“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

★2025 new work by Dr Ryan Dave, the Lecturer in Social Sciences at Cardiff University, and PhD Social Anthropology at University of Cambridge.
★This is the first full-length ethnography of debt problems in Britain, which is with intimate insight that provides from the author’s seven-year fieldwork.

[Open Access Title]

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.

Dr Ryan Dave
Ryan Davey is Lecturer in Social Sciences at Cardiff University, working across anthropology and sociology.
Before coming to Cardiff University, he held an early career fellowship at Bristol, worked and studied in anthropology at SOAS, the LSE and Cambridge, and worked for two mental health charities.

2020-date, Lecturer in Social Sciences, Cardiff University
2018-2020, Vice-Chancellor's Fellow, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol
2015-2018, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science)
2011-2015, PhD Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
2009-2011, Researcher, Royal College of Psychiatrists
2007-2009, MA Anthropological Research Methods, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London
2006-2009, Policy and Campaigns Assistant, Mind the mental health charity
2002-2005, BA Hons Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

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