Politically, it is never a particularly good idea to first tell people they are your equals, and then humiliate and degrade them. This is presumably why peasant insurrections, from Chiapas to Japan, have so regularly aimed to wipe out debts, rather than focus on more structural issues like caste systems, or even slavery.20 The British Raj discovered this to their occasional chagrin when they used debt peonage—superimposed on the caste system—as the basis of their labor system in colonial India. Perhaps the paradigmatic popular insurrection was the Deccan riots of 1875, when indebted farmers
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