Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

As a starting point to any attempt to discern the great rhythms that define the current historical moment, let me propose the following breakdown of Eurasian history according to the alternation between periods of virtual and metal money. The cycle begins with the Age of the First Agrarian Empires (3500–800 BC), dominated by virtual credit money. This is followed by the Axial Age (800 BC–600 AD), which will be covered in the next chapter, and which saw the rise of coinage and a general shift to metal bullion. The Middle Ages (600–1450 AD), which saw a return to virtual credit money, will be covered in Chapter Ten; Chapter Eleven will cover the next turn of the cycle, the Age of Capitalist Empires, which began around 1450 with a massive planetary switch back to gold and silver bullion, and which could only really be said to have ended in 1971, when Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. dollar would no longer be redeemable in gold.