Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Chapter Six

the term “primitive money” is deceptive

they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers—almost anything but trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry.

I’ve decided therefore to refer to them as “social currencies,” and the economies that employ them as “human economies.”

Historically, commercial economies—market economies, as we now like to call them—are a relative newcomer. For most of human history, human economies predominated.

What sort of debts, what sort of credits and debits, do people accumulate in human economies?

Rospabé’s argument is that “primitive money” was not originally a way to pay debts of any sort. It’s a way of recognizing the existence of debts that cannot possibly be paid. His argument is worth considering in detail.

It is really an acknowledgment that one is asking for something so uniquely valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible.

Money, then, begins, as Rospabé himself puts it, “as a substitute for life.”

Chapter Seven

What we discovered was that we cannot begin to think about such questions without taking into account the role of sheer physical violence.

This is because 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.

The best way to do so, I believe, is to start from a single, odd, vexed concept: the concept of honor,

On the one hand, violence: men who live by violence, whether soldiers or gangsters, are almost invariably obsessed with honor, and assaults on honor are considered the most obvious justification for acts of violence.

On the other, debt. We speak both of debts of honor, and honoring one’s debts;

Some of the most genuinely archaic forms of money we know about appear to have been used precisely as measures of honor and degradation: that is, the value of money was, ultimately, the value of the power to turn others into money.

It has always been something of a scandal for those who like to see the advance of science and technology, the accumulation of learning, economic growth—“human progress,” as we like to call it—as necessarily leading to greater human freedom, that for women, the exact opposite often seems to be the case. Or at least, has been the case until very recent times.

In Roman law, property, or dominium, is a relation between a person and a thing, characterized by absolute power of that person over that thing.

Clearly, then, property is not really a relation between a person and a thing. It’s an understanding or arrangement between people concerning things.

The most convincing explanation I’ve seen is Orlando Patterson’s: the notion of absolute private property is really derived from slavery.

(This is how slaves were defined in Roman law: they were people who were also a res, a thing.)

It was quite extraordinary, even in the ancient world, for a father to have the right to execute his slaves—let alone his children. No one is quite sure why the early Romans were so extreme in this regard. It’s telling, though, that the earliest Roman debt law was equally unusual in its harshness, since it allowed creditors to execute insolvent debtors.103 The

Debt bondage reduced family relations to relations of property; social reforms retained the new power of fathers but protected them from debt.

present economic life: wage labor, which is, effectively, the renting of our freedom in the same way that slavery can be conceived as its sale.121

We own ourselves, therefore outsiders have no right to trespass on us.

we seem to be trapped between imagining society in the Adam Smith mode, as a collection of individuals whose only significant relations are with their own possessions, happily bartering one thing for another for the sake of mutual convenience, with debt almost entirely abolished from the picture, and a vision in which debt is everything,

Chapter Eight

If our political and legal ideas really are founded on the logic of slavery, then how did we ever abolish it?

So author assumes this has been established? Couldn’t it be argued that our constitution stated something not consistent with our historical actions?

Most agree that the spread of Christianity must have had something to do with it, but that can’t have been the direct cause, since the Church itself was never explicitly opposed to the institution and in many cases defended it.

So, did those in the U.S. consider it a Christian national?

compatriots would not countenance slaveholding in their own countries—one reason why planters were eventually obliged to acquire their slaves in Africa and set up plantations in the New World.

This appears to argue that the cause of some coming to the U.S. was so they could own slaves? This would seem a different argument than I had assumed.

Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence. There’s a very simple reason for that. Gold and silver coins are distinguished from credit arrangements by one spectacular feature: they can be stolen. A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust.

Egypt

Chapter Nine THE AXIAL AGE

By insisting that only their own coins were acceptable as fees, fines, or taxes, governments were able to overwhelm the innumerable social currencies that already existed in their hinterlands, and to establish something like uniform national markets.

The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like “profit” and “advantage”—and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever cared about anything else.

A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more.

Chapter Ten THE MIDDLE AGES

Middle Ages were the period in which those two institutions began to merge.

At the same time, economic life, from the conduct of international trade to the organization of local markets, came to fall increasingly under the regulation of religious authorities.

One result was a widespread movement to control, or even forbid, predatory lending.

Another was a return, across Eurasia, to various forms of vi...

based on a series of unquestioned assumptions that, as I’ve said, crumble the moment one starts seriously poking at them.

Chief among them is the idea that the absence of coins means the absence of money. True, the destruction of the Roman war machine also meant that Roman coins went out of circulation,

The key innovation was the creation of what were called the “perpetual endowments” or “inexhaustible treasuries.”

a lay supporter wished to make a contribution to her local monastery.

she would provide a certain sum of money—or something worth a great deal of money—that would then be loaned out in the name of the monastery, at the accepted 15-percent annual rate.

while Brahmins were themselves forbidden to lend money at interest, temples were not.

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.

China: Buddhism (the Economy of Infinite Debt)

Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.