David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years

David Graeber is a world renowned anthropologist and activist whose views on history and the economy have been labelled somewhat controversial. In his acclaimed novel Debt: The First 5000 Years, Graeber sets out with a goal to demythologize the current culture’s view on the concept of debt. Within the first pages, Graeber introduces the central theme of the novel, writing “what, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal?” And adding, “what does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them in our language has been so shaped by the market?” (13). While he will answer these questions by the

This period, describing the years wide-scaping years from 800BC to 600 AD are crucial in understanding the history of the world’s debt because the creation of coinage was introduced. A German existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers noted that this was also “ the first period in history in which human beings applied principles of reasoned inquiry to the great question of human existence”, explaining that the greater regions of the world (China, India and the Mediterranean) saw the appearance of philosophical positions in regards to the mind, cosmos and human existence (page 224). The emergence of this philosophical ideas that remain prevalent in philosophy today is actually the reason that Karl Jaspers refers to this period as the Axial Age. When Graeber reaches the end of this chapter, he finds it important to note that he cannot simply “write off” the religious movements as “escapist” as they were successful in bringing about less brutality and slavery (maybe change these words) and thus had a positive effect. As a whole, he explains that the Axial Age and the historical achievements of it cannot be disregarded, because “as they took hold, things began to change. Wars became less brutal and less frequent. Slavery faded as an institution...everywhere too, the new religious authorities began to seriously address the social dislocations introduced by debt” (250). The leaves

Graeber explains on page 313 that in the Middle Ages there were various forms of virtual credit money, including “tallies, promissory notes, or, within smaller communities, simply by keeping track of who owed what to whom” much like the modern credit card. These practices (including mortgages, stocks, bonds, loans with interest and long-term credit banking) took over the ubiquity of bullion in the Axial Age (CITE?!). Graeber’s non-Eurocentric allows readers to explore the transitional period of Europe as well as understand the hand that areas like India and China had in preparing capitalism for the modern