The personal life of debt: Coercion, subjectivity and inequality in Britain By RyanDavey. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2025. 224 pp.

Since the global financial crisis of 2007–8, the anthropology of household debt may have grown, but it remains an emergent body of scholarship. In particular short supply are monographs on the topic. Ryan Davey's book is thus—at least to my knowledge—the first ethnographic monograph on household debt in Britain, which may be slightly surprising. Yet the book's significance goes well beyond its status as the first of its kind. With its original theoretical argument, immersive ethnography, and careful prose, the book makes important contributions that extend well beyond the literature on debt—engaging with anthropological, sociological, and cultural theory and scholarship on the interconnected issues of class, domination, subjectivity, and aspiration. The book focuses on the overindebted residents of Woldham, a pseudonymized neighborhood in a southern English city, and by extension residents of “deprived” housing estates. Building on critical analyses of debt-based exploitation that followed in the wake of the financial crisis, Davey questions anthropologists’ conventional framing of debt in terms of reciprocity and interdependency, which traces back to Mauss's and Malinowski's analyses of gift exchange. As Davey argues, this framing overlooks cases in which debtors refuse reciprocity with their creditors, which is when reciprocity becomes a normative rather than a descriptive category. Such was the case with overindebted Woldham residents, who sought to avoid full repayment and evade enforcement, even though they tended to have high volumes of unsecured consumer debt along with various noncredit liabilities (rent, utility bills, taxes), often in arrears. Evoking Malinowski's method of “internal comparison,” Davey suggests that instead of comparing debt with reciprocity, it should in this case be understood by analogy with other areas of life in the same society, areas that are formally similar and materially connected—namely, eviction and child removal, which, together with debt enforcement, are all forms of lawful coercion and dispossession targeting the personal attachments of housing-estate dwellers. The analogy between these three phenomena yields the original concept of “expropriability,” defined as a condition of “vulnerability to dispossessive legal force” (p. 5). Expropriability is the centerpiece of the book's overarching argument about the shifting material and symbolic dimensions of class in postindustrial, financialized Britain. Davey argues that an increased and unequally distributed exposure to legal dispossession has been the key mechanism through which the abject new “underclass” of “chavs” and “scroungers” was brought into being. Materially, this has been enabled and driven since the 1980s by neoliberal reforms. These have given creditors, landlords, and social workers more discretion to employ legal coercion against debtors, tenants, and parents. The result is what Davey describes as a sovereignty distributed between state and market actors. Discursively, the “underclass” has been constituted in strongly moral terms as those who refuse the obligatory values of post-Thatcher British society, especially a particular aspiration to social mobility. In practice, working-class people are obliged to aspire to becoming middle class in the sense of being economically self-reliant property owners. Much of Davey's analysis focuses on the profound impact of this form of class domination on the subjectivities of the “underclass,” as well as on techniques and tactics they develop to try to stave off the worst eventualities and pursue futures worth living. The book is organized into an introduction, conclusion, five regular chapters clustered into two parts, and two short “interludes.” The introduction outlines the key arguments, the organization of the book, and the author's methods—18 months of residential fieldwork on the Woldham estate combined with volunteering at two local debt-advice centers. It also discusses the author's positionality and introduces a handful of key research participants who appear prominently throughout the book, enabling the reader to get to “know” them well. The first part examines social practices around debt. Chapter 1 contrasts two approaches to debt practiced in Woldham. Debt advisers promote a “purgatory” approach, with a debt-free future as its normative telos. But most overindebted residents take a “suspensory” approach to debt, seeking to “suspend debt in time” in the sense of avoiding its supposedly inevitable closure (via either full repayment, enforcement, or insolvency) and instead staying indefinitely in the “legal grey area between arrears and enforcement” (p. 39). Drawing on the feminist sociological concept of class as comprising unequal struggles over value, Davey argues that this is an infrapolitical form of resistance that reflects the debtors’ structural incapacity to openly