The European sovereign debt crisis of the past decade has rekindled a set of longstanding debates about the power of finance and the consequences of contemporary patterns in international crisis management for social justice and democracy. This book aims to make a contribution to these debates by revisiting a seemingly simple question whose answer has nonetheless eluded economists for decades: why do so many heavily indebted countries continue to service their external debts even in times of acute fiscal distress? While we generally take it for granted that borrowing governments will honor their foreign obligations under all circumstances, historical experience belies the notion that this is somehow a natural condition. Indeed, in the prewar and interwar periods, sovereign default was widespread and generally considered unavoidable in major crises. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, virtually all European and Latin American borrowers suspended payments on their external debts. Today, by contrast, the declaration of such unilateral moratoriums is exceedingly rare: even as the crisis in the Eurozone reached a dramatic climax between 2010 and 2015, the total share of world public debt in a state of default fell to a historic low of 0.2 percent. How do we account for this extraordinary degree of debtor compliance in the wake of the Great Recession?