ABSTRACT
This chapter chronicles the rate at which creditors made use of debtors’ prisons across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was an era of great experimentation in punitive confinement (what Foucault called the ‘new age of penal justice’) in which the use of imprisonment was expanded and diversified such as through bridewells or transportation. The continued use of debt imprisonment appears antithetical to this new approach, with anthropological discussion of the prisons suggesting that new “enlightened” capitalist ideals slowly disposed of it. However, using commitment registers of London’s Fleet Prison and Wood Street Compter alongside Lancaster Castle Gaol this chapter demonstrates that there is no clear evidence of capitalism eradicating debt imprisonment, instead seeming to support rather than hinder use of the institution. Furthermore, this chapter demonstrates how the prisons reflected broader social structures through the use of habeas corpus as well as revealing the occupational structure of debtors who were more likely to be over-encumbered merchants than impoverished labourers.
