Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

such societies always allowed anyone to buy in, rising through the nine initiatory grades if they could pay the fee—these also exacted, of course, in the brass rods the merchants themselves supplied.

Very cult like.

Entry fees were no doubt less exorbitant in small, distant communities, but the effect was still the same: thousands ended up in debt to the merchants, whether for the fees required for joining, or for the trade goods they supplied (mostly cloth and metal put to use creating the gear and costumes for the Ekpe performances—debts that they thus themselves became responsible for enforcing on themselves. These debts, too, were regularly paid in people, ostensibly yielded up as pawns.)

The passage only makes sense if one recognizes that debtors were also, owing to their membership in the secret societies, collectors. The seizing of a child is a reference to the local practice of “panyarring,” current throughout West Africa, by which creditors despairing of repayment would simply sweep into the debtor’s community with a group of armed men and seize anything—people, goods, domestic animals—that could be easily carried off, then hold it hostage as security.

Often debtors would be forced to pawn more and more of their own children or dependents, until finally there was no recourse but to pawn themselves.

Debtors, like their families before them, ended up turned over to the Aro, then to the British, and finally, shackled and chained, crowded into tiny slaving vessels and sent off to be sold on plantations across the sea.

If the Tiv, then, were haunted by the vision of an insidious secret organization that lured unsuspecting victims into debt traps, whereby they themselves became the enforcers of debts to be paid with the bodies of their children, and ultimately, themselves—one reason was because this was literally happening to people who lived a few hundred miles away.

What is remarkable is that all this was done, the bodies extracted, through the very mechanisms of the human economy, premised on the principle that human lives are the ultimate value, to which nothing could possibly compare.

Not very provided you don't cling to the noble savage fantasy.

I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that what I am describing here is in any way peculiar to Africa. One could find the exact same things happening wherever human economies came into contact with commercial ones (and particularly, commercial economies with advanced military technology and an insatiable demand for human labor).

As the premier historian of the region, Anthony Reid, has pointed out, labor throughout Southeast Asia has long been organized above all through relations of debt bondage.

One practice, noted from Thailand to Sulawesi, is for a group of poor brothers to turn to a rich sponsor to pay for the expenses of one brother’s marriage. He’s then referred to as their “master.” This is more like a patron-client relation than anything else:

Reid insists that most of this was relatively innocuous—in fact, poor men might take out loans for the express purpose of becoming debtors to some wealthy patron who could provide them with food during hard times, a roof, a wife.

It’s important to point this out because one of the effects of the slave trade is that people who don’t actually live in Africa are often left with an image of that continent as an irredeemably violent, savage place—an image that has had disastrous effects on those who do live there.

So why are you perpetuating it?

Balinese were considered a rude and violent people ruled by decadent, opium-addicted nobles whose wealth was based almost exclusively on their willingness to sell their subjects to foreigners as slaves.

young Balinese women in particular being in great demand in cities through the region as both prostitutes and concubines.83 As the island was drawn into the slave trade, almost the entire social and political system of the island was transformed into an apparatus for the forcible extraction of women.

Meanwhile, royal law codes were rewritten in all the usual ways, with the exception that here, the force of law was directed above all and explicitly against women. Not only were criminals and debtors to be enslaved and deported, but any married man was granted the power to renounce his wife, and by doing so to render her, automatically, property of the local ruler, to be disposed of as he wished.

The Lele example gave us a hint: to make a human being an object of exchange, one woman equivalent to another, for example, requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from that web of relations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is, and thus, into a generic value capable of being added and subtracted and used as a means to measure debt. This requires a certain violence.

am not using the word “violence” metaphorically. I am not speaking merely of conceptual violence, but of the literal threat of broken bones and bruised flesh; of punches and kicks; in much the same way that when the ancient Hebrews spoke of their daughters in “bondage,” they were not being poetic, but talking about literal ropes and chains.

The role of force in providing the framework for human relations is simply more explicit in what we call “traditional societies”—even if in many, actual physical assault by one human on another occurs less often than in our own.

Ooooor some societies it doesn't work or mutually agree it sucks and we need new systems.

Citing it might seem unfair (the Tiv did, evidently, care enough to elect Akiga to be their first parliamentary representative, knowing he supported legislation to outlaw such practices), but it serves nicely to bring home the real point: that certain sorts of violence were considered morally acceptable.

The slave trade, of course, represented violence on an exponentially different scale. We are speaking here of destruction of genocidal proportions, in world-historic terms, comparable only to events like the destruction of New World civilizations or the Holocaust.

There will always be at least a handful of people unscrupulous enough to take advantage of such a situation—and a handful is all it takes.

Seems like a lot more than a handful.

Groups like the Aro Confederacy represent an all-too-familiar strategy, deployed by fascists, mafias, and right-wing gangsters everywhere: first unleash the criminal violence of an unlimited market, in which everything is for sale and the price of life becomes extremely cheap; then step in, offering to restore a certain measure of order—though one which in its very harshness leaves all the most profitable aspects of the earlier chaos intact.

This is apolitical unfortunately

The African slave trade was, as I mentioned, an unprecedented catastrophe, but commercial economies had already been extracting slaves from human economies for thousands of years. It is a practice as old as civilization. The question I want to ask is: To what degree is it actually constitutive of civilization itself?

If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away.

there is every reason to believe that slavery, with its unique ability to rip human beings from their contexts, to turn them into abstractions, played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere.

Makes sense but needs nuance.

in both the ancient Middle East and the ancient Mediterranean, most of the really critical moments seem to have occurred just before the advent of written records.

since the notion of honor makes no sense without the possibility of degradation, reconstructing this history reveals how much our basic concepts of freedom and morality took shape within institutions—notably, but not only, slavery—that we’d sooner not have to think about at all.

