When was debt invented

Graeber is a scholarly researcher, an activist and a public intellectual. His field is the whole history of social and economic transactions. Start earning points for buying books! Uplift Native American Stories. Add to Bookshelf. May 25, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Oct 28, ISBN Dec 09, ISBN Hardcover —. Add to Cart Add to Cart. About Debt The classic work on debt, now is a special tenth anniversary edition with a new introduction by Thomas Picketty Before there was money, there was debt.

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Preview — Debt by David Graeber. Before there was money, there was debt Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market.

The problem with this version of history? Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal o Before there was money, there was debt Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market.

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5, years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. Debt: The First 5, Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. More Details Original Title. Bread and Roses Award Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Debt , please sign up. Joshua Pitzalis Not at all. It's a superb read and years went into writing it.

Epic and essential, this study of the history of debt in human societies will rattle a lot of cages, especially in the economics world, but I have not read a more fascinating work on this complex subject. Highly recommended. Alex What was your question, sorry?

See all 7 questions about Debt…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Debt: The First 5, Years. Mar 11, Void lon iXaarii rated it it was ok.

I would call this an interesting but dangerous book. As opposed to other books in which every moment was a learning and enlightening enjoyment this book was exhaustingly tense because I found it to be a very confusing mix of dangerous but plausible ideas written in a smart way, and interesting historical or world data. I'm happy to hear of opposing ideas when they are argued logically and without resorting to trickery, but the author uses a large amount of mixed and confusing philosophical debate to confuse, and imposes language with moral undertones to push his arguments: for example in his attempt to vilify clear quantization of values as we do through currency he calls the non-monetary solution "human economy" the other one must be inhuman, right?

Also the author seems very tricky in his attacks Instead he seems to define capitalism as everything he can cherry pick through history and present day that is bad, which of course makes it very easy to argue against them. PS: thanks for reading my humble thoughts. They are of course just my very own subjective, fallible and with more books evolving perspective and should not be taken too seriously. I started writing them down to remind myself of past books before I completely forget them as I often did Writing these things down ends up adding up to surprisingly long times, which is why I try to be brief.

If in doing so I upset anybody by not doing the customary social dance of words please understand and forgive me. View all comments.

Jul 30, Mario the lone bookwolf rated it it was amazing Shelves: 0-humanities , 0-social-criticism , graeber-david. As long as there was real, physical money and a limited amount of it, the system worked, but with more humans came paper and digital money and that made endlessly running central bank printing machines, stock markets, speculations,… possible and here we are.

The author is a progressive, provoking anarchist and what he says has more substance, sense, and wisdom than anything one could take from reading economic or political propaganda, because it describes the core of the problem, the development of this scourge of humankind, how to enslave all for the profit of some. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more.

In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

But to end realistically, it might take a while until then and an expansion of the Nordic model over the world. View all 14 comments. Jan 19, Mike Dillon rated it it was amazing Shelves: economy , anarchism. Fantastic book. To quote the words of Arundhati Roy: "The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable. I guess I'm accountable now.

View all 7 comments. Jun 29, BlackOxford rated it it was amazing Shelves: favourites , economics. Back to the Future of Credit Despite its title this book is really a deconstruction of the idea of money. The economist's idea is that credit loans, cash advances etc. Not so says Graeber and rather convincingly: credit, or more precisely the ledger of who owes what to whom, is the most primitive form of commerce which is only supplemented by either ba Back to the Future of Credit Despite its title this book is really a deconstruction of the idea of money.

Not so says Graeber and rather convincingly: credit, or more precisely the ledger of who owes what to whom, is the most primitive form of commerce which is only supplemented by either barter or immediate monetary exchange when social conditions deteriorate sufficiently to make credit arrangements impossible. Wars, revolutions, and various social upheavals are what cause the demand for cash, that is, the immediate settlement of commercial transactions.

Cash only becomes king when there is no trust, either between parties to a transaction or in the stability of the social environment. Credit in a very practical sense is the fundamental invention and promoter of civilisation.

Graeber's thesis is in fact confirmed by recent technological developments like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is in its simplest terms 'merely' an unfalsifiable ledger of who has 'rights' in the community and how much, essentially what members of the community are worth to each other. The Bitcoin ledger differs from bank accounts because among other things it cannot be interfered with either by criminals or governments.

In other words the ledger can be trusted even when its members have no personal knowledge of each other. The social system is its own guarantor. If only Immanuel Kant not to mention Leibniz were alive to see it! He spent his life trying to find a way to guarantee the integrity of life's accounts, in every sense of the word. Double-entry bookkeeping was a start but not enough to warrant complete trust. With modern technology it looks as if we might be able to create enough trust to return to the most efficient commercial system possible: pure credit.

