Weaving families generally owned their own modest houses, their looms and their other tools, though frequently these served as security against debts to moneylenders.
For example, it enabled those workers who were financially bonded to a particular landlord and/or moneylender to pay off their debts.
Although freed from landlords and moneylenders, they were enslaved by their new employers.
A few owned some marginal plots of land in their own name thirty years ago, but even this was often soon enough lost to moneylenders.
As farmers take out loans to pay for the inputs, they become dependent on moneylenders and continued pesticide use, which is frequently ineffective and uneconomic.
Her husband had gone away with their son in search of work; they needed cash to pay the accumulating rent and interest to the moneylender.
In the 1880s debt was indeed a constraint on working-class families, who struggled to make ends meet, resorting to the pawnbroker or to unlicensed moneylenders.
A big percentage of these men were either free or voluntary workers who paid their own passages or borrowed from village moneylenders or recruiting agents.
