a household in early modern Britain was made up of its property, obligations, and people. By the eighteenth century, as the economy quickened and as forms of property diversified, the relationship between these different forms of wealth and the role that each played in perceptions of individual worth was changing. As part of the Consumer Revolution, individuals came to own more things and goods were used as a means of social display. Individuals came to represent their worth in terms of what they did rather than what they had. Cash value was increasingly assigned to people, as the system of imprisonment for debt allowed bodies to be taken as collateral for goods received on credit.

 This paper draws on a hitherto unused source, ‘debtor’s schedules’ to reassess how wealth was constituted or ‘invested’ by ordinary households in eighteenth-century England. Inventories of individual property drawn up under Debtor Relief Acts, debtors' schedules offer an alternate perspective to probate inventories, a source that has been more readily used to account for wealth. Because debtors’ schedules account for individuals who had been imprisoned for their debts, the source allows bodies to be positioned alongside other forms of property. The paper will focus on the changing relationship between the body, obligations (debts), and physical property (consumer goods) as imagined forms of value. The paper will focus on gender, comparing understandings of wealth as they related to men's and women's property, and analyzing the value attached to gendered bodies.