Tinni Sen, Turk McCleskey, and Atin Basuchoudhary When Good Little Debts Went Bad: Civil Litigation on the Virginia Frontier, 1745 – 1755 The lived experience of debt litigation remains one of colonial Virginia’s great mysteries. Two generations ago, historians identified debt’s vital role in the trans-Atlantic economy, and later scholars, most notably Breen, scrutinized the culture of debt. Subsequent investi- gators, however, never explained how debt worked at the local level. Consequently, a poorly grounded assumption persists that most courts ineffectually enforced credit contracts. Ample evidence to the contrary survives in Virginia county court records, but after earlier scholars completed major quantitative studies of Chesapeake labor and political institutions, numerous questions about local and regional credit networks remained unaddressed. 1 1 Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Base and Social Structure: The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, XXV (1965), 639–654; idem, “Economic Be- havior in a Planting Society: The Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,” Journal of Southern History, XXXIII (1967), 469–485; Jacob M. Price, “The Last Phase of the Virginia-London Consignment Trade: James Buchanan and Co., 1758–1768,” William and Mary Quarterly, XLIII (1986), 64–98; Richard B. Sheridan, “British Credit Crisis of 1772 and the American Colonies,” Journal of Tinni Sen is Professor of Economics, Virginia Military Institute. She is the author of, with Barry R. Cobb, “Finding Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibria with Decision Trees,” International Review of Economics, XV (2010), 43–50; with John R. Conlon, “Price Dynamics and Asymmetric Business Cycles under Mixed State and Time Dependent Pricing Rules,” The B.E. Journal of Macro- economics, X (2010), 1–28. Turk McCleskey is Professor of History, Virginia Military Institute. He is the author of The Road to Black Ned’s Forge: A Story of Race, Sex, and Trade on the Colonial American Frontier (Charlottesville, 2014); with James C. Squire, “Random Selection of Petit Jurors on the Colonial Virginia Frontier, 1746–1755,” Historical Methods, XLVII (2014), 128–137. Atin Basuchoudhary is Professor of Economics & Business, Virginia Military Institute. He is the author of, with Michael Reksulak and William F. Shughart, “Checks and Balances at the OK Corral,” in Alain Marciano (ed.), Constitutional Mythologies: New Perspectives on Controlling the State (New York, 2010), 71–80; with Barry R. Cobb, “A Decision Analysis Approach to Solving the Signaling Game,” Decision Analysis, VI (2009), 239–255. Research for this article was supported in part by a Gilder Lehrman Short-Term Residential Fellowship at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Further support included a Wachtmeister Faculty Development Leave sponsored by the VMI Foundation and grants in aid of research from the VMI Research Committee. The authors thank Chap Michie for help with artificial neural networks, Christopher Bowers for research assistance, and an anon- ymous referee for suggestions and comments. © 2015 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00796 Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVI:1 (Summer, 2015), 60–89.