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Suter Mischa . Rechtstrieb: Schulden und Vollstreckung im liberalen Kapitalismus 1800-1900 [Rechtstrieb: Debts and their enforcement in liberal capitalism 1800-1900]. Konstanz, Germany : Konstanz University Press , 2016. 328 pp. ISBN 978-3-86253-077-9 , [euro] 32.90 / CHF 39.90 (cloth).
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Rechtstrieb is the Swiss-German term for the enforcement of an outstanding money debt through legal or judicial means. In Switzerland, the focus of Mischa Suter's compelling study, procedures for enforcing the payment of debts were codified into national legislation only in 1889. An account of that legislative moment, which Suter characterizes as having "normalized capitalist relations of exchange" (31), and its consequences opens the book and is in every sense the explicandum of the study. However, most of the book is devoted to the decades before that, when a plurality of practices existed in Switzerland--a federal state with strong regional and local identities and legal traditions. The emphasis is on the period between 1830 and 1870 in German-speaking Switzerland, which was characterized by the peculiar fact that even forms of Rechtstrieb formally governed by legal provisions did not involve judges but were executed by the parties to the debt. That is, the creditor directly called in the debt, but only after a series of summonses, warnings, and admonitions failed to get a response did an officer of the law step in to liquidate the debtor's movable property or institute formal bankruptcy proceedings. Suter offers a detailed and critical analysis of the sources documenting this process at the local level, as well as complementary legal and literary texts. In...