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.