Chapter 1 explores the riverine environment and Indigenous societies using four Spanish accounts. Here, there is ample evidence of the complex, large-scale societies mentioned earlier in the Introduction, characterized by exchange, alliances, and intergroup hostilities into which Europeans integrated themselves. Taken as a whole, these accounts demonstrate that Amerindians were not passive; rather, they dominated and directed interactions with Europeans. These interactions included the cross-fertilization of ideas, skills, and material culture, as well as invitations to form alliances and kinship ties, which became significant in shaping a new riverine society.

What happened when people did not pay their debts? Debts Unpaid argues that conflicts over small-scale unpaid debts were a stress test for the economic order. To ensure the wheels of petty commerce continued to turn in Mexico, everyday debtors and creditors had to believe that their interests would be protected relatively fairly when agreements soured. A resounding faith in economic justice provided the bedrock of stability necessary for the expansion of capitalism over the longue durée. Introducing the two-hundred-year period of massive economic transformation explored throughout the book, this chapter presents the text’s key historical and theoretical interventions from the late eighteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first. As the capitalist credit economy grew, especially through modern financial institutions, ordinary people used new financial tools and navigated increasingly opaque and impersonal credit relations. This Introduction outlines the dynamics of change and the challenges and opportunities they posed for the world of small-scale debtors and creditors.

This book places the troubles of ordinary people at the centre of economic change in Mexico, arguing that conflicts over small-scale unpaid debts were a stress test for the economic and political order. Studying malfunction – what happened when contracts broke or soured – exposes the ways in which debt trouble became a driving force in the history of accumulation and justice in the modern world. This concluding chapter offers final thoughts on the book’s core proposal: that a broad sense of fairness and justice provided a bedrock of stability that allowed for massive economic transformation over a long chronological horizon.

By the end of the twentieth century, the forms of economic information had multiplied. The trust problem that the early credit-rating agencies such as R. G. Dun had tried to address – how could creditors trust debtors? – had a new solution: the Credit Bureau, established in 1994. Those who languished on its infamous Black List were excluded from the credit economy and denied new loans. Debtors fared poorly within the new economic order, as it was more common to discipline delinquent debtors than to police predatory creditors. The power dynamics had been transformed, and many debtors faced dispossession through paperwork. Chapter 5 examines how people understood their debt troubles at the turn of the millennium while showing that the debtor–creditor relationship had become one of individual borrowers and institutional lenders. It examines what happened to people who did not pay their debts and analyses how citizens explained their situations, attributed blame, and asked for help. Mexican citizens with unpaid debt in the early twenty-first century were often left feeling vulnerable and isolated amidst the ups and downs of the global economy.

The Conclusion considers the implications of the revisionist framework that seeks to hold the histories of Eastern Amazon together, even if there is much tension and conflict between its constituent parts. Specifically, the study forces a reconsideration of three aspects: the making of Indigenous territories in the sertão; how the concept of the sertão can be reworked in Brazilian historiography; and a reconsideration of the ways in which historical periods are conventionally broken up. Regardless of the changing meanings and varying human interactions with the Amazon environment, the enduring character that shapes human societies and the spaces they inhabit lies in its flowing waters. Understanding the Amazon through the aforementioned spatial history involves seeing it as a geographical place shaped by the interactions between the peoples who have lived there. To understand the Amazon today, these histories must be woven together, as the region was shaped by conflict and dispossession – legacies that persist to this day.

On the eve of the independence movements in the early nineteenth century, the promulgation of the 1812 Cádiz Constitution transformed economic justice for small-scale debtors and creditors by placing magistrates in Mexico City by election instead of appointment. This change directly affected the mediation of the juicios verbales (small claims hearings for cases under 100 pesos), where tens of thousands of debtors and creditors now pressed their claims before elected local magistrates. Chapter 1 analyses this system of economic justice based on nearly 1,000 small claims records, showing that economic justice was relatively effective for ordinary people from the 1810s to the 1860s. These small claims conflicts might seem a petty world of negligible amounts and narrow-minded disputes, but, analysed together, they revise a long-standing historiographical assumption among scholars that Mexico did not have strong property rights in the early nineteenth century. Instead, this chapter shows that Cádiz liberalism established a judicial institution to protect property rights, especially for creditors, that enjoyed a broad legitimacy well into Mexican independence.

The power struggle between debtors and creditors in the 1860s and 1870s signalled a time when face-to-face economic relationships showed signs of strain. Economic life was expanding in more impersonal ways, and debt litigation was increasing as debtors and creditors alike found themselves navigating risk without the long-standing close social ties that once characterised their relationships. Chapter 2 studies legal conflicts and legal codes to understand the risks people took when making contractual agreements and illuminates how they decided to trust each other. It shows debtors attempting to evade their obligations in myriad ways and depicts creditors transmitting their anxieties to the courts through the use of providencias precautorias (precautionary petitions) to sequester goods or people before the initiation of a formal civil suit. Examining legal codes from mediaeval Iberia to nineteenth-century civil law, this chapters shows how jurists, working in a long tradition, attempted to balance the interests of both parties. Although creditors generally prevailed in legal conflicts, the prospects of debtors were on the rise.