Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

With their armies, spies, and administrators controlling everything, the new Indian kings evinced little interest in the old priestly caste and its Vedic ritual, though many kept up a lively interest in the new philosophical and religious ideas that seem to have been cropping up everywhere at the time. As time went on, however, the war machine began to sputter. It’s not clear exactly why this happened. By the time of emperor Aśoka (273–232 BC), the Mauryan dynasty controlled almost all of present-day India and Pakistan, but the Indian version of the military-coinage-slavery complex was showing definite signs of strain. Perhaps the clearest sign was the debasement of the coinage, which over the course of two centuries or so had gone from almost pure silver to about fifty percent copper.39 Aśoka, famously, began his reign in conquest: in 265 BC, destroying the Kalingas, one of the last remaining Indian republics, in a war in which hundreds of thousands of human beings were, according to his own account, killed or carried off into slavery. The king later claimed to have been so disturbed and haunted by the carnage that he renounced war altogether, embraced Buddhism, and declared that from that time on, his kingdom would be governed by principles of ahimsa, or nonviolence. “Here in my kingdom,” he declared in an edict inscribed on one of the great granite pillars in his capital of Patna, which so dazzled the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, “no living being must be killed or sacr...