reflection paper

DEBT

DEBT

THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS

DAVID GRAEBER

'* MELVILLEHOUSE BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

© 2011 David Graeber

F i rst Melv i l l e Ho use Printing: May 2011

Melville Ho use Publ ishing

145 Plymo uth Street

Brooklyn, New York 11201

mhpbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-933633-86-2

P rinted in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

L i b rary of C ongress Cataloging-in-P u b l i cation Data

Grae ber, David.

Debt : the fi rst 5 ,000 years I David Grae b e r .

p . em .

Incl udes b i b l i ograp h i cal refe rences and inde x .

ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2 (al k . paper)

1 . De bt-H istory . 2 . Money-H istory. 3 . F inancial c rises-History.

I. Title.

HG370l.G73 2010

332-dc22

2010044508

CONTENTS

1 On The Experience of

Moral Confusion

2 The Myth of Barter

3 Primordial Debts

4 Cruelty and Redemption

s A Brief Treatise on the Moral

21

43

73

Grounds of Economic Relations 89

6 Games with Sex and Death 127

1 Honor and Degradation , or,

On the Foundations of

Contemporary Civilization 165

s Credit Versus Bullion,

And the Cycles of History 211

9 The Axial Age (800 BC-600 AD) 223

10 The Middle Ages (600 AD-1450 AD) 251

11 Age of the Great Capitalist

Empires (1450-1971) 307

12 (1971- The Beginning of Something

Yet to Be Determined)

Notes

Bibliography

Index

361

393

455

493

Cha p t e r O n e

O N T H E EXPE R I E N C E O F MO R A L C O N F U S I O N

debt

• noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2 the

state of owing money. 3 a feeling of

gratitude for a favour or service.

-Oxford English Dictionary

If you owe the bank a hundred thou­

sand dollars, the bank owns you. If

you owe the bank a hundred million

dollars, you own the bank.

-American Proverb

TWO YEARS AGO, by a series of strange coincidences, I found myself attending a garden party at Westminster Abbey. I was a bit uncom­ fortable. It's not that other guests weren't pleasant and amicable, and Father Graeme, who had organized the party, was nothing if not a gra­ cious and charming host. But I felt more than a little out of place. At one point, Father Graeme intervened, saying that there was someone by a nearby fountain whom I would certainly want to meet. She turned out to be a trim, wel l-appointed young woman who, he explained, was an attorney-"but more of the activist kind. She works for a founda­ tion that provides legal support for anti-poverty groups in London. You'll probably have a lot to talk about. "

We chatted. She told me about her job. I told her I had been involved for many years with the global justice movement-"anti­ globalization movement, " as it was usually called in the media. She was curious: she'd of course read a lot about Seattle, Genoa, the tear gas and street battles, but . . . well, had we really accomplished any­ thing by all of that?

"Actually, " I said, "I think it's kind of amazing how much we did manage to accomplish in those first couple of years. "

2 D E B T

"For example?" "Well, for example, we managed to almost completely destroy

the IMF . " A s i t happened, she didn't actually know what the IMF was, so

I offered that the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world's debt enforcers-"You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs. " I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the '7os oil crisis, OPEC coun­ tries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn't figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called "go-go banking" ) ; how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early '8os; how, during the '8os and '9os, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on basic foodstuffs, or even policies of keeping strategic food reserves, and abandon free health care and free education; how all of this had led to the collapse of all the most basic supports for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth. I spoke of poverty, of the looting of public resources, the collapse of societies, endemic violence, malnutrition, hopelessness, and broken lives.

"But what was your position?" the lawyer asked. "About the IMF? We wanted to abolish it. " "No, I mean, about the Third World debt . " "Oh, w e wanted t o abolish that too. The immediate demand was

to stop the IMF from imposing structural adjustment policies, which were doing all the direct damage, but we managed to accomplish that surprisingly quickly. The more long-term aim was debt amnesty. Some­ thing along the lines of the biblical Jubilee. As far as we were con­ cerned," I told her, "thirty years of money flowing from the poorest countries to the richest was quite enough. "

"But," she objected, as if this were self-evident, "they'd borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one's debts. "

It was at this point that I realized this was going to be a very dif­ ferent sort of conversation than I had originally anticipated.

Where to start? I could have begun by explaining how these loans had originally been taken out by unelected dictators who placed most of it directly in their Swiss bank accounts, and ask her to contemplate the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid, not by the dictator,

O N T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F M O R A L C O N F U S I O N 3

or even by his cronies, but by literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children. Or to think about how many of these poor countries had actually already paid back what they'd borrowed three or four times now, but that through the miracle of compound interest, it still hadn't made a significant dent in the principal. I could also observe that there was a difference between refinancing loans, and demanding that in order to obtain refinancing, countries have to follow some or­ thodox free-market economic policy designed in Washington or Zurich that their citizens had never agreed to and never would, and that it was a bit dishonest to insist that countries adopt democratic constitutions and then also insist that, whoever gets elected, they have no control over their country's policies anyway. Or that the economic policies imposed by the IMF didn't even work. But there was a more basic problem: the very assumption that debts have to be repaid.

Actually, the remarkable thing about the statement "one has to pay one's debts" is that even according to standard economic theory, it isn't true. A lender is supposed to accept a certain degree of risk. If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were still retrievable--if there were no bankruptcy laws, for instance--the results would be disastrous. What reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan?

"Well, I know that sounds like common sense," I said, "but the funny thing is, economically, that's not how loans are actually sup­ posed to work. Financial institutions are supposed to be ways of direct­ ing resources toward profitable investments. If a bank were guaranteed to get its money back, plus interest, no matter what it did, the whole system wouldn't work. Say I were to walk into the nearest branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland and say 'You know, I just got a really great tip on the horses. Think you could lend me a couple million quid?' Obviously they'd just laugh at me. But that's just because they know if my horse didn't come in, there'd be no way for them to get the money back. But, imagine there was some law that said they were guaranteed to get their money back no matter what happens, even if that meant, I don't know, selling my daughter into slavery or harvesting my organs or something. Well, in that case, why not? Why bother waiting for someone to walk in who has a viable plan to set up a laundromat or some such? Basically, that's the situation the IMF created on a global level-which is how you could have all those banks willing to fork over billions of dollars to a bunch of obvious crooks in the first place. "

I didn't get quite that far, because a t about that point a drunken financier appeared, having noticed that we were talking about money, and began telling funny stories about moral hazard-which somehow,

4 D E B T

before too long, had morphed into a long and not particularly engross­ ing account of one of his sexual conquests. I drifted off.

Still, for several days afterward, "

that phrase kept resonating in my head.

"Surely one has to pay one's debts. " The reason it's s o powerful is that it's not actual ly an economic

statement: it's a moral statement. After all, isn't paying one's debts what morality is supposed to be all about? Giving people what is due them. Accepting one's responsibilities. Fulfil ling one's obligations to others, just as one would expect them to fulfil l their obligations to you. What could be a more obvious example of shirking one's responsibili­ ties than reneging on a promise, or refusing to pay a debt?

It was that very apparent sel f-evidence, I realized, that made the statement so insidious. This was the kind of line that could make ter­ rible things appear utterly bland and unremarkable. This may sound strong, but it's hard not to feel strongly about such matters once you've witnessed the effects. I had. For almost two years, I had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived, there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in highland Madagascar many years be­ fore, so that, after a couple of generations, most people had lost their immunity. The problem was, it took money to maintain the mosquito eradication program, since there had to be periodic tests to make sure mosquitoes weren't starting to breed again and spraying campaigns if it was discovered that they were. Not a lot of money. But owing to IMF­ imposed austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program. Ten thousand people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of ten thousand human lives is really justified in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn't have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn't particularly important to its balance sheet anyway. But here was a perfectly decent woman-one who worked for a charitable organization, no less-who took it as self-evident that it was. After all, they owed the money, and surely one has to pay one's debts.

I I I I I

For the next few weeks, that phrase kept coming back at me. Why debt? What makes the concept so strangely powerful? Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation-states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international

O N T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F M O R A L C O N F U . S I O N 5

politics . But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.

The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt-above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this . So do the commanders of conquering armies . For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed.

Nowadays, for example, military aggression is defined as a crime against humanity, and international courts, when they are brought to bear, usually demand that aggressors pay compensation. Germa­ ny had to pay massive reparations after World War I, and Iraq is still paying Kuwait for Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990. Yet the Third World debt, the debt of countries like Madagascar, Bolivia, and the Philippines, seems to work precisely the other way around. Third World debtor nations are almost exclusively countries that have at one time been attacked and conquered by European countries-often, the very countries to whom they now owe money. In 1 8 95, for example, France invaded Madagascar, disbanded the government of then-Queen Ranavalona III, and declared the country a French colony. One of the first things General Gallieni did after "pacification, " as they liked to call it then, was to impose heavy taxes on the Malagasy population, in part so they could reimburse the costs of having been invaded, but also, since French colonies were supposed to be fiscally self-supporting, to defray the costs of building the railroads, highways, bridges, planta­ tions, and so forth that the French regime wished to build. Malagasy taxpayers were never asked whether they wanted these railroads, high­ ways, bridges, and plantations, or allowed much input into where and how they were built. 1 To the contrary: over the next half century, the French army and police slaughtered quite a number of Malagasy who objected too strongly to the arrangement (upwards of half a million, by some reports, during one revolt in 1947 ) . It's not as if Madagascar has ever done any comparable damage to France. Despite this, from the be­ ginning, the Malagasy people were told they owed France money, and to this day, the Malagasy people are still held to owe France money, and the rest of the world accepts the justice of this arrangement. When the "international community" does perceive a moral issue, it's usually

6 D E B T

when they feel the Malagasy government is being slow to pay their debts.

But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of pun­ ishing winners who weren't supposed to win. The most spectacular example of this is the history of the Republic of Haiti-the first poor country to be placed in permanent debt peonage. Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon's armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars) , and the resultant embargo en­ sured that the name "Haiti" has been a synonym for debt, poverty, and human misery ever since. 2

Sometimes, though, debt seems to mean the very opposite. Starting in the 198os, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re­ payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined-mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later) , but not very much-even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.

So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as "empires," and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire--but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these pay­ ments as "loans" and not as "tribute" is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on.

Now, it's true that, throughout history, certain sorts of debt, and certain sorts of debtor, have always been treated differently than

O N T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F M O R A L C O N F U S I O N 7

others. In the 172os, one of the things that most scandalized the British public when conditions at debtors' prisons were exposed in the popular press was the fact that these prisons were regularly divided into two sections. Aristocratic inmates, who often thought of a brief stay in Fleet or Marshalsea as something of a fashion statement, were wined and dined by liveried servants and allowed to receive regular visits from prostitutes. On the "common side," impoverished debtors were shack­ led together in tiny cells, "covered with filth and vermin," as one report put it, "and suffered to die, without pity, of hunger and jail fever. " 3

I n a way you can see current world economic arrangements a s a much larger version of the same thing: the U. S. in this case being the Cadillac debtor, Madagascar the pauper starving in the next cell­ while the Cadillac debtors' servants lecture him on how his problems are due to his own irresponsibility.

And there's something more fundamental going on here, a philo­ sophical question, even, that we might do well to contemplate. What is the difference between a gangster pulling out a gun and demand­ ing you give him a thousand dollars of "p.otection money," and that same gangster pulling out a gun and demanding you provide him with a thousand-dollar "loan"? In most ways, obviously, nothing. But in certain ways there is a difference. As in the case of the U.S. debt to Korea or Japan, were the balance of power at any point to shift, were America to lose its military supremacy, were the gangster to lose his henchmen, that "loan" might start being treated very differently. It might become a genuine liability. But the crucial element would still seem to be the gun.

There's an old vaudeville gag that makes the same point even more elegantly-here, as improved on by Steve Wright:

I was walking down the street with a friend the other day and a guy with a gun jumps out of an alley and says "stick 'em up. "

As I pull out my wallet, I figure, "shouldn't be a total loss." So I pull out some money, turn to my friend and say, "Hey, Fred, here's that fifty bucks I owe you. "

The robber was so offended he took out a thousand dollars of his own money, forced Fred to lend it to me at gunpoint, and then took it back again.

In the final analysis, the man with the gun doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to do. But in order to be able to run even a regime based on violence effectively, one needs to establish some kind of set of rules. The rules can be completely arbitrary. In a way it doesn't even

8 D E B T

matter what they are. Or, at least, it doesn't matter at first. The prob­ lem is, the moment one starts framing things in terms of debt, people will inevitably start asking who really owes what to whom.

Arguments about debt have been going on for at least five thou­ sand years. For most of human history-at least, the history of states and empires-most human beings have been told that they are debt­ ors.4 Historians, and particularly historians of ideas, have been oddly reluctant to consider the human consequences; eapecially since this situation-more than any other-has caused continual outrage and re­ sentment. Tell people they are inferior, they are unlikely to be pleased, but this surprisingly rarely leads to armed revolt. Tell people that they are potential equals who have failed, and that therefore, even what they do have they do not deserve, that it isn't rightly theirs, and you are much more likely to inspire rage. Certainly this is what history would seem to teach us. For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors-of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the seques­ tering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors' chil­ dren into slavery. By the same token, for the last five thousand years, with remarkable regularity, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of the debt records-tablets, papyri, ledgers, whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. (After that, rebels usually go after the records of landholding and tax assessments. ) As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: "Cancel the debts and redistribute the land."5

Our tendency to overlook this is all the more peculiar when you consider how much of our contemporary moral and religious language originally emerged directly from these very conflicts. Terms like "reck­ oning" or "redemption" are only the most obvious, since they're taken directly from the language of ancient finance. In a larger sense, the same can be said of "guilt," "freedom, " "forgiveness," and even "sin . " Arguments about who really owes what t o whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong.

The fact that so much of this language did take shape in arguments about debt has left the concept strangely incoherent. After all, to argue with the king, one has to use the king's language, whether or not the initial premises make sense.

If one looks at the history of debt, then, what one discovers first of all is profound moral confusion. Its most obvious manifestation is that most everywhere, one finds that the majority of human beings

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hold simultaneously that ( 1 ) paying back money one has borrowed is a simple matter of morality, and (2) anyone in the habit of lending money is evil.

It's true that opinions on this latter point do shift back and forth. One extreme possibility might be the situation the French anthropolo­ gist Jean-Claude Galey encountered in a region of the eastern Himala­ yas, where as recently as the 1970s, the low-ranking castes-they were referred to as "the vanquished ones, " since they were thought to be descended from a populat"on once conquered by the current landlord caste, many centuries before--lived in a situation of permanent debt dependency. Landless and penniless, they were obliged to solicit loans from the landlords simply to find a way to eat-not for the money, since the sums were paltry, but because poor debtors were expected to pay back the interest in the form of work, which meant they were at least provided with food and shelter while they cleaned out their creditors' outhouses and reroofed their sheds. For the "vanquished"­ as for most people in the world, actually-the most significant life expenses were weddings and funerals. These required a good deal of money, which always had to be borrowed. In such cases it was com­ mon practice, Galey explains, for high-caste moneylenders to demand one of the borrower's daughters as security. Often, when a poor man had to borrow money for his daughter's marriage, the security would be the bride herself. She would be expected to report to the lender's household after her wedding night, spend a few months there as his concubine, and then, once he grew bored, be sent off to some nearby timber camp, where she would have to spend the next year or two as a prostitute working off her father's debt. Once it was paid off, she'd return to her husband and begin her married life. 6

This seems shocking, outrageous even, but Galey does not report any widespread feeling of injustice. Everyone seemed to feel that this was just the way things worked. Neither was there much concern voiced among the local Brahmins, who were the ultimate arbiters in matters of morality-though this is hardly surprising, since the most prominent moneylenders were often Brahmins themselves.

Even here, of course, it's hard to know what people were saying behind closed doors. If a group of Maoist rebels were to suddenly seize control of the area (some do operate in this part of rural India) and round up the local usurers for trial, we might hear all sorts of views expressed.

Still, what Galey describes represents, as I say, one extreme of possibility: one in which the usurers themselves are the ultimate moral authorities. Compare this with, say, medieval France, where the moral

1 0 D E B T

status of moneylenders was seriously in question. The Catholic Church had always forbidden the practice of lending money at interest, but the rules often fell into desuetude, causing the Church hierarchy to authorize preaching campaigns, sending mendicant friars to travel from town to town warning usurers that unless they repented and made full restitution of all interest extracted from their victims, they would surely go to Hell.

These sermons, many of which have survived, are full of horror stories of God's judgment on unrepentant lenders: stories of rich men struck down by madness or terrible diseases, haunted by deathbed nightmares of the snakes or demons who would soon rend or eat their flesh. In the twelfth century, when such campaigns reached their heights, more direct sanctions began to be employed. The papacy is­ sued instructions to local parishes that all known usurers were to be excommunicated; they were not to be allowed to receive the sacra­ ments, and under no conditions could their bodies be buried on hal­ lowed ground. One French cardinal, Jacques de Vitry, writing around r2ro, recorded the story of a particularly influential moneylender whose friends tried to pressure their parish priest to overlook the rules and allow him to be buried in the local churchyard:

Since the dead usurer's friends were very insistent, the priest yielded to their pressure and said, "Let us put his body on a donkey and see God's will, and what He will do with the body. Wherever the donkey takes it, be it a church, a cemetery, or elsewhere, there will I bury it. " The body was placed upon the donkey which without deviating either to right or left, took it straight out of town to the place where thieves are hanged from the gibbet, and with a hearty buck, sent the cadaver flying into the dung beneath the gallows.7

Looking over world literature, it is almost impossible to find a single sympathetic representation of a moneylender-or anyway, a profes­ sional moneylender, which means by definition �me who charges inter­ est. I'm not sure there is another profession (executioners? ) with such a consistently bad image. It's especially remarkable when one considers that unlike executioners, usurers often rank among the richest and most powerful people in their communities. Yet the very name, "usu­ rer," evokes images of loan sharks, blood money, pounds of flesh, the selling of souls, and behind them all, the Devil, often represented as himself a kind of usurer, an evil accountant with his books and ledgers, or alternately, as the figure looming just behind the usurer, biding his

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time until he can repossess the soul of a villain who, by his very oc­ cupation, has clearly made a compact with Hell.

Historically, there have been only two effective ways for a lender to try to wriggle out of the opprobrium: either shunt off responsibility onto some third party, or insist that the borrower is even worse. In me­ dieval Europe, for instance, lords often took the first approach, employ­ ing Jews as surrogates. Many would even speak of "our" Jews-that is, Jews under their personal protection-though in practice this usually meant that they would first deny Jews in their territories any means of making a living except by usury (guaranteeing that they would be widely detested) , then periodically turn on them, claiming they were detestable creatures, and take the money for themselves. The second approach is of course more common. But it usually leads to the conclu­ sion that both parties to a loan are equally guilty; the whole affair is a shabby business; and most likely, both are damned.

Other religious traditions have different perspectives. In medieval Hindu law codes, not only were interest-bearing loans permissible ( the main stipulation was that interest should never exceed principal) , but it was often emphasized that a debtor who did not pay would be reborn as a slave in the household of his creditor-or in later codes, reborn as his horse or ox. The same tolerant attitude toward lenders, and warnings of karmic revenge against borrowers, reappear in many strands of Buddhism. Even so, the moment that usurers were thought to go too far, exactly the same sort of stories as found in Europe would start appearing. A Medieval Japanese author recounts one--he insists it's a true story-about the terrifying fate of Hiromushime, the wife of a wealthy district governor around 776 AD. An exceptionally greedy woman,

she would add water to the rice wine she sold and make a huge profit on such diluted sake. On the day she loaned some­ thing to someone she would use a small measuring cup, but on the day of collection she used a large one. When lending rice her scale registered small portions, but when she received payment it was in large amounts. The interest that she forcibly collected was tremendous-often as much as ten or even one hundred times the amount of the original loan. She was rigid about collecting debts, showing no mercy whatsoever. Because of this, many people were thrown into a state of anxiety; they abandoned their households to get away from her and took to wandering in other provinces. 8

1 2 D E B T

After she died, for seven days, monks prayed over her sealed coffin. On the seventh, her body mysteriously sprang to life:

Those who came to look at her encountered an indescribable stench. From the waist up she had already become an ox with four-inch horns protruding from her forehead. Her two hands had become the hooves of an ox, her nails were now cracked so that they resembled an ox hoof's instep. From the waist down, however, her body was that of a human. She disliked rice and preferred to eat grass. Her manner of eating was rumination. Naked, she would lie in her own excrement. 9

Gawkers descended. Guilty and ashamed, the family made desperate attempts to buy forgiveness, canceling all debts owed to them by any­ body, donating much of their wealth to religious establishments. Fi­ nally, mercifully, the monster died.

The author, himself a monk, felt that the story represented a clear case of premature reincarnation-the woman was being punished by the law of karma for her violations of "what is both reasonable and right. " His problem was that Buddhist scriptures, insofar as they ex­ plicitly weighed in on the matter, didn't provide a precedent. Normally, it was debtors who were supposed to be reborn as oxen, not creditors. As a result, when it came time to explain the moral of the story, his exposition grew decidedly confusing:

It is as one sutra says: "When we do not repay the things that we have borrowed, our payment becomes that of being reborn as a horse or ox. " "The debtor is like a slave, the creditor is like a master. " Or again: "a debtor is a pheasant and his credi­ tor a hawk. " If you are in a situation of having granted a loan, do not put unreasonable pressure on your debtor for repay­ ment. If you do, you will be reborn as a horse or an ox and be put to work for him who was in debt to you, and then you will repay many times over.10

So which will it be? They can't both end up as animals in each other's barns.

All the great religious traditions seem to bang up against this quan­ dary in one form or another. On the one hand, insofar as all human re­ lations involve debt, they are all morally compromised. Both parties are probably already guilty of something just by entering into the relation­ ship; at the very least they run a significant danger of becoming guilty

O N T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F M O R A L C O N F U S I O N 1 3

i f repayment i s delayed. O n the other hand, when w e say someone acts like they "don't owe anything to anybody, " we're hardly describing the person as a paragon of virtue. In the secular world, morality consists largely of fulfilling our obligations to others, and we have a stubborn tendency to imagine those obligations as debts. Monks, perhaps, can avoid the dilemma by detaching themselves from the secular world entirely, but the rest of us appear condemned to live in a universe that doesn't make a lot of sense.

I I I I I

The story of Hiromushime is a perfect illustration of the impulse to throw the accusation back at the accuser-just as in the story about the dead usurer and the donkey, the emphasis on excrement, animals, and humiliation is clearly meant as poetic justice, the creditor forced to experience the same feelings of disgrace and degradation that debtors are always made to feel. It's all a more vivid, more visceral way of ask­ ing that same question: "Who really owes what to whom?"

It's also a perfect illustration of how the moment one asks the question "Who really owes what to whom?, " one has begun to adopt the creditor's language. Just as if we don't pay our debts, "our payment becomes that of being reborn as a horse or an ox" ; so if you are an unreasonable creditor, you too will "repay. " Even karmic justice can thus be reduced to the language of a business deal.

Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market? On one level the difference between an obligation and a debt is simple and obvious. A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified. This allows debts to become simple, cold, and impersonal-which, in turn, allows them to be transferable. If one owes a favor, or one's life, to another human being-it is owed to that person specifically. But if one owes forty thousand dollars at 12-percent interest, it doesn't really matter who the creditor is; neither does either of the two parties have to think much about what the other party needs, wants, is capable of doing-as they certainly would if what was owed was a favor, or respect, or gratitude. One does not need to calculate the human effects; one need only cal­ culate principal, balances, penalties, and rates of interest. If you end

1 4 D E B T

up having to abandon your home and wander in other provinces, if your daughter ends up in a mining camp working as a prostitute, well, that's unfortunate, but incidental to the creditor. Money is money, and a deal's a deal.

From this perspective, the crucial factor, and a topic that will be explored at length in these pages, is money's capacity to turn moral­ ity into a matter of impersonal arithmetic-and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The factor of violence, which I have been emphasizing up until now, may appear secondary. The difference between a "debt" and a mere moral obliga­ tion is not the presence or absence of men with weapons who can en­ force that obligation by seizing the debtor's possessions or threatening to break his legs. It is simply that a creditor has the means to specify, numerically, exactly how much the debtor owes.

However, when one looks a little closer, one discovers that these two elements-the violence and the quantification-are intimately linked. In fact it's almost impossible to find one without the other. French usurers had powerful friends and enforcers, capable of bullying even Church authorities. How else would they have collected debts that were technically illegal? Hiromushime was utterly uncompromis­ ing with her debtors-"showing no mercy whatsoever"-but then, her husband was the governor. She didn't have to show mercy. Those of us who do not have armed men behind us cannot afford to be so exacting.

The way violence, or the threat of violence, turns human relations into mathematics will crop up again and again over the course of this book. It is the ultimate source of the moral confusion that seems to float around everything surrounding the topic of debt. The resulting dilemmas appear to be as old as civilization itself. We can observe the process in the very earliest records from ancient Mesopotamia; it finds its first philosophical expression in the Vedas, reappears in endless forms throughout recorded history, and still lies underneath the essen­ tial fabric of our institutions today-state and market, our most basic conceptions of the nature of freedom, morality, sociality-all of which have been shaped by a history of war, conquest, and slavery in ways we're no longer capable of even perceiving because we can no longer imagine things any other way.

I I I I I

There are obvious reasons why this is a particularly important moment to reexamine the history of debt. September 2oo8 saw the beginning of

O N T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F M O R A L C O N F U S I O N 1 5

a financial crisis that almost brought the entire world economy screech­ ing to a halt. In many ways the world economy did: ships stopped moving across the oceans, and thousands were placed in dry dock. Building cranes were dismantled, as no more buildings were being put up. Banks largely ceased making loans. In the wake of this, there was not only public rage and bewilderment, but the beginning of an actual public conversation about the nature of debt, of money, of the financial institutions that have come to hold the fate of nations in their grip.

But that was just a moment. The conversation never ended up tak­ ing place.

The reason that people were ready for such a conversation was that the story everyone had been told for the last decade or so had just been revealed to be a colossal lie. There's really no nicer way to say it. For years, everyone had been hearing of a whole host of new, ultra­ sophisticated financial innovations: credit and commodity derivatives, collateralized mortgage obligation derivatives, hybrid securities, debt swaps, and so on. These new derivative markets were so incredibly sophisticated, that-according to one persistent story-a prominent in­ vestment house had to employ astrophysicists to run trading programs so complex that even the financiers couldn't begin to understand them. The message was transparent: leave these things to the professionals. You couldn't possibly get your minds around this. Even if you don't like financial capitalists very much (and few seemed inclined to argue that there was much to like about them) , they were nothing if not capa­ ble, in fact so preternaturally capable, that democratic oversight of fi­ nancial markets was simply inconceivable. (Even a lot of academics fell for it. I well remember going to conferences in 2oo6 and 2007 where trendy social theorists presented papers arguing that these new forms of securitization, linked to new information technologies, heralded a looming transformation in the very nature of time, possibility-reality itself. I remember thinking: "Suckers!" And so they were. )

Then, when the rubble had stopped bouncing, it turned out that many if not most of them had been nothing more than very elaborate scams. They consisted of operations like selling poor families mort­ gages crafted in such a way as to make eventual default inevitable; taking bets on how long it would take the holders to default; packag­ ing mortgage and bet together and selling them to institutional inves­ tors (representing, perhaps, the mortgage-holders' retirement accounts) claiming that it would make money no matter what happened, and al­ low said investors to pass such packages around as if they were money; turning over responsibility for paying off the bet to a giant insurance conglomerate that, were it to sink beneath the weight of its resultant

1 6 D E B T

debt (which certainly would happen) , would then have to be bailed out by taxpayers ( as such conglomerates were indeed bailed out) . U In other words, it looks very much like an unusually elaborate version of what banks were doing when they lent money to dictators in Bolivia and Gabon in the late '7os: make utterly irresponsible loans with the full knowledge that, once it became known they had done so, politicians and bureaucrats would scramble to ensure that they'd still be reim­ bursed anyway, no matter how many human lives had to be devastated and destroyed in order to do it.

The difference, though, was that this time, the bankers were doing it on an inconceivable scale: the total amount of debt they had run up was larger than the combined Gross Domestic Products of every coun­ try in t4e world-and it threw the world into a tailspin and almost destroyed the system itself.

Armies and police geared up to combat the expected riots and unrest, but none materialized. But neither have any significant changes in how the system is run. At the time, everyone assumed that, with the very defining institutions of capitalism (Lehman Brothers, Citibank, General Motors) crumbling, and all claims to superior wisdom revealed to be false, we would at least restart a broader conversation about the nature of debt and credit institutions. And not just a convwersation.

It seemed that most Americans were open to radical solutions. Surveys showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans felt that the banks should not be rescued, whatever the economic consequences, but that ordinary citizens stuck with bad mortgages should be bailed out. In the United States this is quite extraordinary. Since colonial days, Americans have been the population least sympathetic to debtors. In a way this is odd, since America was settled largely by absconding debt­ ors, but it's a country where the idea that morality is a matter of pay­ ing one's debts runs deeper than almost any other. In colonial days, an insolvent debtor's ear was often nailed to a post. The United States was one of the last countries in the world to adopt a law of bankruptcy: de­ spite the fact that in 1787, the Constitution specifically charged the new government with creating one, all attempts were rejected on "moral grounds" until r 8 9 8 Y The change was epochal. For this very reason, perhaps, those in charge of moderating debate in the media and legisla­ tures decided that this was not the time. The United States government effectively put a three-trillion-dollar Band-Aid over the problem and changed nothing. The bankers were rescued; small-scale debtors-with a paltry few exceptions-were not.U To the contrary, in the middle of the greatest economic recession since the '3 os, we are already begin­ ning to see a backlash against them-driven by financial corporations

O N T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F M O R A L C O N F U S I O N 1 7

who have now turned to the same government that bailed them out to apply the full force of the law against ordinary citizens in financial trouble. "It's not a crime to owe money," reports the Minneapolis-St. Paul StarTribune, "But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. " In Minnesota, "the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 6o percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009 .. . In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January [2o1o], a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill . , man 'to indefinite incarceration' until he came up with $3 00 toward a lumber yard debt . " 14

In other words, we are moving toward a restoration of some­ thing much like debtors' prisons. Meanwhile, the conversation stopped dead, popular rage against bailouts sputtered into incoherence, and we seem to be tumbling inexorably toward the next great financial catastrophe-the only real question being just how long it will take.

We have reached the point at which the IMF itself, now trying to reposition itself as the conscience of global capitalism, has begun to issue warnings that if we continue on the present course, no bailout is likely to be forthcoming the next time. The public simply will not stand for it, and as a result, everything really will come apart. "IMF Warns Second Bailout Would 'Threaten Democracy"' reads one recent headline. 15 ( Of course by "democracy" they mean "capitalism. " ) Surely it means something that even those who feel they are responsible for keeping the current global economic system running, who just a few years ago acted as if they could simply assume the current system would be around forever, are now seeing apocalypse everywhere.

I I I I I

In this case, the IMF has a point. We have every reason to believe that we do indeed stand on the brink of epochal changes.

Admittedly, the usual impulse is to imagine everything around us as absolutely new. Nowhere is this so true as with money. How many times have we been told that the advent of virtual money, the dema­ terialization of cash into plastic and dollars into blips of electronic information, has brought us to an unprecedented new financial world? The assumption that we were in such uncharted territory, of course, was one of the things that made it so easy for the likes of Goldman Sachs and AIG to convince people that no one could possibly under­ stand their dazzling new financial instruments. The moment one casts matters on a broad historical scale, though, the first thing one learns

1 8 D E B T

is that there's nothing new about virtual money. Actually, this was the original form of money. Credit system, tabs, even expense accounts, all existed long before cash. These things are as old as civilization itself. True, we also find that history tends to move back and forth between periods dominated by bullion-where it's assumed that gold and silver are money-and periods where money is assumed to be an abstrac­ tion, a virtual unit of account. But historically, credit money comes first, and what we are witnessing today is a return of assumptions that would have been considered obvious common sense in, say, the Middle Ages-or even ancient Mesopotamia.

But history does provide fascinating hints of what we might expect. For instance: in the past, ages of virtual credit money almost invari­ ably involve the creation of institutions designed to prevent everything going haywire--to stop the lenders from teaming up with bureaucrats and politicians to squeeze everybody dry, as they seem to be doing now. They are accompanied by the creation of institutions designed to protect debtors. The new age of credit money we are in seems to have started precisely backwards. It began with the creation of global insti­ tutions like the IMF designed to protect not debtors, but creditors. At the same time, on the kind of historical scale we're talking about here, a decade or two is nothing. We have very little idea what to expect.

I I I I I

This book is a history of debt, then, but it also uses that history as a way to ask fundamental questions about what human beings and human society are or could be like--what we actually do owe each other, what it even means to ask that question. As a result, the book begins by attempting to puncture a series of myths-not only the Myth of Barter, which is taken up in the first chapter, but also rival myths about primordial debts to the gods, or to the state--that in one way or another form the basis of our common-sense assumptions about the na­ ture of economy and society. In that common-sense view, the State and the Market tower above all else as diametrically opposed principles. Historical reality reveals, however, that they were born together and have always been intertwined. The one thing that all these misconcep­ tions have in common, we will find, is that they tend to reduce all hu­ man relations to exchange, as if our ties to society, even to the cosmos itself, can be imagined in the same terms as a business deal. This leads to another question: If not exchange, then what? In chapter five, I will begin to answer the question by drawing on the fruits of anthropol­ ogy to describe a view of the moral basis of economic life; then return

O N T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F M O R A L C O N F U S I O N 1 9

t o the question o f the origins o f money t o demonstrate how the very principle of exchange emerged largely as an effect of violence--that the real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt, and redemption. That, in turn, opens the way to starting, with chapter eight, an actual history of the last five thou­ sand years of debt and credit, with its great alternations between ages of virtual and physical money. Many of the discoveries here are pro­ foundly unexpected: from the origins of modern conceptions of rights and freedoms in ancient slave law, to the origins of investment capital in medieval Chinese Buddhism, to the fact that many of Adam Smith's most famous arguments appear to have been cribbed from the works of free-market theorists from medieval Persia (a story which, inciden­ tally, has interesting implications for understanding the current appeal of political Islam) . All of this sets the stage for a fresh approach to the last five hundred years, dominated by capitalist empires, and allows us to at least begin asking what might really be at stake in the present day.

For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions. Increasingly, it's looking like we have no other choice.

Cha p t e r Tw o

T H E MYT H O F BA R T E R

For every subtle and complicated

question, there is a perfectly simple

and straightforward answer, which is

wrong.

-H.L. Mencken

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between a mere obligation, a sense that one ought to behave in a certain way, or even that one owes something to someone, and a debt, properly speaking? The answer is simple: money. The difference between a debt and an obligation is that a debt can be precisely quantified. This requires money.

Not only is it money that makes debt possible: money and debt ap­ pear on the scene at exactly the same time. Some of the very first writ­ ten documents that have come down to us are Mesopotamian tablets recording credits and debits, rations issued by temples, money owed for rent of temple lands, the value of each precisely specified in grain and silver. Some of the earliest works of 1p0ral philosophy, in turn, are reflections on what it means to imagine morality as debt-that is, in terms of money.

A history of debt, then, is thus necessarily a history of money-and the easiest way to understand the role that debt has played in human society is simply to follow the forms that money has taken, and the way money has been used, across the centuries-and the arguments that inevitably ensued about what all this means. Still, this is neces­ sarily a very different history of money than we are used to. When economists speak of the origins of money, for example, debt is always something of an afterthought. First comes barter, then money; credit only develops later. Even if one consults books on the history of money in, say, France, India, or China, what one generally gets is a history of coinage, with barely any discussion of credit arrangements at all. For almost a century, anthropologists like me have been pointing out

2 2 D E B T

that there is something very wrong with this picture. The standard economic-history version has little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted, in real communities and marketplaces, almost anywhere--where one is much more likely to discover everyone in debt to everyone else in a dozen different ways, and that most transactions take place without the use of currency.

Why the discrepancy? Some of it is just the nature of the evidence: coins are preserved in

the archeological record; credit arrangements usually are not. Still, the problem runs deeper. The existence of credit and debt has always been something of a scandal for economists, since it's almost impossible to pretend that those lending and borrowing money are acting on purely "economic" motivations (for instance, that a loan to a stranger is the same as a loan to one's cousin) ; it seems important, therefore, to begin the story of money in an imaginary world from which credit and debt have been entirely erased. Before· we can apply the tools of anthropol­ ogy to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account.

Economists. generally speak of three functions of money: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. All economic text­ books treat the first as primary. Here's a fairly typical extract from Economics, by Case, Fair, Gartner, and Heather (1996) :

M oney is vital to the working of a market economy. Imagine

what l i fe w o u ld be like without it. The alternative to a mon­

etary economy is barter, people exchanging goods and services

for other goods and services directly instead of exchanging via

the medium of money.

How does a barter system work ? Suppose you want cro is­

sants, eggs and o range juice fo r breakfast. Instead of go ing to

the grocer's and b uying these things with money, you w o u ld

have to find someone who has these items and is w i l l ing to

trade them. You w o u ld also have to have something the bak e r ,

the orange juice p u rveyor and the e g g vendor want . Having

pencils to trade w i l l do you no good i f the baker and the or­

ange juice and egg sellers do not want pencils.

A barter system requi res a double coincidence of wants fo r trade to take p lace. That is, to effect a trade, I need not only

have to find someone who has what I want, but that person

must also want what I have. Where the range of traded go ods

is small, as it is in relatively unsoph isti cated economies, it is

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R

not difficult to find someone to trade with, and barter is often used. '

2 3

This latter point is questionable, but it's phrased in so vague a way that it would be hard to disprove.

In a complex society with many goods, barter exchanges in­ volve an intolerable amount of effort. Imagine trying to find people who offer for sale all the things you buy in a typical trip to the grocer's, and who are willing to accept goods that you have to offer in exchange for their goods.

Some agreed-upon medium of exchange (or means of pay­ ment) neatly eliminates the double coincidence of wants prob­ lem. 2

It's important to emphasize that this is not presented as something that actually happened, but as a purely imaginary exercise. "To see that society benefits from a medium of exchange" write Begg, Fischer and Dornbuch (Economics, 2oos) , "imagine a barter economy. " "Imag­ ine the difficulty you would have today," write Maunder, Myers, Wall, and Miller (Economics Explairzed, 1991) , "if you had to exchange your labor directly for the fruits of someone else's labor. " "Imagine, " write Parkin and King (Economics, 1995) , "you have roosters, but you want roses. "1 One could multiply examples endlessly. Just about every eco­ nomics textbook employed today sets out the problem the same way. Historically, they note, we know that there was a time when there was no money. What must it have been like? Well, let us imagine an economy something like today's, except with no money. That would have been decidedly inconvenient! Surely, people must have invented money for the sake of efficiency.

The story of money for economists always begins with a fantasy world of barter. The problem is where to locate this fantasy in time and space: Are we talking about cave men, Pacific Islanders, the Ameri­ can frontier? One textbook, by economists Joseph Stiglitz and John Driffill, takes us to what appears to be an imaginary New England or Midwestern town:

One can imagine an old-style farmer bartering with the black­ smith, the tailor, the grocer, and the doctor in his small town. For simple barter to work, however, there must be a double coincidence of wants . . . Henry has potatoes and wants shoes, Joshua has an extra pair of shoes and wants potatoes. Bartering

2 4 D E B T

can make them both happier. But if Henry has firewood and Joshua does not need any of that, then bartering for Joshua's shoes requires one or both of them to go searching for more people in the hope of making a multilateral exchange . Money provides a way to make multilateral exchange much simpler. Henry sells his firewood to someone else for money and uses the money to buy Joshua's shoes.4

Again this is just a make-believe land much like the present, except with money somehow plucked away. As a result it makes no sense : Who in their right mind would set up a grocery in such a place? And how would they get supplies? But let's leave that aside. There is a simple reason why everyone who writes an economics textbook feels they have to tell us the same story. For economists, it is in a very real sense the most important story ever told. It was by telling it, in the significant year of r776 , that Adam Smith, professor of moral philoso­ phy at the University of Glasgow, effectively brought the discipline of economics into being.

He did not make up the story entirely out of whole cloth. Already in 330 Be, Aristotle was speculating along vaguely similar lines in his treatise on politics. At first, he suggested, families must have produced everything they needed for themselves. Gradually, some would presum­ ably have specialized, some growing corn, others making wine, swap­ ping one for the other.5 Money, Aristotle assumed, must have emerged from such a process. But, like the medieval schoolmen who occasion­ ally repeated the story, Aristotle was never clear as to how.6

In the years after Columbus, as Spanish and Portuguese adven­ turers were scouring the world for new sources of gold and silver, these vague stories disappear. Certainly no one reported discovering a land of barter. Most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travelers in the West Indies or Africa assumed that all societies would necessarily have their own forms of money, since all societies had governments and all governments issued money.7

Adam Smith, on the other hand, was determined to overturn the conventional wisdom of his day. Above all, he objected to the notion that money was a creation of government. In this, Smith was the intel­ lectual heir of the Liberal tradition of philosophers like John Locke, who had argued that government begins in the need to protect private property and operated best when it tried to limit itself to that function. Smith expanded on the argument, insisting that property, money and markets not only existed before political institutions but were the very fou�dation of human society. It followed that insofar as government

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 2 5

should play any role in monetary affairs, it should limit itself to guar­ anteeing the soundness of the currency. It was only by making such an argument that he could insist that economics is itself a field of human inquiry with its own principles and laws-that is, as distinct from, say ethics or politics.

Smith's argument is worth laying out in detail because it is, as I say, the great founding myth of the discipline of economics.

What, he begins, is the basis of economic life, properly speaking? It is "a certain propensity in human nature . . . the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. " Animals don't do this. "Nobody , " Smith observes, "ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. " 8 But humans, if left to their own devices, will inevitably begin swapping and comparing things. This is just what humans do. Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will always try to seek their own best advantage, to seek the greatest profit they can from the exchange. 9

I t i s this drive t o exchange, i n turn, which creates that division of labor responsible for all human achievement and civilization. Here the scene shifts to another one of those economists' faraway fantasylands­ it seems to be an amalgam of North American Indians and Central Asian pastoral nomads: 1 0

In a tribe of hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dex­ terity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his companions; and he finds at last that he can in this man ner get more cattle and venison, than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business, and he becomes a sort of armourer. Another excels in making the frames and covers of their little huts or moveable houses. He is accustomed to be of use in this way to his neighbours, who reward him in the same manner with cattle and with venison , till at last he finds it his interest to dedicate himself entirely to this employment, and to become a sort of house-carpenter. In the same manner a third becomes a smith or a brazier; a fourth a tanner or dresser of hides or skins, the principal part of the clothing of savages . . .

It's only once we have expert arrow-makers, wigwam-makers, and so on that people start realizing there's a problem. Notice how, as in

2 6 D E B T

so many examples, we have a tendency to slip from imaginary savages to small-town shopkeepers.

But when the division of labor first began to take place, this power of exchanging must frequently have been very much clogged and embarrassed in its operations. One man, we shall suppose, has more of a certain commodity than he himself has occasion for, while another has less. The former consequently would be glad to dispose of, and the latter to purchase, a part of this superfluity. But if this latter should chance to have noth­ ing that the former stands in need of, no exchange can be made between them. The butcher has more meat in his shop than he himself can consume, and the brewer and the baker would each of them be willing to purchase a part of it. But they have nothing to offer in exchange . . .

I I I I I

In order to avoid the inconveniency of such situations, every prudent man in every period of society, after the first establish­ ment of the division of labor, must naturally have endeavored to manage his affairs in such a manner, as to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined that few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for the produce of their industry . 1 1

So everyone will inevitably start stockpiling something they figure that everyone else is likely to want. This has a paradoxical effect, because at a certain point, rather than making that commodity less valuable (since everyone already has some) it becomes more valuable (because it becomes, effectively, currency) :

Salt is said to be the common instrument of commerce and exchanges in Abyssinia; a species of shells in some parts of the coast of India; dried cod at Newfoundland; tobacco in Virginia; sugar in some of our West India colonies; hides or dressed leather in some other countries; and there is at this day a village in Scotland where it is not uncommon, I am told, for a workman to carry nails instead of money to the baker's shop or the ale-house. 1 2

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 2 7

Eventually, of course, at least for long-distance trade, it all boils down to precious metals, since these are ideally suited to serve as cur­ rency, being durable, portable, and able to be endlessly subdivided into identical portions.

Different metals have been made use of by different nations

fo r this p urpose . I ron was the common instrument of com­

merce among the anc i ent Spartans; copper among the ancient

Romans; and gold and silver among all rich and commercial

nations .

I I I I I

Those metals seem originally to have been made use of for this

p u rpose in rude bars, without any stamp o r co inage . . .

I I I I I

The use of metals in this rude state was attended with two very

considerable inconveniencies; first with the trouble of weigh­

ing; and, second l y , with that of assaying them. In the p recious

metals, where a small difference in the quantity makes a great

di fference in the val u e , even the business o f weigh ing, with

proper exactness, requires at least very accurate weights and

scales. The weighing of gold in particular is an operation of

some nicety . . . 13

It's easy to see where this is going. Using irregular metal ingots is easier than barter, but wouldn't standardizing the units-say, stamp­ ing pieces of metal with uniform designations guaranteeing weight and fineness, in different denominations-make things easier still? Clearly it would, and so was coinage born. True, issuing coinage meant govern­ ments had to get involved, since they generally ran the mints; but in the standard version of the story, governments have only this one limited role--to guarantee the money supply-and tend to do it badly, since throughout history, unscrupulous kings have often cheated by debasing the coinage and causing inflation and other sorts of political havoc in what was originally a matter of simple economic common sense.

Tellingly, this story played a crucial role not only in founding the discipline of economics, but in the very idea that there was something called "the economy," which operated by its own rules, separate from moral or political life, that economists could take as their field of study.

2 8 D E B T

"The economy" is where we indulge in our natural propensity to truck and barter. We are still trucking and bartering. We always will be. Money is simply the most efficient means.

Economists like Karl Menger and Stanley Jevons later improved on the details of the story, most of all by adding various mathemati­ cal equations to demonstrate that a random assortment of people with random desires could, in theory, produce not only a single commodity to use as money but a uniform price system. In the process, they also substituted all sorts of impressive technical vocabulary (i.e., "inconve­ niences" became "transaction costs" ) . The crucial thing, though, is that by now, this story has become simple common sense for most people. We teach it to children in schoolbooks and museums. Everybody knows it. "Once upon a time, there was barter. It was difficult. So people in­ vented money. Then came the development of banking and credit. " It all forms a perfectly simple, straightforward progression, a process of increasing sophistication and abstraction that has carried humanity, logically and inexorably, from the Stone Age exchange of mastodon tusks to stock markets, hedge funds, and securitized derivatives. 1 4

It really has become ubiquitous. Wherever we find money, we also find the story. At one point, in the town of Arivonimamo, in Madagas­ car, I had the privilege of interviewing a Kalanoro, a tiny ghostly crea­ ture that a local spirit medium claimed to keep hidden away in a chest in his home. The spirit belonged to the brother of a notorious local loan shark, a horrible woman named Nordine, and to be honest I was a bit reluctant to have anything to do with the family, but some of my friends insisted-since after all, this was a creature from ancient times. The creature spoke from behind a screen in an eerie, otherworldly qua­ ver. But all it was really interested in talking about was money. Finally, slightly exasperated by the whole charade, I asked, "So, what did you use for money back in ancient times, when you were still alive?"

The mysterious voice immediately replied, "No. We didn't use money. In ancient times we used to barter commodities directly, one for the other . . . "

I I I I I

The story, then, is everywhere. It is the founding myth of our system of economic relations. It is so deeply established in common sense, even in places like Madagascar, that most people on earth couldn't imagine any other way that money possibly could have come about.

The problem is there's no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not.

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 2 9

For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter-none with success. Adam Smith set his story in aborigi­ nal North America ( others preferred Africa or the Pacific) . In Smith's time, at least it could be said that reliable information on Native Amer­ ican economic systems was unavailable in Scottish libraries. But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan's descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published-and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women's councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information. 15 Stanley Jevons, for example, who in 1 871 wrote what has come to be considered the classic book on the origins of money, took his examples straight from Smith, with Indians swapping venison for elk and beaver hides, and made no use of actual descriptions of Indian life that made it clear that Smith had simply made this up. Around that same time, missionaries, adventurers, and colonial administrators were fanning out across the world, many bringing copies of Smith's book with them, expecting to find the land of barter. None ever did. They discovered an almost end­ less variety of economic systems. But to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of "I'll give you twenty chickens for that cow. "

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Hum­ phrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available eth­ nography suggests that there never has been such a thing. " 16

Now, all this hardly means that barter does not exist-or even that it's never practiced by the sort of people that Smith would refer to as "savages. " It just means that it's almost never employed, as Smith imagined, between fellow villagers. Ordinarily, it takes place between strangers, even enemies. Let us begin with the Nambikwara of Brazil. They would seem to fit all the criteria: they are a simple society with­ out much in the way of division of labor, organized into small bands that traditionally numbered at best a hundred people each. Occasion­ ally if one band spots the cooking fires of another in their vicinity, they will send emissaries to negotiate a meeting for purposes of trade. If the offer is accepted, they will first hide their women and children in the forest, then invite the men of other band to visit camp. Each band has a chief; once everyone has been assembled, each chief gives a formal speech praising the other party and belittling his own; everyone puts

3 0 D E B T

aside their weapons to sing and dance together-though the dance is one that mimics military confrontation. Then, individuals from each side approach each other to trade:

I f an individual wants an object h e extols i t by saying how fine

it is. If a man values an object and wants much in exchange for

it, instead of saying that it is very valuable h e says that i t is no

good, thus show ing his desire to keep it. "This axe is no good,

it is very o ld, it is very dull , " he w i ll say, referring to his axe

which the other wants.

This argument is carried on in an angry tone of voice un­

til a settlement is reached. When agreement has been reached

each snatches the object out of the other's hand . If a man has

bartered a necklace, instead of taking it o ff and handing it

over, the other person must take it off with a show of fo rce.

Disp utes, often leading to fights, occur when one party is a

little p remature and snatches the o bject before the other has

finished arguing . 1 7

The whole business concludes with a great feast at which the wom­ en reappear, but this too can lead to problems, since amidst the music and good cheer, there is ample opportunity for seductions. 1 8 This some­ times led to jealous quarrels. Occasionally, people would get killed.

Barter, then, for all the festive elements, was carried out be­ tween people who might otherwise be enemies and hovered about an inch away from outright warfare-and, if the ethnographer is to be believed-if one side later decided they had been taken advantage of, it could very easily lead to actual wars.

To shift our spotlight halfway around the world to Western Am­ hem Land in Australia, where the Gunwinggu people are famous for entertaining neighbors in rituals of ceremonial barter called the dza­ malag. Here the threat of actual violence seems much more distant. Partly, this is because things are made easier by the existence of a moi­ ety system that embraces the whole region: no one is allowed to marry, or even have sex with, people of their own moiety, no matter where they come from, but anyone from the other is technically a potential match. Therefore, for a man, even in distant communities, half the women are strictly forbidden, half of them fair game. The region is also united by local specialization: each people has its own trade product to be bartered with the others.

What follows is from a description of a dzamalag held in the 1940s, as observed by an anthropologist named Ronald Berndt.

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 3 1

Once again, it begins as strangers, after some initial negotiations, are invited into the hosts' main camp. The visitors in this particular example were famous for their "much-prized serrated spears"-their hosts had access to good European cloth. The trading begins when the visiting party, which consisted of both men and women, enters the camp's dancing ground of "ring place," and three of them began to entertain their hosts with music. Two men start singing, a third ac­ companies them on the didjeridu . Before long, women from the hosts' side come and attack the musicians:

Men and women rise and begin to dance . The dzamalag opens when two Gunwinggu women of the opposite moiety to the

singing men "give dzamalag" to the latter . They p resent each man with a piece of cloth, and h i t or touch him, p u l l ing him down on the gro und, call ing him a dzamalag h usband, and joking with h i m in an erotic vein. Then another woman of the

opposite moiety to the pipe p layer gives him cloth, h its and

jokes with h i m .

This sets in m o t i o n the dzamalag exchange . Men from t h e visi ting group sit q u i e t l y while women o f the opposite moiety

come over and give them cloth, hit them, and invite them to

copulate; they take any l i b e rty they choose with the men, amid

amusement and applause, w h i l e the singing and dancing con­

tinue . Women try to undo the men's loin coverings or touch

their penises, and to drag them from the " r ing place" fo r co­

itus. The men go with their dzamalag partners, with a show of reluctance, to copulate in the b ushes away from the fires which

light up the dancers . They may give the women tobacco or

beads . When the women return, they give part of this tobacco

to their own husbands, w h o have encou raged them to go dza­ malag. The husbands, in turn, use the tobacco to pay their own female dzamalag partners . . . 1 9

New singers and musicians appear, are again assaulted and dragged off to the bushes; men encourage their wives "not to be shy," so as to maintain the Gunwinggu reputation for hospitality; eventually those men also take the initiative with the visitors' wives, offering cloth, hit­ ting them, and leading them off into the bushes. Beads and tobacco circulate. Finally, once participants have all paired off at least once, and the guests are satisfied with the cloth they have acquired, the women stop dancing and stand in two rows and the visitors line up to repay them.

3 2 D E B T

Then visltlng men of one moiety dance towards the women

of the opposite moiety, in order to "give them dzamalag . " They hold shovel-n osed spears p oised, pretending to spear the

women , but i nstead h i t them with the flat of the blade . " We

w i l l not spear y o u , for we have al ready speared you with our

penises . " They present the spears to the women . Then visiting

men of the other moiety go through the same actions with the

women o f their opposite moiety, giving them spears with ser­

rated p o i nts. This termi nates the ceremony, which is fol l owed

by a large distribution of food.20

This is a particularly dramatic case, but dramatic cases are reveal­ ing. What the Gunwinggu hosts appear to have been able to do here, owing to the relatively amicable relations between neighboring peoples in Western Arnhem Land, is to take all the elements in Nambikwara barter (the music and dancing, the potential hostility, the sexual in­ trigue) , and turn it all into a kind of festive game--one not, perhaps, without its dangers, but (as the ethnographer emphasizes) considered enormous fun by everyone concerned.

What all such cases of trade through barter have in common is that they are meetings with strangers who will, likely as not, never meet again, and with whom one certainly will not enter into any ongoing re­ lations. This is why a direct one-on-one exchange is appropriate: each side makes their trade and walks away. It's all made possible by laying down an initial mantle of sociability, in the form of shared pleasures, music and dance--the usual base of conviviality on which trade must always be built. Then comes the actual trading, where both sides make a great display of the latent hostility that necessarily exists in any ex­ change of material goods between strangers-where neither party has no particular reason not to take advantage of the other-by playful mock aggression, though in the Nambikwara case, where the mantle of sociability is extremely thin, mock aggression is in constant danger of slipping over into the real thing. The Gunwinggu, with their more relaxed attitude toward sexuality, have quite ingeniously managed to make the shared pleasures and aggression into exactly the same thing.

Recall here the language of the economics textbooks: "Imagine a society without money. " "Imagine a barter economy. " One thing these examples make abundantly clear is just how limited the imaginative powers of most economists turn out to be. 21

Why? The simplest answer would be: for there to even be a disci­ pline called "economics," a discipline that concerns itself first and fore­ most with how individuals seek the most advantageous arrangement

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 3 3

for the exchange of shoes for potatoes, or cloth for spears, it must assume that the exchange of such goods need have nothing to do with war, passion, adventure, mystery, sex, or death. Economics assumes a division between different spheres of human behavior that, among peo­ ple like the Gunwinngu and the Nambikwara, simply does not exist. These divisions in turn are made possible by very specific institutional arrangements: the existence of lawyers, prisons, and police, to ensure that even people who don't like each other very much, who have no interest in developing any kind of ongoing relationship, but are simply interested in getting their hands on as much of the others' possessions as possible, will nonetheless refrain from the most obvious expedient (theft) . This in turn allows us to assume that life is neatly divided be­ tween the marketplace, where we do our shopping, and the "sphere of consumption," where we concern ourselves with music, feasts, and seduction . In other words, the vision of the world that forms the basis of the economics textbooks, which Adam Smith played so large a part in promulgating, has by now become so much a part of our common sense that we find it hard to imagine any other possible arrangement.

From these examples, it begins to be clear why there are no societ­ ies based on barter. Such a society could only be one in which every­ body was an inch away from everybody else's throat; but nonetheless hovering there, poised to strike but never actually striking, forever. True, barter does sometimes occur between people who do not consid­ er each other strangers, but they're usually people who might as well be strangers-that is, who feel no sense of mutual responsibility or trust, or the desire to develop ongoing relations. The Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan, for instance, are famous for their open-handed hospitality. Barter is what you do with those to whom you are not bound by ties of hospitality ( or kinship, or much of anything else) :

A favorite mode of exchange among men is barter, or adal­ badal (give and take) . Men are always on the alert for the possibility of bartering one of their possessions for something better. Often the exchange is like for like: a radio for a radio, sunglasses for sunglasses, a watch for a watch. However, un­ like objects can also be exchanged, such as, in one instance, a bicycle for two donkeys. Adal-badal is always practiced with non-relatives and affords men a great deal of pleasure as they attempt to get the advantage over their exchange partner. A good exchange, in which a man feels he has gotten the better of the deal, is cause for bragging and pride. If the exchange is bad, the recipient tries to renege on the deal or, failing that, to

3 4 D E B T

palm off the faulty object on someone unsuspecting. The best partner in adal-badal is someone who is distant spatially and will therefore have little opportunity to complain. 2 2

Neither are such unscrupulous motives limited to Central Asia. They seem inherent to the very nature of barter-which would explain the fact that in the century or two before Smith's time, the English words "truck and barter," like their equivalents in French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Portuguese, literally meant "to trick, bamboozle, or rip off. " 23 Swapping one thing directly for another while trying to get the best deal one can out of the transaction is, ordinarily, how one deals with people one doesn't care about and doesn't expect to see again. What reason is there not to try to take advantage of such a person? If, on the other hand, one cares enough about someone-a neighbor, a friend-to wish to deal with her fairly and honestly, one will inevitably also care about her enough to take her individual needs, desires, and situation into account. Even if you do swap one thing for another, you are likely to frame the matter as a gift.

I I I I I

To illustrate what I mean by this, let's return to the economics text­ books and the problem of the "double coincidence of wants . " When we left Henry, he needed a pair of shoes, but all he had lying around were some potatoes. Joshua had an extra pair of shoes, but he didn't really need potatoes. Since money has not yet been invented, they have a problem. What are they to do?

The first thing that should be clear by now is that we'd really have to know a bit more about Joshua and Henry. Who are they? Are they related? If so, how? They appear to live in a small community. Any two people who have been living their lives in the same small community will have some sort of complicated history with each other. Are they friends, rivals, allies, lovers, enemies, or several of these things at once?

The authors of the original example seem to assume two neighbors of roughly equal status, not closely related, but on friendly terms-that is, as close to neutral equality as one can get. Even so, this doesn't say much. For example, if Henry was living in a Seneca longhouse, and needed shoes, Joshua would not even enter into it; he'd simply men­ tion it to his wife, who'd bring up the matter with the other matrons, fetch materials from the longhouse's collective storehouse, and sew him some. Alternately, to find a scenario fit for an imaginary economics

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 3 5

textbook, we might place Joshua and Henry together in a small, inti­ mate community like a Nambikwara or Gunwinggu band.

SCENARIO 1

Henry walks up to Joshua and says "Nice shoes!" Joshua says, "Oh, they're not much, but since you seem to like

them, by all means take them. " Henry takes the shoes. Henry's potatoes are not at issue since both parties are perfectly

well aware that if Joshua were ever short of potatoes, Henry would give him some.

And that's about it. Of course it's not clear, in this case, how long Henry will actually get to keep the shoes. It probably depends on how nice they are. If they were just ordinary shoes, this might be the end of the matter. If they are in any way unique or beautiful, they might end up being passed around. There's a famous story that John and Lorna Marshall, who carried out a study of Kalahari Bushmen in the '6os, once gave a knife to one of their favorite informants. They left and came back a year later, only to discover that pretty much everyone in the band had been in possession of the knife at some point in between. On the other hand, several Arab friends confirm to me that in less strictly egalitarian contexts, there is an expedient. If a friend praises a bracelet or bag, you are normally expected to immediately say "take it"-but if you are really determined to hold on to it, you can always say, "yes, isn't it beautiful? It was a gift. "

But clearly, the authors o f the textbook have a slightly more im­ personal transaction in mind. The authors seem to imagine the two men as the heads of patriarchal households, on good terms with each other, but who keep their own supplies. Perhaps they live in one of those Scottish villages with the butcher and the baker in Adam Smith's examples, or a colonial settlement in New England. Except for some reason they've never heard of money. It's a peculiar fantasy, but let's see what we can do:

SCENARIO 2

Henry walks up to Joshua and says, "Nice shoes!" Or, perhaps-let's make this a bit more realistic-Henry's wife

is chatting with Joshua's and strategically lets slip that the state of Henry's shoes is getting so bad he's complaining about corns.

3 6 D E B T

The message is conveyed, and Joshua comes by the next day to offer his extra pair to Henry as a present, insisting that this is j ust a neighborly gestu re. He would certainly never want anything in retu rn.

It doesn't matter whether Joshua is sincere in saying this. By do­ ing so, Joshua thereby regi sters a credit. Henry owes him one.

How might Henry pay Joshua back ? There are endless possi­ bi lities. Perhaps Joshua really does want potatoes. Henry waits a discrete interval and drops them off, ins isting that th is too is j ust a gift. Or Joshua doesn't need potatoes now but Henry waits until he does. Or maybe a year later, Joshua is planning a banquet, so he comes stroll ing by Henry's ba rnyard and says " N ice pig . . . "

In any of these scenarios, the problem of " d o u b l e coincidence of wants , " so endlessly invoked i n the economics textbooks , s i m p l y disap­ pears. Henry might not have something J o s h u a wants right n o w . But if the two are neighbors, it's obviously only a m a tter of time before he w i l l . 24

This in turn means that the need to stockpi le c o m m o n l y acceptable items in the way that S m ith suggested disappears a s wel l . With it goes the need to develop currency . As with so many actual s m a l l c o m m u n i ­ ties , everyone simply k e e p s t r a c k of who o w e s what to who m .

There i s j ust o n e m a j o r conceptu a l problem here-on e the atten­ tive reader might have noticed . Henry "owes Joshua one . " One w h a t ? H o w do you quantify a favo r ? O n what b a s i s do you say t h a t t h i s m a n y potatoes, or this big a pig, see m s m o re o r less equiva lent to a p a i r of shoes ? Because even if these things re main rough - a n d - ready ap­ proxi mations, there m u s t be some way to establish that X i s roughly equiva lent to Y, or slightly worse or slightly better. Doesn ' t this i m p l y that something like m o n e y , a t least in t h e s e n s e of a unit of accounts b y which one can c o m pa re the v a l u e of different obj ects, a l ready h a s to e x i s t ?

I n most gift e c o n o m i e s , t h e r e actu a l l y i s a rough - a n d - ready w a y to s o l v e the p r o b le m . O n e establishes a s e r i e s of ranked c a tegories of types of thing. Pigs and shoes m a y b e considered o b j ects o f roughly equivalent statu s , one c a n give one in return fo r the other; coral neck­ laces a re quite another m atter, one would have to give back another necklace, o r a t least a nother piece of j ewel ry-a n th ropologists are used to referring to these a s creating different " spheres of exchange . "25 This does s i m p li fy things somewhat. When cross-cultural b a rter becomes a regu l a r and unexception a l thing, it tends to operate according to s i m i ­ l a r principles : there a re o n l y certain t h i n g s traded for certain others

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 3 7

(cloth for spears, for example) , which makes it easy to work out tra­ ditional equivalences. However, this doesn't help us at all with the problem of the origin of money. Actually, it makes it infinitely worse. Why stockpile salt or gold or fish if they can only be exchanged for some things and not others?

In fact, there is good reason to believe that barter is not a par­ ticularly ancient phenomenon at all, but has only really become wide­ spread in modern times. Certainly in most of the cases we know about, it takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another, don't have a lot of it around. Elaborate barter systems often crop up in the wake of the collapse of national economies: most recently in Russia in the '9os, and in Argentina around 2002, when rubles in the first case, and dollars in the second, effectively disappeared.26 Occasionally one can even find some kind of currency beginning to develop: for instance, in POW camps and many prisons, inmates have indeed been known to use cigarettes as a kind of cur­ rency, much to the delight and excitement of professional economists.27 But here too we are talking about people who grew up using money and now have to make do without it-exactly the situation "imagined" by the economics textbooks with which I began.

