Twin themes of this book are heralded in the title. This is a good synthesis of the long history of wealthy nations imposing debt on poor nations, and a celebration of an almost equally long history of debt repudiation. There is little ideological or political subtlety, which will chart this reader's response. Those already convinced of a rote mathematics of debt compulsion and exploitation, regardless of policy imperatives and differences from country to country, may find the book a worthwhile overview, as may some unfamiliar with the international history of public debt but already swayed by models of economic imperialism that are easily and routinely adapted across place and time. Readers persuaded by the benefits to developing economies of bond issues and other forms of external indebtedness will likely have little use for this study. Finally, many of those wary of the potentially ruinous pitfalls of external debt on working people in impoverished countries, but concerned with policy nuance across place and time, will be disappointed in a volume that is often poorly researched and that rarely delves into the unique economic, political, and social causes of debt and economic crisis in the cases addressed.

With useful maps, chronologies, illustrations, and textbook-like boxed definitions—“The ABCs of Bond Issues” (15), for example—two chapters review the mechanics of debt and imperial subordination, mostly in Latin America. Then, five chapters consider debt and repudiation in Mexico, Greece, Egypt, and Tunisia. There are three chapters on the theoretical and practical applications of debt refutation. The book ends with Mexico's “victory” (153) over its creditors before 1943 and early twentieth-century debt repudiation by the Soviet Union.

Two chapters on Mexico underline what works here and what does not. Details are well laid out on the mechanics of international borrowing, the manifold corruptions of government officials and economic elites in debtor and lending nations, the virtual impossibility of repayment in how debt was structured, and, in broad strokes, the ways in which working people suffered as a consequence of it all. But often, problems specific to individual national cases are poorly understood and glossed over. As a result, the author will leave readers wondering if he got it right. Referencing is hit or miss. For example, the author does not reference arguments that Mexican authorities “made enormous concessions to creditors” (32) or that the Mexican state went “deep into debt to subsidize private companies” (47). In the latter statement as elsewhere, the author is too quick to render actions mono-causal and, as a result, offers inaccurate or incomplete explanations.

The author has not done sufficient primary or secondary research, and is often too reliant on dated sources. He mines Adolfo Gilly's vibrant, four-decades-old The Mexican Revolution, for example, for data that Gilly never referenced, and is far too reliant on William H. Wynne's 70-year-old State Insolvency and Foreign Bondholders, from which he reduces dictator Porfirio Díaz to having “ruled Mexico with an iron hand,” and thus, “During that period he transformed a turbulent and bandit-ridden land into a peaceful and law-abiding country in which life and property were secure” (47). While Toussaint uses Wynne's flawed support of Mexican sovereign debt accumulation to challenge orthodoxies on debt and modernization, the preceding quotation and many others in the book are inaccurate. Toussaint misses vital tensions in Díaz's evolving relationship with the imperial powers, as well as continuities from the Benito Juárez presidency to the Díaz dictatorship that shaped Mexican policy and action on the economy and perennial indebtedness.

It is odd that the book ends with a nondescript 500-word conclusion, but no mention of Argentina's remarkable 2001 default on $82 billion in sovereign bonds and the unprecedented leverage that the country exercised in its negotiations with creditors through the end of default in 2016—leverage that, in a nod to larger book themes, may well have done little to alleviate the precariousness of living conditions for most Argentines.