Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

What makes Medieval Irish laws seem so peculiar from our perspective is that their exponents had not the slightest discomfort with putting an exact monetary price on human dignity. For us, the notion that the sanctity of a priest or the majesty of a king could be held equivalent to a million fried eggs or a hundred thousand haircuts is simply bizarre. These are precisely the things that ought to be considered beyond all possibility of quantification. If Medieval Irish jurists felt otherwise, it was because people at that time did not use money to acquire eggs or haircuts.28 It was the fact that it was still a human economy, in which money was used for social purposes, that made it possible to create such an intricate system whereby it was possible not just to measure but to add and subtract specific quantities of human dignity—and in doing so, provide us with a unique window into the true nature of honor itself. The obvious question is: What happens to such an economy when people do begin to use the same money used to measure dignity to acquire eggs and haircuts? As the history of ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world reveals, the result was a profound—and enduring—moral crisis.

this section is a good summary of how human economies used “debts” for honor