Wetland projects were a leading example of improvement in action in early modern England, offering a counterpoint to many unrealised schemes and dreams that litter the archives. But such ventures were fraught with paradoxes: property rights were transgressed to make more certain ones, while drainage created new floods. Centring the engineers, investors, landowners, settlers, and labourers who propelled improvement on the ground, this chapter examines how their ambitions were altered and restricted by the polarised environmental politics that emerged in Hatfield Level. Improvement was a risky endeavour and the costs of conflict were high. Asking how contemporaries evaluated its ambiguous results in Hatfield Level, this chapter charts the revival of wetland improvement by the network of reformers that coalesced around the ‘intelligencer’ Samuel Hartlib in the mid seventeenth century. The experience of conflict surfaced in debate about, and experiments with, technologies of improvement, which promised to marginalise social negotiation and environmental contingencies.

Chapter 2 takes up Goethe’s distinction between a higher and a lower layer of world literature (discussed in the previous chapter) and argues that in complementing the transnational distribution of cultural mediocrity through markets, Goethe envisioned a more elevated sphere organized along a decidedly non-market form of exchange, that is, gifting. I examine Goethe’s correspondence with his translator Thomas Carlyle as a circuitry of world-literary gifting marked by the to-and-fro movement of tangible (books, journals, manuscripts, jewelry, drawings, interior decoration, etc.) and intangible gifts (tribute, reward, cooperation, guidance). Their nexus, I argue, was emblematic of the transition from the ethos of generous sharing in the republic of letters to world literature as a forum interconnecting outstanding representatives of various national literatures. Contributing to the material diffusion of texts and channelling symbolic economies of prestige, their acts of gift-giving prefigured Carlyle’s conception of hero-worship, and the “significant geography” circumscribed by the movement of gifts between Weimar and Scotland morphed into an imperialistic vision of a Teutonic (British-German) world literature.

This chapter focuses on the change in the law known as the equity of redemption, which took form in the late seventeenth century, and made the title to mortgaged land more secure through the provision that rents could be sequestered to pay off a loan after the due date, to avoid the title to the property reverting to the lender. This legal change led to a rapid expansion of mortgaging and associated conveyancing. It also demonstrates how interest-bearing loans, based on the security of property, became a source of both income and, more importantly, stable abstract value that could be used to increase the money supply by underpinning the creation of local notes and bills. Mortgage income could also smooth credit flows by providing capital when outgoings were greater than incomings. In the past this would have triggered the need to litigate to increase income, but now money could be borrowed. This chapter will also examine savings held in the form of bonds.

This chapter moves back to institutions to deal with the general decline in litigation over failed credit that began around 1690, and argues it came about largely because of changes in credit networks. It demonstrates how attorneys’ business moved away from litigation to conveyancing, and how they profited by becoming local credit. It also looks at the increasing use of local summary justice in the Courts of Requests in London, Bristol, and Newcastle to enforce the small debts of poor consumers, as well as the growing use of arrest and imprisonment in the common law courts. While the use of paper currency provided greater liquidity in credit markets, and reduced the overall level of litigation massively, those debtors who went broke began to be treated in a much harsher fashion.

This chapter analyzes the shift towards a closer involvement of the Amsterdam authorities in the lives of citizens from all layers of society that occurred through various institutional innovations after the city turned Protestant in 1578. Credit was a unifying economic phenomenon in Amsterdam, and examining the function of credit allows us to shed light on the connections between people from various classes. Focusing on the phenomenon of insolvency, essentially a breakdown of credit, makes it possible to open up broader perspectives on the early modern economy. Guilds and their civic middle-class values shaped social and economic policies of this period in important ways, clearly displaying the integration among different social groups that also came to be reflected in contemporary legal theory and practice. Religious communities also occupied an important role in financial conflict resolution between creditors and debtors. The moral dimensions of insolvency that become manifest through the acts of various Amsterdam consistories reflect important changes in the attitudes towards insolvency that are typical of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Chapter 8 considers commerce and money management, the largest category of work in the work-task database. This provides a detailed view of petty commerce, the typically small transactions that took place every day across the country, with women and men almost equally involved. Markets remained the most common locations of commerce, but transactions took place everywhere including the home, the street, and occasionally, the specialist retail shop. Evidence of administering debts and pawning goods demonstrates the significant role played by married women in these activities.

