Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

The world of the Homeric epics is one dominated by heroic warriors who are disdainful of trade. In many ways, it is strikingly reminiscent of medieval Ireland. Money existed, but it was not used to buy anything; important men lived their lives in pursuit of honor, which took material form in followers and treasure. Treasures were given as gifts, awarded as prizes, carried off as loot.56 This is no doubt how tīme first came to mean both “honor” and “price”—in such a world, no one sensed any sort of contradiction between the two.57 All this was to change dramatically when commercial markets began to develop two hundred years later. Greek coinage seems to have been first used mainly to pay soldiers, as well as to pay fines and fees and payments made to and by the government, but by about 600 BC, just about every Greek city-state was producing its own coins as a mark of civic independence. It did not take long, though, before coins were in common use in everyday transactions. By the fifth century, in Greek cities, the agora, the place of public debate and communal assembly, also doubled as a marketplace. One of the first effects of the arrival of a commercial economy was a series of debt crises, of the sort long familiar from Mesopotamia and Israel. “The poor,” as the author of Constitution of the Athenians succinctly put it, “together with their wives and children, were enslaved to the rich.”58 Revolutionary factions emerged, demanding amnesties, and most Greek cities were at...