Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years

629 Pages·2014·3.31 MB·English

by  David Graeber

PRAISE FOR DAVID GRAEBER AND
DEBT: THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS
Winner of 2012 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing Winner
of 2012 Gregory Bateson book prize, awarded by the Society for Cultural
Anthropology ——————————— “A brilliant, deeply original
thinker.”
—REBECCA SOLNIT, AUTHOR OF A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL
“Fresh … Fascinating … Graeber’s book is not just thought-provoking,
but also exceedingly timely. His sweeping narrative history essentially
argues that many of our existing ideas about money and credit are
limited, if not wrong.”
—GILLIAN TETT, FINANCIAL TIMES
“A lengthy field report on the state of our economic and moral disrepair.
In the best tradition of anthropology, Graeber treats debt ceilings,
subprime mortgages and credit default swaps as if they were the exotic
practices of some self-destructive tribe. 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.”
—THOMAS MEANEY, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Exhaustive … Engaging … An authoritative account of the background
to the recent crisis. Both erudite and impertinent, [Graeber’s] book helps
illuminate the omissions of the current debate and the tacit political
conflicts that lurk behind technical budget questions.”
—ROBERT KUTTNER, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
“The book is more readable and entertaining than I can indicate … It is a
meditation on debt, tribute, gifts, religion, and the false history of
money. Graeber is a scholarly researcher, an activist, and a public
intellectual. His field is the whole history of social and economic
transactions.”
— PETER CAREY, THE OBSERVER
“Fascinating …[An] extraordinary book, at once learned and
freewheeling.”
—BENJAMIN KUNKEL, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
“An engaging book. Part anthropological history and part provocative
political argument, it’s a useful corrective to what passes for
contemporary conversation about debt and the economy.”
—JESSE SINGAL, BOSTON GLOBE
“An alternate history of the rise of money and markets, a sprawling,
erudite, provocative work.”
—DRAKE BENNETT, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
“Terrific … In the best anthropological tradition, [Graeber] helps us
reset our everyday ideas by exploring history and other civilizations,
then boomeranging back to render our own world strange, and more
open to change.”
—RAJ PATEL, THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“Fascinating … One of the year’s most influential books. Graeber situates
the emergence of credit within the rise of class society, the destruction of
societies based on ‘webs of mutual commitment,’ and the constantly
implied threat of physical violence that lies behind all social relations
based on money.”
—PAUL MASON, THE GUARDIAN
“A formidable piece of anthropological scholarship …[A] sweeping
global history … In tracing the genealogy of the noxious form of debt
that we are familiar with today and contrasting it against an ancient,
society-grounding conception of human indebtedness, Graeber has given
us a significant piece of historical scholarship, one that demonstrates
how a new understanding of debt might provide us with some clues for
the future.”
— JUSTIN E. H. SMITH, BOOKFORUM
“Debt may assume for the Occupy movement the theoretical importance
that Michael Hardt and Antonio’s Negri’s Empire (2000) did for anti-
globalisation campaigners during the past decade. Moving between
ancient Mesopotamia, the medieval Crusades, the Atlantic slave trade,
and innumerable other historical epochs, his 500-page study argues that
although debt has always been the basis of human society, it is not the
same thing as money.”
—SUKHEV SANDHU, THE TELEGRAPH
“David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years can be seen both as an
anthropologist’s contribution to the new global history and as the
intellectual credo of an anti-capitalist scholar-activist. The project of
writing a history of financial contrivances nicely combines a
deconstruction of debt and the case for seeing the crash of 2008 as a
critical turning point. In this optic, recent events are a further twist in an
age-old contest between rich and poor, creditors and debtors, the money
machine and the cause of human survival and flourishing. It is written
with engaging good humour and a winning radical generosity.”
—ROBIN BLACKBURN, NEW LEFT REVIEW
“If anthropology consists of making the apparently wild thought of
others logically compelling in their own cultural settings and
