Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber, 2011

Graeber traces five thousand years of debt through coinage, slavery and empire, and shows why the demand that debts be paid is a moral claim, not an economic one.

Get the app Read on the web

12 parts, about 39 minutes to read.

Why read it

Challenges the textbook story that barter came first, arguing from ancient records that credit came before coins
Separates three moral principles, communism, exchange and hierarchy, and defines debt as an exchange that has not been brought to completion
Divides Eurasian history into alternating ages of virtual credit and bullion coin, tying each swing to war and slavery

Who it is for

Readers who want to know where money and credit came from
Readers questioning whether every debt must be repaid
History readers drawn to how war and slavery shaped markets

What the summary covers

The Question Nobody Asks4 min
The Myth of Barter3 min
Where Money Really Came From3 min
Debt, Sin, and Redemption2 min
Three Moral Principles4 min
Human Economies and the Price of a Life4 min
Honor and Degradation4 min
Credit, Bullion, and the Cycles of History2 min
The Axial Age4 min
The Middle Ages3 min
The Age of the Great Capitalist Empires3 min
1971 and After3 min

Recommended by

Cory DoctorowBoingBoing writer
An absolutely indispensable—and enormous—treatise on the history of money and its relationship to inequality in society.

About the author

David GraeberAnthropologist and activist who died in 2020
- Master's degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago; 20 months of fieldwork in rural Madagascar from 1989 on a Fulbright
- Assistant professor at Yale from 1998
- Yale did not renew his contract in 2005
- Professor at the London School of Economics from 2013
- Credited by Rolling Stone with the Occupy Wall Street theme 'We are the 99 percent' (November 2011)
- Died suddenly in Venice on 2 September 2020