The more frequent solution is to adopt some sort of credit system. When much of Europe "reverted to barter" after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and then again after the Carolingian Empire likewise fell apart, this seems to be what happened. People continued keeping accounts in the old imperial currency, even if they were no longer us­ ing coins.28 Similarly, the Pukhtun men who like to swap bicycles for donkeys are hardly unfamiliar with the use of money. Money has ex­ isted in that part of the world for thousands of years. They just prefer direct exchange between equals-in this case, because they consider it more manly.29

The most remarkable thing is that even in Adam Smith's examples of fish and nails and tobacco being used as money, the same sort of thing was happening. In the years following the appearance of The Wealth of Nations, scholars checked into most of those examples and discovered that in just about every case, the people involved were quite familiar with the use of money, and in fact, were using money-as a unit of account.30 Take the example of dried cod, supposedly used as money in Newfoundland. As the British diplomat A. Mitchell-Innes pointed out almost a century ago, what Smith describes was really an illusion, created by a simple credit arrangement:

3 8 D E B T

In the early days of the Newfoundland fishing industry, there was no permanent European population; the fishers went there for the fishing season only, and those who were not fishers were traders who bought the dried fish and sold to the fishers their daily supplies. The latter sold their catch to the traders at the market price in pounds, shil lings and pence, and obtained in return a credit on their books, with which they paid for their supplies. Bala nces due by the traders were paid for by drafts on England or France . 3 1

It was q u i t e t h e s a m e in t h e Scotti sh v i l l age. I t ' s n o t a s if anyone actu a l l y walked into the local pub, p l unked down a roofing nail, and asked for a p i n t of beer. Emp loyers in S m i t h ' s day often l acked coin to p a y their workers; wages could be delayed b y a year o r more; i n t h e meanti m e , i t was considered accepta b l e fo r e m p loyees to c a r r y off either some of their own products or leftover work materi a l s , l u m b e r , fa bric, c o r d , and so o n . The n a i l s w e r e de facto interest on what their e m p loyers owed them. S o they went to the pub, ran up a tab, and when occasion permitted , brought in a bag of nails to c h a rge o ff against the debt. The law making tobacco legal tender i n Virginia seems to have been an attempt by p l anters to o b l ige local merchants to accept their products as a credit around h a rvest time. I n effect, the law forced a l l merchants in Virginia to become middlemen in t h e tobacco business, whether they liked it o r not; j ust a s a l l West Indian merchants were obl iged to become sugar dealers, since that's what all their wealthier customers brought in to write off against their debt.

The primary examples, then , were ones in which people were i m p rovising credit syste m s , because actual money-gold and silver coinage--was i n short supply. But the most shocking blow to the con­ vention a l version of economic history came with the translation, first of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and then of Mesopota mian cuneifo r m , which pushed back scholars' knowledge of written h i story a l most th ree m i l ­ lenn i a , fro m the time of H o m e r (circa 8oo Be) , w h e r e it had hovered in S m i th ' s time, to roughly 3500 BC. What these texts revealed was that credit systems o f exactly this sort actually preceded the invention of coinage by thousands of years.

The Mesopota m i a n system i s the best-documented, m o re so than that of Pharaonic Egypt (which appears s i m i l a r ) , Shang China ( a bout which we know little ) , o r the Indus Valley civilization (about which we know nothing at a l l ) . As it happens, we know a great deal about Mesopota m i a , since the vast maj ority of cuneiform documents were financial i n nature.

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 3 9

The Sumerian economy was d o m i n a ted by vast temple and palace complexe s . These were often staffed by thousands: priests and offici a l s , craftspeople who worked in t h e i r industr i a l worksho p s , fa rmers a n d shepherds who worked their considerable estates. E v e n though ancient Sumer was usually divided into a l a rge n u m ber of independent city­ states, by the time the curtain goes u p on Mesopota mian civili zation around 3500 , temple a d m i n i strators a lready appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy-o n e that i s in s o m e ways still with u s , actu a l l y , because i t ' s to the S u merians that we owe such things a s the dozen or the 24-hour day.32 The basic m o netary unit was the s i lver sheke l . O n e sheke l ' s weight i n silver w a s esta blished a s the equivalent of one gur, o r bushel of barley. A shekel w a s s u bdivided into 6o m i n a s , corresponding to one portion of barley-on the prin ­ ciple that th ere were 30 days i n a month, and T e m p l e w or k e rs received two rations of b a rley every day. It's easy to see that " money" in this sense is in no way the p roduct of c o m m ercial transaction s . It w a s a c ­ tually created by bureaucrats in o r d e r to k e e p t r a c k of resources and move things back and fo rth between departments .

Temple bureaucrats used the system to c a l c u late debts ( rents , fees, loans . . . ) in silver. S i lver w a s , effectively, money. And it did indeed circul ate in the form o f unworked chunks, " rude b a r s " as Smith had put it.33 In this he was right. But it was a l most the o n l y p a rt of his ac­ count that w a s right. O n e rea son w a s that s i l ver did not circul ate very much . Most of it j ust sat around in Temple and P a l ace treasuries, some of which remained, c a refully guarded, in the same p l ace for l i tera l l y t h o u s a n d s of y e a r s . It would have b e e n easy e n o u g h to standardize t h e i n g o t s , stamp them, c r e a t e some authoritative s y s t e m to guara ntee their purity. The tech nology exi sted . Yet no one saw a n y p a rticular need to do so. One reason was that while debts were c a l c u l ated in silver, they did not have to b e paid in silver-in fact, they could be paid in more or less anything one had around . Peasants who owed money to the Temple or P a l a c e , or to some Temple o r P a l ace offic i a l , seem to have settled their debts mostly i n barley, which i s why fixing the ratio of s i l ­ ver to b a r l e y w a s so i m p o rtant. But it w a s perfectly accepta b l e to s h o w up with g o a t s , o r furniture, or l a p i s lazul i . T e m p l e s and P a l aces were huge industri a l operations-they could find a use for a l m o s t anything.34

In the m a rketplaces that cropped up in Mesopota m i a n cities, pric­ es were a l s o c a l c u l ated i n silver, and the p rices of com modities that weren ' t entirely contro lled by the Temples and P a l a ces would tend to fl u ctuate according to s u p p l y and demand . But even here, such evidence a s w e have suggests that most transactions were based on credit. Mer­ chants ( w h o sometimes worked for the Temples, someti mes operated

4 0 D E B T

independently) were among the few people who did, often, actually use silver in transaction s ; but even they mostly did much o f their dealings on credit, a n d ordinary people buying beer fro m " a le women , " o r lo­ c a l innkeepers, once again, did so by running up a tab, to be settled a t h a rvest time i n b arley o r a n y t h i n g t h e y might have had a t hand .35

At this point, j ust about every aspect of the conventional story of the origins of money l a y in r u b b l e . Rarely has a n h i storical theory been so abs o lutely and system atically refuted . By the early decades of the twentieth century, a l l the pieces were i n place to completely rewrite the history of money . The groundwork was laid b y Mitchell-Innes­ the same one I ' ve a l ready c i ted on the m a tter of the cod-in two essays that appeared in New York ' s Banking Law Journal in 1913 and 1914. I n these, Mitchell-Innes matter-of-factly laid out the fal s e assumptions on which existing economic h i story w a s b a sed and suggested that w h a t w a s rea l l y needed was a h i story of debt:

One of the popular fal lacies in connection with commerce is that in modern days a money-saving device has been intro­ duced called credit and that, before this device was known, all, purchases were paid for in cash, in other words in coins . A careful investigation shows that the precise reverse is true. In olden days coins played a far smaller part in commerce than they do to-day. Indeed so small was the quantity of coins, that they did not even suffice for the needs of the [Medieval Eng­ lish] Royal household and estates which regularly used tokens of various kinds for the purpose of making small payments . So unimportant indeed was the coinage that sometimes Kings did not hesitate to call it all in for re-minting and re-issue and still commerce went on j ust the same.36

I n fact, our standard account of m o n etary history i s precisely backward s . We did not begin with b a rter, d iscover money, and then eventu a l l y develop credit syste m s . I t h appened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. B a rter, i n turn , appears to be l a rgely a kind of acciden­ t a l byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money : historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or an other they have n o access to currency .

The curious thing is that it never happened . This new history was never written . It's not that any economist has ever refuted Mitchell-Innes. They j ust ignored him. Textbooks did not change their story--even i f

T H E M Y T H O F B A R T E R 4 1

a l l the evidence made clear that the story was s i m p ly wrong. People sti ll write histories o f money that are actu a l l y histories of coinage, on the a s sumption that in the p a s t , these were necessarily the s a m e thing; periods when coinage l a rgely van ished are sti l l described a s times when the economy " reverted to barte r , " a s if the meaning of this phrase is self-evident, even though no one actually knows what it means. As a result we have next-to-no idea how, s a y , the i n h a bitant of a D utch town in 950 AD actually went about acquiring cheese or spoons or hir­ ing musicians to play at his daughte r ' s wedding-let alone how any of this was likely to b e arranged in Pemba or S a m a rkand .17

C h a p t e r T h r e e

P R I M O R D I A L D E B TS

I n being born every b eing i s born a s

debt owed t o t h e gods, t h e saints , the

Fathe rs and to men. If one makes a sac­

rifice, it is because of a debt owing to

th e gods from b irth . . . If one recites a

sacred text, it is b ecause of a debt owing

to the saints . . . If one wish es for off­

sp ring, it is because of a debt due to the

fathe rs from b irth . . . And if one gives

hospitality, it is because it is a debt ow­

ing to men.

-Satapatha Brahmana 1 . 7 . 1 2 , r-6

Let us drive away the evil effects of bad

dreams, just as we pay off debts .

-Rig Veda 8 -47· 17

THE REASON THAT economics textbooks now begin with im aginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist. 1

The question is why the myth has been perpetuated, anyway. Economists have long since jettisoned other elements of The Wealth of Nations-for instance, Smith's labor theory of value and disapproval of joint-stock corporations. Why not simply write off the myth of bar­ ter as a quaint Enlightenment parable, and instead attempt to under­ stand primordial credit arrangements-or anyway, something more in keeping with the historical evidence?

The answer seems to be that the Myth of Barter cannot go away, because it is central to the entire discourse of economics.

4 4 D E B T

Recall here what S m ith w a s trying to d o when he wrote The Wealth of Nations . Above a l l , the book was an attempt to establish the newfound discipline of econo m i c s as a science. This meant that not only did econom i c s have its own peculiar domain of study-w hat we now call "the econo m y , " though the idea that there even was some­ thing c a l led an " econ o m y " was very new i n Smith's day-but that this economy operated according to laws o f much the s a m e sort as S i r Isaac Newton had s o recently identified a s governing the physical world. Newton had represented God a s a c o s m i c watchmaker who had created the physical m a c h inery of the universe in such a way that it would operate fo r the ultim ate benefit of h u m a n s , and then let it run on its own. S mith w a s trying to make a s i m i l a r , Newtonian argument.2 God-or D i v i n e Providence, a s he put it-had a rranged m atters in such a way that our pursuit of self-in terest would nonetheless , given a n unfettered m a rket, be guided " a s if by an i n v i s i b l e h a n d " to prom ote the general welfare. S m i th ' s fa m o u s invisible hand w a s , a s he says in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the agent of D i vine Providence. It was literally the hand of God.3

Once economics had been esta b l i s hed a s a discipline, the theological arguments no longer seemed necessary or i m portant. People continue to argue about whether an unfettered free m a rket really w i l l produce the results that S m i th said it would; but no one questions whether "the market" naturally exists . The underlying a s s u m ptions that derive from this c a m e to be seen as c o m m o n sense--so much so that, as I ' v e noted, we simply assume that when v a l u a b l e obj ects do change hands, it w i l l normally be because two individ u a l s have b o t h decided t h e y would gain a m ater i a l advantage by swapping th e m . O n e interesting corollary is that, as a res ult, economists have come to see the very question of the presence o r a b sence of money a s not especially i mportant, since money is j ust a commodity, chosen to fac i l i tate exchange, and which we use to measure the value of other com modities . Otherwise, it has no special qualities. Sti l l , in 195 8 , Paul S a muelson , one of the leading lights of the neoclassical school that still pred o m i n ates in modern economic thought, could express disdain fo r what he c a l led "the social contriv­ ance o f money . " " Even in the most advanced industrial economies , " he insisted, " i f w e strip exchange down to its b a rest essentials and peel off the obscuring layer of money, we find that trade between individuals and nations l a rgely b o i l s down to b a rter . "4 Others spoke of a "veil o f m o n e y " obscuring t h e n a ture of the "real econom y " in which people produced real goods and services and swapped them back and forth . 5

C a l l this the final apotheo s i s of economics a s c o m m o n s e n s e . M o n e y i s unimportant. Econo m i es-" re a l economies "-are really vast

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 4 5

b a rter syste m s . The problem i s that h istory shows that without money, such vast b a rter systems do not occur. Even when economies " revert to b a rter, " a s Europe was said to do in the Middle Ages, they don't actu­ ally abandon the use of money . They j ust abandon the use of c a s h . I n t h e M i d d l e A g e s , for i n s t a n c e , everyone continued to assess the value of tools and livestock i n the o l d R o m a n currency, even i f the coins themselves had ceased to circulate.6

It's money that h a d made it p o s s i b l e for u s to i m agine o u rselves i n the way e c o n o m i s t s encourage u s to d o : a s a col l ection of individu a l s and n a t i o n s w h o s e m a i n b u s i n e s s i s swapping t h i n g s . It's a l s o c l e a r t h a t t h e m e r e existence of m o n e y , i n itself, i s not enough t o a l l o w us s e e t h e w o r l d this w a y . If i t were, the discipline of economics w o u l d h a v e b e e n created in ancient S u mer, or a n y w a y , far earlier than 1776 , w h e n A d a m S m i t h ' s The Wealth of Nations appeared .

The missing element is in fact exactly the thing S m ith w a s at­ tempting to downpl a y : the role of government policy. In England, i n S m i t h ' s d a y , i t became p o s s i b l e to see the m a r k e t , the world of b u t c h ­ ers, ironmongers , and haberdashers, a s its own entirely independent sphere of human activity because the British government w a s actively engaged i n fostering it. This requ i red l a w s and police, b u t also, specific monetary policies, which l i b e r a l s like S mith were ( s uccessfully) advo­ cating.7 I t required pegging the value of the currency to s i lver, b u t a t the same time greatly increasing the m o n e y supply, and p a rticularly the amount o f small change i n circulation. This not only required huge amounts of tin and copper, b u t also the c a reful regu lation of the banks that were, at that time, the only source of paper money . The century b efore The Wealth of Nations had seen at least two attempts to create state-supported central b a n k s , i n France and Sweden, that had proven to be spectacular failures. I n each case, the would-be cen­ tral bank i s s ued notes b ased l a rgely on speculation that c o l l apsed the moment investors lost fait h . S m it h supported the use of paper money, b u t like Locke b e fore him, he also believed that the relative success of the Bank of England and Bank of Scotland h a d been due to their policy of pegging paper money firmly to precious meta l s . This became the mainstream economic view, s o much so that a l ternative theories of money a s credit-the one that Mitchell-Innes advocated-were quickly relegated to the margins, their proponents written off a s cranks, and the very sort of thinking that led to b a d banks and speculative b u b b le s in the first p l a ce·.

It might b e helpfu l , then, to consider what these a l ternative theo­ ries actually were.

4 6 D E B T

S t a t e a n d C re d i t The o r i e s o f Mo n e y

Mitchell-Innes was an exponent of what came to be known as the Credit Theory of money, a position that over the course of the nine­ teenth century had its most avid proponents not in Mitchel l-Innes ' s native Britain but i n t h e t w o up-and-coming rival powers of the d a y , the U nited S t a t e s and Germa n y . Credit Theorists i n s i sted that money i s not a commodity but an accounting tool . I n other word s , it i s not a "thing" at a l l . You can no more touch a d o l l a r or a deutschmark than you c a n touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of c urrency are merely a bstract units of measurement, and a s the credit theorists cor­ rectly noted, histori c a l l y , such a bstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular token of exch ange . 8

T h e obvious n e x t question i s : I f money i s a j ust a yardstick, what then does it measure ? The answer was s i m p l e : debt. A coin i s , effec­ tively, an I O U . Whereas conventional wisdom holds that a b anknote i s , or s h o u l d be, a promise to pay a certai n a m o unt of "real m o n e y " (gold, silver, whatever that might be taken to mea n ) , Credit Theorists argued that a banknote i s simply the promise to pay something of the same value a s an ounce of gold. B u t that's a l l that money ever i s . There ' s n o fundamental difference in t h i s respect between a silver dollar, a S u s a n B. Anthony d o l l a r coin made of a copper-nickel a l l o y designed to look vaguely like gold, a green piece of paper with a picture of George Washington on it, or a digital b l i p o n some bank's computer. Conceptually, the idea that a piece of gold is rea l l y j ust a n IOU i s a l w a y s rather difficult to w r a p o n e ' s h e a d around, but something like this m u s t be true, because even when gold and s i lver coins were in use, they a l most never circulated a t their b u l l i o n value.

How could credit money come about ? Let us return to the econo m ­ ics professors' i m agin ary tow n . S a y , for e x a m p l e , that Joshua were to give his shoes to Henry, and, rather than Henry owing him a fa­ vor, Henry promises h i m something of equivalent v a l u e . 9 Henry gives Joshua an I O U . Joshua could wait for Henry to have something use­ ful , and then redeem it. I n that case Henry would rip up the I O U and the story would be over. But say Joshua were to p a s s the IOU on to a third party-S heil a-to whom he owes something else. He could tick it off against h i s debt to a fourth party, Lola-now Henry will owe that amount to her. Hence i s money born . Beca use there' s n o logical end to it. Say Sheila now wishes to acquire a pair of shoes fro m Edith; she can j ust hand Edith the IOU, and a s sure her that Henry i s good for i t . I n principle, there ' s no reason that the I O U could not continue

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 4 7

circulating around town for yea rs-provided people continue to have faith in Henry . In fact, if it goes on long enough , people might forget about the issuer entirel y . Things like this do happen . The anthropolo­ gist Keith H a rt once told me a story about h i s brother, who i n the 'sos was a British soldier stationed in Hong Kong. Soldiers used to pay their b a r tabs by writing checks on accounts back in England . Local mer­ chants would o ften simply endorse them over to each other and p a s s t h e m a r o u n d a s currenc y : o n c e , he saw one of h i s own checks, written six months before, on the counter of a local vendor covered with about forty different tiny inscriptions in Chinese.

What credit theorists like Mitchel l - I n nes were arguing i s that even if Henry gave Joshua a gold coin instead of a piece of paper, the situ­ ation would be essenti a l l y the same. A gold coin i s a promise to p a y so mething else o f equivalent value to a gold coin . After a l l , a g o l d coin i s not actually useful i n itself. One only accepts i t because one assumes other people w i l l .

I n t h i s s e n s e , t h e v a l u e of a u n i t of cu rrency i s not t h e measure of the value of an obj ect, but the measure of o n e ' s trust in other human beings .

This element of trust of course makes everything more compli­ cated. Early b anknotes circulated v i a a process a l most exactly like �hat I've j u st described, except that, like the Chinese merch ants, each recipient added h i s o r her signature to guarantee the debt's legiti macy. But genera l l y , the difficulty in the Chartalist position-th i s is what it came to be c a l led, fro m the Latin charta, or token-i s to esta b l i s h why p e o p l e would c o n t i n u e to t r u s t a p i e c e of paper. After a l l , why couldn't anyone j u st sign Henry ' s name on an I O U ? True, this sort of debt-token system might work within a s m a l l vill age w here every­ one knew one another, or even among a more d i spersed community like sixteenth-century Italian o r twentieth-century Chinese merchants, where everyone a t least had ways of keeping track of everybody else. But systems like these cannot create a fu l l - blown currency system, and there ' s no evidence that they ever have. Providing a sufficient n u m ber of IOUs to allow everyone even in a med i u m-sized c i ty to be able to carry out a significant portion of their d a i l y tra n s actions i n such c u r­ rency would req uire m i l l i o n s of tokens. 1 0 T o be a b l e to guarantee a l l of them, Henry would have to be a l most uni maginably rich.

A l l this would be much less of a pro b l e m , however, if Henry were, say, Henry II, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Lord of Irel a n d , and C o u n t of A n j o u .

T h e r e a l i mpetus for t h e Chartalist position , in fact, c a m e out of what came to be known a s the "German Historical Schoo l , " whose

4 8 D E B T

most fa mous exponent w a s the historia n G . F . K n a p p , whose State Theory of M oney first appeared i n 1905 . 1 1 I f money i s simply a u n i t of m e a s u r e , i t makes sense that emperors and kings should concern themselves with such m a tters . E mperors and kings are almost always concerned to establi shed uniform systems of weights and measures throughout their kingd o m s . It i s also true, a s Knapp ob served , that once established, such systems tend to remain remarkably stable over time. D uring the reign of the actual Henry I I ( 1 154-1 1 8 9 ) , j ust about everyone in Western Europe w a s sti l l keeping their accounts using the monetary system esta b l i s hed by Charlem agne some 350 years earlier­ that i s , using pounds, s h i l lings, and pence--despite the fact that some of these coins had never existed ( Charlemagne never actua l l y struck a s i l ver pound ) , none of Charlemagne's actual s h i l lings and pence re­ mained i n circulation , and those coins that did circulate tended to vary enormously i n size, weight, purity, and v a l u e Y According to the Chartalists, this does n ' t really m a tter. What m a tters i s that there i s a uniform system for measuring credits and debts, and that this system rema i n s stable over time. The case of Charlemagne' s currency i s par­ ticularly dramatic because h i s actual empire dissolved quite quickly, but the monetary system he created continued to be used, for keeping accounts, within h i s former territories for more than 8oo years . I t was referred to, i n the s ixteenth century, q uite explicitly as " i maginary money , " and derniers and livres were o n l y completely a b a ndoned, a s u n i t s of account, around t h e time of t h e French Revo l u tion Y

According to Knapp, whether or not the actua l , physical money stuff i n circulation corresponds to this " i m aginary money" i s not par­ ticularly important. It makes n o real difference whether i t ' s p u re sil­ ver, debased s ilver, leather tokens , or dried cod-provided the state is w i l l i ng to accept i t i n payment of taxes . Because w hatever the state was w i l ling to accept, for that rea son, became c urrency. One of the most important forms of currency in England i n Henry ' s time were notched " t a l l y sticks" used to record debts . Tally sticks were quite explicitly I O U s : both p a rties to a transaction would take a h a zelwood twig, notch i t to indicate the amount owed, and then split i t i n h alf. The creditor would keep one h alf, c a lled " the stock " (hence the origin of the term " stock holder " ) and the debtor kept the other, called "the stu b " (hence the origin of the term "ticket stub . " ) Tax assessors used such twigs to c al c u late a mounts owed b y local sheriffs . Often, though, rather than w a i t for the taxes to come due, Henry ' s excheq uer would often sell the tallies at a discount, and they would circulate, a s tokens of debt owed to the govern ment, to anyone willing to trade for them . 1 4

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 4 9

Modern banknotes actua l l y work on a s i m i l a r principle, except in reverseY Recall here the little parable about Henry ' s IOU. The reader might have noticed one puzzling aspect of the equation : the IOU can operate a s money only a s long a s Henry never pays his debt. I n fact this is precisely the logic on which the Bank of England-the first successful modern central bank-was origi n a l l y founded . I n 1694, a consortium of Engl ish bankers made a loan of £1 ,2oo,ooo to the k in g. In return they received a roy a l monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance I O U s for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any i n h a b itant of the kingdom willing to borrow fro m the m , o r willing to deposit their own money in the bank-in effect, to circulate or " monetize" the newly created royal debt. This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the king 8 percent annual interest for the origin al loan and s im u ltaneously charge i nterest on the s a m e money to the c l i ents who borrowed it) , but it o n l y worked a s long a s the original loan remained outstanding. To this d a y , this loan h a s never been paid b a c k . It cannot b e . If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist. 1 6

If n o t h i n g else, this a p p r o a c h helps s o l v e one of t h e obvious mys­ teries of the fiscal policy of so many early kingd o m s : Why did they make subj ects pay taxes at a l l ? This is not a question we're used to asking. The answer seems self-evident. Governments demand taxes be­ cause they wish to get their hands on people's money. But if S m ith w a s right, and g o l d and s i l v e r b e c a m e m o n e y through the n a t u r a l workings of the market comp letely independently of govern ments, then would n ' t t h e obvious thing b e to j u st g r a b control of t h e g o l d and s i l v e r mines ? Then the king would have a l l the money he could possibly need . I n fact, this i s what ancient k i n g s would normally d o . If t h e r e w e r e g o l d and s i l v e r mines in t h e i r terri tory, t h e y would u s u a l l y t a k e c o n t r o l of them. So what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping o n e's picture on it, causing i t to circulate among o n e ' s s u b j ects-and then demanding that those same subj ects give it back aga i n ?

This does seem a bit of a puzzle. But if money and m a rkets do not emerge spontaneously, it actually makes perfect sense. Because this i s t h e simplest and m o s t efficient way to b r i n g m a rkets i n t o being. Let us take a hypothetical example. Say a king wishes to support a stand­ ing army of fifty thousand men . Under ancient o r medieval conditi o n s , feed ing s u c h a force was an enormous problem-unless t h e y were o n t h e ma rch , one w o u l d need to e m p l o y a l most a s many men and a n i ­ m a l s j u st to l o c a t e , acquire, and transport the necessary provision s . 17 On the other h a n d , if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and

5 0 D E B T

then demands that every fa m i l y in the kingdom was o b l iged to p a y one of t h o s e coins back to you, one would, i n one b l o w , turn o n e ' s e n t i r e national e c o n o m y into a vast machine for t h e provisioning of soldiers, since now every fam i l y , in order to get their hands o n the c o i n s , must find some way to contri b u te to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. M arkets are brought into existence a s a side effect.

This i s a bit of a cartoon version, but it i s very clear that m a rkets did spring up around ancient armies; one need only take a glance at K a u t i l y a ' s Arthasasatra, the S a s s a n i a n " circle of sovereign ty , " or the Chinese " D i scourses on Salt and Iron" to di scover that most ancient rulers spent a grea t deal of their time thinking about the relation be­ tween mines, soldiers, taxes, and foo d . Most concluded that the cre­ ation of m a rkets o f this sort w a s not j ust convenient for feeding sol­ diers, but u seful in a l l sorts of ways, since it meant officials no longer had to requisition everything they needed directly from the populace, or figure out a way to produce i t on royal estates or roy a l workshops . I n other words, despite the dogged liberal a s s umption-aga i n , com­ ing from S m i t h ' s legacy-that the existence of states and m a rkets are somehow opposed, the historical record i m p l ies that exactly the op­ posite is the case. Stateless societies tend a l s o to be without m a rkets .

As one might i m agine, state theories of money have a l ways been an athema to m a i nstream economi sts working in the tradition of A d a m S m i t h . I n f a c t , Chart a l i s m h a s tended to be s e e n a s a populist underside of economic theory , favored m a i n ly b y crank s . 1 8 The curious thing i s that t h e m a i n stream economists often ended up actu a l l y w o r k i n g for governments and advising such governments to pursue p o l icies much like those the Chartalists described-that i s , tax policies designed to create markets where they had not existed before-despite the fact that they were in theory committed to S m i t h ' s argument that m arkets develop spontaneously of their own accord .

This w a s particularly true in the colonial world. To return to Mad­ agascar for a moment: I have a l ready mentioned that one of the first things that the French general G a l lien i , conqueror of Madagascar, did when the conquest of the i s l a n d was comp lete i n 1901 was to impose a head tax . Not only was this tax quite high, it was also o n l y payable i n newly i s sued Malagasy fran c s . I n other word s , G a llieni did indeed print money and then demand that everyone i n the country give some of that money b a ck to h i m .

M o s t striking of a l l , though, was l a nguage he u s e d to describe this tax. I t was referred to a s the "imp6t m o ralisateur, " the " educati o n a l " or " moralizing tax . " I n other word s , it w a s designed-to a d o p t the

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 5 1

language o f the day-to teach the natives the value of work . Since the " educational t a x " came due shortly a fter h a rvest time, the easiest way for farmers to p a y i t was to sell a portion of their rice crop to the Chinese o r Indian merchants who soon installed themselves i n s m a l l t o w n s across t h e country. However, h a rvest w a s w h e n t h e market price of rice w a s , for obvious reaso n s , a t its lowest; if one sold too much of one's crop, that meant one would not have enough left to feed one's fa m i l y for the entire year, and thus be forced to buy o n e ' s own r i c e back, on c r e d i t , fro m t h o s e s a m e merchants l a t e r in t h e y e a r w h e n p r i c e s w e r e much h i g h e r . As a r e s u l t , farmers q u i c k l y fel l hope­ lessly into debt (the merchants doubling a s loan sharks ) . The easiest ways to p a y back the debt w a s either to find some kind of cash crop to sell-to start growing coffee, or pineapples--or else to send o n e ' s chi ldren off to w o r k for w a g e s in t h e city, o r on one of the p lantations that French colonists were establishing across the island. The whole project might seem n o more than a cynical scheme to squeeze cheap labo r out of the peasantry, and it w a s that, but i t w a s also something more. The colonial government was were also q u i te explicit ( a t least in their own i n tern a l pol icy documents ) , about the need to make s u re that peasants had at least some money of their own left over, and to ensure that they became accustomed to the minor luxuries-parasol s, lip s t ic k, cookies-a v a i l a b l e a t the Chinese shops . It was crucial that th e y develop new tastes, habits, and expectati o n s ; that they lay the foundations of a consumer demand that would endure long after the conquerors had left, and keep Madagascar forever tied to Fran ce.

Most people are not stupid, and most Malagasy understood ex­ actly what the ir conquerors were trying to do to them . S o m e were determined to resist. More than sixty years after the i n v a s i o n , a French anthropologist, Gerard Althabe, was able to o bserve v i l l ages on the east coast of the i s l a n d whose i n h a bitants would dutifully show up at the coffee p l a ntations to earn the money for their poll tax, and then, having paid i t , stud i o u s l y ignore the w a res for s a l e a t the l ocal shops and i n stead turn over a n y remaining money to l i neage elders, who would then use i t to b u y cattle for sacrifice to their ancestors . 1 9 Many were quite open in saying that they saw themselves a s resisting a trap.

S t i l l , such defiance rarely lasts forever. Markets did gradually take shape, even i n those p a rts of the island where none h a d p reviously existed. With them c a m e the inevitable network of little shop s . And by the time I got there, i n 1990, a generatio n a fter the poll tax h a d fi n a l l y b e e n aboli shed b y a revolutionary government, the l o g i c of the m arket had become so intuitively accepted that even spirit mediu m s were recit­ ing passages that might a s well have come fro m Adam S m i t h .

5 2 D E B T

Such examples could be m u ltipl ied endlessl y. Something l i ke this occurred in j u st about every part of the world conquered by European arms where m a rkets were not a l ready i n place. R a ther than d i scovering b a rter, they ended up using the very tech niques that mainstream eco­ nomics rejected to bring something like the m a rket into being.

I n S e a rc h o f a M yt h

Anthropologists have been complaining about the Myth o f B arter for a l m o s t a century. Occasionally, economists point out with s light ex­ asperation that there ' s a fairly simple reason why they ' re still telling the s a m e story despite a l l the evidence against it: anthropologists have never come up with a better one.10 This i s an understandable o b j ecti o n , but there ' s a simple an swer to it. T h e reasons why anthropologists haven ' t been a b l e to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money i s because there ' s no reason to believe there could be one. Money w a s no more ever " i nvented " than music or mathematics or j ewelry. What we call " m oney" i s n ' t a " thing" at all, i t ' s a way of comparing things mathematic a l l y , a s proportio n s : of saying one of X i s e q u i v a l e n t to six of Y . As such it i s pro b a b l y as old a s h u m a n thought. The moment we try to get any more spec i fi c , we di scover that there are a n y number of different habits and practices that have converged in the stuff we now c a l l " m oney , " and this i s precisely the reason why economists, histori a n s , and the rest have fo und it so difficult to come up with a single defin ition.

Credit Theorists have long been hobb led by the lack of an equ a l l y compelling narrative. This is not to say t h a t a l l s i d e s in the currency debates that ra nged between 1 85 0 and 195 0 were not in the habit of deploying mythologi c a l weaponry . This was true particularly, perh a p s , in t h e Un ited S t a t e s . I n 1 8 94, the Green b a ckers, who pu shed for de­ taching the dollar fro m gold entirely to allow the government to spend freely on j o b -creation campaigns, invented the idea of the March o n Washi ngton-a n i d e a t h a t was to h a v e endless resonance i n U . S . his­ tory. L . Frank B a u m ' s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which ap­ pea red in 1900, i s widely recogn ized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of W i l l i a m Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform-vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would a l l o w the free creation of silver money alongside gold _ l l As with the G reenbackers, one of the main constitu­ encies fo r the movement was debtors : particularly, Midwestern farm

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 5 3

fa milies s u ch a s D o roth y ' s , who h a d been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1 8 9 o s . According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast b ankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply ) , the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn ' t have the brains to avoid the debt trap ) , the Tin Wood s m a n was the industrial proletariat (who didn ' t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers ) , the Cowardly Lion represented the political cl a ss ( who d i d n ' t have the courage to i ntervene) . The yellow brick roa d , si lver s l i ppers, emerald city, and hapless W i z a rd pres u m a bl y speak for themselve s . 22 " O z " is of course the standard a b b reviation for " o u n c e . " 23 As an attempt to create a new myth , B a u m ' s story w a s remarkably ef­ fective. As political propaganda , less s o . W i l l i a m Jennings Bryan fa iled in three attempts to win the presidency, the s i lver standard w a s never adopted , and few nowadays even remember what The Wonderful Wiz­ ard of Oz was origi n a l l y supposed to be a b o u t . 24

For state-money theorists in particular, this h a s been a problem . Stories about rulers using taxes to create m a rkets in conquered territo­ ries, or to pay for soldiers or other state functions, are not p articularly inspiring. German ideas of money a s the embodiment of national will did not travel very wel l .

Every time there w a s a m a j o r economic meltdown, however, con­ ventio n a l l a i ssez-faire economics took another hit. The Bryan cam­ paigns were born a s a reaction to the Panic of 1 8 93 . By the time of the Great D epress i o n of the 193 0 s , the very notion that the market could regulate itself, so long a s the government ensured that money w a s safe­ ly p egged to precious metal s , w a s completely d i scredited. From roughly 1933 to 1979, every m a j o r capitalist government reversed course and adopted some version of Keynes i a n i s m . Keynesian orthodoxy started fro m the a s s umption that capitalist markets would not really work unless capitalist governments were willing effectively to play n a n n y : most fa m o u s l y , b y engaging in m a ssive d e fi c i t " p ump-priming" during downturns. W hile in the ' 8o s , M a rgaret Thatcher i n Britain a n d Ron­ ald Reagan i n the United States made a great show of rej ecting a l l of this, it's unclear how much they really did.25 And i n a n y case, they were operating in the wake of an even greater blow to previous monetary orthodox y : Richard N i xo n ' s decision in 1971 to unpeg the dollar fro m precious metals entirely, e l i m i n a te t h e international g o l d standard, a n d introduce t h e system of floating currency regimes t h a t h a s dominated the world economy ever since. This meant i n effect that all national currencies were henceforth, a s neoclassical econo m i sts like to put it, " fi a t money" b acked only by the p u b l i c trust.

5 4 D E B T

Now, John Maynard Keynes himself was much more open to what he liked to c a l l the " a lternative traditi o n " of credit and state theories than any econo m i s t of that stature ( an d Keynes i s still arguably the sin­ gle most i mportant econo m i c thinker o f the twentieth century) before o r since. At certa i n points he i mmersed himself in it: he spent several years i n the 1920s studying Mesopota m i a n cuneiform banking records to try to ascertain the origins of money-h i s " Babylonian madness, " as he would later c a l l i t . 26 H i s conclusion, which he set forth at the very beginning of his Treatise on Money, his most fa mous work, w a s m o re o r less t h e only c o n c l u s i o n one c o u l d come to i f one sta rted n o t from fi r s t principles, b u t fro m a careful examination of t h e historical record : that the lunatic fringe w a s , essenti a l l y , right. Whatever its earli­ est origin s , for the last fou r thousand years, money h a s been effectively a creature of the state. Individuals, he observed, make contracts with one another. They take out debts, and they promise payment.

The State, therefore, comes i n first of all as the authority of law which enforces the payment of the thing which corresponds to the name or description in the contract. But it comes doubly when, in addition, it claims the right to determine and declare what thing corresponds to the name, and to vary its declara­ tion from time to ti me-when, that is to say it claims the right to re-edit the dictionary . This right is claimed by all modern States and has been so claimed for some four thousand years at least. It i s when this stage in the evolution of Money has been reached that Knapp's Chartalism-the doctrine that mon­ ey i s peculiarly a creation of the State-is fully realized . . . To-day all civilized money is, beyond the possibil ity of di spute, chartalist. 27

This does not mean that the state necessarily creates money . Mon­ ey i s credit, it can be brought into being by private contractu a l agree­ ments ( l o a n s , for instance ) . The state merely enforces the agreement and dictates the legal ter m s . Hence Keynes' next dramatic a s sertio n : t h a t b a n k s create money, and t h a t there i s no intrinsic l i m i t to their a b i l ity to d o so: since however much they lend, the borrower w i l l h a v e no choice b u t to put t h e m o n e y b a ck into some bank aga i n , and thus, from the perspective of the banking system a s a whole, the total number of debits and credits w i l l always cancel out.28 The implications were radic a l , but Keynes h i m self w a s not. I n the end, he was always c areful to fra m e the problem i n a way that could be reintegrated i n to the main stream economics of his d a y .

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 5 5

Neither was Keynes much of a mythmaker. In sofar a s the alterna­ tive tradition has come up with a n a n s wer to the Myth of Barter, it was not fro m Keynes' own efforts ( Keynes ultim ately decided that the origins of money were not p a rticularly important) but in the work of some contemporary neo-Keynesi a n s , who were not afraid to follow some of h i s more radical suggestions a s fa r as they would g o .

T h e real w e a k l i n k i n state-credit theories of money w a s a l ways t h e e l e m e n t of taxes. It i s one thing to explain why early states demanded taxes ( i n order to create markets . ) I t ' s another to ask " b y what righ t ? " Assuming t h a t early rulers were n o t s i m p l y thugs, and t h a t taxes were not simply extortion-and no Credit Theorist, to m y knowledge, took such a cynical view even of early government-one must ask how they j usti fied this sort of thing.

Nowadays, we a l l think we know the answer to this q uestio n . We pay our taxes s o that the government can provide u s with services . This starts with security services-m i l itary protection being, often , about the only service some early states were really a b l e to provide. By now, of course, the govern ment provides a l l sorts o f things . A l l of this i s s a i d to go b a c k t o some s o r t of original " so c i a l contract" t h a t everyone somehow agreed on, though no one rea l l y knows exactly when o r by w h o m , or why we should be bound by the deci s i o n s of distant ances­ tors on this one m a tter when we don ' t feel particularly bound b y the decisions of o u r distant ancestors on anything else.29 All of this makes sense if you assume that markets come before govern ments, but the whole argument totters quickly once you realize that they d o n ' t .

There i s an a l ternative e x p l a n a t i o n , one created to be i n keeping with the state-credit theory approa c h . It's referred to a s "primordial debt theo ry" and i t h a s been developed largely in France, by a team of researchers-not only economists but anthropologists, historians, and classici sts-origi n a l l y assemb led around the figures of Michel Aglietta and Andre O rleans ,30 and more recen tly, Bruno Theret, and it has since been taken up by neo- Keynes i a n s in the United States and the United Kingdom a s wei i Y

It's a position that h a s emerged q u i te recently, a n d at first, l a rgely amidst debates about the nature of the euro . The creation of a common European c urrency sparked not only a l l sorts of intellectual debates (does a common c u rrency necessarily imply the creation of a common European state? O r o f a common E u ropean economy or society ? Are these ultim ately the same thing ? ) but dramatic political ones a s wel l . T h e creation of t h e euro z o n e was spearheaded a bove a l l by Germany, whose central banks still see their m a i n goal a s combating inflation. W h a t ' s more, tight money policies and the need to balance b udgets

5 6 D E B T

having been used as the m a i n weapon to chip away welfare-state pol i­ cies i n Eu r o p e , it h a s necessarily become the stak e of political struggles between b a n kers and pensioners, creditors and debtors, j ust a s heated a s those of r 8 9os America.

The core argument i s that any attempt to separate monetary policy fro m social policy i s ultim ately wrong. Primord i a l -debt theorists i n s i s t that these have always b e e n t h e same thing. Governments use t a x e s to create money, and they a re able to do so because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one a n other. This debt is the essence of society itself. I t exists long before money and m a rkets, and money and markets themselves are simply ways of chopping pieces of it up.

At first, the argument goes , this sense of debt was expressed not through the state, b u t through religio n . To make the argument, Aglietta and Orleans fixed on certain works of early Sanskrit religious l i terature : the h y m n s , prayers, and poetry col lected in the Vedas and the Bra h m a ­ n a s , priestly com mentaries composed o v e r t h e centuries t h a t followed, texts that are now considered the foundations of Hindu thought. It's not a s odd a choice a s i t might seem. These texts constitute the earliest known historical reflections o n the nature of debt.

Actu a l l y , even the very earliest Vedic poems, composed sometime between 1500 and 1200 BC, evince a constant concern with debt-which i s treated a s synonymous with guilt and s i n Y There a re n u merous prayers pleading with the gods to l iberate the worshipper from the shackles o r bonds of debt. Sometimes these seem to refer to debt i n the literal sense-Rig Veda 10 .34, for instance, h a s a lorig description of the s a d plight of gamblers who " w ander homeless, i n constant fear, i n debt, a n d seeking money . " Elsewhere i t ' s clearly metaphori c a l .

I n these hymns, Y a m a , t h e g o d of d e a t h , figures prominently. To be i n debt w a s to have a weight p l aced on you by Death. To be under any sort of unfulfilled o b l igation, any unkept promise, to gods or to men, was to live in the shadow of Death . O ften, even i n the very early text s , debt seems to stand in for a broader sense of inner s u ffering, fro m which one begs the gods-particularly Agni , who represents the sacri fi c i a l fire-for release. It w a s only with the Brahmanas that com­ mentators started trying to weave a l l this together into a more com­ prehensive philosophy. The conclusion : that human existence i s itself a form o f debt.

A man, being born, i s a debt; by his own self he i s born to Death, and only when he sacrifices does he redeem himself from Death .33

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 5 7

S acrifice ( a n d these early commentators were themselves sacrifici a l priests) is t h u s c a l led " tribute p a i d to Death . " O r such was t h e manner of speaking. I n reality, a s the priests knew better than anyone, sacrifice was di rected to a l l the god s , not j ust Death-Death w a s j ust the inter­ mediary. Framing things this way, though, did i m mediately raise the one problem that always comes u p , whenever anyone conceives h u m a n life through such an idi o m . If o u r lives are on l o a n , who w o u l d actually wish to repay such a debt ? To live in debt i s to be guilty, incomplete. But completion can only mean a n n i h i l a t i o n . I n this way, the " tribute" of sacri fice could be seen a s a kind of i n terest payment, with the l i fe of the a n i m a l s u b stituting temporarily for w h a t ' s really owed , which i s ourselves-a m e r e postponement of the inevitable .34

D i fferent com mentators proposed different ways out of the d i l e m ­ m a . Some a m bitious B r a h m i n s b e g a n telling t h e i r clients that sacrificia l ritu a l , if done correctly, promi sed a w a y to break o u t of t h e h u m a n condition entirely and achieve eternity ( s i n c e , in the face of eternity, a l l d e b t s become meaningles s . ) 35 Another way was to broaden t h e notion of debt, so that a l l social respo n s i b i l ities become debts of one sort or another. Thus two fa mous passages in the Brah m a n a s insist that we are born a s a debt not j ust to the god s , to be repaid in sacrifice, but also to the Sages who created the Vedic learning to begin with, which we must repay through stud y ; to our an cestors ( " the Fathers " ) , who we must repay by having children; and fi n a l l y , " t o men "-apparently meaning h u m a n ity a s a whole, to be repaid by offering hospitality to strangers .36 Anyone, then, who lives a proper life i s constantly paying back existential debts of one sort or another; but at the same time, a s t h e n o t i o n of debt s l ides back into a simple s e n s e of social o b l igati o n , it becomes something fa r l e s s terrifying than t h e s e n s e t h a t o n e ' s very existence i s a loan taken against Death .37 Not least because social o b ­ ligations always cut b o t h w a y s . Espec i a l l y s i n c e , o n c e one h a s oneself fathered children, one i s j ust a s much a debtor a s a credi tor.

What prim ordial-debt theorists have done i s to propose that the ideas encoded in these Vedic texts are not pecu l i a r to a certain intel­ lectual tradition of early I ron Age ritual specialists in the G a nges val­ ley, but that they are essential to the very nature and hi story of h u m a n thought. Consider for e x a m p l e this statement, fro m an e s s a y by French economist Bruno Theret with the uninspiring title "The Socio-Cultural D i mensions of the Cu rrency : I m p l ications for the Transition to the Euro , " publ ished in the Journal of Consumer Policy i n 1999:

At the origin of money we have a " relation of representa­ tion " of death as an invisible world, before and beyond life--a

5 8 D E B T

representation that is the product of the symbolic function proper to the human species and which envisages birth as an original debt incurred by all men, a debt owing to the cosmic powers from which humanity emerged .

Payment of this debt, which can however never be settled on earth-because its fu ll reimbursement is out of reach-takes the form of sacrifices which, by rep lenishing the credit of the living, make it possible to prolong life and even in certain cases to achieve eternity by j o ining the Gods. But this initial belief­ claim is also associ ated with the emergence of sovereign powers whose legiti macy resides in their ability to represent the entire original cosmos. And it i s these powers that invented money as a means of settling debts-a means whose abstraction makes it possible to resolve the sacrificial paradox by which put­ ting to death becomes the permanent means of protecting life. Through this institution, belief is in turn tran sferred to a cur­ rency stamped with the effigy of the sovereign-a money put in circulation but whose return is organized by this other institu­ tion which is the tax/settlement of the life debt. So money also takes on the function of a means of payment.38

If nothing else, this provides a neat i l lustration of how different are standards o f debate i n Europe fro m those current i n the Anglo­ A merican w o r l d . O n e can't imagine a n American economist o f any stripe writing s o m ething like t h i s . S t i l l , the author i s actually making a rather clever synthesis here. H u m a n nature does not drive us to " truck and b arter . " Rather, i t ensures that we are a l w a y s creating s y m b o l s­ such as money itself. This is how we come to see ourselves in a c o s m o s surrounded by invisible fo rce s ; a s i n debt to the u n i v e r s e .

The ingen i o u s m ove o f course i s to fol d this back into the state theory of money-since by " sovereign powers " Theret actually means " the state . " The first kings were s acred kings who were either gods in their own right o r stood a s privileged mediators between h u m a n beings and the ultimate forces that governed the cosmos. This sets u s on a road to the gradual realization that our debt to the gods w a s a l w a y s , really, a debt to the society that m a d e u s what we are.

The "primordial debt , " writes British sociologist Geoffrey Ingham, "is that owed b y the living to the continuity and dura b i lity o f the soci­ ety that secures their individual existence. "39 I n this sense i t i s not j ust c r i m i n a l s who owe a "debt to society "-we are a l l , in a certain sense, guilty, even c r i m i n a l s .

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 5 9

For instance, Ingham notes that, while there i s no actual proof that money emerged i n this way, " there is considerable indirect ety m o l ogi­ cal evidence " :

I n all I ndo-European l anguages , words for " debt" are synony­ mous with those for " s i n " o r "gu i l t " , illustrating the links be­ tween religion , payment and the mediation of the sacred and profane realms by "money . " For example, there is a connection between money (German Geld ) , i ndemnity or sacrifice (Old English Geild) , tax (Gothic Gild) and, of course, guilt .40

O r , to take another curious connectio n : Why were cattle so often used a s money ? The German h i storian Bernard Laum long ago pointed out that i n Homer, when people measure the v a l u e of a ship or suit of armor, they always measure it in oxen-even though when they actu­ a l l y exchange things, they never pay fo r anything i n oxen . It i s hard to escape the conclusion that this was because an ox w a s what one of­ fered the gods in sacrifice. Hence they represented absolute v a l u e . From S u mer to Classical G reece, s ilver and gold were dedicated a s offerings i n tem p l e s . Everywhere, money seems to have emerged from the thing most appropriate for giving to the gods.41

I f the king h a s simply taken over guardianship of that primordial debt we a l l owe to society for having created u s , this provides a very neat expl a n a ti o n for why the govern ment feels it h a s the right to make us pay taxes . Taxes a re j ust a measure of o u r debt to the society that made us. But this doesn ' t really explain how this kind of absol ute life­ debt can be converted into money, which i s by definition a mean s of measuring and comparing the value of different things . This i s j ust as much a problem for credit theorists a s for neoclassical economists, even i f the problem for them i s somewhat differently framed . If you start from the b a rter theory of money, you have to resolve the problem of how and why you would come to select one c o mmodity to measure j ust how much you want each of the other ones. I f you start fro m a credit theory , you are left with the problem I described i n the first chapter: how to turn a moral obligation into a specific sum of money, how the mere sense of owing someone else a favor can eventually turn into a system of accounting in which one is a b l e to calcul ate exactly how many sheep or fish or chunks of silver it would take to repay the debt. O r i n this case, how do we go fro m that a b s o l ute debt we owe to God to the very specific debts we owe o u r cousins, o r the b a rtender ?

The answer p rovided by primordial-debt theorists i s , aga i n , i nge­ nious. I f taxes represent our absol ute debt to the society that created

6 0 D E B T

u s , then the first step toward creating real money comes when we start c a l c u l ating much more specific debts to society, systems of fines, fee s , and p e n a l t i e s , or e v e n d e b t s we owe to specific i n d i v i d u a l s who w e h a v e wronged i n some way, a n d thus to w h o m we s t a n d in a relation of " s i n " or "gu il t . "

This i s actually much less i m p l a u s i b l e than it might s o u n d . O n e o f the puzzling things about a l l the theories about the origins o f money that we've been looking at so fa r is that they a l most comp letely ig­ nore the evidence of anthropology . Anthropologists do have a great deal of knowledge of how economies within stateless societies actu a l l y worked-how t h e y still work i n p l aces w h e r e s t a t e s and m a rkets h a v e b e e n unable to completely b r e a k up existing ways of doing things . There are i n n u merable studies of, say, the use of cattle as money i n eastern or southern A fric a , of shell money in t h e A m e r i c a s ( w a m p u m b e i n g t h e most fa mous example) or Papua N e w G u inea, b e a d money, feather money , the use of iron rings, cowries, spondylus shells, brass rod s , or woodpecker s c a l p s . 42 The reason that this literature tends to be ign ored by economists i s s i m p l e : " p r i m i tive currencies" of this sort is only rarely used to buy and sell things, and even when they are, never p r i m a rily to buy and sell everyday items such a s chickens or eggs or shoes or potatoe s . R a ther than being employed to acquire things, they are m a i n l y used to rearrange relations between people. Above a l l , to a rrange ma rriages a n d to settle disputes, particularly those arising fro m murders or personal i n j ury.

There i s every reason to believe that o u r own money sta rted the s a m e way-even the English word " to p a y " is originally derived fro m a w o r d for "to pacify , appease "-as i n , to give someone so mething precious, fo r instance, to express j u st how badly you feel about having j ust k i l l ed h i s brother i n a drunken brawl, and how much you would rea l l y like to avoid this beco ming the basis for a n ongoing blood -feud .43

Debt theorists a re espec i a l l y concerned with this l a tter possibil­ ity . This i s p a rtly because they tend to skip past the anthropological literature and look a t early law codes-taking i n spiration here, fro m t h e groundbreaking work of one of t h e twen tieth century ' s greatest n u ­ m i s matists, Philip Grierson , who i n t h e '7o s , fi r s t suggested t h a t money might first have emerged fro m early legal practice. Grierson was a n e x p e r t in t h e European D a rk Ages , and he b e c a m e fascinated by w h a t have come to be known as t h e " Barbarian Law Code s , " establi shed by m a n y Germanic peoples after the destruction of the Roman Empire i n the 6oos and 7oos-Goths, Frisians, Franks, and so on-soon fo llowed by s i m i l a r codes publ ished everywhere fro m Russia to Ireland. Cer­ tainly they a re fa scinating documents . O n the one hand, they make it

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 6 1

abundantly clear j ust how wrong are conventi o n a l accounts of Europe around this time " reverting to b a rter . " Al most a l l of the Germanic law codes use Roman money to make assessments ; penalties for theft, for i n stance, are almost always fol l owed b y demands that the thief not only return the stolen property but pay any outstanding rent (or i n the event of stolen money, i nterest) owing for the a mount of time it has been i n h i s possession . On the other hand, these were soon fol lowed b y l a w c o d e s by p e o p l e living in territories that had n e v e r been u n d e r Ro­ m a n rule--in Ireland, Wales, Nordic countries, R u s s i a-and these are i f anything even more revea ling. They could be remark abl y creative, both i n what could be used a s a means of payment and o n the precise breakdown of i n j uries and insults that required compensati o n :

Co mpensation in t h e Welsh laws i s reckoned pri marily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal) , with considerable use of precious metals in both . In the Germanic codes it i s mainly in p recious metal . . . In the Russian codes it was silver and furs, graduated from marten down to squirrel . Their detai l is remarka ble, not only in the personal inj uries envis ioned-specific compensations for the loss of an arm, a hand, a forefinger, a nail, for a blow on the head so that the brain is visible or bone proj ects-but in the coverage some of them gave to the possessions of the individual househol d . Title I I of the Salic Law deals with the theft of pigs, Title III with cattle, Title IV with sheep , Title V with goats, Title VI with dogs, each time with an elaborate breakdown differenti ating between animals of different age and sex .44

This does make a great deal of psychological sense. I ' v e a l ready remarked how difficult i t i s to i magine how a system of precise equivalences-one young healthy milk cow is equiva lent to exactly thirty-six chickens-could arise fro m most forms of gift exchange. If Henry gives Joshua a pig and feels he h a s received an i n adequate counter-gift, he might mock Joshua a s a cheapskate, b u t he would have little occasion to come up with a mathematical fo rmula for precisely how cheap he feels Joshua has been . O n the other hand, i f J o s h u a ' s pig j ust destroyed Henry ' s garden, and especia l l y , if that led to a fight in which Henry lost a toe, and Henry ' s fa m i l y i s now hauling Joshua up i n front of the village assembly-this i s precisely the context where people are most l i kely to become petty and legalistic and express out­ rage i f they feel they have received one groat less than was their right­ fu l due. That means exact mathematical specificity : for i n stance, the

6 2 D E B T

capacity to measure the exact value of a two-year-old pregn ant s o w . W h a t ' s more, t h e levying of penalties must have constantly requ i red the calculation of equiva lences . Say the fine is in m a rten pelts but the culprit's clan does n ' t have any m a rten s . How many squirrel skins w i l l do ? O r p i e c e s of s i l v e r j ewelry ? Such p r o b l e m s must h a v e come up a l l t h e t i m e and l e d to at l e a s t a rough -and-ready s e t of r u l e s of t h u m b o v e r what s o r t s of valuable w e r e e q u i v a l e n t to other s . This w o u l d help exp l a i n why, for i n s t a n c e , m e d i e v a l Welsh law c o d e s can contain detai led breakdowns not only of the value of different ages and condi­ tions of m i l k cow, but of the monetary value of every obj ect likely to be found in an ord i n a ry homestead, down to the cost of each piece of t i m ber-despite the fact that there seems no rea son to believe that most such items could even be purcha sed on the open m a rket a t the time.45

I I I I I

There is so mething very compelling in a l l this. For one thing, the prem­ ise m a kes a great deal of intuitive sense. A fter all, we do owe every­ thing we are to others. This i s simply true. The l anguage we speak and even think i n , our h a bits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flu sh, even the style i n which we c a rry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions-a l l of this, we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to i m agine what we owe them a s a d e b t , it c o u l d o n l y be infinite. T h e question i s : D oes i t really make sense to think of this a s a debt? After all, a debt i s by definition some­ thing that we could at least i m agine paying back. It i s strange enough to wish to be square with one's pa rents-it rather i m p l ies that one does not wish to think of them a s p a rents any more. Would we really want to be square with all h u m a n i ty ? What would that even mean ? And i s this d e s i r e rea lly a fun d a mental feature of a l l h u m a n though t ?

Another way to put t h i s w o u l d b e : A r e primordial-debt theo rists describing a myth, have they d i scovered a profound truth o f the hu­ man condition that h a s always exi sted i n a l l societies, and i s it simply spelled out p a rticularly clearly in certa in ancient texts from India-or are they inventing a myth of their own ?

Clearly it must be the l a tter. They are inventing a myth. The choice of the Vedic m a terial i s

· significant. The fact i s , we

know almost nothing about the people who composed these texts and little about the society that created them . 46 We d o n ' t even know if

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 6 3

interest-bea ring l o a n s existed in Vedic India-which obviously h a s a bearing on whether priests rea l l y saw sacrifice as the payment of inter­ est on a loan we owe to Death . 47 A s a result, the materi a l can serve as a kind of empty canvas, or a canvas covered with hieroglyphics in an unknown l a nguage, on which we can project a l most anything we want to . If we look at other ancient civilizations i n which we d o know some­ thing about the l a rger context, we find that no such notion of sacrifice a s payment is i n evidence.48 I f we look through the work of ancient theolog i a n s , we find that most were fa m i l i a r with the idea that sacrifice was a way by which human beings could enter into com merc i a l rela­ tions with the god s , but that they felt it was patently ridicul o u s : I f the gods a l ready have everyth ing they want, what exactly do humans have to bargain with ?49 We've seen in the last chapter how d i fficult i t i s to give gifts to kings . With gods {let alone God) the problem i s magni fied infinitel y . Exchange implies equality . I n dealing with cosmic forces, this was simply assumed to be impossible from the start.

The notion that debts to gods were appropri ated b y the state, and thus became the bases for taxation systems, c a n ' t rea l l y stand up either. The problem here i s that i n the ancient world, free citizens didn't u s u a l l y pay taxes. Generally speaking, tribute w a s levied only on conquered populati o n s . This was a l ready true in ancient Mesopota m i a , where t h e inhabitants of independent c i t i e s did not u s u a l l y h a v e to p a y direct t a x e s at a l l . S i m i l arly, a s M o s e s Fin ley put it, " Classical G reeks looked upon direct taxes a s tyra nnical and avoided them whenever pos­ si ble.50 Athenian citizens did not pay direct taxes of any sort; though the city did sometimes di stribute money to its citizen s , a kind of reverse taxation-sometimes directly, a s with the proceeds of the Laurium s i l ­ v e r mines, and sometimes ind irectly , a s through generous fees for j ury duty or attending the assem b l y . Subj ect cities, however, did have to pay tribute. Even within the Persian Empire, Pers i a n s did not have to pay tribute to the Great King, but the inha bitants of conquered provinces did.51 The same was true in Rome, where for a very long time, Roman citizens not only paid no taxes but had a right to a s h a re of the tribute levied on others, i n the form of the dole-the " b read " part of the fa­ mous " b read and circuses. "52

I n other words, Benj a m i n Franklin was wrong when he said that in this world nothing is certa in except death and taxes . This obviously makes the idea that the debt to one is j u s t a variation on the other much h a rder to maintai n .

N o n e o f t h i s , however, deals a mortal b l o w t o t h e state theory of money . Even those states that did not demand taxes did levy fees, penalties, ta riffs , and fines of one sort or another. But i t is very h a rd

6 4 D E B T

to reconc i l e with a n y theory that c l a i m s states were first conceived a s g u a r d i a n s of some sort of c o s m i c , p r i m o r d i a l d e b t .

I t ' s curious that primordial-debt theorists n e v e r have much to say a b o u t S u mer or B a b y l o n i a , despite the fact that Mesopot a m i a i s where the practice of loaning money at i n terest was first invented, probably two thousand years before the Vedas were composed-an d that i t was also the home of the worl d ' s first state s . But if we look into Mesopo­ tamian history, i t becomes a little less surprising. Aga i n , what we find there i s i n many ways the exact opposite of what such theorists would have predicted .

The reader w i l l rec a l l here that Mesopotam i a n city-states were d o m i n ated by vast Temples : gigantic , complex industrial institutions often staffed by thousands-including everyone from shepherds and b a rge-pullers to spinners and weavers to dancing girls and clerical ad­ m i n istrator s . B y a t least 2700 BC, ambitious rulers had begun to i m itate them by creating p a l ace complexes organ i zed on s i m i l a r terms-with the exception that where the Temples centered on the sacred chambers of a god or goddes s , represented by a sacred i m age who w a s fed and clothed and entertained by priestly servants a s if he or she were a liv­ ing person . P alaces centered on the c h a m bers of a n actual live king. S umerian rulers rarely went so far a s to declare themselves gods , but they often came very close. However, when they did i nterfere i n the lives of their subj ects in their capacity a s cosmic rulers, they did not do i t by i m p o sing public debts, but rather by canceling private ones .53

We d o n ' t know precisely when and how i n terest-bearing l o a n s originated, since t h e y a p p e a r to predate writing. M o s t l i k e l y , Temple a d m i nistrators invented the idea a s a w a y of financing the caravan trade. This trade w a s crucial because while the river valley of ancient Mesopota m i a was extraordinarily fertile and produced huge surpluses of grain and other foodstuffs , and supported enormous n u m bers of livestock, which i n turn supported a vast wool and leather indu stry , i t w a s a l m o s t c o mpletely lacking i n a n y t h i n g else. S t o n e , wood, meta l , even the s i lver used a s money, a l l h a d to be imported . From quite early times, then, Temple admini strators developed the habit of advancing goods to l o c a l merchants-some of them private, others themselves Temple functionaries-who would then go off and sell i t overseas. I n terest w a s j ust a way for the Temples to tak e their share of the re­ sulting profits .54 However, once established, the principle seems to have quickly spread . Before long, we find not only c o mmerc i a l l o a n s , but also consumer loans-usury i n the c l a s s i c a l sense of the ter m . B y c24oo BC i t a l ready appears to have been common practice on the p a rt of lo­ c a l offi c i a l s , o r wealthy merchants, to advance loans to peasants who

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 6 5

were i n financial trouble on collateral and begin to appropriate their posses s io ns if they were unable to p a y . It usually sta rted with grai n , sheep, goats, a n d fu rniture, then moved o n to fields a n d houses, o r , a l ­ ternately or ultim ately, fa mily members. Servants, if a n y , went quickly, fol lowed by children, wives, a n d i n some extre me occ a s i o n s , even the borrower hi mself. These would be reduced to debt-peo n s : not quite slaves, but very close to that, forced into perpetual service in the lend­ e r ' s househo ld-or, s o meti mes, in the Temples o r P a l a ces them selves . In theory, of course, any of them could be redeemed whenever the bor­ rower repaid the money, b u t for obvious rea s o n s , the more a pe asant' s resources were stripped away fro m h i m , the h a rder that be came .

The effects were such that they often threatened to rip society apart. I f fo r any reason there was a bad harvest, l arge proportions of the peasantry would fal l into debt peonage; fa milies would be bro­ ken up. Before long, lands lay a bandoned a s i ndebted fa rmers fled their homes for fea r of repossession and j o ined semi-nomadic bands o n the desert fringes of u r b a n civilizati o n . Faced with the potential for comp lete social breakdown, Sumerian and l a ter Babylonian k i ngs period i c a l ly an nou nced general amnesties: " c l e a n slates , " a s economic historian Michael H udson refers to the m . Such decrees would typi cal l y dec lare a l l outstanding consumer debt n u l l and void (com mercial d e bts were not a ffected ) , return a l l land to its origi n a l owners, and a l l o w a l l debt-peons to return to t h e i r fa mil ies . Before long, it b e c a m e more or less a reg u l a r habit fo r kings to make such a declaration on first as­ suming power, a n d many were forced to repeat i t periodically over the course of their reign s .

In Sumeria, these were called " declarations of freed o m "-a nd i t i s significant that t h e Sumerian word amargi, t h e first recorded word for " freed o m " i n any known human language, literally means " return to mother"-since this i s what freed debt-peon s were finally a l l owed to do .55

Michael Hudson argues that Mesopota m i a n kings were only in a position to do this because of their cosmic prete n s i o n s : in taking power, they saw them selves a s literally recreating human society, and so were i n a position to wipe the slate clean of a l l previous moral ob­ ligations . Sti l l , this i s about a s far from what primordial-debt theorists had in mind as one could possibly i m agine .56

I I I I I

Probably the biggest problem in this whole body of literature is the i n i ­ tial assumpti o n : that we b e g i n with a n i n fi n i t e debt t o something c a l l e d

6 6 D E B T

" society . " I t ' s this debt to society that we project onto the god s . I t ' s this s a me debt that then gets taken up by kings and national govern ments.

What makes the concept of society so deceptive i s that we a s s u m e the world i s organ ized into a series of c o m p a c t , modular units c a l led " societies , " and that all people know which one they ' re i n . Histori­ cally, this i s very rarely the case. I m agine I a m a Christian Armenia!) merchant living under the reign of Genghis Khan. What i s " society" for m e ? I s i t the city where I grew u p , the society of i n tern ational merchants (with its own elaborate codes of conduct) within which I conduct my d a i l y a ffairs, other speakers of Armen i a n , Christendom (or maybe j ust Orthodox Christendom) , o r the i n h a b itants of the Mongol empire itself, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Kore a ? His­ tori c a l l y , kingdoms and empires have rarely been the most important reference points i n peop les' lives . Kingdoms rise and fa l l ; they also strengthen and weaken ; governments may make their presence known i n peop l e ' s lives quite sporad i c a l l y , and many people i n h i story were never entirely clear whose government they were actu a l l y in. Even u ntil q u i te recently, m a n y of the world ' s i n h a bitants were never even qu ite s u re what country they were supposed to be i n , or why i t should mat­ ter. My mother, who was born a Jew i n Poland, once told me a j oke fro m her chi ldhood :

There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged . One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers ap­ proached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby h i l l .

"So where a r e w e , Russia o r Poland ?" "According to our calculations, your village now begins ex­

actly thirty-seven meters into Poland . " The villagers immedi ately began dancing for joy. "Why ? " the surveyors asked . "What difference does it

make ? " " Don' t you know what this means ? " they replied. "It means

we' l l never have to endure another one of those terrible Rus­ sian winters ! "

However, if we are born with an i n fi n ite debt to a l l those people who made our existence possible, but there i s n o natural unit c a l led " society "-then who or what exactly d o we rea l l y owe i t to ? Everyone ? Everyth i n g ? Some people or things m o re than others ? A n d how d o we

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 6 7

pay a debt to something so diffu s e ? O r , perhaps more to the point, who exactly can c l a i m the authority to tell u s how we can repay it, and on what groun d s ?

