Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

very idea of caste, which was that the universe was a vast hierarchy in which different sorts of people were assumed to be of fundamentally different natures, that these ranks and grades were fixed forever, and that when goods and services moved up and down the hierarchy, they followed not principles of exchange at all but (as in all hierarchical systems) custom and precedent. The French anthropologist Louis Dumont made the famous argument that one cannot even really talk about “inequality” here, because to use that phrase implies that one believes people should or could be equal, and this idea was completely alien to Hindu conceptions.18 For them to have imagined their responsibilities as debts would have been profoundly subversive, since debts are by definition arrangements between equals—at least in the sense that they are equal parties to a contract—that could and should be repaid.19