Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

War, conquest, and slavery not only played the central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected.

This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or nowadays, “smart bombs” from unmanned drones.

What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.