If we frame the problem that w a y , the authors of the Brahmanas are offering a quite sophi sticated reflection on a moral question that no one has rea l l y ever been a b l e to answer any better before or since. A s I say, we c a n ' t know much about the conditions under which those texts were composed, but such evidence a s w e d o have s uggests that the crucial do c u m e nts date fro m sometime between soo a n d 400 Be-that is, roughly the t i m e o f Socra tes-w h i c h i n India appears to have been j us t around the t i m e that a commercial econo m y , and i n stitutions like c o i n ed m o ney a n d i nterest-bearing loans were begin n i n g to become features of every d a y l i fe . The intellectual classes of the t i m e were, m u c h a s they were i n Greece a n d C h i n a , grapp l i n g w i t h the i m p l i c a ­ tion s . I n t h e i r c a s e , t h i s m e a n t a s k i n g : What does it m e a n to i m ag i n e o u r resp o n s i b i l i t i e s a s debts ? To w h o m do w e owe o u r exi stence ?

I t ' s significant that their answer did not make any mention either of " society" or states (though certainly kings and govern ments certai n l y existed i n e a r l y Indi a ) . I n s t e a d , t h e y fi x e d on d e b t s t o g o d s , t o s a g e s , t o fathers, and to " m en . " It wouldn't be at a l l difficult to translate their formulation into more contemporary language. We could put i t this w a y . We owe our exi stence above a l l :

• To the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual : ritual be­ ing an act of respect and recognition to all that beside which we are small. 57

• To those who have created the knowledge and cultural accom­ pli shments that we value most; that give our existence its form, its meaning, but also its shape. Here we would include not only the p h i losophers and scientists who created our intellectual tradition but everyone from William Shakespeare to that long-since-forgotten woman, somewhere in the Middle East, who created leavened bread . We repay them by becoming learned ourselves and contributing to human knowledge and human culture.

• To our parents, and their parents-our ancestors . We repay them by becoming ancest.ors.

• To humanity as a whole. We repay them by generosity to strang­ ers, by maintaining that basic communistic ground of sociality that makes human relations, and hence life, possible.

6 8 D E B T

Set o u t this w a y , though, the a rgument begin s to undermine its very premise. These a re nothing like com mercial debts. After all, one might repay one's p a rents b y having children, b u t one i s n o t gener­ ally thought to have repaid one's creditors if o n e lends the cash t o s o meone e l s e . 5 8

Myself, I w o n d e r : C o u l d n ' t that r e a l l y be the p o i n t ? Perhaps w h a t the authors o f the B r a h m a n a s w e r e really demon strating was that, in the final analysis, o u r relation with the c o s m o s i s u l t i m a tely nothing like a commercial transaction, n o r could i t b e . That i s because commercial transactions i m p l y both equality and separati o n . These examples are a l l a b o u t overcoming sep a r a ti o n : you are free fro m y o u r debt to your ancestors when y o u become an ancesto r ; you are free fro m y o u r debt to the sages when you become a sage, y o u are free fro m y o u r debt to h u m a nity when y o u act with humanity. A l l the m o re s o if one i s speak­ ing o f the universe. I f you cannot bargain with the gods because they a l ready have everything, then you certainly cannot bargain with the un iverse, because the universe is everythi ng-and that everything neces­ s a r i l y includes you rself. O n e could in fact interpret this list a s a subtle w a y of saying that the o n l y way o f " freeing oneself" fro m the debt was n o t l i tera l l y repaying debts, b u t rather showing that these debts do not exist because o n e is not in fact sep a r a te to begin with, and hence that the very notion of canceling the debt, and achieving a separate, autonomous existence, was ridiculous fro m the s t a r t . O r even that the very presumption o f positing oneself a s separate fro m h u m a nity or the c o s m o s , s o much s o that one can enter into one-to-one deal ings with it, is itself the crime that can be an swered only by death . O u r guilt is n o t due to the fact that we cannot rep a y o u r debt to the universe. O u r g u i l t is o u r presumption in thinking o f o u rselves a s being in a n y sense a n equivalent to Everything Else that Exists o r H a s Ever Existed, s o as to be able to conceive o f such a debt in the first place.59

Or let us look at the other side of the equation . Even if it is pos­ s i b l e to imagine o u r selves a s standing in a position of a b s o lute debt to the cosmos, o r to humanity, the next question beco mes: Who exactly h a s a right to speak fo r the cosmos, o r humanity, to tell u s how that debt must be repa id ? I f there ' s anything m o re p reposterous than claim­ ing t o stand apart fro m the entire universe so a s to enter into negotia­ tion s with i t , i t i s c l a i ming to speak for the other side.

If one were looking fo r the ethos for a n individ u a listic society such a s o u r o w n , one way to do it might well be to say: we a l l owe a n i n fi n i te debt to hu m an ity, society, nature, or the c o s m o s ( however one prefers to fra m e it) , but n o one else could p o s s i b l y tell u s how we are to pay it. This a t least would be intel lectually consi stent. If s o , it would a c t u a l l y

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 6 9

be possible to see a l m o s t a l l systems of esta b l ished a uthority-religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal-j ustice system-as so many different fraudulent ways to presume to cal culate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that u n l i m i ted debt ought to be rep a i d . H u m a n freedo m would then be our a b i l ity to decide for ourselves how we want to do s o .

No one, to m y knowledge, has e v e r taken t h i s approach . I n ­ s t e a d , theories of existentia l d e b t always e n d up becoming wa-y s of j ustify ing-or laying claim to-structures of a uthority . The case of the Hindu intellectual tradition i s telling here . The debt to h u m a nity appears only i n a few early texts, and i s quickly forgotten . Almost a l l l a t e r Hindu commentators ignore it and i nstead p u t t h e i r e m p h a s i s o n a m a n ' s d e b t to h i s father .60

I I I I I

Primord i a l -debt theorists have other fish to fry . They are not really interested i n the cosmos, but actual l y , in " society . "

Let m e return again t o that word, " society . " The reason that it seems like s u ch a simple, self-evident concept i s because we mostly use it a s a synonym for " n ation . " After all, when Americans speak of paying their debt to society, they a re not thinking of their resp o n s i b i l i ­ t i e s to p e o p l e who live in S weden . I t ' s only the modern s t a t e , with i t s elaborate border controls and soci a l p o l i c i e s , that enables u s to i m agine " society " i n this way, as a single bounded entity. This i s why proj ect­ ing that notion backwards into Vedic or Medieval times will always be deceptive, even though we d o n ' t really have another word .

It seems to me that this is exactly what the primord i a l -debt theo­ rists are doing: proj ecting such a notion backwards .

Really, the whole complex of ideas they are talking about-the notion that there i s this thing cal led society, that we have a debt to it, that governments can speak for it, that it can be i m agined as a sort of secul a r god-al l of these ideas emerged together around the time of the French Revolution, or in its i m m ediate wake. I n other word s , i t was born a longside the idea of the modern nation-state.

We can a l ready see them c o m i n g together clearly i n the work of Auguste Comte, i n early n i neteen th-century France. Comte, a phi­ losopher and political p a m p h leteer n o w m o s t fa m o u s for h a v i n g first coined the term " sociology , " went so fa r , b y the end of h i s l i fe , a s actu a l l y proposing a R e l i g i o n o f S o c i ety, w h i c h he c a lled P o s i t i v i s m ,

7 0 D E B T

broadly modeled on Medieval Catholi c i s m , rep lete with vestments where all the buttons were on the back ( s o they couldn't be put on without the help of others ) . In h i s l a s t work, which he c a l led a " Positiv­ ist Catec h i s m , " he also laid down the first explicit theory of social debt. At one point someone asks an i m agin ary Priest of Positivism what he thinks o f the notion of human rights . The priest scoffs at the very idea . This is nonsense, he s a y s , an error born of individ u a l i s m . Positivism understands o n l y duties. After a l l :

W e are born under a load of obl igations of every kind, t o our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate before the point where we are capable of rendering anyone any service. On what human foundation, then, could one seat the idea of "rights" ?61

While Comte doesn ' t use the word " d e b t , " the sense is clear enough . We have a l ready accumulated endless debts before we get to the age at which we can even think of paying them . By that time, there ' s n o way to calculate to whom we even owe them. The only way to redeem our­ selves i s to dedicate ourselves to the service of H u m a n i ty as a whole.

I n h i s l i feti me, Comte w a s cons idered something of a crackpot, but h i s ideas p roved influenti a l . His notion of u n l i m ited o b ligations to so­ ciety ultimately crystallized in the notion of the " social debt , " a notion taken up a mong social reformers a n d , eventu a l l y , soc i a l i s t politicians in many p a rts of Europe and abroad.62 "We are a l l born a s debtors to so­ ciety " : i n France the notion of a social debt soon became something of a catchphrase, a slogan, and eventua l l y a cliche .63 The state, according to this view, w a s merely the administrator of a n existential debt that a l l of us have to the society that created us, embodied not least in the fact that we a l l continue to be comp letely dependent on one another for our exi stence, even if we are not completely a w a re of h o w .

T h e s e a r e also t h e intellectual and p o l i t i c a l circles t h a t shaped the thought of Em ile D u rkhei m , the founder of the discipline of sociology that we know today, who in a way did Comte one better by arguing that all gods in a l l religi o n s are always a l ready proj ections of society­ so an explicit religion of society would not even be necessary . All religi o n s , for D u rkhei m , are simply ways of recogn izing our mutual dependence on one another, a dependence that a ffects u s in a million ways that we are never entirely aware of. " G o d " and " society" a re ultimately the s a m e .

P R I M O R D I A L D E B T S 7 1

The problem i s that for severa l hundred years now, i t has s i m p l y b e e n assumed that the g u a r d i a n of that d e b t we owe for a l l of t h i s , t h e legi timate representatives of that a m orphous social tota l i ty t h a t h a s a l ­ lowed u s to become individuals, must necessarily be t h e state. A l m o s t a l l socia l i s t or socialistic regimes e n d up appea ling t o s o m e version of this argu ment. To take one notorious example, this was how the Soviet Union used to j ustify forbidding their citizens fro m emigrating to other countries. The argument w a s always: The USSR created these people, the USSR rai sed and educated them, made them who they are. What right do they have to take the product of our i n vestment and transfer it to another country, a s if they didn ' t owe u s anyth i n g ? Neither i s this rhetoric restricted to socia l i s t regi m e s . Nationalists appeal to exactly the same kind of a rgu ments--espec i a l l y in times of war. And all mod­ ern governments are nationalist to some degree.

One might even say that what we really have, in the idea of pri­ mordial debt, is the ultim ate nation a l i s t myth . Once we o wed our lives to the gods that created u s , paid interest i n the form of animal sacrifice, and ultimately paid b a ck the principal with our li ves . Now we owe it to the Nation that formed u s , pay i nterest i n the form of taxes, and when i t comes time to defend the nation against its enemies, to offer to pay i t with our lives.

This i s a great trap of the twentieth century : on one side i s the logic of the m a rket, where we like to i magine we a l l start out a s individuals who d o n ' t owe each other anything. O n the other is the logic of the state, where we a l l begin with a debt we can never truly p a y . We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a fa lse dichoto m y . States created m a rkets . Markets require state s . Neither c o u l d continue without the other, a t least, in anything like the forms we would rec­ ognize tod�y .

C h a p t e r F o u r

C R U E LTY A N D R E D E M PT I O N

We will buy the poor for silver, the

needy for a pair of sandals.

-Amos 2 : 6

THE READER M AY h ave noticed t h a t there i s a n unresolved deb ate between those who see money a s a com modity and those who see it a s an IOU. Which one is it ? By now, the answer should be o b v i o u s : it's both . K e i t h Hart, p ro b a b l y t h e best-known current anthropological authority on the subj ect, pointed this out many years ago . There are, he fa mously o b served , two sides to any c o i n :

Look at a c o i n from y o u r pocket. On o n e s i d e is "heads "-the symbol of the political authority which minted the coin; on the other side is " tails"-the precise specification of the amount the coin is worth as payment in exchange . One side reminds us that states underwrite currencies and the money is originally a rel ation between persons in society, a token perhaps. The other reveals the coin as a thing, capable of entering into definite rel ations with other things. 1

Clearly, money w a s not i nvented to overcome the in conveniences of b a rter between neighbors-s ince neighbors would have no reason to engage i n b a rter in the first place. S t i l l , a system of pure credit money would have serious inconveniences a s wel l . Credit money i s b a sed on trust, and in competitive m a rkets, trust itself becomes a scarce com­ modity . This i s p a rticularly true of dealings between strangers. Within the Roman empire, a si lver coin stamped with the i m age of Tiberius might h ave circulated at a value considerably higher than the value of the silver it conta ined . Ancient coins invari a b l y circ u l a ted at a value higher than their metal conten t . 2 This was l a rgely because Tiberi u s ' s govern ment was w i l l i ng to accept t h e m at face v a l u e . However, the

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Pers i a n government probably w a s n ' t , and the Mauryan and Chinese governments certai n l y weren ' t . Very l a rge n u m bers of Roman gold and silver coins did end up in India and even C h i n a ; this i s presu m a b l y the m a i n reason that they were made of gold and s i lver to begin with .

W h a t ' s true for a vast empire like Rome or China is obviously a l l the more true for a Sumerian o r G reek city-state, let alone anyone operating within the kind of broken checkerboard of kingd o m s , towns, and tiny principalities that prev a i l ed i n most of Mediev a l Europe or India. As I 've pointed out, often what w a s inside and what was out­ side were not especi ally clear. Within a community-a town, a city, a guild or religious society-p retty much anything could function a s money, provided everyone knew there w a s someone w i l l i ng to accept it to cancel out a debt. To offer one p a rticularly striking example, i n certain c i t i e s in nineteenth-century S i a m , s m a l l change consi sted e n ­ tirely of porcelain Chinese g a m i n g counters-b a s i c a l l y , t h e equivalent of poker chips-i ssued b y local casinos. I f one of these casinos went out of business or lost its license, its owners would have to send a crier through the streets b a nging a gong and announcing that anyone hold­ ing such chits had three days to redeem them . 3 For m a j o r transacti o n s , of c o u r s e , currency that was a l s o acceptable o u t s i d e t h e community ( u s u a l l y silver o r gold again) w a s ordinarily employed.

I n a similar w a y , English shops, for many centuries, would issue their own wood or lead or leather token money. The practice w a s often technically i lleg a l , but it continued until relatively recent times. Here is an example from the seventeenth century, b y a certa in Henry, who had a store at Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire:

This i s c l e arly a case of the same principl e: Hen ry would provide small change i n the form of IOUs redeemable at h i s own store. As s u c h , t h e y m i g h t c i r c u l a t e b r o a d l y , at l e a s t among a n y o n e who did regular b u s iness at that shop. But they were u nlikely to travel very far fro m S t o n y Stratford-most token s , in fact, never circulated m o r e t h a n a few blocks in any directi o n . For l a rger transaction s, everyone, including Henry, expected money in a fo rm that would be acceptable anywhere, incl uding i n Italy o r France.4

C R U E L T Y A N D R E D E M P T I O N 7 5

Throughout most of h i story, even where we d o find elaborate mar­ kets, we also find a complex j um b l e of different sorts of curren c y . Some of t h e s e may have origin a l l y emerged fro m b a rter between for­ eigners : the cacao money of Mesoamerica or salt money of Ethiopi a a r e frequently cited examples.5 Others arose fro m cred i t syste m s , o r fro m arguments over w h a t sort of goods should be acceptable t o p a y t a x e s or other d e b t s . S uch questions w e r e often m atters of endless contestatio n . One could often learn a lot about the balance of political forces i n a given time and place b y what sorts of things were accept­ able a s cu rrenc y . For instance: i n much the same way that colon i a l V i rgi n i a p l anters m a n aged to p a s s a l a w obliging s hopkeepers t o a c ­ cept their tobacco a s currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make taxes, fee s , and custo m s d u t i e s , w h i c h w e r e registered i n R o m a n currency, actu a l l y p a y a b l e i n w i n e , cheese, peppers, chickens, egg s , and e v e n herring­ much to the annoyance of traveling merchants, who therefore h a d to either c a r r y such t h i n g s a r o u n d i n o r d e r to p a y t h e tolls or b u y them locally at p r i c e s t h a t would have b e e n m o r e advantageou s t o t h e i r suppliers f o r that v e r y rea son.6 This was i n a n a r e a with a free peasantry , rather than serfs . They were in a relatively strong political position. I n other times and p l aces, the interests of lords and merchants prev a i l ed i n stead .

Thus money is a l m o s t always something hovering between a com­ modity and a debt-token . This i s probably why c o i n s-pieces of s ilver or gold that are already v a l u a b l e commodities i n themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of a local political authority, bec a m e e v e n m o r e v a l u a ble-still sit i n our heads a s the q uintessent i a l form of money. They most perfect l y straddle the divide that defines w h a t m o n e y i s i n t h e fi r s t place. What's m o r e , the relation between t h e t w o w a s a matter of c o n s t a n t p o l i t i c a l contestation .

I n oth e r words, the b a ttle between state and m a rket, between gov­ er n m e n t s and merchants i s not i nherent to the h u m a n con d i t i o n .

I I I I I

O u r two origin stories-the myth of barter and the myth of primord i a l debt-may a p p e a r to be a b o u t a s f a r a p a r t a s t h e y c o u l d be, but i n t h e i r own w a y , t h e y are also two s i d e s of the same c o i n . O n e assumes the other. I t ' s o n l y once we can i m agine h u m a n l i fe a s a series of com­ merc i a l transactions that we' re capable of seeing our relation to the un iverse i n terms of debt.

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To i l l ustrate, let me c a l l a perhaps surpn smg witness, Friedrich Nietzsche, a m a n able to see with uncommon clarity what happens when you try to i m agine the world in commercial ter m s .

Nietzsche's O n the Genealogy of Morals appeared i n 1 8 87 . I n it, h e begins w i t h an argument t h a t m i g h t w e l l h a v e b e e n t a k e n directly from Adam S m i th-bu t he takes it a step fu rther than Smith ever dared to, in sisting that not j ust ba rter, but buying and selling itself, precede any other form of h u m a n rel ationship. The feeling of personal obligation, h e observe s ,

has i t s origin in t h e oldest a n d m o s t pri mitive personal rela­ tionship there is, in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured himself against another individual. We have found no civi lization still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible. To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange thi ngs-that preoccupied man 's very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it' s what thinking itself is. Here the oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can assume are the first begi nnings of man's pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word "man" (manas) contin ues to ex­ press directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes hi mself as a being which assesses values, which values and measures, as the " inherently calculating anim a l . " Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social orga­ nizations and groupings; out of the most rudi mentary form of personal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relation­ ships with similar social structures ) , along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating.7

Smith, too, we will remem ber, s a w the origins of language-and hence of human thought-as lying i n our propensity to " exchange one thing for a nother , " i n which he also s a w the origins of the m a rket . R The urge to trade, to comp are v a l u e s , i s the very thing that makes u s intel­ ligent beings, and different from other a n i m a l s . Society comes l ater­ which means our ideas about responsibil ities to other people first take shape in strictly c o m merci a l term s .

C R U E L T Y A N D R E D E M P T I O N 7 7

Unlike with S m i t h , however, i t never occurred to Nietzsche that you could have a world where a l l such transactions i m mediately cancel out. Any system of com merc i a l accounting, he a s s u med, w i l l produce creditors and debtors. I n fact, he believed that it w a s from this very fact that h u m a n morality e merged . Note, he s a y s , how the German word schuld means both "debt" and " g u i lt . " At first, to be in debt w a s simply to be guilty, and creditors delighted i n punishing debtors unable to repay their loans by i n flicting "all sorts of h u m i l iation and torture on the body of the debtor, for instance, cutting a s much flesh off a s seemed appropriate for the debt . " 9 I n fact, Nietzsche went s o far a s to insist that those original barbarian law codes that tabu l ated so much for a ruined eye, so much for a severed finger, were not origin a l l y m e a n t t o fix rates of monetary compensation f o r the loss of e y e s and fingers, but to esta b l i s h how much of the debto r ' s body creditors were a ll owed to take! Needless to say, he does n ' t provide a scintilla of evi­ dence for this (none exists ) . 10 But to ask for evidence would be to m i s s the point. We are d e a l i n g h e r e not w i t h a r e a l h i storical argument but with a purely i m agin ative exercise.

When h u m a n s did begin to form communities, Nietzsche contin­ ues, they necessarily began to i m agine their relationship to the com­ munity in these ter m s . The tribe provides them with peace and security. They are therefore i n its debt. O beying its l a w s i s a way of paying it back ( " paying your debt to society" agai n ) . But this debt, he says, i s also p aid-here too-in sacrifice:

Within the original tri bal cooperatives-we're talking about primeval ti mes-the l iving generation always acknowledged a legal obligation to the previous generations, and especially to the earliest one which had founded the tribe [ . . . ] Here the reigning conviction is that the tribe only exists at all only be­ cause of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors-and that people have to pay them back with sacrifices and achieve­ ments . In this people recognize a debt which keeps steadily growing because these ancestors in their continuing existence as powerful spirits do not stop giving the tribe new advantages and lending them their power. Do they do this for free ? But there is no " for free " for those raw and "spiritually destitute" ages . What can people give back to them ? Sacrifices (at first as nourishment understood very crudely) , festivals, chapels, signs of honor, above a l l , obedience--for all customs, as work of one' s ancestors, are also their statutes and commands . Do peo­ ple ever give them enough ? This suspicion remains and grows . 1 1

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I n other words, for Nietzsche, starting from Adam S m i th ' s as­ sumptions about h u m a n n a ture means we must necessarily end up with something very much along the lines of primord i a l -debt theory . O n the one h a n d , it i s because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors that we obey the ancestral l a w s : this i s why we feel that the com munity has the right to react " l ike an angry creditor" and punish us for our transgres­ sions i f we break them . I n a l a rger sense, we develop a creeping feeling that we could never really p a y back the ancestors, that n o sacrifice (not even the sacrifice of our first-born) will ever truly redeem u s . We are terrified of the ancestors, and the stronger and more powerful a com­ munity becomes, the more powerful they seem to be, until fi n a l l y , "the a n cestor i s necessarily transfigured into a god . " As com munities grow into kingdoms and kingdoms into universal empires, the gods them­ selves come to seem more univers a l , they take on grander, more cosmic pretenti o n s , ruling the heaven s , c a sting thunderbolts-c u l m i n a ting in the Christian god, who, a s the m a x i m a l deity, necessarily " b rought about the m a x i m u m feeling of indebtedness on earth . " Even our ances­ tor Adam i s no longer figured as a creditor, but a s a tran sgressor, and therefore a debtor, who p a sses on to u s his burden of O riginal S i n :

Finally, with the impossibility o f discharging the debt, people also come up with the notion that it is impossible to remove the penance, the idea that it cannot be paid off ( "eternal pun­ ishment") . . . until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxi ­ cal and horrifying expedient with which a ma rtyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of human beings, God pay­ ing h i mself back with h imself, God as the only one who can re­ deem man from what for human beings has become i mpossible to redeem-the creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that ? ) , out of love for his debtor! 1 2

It a l l m a kes perfect sense if you start fro m Nietzsche's initial prem­ i s e . The problem i s that the premise i s insane.

There i s also every reason to believe that Nietzsche knew the prem­ ise was insane; i n fact, that this w a s the entire point. What Nietzsche i s doing here i s starting out fro m the standard, common-sense a s s u m p ­ tions about the nature of h u m a n b e i n g s prevalent in h i s day (and to a l a rge extent , sti l l prevalent)-that we are ratio n a l calculating machines, that commercial self-interest comes before society, that " society " itself i s j ust a way of putting a kind of temporary lid on the resulting con­ flic t. That i s , he i s starting out fro m ordinary bourgeois assumptions

C R U E L T Y A N D R E D E M P T I O N 7 9

and driving them to a place where they can o n l y shock a bourgeois audience.

It's a worthy game and n o one h a s ever p l ayed i t better; but i t ' s a g a m e p l a yed entirely w i t h i n t h e boundaries of bourgeois thought. I t h a s nothing to say to anything t h a t lies beyond t h a t . T h e b e s t response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche ' s fantasies about sav­ age hunters chopping pieces o ff each other's bodies for fa i lure to remit are the words of an actual h unter-gatherer-an Inuit fro m Greenland made fa mous in the D a n i s h writer Peter Freuche n ' s Book of the Es­ kim o . Freuchen tells how one day, a fter coming home h u ngry fro m an uns uccessful walrus-hunting expedition, h e found one of the successful h unters dropping off several h undred pounds of meat. H e thanked h i m profusely . The m a n obj ected indign a n t l y :

"Up in o u r country w e are human! " s a i d t h e hunter. " And since we are human we help each other . We don 't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs . " 1 3

The l a s t line is so mething of an anthropologi c a l c l a s s i c , and s i m i ­ l a r statements about t h e refu s a l to c a lculate credits and d e b i t s can be found through the anthropological l i terature on ega litarian hunt­ ing societies. Rather than seeing himself a s h u m a n because he could make economic calculations, the h unter insi sted that being truly h u ­ m a n m e a n t refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing s o would inevitably create a world where we began " c o m p a ring power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves o r dogs through debt.

It's not that he, like untold m i l l i o n s of s i m i l a r ega litarian spirits throughout h i story, w a s u n a w a re that humans have a propensity to calculate. I f he w a s n ' t aware of it, he could not have said what he d i d . O f course we have a propensity to calculate. We have a l l sorts of propen sities . In a n y rea l - l i fe situatio n , we have propensities that drive u s in several different contradictory directio n s s i m u ltaneo u s l y . N o one i s more real than any other. The real question i s which we take a s the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, m a ke the basis o f our civilization. I f Nietzsche ' s a n a lysis of debt i s helpful to u s , then , i t i s because it revea l s t h a t w h e n we start fro m t h e assumption t h a t h u m a n thought i s essentia l l y a matter of c o m mercia l calculation, t h a t buying and selling are the basis of h u m a n society-then , yes, once we begin

8 0 D E B T

to think about our relationship with the cosmos, we w i l l necessarily conceive of it i n terms of debt.

I I I I I

I do think Nietzsche helps us in a n other way as well : to understand the concept of redempti o n . Niezsche ' s account of "primeval ti m e s " might be absurd, but h i s description of Christianity-of how a sense of debt i s transformed into an abiding sense o f guilt, and guilt to self- l o athing, and self- l o athing to self-torture-al l of this does ring very true.

Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ a s the " redeemer " ? The primary meaning of " redempti o n " i s to buy something back , or to recover something that had been given up i n security for a l o a n ; to ac­ quire something by paying off a debt. I t i s rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God ' s own son to rescue h u m anity fro m eterna l d a m n ation, should be framed i n the l anguage of a financial transaction.

Nietzsche might have been starting fro m the s a m e assumptions a s Adam S m ith, b u t clearly t h e early Christians weren ' t . T h e roots of this thinking l i e deeper than Smith's with his nation of shopkeepers. The authors of the Brahmanas were not alone i n borrowing the language of the m a rketplace as a way of thinking about the h u m a n condition . Indeed, to one degree or another, a l l the m a j o r world religions do t h i s .

The r e a s o n i s t h a t a l l of them-from Zoroastri a n i s m to I s l a m­ arose a m i d s t intense arguments a b o u t the role of money and the mar­ ket i n human l i fe , and p articularly about what these in stitutions meant for fundamental questions of what h u m a n beings owed to one another. The question of debt, and arguments about debt, ran through every a spect of the political life of the time. These arguments were set a m idst revolts, petitions, reformist movements . Some such movements ga ined a l l ies i n the temples and p a l aces . Others were brutally suppres sed . Most of the ter m s , slog a n s , and specific issues being debated, though, have been lost to h istory . We j ust don ' t know what a political debate i n a Syrian tavern i n 750 BC was likely to be about. A s a result, we h ave spent thousands of years contemplating s acred texts ful l of political a l l usions that would have been instantly recognizable to any reader at the time when they were written , b u t whose meaning we now can only guess at. 14

One of the u n u s u a l things about the Bible i s that i t preserves some bits of this l a rger context. To return to the notion of redemptio n : the Hebrew words padah and goal, b o t h tra n s l a ted a s " redempti o n , " c o u l d be u s e d for b u y i n g b a c k anything one h a d s o l d to someone else,

C R U E L T Y A N D R E D E M P T I O N 8 1

p a rticularly the recovery of ancestral l a n d , or to recovering some o b ­ j ect held by creditors i n way of a pledge . 15 The e x a m p l e foremost in the minds of prophets and theologi ans seems to have been the l a s t : the redemption of pledges, and especi a l l y , o f fa mily members held a s debt­ pawns. It would seem that the economy of the Hebrew kingd oms, b y the time o f the prophets, w a s a l ready begi nning to develop t h e s a m e kind of d e b t c r i s e s t h a t had long b e e n common i n Mesopota m i a : espe­ cially in years of bad h a rvests, the poor became indebted to rich neigh­ bors or to wealthy moneylenders in the tow n s , they would begin to lose title to their fields and to become ten ants on what had been their own land, and their sons and da ughters would be removed to serve as servants in their creditors' househol d s , or even sold abroad a s slaves . 16 The earlier p rophets contain a l l u sions to such crises, b u t the book of Nehem i a h , written i n Persian times, i s the most explicitY

Some also there were that said, " We h ave mortgaged our lands, vineyards, and houses, that we might buy corn, because of the dearth . "

There were also those that said, "We have borrowed money for the king's tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyard s .

" Y e t now our flesh is as t h e fl e s h of o u r brethren, our chil­ dren as their chi ldren: and, lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants, and some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them; for other men have our lands and vi neyards . "

And I was very angry when I heard their cry and these words.

Then I consulted with myself, a nd I rebuked the nobles, and the rulers , and said unto them, "Ye exact usury, every one of his brother. " And I set a great assembly against themY

Nehe m i a h was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup- bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 Be, he man aged to talk the Great King into appointing h i m governor of h i s native Judaea. He also received per­ mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed b y Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. I n the cou rse of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this w a s the moment of the creation of what we now consider Juda i s m .

T h e problem w a s t h a t Nehemiah quickly found h i m s e l f confronted with a s o c i a l cri s i s . All around h i m , impoverished peasants were u n ­ a b l e to pay t h e i r taxes; creditors w e r e carrying off t h e children of t h e p oor . His fi r s t response was to issue a classic Babylonian- style "clean

8 2 D E B T

slate" edict-h aving h i m self been born in B a b y l o n , he was clearly fa­ m i l i a r with the general principl e . All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven . M a x i m u m interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah m a n aged to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jew ish l a w s , now p reserved in Exod u s , D euteronomy, and Leviti c u s , which in certain ways went even fu rther, by institution alizing the princip l e . 1 9 T h e most fa mous of t h e s e is the Law of J u b i l e e : a l a w that stipulated that all debts would be automatic a l l y cancel led "in the S a b b ath year" (that i s , after seven years had passed ) , and that a l l who languished in bond age owing to such debts would be released . 20

" F reedo m , " in the B i b l e , as in Mesopota m i a , came to refer above a l l to release fro m the effects of debt. Over time, the h i story of the Jew­ ish people itself came to be interpreted i n this light: the l i beration fro m bondage in Egypt was G o d ' s first, paradigmatic act of redemption; the historical tribulations of the Jews ( defeat, conquest, exile) were seen as m i sfortunes that would even t u a l l y lead to a final redemption with the coming of the Messiah-though this could only be accomplished, prophets such a s Jere m i a h warned them, after the Jewish people truly repented of their sins ( carrying each other off into bondage, whoring after false god s , the violation of c o m m a nd ments ) Y I n this light, the adoption of the term by Christians i s hardly surprising. Redemption was a release fro m one's b u rden of sin and guilt, and the end of h i story would be that moment when all s l a tes are wiped clean and all debts fi n a l l y l i fted when a great blast fro m angelic trumpets will a n n o unce the final Jubilee.

I f s o , " redempti o n " i s no longer about buying so mething back. I t ' s rea l l y more a matter of destroying the entire system of account­ ing. I n many Middle Eastern cities, this w a s literally true: one of the common acts during debt cancelation w a s the ceremonial destruction of the tablets on which financial records had been kept, an act to be repeated, much less offic i a l l y , i n j ust about every major peasant revo lt in history. 22

This leads to another problem : What i s possible i n the meantime, before that fi n a l redemption comes ? In one of h i s more disturbing parables, the Parable of the Unfo rgiving Servant, Jesus seemed to be explicitly playing with the problem :

Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and

C R U E L T Y A N D R E D E M P T I O N

his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

The servant fel l on his knees before him. "Be patient with me, " he begged, " and I will pay back everything . " The servant' s master took pity on him, canceled the debt, and let him go .

But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii . He grabbed him and began to choke him. "Pay back what you owe me ! " he demanded .

His fellow servant fel l to his knees and begged him, "Be patient with me, and I will pay you back . "

But h e refused . Instead, h e went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other ser­ vants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened .

Then the master called the servant i n . "You wicked ser­ vant, " he said, "I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant j ust as I had on you ? " In anger his master turned him over to the j a i lers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed .23

8 3

This i s quite a n extraordinary text. O n one level i t ' s a j oke; in oth­ ers, i t could hardly be more seri o u s .

We b e g i n with t h e k i n g w i s h i n g to " settle accounts " with h i s ser­ vants. The premise i s absurd. Kings, like god s , can't really enter into relations of exchange with their subj ects, since no parity i s p o s s i b l e . And t h i s i s a k i n g who c l e a r l y is God . Certai n l y t h e r e c a n b e no fi n a l settling of accounts.

S o at best we are dealing with an act of whimsy on the k i n g ' s part. The a b s u rdity of the premise i s h a m mered h o m e b y the s u m the first m a n brought before h i m i s s a i d to owe. I n ancient Judaea, to say some­ one owes a creditor " ten thousand talents " would b e like now saying someone owes " a hundred billion dollars . " The n u m ber i s a j oke, too; it s i mp l y stands i n for " a sum n o human being could ever, concei v a b l y , rep a y . "24

Faced with infin ite, existentia l debt, the servant can o n l y tell obvi­ ous l i e s : " a h undred b i l l i o n ? Sure, I'm good fo r i t ! Just give me a l ittl e more t i m e . " Then, sudden l y , apparently j ust a s arbitrar i l y , the Lord forgives h i m .

Yet, it turns o u t , t h e a m nesty h a s a condition h e i s n o t aware o f . I t i s incumbent o n h i s being willing t o a c t i n a n a n a logous w a y to other

8 4 D E B T

h u m a n s-in this p a rticular c a s e , another servant who owes h i m (to transl ate again into contemporary terms) , maybe a thousand bucks. F a i l i n g the test, the h u m a n i s cast into hell for a l l etern ity, or " until he should pay back a l l he owed , " which i n this case comes down to the same thing.

The parable h a s long been a c h a l l enge to theologi a n s . It's normally interp reted a s a comment o n the endless bounty of God ' s grace and how l i ttle He demands of u s i n comparison-a nd thus, by i m p licati o n , a s a way of suggesting that torturing u s in hell for a l l eternity is not a s unreasona b l e a s it might seem. Certa i n l y , the unforgiving servant i s a g e n u i n e l y odious c h aracter. S t i l l , what i s e v e n more striking to me i s the tacit suggestion that forgiveness, in this world, is u l tim ately im­ p o s s i b l e . Christians practically say as much every time they recite the Lord ' s Prayer, and ask God to " fo rgive u s o u r debts, a s we a l s o forgive our debtors . "25 It repeats the story of the parable a l most exactly, and the i m p lications are s i m i l arly dire. After a l l , most Christi a n s reciting the prayer are a w a re that they do not generally forgive their debtors. Why then should God forgive them their s i n s ?26

W h a t ' s more, there is the l i ngering s uggestion th a t we really could n ' t live up to those standards, even i f we tried. O n e of the things that makes the Jesus of the New Testament such a tantalizing c h a racter i s that i t ' s never clear what he's telling us. Everything can b e read two ways. When he calls on h i s fo llowers to forgive all debts, refuse to cast the first stone, turn the other cheek, love their enemies, to hand over their possessions to the poor-is he rea l l y expecting them to do th i s ? O r a r e such demands j ust a w a y o f throwing in their faces that, since we are clearly not prepared to act this way, we are all sinners whose salvation can o n l y come i n another world-a position that c a n be (and h a s been) used to j ustify almost anything ? This is a vision of h u m a n l i fe as inherently corrupt, but it a l s o fra mes even spiritu a l affairs in com­ merci a l term s : with c a l c u l a tions of s i n , pena nce, and absolution, the Devil a n d St. Peter with their rival ledger books, u s u a l l y accompanied by the creep ing feeling that i t ' s a l l a charade because the very fact that we are reduced to playing such a game of tabu lating s i n s revea l s us to be fun d a mentally unworthy of fo rgivene s s .

W o r l d religio n s , a s we s h a l l s e e , a r e fu l l of this k i n d of a m b i v a ­ l e n c e . O n t h e o n e hand t h e y are outcries a g a i n s t t h e m a rket; on the other, they tend to fra m e their obj ections in commerc i a l terms-as if to argue that turning h u m a n life into a series of transactions i s not a very good dea l . What I think even these few examples revea l , though, i s how much i s being papered over in the conventi o n a l accounts of the origins and history of money. There is something a l m o s t touchingly

C R U E L T Y A N D R E D E M P T I O N 8 5

n aive i n the stories about neighbors swapping potatoes for a n extra pair of shoes. When the ancients thought about money, friendly swaps were hardly the first thing that came to mind.

True, some might have thought about their tab at the local ale­ house, or, i f they were a merchant or a d m i n i strator, of storehouses, account books, exotic imported delights . For most, though, what was likely to come to m i n d was the selling of slaves a n d ransoming of pris­ oners, corrupt tax-farmers a n d the depredations of conquering armies, mortgages and interest, theft and extortion, revenge a n d punishment, a n d , above a l l , the tension between the need for money to create fa mi­ lie s , to acquire a bride so a s to have children , and use of that same money to destroy fa milies-to create debts that lead to the same w i fe a n d c h i l d ren being taken a w a y . " S o m e of o u r d a ughters are brought unto bo n d age already: neither i s i t in our power to redeem them . " One can o n l y i m agine what those words meant, emotion a l l y , to a father in a patriarchal society in which a man's ability to protect the honor of h i s fam i l y was everything. Yet this i s what money meant to the ma­ j ority of people for most of human hi story : the terrifying prospect of one's sons and d a ughters being carried off to the homes of repulsive strangers to clean their pots and provide the occasional sexual services, to be subj ect to every conceivable form of violence a n d abuse, pos­ sibly for years, conceivab l y forever, a s their p a rents waited, helpless, avoiding eye contact with their neighbors, who knew exactly what was happening to those they were supposed to have been a b l e to protect. 27 Clearly this was the worst thing that could h appen to anyone-which i s why, i n the parable, it could be treated a s interchangeable with be­ ing " turned over to the j a ilors to be tortured " for l i fe . And that's j ust from the perspective of the father. One can only i m agine how i t might have felt to be the d a ughter. Yet, over the course of human history, untold m i l l ions of d a ughters have known (and i n fact many still know) exactly what i t ' s like.

One might obj ect that this w a s j ust a s s u med to be i n the n a ture of things: like the imposition of tribute on conquered populations, it might have been resented , but it w a s n ' t considered a moral issue, a matter of right a n d wrong. Some things j ust h a ppen . This has been the most common attitude of peasants to such phenomena throughout hu­ man history. W h a t ' s striking about the historical record is that in the case of debt crises, this was not h o w many reacted . Many actually d i d become indign ant. So m a n y , i n fact, t h a t most of o u r contemporary language of social j ustice, our way of speaking of human bondage and emancipation, continues to echo ancient arguments about debt.

8 6 D E B T

I t ' s p a rticularly striking because so many other things do seem to have been accepted as simply in the nature of things. O n e does not see a s i m i l a r outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that m a tter, the institution of s l avery.28 S u rely slaves and untouchables often experi­ enced at least equal horro r s . No doubt many p rotested thei r conditi o n . Why was it t h a t t h e debtors' protests seemed to c a r r y s u c h greater moral weight ? Why were debtors s o much more effective in winning the ear of priests, prophets , offi c i a l s , and social reformers ? Why was it that offic i a l s like Nehemi a h were willing to give such sy mpathetic con­ sideration to their complaints, to inveigh, to summon great assem b l i e s ?

Some have suggested practical reasons: debt crises destroyed the free peasantry, and it was free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight i n w a r s . 29 No doubt this was a factor; clearly i t wasn ' t t h e o n l y o n e . There i s no reason t o believe t h a t Nehemi a h , for instance, i n h i s anger a t the usurers, w a s primarily concerned with h i s a b i l i ty to levy troops for the Persian king. It is something more fundamenta l .

What makes d e b t different i s that i t i s premised o n a n assumption of equality.

To b e a slave, or lower-caste, is to b e intrinsically i n ferior. We are dealing with relations of unadulterated hierarchy . In the case of debt, we are dealing with two individuals who begin a s equal parties to a contract. Lega lly, at least as fa r as the contract is concerned, they are the s a m e .

We c a n add that, in t h e a n c i e n t world, w h e n p e o p l e who actua l l y w e r e m o r e o r less s o c i a l equals loaned m o n e y to one another, t h e terms appear to have normally been quite genero u s . O ften no i nterest was c h a rged , or i f it was, it was very low. " A n d don ' t charge m e interest , " wrote one wealthy Canaanite to another, i n a tablet dated around 1200 BC, " a fter all, we are both gentl e m e n . "30 Between close kin, many " lo a n s " were probably, then a s now, j ust gifts that no one seriously expected to recover. Loans between rich and poor were something else aga i n .

The p r o b l e m w a s t h a t , u n l ike status d i stinctions l i k e c a ste or s l a v ­ ery, t h e l i n e between rich and poor was never precisely d r a w n . O n e can imagine the reaction of a farmer who went up to the house of a wealthy cousin, on the assumption that " h u m a n s help each other , " and ended u p , a year o r two l a ter, watching his vineyard seized and h i s sons and da ughters led away. Such behavior could be j ustified, in legal terms, by ins isting that the l o a n was not a form of mutual aid but a com merci a l relationship-a contract is a contract. ( I t a l s o req u i red a certain reli­ a b l e access to superior force . ) But it could only have fel t like a terrible betray a l . W h a t ' s more, framing it as a breach of contract meant stating

C R U E L T Y A N D R E D E M P T I O N 8 7

that this w a s , in fact, a moral issue: these two p a rties ough t to be equa l s , but one had failed to honor the b a rga i n . Psychologi c a l l y , this can only have made the indignity of the debtor's condition all the more p a i n fu l , since it made it possible to say that it was h i s own turpitude that sealed h i s daughte r ' s fate. But that j ust made the motive all the more compelling to throw back the moral aspers i o n s : " O u r flesh i s a s the flesh of our brethren, our children a s t h e i r children . " We are a l l t h e s a m e people. We have a respo n s i b i l ity to t a k e a c c o u n t of one a n other' s needs a n d interests. H o w then could m y brother d o this t o m e ?

I n t h e O l d Testament case, debtors were a b l e to m a r s h a l a particu­ larly powerful moral a rgument-as the authors of D eutero n o m y con­ stantly reminded their readers, were not the Jews a l l slaves i n Egypt, and had they not all been redeemed b y God ? Was it right, when they had a l l been given this prom ised land to s h a re, for some to take that land away from others ? Was i t right for a population of li berated slaves to go about enslaving one aother ' s children ?31 Bu t a n a logous arguments were being made in s i m i l a r situations a l most everywhere in the ancient world : in Athens, in Rome, and for that m a tter, i n China-where leg­ end had it that coinage itself w a s first invented b y a n ancient emperor to redeem the children of fa milies who had been fo rced to sell them after a series of devastating floods.

Through most o f h i story, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the for m of pleas for debt cancellation-the freeing of those in bondage, and u s u a l l y , a more j u st rea l location of the l a n d . What we see, in the Bible and other religious traditions, a re traces of the moral arguments by which such c l a i m s were j u stified, usu­ a l l y s u b j ect to a l l sorts of imagin ative twists and turn s , b u t inevita b l y , to some degree, incorporating the language of the m a rketplace itself.

C h a p t e r F i v e

A B R I E F T R EAT I S E O N T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E LAT I O N S

TO T E L L THE HISTORY of debt, then, i s a l s o neces s a r i l y to recon­ struct how the language of the m a rketplace h a s come to pervade every a s pect of h u m a n l i fe--even to provide the ter m i n o l ogy for the m o r a l and religi ous v o i c e s osten s i b l y r a i sed against i t . We have a l ready seen how both Vedic and C h r i stian teachings thus end up m a k i n g the s a m e curious move: fi r s t describing a l l m o r a l i ty as d e b t , but then, i n t h e i r v e r y manner of doing s o , demon strating that m o r a l i ty c a n n o t real l y be reduced to debt, that it must b e grounded in something e l se . 1

B u t w h a t ? Religious traditions prefer vast, cosmological answers: the alternative to the morality of debt lies in recognition of continu­ ity with the un iverse, o r life i n the expectation of the i m m inent a n ­ n i h i lation of the universe, o r a bsolute subord i n a ti o n to the d e i t y , o r w i t h d r a w a l into another world. My own a i m s a re more m o d e s t , so I w i l l take the opposite appro a c h . If we really want to understand the m o r a l grounds of econ o m i c l i fe, and by exte n s i o n , human l i fe , it seems to m e that we must start instead with the very small t h i n g s : the every­ d a y deta i l s of soci a l exi stence, the way we treat o u r friends, enemies, and c h i l d ren-often with gestures so tiny ( p a s s i n g the s a l t , bumming a cigarette) that we ordinarily never stop to t h i n k about them at a l l . Anthropology h a s shown us j u s t how d i fferent a n d numerous a r e the ways in which humans h ave been known to organize themselves. But i t a l s o reve a l s some remarkable c o m m o n a l i ties-fundamental m o r a l p r i n c i p l e s that appear to exist everywhere, and that will a lways t e n d t o be i n v o k e d , wherever p e o p l e tran sfer obj ects b a c k and forth or a r g u e a bout w h a t o t h e r people owe them.

One of the reasons that h u m a n l i fe i s so c o m p l icated , i n turn, is becau s e m a n y of these principles contradict one another. A s we wil l see, they a re constantly p u l l i n g us in radically d i fferent d i recti o n s . The moral logic of exchange, and hence of debt, i s o n l y one; i n any given situation, there a re l i kely to be completely d i fferent principles that

9 0 D E B T

could be b rought to b e a r . In this sense, the m o r a l confu s i o n discussed i n the first c h apter i s h a rdly new; i n a sense, moral thought is founded o n this very ten s i o n .

I I I I I

To really understand w h a t debt i s , then, it w i l l be necessary to u n ­ derstand h o w it's d i fferent fro m other s orts o f o bligation that h u m a n b e i n g s might have to one a n o ther-w h i c h , in turn, means m a p p i n g o u t w h a t those other sorts o f o b ligation actu a l l y are. D o i n g s o , h o w ­ e v e r , p o s e s pecul i a r c h allenges. Contemporary s o c i a l theo ry-economic a n t h ro p o l ogy included-offers surprisingly little help in this regard. There's an enormous anthropological l i terature o n gifts , for instance, starting with the French anthropologist M a rcel Mauss's essay o f 1925 , even o n "gift eco n o m i e s " t h a t operate o n c o m p letely different prin­ ciples t h a n m a rket econom ies-but in the end, a l m o s t a l l t h i s literature concentrates on the exchange o f gifts, assuming that w henever one gives a gift, this act incurs a debt, and the recipient must eventually reciprocate in kind . Much a s in the case o f the great religi o n s , the logic o f the m a rketplace h a s insinuated itself even into the thinking o f t h o s e w h o a re m o s t exp licitly o p p o s e d to it. As a result, I a m g o i n g to have to start over here, to c r e a t e a new theory, pretty much fro m scratch .

Part of the problem is the extraordinary place that economics cur­ rently holds in the s o c i a l sciences . I n m a n y ways it i s treated a s a kind o f master discipline. Just about anyone who runs anything i m p o rtant i n A merica i s expected to have s o m e training i n economic theory, o r at least to b e fa m i l i a r with its basic tenet s . A s a result, those tenets have come to b e treated a s received wisd o m , a s basically beyond question ( o ne knows one i s i n the presence o f received w i s d o m wh e n , i f o n e c h a l lenges it, the first reaction i s to t r e a t one a s simply ignorant­ " Y o u o b v i o u s l y h a v e never heard of the Laffer C u rve " ; " Clearly you need a course in Economics 101 "-the theory is seen a s s o o b v i o u s l y t r u e that n o one w h o understands i t could p o s s i b l y disagree . ) W h a t ' s m or e, those branches o f social t h e o r y that make the greatest c l a i m s to " scientific status"-" rational c h o ice theory , " for instance-start fro m the s a m e assumptions a b o u t h u m a n psychology t h a t economists d o : t h a t h u m a n beings a r e b e s t viewed a s self- interested actors calculating h o w to get the best terms possible out o f any situation, the most profit o r pleasure o r happiness fo r the least sacrifice o r investment-cur i o u s , con sidering experi mental p s y c h o l ogists have demon strated over a n d over again t h a t t h e s e assumptions simply aren ' t true.2

T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E L A T I O N S 9 1

From early o n , there were those who w i s hed to create a theo­ ry of social interaction grounded i n a more generous view of h u m a n n a ture--insisting that moral l i fe comes d o w n to something m o r e t h a n mutual advantage, that i t i s motivated a b o v e a l l by a s e n s e of j ustice. The key term here became " reciprocity , " the sense of equity, b a l ance, fairness , and s y m m etry, embodied i n o u r i m age of j u stice as a set of scales . Economic transactions were j ust one variant of the principle of b a lanced exchange--an d one that had a notorious tendency to go awry. B u t if one examines m a tters closely, one finds that a l l human relations are based on some variation on reciprocity.

I n the r9sos, '6os and '7os, there was something of a craze for this sort of thing, i n the guise of what was then called " exchange theory , " developed in infinite variations, fro m George H o m a n s ' " S o c i a l Ex­ change Theory " i n the United States to Cla ude Levi-Strau s s ' s Structur­ alism i n France. Levi-Str a u s s , who became a kind of intellectual god i n anthropology, made t h e extraordinary argument t h a t h u m a n l i fe could be i m agined a s consisting of three spheres : l a nguage (which consi sted of the exchange of words ) , kinship (which consi sted of the exchange of women ) , and economics (which consisted of the exchange of things ) . A l l three, he i n sisted, were governed by the s a me fun d a mental l a w of reciprocity. 3

Levi -Straus s ' s star is fallen n o w , and such extreme statements seem, i n retrospect, a l i ttle b i t ridiculou s . Still, it's not as i f anyone h a s pro­ posed a bold new theory to rep l ace a l l this. I n stead, the a s sumptions have s i mp l y retreated into the b a ckgroun d . A lmost everyone continues to a s s u m e that i n its fundamental nature, social l i fe i s based on the principle of reciprocity, and therefore that a l l human i n teraction can best be understood as a kind of exchange. I f so, then debt real l y is a t the root of a l l morality, because debt i s what h a p p e n s when some b a l ­ ance h a s not y e t b e e n restored.

B u t can all j ustice really be reduced to reciprocity ? It's easy enough to come up with forms of reciprocity that don ' t seem particularly j ust. " D o unto others a s you would w i s h others to d o unto y o u " might seem like a n excellent foundation for a system of ethics, b u t for most of us, " a n eye for a n eye" does not evoke j u stice so much a s vindictive brutal­ ity.4 "One good turn deserves another" i s a pleasant sentiment, b u t " I ' l l scratch your back, y o u scratch m i n e " is shorthand for political corrup­ tio n . Conversely, there are rel ationships that seem clearly moral but appear to have nothing to do with reciprocity. The relation between mother and child i s a n oft-cited example. Most of u s learn our sense of j u stice and m o rality first fro m o u r parents . Yet i t i s extremely difficult to see the relation between parent and child a s particularly reciproc a l .

9 2 D E B T

Would we really be willing to conclude that therefore it is not a moral relationsh i p ? That it h a s nothing to d o w i th j u stice ?

The Canadian novel ist Ma rgaret Atwood begins a recent book on debt with a s i m i l a r paradox:

Nature Writer Ernest Thompson Seton had an odd bill pre­ sented to him on his twenty- first birthday. It was a record kept by his father of all the expenses con nected with young Ernest' s childhood a n d youth, including t h e fee charged b y t h e doctor for delivering h i m . Even more oddly, Ernest is said to have paid it. I used to think that Mr. Seton Senior was a jerk, but now I'm wondering .5

Most of u s w o u l d n ' t wonder much. Such behavior seems m o n ­ stro u s , i n h u m a n . Certa inly S e t o n d i d : he paid the b i l l , b u t n e v e r s p o k e to h i s fa ther again a fterwa r d . 6 And in a way, this i s precisely why the presentation of such a bill see m s so o utrageo u s . Squaring accounts means that the two p a rties have the a b i l ity to w a l k away from each other. By presenting it, his father s uggested he'd j u st a s soon have noth­ ing further to do with h i m .

I n other word s , w h i l e m o s t of us can i m agine w h a t we o w e to o u r parents a s a k i n d of d e b t , few of u s can i m agine b e i n g a b l e to actu a l l y pay i t-or e v e n t h a t such a debt e v e r should be p a i d . Yet if it c a n ' t be paid, in what sense i s it a "debt" at a l l ? And if it i s not a debt, what i s it?

I I I I I

O n e obvious place to look for a l ternatives is in cases of h u m a n inter­ action in which expectations of reciprocity seem to slam into a w a l l . Nin eteenth-century travelers' accounts, for instance, a r e fu l l of t h i s sort of thing. Missionaries working i n certain parts of Afri ca would often be astounded by the reactions they w o u l d rece ive when they a d m i n i s ­ tered med i c i n e s . Here's a t y p i c a l exa m p l e , fro m a B r i t i s h m i s s i o n a ry in Congo:

A day or two after we reached Vana we found one of the na­ tives very ill with pneumonia. Com ber treated him and kept him alive on strong fowl-soup; a great deal of ca refu l nursing and attention was visited on h i m , for his house was beside the camp . When we were ready to go on our way again , the man was wel l . To our aston ish ment he came and asked us for a

T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E L A T I O N S 9 3

present, and was as astonished and disgusted as he had made us to be, when we declined giving it. We suggested that it was his place to bring us a present and to show some gratitude. He said to us, "Well indeed ! You white men have no shame ! "7

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the French p h i l o s o ­ p h e r L u c i e n Levy-Bru h l , i n a n attempt to prove that " natives" o per­ ated w i th a n entirely different form o f l ogic, compiled a l i s t o f s i m i l a r stories : f o r i n s t a n c e , o f a m a n s a v e d fro m d r o w n i n g w h o proceeded t o ask his rescuer to g i v e h i m s o m e nice clothes to wear, o r a n o t h e r w h o , o n b e i n g n ursed back to health a fter h a v i n g been savaged by a tiger, demanded a knife . O n e French m i s s i o n a ry working i n Central Africa insi sted that such things h appened to him o n a regu l a r b a s i s :

Y o u save a person's l i fe, a n d y o u must expect t o receive a visit from him before long; you are now under an obligation to him, and you will not get rid of him except by giving him presents . 8

N o w , cert a i n l y , there is a l m o s t always felt to be s o mething ex­ traordinary a b o u t saving a l i fe . Anything surrounding b irth and death a l most cannot help but p a rtake o f the infinite, and, therefore, throw all everyday means o f moral calculation askew . This i s probably why stories like this h a d become s o mething o f a cliche i n A merica when I w a s growing u p . I remember as a child several times being told that among the Inuit ( o r sometimes i t w a s a m o ng Buddhists, or Chinese, but curiously, n ever Africans )-tha t i f one saves someone e l s e ' s l i fe, one i s considered resp o n s i b l e for taking care o f that person forever. It defies our sense o f reciprocity. But s o m e h o w , it a l s o m akes a weird kind o f sense.

We have n o way o f knowing what was really going o n in the minds o f the p atients i n these stories, since we don't know w h o they were o r what sort o f expectations they had (how they n o r m a l l y i nteracted with their doctors, for example ) . But we can guess. Let's try a thought experi ment. I m agine that w e are dealing with a pl a ce where, i f one man saved another's life, the two became like brothers. E a c h w a s n o w expected to share everything, and to p r o v i d e f o r the o t h e r when he was i n need . I f so, the p a tient would s u rely notice that his new brother appeared to be extraordinarily wealthy, not i n much need o f anything, but that he, the patient, w a s l acking in many things the m i s s i o n ary could provide.

Alternately ( a n d more likely ) , i m agine that we are dealing n o t with a relationship o f radical e q u a l ity b u t the very opposite. I n many p a rts

9 4 D E B T

of Afric a , acco m p l i shed curers were also i m portant political figures with extensive cl ienteles of fo rmer patients . A would-be follower thus arrives to declare his political al legiance. What complicates the m a tter in this case is that followers of great men, in this p a rt of Afric a , were in a relatively strong bargaining position. Good henchmen were h a rd to come b y ; i mportant people were expected to be generous with fol­ lowers to keep them fro m j oining s o m e riva l ' s entou rage in stead . I f so, asking for a s h i rt o r knife would b e a way of asking fo r confirmation that the m i ssionary does w i s h to h a v e the m a n a s a fo llower. Paying him b ac k, in contrast, would be, like S eton ' s gesture to h i s father, an insult: a way of saying that despite the mission ary having saved h i s l i fe, h e would j u st a s soon h a v e nothing fu rther to d o with h i m .

I I I I I

T h i s is a thought experiment-bec a u se we d o n ' t really know w h a t the African p a tients were thinking. The point is that such for m s of radical equality a n d radical inequality do exist in the world, t h a t each carries within it its own kind of morality, its own way of thinking and arguing a b o u t the rights a n d wrongs of any given situation, a n d these m o r a l i ­ ties are e n t i r e l y d i fferent t h a n that of tit-for-tat e x c h a n g e . In the r e s t of the chapter, I will provide a roug h - a n d - ready w a y to m a p out the main p o s s i b i l ities, b y proposing that there are three m a i n mor al principles on w h i c h econo m i c relations can b e fou n d e d , a l l of w h i c h occur i n a n y h u m a n society , and w h i c h I will c a l l c o m m u n i s m , h i e r a r c h y , a n d exchange.

C o m m u n i s m

I w i l l define c o m m u n i s m h e re a s any h u m a n relationship that operates on the principles of " from each according to their a b i lities, to each ac­ cording to their need s . "

I a d m i t that t h e u s age here i s a b i t provocativ e . " C o m m u n i s m " i s a word t h a t c a n evoke strong emotional reactions-m a i n l y , of course, because we tend to identify it with " c o m m u n i s t " regi m e s . This i s iron­ ic, since the Communist parties that ruled over the U S S R a n d its sat­ ellites, a n d that sti l l rule China and C u b a , never described their own systems a s " c o m m u n ist. " They described them a s " socialist . " " Co m ­ m u n i s m " was a l w a y s a distant, s o m e w h a t fuzzy utopian i d e a l , u s u a l l y

T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E L A T I O N S 9 5

to be accompanied b y the withering away of the state--to be a c h ieved at some point in the distant fu ture.

O u r thinking about c o m m u n i s m h a s been dominated b y a m y t h . O nce upon a t i m e , h u m a n s held a l l t h i n g s in common-in the Gar­ den of Eden, d u ring the Golden Age of Saturn, in P a leolithic h u n ter­ gatherer b a n d s . Then came the F a l l , a s a result of which we a re now cursed with divisions of power and private property . The dream was that someday, with the advance of technology and general prosperity, with social revo lution o r the guidance of the P a rty , we would fi n a l l y be in a p o s i t i o n to put things back, to restore c o m m o n o w n e r s h i p and c o m m o n m a n agement of col lective resources . T h roughout the last two centu ries, C o m m u n i sts and anti- C o m m u nists a rgued over h o w p l a u ­ sible t h i s p i c t u r e w a s and w h e t h e r it w o u l d be a blessing o r a night­ mare. But they all agreed on the basic fra m ework: c o m m u n i s m was about col lective property, " p r i m i tive c o m m un i s m " did once exist i n the d i stant past, and so meday it might retu rn .

We m i g h t c a l l t h i s " m y t h i c c o m m u n i s m " - o r e v e n , " e p i c co m m u n i s m "-a story we l i k e t o t e l l ourselves . S i n c e the d a y s of the French Revolution, it has inspired m i l lions; but it has also done enor­ mous d a m age to h u m a n i t y . It's high time, I think, to brush the entire a rgument aside. I n fact, " c o m m u n i s m " i s not some magical utop i a , and n e i t h e r d o e s it have a n y t h i n g to do with o w n e r s h i p of the m e a n s of productio n . It i s something that e x i s t s r i g h t now-that e x i s t s , t o some degree, in a n y h u m a n society, a lthough there h a s n e v e r b e e n o n e in whic h everything h a s b e e n organ i zed in that way, and it w o u l d b e difficult to i m agine how there c o u l d b e . All of us act l i k e c o m m uni sts a good deal of the time. None of us acts like a c o m m u n i s t consi stently . " Co m m u n i s t society "-in the sense of a society organi zed exclusively on that single principle--could never exist. B u t a l l social syste m s , even eco n o m i c systems like capita l i s m , have a l w a y s been bu il t on top of a bedrock of actually-existing com m u n i s m .

Sta rting, a s I s a y , fro m t h e principle of " from e a c h according t o t h e i r a b i lities, to each according to t h e i r need s " a l l o w s u s t o l o o k p a s t the question of individual o r private ownership ( w h i c h i s often l i ttle more than for m a l legality a n y w a y ) and a t much m o re i m m ediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditio n s . 9 Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it's j ust two people w h o a re interacting, we can s a y we are in the presence of a sort of c o m m u n i s m .

A l m ost everyone fo llows this principle if t h e y are c o l l a borating on some c o m m o n p r o j ect. 1 0 If someone fixing a broken w a ter pipe says, " H a n d m e t h e wrench , " h i s co-worker w i l l not, genera l l y speaking,

9 6 D E B T

say, "And what do I get for i t ? "---even i f they a re working for Exxon­ Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason i s simple efficiency (ironically enough, cons idering the conventional wisdom that " c o m ­ m u n i s m j ust doesn't work " ) : if you r e a l l y care about getting s o m ething done, the most efficient way to go about it i s obviously to a l locate tasks by a b i lity and give people whatever they need to do them . 1 1 O n e might even say that i t ' s one of the scandals of capita l i s m that most capital­ ist firms, interna l l y , operate c o m m unistic a l l y . True, they don't tend to operate very democratically. Most often they are organized around m i l i tary-style top-down chains of c o m m a n d . But there i s often a n i n ­ teresting ten s i o n h e r e , b e c a u s e t o p - d o w n c h a i n s of c o m m a n d are n o t particularly efficient: t h e y t e n d to promote stupidity among t h o s e o n top , resentful foot-dragging a m o n g those on t h e bottom . T h e greater the need to i mprovise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to becom e . Inventors have always understood this, start-up capitalists fre­ quently figure i t out, and computer engineers have recently rediscov­ ered the principle: not only with things like freew are, which everyone talks about, b u t even i n the organization of their businesses. Apple Computers i s a fa mous example: it was founded b y ( m ostly Rep u b l i ­ can) computer engineers who b r o k e fro m I B M in S i l i c o n V a l ley i n the 1 9 8 o s , forming l i ttle democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops i n each other ' s garage s .

This i s presumably also why i n the i mmediate wake of g r e a t di­ sasters-a flood, a b lackout, o r a n eco n o m i c collapse-people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready c o m m u n i s m . However b r i e fl y , hierarchies and m a rkets and t h e l i k e b e c o m e luxuries that n o one c a n afford . Anyone who h a s l i ved through such a moment can speak to their pec u l i a r qualities, the way that strangers become s i sters and brothers and human society itself seems to be reborn . This i s i m portant, because it shows that we a re not s i m p l y talking about cooperation . I n fact, communism is the fou ndation of all human socia­ bility. It is what makes society p o s s i b l e . There is always an a s s u m ption that anyone w h o i s not actually a n enemy c a n be expected o n the prin­ ciple of " from each according to their a b i lities , " a t least to a n extent : for exa m p l e , if one needs to figure out how to g e t s o mewhere, and the other knows the way.

We s o take this for granted, in fact, that the exceptions are them­ selves revealing. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, a n anthropologist who i n the 1920s c arried out research among the Nuer, N i l otic pastoralists i n southern S u d a n , reports h i s discom fiture w h e n he realized that some­ one h a d intentionally given h i m wrong di recti ons :

T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E L A T I O N S 9 7

O n one occasion I asked the way to a certa in place and was deli berately deceived . I returned in chagrin to camp and asked the people why they had told me the wrong way. One of them rep lied, "You are a fo reigner, why should we tell you the right way ? Even if a Nuer who was a stranger asked us the way we would say to him, 'You continue straight along that path,' but we would not tell him that the path forked . Why should we tell h i m ? But you are now a member of our camp and you are kind to our chi ldren, so we will tel l you the right way in future. " 1 2

T h e N u e r a r e con stantly engaged i n feud s ; a n y stranger m i g h t well turn o u t to be a n enemy there to scout o u t a good pl a ce for a n am­ bush, and i t would be unwise to give s u c h a person useful i n fo r m a ti o n . W h a t ' s m o re , Evans-Pritc h a rd ' s own situation was o b v i o u s l y relevant, since h e w a s an agent o f the British government-the s a m e government that h a d recently sent i n the RAF to strafe a n d bomb the i n h a bitants o f t h i s very settlement befo re for c i b l y resettling them there. Under the c i r c u m stances, the i n h a b itants' treatment o f Evans-Pritc h a rd seems quite generou s . The m a i n p o i n t , though, i s that i t req u i res something o n this scale-an i m mediate threat to l i fe and l i m b , terro r - b o m b i n g o f c i v i l i a n p o p u l a t i o n s-befo re people w i l l o r d i n a r i l y consider not g i v i n g a s t r a n g e r accurate d i rectio n s . 13

It's n o t j u st d i recti o n s . Conversation i s a d o m a i n p a rt i c u l a r l y d i s ­ posed to c o m m u n i s m . Lies, i n s u l t s , p u t - d o w n s , and other sorts o f ver­ bal aggre s s i o n are i m porta nt-b u t they derive most o f their power fro m the s h a red a s s u mption that people do not o r d i n a r i l y act t h i s way: a n i n s u l t does n o t sting unless one a s s u mes that others w i l l n o r m a l l y be considerate o f o n e ' s feelings, and i t ' s i m p o s s i b l e to l i e to someone w h o does not a s s u m e you would o r d i n a r i l y tell the t r u t h . When we gen u i n e l y wish to b reak o ff a m i c a b l e relations with s o meone, we stop speaking to them entirely .

