Debt: The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded

Product Description

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. 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? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 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. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history. It shows how debt has defined our human past, and what that means for our economic future.

Review

Winner of the
Bateson Book Prize awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the
Bread and Roses Award for Radical Literature

“Written in a brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of debt — where it came from and how it evolved.” 
—Thomas Meaney,
The New York Times Book Review 

“[A] groundbreaking study…opened up a vibrant and ongoing conversation about the evolution of our economic system by challenging conventional accounts of the origins of money and markets; relationships of credit and debt, he showed, preceded the development of coinage and cash.”
—Astra Taylor, The New Yorker

“Debt [is] meticulously and deliciously detailed.”
—Ben Ehrenreich,
 
Los Angeles Times 

“Exhausting…Engaging…An authoritative account of the background to the recent crisis. Both erudite and impertinent, [Graeber’s] book helps illuminate the omissions of the current debate and the tacit political conflicts that lurk behind technical budget questions.”
—Robert Kuttner, The New York Review of Books

“Fascinating… [An] extraordinary book, at once learned and freewheeling.”
—Benjamin Kunkel, London Review of Books

“One of the year’s most influential books. Graeber situates the emergence of credit within the rise of class society, the destruction of societies based on ‘webs of mutual commitment’ and the constantly implied threat of physical violence that lies behind all social relations based on money.” 
—Paul Mason, The Guardian

“An alternate history of the rise of money and markets, a sprawling, erudite, provocative work.” —
Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek
 
“[A] formidable piece of anthropological scholarship… [Graeber] demonstrates how a new understanding of debt might provide us with some clues for the future.” —Justin E. H. Smith,
Bookforum

“An absolutely indispensable—and enormous—treatise on the history of money and its relationship to inequality in society.” —
Cory Doctorow, 
BoingBoing

“[A]n engaging book. Part anthropological history and part provocative political argument, it’s a useful corrective to what passes for contemporary conversation about debt and the economy.”
—
Jesse Singal, Boston Globe
 
“The book is more readable and entertaining than I can indicate… It is a meditation on debt, tribute, gifts, religion and the false history of money. Graeber is a scholarly researcher, an activist and a public intelle