criticize the dominant morality of debt, formulate alternatives, and organize. Instead, they engage in everyday, individual acts of evasion, subversion, and estrangement from that morality, such as through “flexible repayment” and humor. Chapter 2 zooms in on the practices through which debt advisers and their clients produce standardized knowledge about debt and thus bring it into being as an object. This is premised on the framework of “debt realism,” which stipulates that the first step in dealing with debt problems is to specify and quantify one's debts in order to “face up” to them. Davey exposes the implicit politics of these seemingly technical procedures, which reimpose the dominant morality of debt and position low-income debtors as responsible for their problems. The second part traces expropriability across its multiple spheres and dives into the processes of subject formation that it informs. Chapter 3 brings in (prospects of) eviction or sudden tenancy loss as a form of expropriation made more acute by changes to housing policies since the 1980s: the privatization of much public housing, the neglect and stigmatization of the remaining public stock, the liberalization of renting, and the strengthened authority of landlords. It also presents the idea of “defensive optimism” to understand the form of subjectivity that Woldham residents developed to protect their personal attachments against the threat of expropriability. At the same time, they performed an ambivalent attachment to the hegemonic “aspirational optimism” oriented to future social mobility, even if they felt it to be largely out of their reach. Chapter 4 describes the prospects and occasional materialization of child removal by welfare workers, which came to target “deprived” communities after a punitive shift in UK welfare policies under austerity. The subjectivities of affected mothers range from defensive to fully alienated and resigned, depending on how realistic the threat was. Chapter 5 returns the analysis back to debt and describes the techniques of defensive optimism that debtors practice in relation to unpaid debts and looming enforcement, such as setting up their homes as spaces free from reminders of these issues, focusing on the here and now, and immersing themselves in home-entertainment technology. There is much more to commend than criticize in The Personal Life of Debt. Any weak points are minor, and addressing some of them would probably change the book's well-rounded form. The strong focus on internal comparison seems to come at the expense of external comparison—references to other cases of indebtedness are relatively scarce and brief, leaving unclear the applicability of Davey's conclusions beyond Britain. While Davey notes the differences between the dominant moral evaluations of consumer and mortgage debts, as well as between the forms of resistance practiced by his category of debtors and insurgent mortgagors studied by others, he does not compare mortgagors’ particular form of expropriability with that of the overindebted “underclass.” Finally, engagement with some of the relevant scholarship could perhaps be more elaborate and explicit. The discussion of Foucault's work is more fragmented and cursory than it deserves, and the same goes for that of Wacquant, considering the parallels between his and Davey's ideas. The entirely positive reading of Graeber's work overlooks the tension between Davey's argument against “universalist” interpretations of debt (p. 8) that “collapse” different relationships into a single category (p. 9) and Graeber's own one-size-fits-all approach to debt, which Hadrien Saiag dubs “essentialist.” Similarly, the critique of Laidlaw's ideas about freedom and “the good” is more implicit than I would expect, considering their connections to the hegemonic liberalism that Davey otherwise seeks to challenge. These minor and potentially subjective objections aside, Davey's theoretical intervention in the anthropology of debt is welcome and sure to resonate. The argument about expropriability and the subject formation of the British “underclass” is well developed and persuasive. In taking debtors’ practices seriously and understanding them on their own terms rather than through dominant, top-down frameworks, the book makes particularly substantial contributions to debates on overindebtedness, debt collection and enforcement, and debt advice. Davey's ethnography is rich, evocative, well aligned with his claims, and empathetic yet clear sighted. His writing is accomplished; he deftly weaves together complex theory, ethnography, and historical and structural analysis into a highly readable text, logically and methodically building up his arguments. With its excellent balance between original theorization, robust empirical analysis, and accessibility, The Personal Life of Debt will be of interest to both researchers and students in anthropology and other social sciences, especially those interested in class, household debt, subject formation, and contemporary Britain.