Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

By the height of the trade fifty years later, British ships were bringing in large quantities of cloth (both products of the newly created Manchester mills and calicoes from India) and iron and copper ware, along with incidental goods like beads, and also, for obvious reasons, substantial numbers of firearms.59 The goods were then advanced to African merchants, again on credit, who assigned them to their own agents to move upstream. The obvious problem was how to secure the debt. The trade was an extraordinarily duplicitous and brutal business, and slave raiders were unlikely to be dependable credit risks—especially when dealing with foreign merchants who they might never see again.60 As a result, a system quickly developed in which European captains would demand security in the form of pawns. These pawns are quite different from the kind we encountered among the Lele. In many of the kingdoms and trading towns of West Africa, the nature of pawnship appears to have already undergone profound changes by the time Europeans showed up on the scene around 1500—it had become, effectively, a kind of debt peonage. Debtors would pledge family members as surety for loans; the pawns would then become dependents in the creditors’ households, working their fields and tending to their household chores—their persons acting as security while their labor, effectively, substituted for interest.61 Pawns were not slaves; they were not, like slaves, cut off from their families; but neither were...