Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

The Laws of Manu carefully classify slaves into seven types depending on how they were reduced to slavery (war, debt, self-sale …) and explain the conditions under which each might be emancipated—but then go on to say that Sudras can never really be emancipated, since, after all, they were created to serve the other castes.14 Similarly, where earlier codes had established a 15-percent annual rate of interest, with exceptions for commercial loans,15 the new codes organized interest by caste: stating that one could charge a maximum of 2 percent a month for a Brahmin, 3 percent for a Ksatriya (warrior), 4 percent for a Vaisya (merchant), and 5 percent for a Sudra—which is the difference between 24 percent annually on the one extreme and a hefty 60 percent on the other.16 The laws also identify five different ways interest can be paid, of which the most significant for our concerns is “bodily interest”: physical labor in the creditor’s house or fields, to be rendered until such time as the principal is cleared. Even here, though, caste considerations were paramount. No one could be forced into the service of anyone of lower caste; moreover, since debts were enforceable on a debtor’s children and even grandchildren, “until the principal is cleared” could mean quite some time—as the Indian historian R.S. Sharma notes, such stipulations “remind us of the present practice according to which several generations of the same family have been reduced to the position of hereditary plou...