intellectually revealing of the human condition, then David Graeber is
the consummate anthropologist. Not only does he accomplish this
profound feat, he redoubles it by the critical task—now more urgent
than ever—of making the possibilities of other people’s worlds the basis
for understanding our own.”
— MARSHALL SAHLINS, CHARLES F. GREY DISTINGUISHED SERVICE PROFESSOR EMERITUS
OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
“I am grateful to David Graeber, an anthropologist and the intellectual
leader of the Occupy movement, for his Debt, which is brilliant,
unexpectedly funny, and provides many bracing perspectives on the
subject.”
— LEWIS JONES, THE SPECTATOR
“An absolutely indispensable—and enormous—treatise on the history of
money and its relationship to inequality in society.”
— CORY DOCTOROW, BOINGBOING
“Controversial and thought-provoking, an excellent book.”
—BOOKLIST
“A dazzlingly syncretic, coherent, and multi-faceted effort to re-narrate
virtually the entirety of human history, by starting from a concept and
opening outward to include everything else … A deconstruction of the
terms through which we have learned to think about what human
civilization, history, and society are and are supposed to be (which is to
say, the language we use to make claims upon it) … It’s a really fucking
good book.”
— AARON BADY, THE NEW INQUIRY
“Graeber’s body of anthropological work is highly regarded, yet his style
of writing is not academic but almost chatty. Some scholars use
academic language to reach and extract the deepest of ideas; Graeber is
able to do this—reach, extract, exchange deep and startling ideas—with
plain language … The book is a dense mix of economics, history, and
anthropology. And always, these visits to different times and cultures
reveal something surprising about debt and money.”
—CHARLES MUDEDE, THE STRANGER
“A grand intellectual project and a call for action.”
—JEFFERY ATIK, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
“The world of borrowing needs a little demystification, and David
Graeber’s Debt is a good start.”
—THE L MAGAZINE
“This timely and accessible book would appeal to any reader interested
in the past and present culture surrounding debt, as well as broad-
minded economists.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL
“I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation from
anywhere in the world.”
—MAURICE BLOCH, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE LONDON SCHOOL OF
ECONOMICS
DAVID GRAEBER
teaches anthropology at the London School of
Economics. He is the author of Toward an Anthropological Theory of
Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar,
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy,
Rebellion, and Desire, and Direct Action: An Ethnography. He has written
for Harper’s, The Nation, The Baffler, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and the
New Left Review.
In the summer of 2011, he worked with a small group of activists to
plan Occupy Wall Street. In Time’s 2011 “Person of the Year” feature on
the “Protestor,” Kurt Andersen wrote that Graeber “nudged the group to
a fresh vision: a long-term encampment in a public space, an improvised
democratic protest village without preappointed leaders, committed to a
general critique—the U.S. economy is broken, politics is corrupted by
big money—but with no immediate call for specific legislative or
executive action. It was also Graeber, a lifelong hater of corporate smoke
and mirrors, who coined the movement’s ingenious slogan, ‘We are the
99%.’ ”

DEBT
© 2011, 2012, 2014 David Graeber First published in hardcover in 2011
First Melville House printing of this edition: October 2014
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse
ISBN: 978-1-61219-420-2
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Graeber, David.
Debt : the first 5,000 years / David Graeber.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2 (alk. paper)
1. Debt—History. 2. Money—History. 3. Financial crises—History. I. Title.
HG3701.G73 2010
332–dc22
2010044508
v3.1_r2
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
1 On the Experience of Moral Confusion
2 The Myth of Barter
3 Primordial Debts
4 Cruelty and Redemption
5 A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations
6 Games with Sex and Death
7 Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundations of
Contemporary Civilization
8 Credit Versus Bullion, And the Cycles of History
9 The Axial Age (800 BC–600 AD)
10 The Middle Ages (600 AD–1450 AD)
11 Age of the Great Capitalist Empires (1450–1971)
12 The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined (1971–
present)
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography