Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Here Chinese ideas did grow a bit closer to the Christian ones. But Chinese conceptions of the cosmos had one crucial difference: since there was no emphasis on the absolute gulf between our world and the one beyond it, contractual relations with the gods were by no means out of the question. This was particularly true in medieval Taoism, where monks were ordained through a ceremony called “rending the tally,” ripping apart a piece of paper that represented a contract with heaven.162

The striking thing is that the Confucian condemnation of the merchant and the Islamic celebration of the merchant ultimately led to the same thing: prosperous societies with flourishing markets, but where the elements never came together to create the great merchant banks and industrial firms that were to become the hallmark of modern capitalism.

Important note!

Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade. An excellent case in point was the Society of Merchant Adventurers, charted by King Henry IV in London in 1407, who, despite the romantic-sounding name, were mainly in the business of buying up British woolens and selling them in the Flanders fairs.

What’s more, the return to bullion was accompanied by the return of a whole host of other conditions that, during the Middle Ages, had been largely suppressed or kept at bay: vast empires and professional armies, massive predatory warfare, untrammeled usury and debt peonage, but also materialist philosophies, a new burst of scientific and philosophical creativity—even the return of chattel slavery. It was in no way a simple repeat performance. All the Axial Age pieces reappeared, but they came together in an entirely different way.

One of the perverse effects of the bubonic plague, which killed off about one-third of the European workforce in the years after it first struck in 1347, was that wages increased dramatically.

Over the next centuries, all this was to be destroyed. In England, the festive life was systematically attacked by Puritan reformers, then eventually by reformers everywhere, Catholic and Protestant alike. At the same time its economic basis in popular prosperity dissolved.

Why this happened has been a matter of intense historical debate for centuries. This much we know: it began with a massive inflation. Between 1500 and 1650, for instance, prices in England increased 500 percent, but wages rose much more slowly, so that in five generations, real wages fell to perhaps 40 percent of what they had been.

Why? The favorite explanation, ever since a French lawyer named Jean Bodin first proposed it in 1568, was the vast influx of gold and silver that came pouring into Europe after the conquest of the New World. As the value of precious metals collapsed, the argument went, the ...

The problem with the conventional story is that very little of that gold and silver lingered very long in Europe. Most of the gold ended up in temples in India, and the overwhelming majority of the silver bullion was ultimately shipped off to China. The latter is crucial. If we really want to understand the origins of the modern world economy, the place to start is not in Europe at all. The real story is of how China abandoned the use of paper money.

During their century of rule, the Mongols had worked closely with foreign merchants, who became widely detested. Partly as a result, the former rebels, now the Ming dynasty, were suspicious of commerce in any form, and they promoted a romantic vision of self-sufficient agrarian communities. This had some unfortunate consequences. For one thing, it meant the maintenance of the old Mongol tax system, paid in labor and in kind; especially since that, in turn, was based on a quasi-caste system in which subjects were registered as farmers, craftsmen, or soldiers and forbidden to change their jobs. This proved extraordinarily unpopular. While government investment in agriculture, roads, and canals did set off a commercial boom, much of this commerce was technically illegal, and taxes on crops were so high that many indebted farmers began to flee their ancestral lands.4

In China, many also turned prospector. There was a minor silver rush, with illegal mines cropping up everywhere. Uncoined silver ingots, instead of official paper money and strings of bronze coins, soon became the real money of the off-the-books informal economy.

In the end, the government gave up even trying to suppress the informal economy. Instead, they swung the other way entirely: they stopped issuing paper money, legalized the mines, allowed silver bullion to become the recognized currency for large transactions, and even gave private mints the authority to produce strings of cash.6 This, in turn, allowed the government to gradually abandon the system of labor exactions and substitute a uniform tax system payable in silver.

Effectively, the Chinese government had gone back to its old policy of encouraging markets and merely intervening to prevent any undue concentrations of capital. It quickly proved spectacularly successful, and Chinese markets boomed. Indeed, many speak of the Ming as having accomplished something almost unique in world history: this was a time when the Chinese population was exploding, but living standards markedly improved.7 The problem was that the new policy meant that the regime had to ensure an abundant supply of silver in the country, so as to keep its price low and minimize popular unrest—but, as it turned out, the Chinese mines were very quickly exhausted. In the 1530s, new silver mines were discovered in Japan, but these were exhausted in a decade or two as well. Before long, China had to turn to Europe and the New World.

Important note!

In those early days, Atlantic Europe really had only one substantial advantage over its Muslim rivals: an active and advanced tradition of naval warfare, honed by centuries of conflict in the Mediterranean. The moment when Vasco da Gama entered the Indian Ocean in 1498, the principle that the seas should be a zone of peaceful trade came to an immediate end. Portuguese flotillas began bombarding and sacking every port city they came across, then seizing control of strategic points and extorting protection money from unarmed Indian Ocean merchants for the right to carry on their business unmolested.

The conquest of Mexico and Peru led to the discovery of enormous new sources of precious metal, and these were exploited ruthlessly and systematically, even to the point of largely exterminating the surrounding populations to extract as much precious metal as quickly as possible. As Kenneth Pomeranz has recently pointed out, none of this would have been possible were it not for the practically unlimited Asian demand for precious metals.

Important note!

By 1540, a silver glut caused a collapse in prices across Europe; the American mines would, at this point, simply have stopped functioning, and the entire project of American colonization foundered, had it not been for the demand from China.9

By the late sixteenth century, China was importing almost fifty tons of silver a year, about 90 percent of its silver, and by the early seventeenth century, 116 tons, or over 97 percent.10 Huge amounts of silk, porcelain, and other Chinese products had to be exported to pay for it. Many of these Chinese products, in turn, ended up in the new cities of Central and South America. This Asian trade became the single most significant factor in the emerging global economy, and those who ultimately controlled the financial levers—particularly Italian, Dutch, and German merchant bankers—became fantastically rich.

Important note!

What really caused the inflation is that those who ended up in control of the bullion—governments, bankers, large-scale merchants—were able to use that control to begin changing the rules, first by insisting that gold and silver were money, and second by introducing new forms of credit-money for their own use while slowly undermining and destroying the local systems of trust that had allowed small-scale communities across Europe to operate largely without the use of metal currency.

Important note!

This is what the use of equations so often does: make it seem perfectly natural to assume that, if the price of silver in China is twice what it is in Seville, and inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on large quantities of silver and transporting it to China, then clearly they will, even if doing so requires the destruction of entire civilizations. Or if there is a demand for sugar in England, and enslaving millions is the easiest way to acquire labor to produce it, then it is inevitable that some will enslave them. In fact, history makes it quite clear that this is not the case. Any number of civilizations have probably been in a position to wreak havoc on the scale that the European powers did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Ming China itself was an obvious candidate), but almost none actually did so.

Moralists throughout the ages have inveighed against the endlessness of human greed, just as they have against our supposedly endless lust for power. What history actually reveals, though, is that while humans may be justly accused of having a proclivity to accuse others of acting like conquistadors, few really act this way themselves.

In other words, he’d been living beyond his means, got himself in trouble, and decided, like a reckless gambler, to double down and go for broke. Unsurprising, then, that when the governor at the last minute decided to cancel the expedition, Cortés ignored him and sailed for the mainland with six hundred men, offering each an equal share in the expedition’s profits. On landing he burned his boats, effectively staking everything on victory.

The officers connived to sequester most of the gold, and when the final tally was announced, the troops learned that they would be receiving only fifty to eighty pesos each. What’s more, the better part of their shares was immediately seized again by the officers in their capacity of creditors—since Cortés had insisted that the men be billed for any replacement equipment and medical care they had received during the siege. Most found they had actually lost money on the deal.

These were the men who ended up in control of the provinces and who established local administration, taxes, and labor regimes. Which makes it a little easier to understand the descriptions of Indians with their faces covered by names like so many counter-endorsed checks, or the mines surrounded by miles of rotting corpses. We are not dealing with a psychology of cold, calculating greed, but of a much more complicated mix of shame and righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that would only compound and accumulate (these were, almost certainly, interest-bearing loans), and outrage at the idea that, after all they had gone through, they should be held to owe anything to begin with.

Those making the decisions did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were in control did not particularly care to know the details.

But as with almost all such royal efforts to act as protector of the Indians, the result was the same. Financial exigencies ended up taking precedence. Charles V himself was deeply in debt to banking firms in Florence, Genoa, and Naples, and gold and silver from the Americas made up perhaps one-fifth of his total revenue. In the end, despite a lot of initial noise and the (usually quite sincere) moral outrage on the part of the king’s emissaries, such decrees were either ignored or, at best, enforced for a year or two before being allowed to slip into abeyance.

Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and military power were then gradually reorganized around it.

As we have seen in the case of medieval Islam, under genuine free-market conditions—in which the state is not involved in regulating the market in any significant way, even in enforcing commercial contracts—purely competitive markets will not develop, and loans at interest will become effectively impossible to collect. It was only the Islamic prohibition against usury, really, that made it possible for them to create an economic system that stood so far apart from the state.

In 1525, the year after Luther’s sermon, there was a massive uprising of peasants, miners, and poor townsfolk across Germany: the rebels, in most cases, representing themselves as simple Christians aiming to restore the true communism of the Gospels. Over a hundred thousand were slaughtered. Already in 1524, Luther had a sense that matters were spilling out of control and that he would have to choose sides: in that text, he did so. Old Testament laws like the Sabbatical year, he argued, are no longer binding; the Gospel merely describes ideal behavior; humans are sinful creatures, so law is necessary; while usury is a sin, a four to five-percent rate of interest is currently legal under certain circumstances; and while collecting that interest is sinful, under no circumstances is it legitimate to argue that for that reason, borrowers have the right to break the law.

Important note!

Soon afterward, Calvin was to reject the blanket ban on usury entirely, and by 1650, almost all Protestant denominations had come to agree with his position that a reasonable rate of interest (usually five percent) was not sinful, provided the lenders act in good conscience, do not make lending their exclusive business, and do not exploit the poor.28 (Catholic doctrine was slower to come around, but it did ultimately accede by passive acquiescence.)

the assumption that usury is something that one properly practices on one’s enemies, and therefore, by extension, that all commerce partakes something of the nature of war, never entirely disappears. Calvin, for instance, denied that Deuteronomy only referred to the Amalekites; clearly, he said, it meant that usury was acceptable when dealing with Syrians or Egyptians; indeed with all nations with whom the Jews traded.30 The result of opening the gates was, at least tacitly, to suggest that one could now treat anyone, even a neighbor, as a foreigner.

Inside the small towns and rural hamlets, where the state was mostly far away, medieval standards survived intact, and “credit” was just as much a matter of honor and reputation as it had ever been. The great untold story of our current age is of how these ancient credit systems were ultimately destroyed.

In a typical village, the only people likely to pay cash were passing travelers, and those considered riff-raff: paupers and ne’er-do-wells so notoriously down on their luck that no one would extend credit to them. Since everyone was involved in selling something, however, just about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most family income took the form of promises from other families; everyone knew and kept count of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months or year or so, communities would hold a general public “reckoning,” canceling debts out against each other in a great circle, with only those differences then remaining when all was done being settled by use of coin or goods.

Important note!

Cold cash was employed largely between strangers, or when paying rents, tithes, and taxes to landlords, bailiffs, priests, and other superiors. The landed gentry and wealthy merchants, who eschewed handshake deals, would often use cash with one another, especially to pay off bills of exchange drawn on London markets.49 Above all, gold and silver were used by the government to purchase arms and pay soldiers, and amongst the criminal classes themselves. This meant that coins were most likely to be used both by the sort of people who ran the legal system—the magistrates, constables, and justices of the peace—and by those violent elements of society they saw it as their business to control.

Important note!

I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of “self-interest.”56 It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right around Hobbes’ time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments. When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that all human life can be explained as the pursuit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores. By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense.

“Just as the physical world is ruled by the laws of movement,” wrote Helvétius, in a passage reminiscent of Lord Shang, “no less is the moral universe ruled by laws of interest.”57 And, of course, it was on this assumption that all the quadratic equations of economic theory could ultimately be built.58

as Augustine already anticipated, infinite desires in a finite world means endless competition, which in turn is why, as Hobbes insisted, our only hope of social peace lies in contractual arrangements and strict enforcement by the apparatus of the state.

The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—and often vindictive—power of the state.

Important note!

The sudden accessibility of violence really did threaten to transform what had been the essence of sociality into a war of all against all.66 It’s not surprising, then, that by the eighteenth century, the very notion of personal credit had acquired a bad name, with both lenders and borrowers considered equally suspect.67 The use of coins—at least among those who had access to them—had come to seem moral in itself.

Important note!

What’s more, he uses this utopian image to make a larger point: that even if all businesses operated like the great commercial companies, with an eye only to self-interest, it wouldn’t matter. Even the “natural selfishness and rapacity” of the rich, with all their “vain and insatiable desires” will still, through the logic of the invisible hand, lead to the benefit of all.70 In other words, Smith simply imagined away the role of consumer credit in his own day, just as he had his account of the origins of money.71

As a result, when royal advisors or London pamphleteers discussed economic problems, the issues they debated were always the same: How do we keep bullion from leaving the country? What do we do about the crippling shortage of coin? For most, questions like, “How do we maintain trust in local credit systems?” simply did not arise.

Important note!

From our perspective, though, what it reveals is just how closely bound together war, bullion, and these new credit instruments were. One need only consider the paths not traveled. For instance, there was no intrinsic reason why a bill of exchange couldn’t be endorsed over to a third party, then become generally transferable—thus, in effect, turning it into a form of paper money. This is how paper money first emerged in China. In medieval Europe, there were periodic movements in that direction, but for a variety of reasons, they did not go far.74

Important note!

Alternately, bankers can produce money by issuing book credits for more than they have on cash reserve. This is considered the very essence of modern banking, and it can lead to the circulation of private bank notes.75

Where bankers effectively controlled medieval governments, it proved safer and more profitable to manipulate the government’s own finances. The history of modern financial instruments, and the ultimate origins of paper money, really begin with the issuing of municipal bonds—a practice begun by the Venetian government in the twelfth century when, needing a quick infusion of income for military purposes, it levied a compulsory loan on its taxpaying citizens, for which it promised each of them five percent annual interest, and allowed the “bonds” or contracts to become negotiable, thus creating a market in government debt.

Important note!

While already by the sixteenth century, merchants were using bills of exchange to settle debts, government debt bonds—rentes, juros, annuities—were the real credit money of the new age. It’s here that we have to look for the real origins of the “price revolution” that hammered once-independent townsfolk and villagers into the ground and opened the way for most of them to ultimately be reduced to wage laborers, working for those who had access to these higher forms of credit.

Even in Seville, where the treasure fleets from the New World first touched port in the Old, bullion was not much used in day-to-day transactions. Most of it was taken directly to the warehouses of Genoese bankers operating from the port and stored for shipment east. But, in the process, it became the basis for complex credit schemes whereby the value of the bullion was loaned to the emperor to fund military operations in exchange for papers entitling the bearer to interest-bearing annuities from the government—papers that could in turn be traded as if they were money. By such means, bankers could almost endlessly multiply the actual value of gold and silver they held.

Important note!

Since whether the Spanish government would actually pay their debts, or how regularly, was always slightly uncertain, the bills would tend to circulate at a discount—especially as juros began circulating throughout the rest of Europe—causing continual inflation.80

The reader will recall that the Bank of England was created when a consortium of forty London and Edinburgh merchants—mostly already creditors to the crown—offered King William III a £1.2 million loan to help finance his war against France. In doing so, they also convinced him to allow them in return to form a corporation with a monopoly on the issuance of banknotes—which were, in effect, promissory notes for the money the king now owed them. This was the first independent national central bank, and it became the clearinghouse for debts owed between smaller banks; the notes soon developed into the first European national paper currency.

Important note!

It’s unsurprising, then, that Newtonian economics (if we may call it that)—the assumption that one cannot simply create money, or even, really, tinker with it—came to be accepted by almost everyone. Everyone concluded there had to be some solid, material foundation to all this, or the entire system would go insane. True, economists were to spend centuries arguing about what that foundation might be (was it really gold, or was it land, human labor, the utility or desirability of commodities in general?) but almost no one returned to anything like the Aristotelian view.

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic—one reason both politics and magic tend, just about everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud.

Important note!

In Goethe’s Faust (1808), he actually has his hero—in his capacity as alchemist-magician—pay a visit to the Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor is sinking under the weight of endless debts that he has piled up paying for the extravagant pleasures of his court. Faust and his assistant, Mephistopheles, convince him that he can pay off his creditors by creating paper money. It’s represented as an act of pure prestidigitation. “You have plenty of gold lying somewhere underneath your lands,” notes Faust. “Just issue notes promising your creditors you’ll give it to them later. Since no one knows how much gold there really is, there’s no limit to how much you can promise.”85