The s a m e goes for s m a l l c o u rtesies like a s k i n g for a light, or even fo r a c ig arette . It see m s more legitim ate to ask a stranger fo r a ciga rette than for a n equivalent a m o u n t o f c a s h , o r even foo d ; i n fact, if one h a s been identified a s a fel l o w s m oker, i t ' s rather d i fficult to refuse s u c h a request. In such cases-a m a t c h , a p i ece of i n fo r m a t i o n , h o l d i n g the elevator-one might say the " from each " element i s s o m i n i m a l that most o f u s comply without even thinking about i t . Conversely, the s a m e i s true i f a n o th e r pers o n ' s need-even a strange r ' s-is particular­ l y specta c u l a r o r extreme: i f h e i s drowning, for e x a m p l e . I f a c h i l d has fa llen o n t o the subway track s , we assume that anyone w h o i s capable o f helping h e r up w i l l do so.

9 8 D E B T

I w i l l c a l l this " baseline c o m m u n i s m " : the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need i s considered great enough, or the cost considered reaso n a b l e enough, the principle of " from each according to their a b i l ities, to each according to their need s " w i l l be a s sumed to a p p l y . O f course, different c o m m u n i ties ap­ p l y very different standard s . I n l a rge, i mpers o n a l urban communities, such a standard m a y go no further than asking for a light or directions. This might not seem like m u c h , but i t founds the p o s s i b i lity of l a rger social relation s . I n smaller, less i mpersonal communities-espec i a l l y t h o s e not d i v i d e d into social classes-the s a m e l o g i c w i l l l i k e l y extend much further: for example, it i s often effectively impossible to refuse a request not j ust for tobacco, b u t for food-sometimes even fro m a stranger; certa i n l y fro m a n y o n e considered to b e l o n g to the com­ munity. Exactly one page after describing h i s difficulties i n asking for d irecti o n s , Evans-Pritchard n otes that these same Nuer find it a l most impossible, when dealing with someone they h ave accepted as a mem­ ber of their c a m p , to refu se a request for a l most any item of common consumption, so that a m a n or woman known to have anything extra i n the w a y of gra i n , tobacco, too l s , or agricultural i m p l e ments can be expected to see their stockp iles disappear a l most i m mediatel y . 14 How­ ever, this baseline of openhanded sharing and genero sity never extends to everything. O ften , in fact, things freel y s ha red are treated a s trivial and u n i mportant for that very rea s o n . Among the Nuer, true wealth takes the form of cattle. N o one would freely s h a re their cattle; i n fact, young Nuer men learn that they are expected to defend their cattle with their lives; for this reason, cattle are neither bought nor s o l d .

The o b l igation to share food, and wh atever else i s considered a b a ­ sic necessity, tend s to b e c o m e the b a s i s of everyd a y m o r a l i t y in a society whose members see themselves a s equ a l s . Another anthropologist, Au­ drey Richards, once described how Bemba mothers, " such lax discipli­ narians in everything else , " w i l l scold their chi ldren h a r s h l y if they give one an orange o r some other treat and the child does not i mmediately offer to s h a re it with her friends . 15 But s h a ring i s also, i n such societies­ in a n y , if we rea l l y think about it-a m a j o r focus of l i fe ' s pleasures. As a result, the need to share i s particularly acute in both the best of times and the worst of t i m e s : during fa mines, for example, but also d uring moments of extreme plenty . E a r l y missionary accounts of n ative N o rth Americans a l most invariably include awestruck remarks on gen­ erosity in times of fa mine, often to total strangers . 16 At the same t ime,

On returning from their fishing, their hunting, a n d th e ir trading, they exchange many gifts; i f they have thus obta ined something

T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E L A T I O N S 9 9

unusually good, even if they have bought it, or if it has been given to them, they make a feast to the whole village with it. Their hospitality towards all sorts of strangers is remarkable . 17

The m o re e l a borate the feast, the more l i k e l y one is to see some combinati o n of free sharing of some things ( fo r instance, food and drink) a n d careful d i stri bution of others : s a y , prize me a t, whether fro m game or s a c r i fi c e , which i s often p a rceled out a c c o r d i n g to v e r y elabo­ rate protocols or equally e l a b o rate gift exchange. The giving a n d tak­ ing of gifts often takes on a distinctly g a m e l i k e q u a l ity, continuous often with the actual games, contests, pageants, and performances that also often mark popular festiv a l s . A s with society at l a rge, the s h a red conviviality could be seen a s a kind of c o m m unistic b a s e on top of which everything else i s con structed . It also helps to emphasize that sharing i s not simply a b o u t morality, but a l s o about pleasure. Soli­ tary p l e a s u res w i l l always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities a l m o s t a l w a y s involve s haring something: m u s i c , foo d , l i q u o r , drugs, g o s s i p , d r a m a , bed s . T h e r e i s a c e r t a i n c o m m u n i s m of t h e s e n s e s a t t h e r o o t of most t h i n g s we c o n s i der fun .

T h e s u rest w a y t o know that o n e is in t h e presence o f c o m m u ­ nistic relations i s that not o n l y are no accounts taken, but it w o u l d be considered offensive, or s i m p l y b i zarre, to e v e n consider doing s o . Each v i l l age, c l a n , o r nation w i t h i n the L e a g u e of the Hodeno s a unee, or Iroquois, for example, w a s divided into two h a lves . 1 8 This i s a com­ mon p a ttern : i n other p a rts of the world ( A m azon i a , Melanesia) too, there are arrangements i n which m e m bers of one side c a n only m arry someone fro m the other side, or o n l y eat food grown on the other side; such rules are explicitly designed to m a ke each side dependent o n the other for some b a s i c necessity of l i fe . Among the Six Iroquois, each side was expected to b u r y the other's dead. Nothing would be more a b s urd than for one side to c o m p l a i n that, " last year, we b u ried five of your dead, but y o u o n l y buried two of o u rs . "

Baseline c o m m u n i s m might b e considered the raw m ateri a l o f soci­ ality, a recogn ition of o u r ultimate interdependence that i s the u l t i m ate s u bstance of social peace . S t i l l , i n most c i r c u mstances, that m i n i m a l baseline i s n o t enough . O n e a l w a y s behaves in a s p i r i t of solida rity more with some people than others, and certain institutions are spe­ cifically b ased o n principles of soli darity a n d m u t u a l aid. First a m ong these are those we love, with mothers being the p a radigm of selfless love. Others include close relatives, wives and h u s b a n d s , lovers, one's closest friends. These are the people with w h o m we share everything, or a t least to w h o m we know we can turn in need , which i s the

1 0 0 D E B T

definition of a true friend everywhere. Such fri endships m a y be for m a l ­ ized by a ritu a l a s " bond-fri ends" or " b lood brothers" who cannot refu se each other anything. A s a resu lt, any community could be seen a s criss-crossed with relations of " i ndivid u a l istic commun i s m , " one-to­ one relations that operate, to va rying intensities and degree s , on the b a s i s of " from each according to their a bility, to each according to their needs . " 1 9

This s a m e logic can be, and i s , extended within grou p s : not only cooperative work groups, but a l most any in -group w i l l define itself by creating its own sort of baseline c o m m u n i s m . There will be certain things shared or made freely a v a i l a b l e within the group, others that anyone will be expected to provide fo r other members on request, that one would never share with or provide to outsiders : help in repa ir­ ing o n e's nets i n a n a ssociation of fisherman, stationery su ppl ie s in a n office, certain sorts of information among com modity traders, and so forth . Also, certain categories of people we can always c a l l on in certain situati o n s , such a s ha rvesting or moving h o u s e . 20 O n e could go on fro m here to various fo rms of sharing, pooling, who gets to call on w h o m for help with certain t a s k s : moving, or ha rvesting, or eve n , if one i s in tro u b l e , providing a n interest-free loan . Finally, there are the different sorts of "commons," the collective a d m i n i stration of common resources.

The socio logy of everyd a y communism i s a potenti a l l y enormous field, but one which, owing to o u r pec u l i a r ideological b l i nkers, we have been unable to write about because we have been l a rgely u n a b l e to see it. R a ther than t r y to fu rther outline it, I w i l l l imit m y s e l f to th ree final points.

First, we are not rea lly dealing with reciprocity here--o r a t best, only with reciprocity in the broadest sense . 2 1 What i s equal on both sides i s the knowledge that the other person would do the s a m e for you, not that they necessarily will. The Iroquois example brings home clearly what makes this poss i b l e : that such rel ations are ba sed on a presumption of etern ity. Society will a l w a y s exist. Therefore, there will always be a north and a south side of the village. This i s why no accounts need be taken . In a similar w a y , people tend to treat their mothers and best friends a s if they w i l l a l w a y s exist, however well they know i t i s n ' t true.

The second point h a s to do with the fa mous "law of hospitality . " There i s a pec u l i a r ten sion between a common stereotype o f what are cal led " p rimitive societies" (people lacking both states and m a rkets) as societies i n which anyone not a member of the commun ity is as­ sumed to be a n enemy, and the frequent accounts of early European

T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E L A T I O N S 1 0 1

travelers awestruck by the extraordinary generosity shown them by actual " savages . " Granted, there is a certain truth to both sides . Wher­ ever a stranger i s a dangerous potenti a l enemy, the normal way to overcome the danger i s by some dramatic gesture of generosity whose very magni ficence catapults them into that m u t u a l sociality that i s the ground for all peaceful social relati o n s . True, when one i s dealing w i th completely unknown quantities, there is often a process of testing. Both Christopher Col u m b u s , in H i s p a n i o l a , and Captain Cook, i n Polynesia, reported s i m i l a r stories of i s l a nders who either flee, attack, o r offer everything-but who often l a ter enter the boats and help themselves to anything they take a fancy to, provoking threats of violence fro m the crew, who then did their utmost to establish the principle that relations between strange peoples should be mediated i n stead by " norma l " com­ mercial exchange .

I t ' s understanda b l e that dealings with potentially hostile strangers should encourage an a l l - or-nothing logic, a tension preserved even in English i n the ety m o l ogy of the words " h o st , " "h osti l e , " " hostage , " a n d indeed " hospitality , " a l l of which a r e derived fro m t h e s a m e Latin root .22 What I want to emphasize here i s that a l l such gestures are simply exaggerated displays of that very " b a se l in e c o m m u n i s m " that I have a l ready argued is the ground of a l l h u m a n social l i fe . This is why, for instance, the difference between friends and enemies is so often articul ated through food-and often the most common pl ace, h u m b l e , d o m e s t i c sorts of foo d : a s in the fam i l i a r p r i n c i p l e , common i n b o t h E u r o p e and t h e Middle East, that those who have shared b r e a d a n d salt must n e v e r harm one a n o t h e r . I n fact, t h o s e t h i n g s that exist a b ove all to be shared often become those things one cannot share with en­ emies. Among the Nuer, so free with food and everyday possessions, if one m a n murders another, a blood feud fo l l o w s . Everyone i n the vicinity w i l l often have to l i n e up o n one side o r another, and those on opposite sides are strictly forbidden to eat with anyone on the other, or even to drink fro m a cup or bowl one of their newfound enemies h a s previously used, lest terri ble results ensue . 23 The extraordinary in­ convenience this creates i s a m a j o r incentive to try to negotiate some sort o f settlement. By the s a m e token , i t i s o ften said that people who have shared food, or the right, archetypal kind of food, are forbidden to harm one another, however much they might be otherwise incl ined to do s o . At ti mes, this can take on an almost comical formality, as in the A r a b story of the burglar w h o , w h i l e ransacking someone ' s house, stuck his finger in a jar to see if it w a s ful l of sugar, only to d i scover it was fu l l of salt i n stead . Realizing that he h a d now eaten salt at the owner ' s table, he dutifu l l y put b a ck everyth ing he'd stolen .

1 0 2 D E B T

F i n a l l y , once we start thinking of c o m m u n i s m as a principle of morality rather than j ust a question of property owners h i p , it becomes clear that this sort of m o r a l i ty i s almost always at p l a y to some degree i n any transaction-even com merce . I f one i s on sociable terms with someone, i t ' s h a rd to comp letely ignore their situation. Merchants of­ ten reduce prices fo r the needy. T h i s is one of the m a i n reasons why shopkeepers i n poor neighborhoods are almost never of the s a m e ethnic group a s their customers; i t would b e almost i m p o s s i b l e fo r a merchant who grew up i n the neighborhood to make money, a s they would be under constant pressure to give financial breaks, or at least easy credit term s , to their i m p overi shed relatives and school chums. The opposite is true as w e l l . An anthropologist w h o lived for some time in rural Java once told me that she measured her linguistic a b i l i ties by how well she could b a rg a i n at the local bazaar. It frustrated her that she could never get i t down to a p r i ce a s low as l o c a l people seemed pay. "Wel l , " a Ja­ vanese friend fi n a l l y had to exp l a i n , " they c h a rge rich Javanese people more, too . "

Once aga i n , w e are back t o the principle that i f the needs (for instance, dire poverty) , o r the a b i lities ( for i n stance, wealth beyond i magination ) , are sufficiently dra m a t i c , then unless there i s a comp lete a bsence of sociality, some degree of communistic morality w i l l a l most inevita b l y enter into the w a y people take accounts.24 A Turkish folktale about the Medieval Sufi mystic N asruddin Hod j a i l l ustrates the com­ plexities thus i n troduced into the very concept o f supply and demand:

O n e day when Nasruddin w a s left in charge of the local tea­ h o use, the king and some retainers, who had been hunting

nearby, stopped in fo r breakfast. " Do you have quail eggs ? " asked the ki ng. "I'm sure I ca n find some , " answered Nasruddi n . T h e king o rdered a n omelet o f a dozen quail eggs, and

Nasruddin h u rried out to look for them. A fter the king and his

party had eaten, h e charged them a hundred gold p i eces. The king was puzzled. "Are quail eggs really that rare i n this

part of the co untry ? " " It's not so m u c h quail eggs that a r e rare around h e re , "

Nasruddin rep l i ed. " I t's more visits from k i ngs . "

Ex c h a n g e

C o m m u n i s m , then , is b a sed neither in exchange nor in reciprocity­ except, as I have observed, in the sense that it does involve mutual ex­ pectations and respon s i b i l i t i e s . Even here, it seems better to use a n other

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word ( " mutuality " ? ) so as to emphasize that exchange operates on entirely different principles; that i t ' s a fundamentally d i fferent kind of moral logi c .

Excha nge is a l l about equivalence. It's a back-and-forth process involving two sides in which each side gives a s good a s it gets . This i s why one c a n speak of people exchanging words ( i f there ' s a n argu­ ment) , blows, or even gunfire . 25 In these examples, it's not that there i s ever a n exact equivalence--even if there were some w a y to m e a s u re an exact equivalence--but more a constant process of interaction tend­ ing toward equivalence. Actu a l l y , there ' s something of a p a radox here: each side in each case i s trying to outdo the other, but, unless one side i s utterly put to rout, it's easiest to break the whole thing off when both consider the outcome to be more or less even . When we move to the exchange of m aterial good s , we find a s i m i l a r ten s i o n . O ften there i s a n element of co mpetition ; i f nothing else, there ' s a lways that pos­ sibility. But at the same time, there ' s a sense that both sides a re keeping accounts, and that, unlike what happens in c o m m u n i s m , which a l w a y s p a rtakes of a certa in n o t i o n of eternity, t h e e n t i r e rel ationship c a n be canceled out, and either p a rty can call a n end to it at any time.

This element of competition c a n work in comp letely different ways. I n cases of b a rter or commerc i a l exchange, when both parties to the transaction are only interested in the value of goods being trans­ acted, they may well-as economists insist they should-try to seek the m a x i m u m materi a l advantage . O n the other h a n d , a s a n thropologists have long pointed out, when the exchange i s of gifts, that is, the obj ects p a s s ing back and forth are m a i n l y considered interesting in how they reflect on and rearra nge relations between the people ca rrying out the transacti o n , then in sofar a s competition enters in, it i s likely to work precisely the other way around-to become a m a tter of contests of generosity, of people showing off who can give more a w a y .

L e t m e t a k e t h e s e o n e a t a time. What m a rks com merci a l exchange i s that i t ' s " i mperson a l " : who it

i s that i s selling something to u s , or buying something fro m us, should i n principle be entirely irrelevant. We are s i m p l y comparing the value or two obj ects. True, as with any principle, i n practice, this i s rarely comp letely true. There h a s to be some m i n i m a l element of trust for a transaction to be ca rried out at a l l , a n d , unless one is dealing with a vending machine, that usually req uires some outward display of social­ ity . Even in the most imperson a l shopping m a l l o r supermarket, clerks are expected to a t least s i m u l a te personal warmth, patience, and other reassuring qualities; i n a Middle-Eastern b a z a a r , one might have to go through a n el aborate process of establishing a s i m u l a ted friendship, s h a ring tea, foo d , o r tobacco, before engaging in s i m i l arly elabora te

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haggling-an interesting ritual that begins by esta b l i s h i n g sociality through baseline c o m m u n i s m-and continues with an often prolonged mock b a ttle over prices. It's all done on the b a s i s of the assumption that buyer and seller are, a t least at that moment, friends ( a n d thus each entitled to feel o utraged and indignant at the other' s unreasonable demands ) , but i t ' s a l l a l i ttle piece of theater. O nce the obj ect c h a nges h a n d s , there i s n o expectation that the two will ever have anything to d o with each other again .26

Most often this sort of haggling-in Madagascar the term for it literally m e an s " t o b a ttle out a sale" (miady varotra )-can be a source of pleasure i n itself.

The first time I v i sited A n a l akely, the great cloth m a rket in M a d a ­ gascar's capita l , I came with a Malagasy friend i n t e n t o n b u y i n g a sweater. The whole process took about four h o u r s . It went something like thi s : m y friend would spot a likely sweater hanging i n some booth , ask the price, and then she would begin a prolonged battle of wits with the vendor, invariably involving dramatic displays of insult and indig­ nation, and s i m u lated walkings off i n disgust. O ften i t seemed n inety percent of the argument w a s spent o n a fi n a l , tiny difference of a few ariary-liter a l l y , pennies-th at seemed to become a profound matter of principle on either side, since a mercha n t ' s fai l ure to concede it could sink the entire dea l .

The second time I visited A n a l akely I went with another friend, a l s o a young w o m a n , who h a d a list of measures of cloth to buy sup­ plied by her sister. At each booth she adopted the s a m e procedure: she simply w alked up a n d asked for the price.

The m a n would quote her one. " A l l righ t , " she then asked, " an d w h a t ' s your real fi n a l pric e ? " H e ' d t e l l h e r , and s h e ' d h a n d over t h e money . "Wait a minute ! " I asked. " You can do t h a t ? " Sure , " she s a i d . " Why not ? " I expl a i ned w h a t h a d happened w i t h my l a s t friend . " O h , yeah , " she s a i d . " Some people enjoy that sort of thing . " Exchange allows u s t o cancel o u t o u r debts. It gives u s a w a y to

call it even : hence, to end the relationship . With vendors, one i s usu­ a l l y only pretend ing to have a relationship at all. With neigh bors, one might for this very reason p refer n o t to pay one's debts. Laura Bohannan writes about arriving in a Tiv community in rural Niger i a ; neighbors i m mediately b e g a n arriving b e a r i n g l i ttle gift s : " two e a r s corn , one vegetable m a rrow, one chicken , fi v e t o m a t o e s , one handfu l peanuts . "27 Having no i d e a what was expected of her, she thanked them and wrote down in a notebook their names and what they had

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b rough t . Eventu a l l y , two women ad opted her and expla ined that a l l s u c h gifts did h a v e t o be returned . It w o u l d be entirely inappropriate to simply accept th ree eggs from a neighbor and never bring anything b a c k . O n e did not have to bring back egg s , but one should bring some­ thing back of approximately the s a m e value. O n e could even bring money-there w a s nothing inappropriate in that-provided one did so at a di screet interv a l , and a bove all, that one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs . It had to be either a b i t more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at a l l would be to cast oneself as a n exploiter or a p a r a s i t e . To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned, might spend a good part of the day w a l k i ng fo r m iles to distant homesteads to return a handfu l of okra or a tiny b i t of change, " i n a n endless circle of g i fts to which no one ever handed over the precise v a l u e of the obj ect last received "-a nd in doing s o , they were conti n u a l l y creating their society . There was certa inly a trace of communism here--neighbors on good terms could a l s o be trusted to help each other out in emergencies-but unlike communistic relations, which are assumed to be permanent, this sort of neighborliness had to b e constantly created and maintained, because any l i n k can be broken off at any t i m e .

T h e r e are e n d l e s s v a r i a t i o n s on this s o r t of tit-for-tat, or a l most tit-for-tat, gift exchange. The most fa m i l i a r is the exchange of presents : I buy someone a beer; they buy me the next one. Perfect equiva lence implies equality. But consider a s l ightly more complicated e x a m p l e : I take a friend out to a fa ncy restaurant for dinner; a fter a discreet inter­ val, they do the s a m e . A s anthropologists have long been in the habit of pointing out, the very exi stence of such customs-espec i a l l y , the feeling that one rea l l y ough t to return the favor-c a n ' t be expla ined by stan­ d a rd economic theory, which assumes that any human interaction i s ultim ately a business deal and that w e are a l l self- i n terested individuals trying to get the most fo r ourselves for the least cost or least amount of effort.28 But this feeling i s q u ite rea l , and it can ca u se genuine strain fo r those of l i m i ted means trying to keep up appearances . S o : Why, if I took a free - m a rket economic theorist out to a n expensive dinner, would that economist feel somewhat d i m i n i shed-uncomfo rtably in my debt-until he had been a b l e to return the favor ? Why, if he were fee ling competitive with m e , would he be i n c l i ned to take me to some­ place even more expensive ?

Recall the feasts and festivals a l l uded to above: here, too , there is a b a se of conviv i a l ity and p l ayful ( s o metimes not so p l ayfu l ) competition . On the one h a n d , everyone's pleasure is enhanced-after a l l , how many

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people would really w a n t to eat a superb meal at a French restau ­ r a n t a l l a l o n e ? On the other, t h i n g s c a n e a s i l y s l i p i n t o games of o n e ­ u p m a n s h ip--and h e n c e o b s e s s i o n , h u m i l i a ti o n , r a g e . . . o r , as w e ' l l soon s e e , e v e n w o r s e . I n some societies, these games are formalized, but i t ' s i m portant to stress that such games only really develop between people or groups who perceive themselves to be more or less equivalent in statu s . 29 To return to our i m aginary eco n o m i s t : it's not clear that he would feel d i m i n i shed if he received a present, or w a s taken out to dinner, by j ust anyone. He would be most likely to feel this way if the benefactor were someone he felt was of rough l y equivalent status o r dignity : a colleague, f o r example. If B i l l G a tes or George S o r o s took him out to dinner, he would likely conclude that he had indeed re­ ceived something for nothing and leave it at th a t . If some ingratiating j un i o r colleague or eager graduate student did the same, he'd be likely to conclude that h e w a s doing the man a favor j ust by accepting the invitation-if indeed he did accept, which he probably w o u l d n ' t .

T h i s , too , a p p e a r s to be the case wherever we find society divided into fine gradations of status a n d dignity. Pierre Bourdieu h a s described the " d i alectic of chal lenge and riposte" that governs all games of honor among K a byle Berber men i n Algeri a , i n which the exchange of insults, attacks ( i n feud or b attles ) , thefts, or threats w a s seen to fol l o w exactly the same logic a s the exchange of gifts .30 To give a gift is both a n honor and a provocation. To respond to one req u i res i n finite artistry . Timing i s a l l - i mportant. So i s making the counter-gift j ust different enough, but a l s o j ust slightly grander. Above a l l is the tacit mora l principle that one m u s t always pick o n someone one's own size. To c h a llenge someone obviously older, richer, and more honorable is to risk being snubbed, and hence h u m i l iated; to overwhelm a poor but respecta b l e man w i th a gift he c o u l d n ' t p o s s i b l y pay back is s i m p l y cruel , and w i l l do equal d a m age to your reputati o n . There ' s an Indonesian story a bou t that too: about a rich m a n who s acrificed a magnificent ox to s h a m e a penurious rival ; the poor m a n utterly h u m i l i ated him, and won the contest, b y c a l m l y proceeding to sacrifice a chicken .31

Games like this become especially elaborate when status i s to some degree up for gra b s . When m a tters are too clear-cut, that introd uces its own sorts of prob l e m s . Giving gifts to kings i s often a particularly tricky and complicated business. The problem here i s that one cannot real l y give a gift fit for a king ( unless, perhaps , one is another king) , since kings by definition a l ready have everything. On the one h a n d , one i s expected to make a reasona b l e effort :

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Nasruddin was once cal led up to visit the king. A neigh bor saw him hurrying along the road carrying a bag of turn ips.

"What are those for ? " he asked . " I 've been called to see the king. I thought it would be best

to bring some kind of present . " "You're bringing him turnips ? But turnips are peasant food!

He's a king! You should bring him something more appropri­ ate, like grapes . "

Nasruddin agreed , and came t o the king carrying a bunch of grapes. The king was not amused . "You're giving me grapes ? But I ' m a king! This is ridiculous. Take this idiot out and teach him some manners ! Throw each and every one of the grapes at him and then kick him out of the palace . "

T h e emperor's guards dragged Nasruddin into a s i d e room and began pelting him with grapes . As they did so, he fel l on his knees and began crying, " Thank you, thank you God, for your infin ite mercy ! "

"Why are you thanking God ? " they asked . "You're being totally humiliated ! "

Nasruddin rep lied, "Oh, I was j ust thinking, 'Thank God I didn't bring the turnips ! "'

On the other h a n d , to give something that a king does not already have c a n get y o u i n even greater tro u b l e . O n e story c i r c u lating i n the early R o m a n Empire concerned a n inventor who, with great fanfa r e , p resented a glass b o w l as a gift to the e m p e r o r Tiberiu s . The emperor w a s puzzled: What w a s so i m p ressive about a piece of g l as s ? The man dropped i t o n the ground. Rather than s hatterin g , it merely dented . He picked i t up and simply p ushed it back into its former shape.

"Did you tell anyone else how you made this thing ? " asked a startled Tiberius.

The inventor a s sured h i m that h e h a d not. The emperor therefore ordered him killed, since, i f word of how to m ake un breakable glass got out, h i s trea s u ry o f gold a n d silver would soon be worthless .32

The best bet when dealing with kings w a s to make a reason­ able effort to play the game, but one that i s still bound to fai l . The fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta tells of the customs of the King of S i n d , a terrifying monarch who took a particular delight in displays of arbitrary power.33 It w a s customary for foreign worthies v i siting the king to present h i m with magnificent presents; whatever the gift w a s , h e would invariably respond b y presenting the bearer with s o mething m a n y times its value. As a result, a substantial business

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developed where local b a nkers would lend money to such V I S i tors to finance p a rticularly spectacular gifts , knowing they could be well re­ paid fro m the proceeds of royal one-up m a n s h i p . The king must have known about t h i s . He didn't o b j ect-since the whole point was to show that h i s wealth exceeded a l l possible equivalence-and if he re­ a l l y needed to, he could always expropriate the bankers. They knew that the really important game w a s not economic, but one of statu s , a n d h i s was a bsolute.

I n exchange, the o b j ects being traded a re seen a s equivalent. There­ fo re, by implication, so are the people: at least, a t the moment when gift i s met with counter-gift , or money cha nges hands; when there is no further debt or obligation and each of the two p a rties i s equally free to w a l k away. This in turn i m p l ies autonomy. Both principles sit uncomfortably with monarchs, which is the reason that kings genera l l y dislike any sort of exchange.34 But w i t h i n that overhanging prospect of potential cancellation, of ultimate equivalence, we find endless varia­ tion s , endless games one c a n p l a y . O n e can demand something fro m another person, knowing that by doing s o , one is giving the other the right to demand something of equivalent value in return . I n some con­ texts, even praising another's possession might be interpreted a s a de­ mand of this sort. In eighteenth-century New Zealand, English settlers soon l earned that it w a s not a good idea to admire, s a y , a p a rticularly beautifu l j ade pendant worn around the neck of a Maori warrior; the latter would inevitably insist on giving it, not take no for a n answer, and then , a fter a discreet i nterv a l , return to praise the settler ' s coat or g u n . The only way to head this off w a s to quickly give h i m a gift before he could a s k for one. S o metimes gifts are offered in order fo r the giver to be a b l e to make such a demand : if one accepts the present, one i s tacitly agreeing to allow the giver to claim whatever he deems equivalent .35

All th is , in turn, can s h ade into something very much like barter, directly swapping one thing fo r another-which a s we've seen does occur even in what M a rcel Mauss liked to refer to a s "gift econo­ mies , " even if l a rgely between strangers.16 Within communities, there is a l m o s t a l w a y s a reluctance, a s the Tiv example so nicely i l l u strate s , t o a l l o w things to c a n c e l out-one reason t h a t if there i s money i n c o m m o n u s a g e , p e o p l e w i l l often either refuse t o use it w i t h friends or relatives (which in a v i l l age society incl udes pretty much everyo ne ) , or alternately, like the M a l agasy v i l l agers i n ch apter 3 , use it i n radically different ways.

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H i e ra rc h y

Exchange, then, i m p l ies for m a l equality-or a t least, the p otentia l for it. This is precisely why kings have such trouble w i th it.

I n contrast, relations of explicit hierarchy-that i s , relations be­ tween a t least two p arties i n which one is considered superior to the other-do not tend to operate by reciprocity a t a l l . I t ' s hard to see because the relation i s often j ustified i n reciprocal terms ( " the peas­ ants provide food, the lords provide protecti o n " ) , but the principle by which they operate i s exactly the opposite. I n practice, hierarchy tends to work b y a logic of precedent.

To i l lu strate w h a t I mean by t h i s , let u s i m agine a k i nd of con­ tinuum of one-sided social relatio n s , ranging fro m the most exploit­ ative to the most benevo lent. At one extreme is theft, or plunder; on the other selfless chari ty .37 O n l y at these two extremes is it is possible to have material interactions between people who otherwise have no social relation of any kind. Only a l u n atic would mug h i s next-door neigh b o r . A band of marauding soldiers or nomadic horsemen fa lling on a peasant h a mlet to rape and p i l l age also obviously have no inten­ tion of forming a n y ongoing relations with the survivors. But i n a s i m i l a r w a y , religious tradition s often insist that the o n l y true charity is anonymous-in other words, not meant to place the recipient i n o n e ' s d e b t . One extreme form of this, documented i n v a r i o u s p a r t s of the world, i s the gift by stealth, i n a kind of reverse burglary: to l i terally sneak into the recipient's house at night and plant o n e ' s present so no one c a n know for sure who has left i t . The figure of Santa C l a u s , or Saint Nicholas ( w h o , i t must be remembered, was not j ust the patron saint of children , b u t also the patron saint of thieves) would appear to ·be the mythological version of the same principle: a benevolent burglar with w h o m no social relations are possible and therefore to w h o m no one could possibly owe anything, i n h i s case, a b ove all, because he does not actua l l y exist.

O bserve, however, what happens when one moves j ust a little bit less far out on the contin u u m i n either d i rectio n . I have been told (I suspect it isn't true) that in parts o f Belarus, gangs prey so systemati­ cally on travelers on trains and busses that they have developed the habit of giving each victim a little token, to con firm that the bearer has already been rob bed . O bviously one step toward the creation of a state. Actually, one popular theory of the origins of the state, that goes back at least to the fourteenth-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun, runs precisely along these lines: nomadic raiders eventually systematize

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their relations with sedentary v i l l agers ; p i l l age turns into tribute, rape turns into the " right of the first night" or the carrying off of likely can­ didates as recruits for the royal h a rem . Conquest, untrammeled force, becomes systematized, and thus framed not a s a predatory relation but a s a moral one, with the lords providing protecti o n , and the v i l l agers, their su sten an c e. But even if a l l p a rties assume they a re operating by a s h a red moral code, that even kings cannot do w h a tever they want b u t must operate w i t h i n l i m i t s , a l lowing p e a s a n t s to a r g u e about the rights and wrongs of j u st how much of their h a rvest a king's reta iners are entitled to c a rry off, they a re very unlikely to fra me their c a l c u l ation in terms of the q u a l ity o r quantity of protection provided, b u t rather in terms of custom and p recedent : How much did we pay last yea r ? How much did o u r ancestors have to pay? The same i s true on the other side. I f charitable donations become the basis fo r any sort of social rel ation, it will not be one ba sed on reciprocity. I f you give some coins to a p a n h a ndler, and that p a n h a ndler recognizes you l a ter, it i s unlikely that h e w i l l give you any money-but h e might well consider you more likely to give h i m money again. Certa i n l y this i s true if one donates money to a charitable organizati o n . ( I gave money to the Un ited F a r m Workers once and I sti l l haven ' t heard the e n d of i t . ) Such a n act of one-sided generosity i s treated a s a precedent for what w i l l be expected a fterward.38 It's quite the same if one gives candy to a c h i l d .

This i s w h a t I mean w h e n I s a y t h a t hierarchy operates b y a p r i n ­ ciple that i s the v e r y opposite of reciprocity. Whenever t h e lines of su­ periority a n d i n feriority are clearly drawn and accepted by a l l p a rties a s the framework of a relati o n s h i p , and rel ations are sufficiently ongoing that we are no longer simply dealing with arbitrary force, then relations will be seen a s being regulated by a web of habit or custo m . S o m etimes the situation i s assu med to have o rigi n a ted in some founding act of conquest. O r it might been seen a s ancestral custom for which there i s n o n e e d of exp lanation. But this introduces a n other c o m p l i c a t i o n to t h e problem of g i v i n g gifts to kings-or to any s u p e r i o r : there is a l w ays t h e d a nger that it w i l l be treated a s a precedent, a d d e d to the web of cus­ t o m , and therefore considered o b l igatory thereafter. Xenophon c l a i m s that in t h e early days of t h e P e r s i a n E m p i r e , e a c h province v i e d to send the Great King gifts of its most unique and v a l u a b l e products . This became the basis of the tribute system : each province w a s eventu a l l y expected t o p rovide the same "gifts " every y e a r . 3 9 S i m i l a r l y , according to the great Medieval h i storian Marc B l o c h :

[ I ] n t h e ninth century , when o n e d a y there w a s a shortage of wine in the royal cel lars at Ver, the monks of Saint-Denis were

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asked to supply the two hundred hogs-heads required . This contribution was thenceforth claimed from them as of right every year, and it required an imperial charter to abolish it. At Ardres, we are told, there was once a bear, the property of the local lord . The inhabitants, who loved to watch it fight with dogs, undertook to feed it. The beast eventually died, but the lord continued to exact the loaves of bread. "40

In other word s , any gift to a feu d a l superior, " especi a l l y if repeated three of fou r time s , " was likely to b e treated a s a precedent and added to the web of custo m . A s a result, those giving gifts to su periors often i n s i sted on receiving a " letter of non-prej udice" lega l l y stipulating that such a gift would not be requi red i n the future. While it i s unusual for matters to become qu ite so fo rmalized, any social relation that is a s ­ s u m e d from t h e start t o b e u n e q u a l w i l l inevitably b e g i n to operate o n a n a n a logous logic-if only b e c a u s e , o n c e relations are s e e n a s b a sed on "custo m , " the o n l y way to demon strate that one h a s a duty or o b l i ­ gation to do something i s to show that one h a s d o n e it before.

O ften, such arrangements can turn into a logic of c a ste: certain clans are respo n s i b l e for weaving the ceremo n i a l garments, or bringing the fish for royal feasts, or cutting the king's hair. They thus come to be known a s weavers or fishermen o r barbers.41 This l a s t point can't be overemp h a s i zed because i t brings home another truth regu larly over­ looked : that the logic of identity is, a l ways and everywhere, enta ngled in the logic of hierarchy . It i s only when certa in people are p l aced above others, o r where everyone i s being ran ked in relation to the king, or the high priest, or Founding Fathers, that one begins to speak of people bound b y their essential nature: abou t fund a menta l l y d i ffer­ ent kinds of h u m a n being. Ideologies of ca ste or race are j ust extreme examples. It happens whenever one group i s seen a s raising themselves above others, o r p l a cing themselves below others, in such a w a y that ordinary standards of fai r dealing n o longer a p p l y .

In fact, s o m e t h i n g like this happens in a s m a l l way e v e n i n o u r m o s t intimate social relatio n s . The m o m e n t we recognize s o m e o n e a s a d i fferent sort of person, either a bove or below u s , then ordinary rules of reciprocity become modified or are set aside. I f a friend i s u n u s u a l l y generous once, we w i l l likely wish to reciprocate. If she a cts this way repeated l y , we conclude she i s a generous person, and are hence less likely to reciprocate.42

We c a n describe a s i m p l e for m u l a here: a certain action , repeated , becomes customary; as a result, it comes to define the actor's essential nature . Alternate l y , a pers o n ' s nature m a y be defined by how others

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have acted toward h i m in the past. To be an aristocrat is l a rgely to insist that in the past, others have treated you a s an ari stocrat ( s i nce ari stocrats d o n ' t real l y d o anything i n p a rtic u l a r , most spend their time simply existing i n some sort of putatively superior state ) , and therefore should continue to do so. Much of the art of being such a person is that of treating oneself i n such a manner that it conveys how you expect others to treat you: in the case of actual kings, covering oneself with gold so a s to suggest that others do likewise. O n the other end of the scale, this i s also how abuse becomes self-legi t i m a t i n g . As a former student o f mine, Sarah S t i l l m a n , p o i n ted out: i n the U n ited States, if a middle-class thi rteen -year-old g i r l i s k i d n a p p e d , r a p e d , and k i l l e d , i t i s c o n s i dered a n a g o n i z i n g n a t i o n a l c r i s i s t h a t every o n e with a tele­ v i s i o n i s expected to fo l l o w for several week s . I f a t h i rteen -year-old g i r l i s turned o u t a s a c h i l d prostitute, raped s y s t e m a t i c a l l y for y e a r s , a n d u l t i m ately k i l l e d , a l l t h i s i s c o n s idered u n r e m a r k a b l e-re a l l y j u st the sort of thing one can expect to end u p h a p p e n i n g to someone like t h a t .43

When obj ects of m a teri a l wealth pass back and forth between su­ periors and inferiors as gifts or payments, the key principle seems to be that the sorts of things given on each side should be considered fund amentally different i n quality, their relative value impossible to quantify-the result being that there i s no way to even conceive of a squaring of accounts . Even if Medieval writers i n s isted on i magining society a s a hierarchy i n which priests pray for everyone, nobles fight for everyone, and peasants feed everyone, it never even occurred to anyone to esta b l i s h how m a n y prayers or how much m i l i tary p rotec­ tion was equivalent to a ton of wheat. Nor did anyone ever consider making such a calculation. Neither i s i t that " lo w l y " sorts of people a re necessarily given lowly sorts of things and vice vers a . S o metimes it is quite the opposite. Until recently, j ust about any notable philosopher, artist, poet, or musician w a s requi red to find a wealthy patron for support. F a mous works of poetry or philosophy are often prefaced­ oddly, to the modern eye-with gushing, sycophantic praise fo r the wisdom and virtue of some long-forgotten earl o r count who provided a meager stipen d . The fact that the noble patron merely provided room and board, or money, and that the client showed his gratitude b y painting the Mona Lisa, or composing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, was i n no way seen to compromise the a s s u m ption of the n o b l e ' s intrinsic superiority.

There i s one great exception to this principle, and that i s the phe­ nomenon of hierarchical redistribution. Here, though, rather than giv­ ing back and forth the s a m e sorts of things, they give back and forth

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exactly the same thing: a s , fo r instance, when fan s o f certain Nigerian pop stars throw money onto the stage during concerts, a n d the pop stars in question make occasional tours of their fan s ' neighborhoods tossing (the s ame) money from the windows of their limos. When this is a l l that's going o n , we m a y speak of a n a b s o l utely minimal sort of hierarchy. In much of Papua New G u i n e a , social life centers on " b ig men , " charismatic individuals who spend much of their time coaxing, c a j oling, and m a n i p u l a ting in order to acquire m a sses of wealth to give away again at some great feast. O n e c o u l d , in practice, p a s s fro m here to, say, an Amazonian or indigenous North A merican chief. Unlike big men, their role i s more fo rmalized; but actu a l l y such chiefs have no power to compel anyone to do anything they d o n ' t w a n t to (hence North A merican Indian chiefs ' fa mous skill a t oratory a n d powers of persuasion ) . A s a res ult, they tended to give a w a y fa r more than they received . O b s ervers often rema rked that in terms of personal posses­ s i o n s , a v i l l age chief w a s often the poorest m a n in the v i l lage, such w a s the pressure on h i m for constant s u p p l y of l a rgesse.

Indeed, one could j udge how ega litarian a society really was by ex­ actly th i s : whether those ostensibly in positions of authority a re merely conduits fo r redistribution, or a b l e to use their positions to accumulate riches . The l a tter seems most likely in aristocratic societies that add another element: w a r and plunder. A fter all, j u st about anyone who comes into a very l a rge amount of wealth w i l l ultimately give at least p a rt of it away-often in grandiose and specta c u l a r ways to l a rge n u m ­ b e r s of p e o p l e . The more of one's w e a l t h is obtai ned by p l u n d e r o r extortion , t h e m o r e specta c u l a r and self- aggrandizing w i l l be t h e forms in which it's given a w a y . 44 And what i s true of warrior ari stocracies i s a l l the more true of ancient state s , where rulers a l m o s t invariably represented themselves as the protectors of the helpless, supporters of widows and o rp h a n s , and champions of the poor. The genealogy of the modern redistributive sta te-with its notorious tendency to foster identity pol itics-ca n b e traced back not to any sort of " p r i m i tive c o m ­ m u n i s m " but u l t i m a t e l y t o v i o l e n c e and w a r .

S h i ft i n g b e t w e e n M o d a l i t i e s

I should underline again that w e are not talking about different types of society here (as we've seen , the very idea that we've ever been or­ gani zed into di screte " societies" i s dubious) but moral principles that a l w ays coexist everywhere. We a re a l l communi sts with · o u r closest

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friends, and feudal lords when dealing with s m a l l chi ldren . It i s very h a rd to i m agine a society w here people w o u l d n ' t be both .

The obvious question i s : If we are a l l ordinarily moving back and forth between completely d i fferent systems of moral accounting, why hasn't anybody noticed thi s ? Why, i n stead , do we continually fee l the need to reframe everything i n terms of reciprocity ?

Here we m u s t return to the fact that reciprocity is our m a i n way of i magining j ustice. I n particular, i t i s what we fa l l back on when we're thinking i n the a b stract, and espec i a l l y when we're trying to create an ideal ized picture of society . I ' ve already given examples of this sort of thing. Iroquois communities were b a sed on a n ethos that required ev­ eryone to be attentive to the needs of several different sorts of people : their friends, their fam i l i e s , members of their matri l ineal c l a n s , even friendly strangers i n situations of hardship. It was when they had to think about society in the a bstract that they started to emphasize the two sides of the v i l l age, each of which had to bury the oth e r ' s dead. I t was a way of i m agining communism through reciprocity. S i mi l a rly, feud a l i s m w a s a notori o u s l y messy and complicated business, b u t when­ ever Medieval thinkers general ized a b o ut it, they reduced a l l its ranks and orders into one simple for m u l a in which each order contributed its share: " S ome pray, some fight, sti l l others work . "45 Even hierarchy was seen a s ultimately reciproca l , despite this formula having nothing to do with the real relations between priests, knights, and peasants really operated on the groun d . Anthropologists are fa m i l i a r with the phe­ nomen o n : it's only when people who h a ve never had occasion to really think about their society o r cu lture a s a whole, who probably weren ' t e v e n aware t h e y w e r e living inside something o t h e r p e o p l e considered a " society " or a " c ulture, " are asked to exp l a i n how everything works that they say things like "this i s how we repay our mothers for the pain o f having rai sed us," or puzzle over conceptua l diagra m s i n which clan A gives their women in marri age to clan B who gives theirs to clan C , who g i v e s t h e i r s back to A again , b u t which n e v e r s e e m to quite cor­ respond to what real people actually d o . 46 When trying to i m agine a j ust society, it's h ard not to evoke i mages of b a l ance and sym metry, of elegant geometries where everything b a l ances out.

The idea that there i s so mething c a l led "the m a rket" i s not s o very different. Economists will often admit this, if you ask them in the right way. M arkets aren ' t rea l . They are mathematical models, created by i m agining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge a n d i s engaging i n the s a m e self­ interested calcul ating exchange. Economists are aware that reality is always more complicated ; b u t they are also a w a re that to come up w i th

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a mathematical model, o n e always h a s t o make the world into a b i t of a carto o n . There ' s nothing wrong with this. The problem comes when it enables some ( o ften these same economists) to declare that anyone who ignores the d ictates of the m a rket shall s u rely be punished-or that since we live in a m a rket syste m , everything (except government interference) is b a sed on principles of j ustice: that our economic system i s one vast network of reciprocal relations i n which, i n the end, the accounts b a l ance and a l l debts are p a i d .

T h e s e principles g e t tangled up i n each o t h e r and i t ' s thus often difficult to tell which predom i n a tes i n a given situation-one reason that it's ridiculous to pretend we could ever reduce human behavior, econo m i c or otherwise, to a mathematical fo rmula of any sort. S t i l l , this means that some degree of reciprocity c a n be detected a s poten­ tially present in any s i tuation ; s o a determined o bserver can always find some excuse to say it's there. What's more, certain principles appear to have an inherent tendency to slip into others . For instance, a l o t of extremely hierarc h i c a l relationships can operate (at least some of the time) on c o m m u n i stic principles. I f you have a rich patron, you come to him i n times of need, and he i s expected to help you. But only to a certain degree. No one expects the patron to provide so much help that i t threatens to undermine the underlying inequality.47

Likewise, c o m munistic relations c a n easily start s l ipping into rela­ tions o f hierarchical inequality-often without anyone noticing i t . It's not hard to see why this happen s . S ometimes different people's " ab i l i ­ ties" and " needs " are grossly disproportionate. G e n u i n e l y egal i tarian societies are keen l y aware of this and tend to develop e l aborate safe­ guards around the d angers of anyone--say, especi a l l y good hunters, in a hunting society-rising too far above themselves; j ust a s they tend to be suspicious of anything that might make one member of the so­ ciety feel i n gen uine debt to another. A member who draws attention to h i s own accomplishments will find himself the obj ect of mockery . O ften , the only polite thing to do if one h a s accomplished something signi ficant is to i n stead make fun of oneself. The Danish writer Peter Freuchen, i n his Book of the Eskimo , described how i n G reenl a n d , one could tell what a fine delicacy someone had to offer h i s guests b y how much h e belittled i t beforeh a n d :

T h e old man laughed. " Some people d o n ' t k n o w much . I am such a poor h u nter and my w i fe a terri b l e cook who ruins

everyth ing. I don 't have much, but I think there is a p iece of

meat outside. I t might sti l l be there as the dogs have refused it several times . "

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This was such a recommendation in the Eskimo way of backwards bragging that everyone's mouths began to water . . .

The reader w i l l rec a l l the w a l ru s hunter of the last c h a pter, who took offense when the author tried to thank h i m for giving h i m a s h a re of meat-after a l l , h u m a n s help one another, and once we treat some­ thing as a gift, we turn into something less than human: " U p here we s a y that by gifts one m akes s l aves and by whips one makes dogs . "48

" G i ft " here does not mean something given freel y , not mutual aid that w e can ordinarily expect h u m a n beings to provide to one another. To thank someone suggests that he or she might not have a cted that way, and that therefore the choice to act this way creates a n o b l iga­ tion, a sense of debt-and hence, inferi ority. Comm unes o r ega litarian c o l l ectives in the United States often fac e similar dilem m a s , and they have to come up with their own safeguards against creeping hierar­ c h y . I t ' s not that the tendency for communism to slip into hierarchy i s inevitable-societies like the Inuit have man aged to fend it o ff for thousands of yea rs-b ut rather, that one must a l w a y s guard against i t .

I n contrast, it's notoriously d i fficult-often down right i m p o s s i b le­ to s h i ft relations based on an assumption of c o m m unistic s h a ring to relations of equal exchange. We o bserve this a l l the time with friend s : if someone i s seen a s taking advantage o f your generosity, i t ' s often much easier to break o ff relations entirely than to demand that they some­ how p a y you b a c k . O n e extreme example i s the Maori story about a notorious glutton who used to irritate fishermen up a n d down the c o a s t near w h e r e he l i v e d by c o n s t a n t l y a sking fo r the best p o r t i o n s of t h e i r catch . Since to refuse ;1 direct request fo r food w a s effectively i m p o s ­ s i b l e , t h e y . would dutifu l l y t u r n it o v e r ; until one d a y , p e o p l e decided enough was enough and k i l led h i m . 49

We've a l ready seen how creating a ground of sociability among strangers c a n often require a n e l a borate process of testing the oth­ ers ' l i m i ts b y helping oneself to their possessio n s . The s a m e sort of thing c a n happen in peacemaking, or even i n the creation of business p a rtners h i p s . 50 I n Madagascar, people told m e that two men who are thinking of going into business together w i l l often become blood broth­ ers . Blood b rotherhood , fatidra , consists of an u n l i m ited promise of mutual a i d . Both parties solemnly swear that they w i l l never refuse any req uest fro m the other. I n rea lity, partners to such a n agreement are usually fa irly circumspect in what they actually request. But, my friends insisted, when people first make such a n agreement, they s o metimes like to test it out. One m a y demand the other's house, the shirt off his b a c k , or (everyon e ' s favorite example) the right to spend the night

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with h i s wife . The o n l y l i m i t i s the knowledge that anything one can demand, the other one can too . 5 1 Here, aga i n , we are talking about a n i n i t i a l establishment of trus t . Once the genuineness of the m u t u a l com­ mitment h a s been confirmed, the ground i s prepared, a s i t were, and the two men can begin to buy and sell on consignment, advance fun d s , share profits , and otherwise t r u s t that e a c h w i l l l o o k after t h e other's commercial interests fro m then on. The most fa mous and dramatic moments, however, are those when relations of exchange threaten to break down into hierarchy: that i s , when two parties are acting like equa l s , trading gifts , or blows, or com modities, or anything else, but one of them does something that completely fl i p s the scale.

I've a l ready mentioned the tendency of gift exchange to turn into games of one-up m a n s h i p , and how i n some societies this potential is for m a l i zed i n great public contests . This i s typ i c a l , above all, of what are often c a l led " heroic societie s " : those i n which governments are weak o r n onexistent and society i s organized i nstead around warrior noblemen, each with his entourage of loyal retainers and tied to the others b y ever-s h i fting a l l iances and rivalries. Most epic poetry-from the Iliad to the Mahabharata to Beo wulf-h a rkens back to this sort of world, and anthropologists have di scovered s i m i l a r arrangements among the Maori o f New Zealand and the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, and Haida of the A m erican Northwest coast. I n heroic societies, the throw­ ing of feasts and resulting contests of generosity are often spoken of a s mere exten s i o n s of war: " fighting with property " o r " fighting with food . " Those w h o throw such feasts often i n d ulge i n colorful speeches about how their enemies are thus crushed and destroyed by glorious feats of generosity a i med i n their d i rection (K wakiutl chiefs liked to speak of themselves as great mountains fro m which gifts rolled like gi­ ant bo u l ders) , and of how conquered rivals are thus reduced-m uch a s in the I n u it metaphor-to slaves.

Such statements are not to be taken literally-another feature of such societies i s a highly developed art of boastingY Heroic chiefs and warriors tended to talk themselves up j ust a s consi stently a s those in egalitarian societies talked themselves dow n . I t ' s not a s if someone who loses out i n a contest of gift exchange is ever actu a l l y reduced to slav­ ery, but h e might end up feeling a s if he were. And the consequences could be catastrophic. O n e ancient Greek source describes Celtic fes ­ tiva l s w h e r e rival nobles would a lternate between j o usts and contests of generosity, presenting their enemies with magnificent gold and silver trea sures . Occasionally this could lead to a kind of checkmate; some­ one would be faced with a present so magni ficent that he could not possibly match i t . In this case, the only honorable response w a s fo r h i m

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to cut h i s own throat, thus a l lowing h i s wealth to be distrib uted to his followersY Six hundred years later, we find a case fro m an Icelandic saga of a n aging Viking n a med Egi l , who befriended a younger m a n n a med E i n a r , who w a s still actively r a i d i n g . T h e y l i k e d to sit together composing poetry . One day Einar came b y a magnificent shield " i n ­ scri bed with o l d t a l e s ; and between the writing w e r e overlaid spangles of gold with precious stones . " No one had ever seen anything like it. He took i t with h i m on a visit to Egi l . Egil w a s not a t home, so Einar w a i ted three days, a s w a s the custo m , then hung the shield as a present in the mead-hall and rode off.

Egil returned home, saw the shield, and asked who owned such a treasure. He was told that Einar had visited and given it to him. Then Egil said, "To hell with him! Does he think I 'm going to stay up all night and compose a poem about his shiel d ? Get my horse, I ' m going to ride after him and kill him. " As Einar's luck would have it he had left early enough to put sufficient distance between himself and Egi l . So Egil resigned himself to composing a poem about Einar's gift.54

I I I I I

Co mpetitive gift exchange, then, does not literally render anyone slaves; it i s simply a n affa i r of honor. These are people, however, for w h o m honor i s everyth i n g .

The m a i n r e a s o n that being u n a b l e to pay a d e b t , e s p e c i a l l y a d e b t of honor, w a s such a crisis w a s b e c a u s e this was how noblemen a s ­ sembled t h e i r entourages. The l a w o f hospitality i n the a n c i e n t w o r l d , f o r instance, insi sted t h a t any traveler must b e fed , g i v e n shelter, and treated a s an honored guest-but o n l y for a certain length of time. I f a guest did not go away, he would eventu a l l y become a mere sub­ ordinate. The role of such ha ngers-on has been largely neglected b y students of h u m a n hi story . In many periods-from imperial Rome to mediev a l China-probably the most i m portant relation s h i p s , at least in towns and cities, were those of patron age . Anyone rich and important would find himself s urrounded by flunkies, sycophants, perpetu a l din­ n e r guests, and other sorts of w i l l i ng dependents . D r a m a and poetry o f the time are ful l of such characters . 55 S i m i l a r l y , for much of hu­ m a n history, being respectable and middle-class meant spending o n e ' s m o r n i n g s g o i n g fro m d o o r to door, paying o n e ' s respects to important loc a l patron s . To this day, i n formal patronage systems still crop u p , whenever relatively rich and powerful people feel the n e e d to assemble

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networks o f supporters-a practice well docu mented i n m a n y p arts of the Mediterranean, the Middle E a s t , and Latin A meric a . Such rel a ­ tionships s e e m to c o n s i s t of a s l a p d a s h mix of a l l three principles that I ' ve been mapping out over the course of this ch apter; nevertheles s , those observing t h e m i n s i s t on trying t o c a s t t h e m in t h e l angu age o f exch ange a n d debt.

A fi n a l example: in a collection c a l led Gifts and Spoils, p u b l i shed in r97r, we find a brief essay by the a n thropologist Lorraine Blaxter about a rural department in the French Pyrenees, most of whose i n h a bitants are fa rmers . Everyone places a great emphasis on the importance of mutual aid-the local phrase means "giving service" ( rendre service) . People living in the s a m e c o m m u n i ty should look out for one another and pitch in when their neighbors are having tro u b l e . This i s the es­ sence of communal morality, in fact, it's how one knows that a n y sort of c o m m unity exists. S o fa r so good . However, she notes, when some­ one does a p a rticularly great fav o r , mutual a i d can turn into something e l s e :

I f a m a n in a factory went to t h e boss and asked f o r a j o b , and the boss found him one, this would be an examp le of someone

giving serv ice. The man who got the job could never repay the

boss, b u t he could show him respect, o r p erhaps give him sym­ bolic gi fts o f garden p roduc e . I f a gift demands a return, and no tang i b l e return is p ossi b l e , the repayment w i l l be through support or esteem .56

Thus does mutual aid slip into inequality. Thus d o patron-client rel ations come into being. We have a l ready o bserved t h i s . I chose this p a rticu l a r p a s s age because the author's phrasing i s so weird . It com­ pletely contradicts itself. The boss does the m a n a favor. The m a n cannot r e p a y t h e favor. Therefore, the m a n r e p a y s the favor by s h o w ­ ing up a t the b o s s ' s house with the occa sional b a sket of tomatoes and showing him respect. S o which one i s it? Can he repa y the favor, or not?

Peter Freuchen ' s walrus h u n ter would, no doubt, think he knew exactly what w a s going on here. Bringing the ba sket of to matoes was simply the equivalent o f saying "Thank you . " It w a s a w a y of ac­ knowledging that one owes a debt of gratitude, that gifts h a d i n fact made sl aves j ust a s whips make dogs. The boss and the e m p l oyee are now fund amentally different sorts o f people. The problem i s that in all other respects, they are not fund amentally different sorts of peop l e . M o s t l i k e l y t h e y are b o t h middle-aged Frenchmen, fathers of fa m i l i e s ,

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citizens of the Rep u b l i c with s i m i l a r tastes in m u s i c , sports, and foo d . T h e y ough t to be equa l s . As a r e s u l t , e v e n t h e tomatoes, which are r e ­ a l l y a token of recogn ition of the existence of a d e b t t h a t c a n never be rep a i d , has to be represented a s i f it w a s itself a kind of repayment­ an i nterest payment on a loan that could, everyone agrees to prete n d , s o m e d a y be paid back, thus returning the two mem bers to their proper equal status once again .57

( I t ' s telling that the favor i s finding the client a j ob i n a factory, because w h a t happens i s not very different fro m what happens when you get a j o b i n a factory to begin with . A wage- labor contract is, osten s i b l y , a free contract between equ a l s-but a n agreement between equals in which both agree that once one of them punches the time clock, they w o n ' t be equals a n y more.58 The law does recognize a b i t of a problem here; that's why it insists that y o u cannot sell off your equal­ ity permanently [you are not free to sell yourself into s l avery ] . Such ar­ rangements are only acceptab l e i f the b o s s ' s power i s not a b s o l ute, i f i t i s l i mited to w o r k time, and if you have the l e g a l r i g h t t o break off t h e c o n t r a c t and thereby to restore yourself to ful l equality, a t a n y time . )

I t seems t o m e that this agreement between equals t o n o longer b e equal ( a t least for a time) i s critically important. I t i s the very essence of what we call "debt . "

I I I I I

What, then , is debt ? Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises fro m very specific situ­

ations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fun d amenta l l y different sorts of being, who are at least poten t i a l equ a l s , who are equals i n those ways that are really important, and who are not currently i n a state of equality-but for whom there i s some way to set m a tters straight.

I n the case of gift-giving, a s we've seen , this requires a certain equa lity of statu s . That's why o u r economics professor didn't feel a n y s e n s e of o b ligation-any d e b t of honor-if t a k e n out to d i nner by someone who ranked either much higher or much lower than h i mself. With money l o a n s , a l l that is required is that the two pa rties be of equal legal standing. ( Y o u c a n ' t lend money to a c h i l d , or to a lunatic. Well , y o u c a n , but the courts w o n ' t help you get it b a ck . ) Legal-rather than moral-debts have other unique q u a l ities. For instance, they c a n be forgiven, which i s n ' t always p o s s i b l e with a moral debt.

This means that there i s n o such thing a s a genuinely unpayable debt. I f there w a s n o conceiva b l e way to s a lvage the situation , we

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w o u l d n ' t be c a l l i ng it a "debt . " Even the French vill ager could, con­ ceiv a b l y , save h i s patro n ' s life , o r win the lottery and buy the factory. Even when we speak of a c r i m i n a l " p aying h i s debt to society , " we a re saying that he h a s done something so terri b l e that he h a s now been banished from that eq u a l status under the law that belongs b y natural right to a n y citizen of his country; however, we call it a "debt" because it can be paid, equal ity can be restored , even if the cost may be death by leth a l i n j ection .

During the time that the debt remains u n p a i d , the logic of hierar­ chy takes hold. There i s n o reciprocity. A s anyone who h a s ever been i n j a i l knows, the first thing the j a i lors c o m m unicate is that nothing that happens i n j a i l h a s anything to do with j u stice. S i m i l a r l y , debtor and creditor confront each other like a peasant before a feudal lord . The l a w of precedent takes hold. If you bring your creditor to m a toes fro m the garden, it never occurs to you that he would give something back . He might expect you to do it again, though . But always there i s t h e a s s u mption that t h e s i t u a t i o n i s s o m e w h a t unnatura l , because the debt rea l l y ought to be p a i d .

This i s what m a k e s s i t u a t i o n s of effectively unpayable debt so dif­ ficult and so p a i n fu l . Since creditor a n d debtor are u l t i m a tely e q u a l s , if the debtor cannot do what it takes to restore herself to equality, there i s obviously something wrong with her; it must be her fa ult.

This connection becomes clear if we look at the etymology of com­ mon words for "debt" in European l a nguages . Many a re synonyms for " fa u l t , " " s i n , " or " g u i l t ; " j u st as a criminal owes a debt to society, a debtor is a l w a y s a sort of crimi n a l . 59 In ancient Crete, according to Plu­ tarch, it was the custom fo r those taking loan s to p retend to s n a tch the money fro m the lender's purse. W h y , he wondered ? Probably " s o that, if they default, they could be charged with violence a n d p u n i s hed all the more. "60 This i s why in so many periods of history i nsolvent debt­ ors could be j a iled, or even-as i n early Republican R o me--executed .

A debt, then , is j u st an excha nge that h a s not been brought to completi o n .

It fo llows that d e b t i s strictly a creature of reciprocity and h a s little to do with other sorts of mora lity (com m u n i s m , with its needs and abilities; hierarchy, with its customs and q u a l ities ) . True, if w e were rea lly determined, we could argue (as some do) that c o m m u n i s m i s a condition of permanent mutual indebted n e s s , or that hierarchy is con­ structed out of unpayable debts . But isn't this j ust the s a m e old story, starting fro m the a s s u mption that all human interactions m u s t be, b y definiti o n , fo rms of exchange, and t h e n performing whatever mental somersau lts are required to prove i t ?

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N o . A l l h u m a n interactions are not forms of exchange. O n l y some are. Excha nge encourages a particular way of conceiving h u man rela­ tions. This i s because exchange i m p lies equality, but it also i m p lies separation. It's precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt i s cancelled, that equal ity is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.

Debt i s what happens i n betwee n : when the two p a rties cannot yet walk away fro m each other, because they are not yet equa l . But i t i s carried out i n the shadow of eventual equality. Because achieving that equality, however, destroys the very reason for having a relation­ ship, j ust about everything interesting happens i n betwee n . 6 1 I n fact, j ust about everything human happens i n between-even i f this means that all such human relations bear with them at least a tiny element of criminality, guilt, or s h a m e .

For the Tiv women w h o m I mentioned e a r l i e r i n the chapter, t h i s w a s n ' t much of a proble m . B y ensuring that everyone was always s lightly i n debt to o n e another, they actually created h u m a n society, if a very fragile sort of society-a delicate web made up of o bligations to return three eggs or a bag of okra , ties renewed and recreated , a s any one of them could b e cancelled out at a n y t i m e .

Our own h a bits of civility are not so v e r y differen t . C o n s i d e r the custo m , i n American society, of constantly saying " p l e a s e " and "thank you . " To do so i s often treated a s basic morality: we are constantly chiding children for forgetting to do i t , j ust a s the moral guardians of our society-teachers and m i n i s ters, for instance--do to everybody else. We often assume that the habit i s u niversa l , but a s the Inuit h unter made clear, it i s n o t . 62 Like so many of our everyday courtesie s , i t i s a kind of democratization of what w a s once a h a b i t of feu d a l deference: the i n s i stence on treating a b s o l utely everyone the way that one used o n l y to have to treat a lord or similar hierarchical superi o r .

Perhaps this i s not so i n every c a s e . Imagine we are on a crowded bus, looking for a seat. A fel l o w passenger moves her bag aside to clear one; we smile, or nod, or make some other l i ttle gesture of acknowl­ edgment. O r perhaps we actually s a y "Thank you . " Such a gesture i s simply a recognition of common humanity: we are acknowledging that the woman who had been blocking the seat i s not a mere physical obstacle but a h u m a n being, and that we fee l genuine gratitude toward someone we will likely never see aga i n . None of this i s genera l l y true when one asks someone across the table to " p lease pass the s a l t , " or when the postman thanks you for signing for a delivery . We think of these s i m u ltaneo u s l y a s meaningless formalities and a s the very moral b a s i s of society. Their apparent uni mportance c a n be measured by the

T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E L A T I O N S 1 2 3

fact that a l m ost no one would refuse, on principle, to say "please" or " thank y o u " in j ust about any situation-even those who might find it almost impossible to say " I ' m sorry " or " I apol ogize . "

I n fact, the English " p lease" i s short for " i f y o u please , " " i f it pleases you to do this"-it i s the same in most E u ropean languages (French si il vous plait, S p a n i s h por favor) . Its l i teral meaning i s "you a re under no o b l igation to do thi s . " " Hand me the s a l t . Not that I a m s a y i n g that you have to ! " This i s not t r u e ; t h e r e i s a social obligation, and i t would be a l most impossible not to compl y . But etiquette l a rgely consists of the exchange of p o lite fictions (to use less p o lite l a nguage, lies) . When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; b y attaching the word " p l e a s e , " y o u are saying that i t i s not an order. But, i n fact, i t i s .

