Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Much of our free-market doctrine, then, appears to have been originally borrowed piecemeal from a very different social and moral universe.93 The mercantile classes of the medieval Near West had pulled off an extraordinary feat. By abandoning the usurious practices that had made them so obnoxious to their neighbors for untold centuries before, they were able to become—alongside religious teachers—the effective leaders of their communities: communities that are still seen as organized, to a large extent, around the twin poles of mosque and bazaar.94 The spread of Islam allowed the market to become a global phenomenon, operating largely independent of governments, according to its own internal laws. But the very fact that this was, in a certain way, a genuine free market, not one created by the government and backed by its police and prisons—a world of handshake deals and paper promises backed only by the integrity of the signer—meant that it could never really become the world imagined by those who later adopted many of the same ideas and arguments: one of purely self-interested individuals vying for material advantage by any means at hand.