Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Indeed, India has become notorious as a country in which a very large part of the working population is laboring in effective debt peonage to a landlord or other creditor. Such arrangements became even easier over time. By about 1000 AD, restrictions on usury by members of the upper castes in Hindu law-codes largely disappeared. On the other hand, 1000 AD was about the same time that Islam appeared in India—a religion dedicated to eradicating usury altogether. So at the very least we can say that these things never stopped being contested. And even Hindu law of that time was far more humane than almost anything found in the ancient world. Debtors were not, generally speaking, reduced to slavery, and there is no widespread evidence of the selling of women or children. In fact, overt slavery had largely vanished from the countryside by this time. And debt peons were not even pawns, exactly; by law, they were simply paying interest on a freely contracted agreement. Paying the principle might take generations, but the law stipulated that even if it was never paid, in the third generation, they would be freed.