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Runner-up for the 2026 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize
As the cost of living rises, British households face unprecedented levels of debt. But many commentators characterise those who stash away envelopes, leave telephones ringing, or hide from debt collectors as irresponsible.
The first full-length ethnography of debt problems in Britain, this book uses long-term fieldwork on a southern English housing estate to give a sensitive retelling of the everyday lives of indebted people.
It argues that the inequalities of debt go beyond economic questions to include the way state coercion hinders people’s efforts to define what they truly value. Indeed, from finance to housing and even parenthood, the potential for dispossession has become a pervasive method of power that strikes at the heart of personal life.
“The Personal Life of Debt redefines debt through a groundbreaking and deeply intimate ethnography of Britain’s working classes, uncovering invisible resistance and the violent structuring of lives and class conditions. A transformative reading.” Isabelle Guérin, French Institute of Research for Sustainable Development, author of The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality and Capitalism
“A hugely important book on debt and how ordinary people on low incomes cope in the context of the neoliberal drive for consumption. Essential reading in a time of spiralling insecurity and indebtedness. Profound and highly readable.” Valerie Walkerdine, author of Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class
“Compelling stories centring the voices of people in debt and insightful analysis on the intersection of lived experience, inequality and power.” Heidi Chow, Debt Justice UK
“A major intervention in the anthropology of debt, Davey deploys a detailed ethnography of debtors and the extra-legal agents who surround them in order to argue that we must move from a fixation on reciprocity in debt relations and instead focus on expropriability and enforcement by a ‘distributed’ sovereign. A must-read!” Gustav Peebles, Stockholm University, author of The Euro and its Rivals: Currency and the Construction of a Transnational City
“Davey’s illuminating book compels us to listen carefully to those most affected by the credit system’s draconian demands and to acknowledge the legitimacy of their survival strategies.” Carl Packman, author of Payday Lending: Global Growth of the High-Cost Credit Market
“A remarkable ethnographic exploration of how people experience debt in everyday life. It is unique in the intimate insights that it provides from the author’s seven-year fieldwork.” Sharon Collard, Professor of Personal Finance, University of Bristol
“Davey offers a nuanced and compelling critique of the UK's political economy through lived experiences of borrowing, coercion, aspiration and ambivalence.” Christopher Harker, UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, author of Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine
“Davey has done an unusually thorough job in showing how, in a shockingly unequal world, people subvert, without overtly challenging, the obligations they incur when they borrow money.” Deborah James, London School of Economics, author of Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa
Introduction
Interlude 1: Economic Life and Social Distinction in Woldham
Part I. Expressions of Indebtedness
1. ‘You Can’t Argue with Them’: Debt and the Struggle over Value
2. Making Debt into an Object: The Work of Debt Advisers
Interlude 2: Debt and the Household
Part II. Prospects of Expropriation
3. Unsettled Homes: The Interruptible Futures and Violable Spaces of Rented Housing
4. ‘But I Do Wish Better for My Kids’: Parental Attachment and Forced Child Removal
5. The Arts of Indebted Optimism: Between Fiction and Reality
Conclusion