Eoin Flannery, in his chapter, examines what happens when the revivalist promise of the future has curdled into something else, an inevitability of history rather than the positing power of the artist. It is one thing to accept a faded ideal as the motivating trope of a latter-day revivalist novel; it is quite another thing to turn away from ideals altogether and to accept, even to embrace, a world defined less by cultural aspirations than financial schemes, debt and “ecosickness.” The refusal to adopt traditional revivalist reference points and temporal frameworks leads writers as diverse as Kevin Berry, Anne Haverty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and Mike McCormack to offer narratives that range from financial degradation to social collapse. One result of this refusal is the effort to foreground language, style, voice, and the vitality and exuberance of storytelling that is a hallmark of revivalist art, an advancing light into a potentially dark future.

Exploring the economic ramifications of climate change, this chapter features insights from financial experts such as Sara Jane Ahmed, Managing Director and V20 Finance Advisor of the CVF-V20 Secretariat. It discusses the adverse effects on GDP growth, inflation, debt, and credit ratings, particularly in vulnerable economies. The chapter highlights the crucial role of financial markets, insurance, and climate finance in addressing these challenges. Innovative financing solutions such as Green Bonds and pre-arranged and trigger-based financing, including loss and damage finance, are explored as means to build economic resilience. The importance of sustainable economic policies and international cooperation is emphasised, with case studies from countries successfully integrating climate resilience into their economic planning. The chapter calls for increased investment in climate adaptation and mitigation to safeguard economic stability and promote sustainable development.

Chapter 1 examines the fourteenth-century emergence of problems that drove fifteenth-century developments. When necessary, this chapter places those fourteenth-century problems in their twelfth- and thirteenth-century contexts. The problems were three. Firstly, there was the diminution of the town’s population caused by bubonic plague. Secondly, there was swelling municipal debt; its existence and the measures taken to reduce it exacerbated social antagonisms that fuelled the third problem, distrust. Between the 1340s and the 1390s, suspicion and hostility between burghers and merchants, on the one hand, and tradespeople, on the other, deepened and became dangerously acute.

Generosity and gratitude are prime examples of gracious traits – traits of concern for the other for the other’s sake. They are virtues of direct caring. They are complementary dispositions, readying their possessors to occupy reciprocal roles in gracious transactions. Their grammar contrasts with that of virtues of requirement such as justice and the sense of duty. Gratitude and justice both involve debt and obligation, but in different senses of ‘debt’ and ‘obligation.’ Certain cases of genuine gratitude in which the subject doesn’t believe the reason for his gratitude confirm the superiority of the view of emotions as concern-based construals over judgment theories. The concepts of gratitude and generosity specify, in their grammar, reasons that are internal to (definitive of) gratitude or generosity, but they can also be incited by reasons that don’t belong to their grammar, as long as such external reasons can trigger internal ones.

In 2020, two retired NFL players sued the league for “explicitly and deliberately” discriminating against Black players who filed claims for damages in the league’s billion-dollar concussion settlement. The league had, their suit revealed, directed clinicians to implement a practice known as race norming, which built into the evaluation process an assumption that Black retired players had lower preexposure cognitive functioning than their white peers – and increased the likelihood that their claims would be denied. The epilogue contextualizes the scandal in relation to the career of one of the plaintiffs, the former defensive lineman Kevin Henry, to reveal how norming – of race, gender, compensation – had pervaded his athletic life long before the NFL denied his claim.

In the summer of 2010, LeBron James announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and, as he put it during an ESPN special, taking his talents to the Miami Heat. Cavs fans burned their LeBron jerseys in the street, and team owner Dan Gilbert, the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans, wrote an open letter to Clevelanders condemning the two-time NBA MVP. “You simply don’t deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal,” he wrote. “You have given so much and deserve so much more.” What had fans given LeBron? And what did he owe them? The introduction outlines a theory of the relation between athletic talent and social debt, observing how the assignment of giftedness has reflected and created racial ideas about advantage and deservedness since the civil rights era. It is a theory not of elite athletes but of how the way we imagine elite athletes affects the rest of us. From Bernard Malamud’s classic baseball novel The Natural to the career of the fastest woman of all time to Gilbert’s open letter, the image of the gifted athlete has changed while the assumed debt has grown and resurfaced in other domains of American life.