Without the need for banks or their regulators. Or for that matter, their scams and frauds. Fascinating, provocative and stimulating.

If you have an interest in uncovering the myths of economics and how those myths become part of what you then see in the world, this is a must read. View all 13 comments. May 11, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: social-history.

Okay that's much better! Thanks for all the reviews Okay that's much better! Thanks for all the reviews View all 11 comments. Jun 17, Caitlin O'Sullivan rated it it was amazing Shelves: nonfiction. Debt is a five-star book.

Graeber's history encompasses not just history, but anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, political science, economics, religious studies, and finance as he details the history and definition of "debt. It's not an easy book to read: the subject is complex and the writing is much more challenging than the average pop sci book--this is not Freakonomics.

As well, the sheer sweep of the book--and the author's tendency to jump from subject to subject and theory to theory--make this a bad book to read on an airplane, around children, or in small bites before bed. But if you can stick it out. Some of the questions Graeber answers in Debt include: What was the original meaning of the word "freedom"?

Why were the Middle Ages of Europe just after the Black Plague one of the best times to be a worker, and what surprising reason brought that period to an end?

When and why might paying cash for a meal have marked you as a government official or a criminal? Debt will change the way you see the world. I hope you read it--although I can't lend you my copy. I'm rereading it. View all 9 comments. How can we change the world if we cannot even imagine the change? The negative book reviews describe this book a Update: RIP David Graeber, your works have been an inspiration, may they continue to inspire I re-read the updated edition, with new afterword.

One limitation is the modern confusion over the morality of debt. Another is the legacy of violence in our institutions. Human economies meet Market economies : --The violence and consequences of imposing market economies where anything can be bought and sold , from slave trade to patriarchy in relation to prostitution. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow.

Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs. States monopolize coins to provision armies impersonal coins more practical for marauding soldiers than credit relations.

Coins also alleviate debt crises free peasantry made more efficient armies but lead to expansionism. Rise of world religions reflected this social change.

Rise of Han China, an example of pro-market while anti-capitalist State encouraged markets but against merchants profiting from speculation. Meanwhile, signs of market populism: Islamic commerce where free market is still based on mutual aid and competition is regulated.

Credit is detached from social trust and latched to money. Hobbes ; despite theological roots sin of individuals , it now is framed as objective. Colonialism was a chain of amoral indebtedness, of indebted merchants and soldier trying to move their debts onto the colonized, of entire kingdoms in debt. World Dominance and The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy --This switch back to credit has not been accompanied by trust relations and debtor protection, but we are just in the beginnings.

Only some of us do. And obviously anarchists and post-Keynesians What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom real freedom is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises.

What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point we can't even say. It's more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe. View all 16 comments. Jul 29, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it it was amazing Shelves: economics , social-theory , history , work.

This book is born out of a chance conversation about third-world debt the author had a woman at a party.

Which is also amusing when you think of it, that we owe an infinite debt to those who have created us out of nothing. This book is a history of debt, but also a history of us as humans. And how debt was used the example given here is of the Conquistadors to make already savage acts unspeakable. The book begins with what the author makes clear is a kind of a mythic history — which, ironically enough, is the history that virtually every economics textbook begins with.

That is, he discusses the pre-history of money that was supposed to be barter. In the mythical barter land we are invariably confronted by two people who want to trade, but they struggle to be able to do that because no one can reasonably work out how many chickens a cow was worth — and even, if they do get around to work this out say it is 37 chickens to the cow , what were they now going to do with all these damn chickens?

He points out that at the core of this myth of barter is the idea that money, like an acorn in the story about to become an oak tree. Money is the universal store of value, something that can stand in for all other values, and something that can be infinitely divided unlike either the chickens or the cows being bartered and as I said, this is something that is always imminent in these just-so barter stories.

But even though this land of barter never actually existed, we never seem to recognise that, we also seem to believe it as fact. The author is an anthropologist, and so when he says that we have never found a nation or tribe that exclusively used barter as its major system of exchange, we ought to take him seriously. He goes so far as to say barter could never become the fundamental basis for exchange in any society.

People bartered, but when they did it rarely pretty. Debt is interesting. And interesting in similar ways that gifts are interesting. Gifts need to look like they are gratuitous but in fact they invariably also have a series of rules associated with them.

For instance, only bad things come from giving the wrong sort of gift to someone — whether the gift is too generous or not generous enough. Catherine tells him not to, as her father will only end up in trouble — but since it is of the nature of fairy tales for side characters her dad to never to listen to the good advice of protagonists our Catherine , he gives the gift to the king and the king throws him in gaol, as predicted by his sly daughter.

