debt the first 5000 years updated and expanded david graeber

The way it shows money going back and forth between paper/credit and coin is just one of the many things I learned from it. It is well worth reading for that part of it - which is most of the book. This book is a fascinating, detailed and well researched history of money and debt from the earliest times to the present covering all kinds of cultures, using anthropology, ethnography, history and archaeology. We are still fighting these battles today. 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. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors-which lives on in full force to this day.

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. The groundbreaking international best-seller that turns everything you think about money, debt, and society on its head-from the “brilliant, deeply original political thinker” David Graeber (Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me ) Before there was money, there was debt.

Debt the first 5000 years updated and expanded david graeber