His eloquence and the power of his life story played significant parts in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

The slaves making the commodities the British sold have objections. Britain just subcontracted it out.

Equiano only came around to an abolitionist position after converting to Methodism and making common cause with religious activists against the trade. Many have asked: Why did it take him so long? Surely if anyone had reason to understand the evils of slavery, it was he. The answer seems, oddly, to lie in the man’s very integrity.

To be made a slave is to be stripped of any possible honor. Naturally, Equiano wished to regain what had been taken from him. His problem was that honor is, by definition, something that exists in the eyes of others. To be able to recover it, then, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that deprived him of his honor in the first place.

How about even just being seen as a human fucking being?

At the very least, there was always seen to be something disreputable and ugly about slavery. Anyone too close to it was tainted. Slave-traders particularly were scorned as inhuman brutes.

"We don't like what he does but we like the results."

We read of famines in China so severe that thousands of poor men would castrate themselves, in the hope that they might sell themselves as eunuchs at court—but this was also seen as the sign of total social breakdown.

On one level, al-Wahid’s argument is just an extended apologia for the role of slavery in Islam—widely criticized, since Islamic law never eliminated slavery, even when the institution largely vanished in the rest of the Medieval world.

Why is important. It only vanished due to no easy access to large groups of non-Catholics.

answer is striking in its simplicity: one becomes a slave in situations where one would otherwise have died. This is obvious in the case of war: in the ancient world, the victor was assumed to have total power over the vanquished, including their women and children; all of them could be simply massacred. Similarly, he argued, criminals were condemned to slavery only for capital crimes, and those who sold themselves, or their children, normally faced starvation.

in almost every important sense, a slave was dead. In Roman law, this was quite explicit. If a Roman soldier was captured and lost his liberty, his family was expected to read his will and dispose of his possessions. Should he later regain his freedom, he would have to start over, even to the point of remarrying the woman who was now considered his widow.

First of all, he emphasizes, slavery is unlike any other form of human relation because it is not a moral relation. Slave-owners might dress it up in all sorts of legalistic or paternalistic language, but really this is just window-dressing and no one really believes otherwise; really, it is a relation based purely on violence; a slave must obey because if he doesn’t, he can be beaten, tortured, or killed, and everyone is perfectly well aware of this. Second of all, being socially dead means that a slave has no binding moral relations with anyone else: he is alienated from his ancestors, community, family, clan, city; he cannot make contracts or meaningful promises, except at the whim of his master, who could just as easily take it back; even if he acquires a family, it can be broken up at any time.

One might even say: honor is surplus dignity. It is that heightened consciousness of power, and its dangers, that comes from having stripped away the power and dignity of others; or at the very least, from the knowledge that one is capable of doing so.

Afraid what you'll do to others will happen to you.

On the one hand, we can speak of honor as simple integrity. Decent people honor their commitments.

Becoming archaic however.

that is, the value of money was, ultimately, the value of the power to turn others into money.

Most of what we know about the economy of early Medieval Ireland comes from legal sources—a series of law codes, drawn up by a powerful class of jurists, dating roughly from the seventh to ninth centuries AD.

Kings, in turn, assigned tasks to different clans: this one was to provide them with leather, this one poets, this one shields … precisely the sort of unwieldy arrangement that markets were later developed to get around.18

Welp there goes your own argument Graeber.

What was so unusual about Celtic systems—and the Irish one went further with this than any other—was that honor could be precisely quantified. Every free person had his or her “honor price”: the price that one had to pay for an insult to the person’s dignity.

Honor price is not to be confused with wergeld—the actual price of a man or woman’s life. If one killed a man, one paid goods to the value of seven cumals, in recompense for killing him, to which one then added his honor price, for having offended against his dignity (by killing him).

The problem was how to calculate the injury, since this varied according to both the physical damage and status of the injured party. Here, Irish jurists developed the ingenious expedient of measuring different wounds with different varieties of grain: a cut on the king’s cheek was measured in grains of wheat, on that of a substantial farmer in oats, on that of a smallholder merely in peas. One cow was paid for each.

Attacking a peasant under the protection of a lord was the same as raping a man’s wife or daughter, a violation of the honor not of the victim, but of the man who should have been able to protect them.

Mockery was a refined art in Medieval Ireland, and poets were considered close to magicians: it was said that a talented satirist could rhyme rats to death, or at the very least, raise blisters on the faces of his victims.

What’s more, since the legal system was completely separate from the political one, jurists, in theory, had the right to demote anyone—including a king—who had committed a dishonorable act. If a nobleman turned a worthy man away from his door or feast, sheltered a fugitive, or ate steak from an obviously stolen cow, or even if he allowed himself to be satirized and did not take the offending poet to court, his price could be lowered to that of a commoner. But the same was true of a king who ran away in battle, or abused his powers, or even was caught working in the fields or otherwise engaging in tasks beneath his dignity.

What’s unusual about the Irish material is that it’s all spelled out so clearly. This is partly because Irish law codes were the work of a class of legal specialists who seem to have turned the whole business almost into a form of entertainment, devoting endless hours to coming up with every possible ramification of existing legal principles, whether or not there was any real possibility such a case might end up in court.

At first sight it might seem strange that the honor of a nobleman or king should be measured in slaves, since slaves were human beings whose honor was zero. But if one’s honor is ultimately founded on one’s ability to extract the honor of others, it makes perfect sense. The value of a slave is that of the honor that has been extracted from them.

Honor is a zero-sum game. A man’s ability to protect the women of his family is an essential part of that honor. Therefore, forcing him to surrender a woman of his family to perform menial and degrading chores in another’s household is the ultimate blow to his honor.

Women keep coming up