I n English, " thank y o u " derives fro m " t h i nk , " it originally meant, " I w i l l remember what you did for me''-which i s u s u a l l y not true either-bu t in other l a n gu ages (the Portuguese obrigado i s a good example) the standard term fol l o w s the form of the English " much o bliged "-it actually does means " I a m i n your debt . " The French merci i s even m o re graph i c : it derives fro m " mercy , " a s i n begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your bene­ factor ' s power-since a debtor is, a fter all, a cri m i n a l Y Saying " y o u ' re welco m e , " or " i t ' s nothing" ( F rench de rien, Spanish de nada)-the l a tter has at least the advantage of often being l iter a l l y true--is a way of reassuring the one to whom one has passed the salt that you are not actua l l y i n scribing a debit in your i m aginary moral account book. So is saying " my pleasure "-you are saying, "No, actu a l l y , it's a credit, not a debit-you did m e a favor because in asking me to pass the salt, you gave me the opportunity to do something I found rewarding in itself! "64

Decoding the tacit calculus of debt ( " I owe you o n e , " " N o , you don't owe me anything , " " Actu a l l y , if anything, it's me who owes you , " as if inscribing and then scratching off s o m a n y infinitesimal entries i n an e n d l e s s ledger) m a k e s it e a s y to understand why this s o r t of thing i s often viewed not as the quintessence of morality, b u t as the qui ntes­ sence of middle-class morality. True, by now middle-cl a s s sen s i b i lities dominate society . But there are still those who find the practice odd . Those at the very top of society often still feel that deference is owed primarily to hierarchical superiors and find i t slightly idiotic to watch postmen and p astry cooks taking turns pretending to treat each other like l i ttle feudal lord s . A t the other extreme, those who grew up in what i n Europe are called " p o p u l a r " environ ments-s m a l l towns, poor neighborhoods, anyplace where there is still a n assumption that people who are not enemies w i l l , ordinarily, take care of one another-w i l l

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often find it i n s ulting to be constantly told, in effect, that there is some chance they might not do their job a s a w a iter or taxi driver correctly, or provide hou seguests with tea . In other words, middle-class etiquette insists that we a re all e q u a l s , but it does so in a very particu l a r w a y . On the one h an d, it pretends that nobody is giving anybody orders (think here of the burly security guard at the mall who appears before someone walking into a restricted area and says, " Can I help you ? " ) ; on the other, it treats every gesture of what I 've been calling " b a seline commun i s m " as i f it were really a form of exchange. As a result, like Tiv neighborhoods, middle-class society has to be endless!� recreated, as a kind of constant flickering game of shadows, the criss-crossing of an infinity of momen­ tary debt relations, each one almost instantly cancelled out.

A l l of this i s a rel atively recent innovatio n . The habit of always saying " p lease" and "thank you" first began to take hold during the commerc i a l revolution o f the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries­ among those very middle c l a s ses who were l a rgely responsible for it. It is the la nguage of bure a u s , shops, and offices, and over the course of the last five h u nd red years it has spread across the world along with them. It is also merely one token o f a much l a rger philosophy, a set of assumptions of what h u m a n s are and what they owe one another, that have by now become so deeply ingrained that we cannot see them .

I I I I I

S o meti mes, at the brink of a new h i storical era, some prescient soul can see the fu l l i m p l ications o f what i s beginning to happen-sometimes in a w a y that l a ter generations can ' t . Let me end with a text by such a person . In P a r i s , sometime in 1540s , Franc;:ois R a b e l a i s-lapsed monk, doctor, legal scholar-composed what was to become a fa mous mock eulogy, which he inserted in the third book o f h i s great Gargantua and Pantagruel, and which c a m e to be known a s " I n Praise o f Debt . "

R a b e l a i s places the encomium in the mouth of o n e Pan urge, a wandering scholar and m a n of extreme classica l erudition who, he ob­ serves, " knew si xty-three ways of making money-the most honorable and most routine of which was stea ling. "65 The good-natured giant Pan tagruel adopts Panurge and even p rovides h i m with a respecta ble income, but it bothers h i m that Pan urge continues to spend money like water and rem a i n s up to h i s ears in debt. Wouldn ' t it be better, Pan­ tagruel suggests , to be able to pay his creditors ?

Pan u rge responds with horror: " G od forbid that I should ever be out of debt ! " Debt i s , in fa ct, the very b a s i s of his phi losoph y :

T H E M O R A L G R O U N D S O F E C O N O M I C R E L A T I O N S 1 2 5

Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever pray­ ing God to grant you a good, long and blessed life. Fearing to lose what you owe h i m , he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly ac­ quiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men 's spoil .66

Above a l l else, they w i l l a l w a y s be praying that you come into money. I t ' s like those ancient s l aves destined to be sacrificed a t their m a s ters' funer a l s . When they wished their m a s ter long l i fe and good health, they genuinely meant i t ! What's more, debt can make you into a kind of god, who c a n make something ( money, well-wishing creditors) out of a b s o l utely nothing.

Worse sti l l : I give myself to bonnie Saint Bobelin i f all my life I have not reckoned debts to be, as it were, a connection and colligation between Heaven and Earth (uniquely preserving the lineage of Man without which, I say, all human beings would soon perish) and perhaps to be that great World Soul which, according to the Academics, gives l i fe to all things .

That it really is so, evoke tranquilly in your mind the Idea and Form of a world-take i f you like the thirtieth of the worlds i magined by Metrodorus-in which there were no debt­ ors or lenders at a l l . A universe sans debts ! Amongst the heav­ enly bodies there would be no regular course whatsoever : all would be in disarray. Jupiter, reckoning that he owed no debt to Saturn, would dispossess him of his sphere, and with his Ho­ meric chain hold in suspension all the Intelligences, gods, heav­ ens, daemons, geniuses, heroes , devils, earth , sea and all the elements . . . The Moon would remain dark and bloody; why should the Sun share his light with her ? He is under no obliga­ tion. The Sun would never shine on their Earth ; the heavenly bodies would pour no good infl uences down upon it.

Between the elements there will be no mutual sharing of qualities, no alternation, no transmutation whatsoever, one will not think itself obliged to the other; it has lent it nothing. From earth no longer will water be made, nor water trans­ muted into air; from air fire will not be made, and fire will not warm the earth . Earth will bring forth nothing but monsters, Titans, giants . The rain will not rain, the light will shed no light, the wind will not blow, and there will be no summer, no autumn, Lucifer will tear off his bonds and, sallying forth fro m deepest Hell with the Furies, the Vengeances and the horned

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devils, will seek to turf the gods of both the greater and lesser nations out from their nests i n the heavens.

And w h a t ' s more, i f h u m a n beings owed nothing to one another, life would " be no better than a dog- fight"-a mere unruly b r a w l .

Amongst h u m a n beings n o n e w i l l save another; it w i l l b e n o good a m a n shouting H e l p ! F i r e ! I ' m drowning! M urder! No­ body will come and help him. Why ? Because he has lent noth­ ing: and no one owes him anything. No one has anything to lose by his fire, his shipwreck, his fa l l , or his death . He has lent nothing. And: he would lend nothing either hereafter.

I n short, Faith, Hope and Cha rity would be banished from this world .

P a n u rge-a man without a fa m i l y , a l o n e , whose entire c a l l i ng in life w a s getting l a rge amounts o f money and then spending it-serves as a fitting prophet for the world that was j u st begi nning to emerge. His perspective o f course i s that o f a wealthy debtor-not one l i a b l e to be trundled o ff to some pestiferous dungeon for fa i l u re to p a y . Sti l l , w h a t he i s describing i s t h e logi c a l conclusion, t h e reductio ad absur­ dum , which R a b e l a i s as a l ways l a y s out with cheerful perversity, of the assumptions about the world a s exchange s l u mbering behind all our pleasant bourgeois for m a l i ties ( w h ich Rabelais h i m se l f, incidentally, detested-the book i s b a sically a mixture of classical erudition and dirty j okes ) .

A n d what he says i s true. I f w e i n s i s t o n defining a l l h u m a n interac­ tions a s matters o f people giving one thing for another, then a n y ongo­ ing human relations c a n only take the fo rm o f debts . Without them, no one would owe a nything to anybody. A world without debt would revert to primordial chaos, a war o f all against all; no one would fee l t h e s l ightest respo n s i b i l ity f o r one a n o t h e r ; the simple fa ct o f being hu­ man would have n o significance; w e would a l l become isol a ted p l a nets who c o u l d n ' t even be counted on to maintain our proper orbits .

Pantagruel w i l l have none of i t . H i s own feelings on the m atter, he says, c a n be s u m med up with one l i n e fro m the Apostle P a u l : " O we no man anything, save mutual love and a ffecti o n . " 67 Then, i n a n ap­ propriately b i b l i c a l gesture, he declares, "From your past debts I s h a l l free you . "

" W h a t can I d o but thank you ? " Panurge rep l i e s .

C h a p t e r S i x

G A M E S W I T H S EX A N D D EAT H

WHEN WE RET U RN to an examination of conventio n a l economic history, one thing that j u mps out i s how much h a s been made to dis­ appear. Reducing a l l h u m a n l i fe to excha nge means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience ( h ierarchy, c o m m u n i s m ) , but a l s o ensuring that the v a s t m a j ority of the h u m a n race who are not adult m a l e s , a n d therefore whose day-to-day existence i s relatively difficult to reduce to a m a tter of swapping things in such a w a y a s to seek mutual advantage, melt away into the b a ckground.

As a result, we end up with a s a n itized view of the way actual business i s conducted . The tidy world of shops and m a l l s i s the qu in tes­ sential middle-cl a s s environment, but at either the top or the bottom of the system, the world of financiers o r of gangsters , deals are often made i n ways not so completely different fro m ways that the Gunwi nggu or N a m b i k w a r a make them-at least i n that sex, drugs, m u s i c , extrava­ gant displays of food, and the potential for violence do often play p a rts .

Consider the case of Neil Bush ( George W . ' s brother) who, d u ring divorce proceedings with his wife , admitted to m u ltiple i n fidelities with women who, he c l a i med, would mysteriously appear at his hotel-room door a fter i mportant business meetings in T h a i l a nd and Hong Kong.

"You have to admit it's pretty remarkable, " remarked one of his wife's attorneys, " for a man to go to a hotel -room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her. "

" It was very unusua l , " Bush replied, admitting however that this had happened to him on numerous occasions.

"Were they prostitutes ? " " I don 't know. " '

In fact, such things seem a l most p a r for the course when rea l l y big money comes into p l a y .

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In this light, the econo m i s t s ' i n s i stence that econo m i c life begin s with barter, the i nnocent exchange of a r r o w s for teepee frames, with n o one i n a position to rape, h u m i l i ate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues i n this w a y , i s touchingly utopian .

As a result, though , the hi stories we tell are ful l of blank spaces, and the women i n them seem to appear out of nowhere, without ex­ p l a n atio n , much like the Thai women who appeared at B u sh ' s door. Recall the p a s s age cited i n Chapter Three, fro m n u m i s m atist Philip Grierson, about money in the barbarian l a w codes:

Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal) , with con­ siderable use of precious metals in both . In the Germanic codes it is mainly in preci ous metal . . . 2

How is it possible to read this p a s s age without i m mediately stop­ ping at the end of the first line? " Bondmaids " ? Does n ' t that mean " slaves ? " ( I t does . ) I n ancient Ireland, female slaves were so plentifu l a n d important that they c a m e t o function a s currency. H o w d i d that happen ? And if we are trying to understand the origins of money, here, i s n ' t the fact that people are using one another a s currency a t all interesting or significant?3 Yet none of the sources on money remark much on it. It would seem that b y the time of the l a w codes, slave girls were not actually traded, b u t j ust used as units of account. Sti l l , they m u s t have been traded at some point. Who were they ? H o w were they enslaved ? Were they captured in war, sold by their parents, or reduced to s lavery th rough debt? Were they a m a j o r trade item ? The answer to a l l these questions would seem to be yes, but i t ' s h a rd to say more because the h i story remains l a rgely u n written.4

O r let' s return to the p a r a b l e of the ungrateful servant. " S i n ce he w a s not a b l e to p a y , the m aster ordered that he and h i s wife and his child ren and a l l that he had be sold to repay the debt . " How did that happen ? Note that we're not even speaking of debt service here (he i s a l ready h i s credito r ' s servant) , b u t outright s l avery . H o w did a m a n ' s wife a n d chi ldren c o m e t o be considered no different t h a n his sheep and crockery-as property to be liquid ated on the occasion of defa u l t ? W a s it n o r m a l for a man i n first-century P a lestine to be a b l e to s e l l h i s wife ? ( I t w a s n ' t Y I f h e didn ' t own her, why w a s someone else a l lowed to sell her if he couldn't pay h i s debts ?

The s a m e could be asked of the story in Nehe m i a h . I t ' s h a rd not to empathize with the distress of a father watching his d a ughter taken

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 2 9

off by strangers . On the other h a n d , one might also a s k : Why weren 't they taking him ? The da ughter hadn't borrowed any money .

I t ' s not as if it is ordinary for fathers in traditi o n a l societies to be able to sell their children . This i s a practice with a very specific his­ tory : i t appears in the great agra rian civilizations, from Sumer to Rome to C h in a , right a round the time when we a l s o start to see evidence of money, m a rkets, and interest- bearing loans; l ater, more grad u a l l y , it a l s o a p p e a r s i n t h o s e surrounding hinterlands that s u p p l i e d those civilizations with slaves.6 What's more, if w e examine the h i storical evidence, there seems good reason to believe that the very obsession with patriarchal honor that so defines " tradition" in the Middle East and Mediterra nean world itself a rose alongside the fa ther's power to a l ienate his children-a s a reaction to what were seen a s the moral per­ ils of the market. All of this is treated a s somehow outside the bounds of economic history .

Excluding a l l this is deceptive not only because it excludes the main purposes to which money w a s actually put in the past, but because it doe s n ' t give u s a clear vision of the present. A fter all, who were those Thai women who so mysteri ously appeared at Neil B u s h ' s hotel door ? Almost certa i n l y , they were children of indebted parents . Likely as not, they were contractu al debt peons themselves.'

Focusing on the sex ind ustry would b e deceptive, though . Then a s now, most w o m e n in d e b t bondage spend t h e vast m a j ority of their time sewing, preparing soups, and scouring latrine s . Even in the Bible, the admon ition i n the Ten C o m m a nd m ents not to " covet thy neighbor's wife " clearly referred not to lust in one's heart (adu ltery had a l ready been covered in command ment n u m ber seven ) , but to the prospect of taking her a s a debt-peon-in other words, as a servant to sweep one ' s y a rd and hang out the laundry . x I n most such matters, sexual exploitation w a s at best incidental ( u s u a l l y i l lega l , sometimes practiced anyway, symbolically i mportant . ) Again, once we remove some of our usual blinders, we can see that m a tters have ch anged fa r less, over the course of the last five thousand years or so, than we rea l l y like to think.

I I I I I

These bli nders are a l l the more ironic when one looks at the anthro­ pological literature on what used to be called " p r i m i tive money"­ that i s , the sort one encounters in p l aces where there are no states or markets-whether Iroquois w a m p u m , African cloth money, or Solo­ mon Island feather money, and di scovers that such money i s used

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a l m o s t exclusively for the kinds of tran s actions that eco n o m i sts d o n ' t like to have to talk a b o u t .

I n fact, the t e r m "pri mitive money" i s deceptive for this v e r y r e a ­ s o n , since it suggests that we are dealing with a c r u d e v e r s i o n of t h e kind of currencies we use tod a y . But this i s precisely what we d o n ' t fi n d . O ften , such currencies are n e v e r used to buy and sell anything at a l l . 9 Instead, they are used to create, m a i n t a i n , and otherwise reor­ ganize relations between peop l e : to arrange marriages, esta bl ish the paternity of children , head off feu d s , console mourners at funera l s , seek forgiveness i n the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire fol l owers­ a l most anything but trade in y a m s , shovels, pigs, or j ewelry .

O ften, these currencies were extremely i mportant, so much so that social l i fe itself might be said to revolve around getting and disposing of the stuff. Clearly, though, they mark a totally different conception of what money, or indeed an econ omy, i s actually about. I ' v e decided therefore to refer to them as " social currencies , " and the economies that emp loy them as " h u man economies . " By this I mean not that these societies are necess arily in any way more humane (some are quite hu­ mane; others extraordinarily bruta l ) , but only that they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creatio n , destructio n , and rearranging of h u m a n being s .

H i storica l l y , commercial economies-m a rket economies , a s w e n o w l i k e t o c a l l them-are a relative newcomer. F o r m o s t of h u m a n history, h u m a n econo mies pred o m i n a ted . To even begin to w rite a gen u in e h i story of debt, then, we have to start by asking: What sort of debts, what sort of credits and debits, do people accumulate in human econo m ie s ? And what happens when human economies begin to give away to or are taken over by com mercial ones ? This i s another way of asking the question, " H o w do mere obligations turn into debts ? "-but it means not j u st asking the question in the a bstract, but ex a m i n i n g the historical record to try to reconstruct what actually did happen .

This is what I will do over the course of the next two chapters. First I w i l l look at the role of money i n hu man economies, then de­ scribe what can h a ppen when human economies are suddenly incorpo­ rated into the economic orbits of l a rger, com merci a l ones. The African slave trade will serve a s a pa rticu l a r l y catastrophic case in point. Then, i n the next chapter, I w i l l return to the first emergence of com merci a l economies in early civilizations of E u r o p e and the Middle E a s t .

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 3 1

M o n e y a s I n a d e q u a te S u b s t i t u t e

The most interesting theory of the origin o f money i s the one recent­ l y put forward by a French economist-turned-anthropologist named P h ilippe Rospabe. While h i s work i s l a rgely unknown i n the English­ speaking world, i t ' s q uite ingen ious, and i t bears d i rectly o n our prob­ l e m . Rosp a b e ' s argument i s that "pri mitive money" was not origi n a l l y a way to p a y debts of any s o r t . I t ' s a w a y of recognizing t h e existence of debts that cannot possibly be paid. H i s argument i s worth consider­ ing in deta i l .

In m o s t h u m a n econ o m i e s , money i s u s e d first and foremost to arrange marriages . The simplest and probably most common way of doing this was by being presented a s what used to be c a l led " bride­ price" : a suitor's fam i l y would deliver a certain number of dog teeth, or cowries, o r brass rings, or whatever i s the local social currency, to a w o m a n ' s fa m i l y , and they would p resent their daughter a s his bride. I t ' s easy to see why this might be i n terpreted a s buying a women, and many colonial offi c i a l s i n Africa and Oceania i n the early part of the twentieth century did indeed come to that conclusion. The practice caused s omething of a scandal, and by 1926, the League of Nations was debating banning the practice a s a form of slavery . Anthropologists obj ecte d . Really, they explained, this was nothing like the purchase of, s a y , an o x-let alone a p a i r of s a n d a l s . A fter a l l , i f you buy an ox, you don ' t have any responsibi lities to the o x . What you are really bu ying is the right to dispose of the ox in any way that pleases y o u . M a rriage i s entirely different, since a husband will n o r m a l l y h ave j u st a s many respons i b i l i ties toward his wife as his wife will h a ve toward h i m . It's a way of rearranging relations between people. Second of a l l , if you were really buying a wife , you'd be able to sell her. F i n a l l y , the real signifi­ cance of the payment concerns the status of the wom a n ' s children : if he's buying anything, it's the right to call her offspring h i s own . 10

The anthropologists ended up winning the argument, and " b ride­ price" was dutifu l l y redubbed " b ridewealth . " B u t they never real l y an­ s wered the question : What i s actually happening here ? When a F i j i a n s u i t o r ' s fa mily p resents a whale tooth to ask for a w o m a n ' s hand in marriage, i s this an advance payment for the services the woman will provide in cultivating her future h u s b a n d ' s garden s ? O r i s he purchas­ ing the future fertil i ty of her wo m b ? O r i s this a p u re fo rm ality, the equivalent of the dollar that h a s to c h a nge hands in order to seal a con­ tract ? According to Rospabe, i t ' s none of these. The whale tooth, how­ ever valuable, i s not a form of payment. It i s rea l l y a n acknowledgment

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that one is a sking for something so uniquely v a l u a b l e that ' payment of any sort would be impossible. The o n l y appropriate payment for the gift of a wom an is the gift of another w o m a n ; in the meantime, a l l one c a n do i s to acknowledge the outstanding debt.

I I I I I

There are places where suitors s a y this quite explicitl y . Consider the Tiv of Central Nigeri a , who we have a l ready met briefly in the last chapter. Most of o u r information on the Tiv comes from mid-century, when they were still under British colon i a l rule . 1 1 Everyone at that time insisted that a proper m a rriage should take the form of a n exchange of sisters . O n e m a n gives his s i ster in marriage to another, that m a n m a rries the si ster o f h i s newfound brother- i n - l a w . This is the perfect m a rriage because the only thing one can really give in exchange for a wo m an is another woman,.

Obviously, even if every fa mily had exactly equal n u m bers of brothers and sisters, thi ngs couldn't always work this neatly. S a y I m a rry your si ster but you d o n ' t want to marry mine (because, s a y , you d o n ' t like her, or b e c a u s e s h e ' s only five y e a r s old) . In t h a t c a s e , you b e c o m e her "guard i a n , " which means you c a n c l a i m the right t o d i s p o s e of her in m a rri age to s o m e o n e else--for i n s t a n c e , someone whose si ster you actu a l l y do wish to marry. This system quickly grew into a complex system in which most i mportant men became guard­ ians of numerous " w a rd s , " often scattered over wide area s ; they would swap and trade them and in the process accumul ate numerous wives fo r themselves, while less-fortunate men were only able to m a rry l ate in life , or not at a l l . 12

There was one other expedient. The Tiv at that time used bundles of brass rods a s their most prestigious fo rm of currency . Brass rods were only held by m e n , and never used to buy things in m a rkets ( m a r­ kets were d o m i n a ted by women ) ; instead, they were excha nged only fo r things that men cons idered of higher importance : cattle, horses, ivory, ritual titles, medical treatment, magical c h a r m s . It w a s possible, a s one Tiv ethnographer, Akiga S a i , expla i n s , to acquire a wife with brass rod s , but it requi red quite a lot of them. You would need to give two or three bundles of them to her parents to esta bl ish yourself a s a suitor; then , when you did fi n a l l y make off with her (such ma rriages were always first framed a s el opements ) , another few bundles to a s ­ su age h e r mother w h e n she s h o w e d up angrily demanding to know what was going o n . This would normally be fol l owed by five more to get her guardian to at least temporarily accept the situation, and

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more still to her p a rents when she gave birth, if you were to have any cha nce of their accepting your c l a i m s to be the father of her children . That might get her p a rents off your back, but y o u ' d have to pay off the guardian forever, because you could never real l y use money to acquire the rights to a w o m a n . Everyone knew that the only thing you c a n legitimately g i v e i n exchange f o r a w o m a n i s another w o m a n . I n this case, everyone h a s to abide by the pretext that a woman w i l l someday be forthcoming. I n the meantime, a s one ethnographer succinctly puts it, " the debt can never be ful l y paid . " 13

According to Rospabe, the Tiv are j ust making explicit the un­ derlying logic of bridewealth everywhere. The suitor presenting bride­ wealth i s never paying for a woman, or even for the rights to claim her children . That would imply that brass rods, or whale's teeth , cowrie shells, or even c a ttle are somehow the equivalent of a human being, which b y the logic of a human economy i s obviously absurd. O n l y a h u m a n could ever be considered equivalent to a nother h u m a n . A l l the more so since, i n the case of marriage, we a re speaking of something even more v a l u a b l e than one human l i fe : we are speaking of a h u m a n l i fe t h a t also has the capacity to generate new l i v e s .

Certainly, m a n y of t h o s e who p a y bridewealth are, like t h e T i v , q u i t e e x p l i c i t about a l l t h i s . Bridewealth m o n e y i s presented not t o settle a d e b t , b u t a s a kind of acknowledgment t h a t there exists a debt that cannot be settled by means of money. Often the two sides will maintain at least the polite fiction that there will, someday, be a recompense in k i n d : that the suitor ' s c l a n w i l l eventu a l l y provide one of its own women, perhaps even that very w o m a n ' s d aughter or grand­ d aughter, to marry a man of the wife ' s natal c l a n . O r maybe there w i l l be some arrangement about the disposition of her c h i l d r e n ; p e r h a p s h e r c l a n w i l l g e t t o k e e p one for itself. The p o s s i b i lities are endles s .

I I I I I

Money, then, begin s , as Rospabe h i m self puts it, " a s a s u bstitute for life . '* O n e might c a l l it the recognition of a l i fe-debt. Th is, in turn, ex­ plains why it's invariably the exact s a m e kind of money that's used to a rrange m a rriages that i s also used to pay wergeld (or " b loodwealth" a s it's sometimes a l s o called ) : money presented to the fa m i l y of a mur­ der victim so a s to prevent or resolve a blood-feud. Here the sources are even more explicit. On the one h a n d , one presents whale teeth or brass rods because the m u rderer's kin recogn ize they owe a l i fe to the victi m ' s fa m i l y . O n the other, whale teeth or brass rods are in no sense, and can never be, compensation for the loss of a m u rdered relative.

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Certainly n o one presenting such compensation would ever be foo l i s h e n o u g h to suggest that any a mount of m o n e y c o u l d possibly be t h e " e q u i v a l e n t " to the v a l ue of someone ' s father, s i s t e r , or child .

So here again, money is first and fo remost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than money .

In the case of a blood-feud, both p a rties w i l l also be a w a re that even a revenge k i l l ing, while at least it conforms to the principle of a life for a l i fe , w o n ' t really compensate for the victi m ' s grief and p a i n e i t h e r . This know ledge a l l o w s fo r some possibility of settling t h e m a t ­ t e r without violence. But e v e n h e r e , there is often a feeling t h a t , a s in the case of m a rriage, the real solution to the problem is simply being temporarily postponed.

An i l l u stration might be helpfu l . Among the Nuer, there i s a speci a l c l a s s of priestly figures w h o specialize in mediating feuds, referred to in the l i terature a s " leopard-skin chiefs . " If one m a n murders another, he will im mediately seek out one of their homesteads, since such a home­ stead is treated a s a n inviolate s a nctu a r y : even the dead man's fa m i l y , who w i l l be honor-bound to avenge the murder, w i l l know t h a t they cannot enter it, lest terrible con sequences ensue. According to Evans­ Pritchard ' s classic account, the chief w i l l immediately start trying to negotiate a settlement between the m u rderer and victi m ' s fa milies, a delica te business, because the victi m ' s fa m i l y w i l l always first refuse:

The chief first finds out what cattle the slayer's people possess and what they are prepared to pay in compensation . . . . He then visits the dead man 's people and asks them to accept cattle for the life. They usually refuse, for it is a point of honor to be obstinate, but their refusal does not mean that they are unwi ll­ ing to accept compensation . The chief knows this and insists on their acceptance, even threatening to curse them if they do not give way . . . 15

More-distant kin weigh in, reminding everyone of their responsi­ bility to the l a rger community, of a l l the trouble that a n outstanding feud will cause to i n nocent relatives, a n d a fter a great show of holding out, insisting that it is insulting to suggest that any number of cattle could possibly substitute for the l i fe of a son or brother, they w i l l usu­ ally grudgi ngly accept . 1 6 In fact, even once the m a tter has tec h n i c a l l y b e e n sett le d, i t r e a l l y h a s n ' t-it u s u a l l y t a k e s yea rs to a s s e m b l e t h e c a t t l e , and e v e n once t h e y h a v e been p a i d , the two sides w i l l a v o i d e a c h o t h e r , " espec i a l l y a t d a n c e s , fo r i n the excitement t h e y engender, merely bumping i n to a m a n w h o s e k i n s m a n h a s been slain m a y c a u s e

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 3 5

a fight to break out, because the' offense is never forgiven and the score must fi n a l l y be paid with a l i fe . " 17

So i t ' s much the same as with bridewea lth . Money does not wipe out the debt. One life c a n only be paid for with another. A t best those paying bloodwealth, by a d m itting the existence of the debt and insist­ ing that they wish they could pay it, even though they know this is impossible, can a llow the matter to be p l aced permanently on h o l d .

H a l fw a y a r o u n d t h e world, one finds Lew i s H e n r y M o r g a n de­ scribing the elab o rate mechanisms set up b y the Six Nations of the Iroquois to avoid precisely this state of a ffa i r s . I n the event one man k i l led another,

Immediately on the comm1sswn of a murder, the affair was taken up by the tribes to which the parties belonged , and stren­ uous efforts were made to effect a reconci l i ation , lest private retaliation should lead to disastrous con sequences .

The first council ascertained whether the offender was will­ ing to confess h i s crime, and to make atonement. If he was, the counci l immediately sent a belt of white wampum, in his name, to the other counci l , which contained a message to that effect. The latter then endeavored to pacify the fa mily of the deceased, to quiet their excitement, and to i nduce them to ac­ cept the wampum as condonation . 1 8

Much as in the case of the Nuer, there were complicated schedules of exactly how many fathoms of wampum were paid over, depending on the status of the victim and the n a ture of the crime. As with the Nuer, too , everyone insisted that this w a s not payment. The value of the wampum i n no sense represented the v a l ue of the dead m a n ' s life :

The present of white wampum was n o t in the nature of a compensation for the l i fe of the deceased, but of a regretful confession of the crime, with a petition for forgiveness. It was a peace-offering, the acceptance of which was pressed by mutual friends . . . 19

A c tu a l l y , i n m a ny c a ses there was also some way to m a n i p u l ate the system to turn payments meant to a s s uage one's rage and grief into ways of creating a new life that would in some sense s u b stitute for the one that was lost. Among the Nuer, forty c a ttle were set as the stan­ dard fee for b l o odwealth . But it w a s also the standard rate of bride­ wealth . The logic was thi s : if a m a n h a d been m u rdered before he was

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a b l e to m arry and produce offspring, i t ' s only natural that his spmt would be angry. He h a d bee n , effectively, robbed of h i s eternity. The best solution would be to use the cattle paid i n settlement to acquire what was c a l led a "ghost-wife " : a woman who would then be for m a l l y m a rried to the d e a d m a n . I n practice, she was u s u a l l y p aired o f f with one of the victi m ' s brothers, but this was not particularly i mportant; it didn't really m atter too much who i m p regnated her, since h e would be i n no sense the father of her chi ldren . Her chi ldren would be con­ s idered the chi ldren of the victi m ' s ghost-and a s a result, any boys among them were seen a s having been born with a parti c u l a r commit­ ment to someday avenge his death . 20

This l a tter is u n u s ua l . But Nuer appear to have been unusually stubborn about feud s . Rospabe provides examples fro m other parts of the world that are even more tell i n g . Among North Afric a n Bedo u i n s , f o r i n s t a n c e , i t sometimes happened t h a t the only way to settle a feud was for the killer's fam i l y to turn over a daughter, who would then marry the victi m ' s next of k i n-his brother, s a y . I f she bore him a male child, the boy was given the s a m e name a s h i s dead uncle and consid­ ered to be, at least i n the broadest sense, a substitute for h i m . 2 1 The Iroqu o i s , w h o traced descent i n the fem a l e line, did not trade women in this fa shion . However, they had another, more direct approach. I f a man d ied-even of natural causes-hi s wife ' s relatives might "put h i s name u p o n the mat, " sending off b e l t s o f w a m p u m to c o m m i ssion a war party, which would then raid an enemy v i l lage to secure a captive. The captive could either be killed, or, if the clan m a trons were i n a benevolent mood (one could never tel l ; the grief of mourning is tricky ) , adopted : this w a s signified b y throwing a belt o f w a m p u m around h i s shoulders, whereon he would be g i v e n t h e name o f the deceased and be considered, from that moment o n , married to the vict i m ' s wife , the owner of h i s personal possessi o n s , and i n every way, effectively, the exact same person as the dead m a n used to b e . 22

A l l of this merely serves to underline Rospabe's basic point, which is that money can be seen, i n human economies, a s first and foremost the acknowledgment of the existence of a debt that cannot be p a i d .

I n a way, i t ' s a l l v e r y reminiscent of primordial -debt theory : money emerges from the recogn ition of an absolute debt to that which has given you l i fe . The difference i s that instead of i m agining such debts as between a n individual and society, or perhaps the cosmos, here they are i magined a s a kind of network of dyadic relati o n s : almost everyone i n such societies was in a relation of absolute debt to someone else. It's not that we owe " society . " I f there i s any notion of " society" here--an d it's not clear that there i s-society is our debts .

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 3 7

B l o o d D e bts ( l e l e )

Obviously, this leads us to the s a m e fa m i l i a r proble m : How does a token of recogn ition that one cannot pay a debt turn into a fo rm of payment by which a debt can be extinguished ? I f anything, the problem seems even worse than it w a s before.

In fact, i t i s n ' t . The African evidence clearly shows how such things can happen-though the answer i s a bit unsettling. To demonstrate this, it w i l l be necessary to look at one or two African societies with a closer foc u s .

I ' l l s t a r t w i t h t h e L e l e , a n A frican people who h a d , at the time t h a t M a ry D o u g l a s studied t h e m i n t h e r9s o s , m a n aged t o t u r n t h e principle of blood debts into the organizing p rinciple of their entire society .

The Lele were, at that time, a group of perhaps ten thousand s o u l s , living on a stretch of rolling country near the K a s a i River i n the Belgian Congo, and considered a rude backcoun try fol k by their richer and more cosmopolitan neighbors, the Kuba and Bushong. Lele women grew maize and manioc; the men thought of themselves a s i ntrepid hunters but spent most of their time weaving a n d sewing raffi a - p a l m cloth . This c l o t h w a s what the area w a s rea l l y k n o w n for . It w a s n o t only used for every sort of c l o t h i n g , but a l s o exported : the L e l e c o n s i d ­ e r e d themselves the clothiers of the regi o n , and it was traded with s u r ­ rounding p e o p l e to acquire luxuries. Intern a l l y , it fu nctioned a s a sort of currency. Sti l l , i t was not used in m a rkets ( there were no m a rkets ) , a n d , as Mary Douglas discovered to her great inconvenience, within a v i l l age, one couldn ' t use it to acquire food, tool s , tableware, or really much of anythingY It was the qui ntessenti a l social c u rrency .

Informal gifts of raffia cl oth smooth all social relations: hus­ band to wife, son to mother, son to father. They resolve oc­ casions of tension, as peace-offerings; they make parting gifts, or convey congratulations. There are also formal gifts of raffia which are neglected only at risk of rupture of the social ties in­ volved . A man, on reaching adulthood, should give 20 cl oths to his father. Otherwise he would be ashamed to ask his father's help fo r raising his marri age dues . A man should give 20 cloths to his wife on each delivery of a child . . . 24

Cloth was also used for various fines and fees, a n d to pay curers. So fo r instance, if a man's wife reported a would-be seducer, it was customary to reward her with 20 cloths for her fidelity (it w a s not

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required, but not doing so was considered decidedly unwise) ; if an adulterer was c a ught, he w a s expected to p a y 50 or roo cloths to the w o m a n ' s h u s b a n d ; if the h u s b and and lover d i sturbed the peace of the v i l l age b y fighting before the matter was settled, each would have to p a y two in compensation, and so forth .

G i fts tended to flow upward. Young people were always giving little presents of cloth a s marks of respect to father s , mothers, uncles, and the l i k e . These gifts were hierarchical in n ature: that i s , it never occurred to those receiving them that they should have to reciprocate i n any way. A s a result, elders, and especially elder men, u s u a l l y had a few extra pieces lying around, and young men , who could never weave quite enough to meet their need s , would have to turn to them whenever time for some m a j o r payment rolled around : for instance, i f they h a d to p a y a m a j o r fine, o r wished to hire a doctor to a s s i st their w i fe i n c h i l d ­ birth, or wanted to j oin a cult s o c i e t y . T h e y w e r e thus a l w ay s slightly i n debt, or at least s l ightly beholden, to their elders. But everyone also h a d a whole range of friends and relatives who they h a d helped out, and so could turn to for a s s i stance . 25

Marriage was particularly expen sive, since the arrangements u s u a l l y required getting o n e ' s hands on sever a l bars of c a m w o o d . I f raffia c l o t h w a s t h e s m a l l c h a nge of social life , c a mwood-a r a r e imported w o o d u s e d f o r the man ufacture of cosmetics-wa s the high-deno mination c urrenc y . A h u ndred raffia cloths were equivalent to three to five bars. Few individuals owned much in the w a y of camwood, u s u a l l y j ust l i ttle bits to grind up for their own use. M o s t w a s kept i n each v i l l age ' s c o l ­ lective treasury.

This i s not to say that camwood was used for anything like bridewealth-rather, it was used in m a rriage negoti ations, i n w h i c h a l l s o r t s of gifts w e r e p a s sed b ack and forth . I n fact, there w a s no bridewe a l t h . Men could not use money to acquire women; nor could they use i t to c l a i m any rights over children. The Lele were matrilinea l . C h i l dren belonged not t o their father's c l a n , b u t t o their mother ' s .

There w a s another w a y t h a t m e n gained control over women, however.26 This w a s the system of blood debts .

It is a common understanding among m a n y traditi o n a l A fric a n p e o p l e s that h u m a n b e i n g s do not simply die w i t h o u t a reason . I f s o m e o n e dies, s o m e o n e must h a ve k i l led the m . If a L e l e w oma n d i e d i n c h i l d b i r t h , f o r example, this was a s s u med to be b e c a u s e she h a d c o m mi tted a d ultery . The a d ulterer w a s thus respon sible for t h e death . S o metimes she would confess on her deathbed, otherw i s e the facts o f the m a tter w o u l d h a v e to be e s t a b l i shed t h r o u g h d i v i n a t i o n . It w a s the s a m e i f a b a b y died . I f someone b e c a m e s i c k , or s l i p p ed and fe l l

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w h i l e c l i m bing a tree, one would check to see if they had been involved in any quarrel that could be said to have caused the m i s fortun e . If a l l e l s e fa iled, one could e m p l o y m a g i c a l m e a n s to identify t h e sorcerer. O nce the v i l lage was satisfied that a culprit had been identified, that person owed a blood-debt: that is, he owed the victi m ' s next of kin a human l i fe . The culprit would thus have to transfer over a young woman fro m h i s fa m i l y , h i s s i ster or her d aughter, to be the victi m ' s w a r d , or " p a w n . "

A s with the T i v , the system quickly became i m mensely compli­ cated . Pawnship w a s inherited . If a w o m a n w a s someone's p a w n , so would her children be, and so would her d aughters ' chi ldren . This meant that most m a les were also cons idered someone e l s e ' s m a n . Sti l l , no one would accept a m a l e p a w n i n payment of blood-debts : the whole point was to get hold of a young w o m a n , who would then go on to produce additional pawn chi ldren . D o uglas ' s Lele i n formants emphasized that any man would naturally want to have many of these a s p o s s i b l e :

A s k " Why do y o u want t o have more pawns ? " a n d they invari ­ ably say, " The advantage of owning pawns is that if you incur a blood-debt, you can settle it by paying one of your pawns, and your own sisters remain free. " Ask, "Why do you wish your own sisters to rem ain free ? " and they reply, "Ah! then if I incur a bl ood-debt, I can settle it by giving one of them as a pawn . . . "

Every man is always aware that at any time he is liable for a blood-debt. If any woman he has seduced confesses his name in the throes of child-birth, and subsequently dies, or if her child dies, or if anyone he has quarreled with dies of i llness or accident, he may be held responsible . . . Even if a woman runs away from her husband, and fighting breaks out on her account, the deaths will be laid at her door, and her brother or mother's brother will have to pay up. Since only women are accepted as blood-compensation, and since compensation is demanded for all deaths, of men as well as of women , it is obvious that there can never be enough to go around. Men fall into arrears in their pawnship obligations, and girls used to be pledged before their birth, even before their mothers were of marri agea ble age Y

In other word s , the whole thing turned into an endlessly compl icat­ ed chess game-one reason , Douglas remarks, why the term " p a w n "

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seems singularly apropos . Just about every adult Lele m a l e w a s both someone e l s e ' s pawn, and engaged in a constant game of securing, swapping, or redeeming pawns. Every major drama or tragedy of vil­ lage l i fe would ordinarily lead to a transfer of rights in women . A l most a l l of those women would eventua l l y get swapped a ga i n .

Several points need t o be empha sized here. F i r s t of a l l , w h a t were being traded were, quite speci fi c a l l y , human lives. Douglas c a l l s them " b lood -debts , " but " l i fe-debts" would b e more appropriate. Say, for instance, a m a n is drowning, and another man rescues h i m . Or say h e ' s deathly i l l but a doctor cures him. I n either c a s e , we would likely say one m a n "owes h i s life " to the other. S o would the Lele, but they meant it litera l l y . Save someon e ' s l i fe , they owe you a life , and a l i fe owed had to be paid b a c k . The u s u a l recourse was for a m a n whose life was saved to turn over h i s si ster as a pawn-or if not that, a d i fferent w o m a n ; a pawn he had acquired from someone e l s e .

The s e c o n d point is that n o t h i n g c o u l d substitute for a h u m a n life . " Compensation w a s b a s e d on t h e principle of equivalence, a l i fe for a life , a person for a person . " Since the value of a h u m a n l i fe w a s abso­ lute, no amount of raffia cloth, or c a mwood b a r s , o r goats, o r transis­ tor radios, or anything else could possibly take its place.

The third and most i m p ortant point i s that i n practice, " h u m a n l i fe " actu a l l y meant " w o m a n ' s life "-or e v e n more specifica l l y , "young wo m an ' s l i fe . " O stensi b l y this was to m a x i m i ze on e ' s holdings : a bove a l l , one wished for a h u m a n being who could become pregn a n t and produce chi ldren , since those children would also be p a w n s . S t i l l , even Mary D o u g l a s , who was i n no sense a feminist, was forced to a d m i t that the whole arrangement did seem to operate a s if i t were one gigantic apparatus for a sserting m a l e control over women. This was true a bove all because women themselves could not own pa w n s .28 They could only b e pawns. In other word s : when it came to life-debts , o n l y men could be either creditors o r debtors. Young women were thus the credits and the debits-the pieces being moved around the chessboard-w h i l e the h an ds that moved them were invariably m a l e .29

O f course, since almost everyone was a p a w n , or had been a t some point in their lives, being one could not in itself be much of a tragedy . F o r m a l e pawn s it was in some ways quite advantageou s , since on e ' s "owner" had to p a y most of o n e ' s fines and fees and e ve n blood-debts. This i s why, a s Dougl a s ' s i n formants uniformly insisted, pawnship had nothing in common with sl avery. The Lele did keep slaves, b u t never very m a n y . Slaves were war captives, u s u a l l y foreigners . As such they had no fa m i l y , no one to protect the m . To be a p a w n , on the other h a n d , meant to have not one, but two different fa milies to look a fter

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 4 1

y o u : you still had your own mother and her brothers, b u t now y o u a l s o h a d your " lord . "

F o r a w o m a n , the very fact that she w a s the stakes in a game that a l l men were p laying afforded a l l sorts of opportunities to game the system . I n principle, a girl might be born a pawn, assigned to some m a n for eventual marriage. I n practice, however,

a little Lele girl would grow up a coquette . From infancy she was the centre of affectionate, teasing, flirting attention . Her affianced husband never gained more than a very limited con­ trol over her . . . Since men competed with one another for women there was scope for women to manoeuvre and intrigue. Hopeful seducers were never lacking and no woman doubted that she could get another husband if it suited her.30

In addition, a young Lele w o m a n h a d one unique and p o werful card to play. Everyone w a s well aware that, i f she c ompletely refused to countenance her situation, she always had the option of becoming a " v i l l age-wife . "31

The i nstitution of v i l lage-wife w a s a peculiarly Lele o n e . Probably the best w a y to describe it is to i m agine a hypothetical case. Let u s say that an o l d , i mportant m a n acquires a young w o m a n a s p a w n through a blood-debt, and he decides to marry her h i mself. Technically, h e has the right to do s o , but it's no fun for a young woman to be a n old man's third o r fourth wife . O r , say he decides to offer her in m arriage to one of his male pawns in a village far away fro m her mother and natal home. She protests. He ignores her protestations . S h e waits for an opportune moment and slips off at night to an enemy v i l lage, where she asks for sanctuary. This i s always p o s s i b l e : all villages have their traditi o n al enemies . Neither would a n enemy v i l lage refuse a woman who came to them i n such a situation . They would i mmediately d e­ c l a re her " wife of the village , " who a l l men living th e re would then be o b l iged to p rotect.

I t helps to understand that here, a s in many p a rts of A frica, most older men had several wives . This meant that the pool of women avail­ able for younger men was considerably reduced . A s our ethnographer exp l a i n s , the i m b a lance was a source of considerab l e sexu a l ten si on :

Everyone recognized that the young unmarried men coveted the wives of their seniors . Indeed, one of their pastimes was to plan seductions and the man who boasted of none was derided. Since the old men wished to remain polygynists, with two or

1 4 2 D E B T

three wives, and since adulteries were thought to disrupt the peace of the village, Lele had to make some arrangement to appease their unmarried men .

Therefore, when a sufficient number of them reached the age of eighteen or so, they were allowed to buy the right to a common wife.32

A fter paying an app ropriate fee in raffia cloth to the v i l l age trea sury , they were permitted t o build a collective house, a n d then they were ei­ ther a l lotted a wife to put i n it, o r al lowed to fo rm a party that would try to steal one fro m a rival v i l l age. (Or, alternately, if one showed up a s a refugee, they would ask the rest of the v i l l age for the right to accept her: this w a s invariably granted . ) This common wife i s what's referred to a s a " v i l lage wife . " The position of v i l l age wife was more than respectab l e . I n fact, a newly m arried v i l lage wife was treated very much like a princes s . S h e w a s not expected to plant or weed i n the gardens, fetch wood or water, or even to cook; all household chores were done by her eager young h u s b a n d s , w h o provided the best of everything, spending much of their time hunting in the forest vying to bring her the choicest delicacies, or plying her with palm wine. She could help herself to others' possessions and was expected to make all sorts of m ischief to the bemused indulgence of a l l concern e d . She w a s a l s o expected to make herself s ex u a l l y a v a i l a b l e to a l l m e m bers of t h e age-set-perhaps t e n or twelve different men-at fi r s t , pretty m u c h whenever t h e y wanted her .33

Over t i m e , a v i l l age wife would u s u a l l y settle down with j u st three or fou r of her h u s b a n d s , and fi n a l l y , j ust one. The domestic arrange­ ments were flexible. Nonetheless, in principle, she w a s m a rried to the v i l l age a s a whole. I f she had chi ldre n , the v i l l age was considered to b e their father, and a s such expected to bring them up, provide them with resources, and eventua l l y , get them properly m a rried off-which i s why vill ages had to maintain collective trea suries ful l of raffia and ca mwood bars in the first place. Since at any time a vill age w a s likely to have several v i l l age wives, i t would also have its own chi ldren and grandchildren, and therefore be i n a position to both demand and pay b l ood-debts , and t h u s , to accumulate p a w n s .

A s a r e s u l t , vill ages b e c a m e corporate b o d i e s , collective groups that, like modern corporation s , h a d to be treated a s i f they were indi­ v i d u a l s for p u rposes of l a w . However there was one key difference. U n ­ like ordinary individ u a l s , v i l l ages could back up t h e i r c l a i m s with fo rce.

A s Douglas emphasizes, this was cruci a l , because o rd i n a ry Lele men were s i m p l y not able to do this to one another.34 I n everyday

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 4 3

a ffa i r s , there w a s an almost complete lack of a n y systematic means of coerc i o n . This w a s the m a i n rea son , she notes , that pawnship w a s so innocuous. There were a l l sorts of rules, but w i th no govern ment, no courts, no j udges to make a u thoritative dec i s i o n s , no group of armed men willing or able to employ the threat of force to back those deci­ sions u p , rules were there to be adj u sted and interpreted . In the end, everyon e ' s feelings had to b e taken into account. I n everyday a ffa irs, Lel e put g reat s tock on gentle and agreeable behavior. Men might have been regularly seized with the urge to throw themselves a t each other in fits of j ealous rage ( o ften they had good reason to ) , but they very rarely did. And if a fight did break out, everyone would i m m edi ately j u mp in to break it up and s u b m i t the affa ir to p u b l i c medi ation .35

V i l l ages, in contrast, were fortified, and age-sets could be m o b i l i zed to act a s m ilita ry units. Here, and only here, did organ ized violence enter the picture. True, when v i l l ages fought, it was also always over women (everyone Douglas ta lked to expressed incredulity at the very idea that grown men, anywhere, could ever come to blows over any­ thing else) . But in the c a s e of v i l l ages, it could come to a n actual war. I f another village's elders ignored o n e ' s claims to a pawn, o n e ' s young men might organize a raiding p a rty and kidnap her, o r carry off some other likely young women to be their collective wife . This might lead to death s , and to further claims for compensatio n . " Since it had the backing of forc e , " Dougl a s observes drily, "the vill age could a fford to be less concili atory towards the wishes of its p a w n s . "36

It's at exactly this point, too , where the potential for violence enters, that the great wall constructed between the v a l u e of lives and money c a n suddenly come tumbling dow n .

Sometimes when two clans were disputing a claim t o blood compensation, the clai mant might see no hope of getting sat­ isfaction from his opponents . The political system offered no direct means for one man (or clan) to use physical coercion or to resort to superior authority to enforce claims against an­ other. In such a case, rather than abandon his claim to a pawn­ woman, he would be ready to take the equivalent in wealth, if he could get it. The usual procedure was to sell his case against the defendants to the only group capable of extorting a pawn by force, that is, to a village.

The man who meant to sell his case to a village asked them for Ioo raffia cloths or five bars of ca mwood . The village raised the amount, either from its treasury, or by a loan from one

1 4 4 D E B T

of its members , and thereby adopted as its own his claim to a pawn .37

Once he held the money, h i s c l a i m was over, and the v i l l age, which had now bought it, would proceed to organize a raid to seize the w o m a n in dispute.

I n other words, it w a s only when violence w a s brought i nto the equation that there w a s any question of buying and selling peopl e . The a b i lity to deploy force, to cut through the endless maze of preferences, o b l igations , expectations, and responsibilities that mark real human relationships, a l s o made i t possible to overcome w h a t i s otherwise the first rule of all Lele economic relationsh i p s : that h u m a n lives c a n only be exchanged for other human lives, and never for physical o b j ects. Significantly, the amount p aid-a hundred cloth s , o r a n equivalent amount of c a mwood-wa s also the price of a slave.38 Slaves were, a s I mentioned , w a r captiv e s . There s e e m never to have b e e n v e r y m a n y of them; D o u g l a s only m a n aged to locate two descendants of s l aves in the 195 0 s , some twenty-five years after the practice had been a b o l ­ i s h e d . 3 9 S t i l l , the n u m b e r s w e r e not important. The m e r e fact of their existence set a precedent. The value of a human l i fe could, sometimes, be q u a ntified; but if one w a s able to move fro m A = A (one l i fe equals another) to A = B (one l i fe = one h undred cloths ) , i t w a s only because the equation w a s esta b l i s hed at the point of a spe a r .

F l e s h - D e b t ( T i v )

I have dwelt o n the Lele i n such detail i n p a rt because I wanted t o con­ vey some sense of why I w a s using the term " h u m a n econo m y , " what life i s like inside one, w h a t sort of dramas fi l l people ' s d a y s , and how money typi c a l l y operates in the midst of a l l t h i s . Lele currencies are, a s I say, quintessential social currencies. They are used to mark every visit, every promise, every important moment in a m a n ' s o r w o m an ' s l i fe . It i s surely significant, t o o , w h a t t h e obj ects used a s currency here actually were. R a ffi a cloth was used for clothing. I n D ougl a s ' s d a y , it was the m a i n t h i n g u s e d to c l o t h e t h e h u m a n body; c a m wood bars were the source of a red p a ste that w a s used a s a cosmetic-it w a s the m a i n s u b stance used as makeup, b y both men and w o m e n , to beautify themselves each d a y . These, the n , were the m ateri a l s used to shape peopl e ' s physical appearance, to make them appear mature, decent, at­ tractive, and digni fied to their fel l o w s . They were w h a t turned a mere naked body into a proper social being.

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 4 5

This is no coincidence. In fa ct, it's extraordinarily common in what I ' v e been c a l l i ng h u m a n economies. Money a l most a l w a y s ari ses first fro m obj ects that a re used primarily a s adornment of the person. Beads , s h e l l s , feathers, dog or whale teeth , gold, and silver are a l l well­ known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than mak­ ing people look more interesting, and hence, more beautifu l . The brass rods used by the Tiv might seem a n exception, but actu a l l y they ' re not: they were used mainly a s raw material for the manufacture of j ewelry, or simply twi sted into hoops and worn at dances. There are exceptions (cattle, fo r instance) , but a s a general rule, it's only when governments, and then markets, enter the picture that we begin to see currencies like barley, cheese, tobacco , or s a l t . 40

It a l s o illu strates the pecu l i a r p rogression of ideas that so often mark h u m a n economies . On the one h a n d , h u m a n l i fe i s the a bsolute v a l u e . There is no possible equivalent. Whether a life is given or taken , the debt is absolute. In places, this principle is indeed sacrosanct. More ofte n , it i s compromised by the e l a b o rate games played by the Tiv, who treat the giving of lives, and the Lele, who treat the taking of lives, a s creating debts that can only be paid by delivering another h u m a n b e i n g . In each c a s e , too , the practice ends up engendering a n extraor­ dinarily complex game in which i mportant men end up excha nging women, or at least, rights over their ferti lity.

But this i s a lready a kind of opening. O n c e the game exists, once the principle of s u b stitution comes i n , there w a s a l w a y s the p o s s i b i lity of extending i t . When that begins to happen, syste m s of debt that were premised on creating people c a n-even here--suddenly become the means of destroying the m .

A s an example, l e t us once a g a i n return to t h e T i v . T h e reader w i l l rec a l l that if a m a n did not have a si ster or a ward to g i v e i n exchange for one's wife , it w a s possible to a s s u age her p a rents a n d guard ia n s by gifts of money. However, such a wife would never be considered truly his. Here too , there w a s one d r a m atic excepti o n . A m a n could buy a slave, a woman kidnapped in a raid fro m a distant country .41 S l aves, after all, had no p a rents, or could be treated a s i f they didn't; they h a d b e e n forcibly rem oved f r o m a l l t h o s e networks of mutual o b l igation and debt in which ordinary people acquired their outward identiti e s . This w a s why t h e y could be b o u g h t and s o l d .

Once m a rried, though , a p u rc h a sed wife w o u l d q u i c k l y develop new ties. She w a s no longer a slave, and her chi ldren were perfectly legiti m a te--more so, in fact, than those of a wife who was merely ac­ qui red through the conti n u a l payment of brass rod s .

1 4 6 D E B T

We have perhaps a general princi p l e : to make something saleable, i n a h u m a n economy, one needs to first rip i t fro m its context. That's what slaves are: people stolen from the community that made them what they are. As strangers to their new communities, slaves no longer had mothers, fathers, kin of a n y sort. This i s why they could be bought and sold or even killed : because the only relation they had was to their owners . A Lele village's a b i l ity to organize raids and kidnap a woman fro m a n alien community seems to have been the key to its a b i l ity to start trading women for money-even if i n their case, they could do so o n l y to a very l i mited extent . A fter all, her relatives were not very far a w a y , and they would s u rely come around demanding an exp l a n atio n . I n t h e e n d , so meone w o u l d h a v e t o c o m e up with a n arrangement that everyone could live with .42

Sti l l , I would a l s o insist that there is something more than t h i s . O n e g e t s the distinct s e n s e , in much of the l i terature, t h a t m a n y African societies were h a unted by the a w a reness that these ela borate networks of debt could, if things went j ust s l ightly wrong, be transformed into something a b s o l utely terri ble. The Tiv are a dramatic case i n point.

I I I I I

Among students of anthropology, the Tiv are m a i n l y famous for the fact that their economic l i fe was divided into what their best-known ethnographers, Paul and Laura B o h a n n a n , referred to as three sepa­ rate " spheres of exchange . " Ordinary, everyday economic activity was mostly the affa i r of women . They were the ones who fil led the m a rkets, and who trod the paths giving and returning minor gifts of okra , nuts, or fish. Men concerned themselves with what they considered higher things : the kind of transactions that could be conducted using the Tiv currency, which, a s with the Lele, consisted o f two deno minations, a kind of locally made cloth c a l led tugudu , widely exported, a n d , for m a ­ j o r transacti o n s , bundles of imported b r a s s rods.43 These c o u l d be used to acquire certain flashy and luxurious things (cows, purchased foreign wives ) , but they were m a i n l y for the give and take of political a ffairs, hiring curers, acquiring magic, gaining i n itiation into cult societies. I n political matters, Tiv w e r e e v e n m o r e resol u tely egalitarian than t h e Lele : successful old men with t h e i r n u merous w i v e s m i g h t have lorded it over their sons and other dependants within their own house com­ pounds, but beyond that, there was no for m a l political orga n ization of any sort. Finally, there was the system of wards, which consisted entirely of m e n ' s rights i n women. Hence, the notion of " spheres . " In principle, these three levels-ordinary consumption good s , masculine

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 4 7

prestige goods, and rights in women-were completely separate. No amount of okra could get you a brass rod, j ust a s , in principle, no n u m ber of brass rods could give you full rights to a w o m a n .

I n practice, there w e r e ways to game the syste m . Say a neighbor w a s spon soring a feast but w a s short on supplies; one might come to h i s a i d , then later, d i screetly, ask for a bundle o r two in repayment. To b e able to wheel and dea l , to " turn chickens into cows , " a s the saying went, and ultimately, broker one's wealth and p restige into a way of acquiring wives, required a " strong heart"-that is, an enterprising and charismatic person a lity.44 But " strong heart" had another meaning too. There w a s believed to be a certai n actual b i ological s u bstance c a l led tsav that grew on the h u m a n heart. This was what gave certa i n people their charm, their energy, and their powers of persu a s i o n . Tsav there­ fore was both a physical s u b stance and that invisible power that a l l o w s certa i n p e o p l e to b e n d o t h e r s to their w i l l .45

The problem w a s-and most Tiv of that time appear to have be­ lieved that this was the problem with their society-that it was also possible to augment one's tsav through artificial means, and this could only b e accomplished b y consuming h u m a n fl e s h .

N o w , I should e m p h a s i z e r i g h t away that there i s n o r e a s o n to b e ­ l i e v e that any Tiv a c t u a l l y did p r a c t i c e c a n n i b a l i s m . The idea of eating human flesh appears to have disgusted and horrified them a s much as i t would most A merica n s . Yet for centuries, most appear to have been verita b l y obsessed b y the suspicion that some of their neighbors-and p a rticularly prominent men who became de facto political leaders­ were, in fact, secret c a n n i b a l s . Men who b u i l t up their tsav by such means, the stories went, attained extraord i n a ry powers : the a b i l ity to fly, to become i mpervious to weapons, to b e able to send out their souls at night to kill their victims i n such a way that their victims did not even know that they were dead, but would wander about, confused and feckless, to b e harvested fo r their c a n n i b a l feasts. They became, i n s h o r t , terrifying witches .46

The mbatsav, or society of witches, w a s always looking for new members , and the way to accomplish this w a s to trick people into eat­ ing human flesh. A witch would take a piece of the body of one of his own close relatives, who he had m u rdered , and place it in the victi m ' s food . I f t h e m a n was foolish enough t o eat it, he w o u l d contract a "flesh-debt," and the society of witches ensured that flesh-debts are always p a i d .

Perhaps y o u r friend, or some older m a n , h a s noticed that you have a large number of chi ldren, or brothers and si sters , and so

1 4 8 D E B T

tricks you into contracting the debt with him. He invites you to eat food in his house alone with him, and when you begin the meal he sets before you two dishes of sauce, one of which contains cooked human flesh . . .

If you eat fro m the wrong d i s h , but you d o not have a " strong heart "-the potent i a l to become a wi tch-you will become sick and flee fro m the house in terror. But if you have that hidden potenti a l , the flesh will begin to work i n you. That evening, you will find your house surrounded by screeching cats and owls. Stra nge noises will fi l l the air. Your new creditor will appear before you, b a cked b y h i s confederates i n evil . He will tell of how he k i l led h i s own b rother s o you two could dine together, a n d p retend to be tortu red by the thought o f having lost his own kin a s you sit there, surrounded by your plump and healthy relatives . The other witches will concur, acting a s if a l l this is your own fau l t . " Yo u have sought for tro u b l e , and trouble h a s come upon you . Come and lie down on the ground , that we may cut your throa t . "47

There's only one way out, and that's to p ledge a member of your own fa mily a s s u bstitute . This i s possible, because you will find you have terri ble new powers, but they must b e used a s the other witches demand. O n e by o n e , you must kill off your brothers, sisters, chi ldren; their bodies w i l l be stolen fro m their graves by the col l ege of witches, brought back to l i fe j u st long enough to be properly fattened , tortured , k i l led a g a i n , then c a rved and roasted for yet another fea s t .

T h e flesh debt goes o n a n d on. T h e creditor keeps on coming. Unless the debtor has men behind him who are very strong in tsav, he cannot free hi mself from the flesh debt until he has given up a l l his people, and his fa mily is finished . Then he goes himself and lies down on the ground to be slaughtered , and so the debt is finally discharged .48

T h e S l a v e Tra d e

I n one sense, i t ' s obvious w h a t ' s going o n here. Men with " strong hearts " have power and c h a r i s m a ; using i t , they can m a n i p u l ate debt to turn extra food into treasures, and treasures into wives, wards, and d a ughters, and thus become the heads of ever-growing fa m i l i e s . But that very power and c h a r i s m a that a l l ows them to d o this also m a kes them run the constant danger of sending the whole process j o lting back

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 4 9

into a kind of horrific i m p l o s i o n , of creating flesh-debts whereby o n e ' s family i s converted back i n to food.

Now, i f one i s simply trying to i m agine the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone, s u rel y , being forced to dine o n the m u ­ tilated corpses of o n e ' s o w n c h ildren would, a n ywhere, be pretty h i g h on t h e l i s t . S t i l l , anthropologists have c o m e to understand, o v e r t h e y e a r s , that every society i s h a unted b y slightly different nightmares, and these differences are significant. Horror stories, whether about vampires, ghouls , o r flesh-eating zombies, always seem to reflect some aspect of the tellers' own social lives, some terrifying potenti a l , i n the way they are accustomed to interact with each other, that they do not wish to acknowledge o r confront, b u t a l s o cannot help b u t talk a b o u t .49

I n the Tiv case, what would that b e ? Clearly, Tiv did have a m a j o r problem w i t h authority. T h e y l i ved i n a landscape dotted w i t h c o m ­ pounds , e a c h organized a r o u n d a s i n g l e older m a n w i t h h i s numerous wives, children, and a ssorted h a ngers- o n . Within each compound, that m a n h a d near-absolute authority . O utside there w a s n o form a l political structure, and Tiv were fiercely egalitarian. I n other word s : a l l men a s ­ pired to b e c o m e the m asters o f l a rge fa milies, but t h e y w e r e extremely suspicious of any form of m astery . Hardly surprising, then , that Tiv men were so a m b ivalent about the nature of power that they became convinced that the very q u alities that allow a m a n to rise to legitimate prominence could, if taken j ust a l i ttle bit further, turn h i m into a mon­ ster . 50 I n fact, most Tiv seemed to assume that most m a l e elders were witches , and that if a young person died, they were probably being paid off for a flesh-debt.

But this sti l l doesn't answer the one obvious questi o n : Why i s a l l this fra med in t e r m s of debt?

I I I I I

.

Here a l i ttle history is in order. It would appear that the ancestors of the Tiv a rrived in the Benue river v a lley and adj acent lands sometime around 175o-a time when a l l of what's now Nigeria was being torn apart by the Atlantic slave trade. Early stories relate h o w the Tiv, dur­ ing their migrati o n s , used to paint their wives and children with what looked like s m a l lpox scars, so that potenti a l raiders would be a fraid to carry them off.51 They establi shed themselves i n a notoriously i nacces­ sible stretch of country and offered up ferocious defense against peri­ odic raids from neighboring kingdo m s to their north and west-with which they eventually came to a political rapprochement.SZ

1 5 0 D E B T

The Tiv, then , were well aware of what was happening a l l around the m . Consider, for example, the case of the copper bars whose use they were so ca reful to restrict, so a s to avoid their becoming a n a l l ­ p u r p o s e form o f c u rren c y .

N o w , c o p p e r bars had b e e n used f o r money in this part of Africa for centuries, and at least in some places, for ordinary commercial transactions, a s wel l . It was easy enough to d o : one simply snapped them apart into s m a l ler pieces, or p u lled some o f them i n to thin w i res , twisted those around to little loops, and one had perfectly serviceable small change for everyday m a rket transactions .53 Most of the ones cur­ rent i n Tivland since the l a te eighteenth century, on the other h a n d , w e r e m a s s-produced in factories in B i r m i n g h a m and imported through the p o rt of O l d C a l a b a r at the mouth of the Cross River, by slave­ traders b a sed i n Liverpool and Bristol . 54 I n all the country adj oining the Cross River-that i s , i n the region di rectly to the south of the Tiv territory-copper bars were used as everyday currency. This was pres u m a b l y how they entered Tivland; they were either carried i n by pedl a rs from the Cross River or acquired by Tiv traders on expeditions abroad . All this, however, makes the fact that the Tiv refused to use copper bars a s such a currency doubly significant.

During the q6os alone, perhaps a hundred thousand A fric a n s were s hipped down the Cross River to C a l a b a r and nearby ports , where they were put i n c h a i n s , p l aced on British, Fren c h , o r other E u ropean ships, and shipped across the Atlantic-part of perhaps a m i l l i o n and a half exported fro m the Bight of Biafra during the whole period of the At­ lantic slave trade .55 Some of them had been captured in wars or raids, or s i m p l y kidnapped . The m a j ority, though , were c arried off because of debts .

Here, though, I must explain something a bout the orga nization of the slave trade.

The Atlantic S l ave Trade a s a whole was a gigantic network of credit arrangements. Ship-owners b a sed in Liverpool o r Bristol would acquire goods on easy credit terms fro m local wholesalers, expecting to make good by selling slaves ( a l s o on credit) to p l anters i n the A n t i l les and America, with commission agents in the city of London u l tim ately financing the a ffa i r through the profits of the sugar and tobacco trade. 56 Ship -owners would then transport their w a res to African ports like O l d Calabar. Calabar itself was the quintessential mercantile city-state, dominated by rich A fric a n merchants who dressed in E u ropean clothes, lived in E u ropean-style houses, and in some cases even sent their chil­ dren to England to be educated .

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 5 1

On arrival , E u ropean traders would negoti a te the v a l ue of their c a rgoes in the copper bars that served a s the currency of the port. In 1 6 9 8 , a merchant a board a ship c a l led the Dragon n oted the following prices he m a naged to esta b l i s h for h i s ware s :

o n e b a r iron 4 copper bars

one bunch of beads 4 copper bars

five rangoes57 4 copper bars

one basin No. 1 4 copper bars one tankard 3 copper bars

one yard l i nen I copper bar

six knives I copper bar one brass bell N o . I 3 copper ba rs58

By the height of the trade fifty years later, British ships were bri ng­ ing i n l a rge q u a n tities of cloth ( both products of the newly created Manchester m i l l s and c a l icoes fro m Ind i a ) , and i ron and copper ware, a long with incidental goods l i ke beads, and also, for obvious reasons, substanti a l n u m bers of firearms .19 The goods were then advanced to Afric a n merchants, again on credit, who a s signed them to their own agents to move upstrea m .

T h e obvious problem w a s h o w t o secure t h e debt. The trade was a n extraordinarily duplicitous a n d brutal business, a n d slave raiders were unl ikely to be depen d a b le credit risks-espec i a l l y when dealing with foreign merchants who they might never see again . 60 As a result, a system quickly developed in which E u ropean captains would demand security in the form of p a w n s .

The s o r t of " p a w n s " we are t a l k i n g abou t here a re c l e a r l y quite different from the kind we encountered among the Lele. In many of the kingdoms and trading towns of West Afri c a , the n a ture of pawn­ ship appears to have a l ready undergone pro found c h a nges b y the time Europeans showed up on the scene around 1500-it had beco me, effec­ tively , a kind of debt peonage. Debtors would p ledge fa mily mem bers a s s u rety for l o a n s ; the pawns would then become dependents in the creditors' househ o l d s , working their fields and tend ing to their house­ hold cho res-their persons acting a s security while their labor, effec­ tively, s u b s tituted for interest.61 Pawns were not slaves; they were not, like slaves, cut off fro m their fa milies; but neither were they precisely free.62 I n C a l a b a r a n d other ports, m a sters of sl aving ships, on advanc­ ing goods to their A frican counterparts, soon developed the custom of

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demanding pawns as security-for instance, two of the merchants' own dependents for every three slaves to b e delivered, preferably including a t least one member of the merchants' fam i l i e s Y This w a s i n practice not much different than demanding the surrender of hostages, and at times i t created major political crises when captains, tired of waiting for delayed shipments, decided to take off with a cargo of pawns i n ­ stea d .

Upriver, d e b t p a w n s also p l ayed a m a j o r p a rt i n the t r a d e . I n one w a y , the area w a s a b i t unusua l . In most of West Afric a , the trade ran through major kingdoms such a s D a homey or A sante to make wars and impose dracon i a n p u n i s h ments-one very common expedient for rulers w a s to m a n i p u late the j ustice system, so that a l m o s t any crime came to be p u n i s h a b l e by enslavement, or by death with the e n s l ave­ ment of one's wife and children, or b y outrageously high fines w h i c h , i f one could not p a y them, would cause the defaulter and h i s fa m i l y t o be sold a s slaves. I n another way, i t i s u n u s u a l l y revealing, since t h e lack of any l a rger govern ment structures made it e a s i e r to s e e what w a s rea l l y happening. The pervasive c l i m ate of violence led to the sys­ tematic perversion o f a l l the institutions o f existing h u m a n econ o m i e s , which w e r e transformed into a gigantic a p p a r a t u s of dehumanization and destruction .

In the Cross River region, the trade seems to have seen two phases . The first w a s a period of absol ute terror and utter c h a o s , in which raids were frequent, and anyone traveling alone risked being kidnapped by roving gangs of thugs and sold to Calabar. Before long, v i l l ages l a y abandoned; many people fled into the forest; men would have to form armed parties to work the field s . 64 This period was relatively brief. The second began when representatives of local merchant soci­ eties beg a n to establish themselves in communities u p and down the regi o n , offering to restore order. The most fa mous of these was the Aro Confederacy, who called themselves, " Ch i ldren of G o d . "65 Backed b y heavily armed mercenaries and the p restige of their fa mous Oracle at Arochu k w u , they esta b l i s hed a new and notoriously harsh j ustice syste m . 66 K i dnappers were h unted down and themselves sold a s slaves. S a fety was restored to roads and fa rmstead s . At the s a m e time, Aro c o l l a borated with local elders to create a code of ritual l a w s and penal­ ties so comprehensive and severe that everyone w a s at constant risk of fal l i n g afo u l of the m Y Anyone who violated one would b e turned over to the Aro for transport to the coast, with their accuser receiving their price in copper b a r s . 68 According to some contemporary accounts, a m a n who simply d i sliked his w i fe and w a s in need of brass rods could

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 5 3

always come up with some reason to sell her, and the v i l l age elders­ who received a share of the p rofits-would almost invariably concur .69

The most ingenious trick of the merchant societies, though , was to assist in the dissemination of a secret society, called Ekpe. Ekpe was most fa mous fo r sponsoring magni ficent m a s q uerades and for initiat­ ing its members into arcane mysteries, but it also acted a s a secret mech a n i s m fo r the enforcement of debts .70 I n C a l a b a r itself, for ex­ ample, the Ekpe society h a d access to a whole range of sanctions, starting with boycotts (all members were forbidden to conduct trade with a defaulting debtor) , fines, seizure of property, arrest, and fi n a l l y , execution-with the m o s t hapless v i c t i m s left t i e d to trees , t h e i r lower j a ws removed, a s a warning to others .71 It w a s ingen i o u s , particularly, because such societies always a l lowed anyone to buy i n , rising though the n i n e in itiatory grades if they could pay the fee-these a lso exacted, of course, in the brass rods the merchants themselves supplied. I n C a l a ­ bar, the fee s c h e d u l e fo r each g r a d e l o o k e d like this :72

1. N y a m p i 2 . Oku Akana

3· Brass 4 · Makanda 5 · Makara

6. Mboko M boko 7 · Bunko Abonko

8 . Mboko Nya Ekpo 9 · Ekpe

} 3 oo boxes brass rods, each £2 9s. = £73 5 , for the first four grades .

} so boxes brass rods for each of the lower grades. I n other words, it w a s quite expensive. But mem bership quickly

became the chief m a rk of honor a n d di stinction everywhere. Entry fees were no doubt less exorbitant in s m a l l , distant communities, but the effect was sti l l the s a m e : thousands ended up in debt to the merchants, whether fo r the fees requi red for j oining, or fo r the trade goods they supplied ( mostly cloth and metal put to use creating the gear and costumes for the Ekpe performances-debts that they thus themselves became respo n s i b l e for enforcing on themselves . These debts, too, were regu l a r l y paid in people, osten sibly yielded up a s pa w n s . )

H o w d i d i t work in practice ? It appears t o have v a ried a great deal from place to p l a c e . In the Afikpo di strict, on a remote p a rt of the up­ per Cross River, for instance, we read that everyday a ffa irs-the acqui­ sition of food, fo r example-wa s conducted, a s a mong the Tiv, " with­ out trade or the use of money . " Brass rod s , supplied by the merchant societies , were used to buy and sell slaves, but otherwise mostly a s a

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social c urrency, " u sed for gifts and for payments in funerals, titles, and other ceremonies . "73 Most of those payments, titles, and ceremonies were tied to the secret societies that the merchants had also brought to the area. All this does sound a b i t like the Tiv arrangement, but the presence of the merchants ens ured that the effects were very different:

In the old days, if anybody got into trouble or debt in the up­ per parts of the Cross River, and wanted ready money, he used genera lly to " pledge" one or more of his children , or some other members of his family or household, to one of the Aku­ nakuna traders who paid periodical visits to his village. Or he would make a raid on some neighboring village, seize a child, and sell him or her to the same willing purchaser .74

The pass age o n l y makes sense if one recognizes that debtors were a l s o , owing to their membership i n the secret societi e s , col lecto r s . The seizing of a child i s a reference to the local practice of " p a n y a rring , " current throughout West Africa, by w h i c h creditors despairing of repay­ ment would simply sweep into the debtor's com munity with a group of armed men and seize anything-people, goods, domestic a n i m a l s-that could b e easily carried off, then hold it hostage as security .75 It didn't m atter if the people or goods had belonged to the debtor, or even the debto r ' s relatives. A neighb o r ' s goats o r children would do j ust a s we l l, since the whole point w a s to bring social pressure on whoever owed the money. As W i l l i a m B o s m a n put it, " If the D ebtor b e a n honest man and the Debt j ust, he i m mediately endeavours by the satisfaction of his Creditors to free his Countrymen. "76 It was actually a quite sensible expedient i n an environment with n o central authority, where people tended to feel a n enormous sense of respon s i b i l ity toward other mem­ bers of their commun ity and very l i ttle responsibil ity toward anyone e l s e . I n the case of the secret society cited above, the debtor would, pres u m a b l y , be c a l l i ng i n h i s own debts-rea l or i m agined-to those outside the orga nization, i n order not to have to send off members of his own fa m i l y . n

Such expedients were not always effective. O ften debtors would b e forced to pawn more and more of their own chi ldren or dependents, until finally there w a s no recourse but to pawn themselves .78 And of course, a t the height of the slave trade, "pawning" had become little more than a euphe m i s m . The distinction between pawns and slaves h a d l a rgely d i sappeared . Debtors, like their families before them, ended up turned over to the Aro, then to the British, and fi n a l l y , shackled and

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 5 5

chained, crowded into tiny slaving vessels a n d sent off to be sold on p l antations across the sea?9

I I I I I

If the Tiv, then , were h a u n ted by the vision of an insidious secret orga­ nization that l ured unsuspecting victims into debt traps, whereby they themselves became the enforcers of debts to be paid with the bodies of their chi ldren , and ultimately, themselves-one reason was because this was, l i teral l y happening to people who lived a few hundred miles a wa y . Nor is the use of the phrase " flesh-debt" i n a n y way inappropri­ ate. S l a ve-traders might not have been reducing their victims to meat, but they were certai n l y reducing them to nothing more than bodies. To be a slave was to be p lucked fro m one's fa m i l y , k i n , friends , and com­ munity, stripped of one's n a m e , identity, and dignity; of everything that made one a person rather than a mere human machine capable of un­ derstanding orders . Neither were most slaves offered much opportunity to develop enduring human rel atio n s . Most that ended up in C a r i b bean or A merican p lantations, though, were simply worked to death .

What is remarkable is that a l l this w a s done, the bodies extracted, through the very mech a n i s m s of the human econ o m y , premised on the principle that human lives a re the ultimate value, to which nothing could possibly compare. Instead, all the same i nstitutio n s-fees for i n i ­ tiati o n s , means of calculating guilt and compensation, social currencies, debt pawnship-were turned into their opposite; the machinery was, as i t were, thrown into reverse ; a n d , a s the Tiv also perceived, the gears and mech a n i s m s designed for the creation o f human beings collapsed on themselves and became the means for their destructi o n .

I I I I I

I do not want to leave the reader with the i m p ression that w h a t I a m describing here i s in a n y w a y pec u l i a r t o Africa. O n e could fi n d the exact same things happening wherever h u m a n economies came into contact with c o m merc i a l ones ( an d p articularly, com mercial economies with advanced m i l itary technology and a n insatiable demand for hu­ man labor) .

Remarkably similar things can be o bserved throughout Southeast Asia, particularly amongst hill and island people living on the fringes of major kingdom s . As the premier historia n of the region, Anthony Reid,

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h a s pointed out, l a b o r throughout Southeast A s i a h a s long been orga­ n ized a bove a l l through relations of debt bondage .

Even in relatively simple societies l ittle penetrated by money, there were ritual needs for substanti al expenditures-the pay­ ment of bride-price for marri age and the slaughter of a buffalo at the death of a fa mily member. It is widely reported that such ritual needs are the most common reason why the poor become indebted to the rich . . . 80

For i n stance, one practice, noted fro m Thailand to S u lawesi, i s for a g r o u p of poor brothers to turn to a rich s p o n s o r to pay fo r t h e expenses of one b r o t h e r ' s m a rriage. H e ' s t h e n referred to a s t h e i r " m a s ­ ter . " T h i s is m o r e l i k e a patron-client relation t h a n anything e l s e : the brothers might be o b l iged to do the occasional odd j ob , o r appear as his entourage on occasions when he h a s to make a good i m pression­ not much more. S t i l l , tec h n i c a l l y , he owns their c h i ldren, a n d " ca n a l so repossess the wife he provided if his bondsmen fa i l to c arry out h i s o b l igatio n s . "8 1

Elsewhere, w e hear s i m i l a r stories t o those i n Africa-of peasants pawning themselves o r members of their fam i l i e s , or even gambling themselves into bondage; of principal ities where penalties invariably took the fo rm of heavy fines . " F requently, of course, these fines could not be p a i d , and the condemned m a n , often accompan ied by h i s depen­ dants, became the bondsman of the ruler, of the i n j u red p a rty, o r of whoever w a s able to pay his fine for h i m . "82 Reid insi sts that most of this w a s relatively innocuous-in fact, poor men might take out loans for the express purpose of becoming debtors to some wealthy patron, who could provide them with food d u ring hard times, a roof, a wife . Clearly t h i s was n o t " s l avery" in t h e ordinary sense. T h a t i s , unless the p a tron decided to ship some of his dependents off to creditors of his own in some distant city like Maj a p a h i t o r Ternate, whereupon they might find themselves toiling in some grandee ' s kitchen o r pepper plantation like any other slave.

I t ' s i mportant to point this out because one of the effects of the slave trade i s that people who d o n ' t actually live in Africa are often left with an i m age of that continent as a n i r redee m a b l y violent, savage p l a ce--a n i m age that has had d i s a stro u s effects on those who do live there. It might be fitting, then, to consider the history of one place that is u s u a l l y represented a s the p o l a r opposite: B a l i , the fa m o u s " l a nd of ten thousand temp l e s "-an i s l a n d often pictu red in anthropologi c a l texts and t o u r i s t brochures as if it w e r e i n h a b ited excl usively by p l a c i d ,

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 5 7

dreamy artists who spend their days arranging flowers and practicing synchro n i zed dance routi n e s .

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bali had not yet ob­ tained this reputation . At the time, it w a s still divided a m o ng a dozen tiny, s q u a b bling kingdoms i n an a l most perpetual state of war. I n fact, its rep utation among the D utch mercha n ts a n d offic i a l s ensconced i n nearby Java was a l m o st exactly the opposite of what it i s tod a y . B a ­ linese w e r e considered a r u d e and violent people r u l e d by decadent, opium-addicted nobles whose wealth was b a sed almost exclusively on their w i l l ingness to sell their subj ects to fo reigners a s slaves. B y the time the D utch were fu l l y in control i n Jav a, Bali had been turned l a rgely into a reservoir for the export of h u m a n beings-young B a l i ­ n e s e women in p a rticular b e i n g i n g r e a t demand in c i t i e s through the region a s both prostitutes and concubines.83 A s the i s l a nd was drawn into the slave trade, almost the entire social and political system of the island was transformed into an apparatus for the forc i b l e extraction of women . Even within vil lages, ordinary m arriages took the form of " m arriage by capture "-sometimes staged elopements, s o metimes real forci b l e kidnappings, after which the kidnappers would pay a w o m a n ' s family to let t h e m a tter drop . 8 4 I f a woman w a s captured by someone genuinely i mportant, though, no compensation would be offered . Even i n the 196os, elders rec a l led how attractive young women used to be hidden away b y their parents,

forbidden to bear towering offerings to temple festivals, lest they be espied by a royal scout and hustled into the closely protected female quarters of the palace, where the eyes of male visitors were restricted to foot level . For there was slim chance a girl would become a legitimate low-caste wife (penawing) of the raja . . . More likely after affording a few years ' licentious satisfaction, she would degenerate into a s lave-like servant.85

O r , if she did rise to such a position that the high-caste wives be­ gan to see her a s a riv a l , she might be either poisoned or shipped off overseas to end up servicing soldiers at some Chinese-run bordello in Jogj a karta , o r c h a nging bedpans i n the house of a French p lantation­ owner in the Indian Ocean island of Reunion .86 Meanwhile, royal law codes were rewritten i n a l l the usual ways, with the exception that here, the force of law was directed above all and explicitly against women . Not only were criminals and debtors to be enslaved and deported, but any married man was granted the power to renounce his w i fe , and by doing so render her, automati c a l l y , property of the local ruler, to be

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di sposed of as he wished. Even a w o m a n whose husband died before she had p roduced male offspring would to be handed over to the p a l ace to be sold abroadY

As Adrian Vickers e x p l a i n s , even Bali's fa mous cockfights-so fa ­ m i l i a r to any first-year anthropology student-were origi n a l l y promot­ ed by royal courts a s a way of recru iting human mercha n d i s e :

Ki ngs even helped p u t people into d e b t by staging large cock­ fights in their capitals. The passion and extravagance encour­ aged by this exciting sport led many peasants to bet more than they could afford . As with any gambl ing, the hope of great wealth and the drama of a contest fuelled ambitions which few could afford and at the end of the day, when the last spur had sunk into the chest of the last rooster, many peasants had no home and fa mily to return to. They, and their wives and children, would be sold to Java. 88

R e f l e ct i o n s o n V i o l e n c e

I began this book by a sking a questi o n : H o w i s i t that mora l obliga­ tions between people come to be thought of a s debts, a n d a s a result, end up j u stifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly i m m o ra l ?

I began this chapter b y beginning t o propose a n answer: b y making a di stinction between commerci a l economies and what I c a l l " h u m a n economies "-th at i s , those w h e r e money a c t s p r i m a r i l y a s a social cu rrency, to create, m a i n t a i n , or sever relations between people rather than to purchase things . As Rospabe so cogently demonstrated, it i s t h e pecul i a r qua lity of s u c h s o c i a l currencies t h a t they are never quite equivalent to peop l e . If anything, they a re a constant reminder that human beings can never be equivalent to anythi ng-eve n , ultimately, to one another. This i s the profound truth of the blood-feud . No one c a n ever rea lly fo rgive the m a n who k i l led h i s brother because every brother is unique. Nothing could su bstitute-not even some other m a n g i v e n t h e s a m e name and s t a t u s a s your brother, or a c o n c u b i n e who w i l l bear a son who w i l l be n a med after your brother, or a ghost-wife who w i l l bear a child pledged to someday avenge h i s death .

In a h u m a n econo m y , each person is unique, and of incompa­ rable v a l u e , because each is a unique nexus of relations with others . A woman m a y be a d a ughter, sister, lover, riv a l , companion, mother, age-mate, and mentor to many different people in different ways. Each relation is unique, even in a society in which they are sustained through

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 5 9

the constant g1vmg back and fo rth of generic obj ects such a s raffia cloth or bundles of copper wire. I n one sense, those o b j ects make one who one i s-a fact i l l u strated by the way the obj ects used a s social currencies are so often things otherwise used to clothe or decorate the human body, that help make one who one i s in the eyes of others . Sti l l , j ust a s our clothes d o n ' t really m a k e u s who we a r e , a relationship kept alive by the giving and taking of raffi a i s always something more than that.89 This means that the raffi a , in turn, i s always something less. This i s why I think Rospabe w a s right to emphasize the fact that in such economies, money c a n never s u bstitute fo r a person : money is a way of acknowledging that very fact, that the debt cannot be p a i d . But even the notion that a person c a n s u b stitute for a person , that one sis­ ter c a n somehow be equated with another, i s by no means self-evident. In this sense, the term "human economy" i s double-edged . These are, after all, economies : that i s , systems of exchange in which q u a l ities are reduced to q u antities, a l lowing calculations of gain a n d loss-even if those calculations are simply a m a tter ( a s in sister exchange) of I equals I , or ( a s in the feu d ) of I m i n u s I equals o.

How is this calculabi lity effectuated ? How does it become pos­ s ibl e to treat people a s if they a re identic a l ? The Lele example gave u s a hint: to make a human being a n obj ect of exchange, one woman equivalent to another for example, requires first of a l l ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away fro m that web of rel ations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is, and thus, into a generic value capable of being added and subtracted and used as a means to measure debt. This requires a certa in violence . To make her equivalent to a bar of ca mwood takes even more violence, and i t takes a n enormous a m o u n t of sustained a n d systematic violence to rip her so completely fro m her context that she becomes a slave.

I should be clear here. I am not using the word " v i o lence" meta­ phoric a l l y . I a m not speaking merely of conceptu al violence, but of the literal threat of broken bones and brui sed fl e s h ; of punches a n d kicks; in much the same way that when the ancient Hebrews spoke of their daughters in " bondage," they were not being poetic, but talking about literal ropes a n d c h a i n s .

Most of u s d o n ' t like to t h i n k much abou t v i o l e n c e . T h o s e l u cky enough to live relatively comfortable, secure lives in modern cities tend either to act a s if i t does not exist or, when reminded that it does, to write off the l a rger world " o u t there" as a terri ble, brutal place, with not much that can be done to help it. Either instinct a l lows us not to have to think about the degree to which even o u r own daily existence i s defined b y violence or a t least the threat of violence (as I've often

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noted, think about what would happen if you were to i n s i s t on your right to enter a university library without a properly validated ID ) , and to overstate the importance-or a t least the frequency-of things like war, terro r i s m , and violent c r i m e . The role of fo rce in providing the fra mework for human relations i s simply more explicit in what we c a l l " traditional societies "-even i f i n many, a c t u a l p h y s i c a l a s s a u l t by o n e h u m a n on a n other o c c u r s less often than in o u r own . Here ' s a story fro m the Bunyoro kingdom, i n East A fric a :

O n c e a m a n moved into a n e w village. He wa nted to fi n d out what h i s neigh bors were l i k e , so i n the middle of the night he

pretended to beat h i s wife very severel y , to see i f the neighbors would come and remonstrate with h i m . But he did not really

beat her; in stead he beat a goa tski n , w hil e h i s w i fe screamed and cried out that h e was k i l l i n g h e r . N o b ody c a m e , and the very next day the man and h i s wife packed up and left that vil­ l age and went to find some other p l a c e to live . 90

T h e p o i n t i s o b v i o u s . In a p r o p e r v i l l age, the neighbors should h a v e rushed i n , held h i m back, demanded to know what the w o m a n could possibly have done to deserve such treatment. The d i spute would be­ come a collective concern that ended i n some sort of collective settle­ ment. This i s how people ought to live. N o reason a b l e man or woman would want to live i n a place where neighbors d o n ' t look after one another.

I n its own way i t ' s a revealing story , charming even, b u t one must still a s k : How would a community-even one the m a n i n the sto­ ry would have considered a proper community-h ave reacted i f they thought she w a s beating h im ?91 I think we a l l know the answer. The first case would have led to concern; the second would have led to ridi­ cule. I n E u rope in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, young vil­ lagers used to put on satirical skits making fun of h u s b ands beaten by their wives, even to p a rade them about the town mounted backwards on a n a s s for everyone to j eer a t . 92 N o African society, a s far a s I know, went quite this far . ( Neither did a n y A frican society burn a s many witches-Western Europe at that time was a p a rticularly savage place . ) Yet a s in most of the world, the a s s u mption that t h e o n e sort of brutal­ ity was at least potenti a l l y legitimate, and that the other was not, was the fra mework within which relations between the sexes took p l ace.93

What I w a n t to empha size is that there is a direct relation be­ tween that fact and the p o s s i b i l ity of trading lives for one another.

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 6 1

Anthropologists are fond of making d i agrams to represent preferential m a rri age pattern s . Sometimes, these diagrams c a n be q u i te beautifu l : 94

Ideal pattern of bilateral cross-cousin marriage

Sometimes they merely have a certa i n elegant s i m plicity, as in this diagram o n an instance of Tiv s i ster exhange : 95

M BA G B E R A

I I

K U N AV

I I I

M B A D U KU

I O D a c * B .6. A O M a N

I : . . . . . . . . . . . �1 --------�1 I

H u m a n beings, left to fo l l o w their own desires, rarely arrange themselves in symmetrical pattern s . Such sym metry tends to be bought a t a terri b l e human price. I n the Tiv case, Akiga i s actu a l l y w i l l i n g to describe i t :

Under t h e o l d system a n elder w h o had a ward c o u l d always marry a young girl, however senile he might be, even i f he

1 6 2 D E B T

were a leper with no hands or feet; no girl would dare to re­ fuse h i m . If another man were attracted by his ward he would take his own and give her to the old man by force , in order to make an exchange . The girl had to go with the old man, sorrowfully carrying his goat-skin bag. If she ran back to her home her owner caught her and beat her, then bound her and brought her back to the elder . The old man was pleased, and grinned till he showed his b lackened mol ars . " Wherever you go, " he told her, "you will be brought back here to me; so stop worrying, and settle down as my wife . " The girl fretted, till she wished the ea rth might swallow her. Some women even stabbed themselves to death when they were given to an old man against their will; but in spite of a l l , the Tiv did not care. 96

The last l i n e says everything. Citing it might seem unfa i r (the Tiv did, evidently , care enough to elect Akiga to be their first parliamen­ tary representative, knowing he supported legislation to outlaw such practices ) , but it serves nicely to bring h o m e the real point: that certain sorts o f violence were con sidered morally accepta b l e . 97 No neighbors would rush i n to i ntervene if a guardian w a s beating a runaway w a r d . O r i f t h e y did, it would be to i n s i s t that h e use more g e n t l e means to return her to her rightful h u s b a n d . And it was because women knew that this is h o w their neighbors , or even p a rents, would react that "ex­ change marriage" was possible.

T h i s is w h a t I mean b y people " ripped fro m their contexts . "

I I I I I

The Lele were fortunate enough to have l a rgely escaped the devasta­ tions of the slave trade; the Tiv were sitting practically on the teeth of the shark, and they had to make heroic efforts to keep the threat at bay. Nonetheless, i n both cases there were mechanisms for forcibly removing young women fro m their h o m e s , and it w a s precisely this that made them exchangeable-th o ugh i n each case too, a principle stip ulated that a w o m a n could only be exchanged for another woman . The few excepti o n s , when women could be exchanged for other things, emerged directly fro m w a r and s l avery-that i s , when the level of vio­ lence w a s significantly ratcheted up.

The slave trade, of course, represented violence on a n entirely dif­ ferent s c a l e . We are speaking h e re of destruction of genocidal pro­ portio n s , in world-historic term s , comparable only to events like the destruction of New World civilizations o r the Holocaust. Neither do

G A M E S W I T H S E X A N D D E A T H 1 6 3

I mean in any way to blame the victi m s : we need only i m agine what would be likely to happen in our own society if a group o f space aliens suddenly appeared , armed with undefeatable m i litary technology, infi­ nite wealth, and n o recognizable morality-and announced that they were willing to pay a million dollars each for h u m a n workers, no ques­ tions asked . There w i l l always be at least a h andful of people unscru­ pulous enough to take advantage of such a situation-and a handful i s all it takes .

Groups like the Aro Confederacy represent an a l l-too-fa m i l i a r strategy, deployed b y fascists, m a fi a s , and right-wing gangsters every­ where: first unleash the cri m i n a l violence of a n unli mited market, in which everything i s for sale and the price of life becomes extremely cheap; then step i n , offering to restore a certain measure of order­ though one which in its very harshness leaves a l l the most profitable a spects of t4e earlier chaos intact. The violence i s preserved within the structure of the law. S uch m a fi a s , too, a l most invariably end up enforc­ ing a strict code of honor in which morality becomes above all a m a tter of p a ying o n e ' s debts .

Were this a different book, I might reflect here on the curious par­ a l lels between the Cross River societies and Bali, both of which saw a magnificent outburst of artistic creativity ( Cross River Ekpe masks were a major influence on Picasso) that took the form, above all, of a n effl o rescence of theatrical performance, replete with intricate music, splendid costumes, and sty l i zed dance-a kind of alternative political order as i m aginary spectacle-at the exact moment that ordina ry life became a game of constant peril in which any m isstep might lead to being sent away. What was the link between the two ? I t ' s an interesting question, but not one we can really answer here. For present purposes, the cruci a l question h a s to b e : How common w a s thi s ? The African slave trade w a s , a s I mentioned, a n unprecedented catastrophe, but commercial economies had a l ready been extracting slaves from human economies for thousands of years. I t is a practice a s old a s civilizati o n . The question I want to ask i s : To what degree i s it actua l l y constitutive of civilization itself?

I a m not speaking strictly of s l a very here, b u t of that process that dislodges people fro m the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so a s to make them exchangeable-that is, to make it possible to make them subj ect to the logic of debt. S l a very is j ust the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement. But for that reason it pro­ vides us with a window on the process a s a whole. What's more, ow­ ing to its hi storical role, s l avery h a s shaped our basic assumptions and

1 6 4 D E B T

i n stitutions in w a y s that we are no longer aware of and whose in flu ­ ence we would probably never wish to acknowledge if we w e re . I f we have become a debt society, it i s because the legacy of war, conquest, a n d slavery h a s never comp letely gone a w a y . I t ' s still there, lodged in o u r most intimate conceptions of h o n o r , property, even freedo m . It's j u st that we can n o longer see that it's there.

In the next c hapter, I w i l l begin to describe how this h appened .

C h a p t e r S e v e n

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D AT I O N

O R , O N TH E FO U N DA TI O NS O F C O N TE M P O R A R Y C I VI L IZATI O N

ur5 [HA R ] : n . , liver; spleen; heart, s oul;

bulk, main b o dy; foundation; loan;

o bligation; in terest; surplus, profit;

in teres t-bearing debt; repayment; slave­

w o man.

-early Sumerian dictionary1

It is jus t to give each what is o wed.

-Simonides

IN T H E L A S T C H A PT E R , I offered a glimpse of how hum an econo­ mies, with their social currencies-which are used to measure, assess, and maintain relationships between peopl e , and only perhaps inciden­ tally to acquire materi a l goods-might be transformed into something else. What we d iscovered was that we cannot begin to think about such questions without taking into account the role of sheer physical vio­ lence. I n the case of the African slave trade, this w a s primarily violence imposed from outside. Nonethel e s s , its very suddenness, its very brutal­ ity, provides us with a sort of freeze-frame of a process that must have occurred i n a much slower, more haphazard fashion i n other times and places. This i s because there i s every reason to believe that s lavery, with its unique a b i lity to rip human beings fro m their contexts, to turn them into a bstracti o n s , p layed a key role in the rise of m a rkets everywhere.

What happens, then, when the same process happens more slowly ? It would seem that much of this h istory is permanently l ost-since i n b o t h t h e ancient Middle E a s t and t h e ancient Mediterranean, m o s t of the really critical moments seem to have occurred j ust before the ad­ vent of written records. Still, the broad outlines c a n be reconstructed .

1 6 6 D E B T

The best way to d o s o , I believe, i s to start from a single, o d d , vexed concept: the concept of honor, which can b e treated a s a kind of arti­ fact, or even a s a h i erogl yphic, a fragment p reserved from h i story that seems to compress into itself the answer to almost everyth ing we've been trying to understan d . O n the one h a n d , violence: men w h o live by violence, whether soldiers or gangsters, are a l most invariably obsessed with honor, and assaults on honor are considered the most obvious j ustification for acts of violence. O n the other, debt. We speak both of debts of honor, and honoring one's debts; in fact, the transition from one to the other provides the best clue to how debts emerge fro m o b l i ­ gation s ; e v e n a s the n o t i o n of honor s e e m e d to echo a defiant insistence that financial debts are not rea l l y the most i mportant ones; an ech o , here, of a rguments that, like those in t h e Vedas a n d t h e B i b l e , go back to the very dawn of the m a rket itself. Even more d i sturbingly, since the notion of honor m akes no sense without the possibil ity of degradation, reconstructing t h i s h i story reveals h o w much our basic concepts of freedom and mora lity took shape within i n stitutions-notably, but not only, s l avery-that we'd sooner not have to think about at a l l .

I I I I I

To underscore some of the paradoxes surrounding the concept a n d bring h o m e w h a t ' s rea lly at s t a k e here, let u s c o n s i d e r the s t o r y of o n e man w h o survived the M i d d l e Passage: O l a u d a h Equiano, born s o m e ­ time around 1745 i n a rural c o m m u n i t y somewhere within the confines of the K i ngdom of Ben i n . Kidn apped fro m h i s h o m e at the age of eleven, Equiano w a s eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from w hence h e w a s conveyed first to B arbad os, then to a p l a ntation in colonial V i rgi n i a .

E q u i a n o ' s fu rther adven tures-a n d there were many-are n a rrated i n his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olau­ dah Equiano: or, Gustavus V ass a, the African, p u b l i s h ed in 1789. After spending much of the Seven Years' War h a u l i n g gunpowder on a Brit­ i s h frigate, h e w a s promised h i s free d o m , denied his freedo m , sold to several o wners-w ho regu larly lied to h i m , promising his freedo m , and then broke their word-until h e passed into the h a n d s of a Quaker merc h a n t in Pennsylva n i a , who eventually a l lowed h i m to purchase h i s freedo m . O v e r the c o u r s e of h i s l a t e r y e a r s h e was to become a success­ fu l merchant in his own right, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventual l y , one of the leading voices of English Abol itio n i s m . His eloquence and the power of h i s l i fe story p l ayed significant parts in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 6 7

Readers of Equiano ' s book are often troubled by one aspect of the story : that for most of h i s early l i fe , he w a s not oppo sed to the institu­ tion of slavery. At one point, while saving money to buy h i s freedo m , he even briefly took a j o b t h a t involved purchasing slaves in Afri c a . E q u i a n o only came a round to a n abolitionist position afte r converting to Meth odism and fa lling in with religious activists against the trade. Many have asked: Why did it take him so long ? S u rely if anyone had reason to understand the evils of s l avery, he did.

The answer see m s , oddly, to lie in the man's very integrity. One thing that comes through strikingly in the book i s that this was not only a m a n of endless resourcefulness a n d determination, b u t above all, a man of honor. Yet this created a terrible dilemma. To be made a s lav e is to be stripped of any possible honor. Equiano w i shed above a l l else to reg a i n what had been taken fro m him. The problem is that honor i s , by definiti o n , something that exists in the eyes of others . To be a b l e to recover it, then, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that s u rrounds h i m , and this me a n s that, in practice at least, he cannot a b s o lutely reject the institutions that de­ prived him of h i s honor i n the first place.

It strikes m e that this experience--of only being a b l e to restore one's lost honor, to regain the a b i l ity to act with integrity by acting in accord with the terms of a system that one knows, through deeply traumatic personal experience, to be utterly u n j u s t-is itself one of the most profoundly violent aspects of sl avery. It is another example, perhaps, of the need to a rgue in the master's l a nguage, but here taken to insidious extremes .

All societies based on slavery tend to be m a rked by this agon izing double consciousne s s : the a w a reness that the highest things one h a s to strive for a re a l s o , ultim ately, wrong; but at the s a m e time, the feeling that this i s simply the n a ture of reality. This might help explain why throughout most of h i story, when slaves did rebel against their m a s ­ ters, t h e y r a r e l y rebelled a g a i n s t s l a very itself. But the fl ip side of this is that even sl ave-owners seemed to feel that the whole arrangement was somehow fund amentally perverse or unnatura l . F i rst-year Roma n law students, fo r instance, were made to memo rize the following definitio n :

slavery is an institution according to the law of nations whereby

one person fa lls under the property rights of another, contrary to nature .2

1 6 8 D E B T

At the very least, there w a s always seen to be something disrep­ utable and ugly about s l avery . Anyone too close to i t was tainted. S l ave-traders particularly were scorned a s inhuman brute s . Throughout h istory, moral j u stifications for slavery are rarely taken particularly seriously even by those who espouse them. For most of h u m a n h i story, most people saw s l avery much a s we see war: a tawdry business, to be sure, but one would have to be n aive i ndeed to i m agine i t could simply be eliminated.

H o n o r I s S u r p l u s D i g n i ty

So what is s l avery ? I 've already begun to suggest an a n s wer in the last chapter. S lavery i s the ultimate form of being ripped fro m one's con­ text, and thus fro m a l l the social relationships that make one a human being. Another w a y to put this i s that the slave i s , i n a very real sense, dead.

This w a s the conclusion of the first scholar to carry out a broad h istorical survey of the institution, a n Egyptian sociologist named Ali ' A b d al-Wahid W a fi , i n Paris i n 193 1 . 3 Everywhere, he o b serves, fro m t h e ancient world to then-present-day S o u t h America, one fi n d s the same list of possible ways whereby a free person might be reduced to s l avery :

r) By the law of force a. By surrender or capture in war b. By being the victi m of raiding or kidnapping

2) As legal punishment for crimes (including debt) 3 ) Through paternal authority (a father's sale of his children) 4) Through the voluntary sale of one's self4

Everywhere, too, capture in war is considered the only way that i s considered absolutely legitimate. A l l the others were surrounded b y moral proble m s . Kidnapping was obviously cri m i n a l , and parents would not sell children except under desperate circumstances .5 We read of fa mines i n China so severe that thousands of poor men would cas­ trat� themselves, i n the hope that they might sell themselves a s eunuchs at court-but this was also seen a s the sign of total social breakdown .6 Even the j ud i c i a l process could easily be corrupted , as the ancients were well aware--especi a l l y when it came to enslavement for debt.

On one level, a l -Wahid ' s argument i s j ust a n extended apologia for the role of s l a very in Isl am-widely criticized, since I s l a m i c l a w never

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 6 9

e l i m i n a ted slavery, even when the institution l a rgely v a n i shed in the rest of the Medieval world. True, h e a rgues, M o h a m m e d d i d not forbid the practice, but sti l l , the early C a l i p h ate w a s the first govern ment we know of that actu a l l y succeeded in e l i m i n ating a l l these practices ( j udi­ c i a l a b u s e , kidnappings, the s a l e of offspring) that h a d been recognized a s social problems for thousands of years, and to l i m i t s l avery strictly to prisoners of w a r .

T h e b o o k ' s m o s t enduring contri bution, t h o u g h , l a y s i m p l y in ask­ ing: W h a t do a l l these circumstances have in common ? A I - W a h i d ' s a n s w e r i s striking in i t s s i m p l i c i t y : one becomes a slave in situations where one would otherwise h ave died . This i s obvious in the case of w a r : i n the ancient world, the victor w a s a s s u med to h a v e total power over the vanquished, including their women a n d c h i l d re n ; a l l of them could b e simply m a ssacred . S i m i l a r l y , h e a rgue d , cri m i n a l s were con­ demned to s l a very only for capital crimes, and those who sold them­ selves, o r their c h i l d ren, normally faced starvati o n . 7

This i s not j u st to s a y , though , that a sla ve was s e e n a s owing h i s ma ster h i s l i fe since h e would otherwise be dead . 8 Perh a p s this w a s true at the moment of his or her enslavement. B u t a fter that, a slave could not owe debts, because in a l most every important sense, a slave was d e a d . In R o m a n l a w , this was quite explicit. If a Roma n soldier w a s captured a n d lost h i s l i b e r t y , h i s fa m i l y w a s expected to read h i s w i l l and dispose of h i s possess i o n s . S h o u l d h e later r e g a i n h i s freedo m , h e w o u l d have t o start over, even t o the p o i n t of remarrying t h e woman who w a s now considered h i s widow . 9

In W e s t Afric a , according to one F r e n c h anthropologist, the s a m e p r i n c i p l e s applied :

Once he had been finally removed from his own milieu th rough capture the sl ave was considered as socially dead, j ust as if he had been vanquished and kil led in combat. Among the M ande, at one time, pri soners of war brought home by the conq uerors were offered dege ( m i l let and milk porridge)-because it was held that a man should not die on an empty stomach-and then presented with their arms so that they could k i l l them­ selves. Anyone who refused was sl apped on the face by h i s abductor a n d kept as a captive: he had accepted t h e contempt which deprived him of personality . 1 0

Tiv horror stories about men who a re d e a d but do not know it o r who are brought back fro m the grave to serve their m u rderers, and

1 7 0 D E B T

Haitian zombie stories, a l l seem to play on this essential horror of sl av ­ ery : the fa c t that i t ' s a kind of living death.

I n a book called Slavery and Social Death-surely the most pro­ found comparative study of the i nstitution yet written-O rlando Pat­ terson works out exactly what it h a s meant to be s o completely and a b s o l utely ripped fro m one's contextY First of all, he emphasizes, slav­ ery is u n like any other form of h u m a n relation because it is not a moral relation . S lave-owners might dress it up in a l l sorts of legalistic or paternalistic language, but really this i s j ust window-dressing and n o one r e a l l y believes it; r e a l l y , it i s a relation b a s e d purely on violence; a s l ave must obey because if he doesn ' t , he can be beaten , tortured, or killed, and everyone i s perfectly well aware of thi s . Second of all, being socially dead means that a slave h a s no binding moral relations with anyone else: he i s alienated fro m his ancestors, community, fam i l y , c l a n , c i t y ; he cannot make contracts or meaningful p r o m i s e s , except at the whim of h i s m a s ter; even if he acquires a fa m i l y , it can be broken up a t any t i m e . The relation of pure force that attached him to his mas­ ter was hence the only h u m a n relationship that u l ti mately m a ttered . As a result-and this i s the third essential element-the slave's situation was one of utter degradation . Hence the Mande w arrior ' s slap: the captive, having refused h i s one final chance to save his honor by k i l l ­ ing h i mself, m u s t recognize t h a t he w i l l now be considered a n entirely contemptible being . 12

Yet at the same time, this a b i lity to strip others of their dignity beco mes, for the m aster, the foundation of his honor. A s P a tterson notes , there h ave been p l aces-the I s l a m i c world affords n umerous exa m p les-where slaves are not even put to work for profit; instead, rich men make a point of surrounding themselves with battalions of slave retainers simply for reasons of status , a s tokens of their magnifi­ cence and nothing else.

I t seems to me that this is precisely what gives honor its notori­ ously fragile quality. Men of honor tend to combine a sense of total ease and self- a ssurance, which comes with the habit of c o m m a n d , with a notorious j u mpines s , a heightened sensitivity to s l ights and insults, the feeling that a man ( a n d it is a lmost always a m a n ) is somehow reduced, humiliated, if a n y "debt of honor" i s a llowed to go unpaid. This i s because honor i s not the s a m e as dignity . O n e might even s a y : honor i s surp l u s dignity . I t i s that heightened consciousness of power, and its d a ngers, that comes from having stripped away the power and dignity of others; or a t the very least, fro m the knowledge that one is capable of doing s o . At its simplest, honor is that excess dignity that must be defended with the knife or sword (violent men, a s we

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 7 1

a l l know, are almost invariably o b sessed with honor) . Hence the war­ rior's ethos, where a l most anything that could possibly be seen a s a sign of d i srespect-in i nappropriate word, an inappropriate glance--i s considered a challenge, or can be treated a s s u c h . Y e t even w here overt violence has l a rgely been put out of the picture, wherever honor Is a t issue, it comes with a s e n s e that d i g n i t y c a n be lost, and therefore must be constantly defended .

The result is that to this day, "honor" has two contradictory mean ­ ings. On the one h a n d , we can speak of honor as s i m p l e integrity. Decent people honor their c o m mitments . This i s clearly w h a t " h o n o r " meant for E q u i a n o : to be an h o n o r a b l e m a n meant to be one who speaks the truth, obeys the l a w , keeps h i s promises, i s fai r and con­ scientious i n his com merc i a l dealings . 13 His problem w a s that honor s i m u ltaneously meant something else, which had everything to do with the kind of violence required to reduce h u m a n beings to commodities to begin with.

The reader might be asking: But what does a l l this h ave to do with the origins of money ? The a n s wer i s , surprisingly: everything. Some of the most genuinely archaic forms of money we know about appear to have been used precisely a s measures of honor and degradation: that i s , t h e v a l u e of m o n e y w a s , ultimately, t h e v a l u e of t h e power to t u r n oth­ ers into money . The curious puzzle of the cumal-the s lave-girl money of medieval Irelan d-would appear to be a dramatic i l l ustration .

H o n o r P r i c e ( E a r l y M e d i e v a l I re l a n d )

For much of its early history, Irela n d ' s situation was not very different than that i n many of the A frican societies we looked a t i n the end of the last chapter. It was a h u m a n economy perched uncomfortably on the fringe of a n exp anding commercial one. What's more, at certain periods there w a s a very l i vely slave trade. A s one h i s torian put it, "Ireland h a s no mineral wealth, and foreign luxury goods could be bought b y Irish kings mainly for two export good s , cattle and peo­ ple. " 14 Hardly surprising, perhaps, that cattle and people were the two m a j o r denominations of the currency. Sti l l , - b y the time our earliest re­ cords kick in, around 6ooAD , the slave trade appears to h ave died off, and slavery itself w a s a waning institution, coming under severe d i s a p ­ p r o v a l fro m the Church Y Why, then , w e r e c u m a l still b e i n g used as units of account, to tally up debts that were actually p a i d out i n cows, and in cups and brooches and other obj ects made of silver, or, i n the

1 7 2 D E B T

case of m in o r transaction s , sacks of wheat or oats ? And there ' s an even more obvious question : Why women ? There were plenty of male s l aves i n early Ireland, yet no one seems ever to have used them a s money.

Most of what we know about the economy of early Medieval Ireland comes fro m legal sources-a series of law codes, drawn up by a powerful class of j u rists, dating roughly fro m the seventh to n i nth centuries A D . These, however, are exceptionally ric h . Ireland at that time was still very much a human economy. It was also a very rural o n e : people lived in scattered homesteads, not u n l ike the Tiv, growing wheat and tending cattle. The closest there were to towns were a few concentrations around monasteries. There appears to have been a near total a b sence of m a rkets, except fo r a few on the coast-pre s u m a b l y , m a i n l y slave or c a t t l e m a rkets-frequented by foreign ships . 1 6

As a result, money was empl oyed a l most exclusively for social p u rposes : gifts; fees to craftsmen , docto r s , poets, j udges, and enterta i n ­ ers; various feudal payments ( lords gave gifts of c a t t l e to c l i e n t s who then had to regu l a r l y supply them with food ) . The authors of the l a w c o d e s d i d n ' t e v e n know how to put a p r i c e on most g o o d s of ord i n a ry u se--pitchers, p i l l o w s , c h i s e l s , s l a b s of bacon, and the like; no one seems ever to have paid money for them . 17 Food was s h a red in fa milies or delivered to feud a l superiors, who laid it out in sumptuous feasts fo r friends, rivals, and retainers. Anyone needing a tool or fu rniture or clothing either went to a kinsman with the relevant craft skills o r paid someone to make i t . The obj ects them selves were not for s a l e . Kings, in turn, assigned tasks to d i fferent clans: this one was to provide them with leather, this one poets, this one shields . . . precisely the sort of un­ wieldy arrangement that m a rkets were la ter developed to get around . 1 8

Money could b e loaned. There w a s a highly complex system o f pledges a n d sureties t o guarantee that debtors delivered what they owed . M a i n l y , though, it was used for paying fines. These fines a re endlessly and meticulously e l a borated in the codes, but what really strikes the contemporary o bserver i s that they were carefu l l y graded b y r a n k . This i s t r u e of almost a l l t h e " Barbarian Law Codes "-the s i z e of the p e n a l t i e s u s u a l l y has a t least a s much do with the s t a t u s of t h e v i c t i m a s it d o e s with t h e n a t u r e of the i n j u ry-but only in I r e l a n d were things mapped out quite so systemati c a l l y .

T h e k e y to the s y s t e m was a n o t i o n of h o n o r : l i tera l l y " fa ce . " 1 9 O n e ' s honor w a s the esteem o n e h a d in the eyes of others, on e ' s hon­ esty, integrity, and character, but also one's power, in the sense of the a b i l ity to p rotect oneself, and one's fa mily and followers, fro m any sort of degradation or insult. Those who had the highest degree of honor were litera l l y sacred beings : their persons and possessions were

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sacrosanct. What was so unusual about Celtic systems-and the Irish one went further with this than any other-was that honor could be precisely quantified. Every free person h a d his or her " honor price " : the price that one had to pay for a n insult to the perso n ' s dignity. These varied. The honor price of a king, for instance, w a s seven c u m a l , or seven slave girls-thi s w a s the standard honor price for any s acred be­ ing, the s a m e a s a bishop or m aster poet. Since ( a s a l l sources h a sten to point out) slave girls were not normally paid a s su c h , this would mean, i n the case of a n i n s u l t to such a perso n ' s dignity, one would have to p a y twenty-one milk cows or twenty-one ounces of s i lver.20 The honor price of a wealthy peasant was two and a h a l f cows, of a minor lord, that, plus h a l f a cow additionally for each of h i s free dependents-an d s i n c e a l o r d , to r e m a i n a l o r d , h a d to have at l e a s t fi v e of these, t h a t brought h i m up to at l e a s t fi v e c o w s total . 2 1

H o n o r price i s not to be confused w i t h wergeld-the a c t u a l price of a man o r w o m a n ' s l i fe . I f one killed a man, one paid goods to the value of seven c u m a l s , i n recompense for k i l ling him, to which one then added h i s honor price, for having offended against h i s dignity ( b y k i l l ing h i m ) . I nterestingly, o n l y i n t h e c a s e of a k i n g a r e t h e b l o o d price and h i s honor price the same.

There w e r e also payments for i n j u r y : i f one wounds a m a n ' s cheek, one pays h i s honor price plus the price of the i n j u r y . ( A blow to the face was, for obvious reasons, particularly egregio us . ) The problem w a s how to calculate the inj ury, since this varied according to both the physical damage and status of the inj u red party. Here, Irish j urists developed the ingenious expedient of measuring different wounds with different varieties of grain : a cut on the king's cheek w a s measured i n grains of wheat, o n t h a t of a s u b stantia l farmer i n o a t s , on t h a t of a s m a llholder merely in peas. O n e cow w a s p a i d for each .U S i m i l a r l y , i f one s t o l e , say, a m a n ' s b r o o c h or pig, one h a d to p a y back three brooches o r three p igs-plus his honor price, for having violated the s anctity of h i s homestead. Attacking a peasant under the protection of a lord w a s the same a s raping a m a n ' s wife o r d a ughter, a violation of the honor not of the victim , but of the m a n who should have been able to protect them .

F i n a l l y , one h a d to pay the honor price if one s i mply i n s u l ted someone of any importance: say, by turning the person away at a feast, inventing a particularly embarrassing nickname ( a t least, i f it caught on ) , or h u m i liating the person through the use of satire.23 Mockery was a refined art i n Medieval Ireland, and poets were considered close to magic i a n s : it w a s said that a talented satirist could rhyme rats to death, or at the very least, raise b l isters on the faces of victi m s . Any

1 7 4 D E B T

man p u b l i c l y mocked would have no choice but to defend h i s honor; and, in Medieval Ireland, the value of that honor was precisely defined.

I should note that while twenty-one cows might not seem like much when we are dealing with kings, Ireland a t the time had about 150 kings.24 Most had only a couple of thousand subj ects, though there were also higher-ranking, provi n c i a l kings for whom the honor price was d o u b l e . 25 W h a t ' s more, since the legal system was comp letely sepa­ rate fro m the political one, j u rists, i n theory, had the right the demote anyone-including a king-who had committed a dishonorable act. I f a nobleman turned a w o r t h y m a n away fro m his door or feast, s h e l ­ tered a fugitive, o r a t e s t e a k fro m an o b v i o u s l y s t o l e n cow, or e v e n if he a l l o wed himself to be satirized and did not take the offending poet to court, his price could b e lowered to that of a commoner. But the same was true of a king who ran away in battle, or abu sed h i s powers , or even was caught working in the fields or otherwise engaging in tasks beneath his dignity . A king who did something utterly outrageous­ murdered one of his own relatives, for example-might end up with no honor price at a l l , which meant not that people could say anything they liked about the king, without fea r of recompense, but that he couldn't stand a s su rety or witness in court, a s one's oath and standing in l a w was a l s o determined by one's honor p r i c e . This d i d n ' t h a p p e n often , b u t it did happen, a n d legal wisdom m a d e s u r e t o remind people of i t : t h e l i s t , contained in one fa mous legal text, of t h e " seven kings who lost their honor price , " w a s meant to ensure that everyone remembered that no matter how sacred and powerfu l , anyone could fal l .

What's u n u s u a l about the Irish material is that i t ' s a l l spelled out so clearly. This i s partly because Irish law codes were the work of a class of legal specialists who seem to have turned the whole thing a l ­ most into a for m of entertainment, devoting e n d l e s s h o u r s to coming up with every possible a bstract possibility. Some of the provisos a re so whimsical ("if stung b y a n other man's bee, one must calcul ate the ex­ tent of the inj ury, but also, if one swatted it in the process, subtract the replacement v a lue of the bee " ) that one h a s to assume they were simply j okes. Still, as a result, the moral logic that lies behind any e l a borate code of honor is laid out here in startling honesty . What about women ? A free woman was honored at precisely so percent of the price of her nearest male relative (her father, if alive; if not, her h u s b a nd ) . I f she was d i shonored, her price was payable to that relative. Unless, that i s , she was an independent landholder. In that case, her honor price was the same a s that o f a man. And unless she was a woman of easy virtue, in which case it was zero, since she had no honor to outrage. What about ma rriage ? A suitor paid the value of the wife ' s honor to

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her father and thus became its guard i a n . What about serfs ? The same principle applied : when a l o rd acquired a serf, he bought out that m a n ' s h o n o r price, presenting h i m with its equivalent in cows. F rom that moment on, if anyone ins ulted o r i n j u red the serf, it was seen an attack o n the l o rd ' s honor, a n d it w a s up to the lord to collect the at­ tendant fee s . Meanwhile the l o rd ' s honor price was notched upward as a result of gathering another dependent: in other word s , he literally absorbs h i s new vassal's honor into his own . 26

A l l this, in turn, makes it possible to understand both something of the n a ture of honor, and why slave girls were kept as units for reckoning debts of honor even at a time when-owing no d o u b t to church infl uence-they no longer actually cha nged h a n d s . At first sight it might seem strange that the honor of a nobleman o r king should be measured i n slaves, since slaves were human beings whose honor was zero. But if one's honor is ultim ately founded o n one's a b i l ity to extract the honor of others, it makes perfect sense. The value of a slave i s that of the honor that h a s been extracted from the m .

S o meti mes, one comes on a single h a p h a z a rd detail that gives the game away. In this case it comes not fro m I reland but from the Di­ metian Code in Wales, written somewhat later but operating on m uch the same principles. At one point, a fter l i sting the honors d u e to the seven holy sees of the Kingdom of D yfed , whose bishops and a b bots were the most exalted and sacred creatures i n the kingd o m , the text specifies that

Whoever draws blood from an ab bot of any one of those prin­ cipal seats before mentioned, let him pay seven pounds; and a female of his kindred to be a washerwo man, as a disgrace to the kindred, and to serve as a memo rial to the payment of the honor priceY

A washerwoman was the lowest of servants, a n d the one turned over i n this case w a s to serve for l i fe . She was, in effect, reduced to s l avery. Her perma nent d i sgrace was the restoration of the abbot's honor. While we cannot know if some s i m i l a r institution once lay be­ hind the habit of reckoning the honor of Irish " s acred " beings i n slave­ women, the principle i s clearly the s a m e . Honor is a zero-sum game . A man ' s a b i l ity to protect the women of his fa m i l y is an essential part of that h o n o r . Therefore, forcing h i m to surrender a woman of h i s fa mily to perform menial and degrading chores in another ' s household is the ultim ate blow to h i s honor. This, i n turn, makes i t the ultim ate reaf­ firmation of the honor of he who takes it a w a y .

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I I I I I

What makes Medieval Irish laws seem so peculiar from our perspective i s that their exponents had not the s l ightest discomfort with putting a n exact monetary price on human dignity. For us, the notion that the s anctity of a priest or the maj esty of a king could be held equivalent to a million fried eggs or a hundred thousand h a i rcuts i s s i mply bizarre. These are precisely the things that ought to be considered beyond all possibility of q uantification . If Medieval Irish jurists fel t otherwise, it was because people at that time did not use money to buy eggs or h a i rcuts .28 It was the fact that it was sti l l a human economy, in which money w a s used for social purposes, that it was possible to create such a n intricate system whereby it was possible not j ust to measure but to add and s ubtract specific q u antities of human dignity-and in doing s o , provide u s w i t h a u n i q u e w i n d o w i n t o the t r u e n a ture of h o n o r itself.

The obvious question is: What happens to such a n economy when people do begin to use the same money used to measure dignity to buy eggs and h a ircuts ? A s the history of ancient Mesopota mia and the Mediterranean world reveals, the result was a profound-and enduring-moral crisis.

M e s o p o t a m i a ( T h e O r i g i n s o f P a t r i a rc h y )

I n ancient Greek, the word for " honor" w a s tfme. I n Homer's time, the term appears to have been used much like the Irish term " honor price " : i t referred both t o the glory o f the warrior and the compensation paid a s d a mages i n case of inj ury or insult. Yet with the rise of markets over the next sever a l centuries, the meaning of the word tfme began to change. On the one hand, it became the word for "price"-as in, the price of s omething one buys i n the market. O n the other, it referred to a n attitude of complete contempt for m a rkets .

Actua l l y , this is still the case today :

In Greece t h e word " t i m i " means honor, which h a s been typi­

cally seen a s the most i m p o rtant value i n Greek v i l l age society .

Honor is often c h a racterized in Greece as an open-ha nded gen­

erosity and blatant dis regard for monetary costs and counting.

And yet the s a m e word a l s o means " p rice" a s in the price of a

pound of tomatoes . 29

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 7 7

The word "crisis " litera l l y refers to a crossro a d s : it is the poin t wh ere t h in g s could go either of two d i fferent w a y s . The odd th in g about the crisis in the concept of honor i s that it n e ve r seems to h a v e b e e n resolved . Is honor t h e will ingness to pay o n e ' s m o n e t a r y debts ? Or is it the fact that one does not feel that monetary debts are rea l l y that importa n t ? It a p p e a r s to be b o t h at t h e s a m e time.

There ' s a l so the question of what men of honor actu a l l y do think i s i m portant. When m o s t of us t h i n k of a Mediterranean v i l l ager's sense of honor, we don't think so much of a casual attitude toward money a s of a verita ble obsession with premarital virgin i t y . M a s c u l i ne honor is c a ught up not even so much i n a man's a b i l ity to p rotect his wom­ enfolk a s in his a b i l i ty to p rotect their sexual reputati o n s , to respond to any suggestion of impropriety on the p a rt of h i s mother, wife , sister, or daughter a s if it were a d i rect physical attack on h i s own perso n . T h i s i s a stereotype, b u t i t ' s n o t entirely u n j usti fied . O n e h i storian who went through fifty years of police reports about k n i fe-fights i n nineteenth -century I o n i a discovered that virtu a l l y every one of t h e m b e g a n w h e n one p a rty p u b l i c l y suggested t h a t t h e othe r ' s wife o r s i ster was a whore.30

S o , why the sudden obsession with sex u a l p ropriety ? It d o e s n ' t s e e m to be there in the W e l s h or Irish materi a l . T h e r e , the greatest h u m i l i ation was to see your sister or d a ughter reduced to scrubbing someone e l s e ' s laundry. What i s it, then, about the rise of money and m a rkets that cause so many men to become so uneasy a bou t sex ?3 1

This is a difficult questi o n , but at the very least, one can i m agine how the transition fro m a human economy to a commerci a l one might cause certain moral d i l e m m a s . What happens, fo r instance, when the s a m e money once used to arra nge m a rriages a n d settle a ffairs of honor can a l s o be used to p a y fo r the services of prostitutes ?

As w e ' l l see, there is reason to believe that it is in such mora l cris es that we can find the origin not only of o u r cu rre n t conceptions of honor, but of patriarchy itself. This is true, a t least, if we define "patriarchy" in its more specific Biblical sense: the rule of fathers, with a l l the fa m i l i a r i m ages of stern bearded men in robes, keeping a close eye over their sequestered wives and d a ughters, even a s their c h i l d ren kept a close eye over their flocks a n d herd s , fa m i l i a r from the book of Genesis.32 Readers of the Bible h a d a l w a y s assumed that there w a s something primord i a l in a l l this; that this w a s s i m p l y the way desert people, a n d thus the earliest i n h a bitants of the Near East, had a l ways behaved . This w a s why the translation of S u me r i a n , in the first half of the twentieth century, came a s something of a shock .

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I n the very earliest S umerian texts, particularly those fro m roughly 3000 to 2500 Be, women are everywhere. Early h i stories not only re­ cord the names of n umerous fem a l e rulers, but m ake clear that women were well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scri bes, and public offic i a l s , and generally free to take part in a l l a spects of public life . O n e cannot speak of ful l gender equality: men still outnum­ bered women i n a l l these areas . S t i l l , one gets the sense of a society not so different than that which prev a i l s i n much of the developed world toda y . Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this c h a nges . The p l ace of women i n civic l i fe erodes; grad u a l l y , the more fam i l i a r patriarchal p attern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disap­ pearance of women ' s role i n government and the l i beral profess i o n s , and t h e loss of women ' s i ndependent l e g a l s t a t u s , which renders t h e m wards of t h e i r husbands. By the end of the B r o n z e A g e , a r o u n d noo BC, we b e g i n to s e e l a rge n u mbers of w o m e n sequestered away i n harems and ( i n some p laces , at least) , subj ected to o bligatory veiling.

I n fact, this appears to reflect a much broader worldwide p attern . It h a s always been so mething of a scandal for those who like to see the advance of science and technology, the acc u m u l a tion of learning, economic growth- " h u m a n progre s s , " a s we like to c a l l it-as neces­ sarily leading to greater human freedom, that for women, the exact opposite often seems to be the case. O r at least, h a s been the case until very recent t i m e s . A s i m i l a r gradual restriction o n women ' s freedo m s can be o bserved i n I n d i a and C h i n a . T h e question i s , obviously, Why ? The standard explanation in the S u merian case h a s been the gradu a l infiltration of pastoralists from t h e surrounding deserts who, pres u m ­ a bly, a l w a y s had m o r e patriarchal m o r e s . There w a s , after a l l , only a narrow strip of land along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that could support intensive irrigation work s , and hence, urban l i fe . Civilization was thus fro m early times surrounded by a fringe of desert people, who lived much like those described i n Genesis and spoke the s a m e Semitic languages . It i s undeni a b l y true that, over the course of time, the Su­ merian l a nguage was gradually repl aced-first by Akkad i a n , then by Amorite, then by Aramaic languages, and finally, most recently of a l l , by Arabic, w h i c h w a s also brought t o Mesopotam i a and t h e Levant by desert pa storalists. While a l l this did, clearly, bring with i t profound cultural changes as w e l l , i t ' s not a particularly satisfying exp l a n ation .33 Former nomads appear to have been willing to adapt to urban life in any n u m ber of other ways. Why not that one ? And it's very much a local explanation and does nothing, really, to exp l a i n the broader pat­ tern . Feminist scholarship has i nstead tended to emphasize the growing

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 7 9

scale and social i mportance of war, and the increasing centralization of the state that accompanied it.34 This i s more convincing. Certai n l y , the m o r e m i litaristic t h e state, the h arsher its laws tended to be toward women . But I would add another, complementary argument. As I have empha sized, h i s tori c a l l y , war, states, and m a rkets a l l tend to feed off one another. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create m a rkets, which are convenient for soldiers and a d m i n i strator s . I n the specific case of Mesopota m i a , a l l of this took on a complicated relation to an exp losion of debt that threatened to turn all human relations­ and by exten s i o n , women ' s bodies-into potential commodities. At the same time, it created a horri fied reaction on the part of the ( male) w i n ­ ners of t h e e c o n o m i c game, who o v e r time felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to make clear that their women could i n no sense be bought or sold.

A glance at the existing material . on Mesopota m i a n m a rriage gives

u s a clue a s to how this might have happened. It i s common anthropological wisdom that bridewealth tends to

be typical of situations where population i s relatively thin, land not a p a rticularly sca rce resource, and therefore, politics are a l l about con­ tro l l i n g labor. Where population i s dense and land at a premi u m , one tends to instead find dowry : adding a w o m a n to the household i s add­ ing another m outh to feed, and rather than being paid off, a bride's father is expected to contribute something ( l an d , wealth, money . . . ) to help support his d aughter in her new home .35 In S u merian times, for instance, the m a i n p ayment at m a rriage was a huge gift of food paid b y the groo m ' s father to the bride ' s , destined to provide a s u m p t u o u s feast for the wedding.36 Before long, however, this seems to have split i n to two payments, one for the wedding, another to the w o m a n ' s father, calculated-an d often p a i d-in s ilver.37 Wealthy women sometimes ap­ pear to have ended up with the money: a t least, m a n y appear to have to worn s ilver arm and leg rings of identical den o m i n a t i o n s .

However a s time went o n , this p a y m e n t , called the terhatum, often began to take on the q u alities of a simple purchase. It was referred to a s "the price of a virgin "-not a mere metaphor, since the i llegal deflowering of a virgin was considered a property crime against her father.38 Marri age w a s referred to as " taking possession" of a w o m a n , t h e same w o r d one would use for t h e seizure of goods . 39 I n principle, a wife , once possessed, owed her husbands strict obedience, and o ften could not seek a divorce even i n cases of physical abuse.

