Sergei Antonov, Queens College CUNY / Columbia has published Bankrupts and Usurers in Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy with Harvard University Press. From the publisher: ‘As readers of classic Russian literature know, the nineteenth century was a time of pervasive financial anxiety. With incomes erratic and banks inadequate, Russians of all social castes were deeply enmeshed in networks of credit and debt. The necessity of borrowing and lending shaped perceptions of material and moral worth, as well as notions of social respectability and personal responsibility. Credit and debt were defining features of imperial Russia’s culture of property ownership. Sergei Antonov recreates this vanished world of borrowers, bankrupts, lenders, and loan sharks in imperial Russia from the reign of Nicholas I to the period of great social and political reforms of the 1860s …’ (more)
[Mitra Sharafi, Legal History Blog, 5 January]
First posted 2017-01-06 08:17:24
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