ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the gradual acceptance of compositions over long periods of time and across regions in continental Europe, in England, and in the United States. It sketches the slow emergence of a rescue culture in law. The chapter proposes some potential lines of research relating to turnaround management and its interactions with official approaches toward insolvency. The legal concept of insolvency has changed tremendously over the past decades. Legal scholars and lawmakers have for a long time considered insolvency, in addition to the options provided for by legislation in case of permanent default, as a means of last resort. Until the end of the Middle Ages, bankruptcies initiated by creditors were the most common. As mentioned earlier, debtors did not have much to look forward to when making their default public. In England, preventive compositions were slowly reintegrated into official insolvency proceedings after their demise in the seventeenth century.
