City of Debtors

Fleming’s fascinating, carefully researched study reveals the pivotal role New York played in the development of consumer-credit regulation. New York might be an outlier in the twenty-first century, but at the turn of the twentieth century, when small-sum loans originated, every major thread was connected to the events and personalities of New York. -- Ronald J. Mann, author of <i>Bankruptcy and the U.S. Supreme Court</i> Anne Fleming’s pathbreaking narrative of small-sum lending in New York City brings alive loan sharks, lenders seeking respectability, reformers, crusading lawyers, and the debtors themselves, all while focusing on a problem that plagues us to this day: the poor need money desperately, have little credit to obtain it, and thus are easy marks for exploitation. -- Robert W. Gordon, author of <i>Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law</i> Loan sharks and banks reside on a single lending continuum. Fleming takes us to the only space on that continuum where marginal wage-earners could legally, albeit expensively, borrow money. City of Debtors is essential reading for anyone who would understand that world and its consequences, then and now. -- Bruce H. Mann, author of <i>Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence</i> It would be easy to get lost in the thicket of loopholes, appeals, FTC rules, ‘wage assignments,’ ‘waiver of defense clauses,’ and similar arcana, but Fleming is a surefooted guide. The reader comes out with a much deeper understanding of the shadowy, constantly changing landscape at the edges of standard finance and economic daily life. -- Bethany Moreton, author of <i>To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise</i> Fleming has taken a fragmented history and turned it into a compelling narrative, about not only fringe lending but also the fraught relationship that Americans have long had with consumer debt, and specifically its role in poverty alleviation. -- Rowena Olegario * Business History Review *