For women with wealthy or powerfu l parents, a l l this remained l a rgely a m atter of principle, modi fied considerably in practice. Mer­ chants' d a ughters , for example, typ i c a l l y received substantial c a s h

1 8 0 D E B T

dowries, with which they could go into business in their own right, o r act a s p a rtners to their h u s b a n d s . However, for the poor-that is, most people-m a rriage came more and m o re to resemble a simple c a s h transaction .

Some of this m u s t have been an effect of s l a very : while actu a l s l a v e s were r a r e l y n u m e r o u s , the v e r y existence of a c l a s s of people with n o k i n , who were simply c o m modities, did make a d i fference. I n N u z i , for in stance, " the brideprice was paid in domestic a n i m a l s and silver a mounting to a total value of 40 shekels of silver" '-to which the author drily adds, " there i s some evidence that it was equal to the price of a slave girl . "40 This must have been making things uncomforta b l y obvious. I t ' s in Nuzi, too, w h e r e we h a p p e n to have u n u s u a l l y detailed record s , that we find examples of rich men paying cut-rate " b ridepri c e " to i mpoverished fa m i l i e s to acquire a d a ughter who t h e y would t h e n a d o p t , but who w o u l d i n fact b e e i t h e r k e p t as a c o n c u b i n e o r nurse­ m aid, o r ma rried to one of their slaves.41

Sti l l , the really criti c a l factor here was debt. As I pointed out in the last c h apter, a n thropologists have long emphasi zed that paying bride­ wealth i s not the s a m e a s buying a wife . After a l l-and this w a s one of the clinching a rguments, remember, in the origi n a l 1930s League of Nations debate-if a m a n were really buying a woman, wouldn ' t he also b e a b l e to sell her ? Clearly African and Melanesian husbands were not a b l e to sell their wives to some third p a rty. At most, they could send them h o m e and demand back their b ridewe a l t h . 42

A Mesopota m i a n husband couldn't sell his wife either. O r , nor­ m a l l y he couldn't. Still, everyth ing ch anged the moment he took out a l o a n . Since if he did, it was perfectly legal-as we've seen-to use h i s wife and children as s u rety, and if he w a s unable to pay, t h e y c o u l d t h e n b e t a k e n away a s debt pawns in exactly the s a m e way that h e c o u l d lose h i s s l a v e s , s h e e p , and g o a t s . What this a l s o m e a n t w a s t h a t h o n o r and credit bec a m e , effectively, t h e s a m e t h i n g : at least for a poor m a n , o n e ' s c reditworth iness was precisely o n e ' s c o m m a n d over one's household , and (the flip side, as it were) relations o f domestic authority, relations that in principle meant ones of care and protecti o n , b e c a m e p roperty rights that could indeed be b o u g h t and sol d .

A g a i n , for the poor, this meant that fa mily members became com­ modities that could be ren ted o r s o l d . Not only could one d i spose of daughters as " brides" to work in rich men ' s households, tablets in Nuzi show that one could now h i re out fa mily members simply by taking out a l o a n : there a re recorded cases of men sending their sons o r even wives a s " p a w n s " for loans that were clearly j ust advance payment for employment in the lender ' s farm or cloth workshop .43

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The most dramatic and enduring crisis centered on prostituti o n . I t ' s a c t u a l l y not entirely c l e a r , from the earliest sources, w hether o n e can s p e a k h e r e of " prostitutio n " at a l l . S u merian temples do often ap­ pear to have hosted a variety of sex u a l activities. Some priestesses, for instance, were considered to be m a rried to or otherwise dedicated to god s . What this meant in practice seems to have varied considerab l y . M u c h a s i n t h e c a s e of t h e l a ter devadasis , or " temple dancers" of Hindu I n d i a , some remained celibate; others were permitted to marry but were not to bear children; others were apparently expected to find wealthy patrons, becoming i n effect courtesans to the elite. Still oth­ ers lived i n the temples and had the respon s i b ility to make themselves sexually available to worshippers on certa i n ritual occasions.44 One thing the early texts do make clear i s that a l l such women were con­ sidered extraordin a r i l y important. I n a very real sense, they were the ultimate embodiments of civilization . After a l l , the entire machinery of the Sumerian economy ostens i b l y exi sted to support the temples, which were considered the households of the god s . As such, they represented the ultim ate possible refinement i n everyth ing fro m music and dance to art, cuisine, and graciousness of living. Temple priestesses and spouses of the gods were the highest h u m a n incarnations of this p erfect l i fe .

I t ' s also i m p o r t a n t t o e m p h a s i z e that Sumerian men do not appear, at least i n this earliest period, to have seen anything troubling about the idea of their s isters having sex for money . To the contrary, in sofar as prostitution did occur ( an d remember, it could not have been nearly so impers o n a l , cold-cash a relation i n a credit econo my ) , S umerian religious texts identify it a s a m ong the fundamental features of h u m a n civilization, a gift given b y the g o d s a t t h e dawn of time. Procreative sex was considered natural ( a fter all, a n i m a l s d i d it) . N o n-procreative sex, sex for pleasure, was divine.45

The most fa mous expression of this identification of prostitute and c ivilization can be found i n the story of Enkidu i n the epic of G i l ­ games h . I n t h e beginning of the s t o r y , Enkidu i s a monster-a n a ked and ferocious " wi l d m a n " who grazes with the gazell e s , drinks a t the watering p l ace with wild cattle, and terrorizes the people of the city. Unable to defeat him, the citizens finally send out a courtesan who is also a priestess of the goddess Ishtar. She strips before him, and they make love for six days and seven nights . A fterward, Enkidu's former animal companions run away from h i m . After she exp l a i n s that he has now learned wisdom and become like a God (she i s , after all, a divine consort) , he agrees to put on clothing and come to live in the city like a proper, civilized h u.m a n being.46

1 8 2 D E B T

Already, in the earliest version of the Enkidu story, though, one c a n detect a certa i n ambivalence. Much later, Enkidu i s sentenced to death by the god s , and his i m m ediate reaction i s to condemn the cour­ tesan for having brought h i m from the wilds i n the first p l a c e : he curses her to become a common streetwalker or tavern keeper, living among vomiting drunks, a bused and beaten by her clients. Then, l a ter, he re­ grets his behavior and blesses her instea d . But that trace of a m b ivalence w a s there fro m the beginning, and over time, i t grew more powerfu l . F r o m early times, Sumerian a n d Babylonian temple complexes were s u rrounded by far less glamorous providers of sexual services-indeed, by the time we know much about them, they were the center of veri­ table red- l ight districts ful l of taverns with dancing girls, men in drag (some of them slaves, some runaway s ) , and an a l most infinite variety of prostitute s . There i s an endlessly elaborate terminology whose s u btle­ ties are long since lost to u s . Most seem to have doubled a s entertain­ ers : tavern-keepers doubled a s musicians; male transvestites were not only singers and dancers, but often performed knife-throwing acts . Many were s l aves put to work by their masters, or women working off religious vows or debts, or debt bondswomen , or, fo r that m a tter, women escaping debt bondage with no place else to go. Over time, many of the lower-ranking temple women were either bought as s l aves or debt peons as wel l , and there might have often been a b l urring of roles between priestesses who performed erotic rituals and prostitutes owned by the temple ( a nd hence, in principle, by the god ) , sometimes lodged within the temple compound itself, whose earnings added to the temple treasuries .47 Since most everyd ay transactions in Mesopo­ tamia were not cash transacti o n s , once has to assume that it was the same with prostitu tes-like the tavern-keepers, many of whom seem to have been former prostitutes, they developed ongoing credit rel ations with their clients-and this m u s t have meant that most were less like what we think of a s streetwalkers and more like courte s a n s . 48 Sti l l , t h e origins of commerci a l prostitution appear to h a v e b e e n caught u p in a pecu l i a r mixture of sacred ( o r once-sacred) practice, commerce, slavery, and debt.

I I I I I

" Patriarchy" originated , first and foremost, in a rej ection of the great urban civilizations in the name of a kind of purity, a reassertion of p a ­ tern a l control against great c i t i e s l i k e U r u k , Laga s h , and B a b y l o n , seen a s p l aces of bureaucrats, traders, and whores . The pastoral fringes, the deserts and steppes away fro m the river v a l leys, were the pl aces

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 8 3

to which displaced, i ndebted fa rmers fled. Resi stance, in the ancient Middle East, was always less a politics of rebellion than a politics of exod u s , of melting away with one's flocks and fa milies-often before both were taken away .49 There were always tri b a l peoples living on the fri nges . D u ring good times, they began to take to the cities; in hard times, their n u m bers swelled with refugees-fa rmers who effectively became Enkidu once aga i n . Then, periodically, they would create their own a l l i a nces and sweep back into the cities once again a s conquero r s . I t ' s difficult to say p r e c i s e l y how t h e y i m agined their s i t u a t i o n , b e c a u s e i t ' s only in the O l d Testament, written on the o t h e r side of the Fertile Crescent, that one h a s any record of the pastoral rebels' points of view. B u t nothing there m i tigates against the s uggestion that the extraordi­ nary emphasis we find there on the a b s o l ute authority of fathers, and the j ea l o u s protection of their fickle womenfo l k , were made p o s s i b l e by, but at the s a m e time a protest a g a i n s t , this very c o m m oditization of people i n the cities that they fled .

The world's Holy Books-the O l d and New Testa ments, the Ko­ r a n , religi ous literature fro m the Middle Ages to this day-echo this voice of rebellion, combining contempt for the corrupt urban life , sus­ picion of the merch ant, and often, intense misogyny . O n e need only think o f the i m age of Babylon itself, which h a s become permanently lodged i n the collective i m agination a s not only the cradle of civiliza­ tion, but a l s o the Place of Whores. Herodotus echoed popular G reek fantasies when he clai med that every Babylonian maiden was o b l iged to prostitute herself a t the temple, so a s to raise the money for her dowry . 50 I n the New Testa ment, S a i n t Peter often referred to Rome a s " B a bylon , " and the Book o f Revelation provides perhaps the most vivid i m age of what he meant by this when it speaks of Babylon, " the great whore , " sitting " upon a scarlet colored beast, fu l l of names of b l a sphemy " :

1 7 = 4 And the woman was arrayed i n purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her forn ication:

ITS And upon her forehead was a name written , M Y S T E R Y , B A B Y L O N T H E G R E A T , T H E M O T H E R O F H A R L O T S A N D A B O M ­

I N A T I O N S O F T H E E A R T H . 5 1

S u c h i s t h e voice of patriarchal h a tred of t h e city, and of t h e angry m i l l e n n i a ] voices of the fathers of the ancient poor .

1 8 4 D E B T

Patriarchy as we know it seems to have taken shape in a see-sawing battle between the newfound elites and newly dispossessed . Much of my own analysis here i s inspired by the brilliant work of feminist h i s ­ t o r i a n G e r d a Lerner, w h o , in a n essay on the o r i g i n s of prostitution, observed :

Another source for commercial prostitution was the pauper­ i zation of farmers and their increasing dependence on loans in order to survive periods of fa mine, which led to debt slav­ ery. Children of both sexes were given up for debt pledges or sold f�r " adoptio n . " Out of such practices, the prostitution of female fa mily members for the benefit of the head of the fam­ ily could readily develop. Women might end up as prostitutes because their parents had to sell them into sl avery or because their impoverished hus bands might so use them . O r they might become self-employed as a last alternative to enslavement. With luck, they might in this profession be upwardly mobile through becoming concubines .

By the middle of the second millennium B . C . , prostitution was well established as a likely occupation for the daughters of the poor. As the sexual regulation of women of the propertied class became more firmly entrenched , the virginity of respect­ able daughters became a financial asset for the family. Thus, commercial prostitution came to be seen as a social necessity for meeting the sexual needs of men. What remained problem­ atic was how to distinguish clearly and permanently between respectable and non-respectable women .

This last point is cruci a l . The most dramatic known attempt to solve the problem, Lerner observes, can be found in a Middle Assyrian law code dating fro m somewhere between 1400 and rroo BC, which is also the first known reference to veiling i n the history of the Middle E ast-an d a l s o , Lerner e m p hasizes , first to make the p o l icing of social boundaries the responsibility of the state.52 It i s not s u rprising that this takes place under the authority of perhaps the most notoriously milita­ ristic state in the entire ancient Middle East.

The code c a refully distinguishes a m ong five classes of women. Re­ specta ble women (either m arried ladies or concubines) , widow s , and d aughters of free Assyrian men-" m u s t veil themselves " when they go o u t on the street. Prostitutes and s l aves (and prostitutes are now con­ sidered to include u n married temple servants a s well a s simple h a rlots) are not a l l o wed to wear vei l s . The remarkable thing about the l a w s is

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 8 5

that the p u n i s h ments specified in the code are not directed at respect­ able women who do not wear v e i l s , but against prostitutes and slaves who d o . The prostitute was to be publicly beaten fifty times with staves and have pitch pou red o n her head; the slave girl w a s to have her ears cut off. Free men proven to have knowingly a betted an impostor would a l s o be thrashed and p u t to a month ' s forced labor.

Pres u m a b l y in the case of respecta b l e women, the law w a s assumed to b e self-enforcing: a s what respecta b l e woman would wish to go o u t on the street in t h e guise of a prostitute ?

When we refer to " respectable" women, then , we are referring to those whose bodies could not, under any conditions, be bought or s o l d . Their p h y s i c a l p e r s o n s w e r e h i d d e n a w a y and permanently relegated to some m a n ' s domestic sphere; when they appea red in p u b l i c veiled, they were effectively still ostentatiously walking around, even i n p u b l i c , inside such a sphere.53 W o m e n who c o u l d be excha nged for m o n e y , on the other hand, must be instantly recogn izable a s s u c h .

The A s s y r i a n l a w c o d e i s one isol ated instance; v e i l s certa inly did not become o b l igatory everywhere a fter 1300 B C . B u t it provides a win­ dow on developments that were happening, h owever unevenly, even spas modica l l y , across the region, propelled by the intersecti on of c o m ­ m e r c e , c l a s s , d e fi a n t a ssertions of male honor, and the constant threat of the defection of the poor. States seem to h a ve played a complex d u a l r o l e , s i m u ltaneously fo stering com moditization and intervening to a m e ­ l iorate i t s effects : enforc ing t h e l a w s of d e b t and rights of fathers, and offering periodic amnesties . B u t the dynamic also led, over the course of m i l l e n n i a , to a systematic demotion of sexuality itself fro m a divine gift and embodi ment of civilized refinement to one of its more fa m i l i a r association s : with degradation, corrupti o n , and g u i l t .

I I I I I

H e re I think we have the explanation for that general decline of wom­ e n ' s freedo m s that may be observed in a l l the great urban civilizations for so much of their history. In a l l of them, similar things were hap­ pening, even if in each case, the pieces c a m e together in different w a y s .

The hi story of C h i n a , for instance, s a w conti n u a l and l a rgely u n ­ successfu l government campaigns to eradicate b o t h brideprice and debt slavery, and periodic scandals over the existence of " m a rkets in daugh­ ters , " including the outright s a l e of girls a s daughters, wives, concu­ bines, or prostitutes ( a t the buyer's discretion) continue to this day .54 In I n d i a , the ca ste system allowed what were otherwise differences between rich and poor to be made formal and explicit. Brahmins and

1 8 6 D E B T

other members of the upper c a stes j ea l o u s l y sequestered their daugh­ ters, and m arried them off with lavish dowries, w h i l e the lower ca stes practiced brideprice, a l l owing members of the higher ( " twice-born " ) c astes t o scoff a t them fo r selling their daughters. The twice-born were likewise l a rgely protected fro m fa lling into debt bondage, while for much of the rural poor, debt dependency was institutio n a lized, with the d a ughters of poor debtors, predicta bly, often dispatched to brothels or to the kitchens or l aundries of the rich .55 I n either case, between the p u s h of com moditization, which fel l d isproporti o n a l l y on d a ughters, and the p u l l of those trying to reassert patriarchal rights to "pro­ tect" women from any s uggestion that they might be commoditized, women ' s for m a l and practical freedoms appear to have been grad u a l ly but increasingly restricted and effaced . As a resu l t, notions of honor c h anged too, beco ming a kind of p rotest against the implications of the m a rket, even a s at the same time ( l ike the world religions) they came to echo that m a rket logic i n endless subtle ways.

Nowhere, h owever, are o u r sources a s rich and detai l ed a s they are for ancient G reece. This i s p a rtly because a commercial economy arrived there s o late, almost three thousand years l a ter than i n Sumer. As a result, C lassical G reek literature gives u s a unique opportunity to o bserve the tran sformation as i t was actually taking p lace.

A n c i e n t G re e c e ( H o n o r a n d D e b t )

The world o f the Homeric epics i s one d o m i nated b y heroic w a rriors who are disdainful of trade. I n m a n y ways, it i s strikingly reminiscent of medieval Ireland. Money existed, but i t was not used to b u y any­ thing; important men lived their lives i n pursuit of honor, which took material for m i n followers and treasure. Treasures were given a s gifts, awarded a s prizes, carried off a s loot.56 This i s no doubt how tfme first came to mean both " honor" and " p rice"-in such a world, n o one sensed any sort of contradiction between the two .57

All this was to change dramatically when commercial m arkets be­ gan to develop two h u ndred years later. Greek coin age seem to have been first used mainly to pay soldiers, a s well as to pay fines a n d fees and payments made to and by the government, but by about 6oo BC, j ust about every Greek city-state w a s producing its own coins as a mark of civic independence. It did not take long, though, before coins were i n common use in everyday transactions . By the fifth century, i n

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 8 7

Greek citie s , the agora, the p lace of p u b l i c debate and c o m m u n a l a s ­ s e m b l y , also doubled as a m a rketplace.

One of the first effects of the arrival of a com mercial economy was a series of debt crises, of the sort long fa miliar fro m Mesopota m i a and Israel . "The poor , " a s Aristotle succinctly put it in h i s Co nstitution of the A thenians, " together with their wives and children, were enslaved to the ric h . "58 Revolutionary factions emerged , demanding amnesties, and most G reek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical debt relief. The solution most cities u l t i m ately fo u n d , however, w a s quite different than it h a d been in the Near E a s t . Rather than institution alize periodic a mnesties, Greek cities tended to adopt legislation l i miting or abolishing debt peon age a l together, and then , to forestal l future crises, they would turn to a policy of expansion, shipping off the children of the poor to found m i litary colonies oversea s . Before long, the entire coast fro m Crimea to M a rseille was dotted with Greek cities, which served, i n turn, a s conduits for a lively trade i n slaves.59 The sudden abundance of chattel slaves, in turn , completely tran sformed the n a ture of Greek society. F i rst and most fa mously, it a l lowed even citizens of modest means to take part in the political and cultural l i fe of the city and have a gen uine sense of citizen ship . But this, i n turn , drove the old aristocratic classes to develop more and more e l aborate means of setting themselves off fro m what they considered the tawdriness and moral corruption of the new democratic state.

When the curtain truly goes up o n G reece, in the fifth century, we find everybody arguing about money. For the aristocrats, who wrote most of the surviving texts, money was the embodiment of corrupti o n . Aristocrats disdained t h e m a rket. I d e a l l y , a m a n of honor should b e able to r a i s e everything he needed on h i s own estates, and n e v e r have to handle cash at a l l .60 I n practice, they knew this was i m p o s s i b l e . Yet a t every point t h e y t r i e d to s e t themselves apart fro m t h e v a l ues of the ordinary den i zens of the m a rketplace: to contrast the beautiful gold and s ilver beakers and tripods they gave one a n other at funerals and weddings with the vulgar hawking of s a usages or charco a l ; the dignity of the athletic contests for which they endlessly trained with commoners' vulgar gambling; the sophisticated and l i terate courtesans who attended to them at their drinking clubs, and common prostitutes (po rne)-slave-girls housed in brothels near the agor a , brothels often sponsored by the democratic polis itself as a service to the sexual needs of its m a l e citizenry. In each case, they p laced a world of gifts, generos­ ity, and honor above sordid commercial exchange.61

1 8 8 D E B T

T h i s resulted in a s l ightly d i fferent play of p u s h and p u l l than we s a w in Mesopot a m i a . On the o n e h a n d , we see a c u lture of ari stocratic protest against what they saw a s the l o w l y c o m m ercia l sen s i b i l i ties o f ordin ary citizens. O n the o t h e r h a n d , w e s e e a n a l most s c h izophrenic reaction o n the part o f the o r d i n a ry citizens themselves, w h o s i m u l t a ­ neously t r i e d to l i m i t o r e v e n b a n a spects o f a r i s t o c r a t i c c u l t u r e and to i m itate aristocratic s e n s i b i l i t i e s . Pederasty i s an excellent case i n p o i n t here. O n the one h a n d , m a n - b o y love w a s s e e n a s the qui ntessenti a l ari stocratic practice-i t w a s t h e w a y , in fac t , t h a t young a ristocrats would ordinarily become i n iti ated i nto the privileges o f high society . As a result, the democratic p o l i s saw i t as politically su bversive a n d made sexual relations between m a l e c i tizens i l l ega l . At the same t i m e , a l m o s t everyone b e g a n to p r a c t i c e i t .

The fa m o u s Greek o b s e s s i o n with male h o n o r that sti l l informs s o much o f the texture o f d a i l y l i fe in r u r a l c o m m u n i ties in G reece hear­ kens back not s o much to Homeric honor but to t h i s aristocratic rebel­ l i o n against the values o f the m a rketp l a c e , which everyone, eventu a l l y , b e g a n to make t h e i r o w n . 62 The effects o n w o m e n , t h o u g h , w e r e even more severe than they had been i n the M i d d l e East. Already by the age o f Socrates, w h i l e a m a n ' s h o n o r was in crea singly tied to d i sdain for c o m merce and a s sertiveness i n public l i fe , a woman's h o n o r had c o m e to be defined i n a l m o s t exclusively sexual ter m s : as a m a tter o f v i r g i n i t y , m o d e s t y , and c h a stity, to the extent that respecta ble women were expected to be s h u t up inside the h o u s e h o l d a n d any woman who played a part i n p u b l i c l i fe was c o n s i dered for that reason a prostitute, or tantamount to o n e Y The Assyrian habit o f veiling was not widely a dopted in the Middle East, b u t i t was a d o pted i n Greece. As much as it flies in the face o f o u r stereotypes about the origins o f " Western" free d o m s , women i n d e m o c ratic Athens, unlike those o f Pers i a o r Syri a , were expected to wear veils when they ventured o u t i n p u b l i c . 64

I I I I I

Money, the n , h a d passed fro m a measure of h o n o r to a measure o f everything that h o n o r w a s not. To suggest that a m a n ' s h o n o r c o u l d be bought with m o n e y became a terrible insult-th i s d e s p i t e the fact that, s i n ce men were o ften taken i n war o r even by b a n d its o r p i rates and held fo r r a n s o m , they o ften did go through d r a m a s o f bon d age and redemption not unl ike those experienced by so many M i d d l e East­ ern w o m e n . O n e particula rly striking way o f h a m mering it h o m e­ a c t u a l l y , in t h i s c a s e , a l m o st literal ly-w a s by branding ransomed pris­ oners with the m a rk o f their own currency, m u c h a s i f today s o m e

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 8 9

imaginary foreign kidnapper, after having received the ransom money for a n American victim, made a point of burning a d o l l a r sign onto the victi m ' s forehead before returning h i m . 65

O n e question that i s n ' t clear fro m a l l this i s , Why ? Why h a d mon­ ey, i n particular, become such a symbol of degradation ? Was i t all because of s lavery ? One might be tempted to conclude that i t was: per­ haps the newfound presence of thousands of utterly degraded human beings i n ancient Greek cities made any suggestion that a free m a n ( let alone a free w o m a n ) might i n any sense be bought o r sold parti c u l a rly insulting. But this i s clearly not the case. Our discussion of the slave money of Ireland showed that the possibility of the utter degradation of a h u m a n being was i n no sense a threat to heroic honor-in a way, it was its very essence. Ho meric G reeks do not appear to have been any different. It seems hardly coincidental that the q uarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles that sets off the action of the Iliad, generally considered to be the first great work of Western literature, is a d i spute over honor between two heroic warriors over the disposition of a s l ave girl . 66 Agamemnon and A c h i l les were also well aware that i t would only take an unfortunate turn in battle, or perhaps a sh ipwreck , for either of them to wind up as a slave. Odysseus b a rely escapes being enslaved on several occasions in the Odyssey. Even in the third century AD, the Roman emperor Valerian (253-260 AD) , defeated at the B a ttle of Edess a , was captured and spent the last years of his l i fe as the footstool that the Sassanian emperor Shapur I used to mount h i s horse. Such were the peri l s of war. All this was essentia l to the nature of martial honor. A warri o r ' s honor i s his w i l lingness to play a game on which he stakes everything. His grandeur i s directly proportio n a l to how far he can fa l l .

W a s i t , then, that t h e advent of com merci a l money threw tradition­ a l social hierarchies into disarray ? G reek ari stocrats often spoke this way, but the complaints seem rather d i s i ngen u o u s . Surely it was money that a l lowed such a poli shed aristocracy to exist i n the first place.67 Rather, the thing that real l y seemed to bother them about money was simply that they wanted i t so much. Since money could be used to buy j ust about anything, everybody wanted it. That is: it was desirable because it was non-discri m i n ating. One could see how the metaphor of the porne might seem particularly appropriate. A woman "common to the people"-as the poet Archilochos put i t-is available to every­ one. In principle, we shouldn ' t be attracted to such a n undiscrimin at­ ing creature. I n fact, of course, we are.68 And nothing was both so undiscri m i nating, and so desirable, a s money. True, G reek ari stocrats would ordinarily insist that they were not attracted to common porne,

1 9 0 D E B T

and that the courtesa n s , flute-gi r l s , acro b a t s , and bea utiful boys that frequented their symposia were not rea lly prostitutes at a l l (though at times they a l s o admitted that they really were) , they a l s o struggled with the fact that their own high-minded pursuits, such a s chariot-racing, outfitting ships for the navy, and sponsoring tragic d r a m a s , required the exact same coins a s the ones used to b u y cheap perfume and pies for a fisherm a n ' s wife--the only real d i fference being that their pursuits tended to req u i re a lot more of them . 69

We might say, then, that money introduced a democratization of desire. In sofar as everyone wanted money, everyone, high and l o w , was pursuing the s a m e promiscuous s u b stance. But even more: increasingly, they d i d not j u st want money. They needed it. T h i s was a p rofound change. I n the Homeric world, a s i n most human econo mies, we hear a l most no discussion o f those things cons idered necess a ry to h u m a n l i fe ( food , shelter, clothing) because it is simply assumed that everybody has the m . A m a n with no possessions could, at the very least, become a reta iner in some rich m a n ' s househo l d . Even s l aves h a d enough to eat?0 Here too, the prostitute w a s a potent symbol for what had c h a nged , since wh ile some of the denizens of b rothels were slaves, others were simply poor; the fact that their b a s i c needs could no longer b e taken for granted were precisely what made them s u b m i t to others ' desires. This extreme fea r of dependency on others' w h i m s l i e s at the basis of the Greek obsession with the self-sufficient househo l d .

A l l this lies b e h i n d the u n u s u a l l y a s s i d u o u s effo rts of the m a l e c i t i z e n s of Greek city-states-l ike the l ater R o m a n s-to i n s u l ate their wives a n d daughters fro m both the dangers a n d the freedoms of the m a rketp l a c e . Unlike their equivalents i n the Middle East, they do not seem to h a ve offered them a s debt pawns. Neither, at least i n Ath­ ens, w a s i t legal for the d aughters of free citizens to b e employed as prostitutes .71 A s a result, respectable women became invisible, l a rgely removed from the h igh d r a m a s of economic a n d political life . 72 I f any­ one w a s enslaved for debt, i t was normally the debtor. Even more dramatically, it w a s ord i n a r i l y male citizens who accu sed one another of prostitution-with Athen i a n politicians regu larly a sserting that their rivals, when they were young boys being plied with gifts fro m their m a l e suitors, were really trading sex for money, and hence deserved to lose their civic freedoms .71

I I I I I

It might be helpful here, to return to the principles l a i d out in ch a p­ te r five. What we see a bove a l l i s the erosion both of older for m s of

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 9 1

hierarchy-the Homeric world of great men with their reta iners-a nd, at the s a m e time, of older forms of mutual a i d , with c o m m u n istic rela­ tions increasingly being confined to the interior of the househol d .

I t ' s t h e former-the erosion of hierarchy-that rea l l y seems to have been at stake in the "debt crises" that struck so m a n y Greek cities around 6oo BC, right around the time that com merci a l m a rkets were first taking shape.74 When Ari stotle spoke of the Ath e n i a n poor a s fa l l ­ ing slave t o t h e rich, what he a p p e a r s t o have m e a n t w a s that in h a r s h y e a r s , m a n y p o o r farmers fel l i n t o d e b t ; a s a r e s u l t t h e y ended up as sharecroppers on their own property, dependents . Some were even sold a b road a s slaves. This led to unrest and agitation , and also to demands for clean s l ate s , for the freeing of those held in bondage, and for the redistribution of agricultural land. I n a few cases it led to outright revolution. In M eg a r a , we are to l d , a radical faction that seized power not only made i nterest- bearing l o a n s i l lega l , but did s o retroactively, forcing creditors to make restitution of a l l interest they had c o l l ected in the p a s t ?5 I n other cities, populist tyrants seized power on promises to a b rogate agricultural debts .

On the face of it, a l l this doesn't seem a l l that surprising: the mo­ ment when commercial m a rkets developed, Greek cities quickly devel­ oped all the social problems that had been plaguing Middle Eastern cities for millenn i a : debt crises, debt resistance, political u n rest. I n real­ ity, things are not s o clear. For one thing, fo r the poor to be " e n s l aved to the rich , " in the loose sense that Aristotle seems to be using, was hardly a new development. Even in Homeric society, it was a s s u med as a matter of course that rich men would live surrounded by depen­ dents and reta iners, drawn from the ranks of the dependent poor. The criti c a l thing, though , about such relations of patronage is that they involved respon s i b i l ities on both sides. A noble warrior a n d his h u m b l e c l i e n t w e r e a s s u m e d to be fu ndamentally different s o r t s of p e o p l e , b u t b o t h w e r e also expected to t a k e a c c o u n t of each oth e r ' s ( fund amentally different) need s . Tra nsforming p atronage into debt relations-treating, s a y , a n advance of seed corn as a loan, let alone a n interest- bearing loan-changed all thi s ?6 What's more, i t did so in two completely contradictory respects . O n the one hand, a loan implies no ongoing responsibil ities on the part of the creditor. O n the other, a s I have con­ tinua l l y emphasized, a l o a n does assume a certa in fo r m a l , legal equa lity between contractor and c o ntractee . It assumes that they are, at least in some ways on some level , funda menta l l y the s a m e kind of person . This is certa i n l y about the most ruthless and violent form of equality i m a g i n a b l e . But the fact it was conceived a s equality before the m a rket made such arrangements even more difficult to endure . 77

1 9 2 D E B T

The same tensions can be observed between neighbors, who i n farming communities tend to give, l e n d , and borrow things amongst themselves-anything from sieves and sickles, to charcoal and cooking oil, to seed corn or oxen for plowing. O n the one hand, such giving and lending were considered essential parts of the basic fabric of hu­ man sociability in farm communities, on the other, overly demanding neighbors were a notorious irritant-one that could only have grown worse when all parties are aware of precisely how much i t would have cost to buy or rent the same items that were being given away. Aga i n , o n e of t h e b e s t w a y s to g e t a s e n s e of what were considered everyday dilemmas for Mediterranean peasants i s to look at j okes . Late stories from across the Aegean i n Turkey echo exactly the same concer n s :

Nasruddin ' s neighbor o n c e c a m e by ask i f he c o u l d b o r r o w h i s

donkey fo r an unexpected e r r a n d . N a s ruddin o b l iged, but the

next day the neighbor was back again-he needed to take some

grain to be milled. Before long he was showing up a l m o s t every

morning, b a rely feeling he needed a pretext. F i n a l l y , Nasruddin got fed u p , and one morning told h i m h i s brother had already

come by and taken the donkey.

Just a s the neighbor w a s leaving he heard a loud braying

sound from the yard.

" Hey, I thought you said the donkey wasn't here ! "

" L o o k , who a r e y o u going t o believe ? " asked Nasrudd i n .

" M e , or some a n i ma l ? "

W i t h t h e appearance of money, i t c o u l d a l so become unclear what was a gift, and what a loan . O n the one h a n d , even with gift s , it w a s always considered b e s t to return something s l ightly better than one had received .78 O n the other hand, friends do not charge one another inter­ est, and any s uggestion that they might was sure to rankle . S o what' s the difference between a generous return gift and an interest paymen t ? T h i s i s t h e b a s i s of o n e of t h e m o s t famous N a s ruddin stories, one that appears to have provided centuries of amusement for peasants across the Mediterranean b a s i n and adj oining regions. ( I t i s also, I might note, a play on the fact that i n many Mediterranean l a nguage s , Greek included, the word for " i nterest" literally means " o ffspring . " )

O n e day Nasruddi n ' s neigh b o r , a notorious miser, came by

to announce he was throwing a party for some friends . Could he borrow some of Nasruddin ' s pots ? N a sruddin didn't have many but said he w a s happy to lend wh atever he h a d . The next

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N

day the miser returned , ca rrying Nasrudd i n ' s three pots, and one tiny addi tion a l one.

"Wh a t ' s that?" asked Nasruddd i n . " O h , t h a t ' s t h e offspring o f t h e pots . T h e y reprod uced dur­

ing the time they were with m e . " Nasruddin sh rugged and accepted them, and the miser left

happy that he h a d esta b l i shed a principle of interest. A month later Nasruddin was throwing a p a rty, and he went over to borrow a dozen pieces of his neighbor' s much more luxurious crockery . The m iser com plied. Then he w a i ted a d a y . And then another . . .

O n the third day, the miser came by and asked what had happened to h i s pots .

" O h , them?" Nasruddin said sadly. " I t was a terri b l e trag­ edy . They died . "79

1 9 3

In a heroic s y s tem , it is only debts of honor-the need to rep ay

gifts , to ex act revenge, to rescue or redeem frien d s or kins men fallen

p risoner-t h a t operate completely u n d e r a logic of tit-for-tat exch a nge.

Honor is the s a me as credit; it' s one ' s ability to keep one' s p romi s e s ,

but a l s o , in t h e c a s e of a w rong, to " g e t even . " As the l a s t p h ra s e

implie s , it w a s a mon e t a r y logic, but money , or a n y w a y money-like

relation s , a re confined to this . G r a d ually , s ubtly , without a n yone com ­

pletely u nder s t a nding t h e full implicatio n s o f w h a t w a s h ap penin g ,

w h a t h a d been the essence o f m o r a l relatio n s t u rned i n t o the mean s for

every sort of dishonest s t r a t a gem .

We k now a little about it from t rial s peeches, m a n y of w hich have

s urvived . Here is one from the fou r t h cent u r y , p robably a ro u n d 365

BC. Apollodorus w a s a p rospero u s but low -born Athenia n citizen (his father, a banker, had begu n life as a slave) w ho, like m a n y such gentle­

men , h a d acq uired a cou ntry estate. There he m a d e a point of m a king

friends with his closest neighbor, Nicost r a t u s , a man of a ristocra tic

origin s , though curren tly of some w h a t straitened mea n s . They acted a s

neighbors norm ally did, giving a n d borrowing s m a ll s u m s , lending each

othe r a nimals or slaves , minding each other ' s p roperty when one w a s

a w a y . Then o n e d a y Nicost r a t u s r a n into a piece o f terrible luck . While

trying to track down some r u n a w a y slaves, he w a s himself cap t u red by

pir a tes a n d held for r a n som a t t h e slave m a rket on the i s l a n d of Aegi­

nJ.. His relatives could only a s s e m ble p a r t of the price, so he w a s forced

:o borrow the rest from s t r a ngers in the m a rket. These a ppe a r to have

�een p rofes sion als w h o specialized in s uch loa n s , a n d their terms were

:10roriou sly h a r s h : if not rep aid in thirty d a y s , the s u m doubled ; if not

1 9 4 D E B T

rep a i d at a l l , the debtor became the slave of the m a n who had put up the money for his redemption.

Tearfully, Nicostratus appealed to h i s neighbor. All h i s posses­ sions were already p ledged now to one creditor or another; he knew Apollodorus wouldn't h ave that much cash lying around, but could his dear friend possibly put up something of h i s own by way of secu­ rity? Apollodorus was moved . He would be happy to forgive all debts Nicostratus a l ready owed him, but the rest would be difficult. Still, he would do his best. In the end, he arranged to himself take a loan fro m an acquaintance of h i s , Arcesas , on the security of h i s town-house, at r6 percent annual interest, so as to be able to sati sfy Nicostratus ' s creditors w h i l e Nicostratus himself arranged a friend l y , no-i nterest era­ nos loan fro m his own relatives . But before long, Apollodorus began to realize that he had been set up. The i mpoverished aristocrat had decided to take advantage of his nouveau-riche neighbor; he w a s actu­ ally working with Arcesas and some of Apol lodoru s ' s enemies to have h i m fal sely declared a " p u b l i c debto r , " that i s , someone who had de­ faulted on an obl igation to the p u b l i c treasury. This would h ave first of all meant that he would lose his right to take anyone to court ( i . e . , h i s deceivers , t o recover t h e money ) , a n d second, would give them a pretext to raid h i s house to remove h i s furniture and other possessions. Pres u m a b l y , N i costratus had never felt espec i a l l y comfortable being i n d e b t to a man he considered h i s s o c i a l inferior. Rather like E g i l the Viking, who would rather k i l l his friend Einar than have to compose an elegy thanking him for an overly magni ficent gift, N i costratus appears to have concluded that it was more honorable, or anyway more bear­ able, to try to extract the money from his lowly friend through force and fraud than to spend the rest of his l i fe feeling beholden . Before long, things had i ndeed descended to outright physical violence, and the whole matter ended up in court . 80

The story h a s everything. We see mutual a i d : the c o m m u n i s m of the prosperous, the expectation that if the need is great enough, or the cost m a nageable enough, friends and neigh bors w i l l help one another. 8 1 A n d most did, i n fact, have circles of people who w o u l d p o o l m o n e y if a cri sis did arise: whether a wedding, a fa mine, or a ranso m . We also see the omnipresent danger o f predatory vio lence that reduces human beings to commodities, and by doing so introduces the most cutthroat kinds of calculation into economic l i fe-not j ust on the part of the p i rates, but even more so, perhaps, on those moneylenders lurking by the m a rket offering stiff credit terms to anyone who came to ran­ som their relatives but found themselves caught short, and who then could appeal to the state to allow them to h i re men with weapons to

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 9 5

enforce the contract. We see heroic pride, which sees too great an act of generosity a s itself a kind of belittling assault. We see the a m bigu­ ity a mong gifts, loans, and commercial credit arrangements. Neither does the way things p l ayed out i n this case seem particularly unusual, except perhaps for Nicostrat u s ' s extraordinarily ingratitude. Prominent Atheni a n s were always borrowing money to pursue their political proj ­ ect s ; less-prominent ones were constantly worrying about their debts, or how to collect from their own debtors .SZ F i n a l l y , there i s another, subtler element here. While everyday market transactions, at shops or stalls i n the agora, were here as elsewhere typically conducted on credit, the mass production of coinage permitted a degree of anonymity for transactions that, in a pure credit regime, simply could not exist.83 Pirates and kidnappers do business i n cash-yet the loan sharks at Ae­ gina's m a rketp lace could not have operated without them. It i s on this same combination of i l legal cash business, usually involving v i olence, and extremely harsh credit term s , also enforced through violence, that innumerable criminal underworlds have been constructed ever since.

I I I I I

In Athen s , the result w a s extreme moral confusion . The l a nguage of money, debt, and finance provided powerful-and ultimately irresistible--ways to think about moral problems. Much as i n Vedic I n d i a , people started talking about l i fe as a debt to the gods, of ob­ ligations a s debts, about l i teral debts of honor, of debt as s i n and of vengeance as debt collectio n . 84 Yet i f debt w a s morality-and certainly at the very least it was i n the interest of creditors, who often had l i ttle legal recourse to compel debtors to pay u p , to insist that it w a s-what was one to make of the fact that money, that very thing that seemed capable of turning morality into an exact and quantifiable science, also seemed to encourage the very worst sorts of behavior?

It is from such dilemmas that modern ethics and moral p h i loso­ phy begi n . I think this i s true quite l i teral l y . Consider Plato's Repub­ lic, another product of fourth-century Athen s . The book begins when Socrates vi sits an old friend, a wealthy arms manufacturer, at the port of Piraeus. They get into a discussion of j ustice, which begins when the old man proposes that money cannot be a bad thing, since i t a l l ows those who have i t to be j ust, and that j ustice consists i n two things : telling the truth, and always paying one's debts . 85 The proposal is easily demolished . What, Socrates asks, if someone lent you h i s sword, went violently insane, and then asked for it back (presum a b l y , so he could kill someone) ? Clearly i t can never be right to arm a lunatic whatever

1 9 6 D E B T

the circumstance s . x6 The old man cheerfully sh rugs the problem off and heads off to attend to some ritu a l , leaving h i s son to ca rry on the argument.

The s o n , Polemarchus, switches gea rs: clearly his fa ther h a d n ' t meant "debt" in t h e l i t e r a l s e n s e of retu rning what one h a s borrowed . He meant it more in the sense of giving people what is owed to them; repaying good with good and evil with evi l ; helping one's friends and hurting one's enemies. Demolishing this one takes a little more work (are we saying j u stice plays no part in determining who o n e ' s friends and enemies a r e ? If s o , would n ' t someone who decided he had no friends, and therefore tried to h u rt everyone, be a j u st man ? And even if you did have some way to say fo r certain that one's enemy rea lly is an intrinsically bad person and deserves h a r m , by h a rming h i m , do you not thus make him worse ? C a n turning bad people into even worse people rea lly be an example of j u stice ? ) but it is eventually accom­ plished. At this point a Sophist, Thrasymachos, enters and denounces a l l of the debaters as mi lky-eyed idealists. I n rea lity, he says, a l l talk of " j u stice" i s mere political pretext, designed to j u stify the i n terests of the powerfu l . And so it should be, beca use in sofa r as j u stice exists , it is s i m p l y that: the i n terest of the powerfu l . Rulers are like shepherd s . W e l i k e t o t h i n k of t h e m a s benevolently tending t h e i r flocks, but what do shepherds u l ti mately do with sheep ? They k i l l and eat them, or sell the meat for money . Socrates responds by pointing out that Thrasy­ machos is confusing the a rt of tending sheep with the art of profiting fro m them. The art of medicine aims to i m p rove health, whether or not doctors get paid for practicing it. The art of shepherding a i m s to ensure the well-being of sheep, whether or not the shepherd ( o r h i s employer) is a l s o a businessman who knows how to extract a profit from the m . J u s t so w i t h t h e a rt of govern ance. If s u c h a n a r t exists, it m u s t have its own intrinsic aim apart fro m a n y profit one might also get from it, and what can this be other than the esta b l i shment of social j ustice? It's only the existence of money, Socrates suggests, that allows us to imag­ ine that words like "power" and " interest" refer to universal realities that can be p u rsued in their own right, let alone that a l l pursuits are rea lly ultimately the pursuit of power, advan tage, o r self- i n terestY The questi o n , he s a i d , is how to ensure that those who hold political office will do so not for gain, but rather fo r honor.

I w i l l leave off here. As we a l l know, Socrates eventually gets around to offering some political proposals of his own, involving phi­ losopher kings; the abolition of ma rriage, the fa m i l y , and private prop­ erty; selective human breeding boards. ( Clearly, the book was meant to annoy its readers, and for more than two thousand years, it has

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 9 7

succeeded b r i l l i antly . ) What I want to emphasize, though, i s the degree to which what we consider our core tradition o f moral and political theory today springs from this questio n : What does it mean to pay our debts ? Plato presents us first with the simple, literal busines s m a n ' s view. W h e n this proves i nadequate, he a llows i t to be refra med i n h e ­ r o i c term s . Perhaps a l l debts a r e real l y debts of h o n o r a fter a l l . 88 But heroic honor n o longer works i n a world where ( a s Apollodorus sadly di scovered ) com merce, class, and profit have so confused everything that peoples' true motives are never clear. How do we even know who our enemies are? Finally, Plato presents us with cynical realpol i t i k . Maybe nobody rea l l y o w e s a n y t h i n g to a n y b o d y . M a y b e t h o s e who pursue profit for its own sake have it right after all. But even that does not hold u p . We are left with a certai nty that existing standards are incoherent and self-contradictory, and that some sort of radical break would be req u i red i n order to create a world that makes a n y logical sense. But most of those who seriously consider a radical break along the lines that Plato suggested have come to the conclusion that there m ight be far worse thi ngs than moral i ncoherence. And there we have stood, ever since, i n the midst o f an insoluble d i l e m m a .

I I I I I

I t ' s not surprising that these issues weighed on P l a t o ' s m i n d . Not seven years before, he had taken a n i l l-fated sea cruise and wound up being captured and, supposedly like Nicostratus, offered for sale on the auc­ tion block at Aegi n a . However, Plato had better luck. A Libyan phi­ losopher of the Epicurean scho o l , one A n n iker i s , h appened to be i n the market a t the time. He recogni zed Plato and ransomed him. Plato fel t honor-bound to t r y to repay h i m , and h i s Atheni a n friends assembled twenty minas i n silver with which to do s o , but Annikeris refused to accept the money, i n s isting that it was his honor to be able to benefit a fellow lover of wisdo m . 89 As i n deed it w a s : Annikeris has been remem­ bered , and celebrated, for h i s generosity ever since. Plato went on to use the twenty m i n a s to buy land for a schoo l , the famous Academy . And while he hardly showed the same ingratitude as Nicostratus, one does rather get the i mpression that even Plato wasn't especi a l l y happy about the fact that h i s subsequent career was, i n a sense, made pos­ sible by h i s debt to a m a n who he probably considered a n extremely minor p h i losopher-and Annikeris wasn't even G reek ! At least this would help expl a i n why Plato, otherwise the i nveterate n a me-dropper, never mentioned A n n i keri s . We know of his existence only from l a ter biographer s . 90

1 9 8 D E B T

A n c i e n t Ro m e ( P rope r ty a n d Fre e d o m )

If Plato ' s work testifies to how profoundly the moral confusion intro­ duced by debt h a s shaped o u r traditions of thought, Roman law reveals how much it h a s sh aped even our most fa m i l i a r i n stituti o n s .

G e r m a n legal theorist R u d o l f von Jhering fa mously rema rked that ancient Rome had conquered the world three times : the first t i m e through its armies, the second through its rel igion, the t h i r d through i t s l a w s .91 He m ight have added : each time m o r e thorough l y . The E m p i re , after a l l , only spanned a tiny portion of t h e globe; the Roman Catholic Church h a s spread farther; Roman law has come to provide the lan­ guage and conceptual underpinn ings of legal and constitutional orders everywhere. Law students from South Africa to Peru are expected to spend a good deal of their time memorizing technical terms i n Lati n , and it is R o m a n law t h a t provides al most a l l o u r b a s i c conceptions about contract, o b l igation , torts, property, and j u risd iction-a n d , i n a broader sense, of citizen s h i p , rights, and l i berties on which political life , too, i s ba sed .

This w a s possible, Jhering held , becau se, the Romans were the first to turn j u ri sprudence into a gen uine science. Perhaps-but fo r a l l that, i t remains true that Roman law has a few notoriously q u i rky features, some so odd that they have confused and confounded j u rists ever since Roman law was revived in Italian universities i n the High Middle Ages . The most notorious of these is the unique way it defines p roperty . I n Roman l a w , property, or dominiu m , is a r e l a t i o n between a person and a thing, characteri zed by a b solute power of that person over that thing. This definition has caused endless conceptual problems. First of a l l , i t's not clear what it would mean for a h u m a n to have a " relation" with an i n a n i mate o b j ect. H u m a n beings can have relations with one an other. But what would it mean to have a " relatio n " with a thing? And if one did, what would i t mean to give that relation legal standing? A simple i l l ustration will suffice : i m agine a m a n trapped on a desert island. He might develop extremely personal relationships with, say, the p a l m trees growing on that island . If h e ' s there too long, he might well end up giving them a l l n a mes and spending half h i s time having i m aginary conversations with them. S t i l l , does he own them ? The ques­ tion is meaningless. There ' s no need to worry about property rights if noone else i s there.

Clearly, then, property i s not real l y a relation between a person and a thing. I t ' s a n understanding or a rrangement between people con­ cerning things. The only reason that we sometimes fai l to notice this i s

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 1 9 9

that i n m a n y cases-particularly when we are talking about our rights over our shoes, or cars, or power tools-we are talking of rights held, as English law puts it, "against all the world "-that is, understandings between ourselves and everyone else on the p l a net, that they w i l l all refrain fro m interfering with our possessio n s , and therefore allow us to treat them more o r less any way we like. A relation between one person and everyone else on the planet is, understandably, difficult to conceive a s such . It's easier to think of it as a relationship with a thing. But even here, i n practice this freedom to do as one likes turns out to be fa irly l i m ited. To say that the fact that I own a chainsaw gives me an " a b s o lute power" to do anything I want with i t is obviously absurd. Almost anything I might think of doing with a chainsaw outside my own home o r land i s likely to be i l l eg a l , and there are only a l i m ited number of things I can really do with it inside. The only thing " a bso­ lute" about my rights to a chainsaw i s my right to prevent anyone else from using it.92

Nonetheles s , Roman law does insist that the basic form of prope rty is private property, and that private property is the owner's absol ute power to do anything he wants with his possess ions. Twelfth -century Medieval j u rists came to refine this into three principles, usus ( u s e of the thing) , fructus ( fruits, i . e . , enjoyment of the products of the thing) , and abusus (abuse or destruction of the thing ) , but Roman j u rists weren ' t even interested i n specifying that much, since i n a certain way, they saw the deta i l s as lying entirely outside the domain of law . I n fact, scholars have spent a great deal of time debating whether Roman au­ thors actually cons idered private property to be a right ( ius) ,93 fo r the very reason that rights were ultim ately based on agreements between peop le, and one's power to di spose of one's p roperty was not: it was j ust o n e ' s natural a b i l i ty to do whatever one pleased when social im­ pedi ments were absent.94

If you think about it, this rea lly is an odd place to start in devel­ oping a theory of property law. It i s probably fa ir to say that, in any part of the world , i n any period of history, whether i n ancient Japan or Machu Picchu, someone who had a piece of string w a s free to twist it, knot it, pull it apart, o r toss it i n the fire more or less as they had a mind to. Nowhere else did legal theorists appear to have fo und this fact i n any way interesting or important. Certa inly n o other tradition makes it the very basis of property law-since, a fter all, doing so made almost a l l actual l a w little more than a series of exceptio n s .

How did this come a b o u t ? And w h y ? The m o s t convincing expla� nation I ' v e seen is Orlando Patterson ' s : the notion of absolute private p roperty is rea l l y derived fro m slavery. One can imagine property not

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as a relation between people, but as a relation between a person and a thing, i f o n e ' s starting point i s a relation between two people, one of whom i s a l s o a thing. ( T h i s i s how s l aves were defined i n Roman l a w : they were people who were also a res, a t h i ng . ) 95 The emphasis on absolute power begin s to make sense a s well . 96

The word dominiu m , meaning absolute private property, was not particularly ancient.97 It only appears i n Latin i n the late Republic, right around the time when hundreds of thousands of captive la borers were pouring into Italy, and when Rome, as a consequence, was be­ coming a genuine slave society .98 By s o BC, Roman writers had come to simply assume that workers-whether the fa rmworkers harvesting peas i n countryside plantations, the muleteers delivering those peas to shops i n the city, or the clerks keeping count of them-were someone else's property . The existence of millions of creatures who were simultane­ ously persons and things created endless legal problems, and much of the creative genius of Roman l a w was spent i n working out the endless r a m i ficati o n s . One n eed only fl i p open a casebook of Roman l a w to get a sense of these. This i s from the second-century j urist U l p i a n :

Again, Mela writes that if some persons were pl aying ball and one of them, hitting the ball quite hard, knocked it against a barber's hands, and in this way the throat of a slave, whom the barber was shaving, was cut by a razor pressed against it, then who is the person with whom the culpability lay is liable under the Lex Aquilia [the law of civil da mages] ? Proclus says that the culpability lies with the barber; and indeed, if he was shav­ ing at a place where games are normally played or where traffic was heavy, there is reason to fault him. But it would not be badly held that if someone entrusts himself to a barber who has a chair in a dangerous place, he should have himself to blame.99

In other words, the m a ster cannot c l a i m civil d a m ages against the b a l l p l ayers or barber for destroying h i s property if the real problem w a s that he bought a stupid slave. Many of these debates might strike us a s profoundly exotic (could you be accused o f theft for merely con­ vincing a slave to run away ? If someone k i lled a slave who was a l s o your s o n , could you t a k e your sentimental feelings toward h i m i n t o a c c o u n t i n a s s e s s i n g d a m ages, or would you h a v e to s t i c k to h i s market value ? )-but our contemporary tradition of j urisprudence i s founded directly on such debates . 100

As for dominium, the word is derived fro m dominus, meaning " m as­ ter" or " s lave-owner , " but ulti m ately fro m domus, meaning " house"

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or "household . " I t ' s of course related to the English term "domesti c , " w h i c h e v e n now can be u s e d e i t h e r to mean " p e r t a i n i n g to private l i fe , " or t o refer to a servant w h o cleans t h e h o u s e . Domus overlaps some­ what i n meaning with familia, " fa m i l y "-but, as proponents of " fa m i l y values" m i g h t be i n terested to know, familia i t s e l f ultim ately derives from the word famulus, meaning " slave . " A fa m i ly was origin a l l y all those people under the domestic authority of a paterfamilias , and that authority was, i n early Roman law at least, conceived as absolute . 1 0 1 A man did not have total power over h i s wife , since she was still to some degree under the protection of her own fa ther, but h i s children , slaves, and other dependents were h i s to do with as he wan ted-a t least in early Roman law, he was perfectly free to whip, torture, o r sell them. A fa ther could even execute his children, provided he fo und them to have c o m m i tted capital c r i m e s . 102 With his slaves, he d i d n ' t even need that excuse.

In creating a notion of dominiu m , then, and thus creating the modern principle of absol ute private property, what Roman j u rists were doing first of all was taking a principle of domestic authority, of absolute power over peop le, defining some of those people ( s l aves) as things, and then extending the logic that origi n a l l y applied to slaves to geese, chariots, barns, j ewelry boxes, and so fo rth-that is, to every other sort of thing that the law had anything to do w i t h .

I t was quite extraord i n a ry , e v e n in t h e a n c i e n t world, for a fa ther to have the right to execute his slaves-let alone his children . No one i s quite sure why the early Romans were so extreme in this regard. I t ' s telling, though, that the earliest Roman debt law was equally un­ usual i n its harshness, since it a l lowed creditors to execute i n solvent debtors . 103 The early history of Rome, like the h i stories of early G reek city-states, was one of continual political struggle between creditors and debtors, until the Roman elite even tually figured out the principle that most successful Mediterranean elites learned: that a free peasantry means a more effective army, and that conquering armies can provide war captives who can do anything debt bondsmen used to d o , and therefore, a social compromise-a llowing l i m i ted popular representa­ tion , banning debt slavery, channeling some of the fru its of empire into social-welfare payments-w a s actually in their interest . Pres u m a b l y , the absol ute power of fathers developed as p a rt of this whole constel­ lation i n the s a m e way a s we've seen elsewhere. Debt bondage reduced fa mily relations to rel ations of property; social reforms retai ned the new power of fathers but protected them from debt. At the same time, the increasing i n fl u x of slaves soon meant that any even moderately prosperous household was l i kely to contain slaves. This meant that

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the logic of conquest extended into the most inti m a te aspects of ev­ eryd ay l i fe . Conquered people p oured one's bath and combed one's h a i r . Conquered tutors taught o n e ' s children about poetry. Since slaves were sexually available to owners and their fa m i l i e s , a s well a s to their friends and dinner guests, it i s l ikely that most Romans' first sexual experience w a s with a boy or girl whose legal status w a s conceived a s t h a t of a defeated enemy . 1 04

O ver time, this became more and more of a legal fiction-actua l s laves were much m o r e likely to h a v e been paupers s o l d by parents, unfortunates kidnapped by p i rates or bandits, victims of wars or j ud i ­ c i a l process among barbarians a t the fringes of t h e e m p i r e , or c h ildren of other slaves. 105 S t i l l , the fiction was maintained.

What made Roman s l avery so unusual, i n historical terms, was a conj uncture of two factors. One w a s its very arbitrarines s . In dramatic contrast with, say plantation sl avery in the Americas, there w a s no sense that certain people were naturally inferior and therefore destined to be slaves. Instead, s l a very was seen as a m i s fortune that could hap­ pen to anyone. 106 A s a res ult, there was no reason that a slave might not be i n every way superior to his or her m aster: s m a rter, with a finer sense of morality, better ta�te, and a greater understanding of p h i loso­ p h y . The master might even be willing to acknowledge this. There was no reason not to, since it had no effect on the nature of the relation­ ship, which w a s simply one of power.

The second was the absolute nature of this power. There are many places where slaves are conceived as war captives, and masters a s con­ querors with absol ute powers of l i fe and death-but usually, this is something of an a b stract princi p l e . Almost everywhere, govern ments quickly move to l i m i t such right s . At the very least, emperors and kings will insist that they are the only ones with the power to order others put to death . 107 But under the Roman Rep u b l i c there was no emperor; i nsofar a s there was a sovereign body, i t w a s the collective body of the s l ave-owners themselves . Only under the early Empire do we see any legislation l i miting what owners could do to their ( h u m a n ) property : the first being a l a w of the time of the emperor Tiberius (dated r6 AD) stipulating that a m a ster had to obtain a magistrate ' s permission before ordering a slave publicly torn apart by wild beasts . 108 However, the absolute nature of the master's power-the fact that i n this context, he effectively was the state--a l s o meant that there were also, at first, no restrictions on manumission : a m aster could l iberate his slave, or even adopt him or her, whereby-since l i berty meant nothing outside of membership in a community-that slave automatically became a Ro­ man citizen . This led to some very peculiar arrangements . In the first

H O N O R A N D D E G R A D A T I O N 2 0 3

century AD, for example, i t w a s not uncommon for educated Greeks to have themselves sold into s lavery to some wealthy Roman i n need of a secretary, entrust the money to a close friend or fa mily member, and the n , after a certain interv a l , buy themselves back, thus obtaining Roman citizen s h i p . This despite the fact that, d u ring such time a s they were slaves, if their owner decided to, say, cut one of his secretary's feet off, legally, he would have been perfectly free to do s o . 109

The relation of dominus and slave thus brought a relation of con­ quest, of absolute political power into the household (in fact, made it the essence of the household) . It's i mportant to emphasize that this was not a moral relation on either side. A well-known legal for m u l a , attrib­ uted to a Republican lawyer n a med Quintus Hateri u s , brings this home with particular clarity. With the Romans as with the Atheni a n s , for a male to be the obj ect of sexual penetration w a s considered u nbefitting to a citizen . In defending a freed m a n accused of continuing to provide sexual favors to his former m aster, Haterius coi ned a n aphorism that was later to become something of a popular di rty j ok e : impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas, in Liberto officium ( " to be the obj ect of a n a l penetration i s a crime i n the freeborn, a necessity for a slave, a duty for a freedm a n " ) . 1 10 What is significant here is that sexual subservience i s considered the "duty" only o f the freedm a n . It i s not considered the " duty" of a slave. This i s because, again , slavery was not a moral relation. The m aster could do what he liked, and there was nothing the slave could do about it.

I I I I I

The most insidious effect of R o m a n slavery, however, is that through Roman law, i t has come to play havoc with our idea of human free­ d o m . The meaning of the Roman word libertas itself changed dra­ matically over t i m e . As everywhere i n the ancient world, to be " free" meant, first and foremost, not to be a slave. Since s l a very means a bove all the a n n i h i lation of social ties and the a b i l i ty to form them, free­ dom meant the capacity to make and m a i n t a i n moral commitments to other s . The English word " free , " for instance, is derived from a Ger­ man root meaning " frien d , " since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a commun ity of equal s . This i s why freed slaves i n Rome became citizen s : to be free, by definition, meant to be anchored i n a civic community, with a l l the rights and resp o n s i b ilities that this entailed . 1 1 1

By the second century AD, however, this h a d begun t o change. The j urists grad u a l l y redefined libertas until it became almost

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indi stingu ishable from the power of the master. It was the right to do absolutely anything, with the excepti o n , aga i n , of all those things one could not d o . Actually, in the Digest, the definitions of freedom and s l avery appear back to back:

Freedom is .the natural faculty to do whatever one wishes that is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution ac­ cording to the law of nations whereby one person becomes private property (dominium) of another, contrary to nature.1 12

Medieval commentators i m mediately noticed the problem here . 1 1 3 B u t wouldn ' t this m e a n that everyone i s free ? After a l l , even slaves a re free to do absolutely anything they're actually permitted to d o . To say a slave i s free (except i n sofar as he isn't) i s a bit like saying the ea rth i s squ are (except i n sofa r as it i s round ) , o r that the sun i s blue ( except i n sofar a s it i s yellow ) , or, again, that we have a n absol ute right to do anything we wish with our chainsaw (except those thi ngs that we can ' t . )

I n fact, t h e definition introduces a l l sorts of complicati o n s . If free­ dom i s natural, then surely sl avery i s unnatura l , but if freedom and slavery are j u st m a tters of degree, then , logically, would not all restric­ tions on freedom be to some degree unn atural ? Would not that i m p l y that society, s o c i a l rules, in fact e v e n property r i g h t s , are u n n a t u r a l as wel l ? This i s preci sely what many Roman j urists did conclude-that i s , when they did venture to comment on such abstract matters, which was only rarely . Originally, h u m a n beings lived in a state of n ature where all things were held i n common; it was war that first d ivided up the world, and the resultant "law of nation s , " the common us ages of mankind that regulate such matters a s conquest, s l avery, treaties, and borders, that w a s first respon s i b l e for inequali ties of property a s well . 1 14

This in turn meant that there was no intrinsic difference between private property and political power-at least, insofa r a s that power was b ased i n violence. As time went on, R o m a n emperors also began c l a i m i n g something like dominiu m , insisting that within their domin­ i o n s , they had absolute freedo m-i n fact, that they were not bound by l a ws . 1 1 5 At the same time, as Roman society shifted from a republic of slave-holders to a rrangements that increasingly resembled l a ter feudal Europe, with magnates on their great estates surrounded by dependent peasants, debt serva n t s , and an endless variety of slaves-w ith whom they could l a rgely do as they plea sed . The barbarian invasions that overthrew the empire merely for m a l i zed the situation, largely e l i m i nat­ ing cha ttel slavery, but a t the s a m e time i ntroducing the notion that the

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noble classes were really descendants of the Germ a n i c conquerors, and that the common people were i nherently subservient.

Sti l l , even i n this new Medieval world, the old Roman concept of freedo m remained. Freedom was simply power. When Medieval political theorists spoke of " liberty , " they were normally referring to a l o r d ' s right to do whatever he wanted within h i s own d o m a i n s . This w a s , again, u s u a l l y a s s u med to be not something origin a l l y established by agreement, but a mere fact of conquest: one famous English legend holds that when, around 1290, King Edward I asked his lords to pro­ duce documents to demon strate by what right they held their franchises (or " l i berties " ) , the Earl Warenne presented the king only with h i s rusty sword . 1 16 Like Roman dominiu m , it was less a right than a power, and a power exercised first and foremost over people--which i s why i n the Middle Ages i t was common to speak of the " l i berty of the gallow s , " meaning a lord ' s right to main t a i n his o w n private p l ace of executi o n .

By t h e t i m e R o m a n law began t o be recovered and modernized i n t h e twelfth century, t h e term dominium posed a p a rticular problem, since it had come, i n ordinary church Latin of the time, to be used equally for " lordship" and "private property . " Medieval j urists spent a great deal of time and argument establishing whether there w a s indeed a difference between the two . It was a particularly thorny problem because, if property rights real l y were, a s the Digest i n sisted, a form of absolute power, i t was very difficult to see how anyone could have it but a king-or even , for certain j urists, G od . 1 17

This is not the place to describe the resulting arguments, but I fee l i t ' s important to e n d h e r e because i n a way, i t brings us fu l l circle and allows u s to understand precisely how Liberals like Adam Smith were able to imagine the world the way they did. This i s a tradition that assumes that l i berty i s essenti a l l y the right to do what one likes with o n e ' s own property. I n fact, not only does i t make property a right; i t treats rights themselves as a form of property . I n a way, this is the greatest paradox of all. We are so used to the idea of " h aving" rights­ that rights are so mething one can possess-that we rarely think about what this might actu a l l y mea n . I n fact ( a s Medieval j urists were well aware) , one man's right i s simply another's obligati o n . My right to free speech is others' obligation not to p u n i s h me for speaking; my right to a trial by a j ury of m y peers is the resp o n s i b i l ity of the govern ment to maintain a system of j ury duty . The problem is j u st the same as it was with property rights : when we are talking about o b l igati ons owed by everyone i n the entire world, i t ' s difficult to think about it that way. I t ' s much e a s i e r to s p e a k of " h aving" rights and freed o m s . Sti l l , i f freedo m is basically our right to o w n things, or to treat things as i f we o w n

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them, then what would it mean to " o w n " a freedo m-wouldn ' t it have to mean that o u r right to own property i s itself a form of p roperty ? That does seem un necessarily convol uted . What possible reason would one have to want to define it t h i s way ? 1 1 8

H i storic a l l y , there is a simple--if somewhat di sturbi ng-answer to this . Those who have a rgued that we are the natural owners of o u r rights and l i berties have b e e n m a i n l y interested i n asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.

