Louis Dumont's modern classic, here presented in an enlarged, revised, and corrected second edition, simultaneously supplies that reader with the most cogent statement on the Indian castle system and its organizing principles and a provocative advance in the comparison of societies on the basis of their underlying ideologies. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history-as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.
And the system perpetuated itself with tremendously violent consequences, with only the rare intervention of kings and churches keeping the system from spiraling out of control. Interest rates spiked and the indebted became slaves. With the passage of time, however, virtual credit money was replaced by gold and silver coins-and the system as a whole began to decline. It is in this era, Graeber shows, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. He shows that 5,000 years ago, during the beginning of the agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. 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.
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