Debt, Tenth Anniversary Edition

The First 5,000 Years

hardcover, 576 pages

Published May 11, 2021 by Melville House.

ISBN:
978-1-61219-933-7
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The classic work on debt, now is a special tenth anniversary edition with a new introduction by Thomas Piketty

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 …

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