Gifts need to be carefully judged so as not to cause offence. There needs to be a distance in time between the giving of the gifts to sustain the illusion of the gift being freely given , but also often the second gift will need to be of slightly higher value than the first one received, so that both parties remain tied in obligation to each other.

And that is the actual point of gift giving — to create bonds of obligation and therefore to provide necessary social bonds. I found a lot of the stuff in the middle of this particularly interesting. We are constantly told today that the most natural mode of human interaction for us is the market — preferably capitalist markets, obviously enough, but if push comes to shove, any market will do. As he repeatedly says, families and the very wealthy exist as basically forms of communism as the norm, rather than the exception.

He quotes an Atwood novel where she talks of a father who presented his son with a bill that detailed everything he had paid for his son since his birth. As the author points out, it is very possible to do this, people have been making itemised accounts of just about anything forever — but to seek reimbursement in this case is pretty well the best way to guarantee the end of a family relationship. I really liked this book — another book I started recently was Symbolic Exchange and Death by Baudrillard.

View all 10 comments. Jul 11, Colleen rated it it was amazing Shelves: sociology. As a sociologist, I've been despairing of late at the paucity of imagination and theoretical innovation in social science research.

Academics, perhaps because of the need to publish quickly and garner grant money, seem content to only add statistical validation to already established conclusions. Debt: The First 5, Years redeems the social sciences. Not As a sociologist, I've been despairing of late at the paucity of imagination and theoretical innovation in social science research.

Not easily reduced to a brief summary, the book asks the questions: How has humanity--from the ancient cities of Mesopotamia to the current day--conceived of the idea of debt? How has the construction of debt been inextricably bound to economic, religious, political, and historical realities? And, finally, it asks a provocative philosophical question: Given the history of the social construction of debt, how do we in the current moment respond to our own alleged indebtedness?

To answer these questions, Graeber embarks on the massive project of giving us a history of debt as a both a moral and economic concept, documenting in relentless and glorious detail how that concept changed through major periods of time Ancient, Axial, Middle Ages, Early capitalist and current period and amongst different societies Islam vs. Christianity, etc.

In doing so, he shows conventional economic truisms for what they are: utter falsehoods. Exciting insights are also given into how people have resisted paying debts throughout history, this is not a passive story meant provoke sympathy. The last chapter on the current period 's--present felt a little rushed and given the gravity and depth of the previous chapters, I think it could have used more of a drawing together of all of the many fascinating points made in the book.

Graeber doesn't offer any concrete suggestions neither did Marx, so this can be easily forgiven other than a Jubilee, but I hope that he does lend his imaginative and analytic powers to praxis in the future. The read provides one not only with a new extraordinary depth of knowledge, but also stimulates new questions and hopefully will inspire other researches to continue following Graeber's lead. Lastly, it makes one think more humanistically about what our true debts are Aug 24, Mehrsa rated it it was amazing.

I have read many many books--I am a professor and it is my job to read. This is the only book I would label a "Must Read. It blew my mind--figuratively, of course. My area is banking and finance and so I am not unfamiliar with the standard banking story.

But Graeber starts way before any other book I've ever read on the subject. By the time you get to modern banking and the bank of England, what you've been told is irrelevant. It's also just very I have read many many books--I am a professor and it is my job to read. It's also just very fascinating. Lots of just really interesting stories. It's like the Guns Germs and Steel for money, but with a much bigger bang. There are of course problems with the book--but nothing to take away from its must read status in my opinion.

View 1 comment. Sure it has biases and like Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a bit too idealistic, but still -- wow -- an amazing read.

While most economic books are still battling over the binary capitalism::socialism model, Graeber quietly flips both boats or if not flips, rocks both boats HARD. I mean really, when was the last time my wife let me read to her about social and economic transactions? Even more problematically, the minimal use of social structures as explanatory concepts leaves Graeber unable to theorize agencies capable of overthrowing the system he describes.

The Marxist account argues that since the exploitation of workers is the motor force of capitalism, and since workers cannot simply divide up a factory the way peasants could a field to farm individually, they have both the ability and the interest to end capitalism and build a socialist society.

We see the problems this perspective creates at the very end of the book, where he suggests that a general debt forgiveness could serve as a useful strategic orientation.

While Graeber is forthright that his agenda is more about analysis than strategy in Debt , offering a strategic goal without any analysis of the strategies required for achieving it is not particularly helpful. In the framework of an argument that makes that kind of analysis quite difficult, it can be downright disorientating. But his historical work in demystifying markets is nonetheless extremely valuable, as his recounting of the sheer range of ways in which debt and economic life have been arranged in human society.

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