Debt
The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded
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…
$45.99
May 25, 2021
David Graeber (1961-2020) was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. One of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Graeber was also the author of Utopia of Rules and wrote widely for publications such as The Guardian, Harper’s, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, n+1, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New Inquiry, and The New Left Review.
Debt
David Graeber