“Debt meticulously and deliciously detailed.” -Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times “Written in a brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of debt - where it came from and how it evolved.” - The New York Times Book Review Winner of the Bateson Book Prize awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Literature The special tenth anniversary edition contains a new introduction by Thomas Picketty. It shows how debt has defined our human past, and what that means for our economic future. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.ĭebt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history-as well as how it has defined human history.
He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods-that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom.
The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems-to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market.
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