Modern ideas of rights and l i b erties are derived from what, from the time when Jean Gerson, Rector of the University of P a r i s , began to l a y them out around 1400, b u i lding on Roman law concepts, came to be known as " n atural rights theory . " As Richard Tuck, the premier historian of such idea s , has long noted, i t is one of the great i ronies of h i story that this was always a body of theory embraced not by the progressives o f that time, but by conservatives . "For a Gers o n i a n , l i b ­ e r t y was property and could be exchanged in t h e same way and in t h e same t e r m s as any o t h e r property"-sold, s w a p p e d , l o a n e d , or other­ wise voluntarily surrendered . 1 1 9 It fol lowed that there could be nothing intri n s i c a l ly wrong with, say, debt peonage, or even s l avery. And this is exactly what natural-rights theorists came to assert. I n fa ct, over the next centuries, these ideas came to be developed above all i n Antwerp and Lisbon, cities at the very center of the emerging slave trade. After a l l , they a rgued , we d o n ' t really know what's going o n i n the lands be­ hind pl aces like Calabar, but there i s no intrinsic reason to assume that the vast m a j o rity of the human cargo conveyed to European ships had not sold themselves, or been di sposed of by their legal guard i a n s , or lost their liberty i n some other perfectly legitimate fa s h i o n . No doubt some had not, but abuses w i l l exist i n any syste m . The important thing was that there was nothing inherently unn atural o r i l legiti mate about the idea that freedom could be sold. 120

Before long, s i m i l a r a rguments came to be employed to j u stify the absolute power of the state. Thomas Hobbes was the first to really develop this argument i n the seventeenth century, but it soon became commonplace. Government was essentially a contract, a kind of busi­ ness arrangement, whereby citizens had voluntarily given up some of their natural l i b erties to the sovereign . F i n a l l y , s i m i l a r ideas have be­ come the basis of that most basic, dominant institution of our pres­ ent economic life : wage labor, which i s , effectively, the renting of our freedo m i n the same way that slavery can be conceived as its s a l e . 1 2 1

I t ' s n o t o n l y our freedoms t h a t we o w n ; t h e s a m e logic h a s c o m e t o be applied even to o u r o w n bodies, which a r e treated , i n s u c h formu­ lations, as real l y no different than houses, cars, or fu rniture. We own

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ourselves, therefore outsiders have no right to trespass on u s . 122 Again, this m ight seem a n innocuous, even a positive notion, but it looks rath­ er different when we take into consideration the Roman tradition of property on which it is based. To say that we own ou rselves is, oddly enough, to cast ourselves as both m a s ter and slave s i multaneously. " We " are both owners (exerting a b s o l ute power over our property ) , a n d yet somehow, at the same time, the things being owned (being the o b j ect of absolute power) . The ancient Roman household, far from having been forgotten in the mists of h i story , is preserved in our most basic conception of ourselves-a n d , once aga i n , j u s t as in property law, the result i s so strangely incoherent that i t spins o ff into endless paradoxes the moment one tries to figure out what i t would actually mean i n practice . Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of R o m a n property concepts, so have p h i l o sophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of domination over ourselves . The most popular solution-to say that each of us h a s something cal led a " m i n d " and that this is com­ pletely sepa rate from something else, which we can c a l l "the body , " and t h a t t h e first thing holds natural dominion over t h e second-fl ies in the face o f j u st about everything we now know about cogn itive science. I t ' s obviously untrue, but we continue to hold onto it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assu mptions about property, law, and freedom would make any sense without it. 123

Co n c l u s i o n s

The first four chapters of this book describe a dilem m a . We don ' t re­ a l l y know how to think about debt. Or, to be more accurate, we seem to be trapped between i magining society in the Adam Smith mode, a s a collection of individuals whose only significant relations are with their own possession s , happily ba rtering one thing for another for the sake of mutual convenience, with debt a l most entirely a b o l i shed from the picture, and a vision in which debt i s everything, the very substance of all human relations-which of course leaves everyone with the uncom­ fortable sense that human relations are somehow an intrinsically taw­ dry business, that our very respon s i b i l ities to one another are a l ready somehow necessarily based i n sin and cri m e . It's not a n appealing set of alternatives .

In the last three chapters I have tried to show that there is a n other way of looking at things, and then to describe how it i s that we got

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here. This is why I developed the concept of h u m a n economi e s : ones i n which what i s considered rea lly i mportant about human beings is the fact that they are each a unique nexus of relations with others­ therefore, that no one could ever be considered exactly equivalent to anything or anyone else. I n a h u m a n economy, money i s not a way of buying or trading human beings, but a way of expressing j ust how much one cannot do so.

I then went on to describe how a l l this can begin to break down: how humans can become obj ects of exchange : first, perhaps, women given i n marriage; ultimately, slaves captured i n war. What a l l these relations have i n common, I observed, was violence. Whether i t i s Tiv girls being tied up and beaten for running away from their husbands, or husbands being herded into slave ships to die on faraway planta­ tions, that same principle always applies: i t i s only by the threat of sticks, ropes, spears, and guns that one can tear people out of those endlessly complicated webs of relationship with others ( s isters, friends, rivals . . . ) that render them unique, and thus reduce them to something that can be traded.

A l l of this, i t i s i mportant to emphasize, can happen in p l aces where m a rkets i n ordinary, everyday goods-clothing, too l s , foodstuffs-do not even exist. In fact, in most human economies, one's most important possessions could never be bought and sold for the same reasons that people can't: they are unique obj ects, c a ught up i n a web of relation­ ships with h u m a n beings. 124

My old professor John Cornaro££ used to tell a story about car­ rying out a survey i n Natal, i n South A frica. He had spent most of a week driving fro m h omestead to homestead in a j eep with a box ful l of questionnaires a n d a Zulu-speaking i nterpreter, driving p a s t appar­ ently endless herds of cattle. A fter about six days, h i s interp reter sud­ denly started and pointed into the middle of one herd. "Look ! " he said. " Th a t ' s the same cow! That one there-with the red spot on its back. We saw i t three days ago i n a p l ace ten miles from here. I wonder what happened ? D i d someone get married ? O r maybe there w a s a settlement to some dispute . "

I n h u m a n economies, when this a b i l ity to rip people from their contexts does appear, i t is most often seen as an end i n itself. One can already see a hint of this among the Lele. I mportant men would occa­ sionally acquire war captives fro m far away as slaves, but i t was a l m o s t always to be sacrificed at their funeral . 125 The squelching of one m a n ' s individuality was s e e n a s somehow swelling t h e reputation, t h e social existence, of the other . 126 In what I ' v e been calling heroic societies, of course this kind of addition and subtraction of honor and d isgrace is

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lifted from a somewhat m a rgi n a l practice to become the very essence of politics. As endless epics, saga s , and eddas attest, heroes become heroes by making others small. In Ireland and Wales, we can observe how this very ability to degrade others, to remove unique h u m a n beings fro m t h e i r hearths a n d fa milies and t h u s render t h e m anonymous u n i t s of accounting-the Irish s l ave-girl currency, the Welsh washerwo men-is itself the highest expression of honor.

In heroic societies, the role of violence i s not hidden-i t ' s glorified . O fte n , it can form the basis of one's most intimate rel a t i o n s . In the Iliad, Achilles sees nothing sha meful i n h i s relation with h i s slave-gi r l , B r i s e i s , w h o s e h u s b a n d and brothers he k i l l e d ; he refers to her a s h i s " p rize of h o n o r , " but a l m o s t i n t h e very same breath, he also insists that, j u st any decent m a n must love and care for his household depen­ dents, "so I from my heart loved this one, even though I won her with my spea r . " 127

That such relations of inti macy can often develop between men of honor and those they have stripped of their dignity, h i story can well at­ test. After all, the a n n i h i lation of any possibility of equality also e l i m i ­ n ates any question of d e b t , of any relation o t h e r than p o w e r . It a l l o w s a certain c l a r i t y . This i s presumably why emperors and k i n g s have s u c h a notorious tendency to surround themselves with s l a v e s or eunuchs.

There i s something more here, though . If one looks across the ex­ panse of hi story, one cannot help but notice a curious sense of identi­ fication between the most exalted and the most degraded; particularly, between em perors and kings, and slaves. Many kings surround them­ selves with slaves, appoint slave mini sters-there have even been, a s w i t h t h e M a m l u k s i n Egypt, actual dynasties of slaves. K i n g s surround themselves with slaves for the same reason that they surround them­ selves with eunuch s : because the slaves and criminals have no fa m i l ies o r friends, no p o s s i b i l i ty of other loyalties-or at least that, i n prin­ ciple, they should n ' t . But in a way, kings should really be like that too. As many a n African p roverb emphasizes : a proper king h a s n o relatives either, or at least, he acts a s if he does not . m I n other word s , the king and slave a re mirror i m ages, in that unl ike normal h u m a n beings who are defined by their commitments to others, they are defined only by relations of power. They are a s close to perfectly isolated, alienated beings a s one can possibly beco me.

At this point we can finally see what's really at stake i n o u r pe­ culiar habit of defining ourselves s i m u l taneously a s master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household i n o u r v e r y concept of ourselves, as ma sters of our freedoms, o r a s owners of o u r very selves . It i s the only way that we can i magine o u rselves as

2 1 0 D E B T

completely i s o l a ted beings . There is a direct line fro m the new Roman conception of liberty-not as the a b i l ity to form mutual relationships with others, but a s the kind of a b solute power of " use and abuse" over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman m a n ' s household-to the strange fantasies of liberal p h i losophers like Hobbes, Locke, and S m i t h , about the origins of h u m a n society i n some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth ful l y formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts. 129

European and American intellectua l s , i t i s true, have spent much of the l a s t two hundred years trying to flee from the more d i sturbing implications o f this tradition of thought. Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of I ndependence by di­ rectly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men ·are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain i n a l ienable Rights . . . " ­ thus undercutting s i m ultaneously any argument that Africans were raci a l l y i nferior, and a l s o that they or their ancestors could ever have been j ustly and legally deprived of their freedo m . In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and l i ber­ ties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we've j ust kept the old ones, but with the word "not" i n serted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedo m s are a series of exceptions to an overal l moral and legal fra mework that suggests we shouldn ' t really have them i n the first place.

Formal s l avery h a s been eliminated, but ( a s anyone who works from nine to five can testify ) the idea that you can al ienate your l iberty , at least temporarily, endures. In fact, it determines what most of us have to do for most of our waking hours, except, usually, on weekends. The violence h a s been l a rgely pushed out of sight. 130 But this i s l a rgely because we're no longer able to imagine what a world b ased on social arrangements that did not require the conti n u a l threat of tasers and surveil l ance cameras would even look like.

C h a p t e r E i g h t

C R E D I T V E R SUS B U L L I ON

AND THE CYCLES OF HISTORY

Bullion is the access o ry of war, a nd n o t

of peaceful trade.

-Geoffrey W . G ardi ner

ONE M I G H T WELL A S K: If our political and legal ideas really are founded on the logic of s l avery, then how did we ever e l i m i nate slavery ? Of course, a cynic might argue that we haven't; we've just relabeled it. The cynic would have a p o i n t : an ancient G reek would certainly have seen the di stinction between a slave and an indebted w age laborer a s , at b e s t , a lega listic nicety . ·1 S t i l l , e v e n the e l i m i n ation of formal chat­ tel s lavery has to be considered a remarkable achievement, and i t i s worth w h i l e to wonder how i t was accomplished. Especially s i n c e it was not j u st accomplished once. The truly remarkable thing, if one consults the historical record , is that s l a very h a s been e l i m i n ated-or effectively eliminated-many times i n human hi story.

I n Europe, for instance, the institution largely vani shed in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman empire--an h i storical achievement rarely recognized by those of us used to referring to these events as the beginning of " the Dark Ages . "2 No one i s quite sure how it happened . Most agree that the spread of Christianity must have had something to do with it, but that can't have been the d i rect cause, s ince the Church itself w a s never explicitly opposed to the i n stitution and i n many cases defended i t . Instead, the abolition appears to have hap­ pened despite the attitudes of both the intellectu a l s and the political authorities of the time. Yet it did happen , and it h a d l a sting effects. On the popular level, slavery remained so universally detested that even a thousand years later, when European merchants sta rted try­ ing to revive the trade, they di scovered that their compatriots would

2 1 2 D E B T

n o t countenance sl aveholding in their own countries-one reason why p l a n ters were eventually obl iged to acquire their slaves i n Africa and set up plantations in the New World .3 I t i s one of the great i ronies of h istory that modern racism-probably the single greatest evil of our last two centuries-h ad to be i nven ted l a rgely because Europea n s contin ued to refuse to l i sten to t h e arguments of the intellectu a l s and j u rists and did not accept that anyone they believed to be a fu l l and equal h u m a n being could ever be j ustifiably enslaved.

What's more, the demise of ancient slavery was not l i m i ted to Eu rope . Remarkably, right around the same time-in the years around 6oo AD-we find almost exactly the s a m e thing happening in India and C h i n a , where, over the course of centuries, amidst much unrest and confusion, chattel slavery l a rgely ceased to exist. What a l l this suggests i s that moments of h i storical opportuni ty-m oments when meani ngful change i s possible-follow a distinct, even a cyclical pattern , one that h a s long been far more coordina ted across geographical space than we would ever have i m agined. There is a shape to the past, and it is only by understanding it that we can begin to have a sense of the h i storical opportunities that exist in the presen t .

I I I I I

The easiest way to make these cycles v i s i b l e is to reexa mine exactly the phenomenon we've been concerned with over the course of this book: the h i story of money, debt, and cred i t . The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian h i story, startling patterns begin to emerge. In the case of money, one event stands out a bove all other s : the invention of coinage. Coinage appears to have arisen independently i n three different places, almost s i m u ltaneo u s l y : on the G reat P l a i n of no rthern C h i n a , i n the Ganges river valley of northeast India, and in the lands surrounding the Aegean Sea, i n each case, between roughly 6oo and soo BC. This wasn ' t due to some sudden technological innovation : the technologies used in mak­ ing the first coins were, in each case, entirely different.4 I t was a social transform ati o n . Why this happened i n exactly this way i s a n historical mystery. But this much we k n o w : for some reason , in Lyd i a , I n d i a , and C h i n a , local rulers decided that whatever longstanding credit systems had existed i n their kingdoms were no longer adequate, and they began to issue tiny pi eces of precious metals-meta l s that had previ ously been used l a rgely in international com merce, i n ingot fo rm-a nd to encour­ age their subj ects to use them i n day-to-day transactio n s .

C R E D I T V E R S U S B ULL I O N 2 1 3

From there, the innovation spread. For more than a thousand years, states everywhere started issuing their own coinage. But then, right around 6oo AD, about the time that s l a very w a s dis appearing, the whole trend was suddenly thrown into reverse. Cash dried up. Every­ where, there w a s a movement back to credit once again.

I f we look at Eurasian h istory over the course of the last five thou­ sand years, what we see is a broad alternation between periods domi­ nated by credit money and periods i n which gold and silver come to dominate-that is, those during which at least a l a rge share of transac­ tions were conducted with pieces of valuable metal being p a ssed fro m hand t o h a n d .

W h y ? The s i n g l e most i mportant factor would appear to be war. B u l l i o n predominates, above a l l , in periods of generalized violence. There ' s a very simple reason for that. Gold and s i lver coins are distin­ guished from credit arrangements by on� spectacular feature: they can be stolen . A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation o f t r u s t . Someone accepting g o l d or silver in exchange f o r merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the q u a lity o f the meta l , and the likelihood that someone else w i l l be w i l l i ng to accept it. In a world where war and the threat of violence are everywhere-and this appears to have been an equally ac­ curate description of Warring States China, Iron Age Greece, and pre­ Mauryan I n d i a-there are obvious advantages to making one's trans­ actions simple. This i s all the more true when dealing with soldiers. O n the one hand, soldiers tend to have access to a great deal of loot, much of which consi sts of gold and si lver, and will always seek a way to trade it for the better thi ngs i n l i fe. O n the other, a heavily armed itinerant soldier i s the very definition of a poor credit risk. The econo­ mists' b a rter scenario might be absurd when applied to transactions between neighbors i n the same small rural commun ity, but when deal­ i ng with a transaction between the resident of such a community and a passing mercenary, i t suddenly begin s to make a great deal o f sense.

For much of h u m an history, then, an ingot of gold o f silver, sta mped or not, h a s served the same role a s the contemporary drug dealer's suitcase ful l of unmarked b i l l s : an obj ect without a history, valuable because one knows it w i l l be accepted in exchange for other goods j ust about anywhere, no questions asked . As a result, while credit systems tend to dominate in periods o f relative social peace, or across networks of trust ( whether created by states or, in most periods, transnatio n a l institutions like merchant guilds or communities of fa ith ) , i n periods cha racterized b y widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious meta l . What's more, while predatory lending

2 1 4 D E B T

goes on in every period of h u m a n hi story, the resulting debt crises ap­ pear to have the most d a m aging effects at times when money i s most easily converti ble into cash .

As a starting point to any attempt to di scern the great rhyth ms that define the current h i storical moment, let me propose the following breakdown of Eurasian h i story according to the alternation between periods of virtual and metal money. The cycle begins with the Age of the F i rst Agra rian Empires (35oo-8oo B e ) , domin ated by virtual credi t money . This i s fol lowed by t h e A x i a l Age (8oo BC-6oo AD ) , w h i c h w i l l be covered in t h e n e x t chapter, and w h i c h saw the rise of coinage a n d a general shift to m e t a l bull ion . The M i d d l e Ages (6oo-1450 A D ) , which saw a return to virtual credit money, w i l l be covered in chapter 10; chapter n will cover the next turn of the cycle, the Age of Capitalist Empires, which began around 1450 with a massive pl anetary switch back to gold and silver b u l l i o n , and which could only really be said to have ended i n 1971, when Rich ard Nixon announced that the U . S . dollar would n o longer be redee m a b l e i n gold. T h i s m a rked t h e begin­ ning of yet another phase of virtual money, one which h a s only j u st begun , and whose ultimate contours are, necessarily, invisible. Chapter 12, the final chapter, will be devoted to applying the i n s ights of hi story to understanding what it might mean and the opportunities it might throw open .

M e s o p o t a m i a

(3 500-800 B C )

We h a v e already h a d occasion to n o t e t h e predomin ance of credit money i n Mesopota m i a , the earliest urban civilization that we know about. I n the great temple and p a l ace complexes, not only did money serve largely as an accounting measure rather than physically changing hands, merchants and tradespeople developed cred it arrangements of their own . Most of these took the physical form of clay tablets, i n ­ scribed w i t h some obligation of future p a y m e n t , that were t h e n sea led inside clay envelopes and marked with the borrowe r ' s seal. The credi­ tor would keep the envelope as a surety, and i t would be broken open on repayment. In some times or pl aces at least, these bullae appear to have become what we would now call negotiable i n struments, since the tablet inside did not simply record a promise to pay the origi n a l lender, but w a s designated "to the bearer"-in o t h e r w o r d s , a tablet recording a debt of five shekels of silver ( a t prevailing rates of i n terest)

C R E D I T V E R S U S B U L L I O N 2 1 5

could c i rcul ate a s the equivalent of a five-shekel promissory note-that i s , as money.5

We don ' t know how often this happened; how m a n y hands such tablets would typically pass through, how many transactions were ba sed on credi t, how often merchants actually did weigh out silver in rough chunks to buy and sell their merchandise, or when they were most likely to do so. No doubt all this varied over time. Promi ssory notes usually circul ated within mercha n t guilds, or between inhab itants of the relatively well-off urban neighborhoods where people knew one another well enough to trust them to be accountable, but not so well that they could rely on one another fo r more traditional forms o f mu­ tual aid.6 We know even less a bout the ma rketp laces frequented by or­ dinary Mesopota m i a n s , except that tavern-keepers operated on credit, and hawkers and operators of ma rket stalls probably did as welJ.7

The origins of interest w i l l forever remain obscure, since they pre­ ceded the invention of writing. The term i n o l ogy for i n terest i n most ancient l anguages i s derived from some word for "offsp ring," causing some to speculate that it originates i n loans of livestock, but this seems a bit literal-minded. More likely, the first widespread i n terest-bearing loans were commerci a l : temples and p a l aces would forward wares to merch a n ts and commercial agents, who would then trade them i n near­ by mountain kingdoms or on trading expeditions oversea s . H

The practice is significant because it implies a fundamental lack of trust. After all, why not simply demand a s h a re i n the profits ? This seems more fa i r ( a merch ant who came back bankrupt would probably have l i ttle means of paying anyway ) , and profit-sharing partnerships of this sort became common practice i n the later Middle East.9 The an swer seems to be that profit-sharing partnerships were typ ically con­ tracted between merchants, or anyway people of s i m i l a r background and experience who had ways of keep ing track of one another. Palace or temple bureaucrats and world-roaming merchant adventurers had little i n common, and the bureaucrats seem to have concl uded that one could not normally expect a merch ant retu rned from a fa r-off land to be entirely honest about h i s adventures . A fixed interest rate would render i rrelevant whatever ela borate tales of robbery, shipwreck, or attacks by winged sn akes or elephants a creative mercha n t might have concocted . The return was fixed i n advance.

This connection between borrowing and lying, incidenta l l y , i s an i mportant one to h i story. Herodotus rema rked about the Pers i a n s : " To tell a lie is considered by them the greatest di sgrace, and next to that to be i n debt . . . especi ally because they think that one i n debt must of necessity tell lies . " 1 0 ( Later, Herodotus reported a story told to him by

2 1 6 D E B T

a Persi a n about the origins of the gold that the Persians had acquired i n India : they stole it from the nests of giant ants . ) 1 1 Jes u s ' s parable of the unforgiving servant makes a j oke out of the matter ( " Ten thousand talents ? N o probl e m . Just give me a l ittle more time " ) , but even here, one can see how such endless falsehoods contributed to a broader sense that a world in which moral relations are conceived as debts i s also, while i n certain ways entertaining, necessarily a world of corruption, guilt, and sin.

By the time of the earliest Sumerian documents, this world may not yet have arrived . Still, the principle of lending at interest, even compound interest, was already fa m i l i a r to everyone. I n 2402 Be, for instance, a royal i nscription by King Enmetena of Lagash-one of the earliest we have--complains that h i s enemy, the King of Umma, had been occupying a huge stretch of farmland that had rightfu l l y belonged to Lagash for decades. He announces : i f one were to calcul ate the rental fees for all that land, then the i n terest that would h ave been due on that rent, compounded annually, i t would reveal that U m m a now owes La gash four and a half trillion l i ters of barley . The s u m was, a s in the parable, intentionally prepostero u s Y It was j ust an excuse to start a war. Still, he wanted everyone to know that he knew exactly how to do the m a t h .

Usury-in t h e s e n s e of interest-bearing consumer l o a n s-wa s also well estab l i shed by En meten a ' s time. The king ulti mately had his war and won it, and two years later, fresh off his victory, he was forced to p u b l i s h another edict: this one, a general debt cancellation within h i s kingdo m . A s he later boasted, " h e instituted freedo m (amargi) i n L a ­ gash . He restored the c h i l d to its mother, and the mother to h e r c h i l d ; he cancelled a l l interest due . " 13 This w a s , in fact, t h e v e r y fi r s t s u c h declaration we h a v e on record-and the fi r s t time i n h istory that t h e w o r d "freed o m " a p p e a r s in a p o l i t i c a l document.

Enmeten a ' s text i s a bit vague on the deta i l s , but a h a l f-century later, when his successor Uruini mgina declared a general a mnesty dur­ ing the New Year's ceremonies of 2350 BC, the terms are all spelled out, and they conform to what was to become typical of such amnesties : cancelling not only a l l outstanding loans, but a l l forms of debt servi­ tude, even those based on fai lure to pay fees or cri m i n a l penalties-the only thing excepted being commercial l o a n s .

S i m i l a r declarations a r e to be found a g a i n and a g a i n , i n Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian record s , and always with the same theme: the restoration of "j ustice and equity , " the protection o f wid­ ows and orphans, to ensure--as Hammurabi was to put i t when he

C R E D I T V E R S U S B U L L I O N 2 1 7

aboli shed debts i n Babylon i n 1761 Bc-"that the strong m ight not op­ press the weak . " 1 4 I n the words of Michael Hudson,

The design ated occasion for clearing Babylonia's financial sl ate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylo­ nian rulers oversaw the ritual of " b reak ing the tablets, " that is, the debt records, resto ring economic balance as part o f the calendrical renewa l of society along with the rest of nature. Hammurabi and his fellow rulers signaled these proclamations by raising a torch, probably symbolizing the sun-god of j ustice Shamash, whose principles were supposed to guide wise and fa i r rulers. Persons held as debt pledges were released to rej oin their fa milies. Other debtors were restored cultivation rights to their customary lands, free of whatever mo rtgage liens had accumul ated . 15

Over the next several thousand years, this s a m e list-cancelling the debts, destroying the record s , rea llocating the land-was to become the standard list of demands of peasant revolution aries everywhere . In Mesopota m i a , rulers appear to have headed off the possibility of unrest by i nstituting such reforms themselves, as a grand gesture of cosmic renewal, a recreation of the social universe-in Babylo n i a , during the same ceremony i n which the king reenacts h i s god Marduk's creation of the physical un iverse. The h i story of debt and sin was wiped out, and it was time to begin aga i n . But i t ' s also clear what they s a w a s t h e alternative: the world plunged i n t o c h a o s , w i t h farmers defect­ ing to swell the ranks of nomadic p a storalists, and ultimately, if the breakdown continued, returning to overrun the cities and destroy the existing economic order entirely .

-

E gypt

( 2 650-7 1 6 BC)

Egypt represents an interesting contrast, s i n c e for most of its hi story, it man aged to avoid the development of interest-bearing debt entirely .

Egypt w a s , l i k e Mesopota m i a , extraordinarily rich by ancient stan­ dards, but it was a l s o a self-contained society, a river running through a desert, a n d fa r more centralized than Mesopota m i a . The pharaoh was a god, and the state and temple bureaucracies had their hands in everyth i n g : there were a dazzling array of taxes and a continual

2 1 8 D E B T

distrib ution of a llotments, wages, and p a yments from the state. Here, too, money clearly arose as a means of account. The basic unit was the deben, or " measure"-originally referring to measures of grain, and l a ter of copper or silver. A few records make clear the catch-as-catch­ can n ature of most transacti o n s :

In the 15th year of Ramses II [c. 1275 BC] a merchant offered the Egyptian lady Erenofre a Syrian slave girl whose price, no doubt after bargai ning, was fixed at 4 deben I kite [about 373 grams] of silver. Erenofre made up a collection of clothes and blankets to the value of 2 deben 2 r/3 kite-the details are set out in the record-and then borrowed a miscellany of obj ects from her neighbors-bronze vessels, a pot of honey, ten shirts, ten deben of copper ingots-till the price was made up . 16

Most merchants were itinerant, either foreigners or commercial agents for the owners of large estates. There ' s not much evidence fo r commercial credit, however; loans in Egypt were still more likely to take the form of mutu a l aid between neighbors . 17

S ubstanti a l , legal l y enforceable loans, the kind that can lead to the loss o f lands or fa mily members, are documented , but they appear to have been rare--and much less pernicio u s , a s the loans did not bear interest. Similarly, we do occa sionally hear of debt-bondservants, and even debt slaves, but these seem to have been unusual phenomena and there' s no suggestion that matters ever reached crisis proportions, as they so regularly did i n Mesopota m i a and the Levan t . 1 8

I n fact, for t h e fi r s t several thousand years, we seem to be i n a somewhat different world, where debt really was a matter of "guilt" and treated l a rgely as a criminal matter:

When a debtor fa iled to repay his debt on time, his creditor could take him to court, where the debtor would be required to pro mise to pay in full by a specific date. As part of his promise-which was under oath-the debtor also pledged to undergo 100 blows and/or repay twice the amount of the origi­ nal loan if he fai led to pay by the date specified . 19

The "and/or" is significant. There w a s no formal distinction be­ tween a fine and a beating. In fact, the entire purpose of the oath (rather l i ke the Cretan custom of having a borrower pretend to snatch the money) seems to have been to create the j ustification for punitive acti o n : so the debtor could be punished a s either a perj urer or a thief.20

C R E D I T V E R S U S B ULL I O N 2 1 9

By the time of the New Kingdom ( rsso-1070) there i s more evi­ dence for m a rkets, but it's only by the time we reach the Iron Age, j ust before Egypt was absorbed into the Persian empire, that we begin to see evidence for Mesopota m i a n-style debt crises . G reek sources, for instance, record that the Pharaoh Bakenranef (reigned 720-715 BC) is­ sued a decree abolishing debt bondage and annulling a l l outstanding l i a b i l ities, since "he fel t i t would be a b surd for a soldier, perhaps at the moment when he w a s setting forth to fight for h i s fatherland, to be h auled off to prison by his creditor fo r an unpaid loan "-which, if true, is also one of the earliest mentions of a debt prison .21 Under the Ptolemies, the G reek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander, periodic clean s lates had become institutionized. It's well known that the Rosetta Stone, w ritten both i n Greek and Egyptian, proved to be the key that made i t possible to translate Egypt i a n h i eroglyphics. Few are aware of what i t actually says. The stela w a s origi n a l l y raised to announce an amnesty, both for debtors and for prisoners, declared by Ptolemy V in r96 sc.ZZ

-

C h i n a

(2200-7 7 1 BC)

We can say a l most nothing about Bronze A g e I n d i a , s i n c e i t s writ­ ing remains indecipherable, and not much more about Early Chin a . W h a t little we d o know-m a i n l y culled from d r i b s a n d drabs in l a ter l i terary sources-suggests that the earliest Chinese states were far less bureaucratic than their western cousins . 23 There being no centralized temple or p a lace system with priests and administrators m a n aging the sto rerooms and recording inputs and outputs, there was also little in­ centive to create a single, uniform unit of account. Instead, the evidence suggests a different path, with social currencies of various sorts still holding sway i n the countryside and being converted to commerc i a l p u rposes i n dealings between strangers.

Later sources rec a l l that early rulers " u sed pearls and j ade as their superior method of p ayment, gold as their middle method of pay­ ment, and knives and spades as their lower method of payment. "24 The author can only be t a l king about gifts here, and h i erarchi c a l ones at that: kings and great magnates rewarding their fol lowers for services i n theory rendered voluntaril y . In most places, long strings of cowrie shells figure prominently, but even here, though we often hear of "the cowrie money of early C h i n a , " and i t ' s easy enough to find texts i n

2 2 0 D E B T

which the value of sumptuous gifts are measured in cowries , i t ' s never clear whether people were really carrying them around to buy and sell things i n the m a rketplace.25

The most likely interpretation is that they were carrying the shells, but for a long time marketplaces themselves were of minor significance, so this use was not nearly as important as the usual uses fo r social currencies : ma rriage presents, fines, fees , and tokens of honor .26 At any rate, all sources insist that there was a wide variety of currencies i n cir­ culation. As David Scheidel, one of the premier contemporary scholars of early money, notes:

In pre-imperial C h i n a , money took the form of cowrie shel l s , b o t h origi n a l s and-i ncreasingly-bronze i m itation s , tor­ toise shells, weighed gold and ( rarely) silver bars, and most notab ly-from at least r o o o BC onward-uten s i l money i n the shape of spade blades and knives made o f bronzeY

These were most often used between people who d i d n ' t know each other very well. For tabulating debts between neighbors, with local vendors, or with anything having to do with the government, people appear to have emp loyed a va riety of credit i n struments : later Chi­ nese historians c l a i med that the earliest of these were knotted strings, rather like the Inca khipu system, and then later, notched strips of wood or b a m boo .28 As i n Mesopota m i a , these appear to have long predated writing.

We don't really know when the practice of lending at i n terest first reached China either, or whether Bronze Age China came to see the same sorts of debt crises as occurred in Mesopota m i a , but there are tantalizing hints i n later docu ments .29 For instance, later Chinese legends about the origin of coinage ascri bed the invention to emper­ ors trying to relieve the effects of natural disa sters. O n e early Han text report s :

I n ancient t i m e s , during t h e floods of Yu a n d t h e droughts o f Tang, t h e common people became so exha usted t h a t they were forced to borrow fro m one another in order to obtain food and clothing. [ E mperor] Yu coined money fo r h i s people fro m the gold of Mount Li and [Emperor] Tang d i d likewise from the copper of Mount Y a n . Therefore the world called them benevolent.10

C R E D I T V E R S U S B U L L I O N 2 2 1

Other versions are a l ittle more explicit. The Guanzi, a collection that i n early imperial China became the standard primer on political economy, notes " There were people who lacked even gruel to eat, and who were forced to sell their chi ldren . To rescue these people, Tang coined money . " 3 1

The s t o r y i s c l e a r l y fancifu l ( the real o r i g i n s of coined m o n e y were at least a thousand years later) , and i t i s very hard to know what to make of i t . Could this reflect a memory of children being taken away as debt sureties ? O n the face of it, it seems more like starving people sell­ ing their children outright-a practice that was l ater to become com­ monplace i n certain periods of Chinese h i story.32 B u t the j uxtaposition of l o a n s and the sale of children i s suggestive, especially considering what was h appening on the other side of A s i a at exactly the same time. The Guanzi later goes on to explain that these same rulers instituted the custom of reta ining 3 0 percent of the h a rvest i n public granaries for redistribution in e mergencies, so as to ensure that this would never happen aga i n . I n other words, they began to set up j u st the kind of bureaucratic storage fac i l i ties that, i n places like Egypt and Mesopota­ mia, had been responsible for creating money as a unit of account to begin with.

C h a p t e r N i n e

T H E AX I A L A G E

(8 0 0 B C - 6 0 0 AD)

Let us designate this p e riod as the

"axial age . " Extrao rdinary events are

cro wded into this p e riod. I n China lived

Co nfucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in

Chinese philosophy arose . . . In India

it was the age of the Upa n ishads and of

Buddha; as in China, all p h ilosophical

trends, including skep ticism and ma­

terialis m , soph istry and nihilis m, were

developed.

-Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom

T H E P H R A S E " T H E A X I A L A G E" was coi ned by the German existen­ tialist philosopher Karl Jaspers . 1 In the course of writing a h istory of philosophy, Jaspers became fa scinated by the fact that figures like Py­ thagoras (570-495 Be) , the Buddha (563-483 Be) , and Confucius (551-479 BC) , were a l l alive at exactly the same time, and that Greece, India, and China, i n that period, a l l saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schoo l s , each group apparently, un aware of the others' existence. Like the si multaneous i nvention of coinage, why this happened had always been a puzzle. Jaspers wasn ' t enti rely sure h i m self. To some extent, he suggested, it must have been an effect of similar h i s torical conditions . For most of the great urban civilizations of the time, the early Iron Age was a kind of pause between empires, a time when political l a ndscapes were broken into a checkerboard of often d i m i n utive k i ngdoms and city-states, most often a t constant w a r externally and locked i n c o n s t a n t p o l i t i c a l d e b a t e with i n . E a c h c a s e witnessed the development of something akin to a drop-out culture,

2 2 4 D E B T

with ascetics and sages fleeing to the wilderness or wandering fro m t o w n to t o w n seeking w i s d o m ; i n e a c h , t o o , they were eventually reab­ sorbed into the political order as a new kind o f intellectual or spiritual elite, whether a s Greek sophists, Jewish prophets, Chinese sages, or Indian holy men .

Whatever the reas o n s , the result, Jaspers argued , was the first pe­ riod i n h i story i n which human beings applied principles of reasoned inquiry to the great questions of human existence. He o bserved that a l l these great regions of t h e world , C h i n a , I n d i a , and t h e Mediterranean , s a w t h e emergence o f remarkably parallel p h i losophical tren d s , from skepticism to idealism-in fact, almost the entire range of positions about the nature of the cosmos, m i n d , acti o n , and the ends of h u m a n existence that have rem ained the stuff of p h i l o s o p h y to this d a y . As one of Jaspers' disciples later put i t-overstating only s lightly- " n o really new ideas have been added since that ti m e . "1

For Jaspers, the period begins with the Persian prophet Zoroaster, around 8oo Be, and ends around 200 Be, to be fol l owed by a Spiritual Age that centers on figures like Jesus and Mohammed. For my own purposes, I find it more useful to combine the two . Let us define the Axial Age, then , as running fro m 8oo BC to 6oo AD . 3 This makes the Axial Age the period that saw the birth not only of all the world ' s m a j o r p h i losophical tendencies , but a l s o , a l l of tod a y ' s m a j o r world religi o n s : Zoroastri a n i s m , Prophetic Juda i s m , Buddhi s m , J a i n i s m , Hin­ d u i s m , Confuc i a n i s m , T a o i s m , Christianity, and I s l a m . 4

The attentive reader may h a v e noticed t h a t the c o r e period o f Jasper's A x i a l age--the l i fetimes of Pythagoras, Confuci u s , and the Buddha-corresponds almost exactly to the period i n which coinage was invented . What's more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived; i n fact, they became the epicenters of Axial Age religious and philosophical creativity: the kingdoms and city-states around the Yell ow River i n China, the Ganges valley i n northern I n d i a , and the shores of the Aegean Sea .

What was the connecti o n ? We might start by asking: What is a coin ? The normal definition is that a coin is a piece of valuable meta l , shaped i n t o a standard i zed unit, w i t h s o m e e m b l e m or mark i n scribed to authenticate it. The worl d ' s first coins appear to have been cre­ ated within the kingdom of Lydi a , i n western Anatolia ( n ow Turkey) , sometime a round 6oo sc.5 These first Lyd i a n coins were basically j ust round l u m p s of electru m-a gold -si lver alloy that occurred naturally in the nearby Pacto l u s River-that had been heated, then h a m mered with some kind of insign i a . The very first, stamped only with a few letters,

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 2 5

appear to have been manufactured by ordinary j ewelers, but these dis­ appea red almost i n stantly, replaced by coins m a n u factured i n a newly establi shed roya l m i n t . G reek cities on the Anato l i a n coast soon began to strike their own coins, and they came to be adopted i n G reece itself; the same thing occu rred in the Persian Empire after it a b sorbed Lyd ia i n 547 BC.

I n both India and C h i n a , we can o b serve the same pattern : invent­ ed by private citizen s , coin age was quickly monopol ized by the state. The first Indian money, which seems to have appeared a t some point i n the sixth century, consi sted of bars of s i lver trim med down to uni­ form weights, then punch-marked with some kind of o ffici al sy m b o l . 6 Most of the e x a m p l e s discovered by archaeologists c o n t a i n numerous additional counter-punches, presumably added much in the way that a check or other credit i n strument is endo rsed before being transferred . This strongly suggests that they were being handled by people used to dealing with more abstract credit instruments.7 Much early Chinese coin age also shows signs of having evolved di rectly from social curren­ cies: some were i n fact cast bronze i n the shape of cowries, though oth­ ers took the shape of d i m i n utive knives, disks, or spades. I n every case, local governments quickly stepped in-presumably within the space of about a generation . R However, since in each of the three areas there was a plethora of tiny states, this meant that each ended up with a wide variety of different currency syste m s . For example, around 700 Be, northern I n d i a was still divided into J a n apadas or "tribal territories , " some of them monarchies a n d some republics, a n d in t h e sixth century there were still at least sixteen m a j o r ki ngd o m s . In C h i n a , this was the period where the old Zhou Empire first devolved i n to vying principa li­ ties (the " S p ring and Autu m n " period , 722-481 Be ) , then spli ntered into the chaos of the " W a rring State s " (475-221 sc . ) Like the G reek city­ states, a l l of the resulting kingd o m s , no m a tter how d i m i n u tive, a s p i red to issue their own official currency.

Recent scholarship has shed a great deal of light on how this must have happened . Gold, silver, and bron ze--the materi a l s from which coins were made--h ad long been the media of international trade; but until that time, only the rich had actually had much in their posses s i o n . A typical Sumerian fa rmer may w e l l have n e v e r had o c c a s i o n to hold a substantial p i ece of s i l ver in h i s hand, except perhaps at h i s wedding. Most precious metals took the fo rm of wealthy women ' s anklets and heirloom chal ices presen ted by kings to their reta iners, or it was simply stockpiled i n temples, in ingot fo rm, as sureties for l o a n s . Somehow, during the Axial Age, all this began to change. Large amounts of silver, gold, and copper were dethesaurized, as the economic historians like

2 2 6 D E B T

to s a y ; it was removed from the temples and houses of the rich and p laced i n the h ands of ordinary people, w a s broken into tinier pieces, and began to be used i n everyda y transacti o n s .

H o w ? I s r a e l i C l a s s i c i s t D a v i d S c h a p s provides t h e most p l a u s i b l e suggestion: most of it w a s s t o l e n . This was a period of general ized w a r ­ fare, and it i s i n t h e n a t u r e of war that precious t h i n g s a r e p l undered .

Soldiers who plunder may indeed go first for the women, the alcoholic drinks, or the food, but they will also be looking around for things of value that are easily porta ble. A long-term standing army will tend to accumulate many things that are valuable and portable-and the most valuable and portable items are precious metals and precious stones . It may well have been the protracted wars among the states of these areas that first produced a large population of people with precious metal in their possession and a need for everyday necessities . . .

Where there are people who want to buy there will be peo­ ple willing to sell, as innumerable tracts on black markets, drug dealing, and prostituti on point out . . . The constant warfare of the archaic age of Greece, of the Janapadas of In­ dia, of the Warring States of China, was a powerful i mpetus for the development of market trade, and in particular for market trade based on the exchange of precious metal, usually in small amounts . If plunder brought precious metal into the hands of the soldiers, the market will have spread it through the populati o n . 9

N o w , one m i g h t obj ect: but s u r e l y , war and p l under w e r e noth­ ing new . The Homeric epics, for i n stance, show a well-nigh obsessive interest i n the division of the spoi l s . True, but what the Axial Age also saw-again, equally i n China, India, and the Aegean-was the rise of a new kind of army, made up not of aristocratic wa rriors and their retainers, but trained profess i o n a l s . The period when the Greeks began to use coinage, for instance, was also the period when they developed their famous p h a l a nx tactics, which required constant drill and training of the hoplite soldiers . The resu lts were so extraordinarily effective that Greek mercenaries were soon being sought after from Egypt to Crimea. But unlike the Homeric retainers, who could simply be ignored, an army of trained mercenaries needs to be rewarded in some meaningful way. One could perhaps provide them all with livestock, but l i vestock are hard to transport; or with promi ssory notes, but these would be

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 2 7

worthless i n the mercenaries ' own country. A llowing each a tiny share of the plunder does seem an obvious solution.

These new armies were, d i rectly or indirectly, under the control of governments, and i t took governments to turn these chunks of metal into genuine currenc y . The m a i n reason for this i s simply scale: to cre­ ate enough coins that the people could begin to use them i n everyday transactions requ ired mass production on a scale far beyond the a b i l i ­ t i e s of local merchants or s m i th s . 10 O f c o u r s e we have already s e e n w h y governments might h a v e incentive to do s o : the existence of m a rkets was highly convenient for governments, and not j ust because i t m ade it so much easier for them to provision l a rge standing armies. By i n sist­ ing that only their own coins were acceptable as fees, fines, or taxes, governments were able to overwhelm the innumerable social currencies that already existed i n their h i nterlands, and to esta b l i s h something like uniform national m a rkets .

Actually, one theory is that the very first Lyd i a n coins were in­ vented explicitly to pay mercenariesY T h i s might help exp l a i n why the Greeks, who supplied most of the mercenaries, so quickly became accustomed to the use of coins, and why the use of coinage spread so quickly across the Hellenic world, so that by 480 BC there were at least one hundred mints operating i n different G reek cities, even though at that time, none of the great trading nations of the Mediterranean had as yet showed the s lightest i n terest i n them. The Phoenicians, for exam­ ple, were considered the greatest merchants and bankers o f antiquity . 12

They were also great inventors, having been the first to develop both the a l p h a bet and the abacus. Yet for centuries after the invention of coinage, they preferred to continue conducting business a s they always had, with unwrought ingots and promissory note s . 1 3 Phoenician cities struck no coins until 3 65 Be, and while Carthage, the great Phoenician colony i n North Africa that came to dominate commerce i n the West­ ern Mediterranean, did so a bit earlier, i t was only when " forced to do so to pay Sicilian mercen aries; and its issues were m a rked i n Punic, ' for the people of the camp . "' 14

On the other hand, in the extraordinary v i o lence of the A x i a l Age, being a "great trading nation" (rather than, say, a n aggressive m i l itary power like Persi a , Athens, or Rome) was not, u l t i m ately, a winning proposition . The fate of the Phoenician cities i s i n structive. Sidon, the wealthiest, w a s destroyed by the Persian emperor Artaxerxes I I I after a revolt in 351 BC. Forty thousand of its i n h a bitants are said to have committed mass suicide rather than surrender. N ineteen years later, Tyre w a s destroyed after a prolonged siege by Alexander: ten thousand died i n battle, and the thirty thousand survivors were sold into s lavery .

2 2 8 D E B T

Ca rthage la sted longer, but when Roman armies finally destroyed the city i n 146 BC, hundreds of thousands of Ca rthagi n i a n s were said to have been raped and sla ughtered , and fifty thousand captives put on the auction block, a fter which the city itself was razed and its fields sowed with s a l t .

All this may bring home something of the l e v e l of violence a m i d s t which Axial A g e thought developed . 15 But it a l s o leaves us asking: What exactly was the ongoing relation among coin age, m i l i ta ry power, and this unp recedented outpouring of idea s ?

T h e M e d i t e r ra n e a n

Here again o u r best i n fo rmation i s from the Mediterranean world, and I have a l ready provided some of its outlines. Comparing Athens­ with its fa r-flung naval empi re-and Rome, we can i m mediately detect striking s i m i l a rities. I n each city, h i story begi ns with a series of debt crises. I n Athens, the first c r i s i s , the one that c u l m i n ated i n Solon ' s reforms of 5 9 4 Be, w a s so early that coinage could h a rdly have been a facto r . In Rome, too, the earliest crises seem to have proceeded the advent of currency . Rather, in each case, coinage became a solutio n . In brief, o n e might s a y that these conflicts over debt h a d t w o possible outco m e s . The first was that the ari stocrats could w i n , and the poor re m a i n " slaves of the rich "-which i n practice meant that most people would end up clients of some wealthy patron . Such states were gener­ ally mi litarily ineffective . 1 6 The second was that popular factions could prev a i l , i n stitute the usual popular program of redi stribution of lands and safeguards against debt peonage, thus creating the basis fo r a class of free fa rmers whose children would, i n turn, be free to spend much of their time training fo r w a r . 17

Coin age played a critical role in m a i n t a i n i ng this kind of free peasantry-secure in thei r landholding, not tied to any great lord by bonds of debt. In fact, the fiscal policies of many Greek cities amounted to little more than ela borate systems for the distribution of loot. It's important to emphasize that few ancient cities, if any, went so fa r as to outlaw predatory lending, or even debt peonage, entirel y . In stead, they threw money at the problem. Gold, and especially si lver, were ac­ q u i red i n war, or mined by slaves captured i n war. Mints were located in temples (the traditi o n a l place for depositing spo i l s ) , and city-states developed endless ways to di stribute coi n s , not only to soldiers, s a i l ­ ors, and t h o s e producing a r m s or outfitting ships, but to the populace

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 2 9

general l y , as j ury fees, fees for attending public assemblies, or some­ times j ust a s outright distributions, a s Athens did most famously when they d iscovered a new vein of si lver i n the mines a t Laurium i n 483 BC. At the same time, i n s i sting that the same coins served as legal tender for all payments due to the state guaranteed that they would be i n suf­ ficient demand that m arkets would soon devel o p .

Many of t h e p o l i t i c a l c r i s e s in a n c i e n t G reek c i t i e s s i m i larly turned on the distribution of the spo i l s . Here i s another incident recorded in Aristotle, who provides a conservative take on the origins of a coup in the city of Rhodes around 39I BC ( " demagogues" here refers to the leaders o f the democracy ) :

The demagogues needed money to pay the people for attend­ ing the assembly and serving on j uries; for if the people did not attend, the demagogues would lose their influence . They rai sed at least some of the money they needed by preventing the disbursement of the money due the trireme [warship] com­ m anders under their contracts with the city to build and fit triremes for the Rhodian navy. Since the trireme commanders were not paid, they were unable in turn to pay their suppliers and workers , who sued the trireme commanders . To escape these lawsuits the trireme commanders banded together and overthrew the democracy . 18

It w a s s l avery, though, that made all this possible. As the figures concerning Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage suggest, enormous numbers of people were being enslaved in many of these conflicts, and, of course, many s l aves ended up working in the mines, producing even more gold, silver, and copper. (The mines i n Laurium reportedly employed ten to twenty thousand of them . ) 1 9

Geoffrey Ingham c a l l s the resulting system a " mi litary-coinage complex "-though I think it would be more accurate to c a l l it a " m i l i tary-coinage-slavery complex. "20 Anyway, that describes rather nicely how it worked i n practice. When Alexander set out to conquer the Persi a n Empire, he borrowed much of the money with which to pay and provision his troops , and he minted his first coins, used to pay his creditors and continue to support the money, by melting down gold and si lver p l undered after h i s i n i t i a l victoriesY However, an expeditionary force needed to be paid, and paid wel l : Alexander' s army, which num­ bered some no,ooo men , required h a l f a ton o f silver a day j ust for wage s . For this reason, conquest meant that the existing Persi an system of mines and mints had to be reorganized around providing for the

2 3 0 D E B T

invading army; and ancient m i n e s , of course, were worked by slaves. I n t u r n , m o s t s l aves i n mines were w a r captives . Presumably m o s t of the unfortunate survivors of the siege of Tyre ended up working i n such mines. O n e can see how this process might feed upon itself.22

Alexander was also the man responsible for destroying what re­ m a ined o f the ancient credit systems, since not only the Phoen i c i a n s but a l so the old Mesopota m i a n h e a r t l a n d had resi sted the new coin econ omy. H i s armies not o n l y destroyed Tyre; they also dethesaurized the gold and s i lver reserves of Babylonian and Persian temples, the security on which their cred it systems were based, and i n s i sted that a l l taxes to h i s new govern ment be paid i n his own money. The result was to " release the accu mulated specie of century onto the m a rket i n a matter of month s , " something like 1 8 o ,ooo talents, or in contemporary term s , an estim ated $285 billion .23

The Hellenistic successor k i ngdoms established by Alexa nder' s gen­ eral s , fro m G reece to India, employed mercen aries rather than national armies, but the story of Rome i s , aga i n , s i m i l a r to that of Athen s . Its early history, as recorded by official chroniclers like Livy, i s one of continual struggles between patricians and plebians, and of conti n u a l c r i s e s o v e r d e b t . Peri odically, t h e s e w o u l d l e a d to what w e r e cal led m o ­ m e n t s of "the secession of the plebs , " w h e n the commoners of t h e city abandoned their fields and workshops, ca mped outside the city, and threatened m a s s defection-a n i n teresti�g halfway point between the popular revolts of G reece and the strategy of exodus typically pursued in Egypt and Mesopota m i a . Here, too, the patricians were ultimately faced with a decis i o n : they could use agricultural loans to gradually turn the plebian population i n to a class of bonded l a borers on their estates, or they could accede to popular demands for debt protectio n , preserve a free peasantry, a n d employ t h e younger s o n s of free fa rm fa m i l i e s as soldiers .24 As the prolonged h i story of crises, secessi o n s , and reforms m a k e s c l e a r , t h e c h o i c e was m a d e grudgingly .25 The p l e b s practically had to force the senatorial class to t a k e the i m p e r i a l opti o n . S t i l l , t h e y did, and o v e r t i m e t h e y gradua l l y presided o v e r the esta b l i s h ­ ment of a welfare s y s t e m that recycled at least a share of the spoils t o s o l d i e r s , vetera n s , and t h e i r fa m i l i e s .

It s e e m s s i g n i fi c a n t , i n this l i g h t , that the traditional d a te of t h e fi r s t Roman coin age-3 3 8 Be-i s almost exactly the d a t e when d e b t bondage was finally outlawed (326 BC) .26 Aga i n , coin age, m i nted fro m war s p o i l s , d i d n ' t c a u s e t h e cri s i s . It was u s e d as a soluti o n .

I n fact, t h e entire R o m a n empire, at its height, could be understood as a vast machine for the extraction of precious metals and their coin­ ing and distribution to the m i l i tary-combined with taxation policies

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 3 1

designed to encou rage conquered populations to adopt coins i n their everyday transactio n s . Even s o , fo r most of its hi story, use of coins was heavily concentrated in two regi o n s : i n Italy and a few m a j o r cities, and on the frontiers, where the legions were actually stationed . I n areas where there were neither mines nor m i l i tary operati o n s , older cred i t systems presumably contin ued to operate.

I will add one final note here. I n G reece a s i n Rome, attempts to solve the debt crisis through m i l itary expansion were always, ultim ate­ ly, j ust ways of fending off the problem-and they only worked for a l i m ited period of time. When expansion stopped, everything returned to as i t had been before. Actu a l l y , it's not clear that all forms of debt bondage were ever entirely e l i m i n ated even i n cities like Athens and Rome. In cities that were not successful mil itary powers, without any source of income to set up welfare policies, debt crises continued to flare up every century or so-a nd they often became far more acute than they ever had in the Middle East, because there was no mecha­ nism, short of outright revo lution, to decl are a Mesopota m i a n - style clean slate. Large populations, even in the G reek world, did, i n fact, sink to the rank of serfs and clients .27

Athen i a n s , a s we've seen , seemed to assume that a gentleman nor­ m a l ly lived a step or two ahead of h i s creditors. Roman politicians were little different. O f course much of the debt was money that mem­ bers of the senatori a l class owed to each other : i n a way, i t ' s j ust the usual communism of the rich, extending credit to one another on easy terms that they would never think to offer others . Still, under the late Republic, h i story records m a n y i ntrigues and conspiracies hatched by desperate debtor s , often aristocrats driven by relentless cred itors to make common cause with the poor.28 If we hear less about this sort of thing happening under the emperors, i t ' s probably because there were fewer opportun ities for protest; what evidence we have suggests that if anything, the problem got much worse.29 Around 100 AD, Plutarch wrote about his own country as if it were under foreign invasio n :

And a s King D a rius sent t o the city o f Athens his lieutenants Datis and Artaphernes with chains and cords, to bind the pris­ oners they should take; so these usurers, bringing into G reece boxes full of schedules, bills, and obl igatory contracts, as so many irons and fetters for the shackling of poor criminals . . .

For at the very delivery of their money, they immediately ask it back, taking it up at the same moment they lay it down; and they let out that again to interest which they take for the use of what they have before lent.

2 3 2 D E B T

So that they laugh at those natural philosophers who hold that nothing can be made of nothing and of that which has no existence; but with them usury is made and engendered of that which neither is nor ever was .30

The works of the early Christian fathers likewise resound with endless descriptions of the mi sery and desperation of those caught i n r i c h lenders' webs. In the e n d , through this m e a n s , that s m a l l win­ dow of freedom that had been created by the plebs was completely undone, and the free peasantry largely eliminated. By the end of the empire, most people i n the c ountryside who weren ' t outright slaves had become, effectively, debt peons to some rich landlord; a situation i n the end legal l y form a l ized by i mperi a l decrees binding peasants to the land.31 Without a free peasantry to form the b a s i s for the army, the state was forced t o rely more and more on arming and employing Germanic barbarians from across the imperial frontiers-with results I need hardly relate.

-

I n d i a

In most ways, India, could not be more different as a civilization than the ancient Mediterranean-but to a rem arkable degree, the same basic pattern repeats itself there as wel l .

T h e Bronze Age civilization of t h e Indus Valley c o l l apsed sometime around 16oo BC; it would be about a thousand years before India saw the emergence o f another urban civilizati o n . When i t did, that civi l i ­ z a t i o n was centered on t h e fertile plains that surrounded the Ganges farther east. Here too we observe, a t first, a checkerboard o f different sorts o f government, fro m the fa m o u s " K satriya republics" with a pop­ ulace i n arms and urban democratic assemblies, t o elective m o narchies, to centralized empires like Kosala and Magadha.32 Both Gautama (the future Buddh a ) , and Mahavira (the founder o f J a i n i s m ) were born i n o n e of the republics, though b o t h ultim ately found themselves teaching within the great empires, whose rulers often became patrons o f wan­ dering ascetics and phi losophers.

Both kingdoms and republics produced their own silver and cop­ per coinage, but i n some ways the republics were more traditio n a l , s i n c e the self-governing "popul ace i n arms" consisted of t h e traditional Ksatriya or warrior caste, who typically held their lands in common and had them worked by serfs o r s l a ves.33 The kingdom s , on the other hand, were founded on a fundamentally new institution : a trained,

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 3 3

professional army, open to young men of a wide va riety of back­ grounds, their equipment supplied by central authorities (soldiers were obl iged to check their arms and armor when they entered cities ) , and provided with generous salaries.

Whatever their origi ns, here too, coins and markets sprung up above a l l to feed the machinery of w a r . Magadha, which ultimately came out on top, d i d so la rgely because it controlled most of the mines. K a u t i l y a ' s A rthasastra, a political treatise wri tten by one of the chief mini sters for the Mauryan dynasty that succeeded it (3 21-185 Be) , stated the matter precisely: " The trea sury is based upon mining, the army upon the trea sury; he who has army and treasury may conquer the whole wide earth . " 34 The government drew its personnel first of a l l from a landed c l a s s , which provided trained admini strators, but even more, fu ll-time soldiers: the s a l a ries of each rank of soldier and admini strator were ca refully stipulated . These armies could be huge. G reek sources report that Magadha could put to the field a fo rce of 2oo ,ooo infantry, 2o,ooo horses, and about 4,000 elephants-a nd that Alexander's men mutin ied rather than have to face them . Whether on campaign or in garrison, they were inevitably accompanied by a range of different sorts of camp fol lowers-petty traders, prostitutes, and hired servants-w h i c h , with the soldiers, seems to have been the very medium through which a cash economy had originally taken fo rm .35 By Kauti lya ' s time, a few hund red years later, the state was inserting itself into every a spect of the proces s : Kautilya suggests paying sol­ diers appa rently generous wages, then secretly rep lacing ha wkers with govern ment agents who could charge them twice the normal rates fo r supplies, as well as orga nizing prostitutes under a m i n i stry in which they could be trained as spies, so as to make deta iled reports on their clients' loyalties.

Thus w a s the ma rket economy, born of w a r , grad ually taken over by the government. Rather than stifle the spread of currency, the pro­ cess seems to have doubled and even tripled i t : the mil itary logic was extended to the entire economy, the government systematically setting up its granaries, workshops, trading houses, w a rehouses, and j a ils, staffed by s a l a ried offici a l s , and all selling products on the market so as to collect the pieces of silver paid off to soldiers and officials a n d put them back into the royal treasuries aga i n . 16 The result w a s a moneta­ rization of d a i ly life unlike anything India w a s to see fo r another two thousand years . 37

Something s i m i l a r seems to have ha ppened with slavery, which was quite commonplace at the time of the rise of the great armies-again, unlike a l most any other point in Indian h i s to ry-but was gradually

2 3 4 D E B T

brought under government control . 38 By Kautilya's time, most war cap­ tives were not sold in m a rketp l aces but relocated to government vil­ l ages on newly recl a i med land. They were not a l l owed to leave, and these government v i l l ages were, at least according to the regulations, remarkably dreary places: veritable work camps, with a l l forms of festive entertai n ment officia l l y prohi b i ted. Slave hirelings were mostly convicts, rented by the state during their ter m s .

With t h e i r armies, spies, and a d m i n i stration controlling everything, the new Indian kings evinced l i ttle i nterest i n the old priestly caste and its Vedic ritual, though many kept up a lively i nterest in the new philosophical and religious ideas that seem to have been cropping up everywhere at the time. As time went on, however, the war machine began to sputter. I t ' s not clear exactly why this h appened . By the time of emperor Asoka ( 273-23 2 be) , the Mauryan dynasty controlled a lmost a l l of present-day India and Pakistan, but the Indian vers ion of the m i litary-coinage-sl avery complex was showing definite signs of strain. Perhaps the clearest sign was the deba sement of the coinage, which over the course of two centuries or so had gone from a l m ost pure s i lver to about fifty percent copper .39

A s o k a , famously, began his reign in conquest: in 265 be, destroying the Kalingas, one of the last remaining Indian repub l i c s , in a war in which h undreds of thousands of h u m a n beings were, according to his own account, k i lled or carried off i n to slavery. Asoka later clai med to have been so d isturbed and h aunted by the carn age that he renounced war a l together, embraced Buddh i s m , and declared that fro m that time on, his k i ngdom would be governed by principles of ahimsa, or non­ v i o lence. " Here i n my kingdo m , " he declared i n an edict inscribed on one of the great granite p i l l a rs i n his capital of Patna, which so dazzled the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, "no living being must be k i l led or sacrificed . "40 Such a statement obviously can't be taken l i teral l y : Asoka might have repl a ced sacrificial ritual with vegetarian feasts, but he didn't abolish the army, a b andon capital p u n i s h ment, or even outlaw s lavery . But his rule marked a revolutionary shift in eth o s . Aggressive war w a s abandoned, and much of the army does seems to have been demobilized, along with the network of spies and state bureaucrats, with the new, proliferating mendicant orders (Buddhists, Jains, and a l s o world-renouncing Hi-ndus) given official state support to preach to the v i l lages on questions of social morality. Asoka and his successors d iverted substantial resources to these religious orders , with the result that, over the next centuries, thousands of stupas and monasteries were built across the subcontinent.41

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 3 5

A s o k a ' s reforms are usefu l to contemplate here because they help reveal j ust how m istaken some of our basic assumptions are : par­ ticularly, that money equa l s coins, and that more coins i n circulation means more com merce and a greater role for private merchants . In reality, the Magadha state p ro moted m a rkets but had been suspicious of private merchants, seeing them largely a s competitors .42 Merchants had been among the earliest and most ardent supporters of the new religions (Jains, owing to their rigorous enforcement of rules against harm to any living creature, were obliged to become, effectively, a mercantile caste) . Mercantile i n terests fully supported A s o k a ' s refo r m s . Y e t the r e s u l t w a s not an increase i n t h e use of cash in everyday a ffairs but exactly the opposite.

Early Buddhist economic attitudes have long been considered a bit mysterious. On the one hand, monks could not own property as indivi d u a l s ; they were expected to live an a ustere communistic l i fe with l ittle more than a robe and begging bowl as personal possessions, and they were strictly forbidden to so much as touch anything made of gold or s i lver. O n the other hand, however suspicious of precious meta l s , Buddhism had always had a l i beral attitude toward credit ar­ rangements . It i s one of the few of the great world religions that has never formally condemned usury.43 Taken in the context of the times, however, there ' s nothing particularly mysteri ous about any of this. It makes perfect sense for a religious movement th at rej ected violence and militarism, but that was i n no way opposed to com merce .44 A s we shall see, while A s o k a ' s own empire was not long to endure, soon to be rep laced by a succession of ever weaker and mostly s m a ller states, Buddh i s m took root. The decline of the great armies eventua l l y led to the near-disappearance of coin age, but also to a veritable efflorescence of increa singly sophi sticated forms of credit.

-

C h i n a

Until about 475 BC, northern China was still nominally an empire, but the emperors h a d devolved i n to figureheads and a, series of de facto kingdoms had emerged . The period from 475 to 221 BC is referred as the " Warring States period " ; at that point, even the pretense of unity was cast aside. Ulti mately, the country w a s reunited by the state of Q i n , who established a dyna sty that w a s then i m mediately overthrown by a series of massive popular insurrections, u s hering i n the Han dy­ nasty (2o6 sc-220 AD ) , founded by a previously obscure rural constable

2 3 6 D E B T

and peasant leader named Liu Bao, who w a s the first Chinese leader to adopt the Confucian ideology, exam system, and pattern of civil admini stration that were to continue for almost two thousand years.

Sti l l , the golden age of Chi nese philosophy w a s the period of chaos that preceded u n i fication, and this fo llowed the typ ical Axial Age pat­ tern : the same fractured political l a n d scape, the same rise of trained, professional armies and the creation of coined money la rgely in order to pay them .45 We also see the same government policies designed to encourage the development of markets, chattel slavery on a scale not seen before or since in Chinese hi story, the appearance of itinerant p h i losophers and religious visionaries, battling intellectual schoo l s , and eventu a l l y , attempts by political leaders to transform the new philoso­ phies into religions of state .46

There were a l s o significant differences, starting with the currency system . China never minted gold or silver c o i n s . Merchants used pre­ cious meta l s in the fo rm of b u l l i o n , but the coins in actual circulation were basically s m a l l change: cast bronze disks, usually with a hole in the middle so that they could be strung together. Such strings of " c a s h " w e r e produced in extraord i n a ry n u m b e r s , and v e r y la rge amounts h a d to be assem bled fo r l a rge-scale transacti o n s : w h e n wealthy m e n w i s hed to make donations to temples, for i n stance, they had to use oxca rts to carry the money. The most p l a u s i b l e explanation is that, especially a fter uni fication, Chinese armies were enormo us-some Warring States armies n u m bered up to a m i l l ion-but not nearly a s professional or well p a i d as those of kingdoms fa rther west, and fro m Q i n and Han times o n , rulers were ca reful to ensure that this remained the case, to make sure the army never became an independent power base.47

There w a s a l s o a notable difference in that the new religious and p h i losophical movements in China were from their very beginnings also social movements . El sewhere, they only grad u a l l y became s o . I n ancient G reece, philo sophy began with cosmological specu lation; philosophers were more likely to be individual sages, perhaps surrounded by a few ardent disciples, as founders of movements .48 Under the Roman empire, schools of philosophy like the Stoics, Epicurea n s , Neo-Platonists d i d b e c o m e movements of a sort: at least in t h e s e n s e that t h e y h a d thou­ sands of educated adherents, who " p racticed " philosophy not only by reading, writing, and debating, but even more by meditation, diet, and exerci s e . S t i l l , p h i losophical movements were basically confined to the civic elite; it was only with the rise of Christianity and other religious movements that phi losophy moved beyond i t . 49 One can o bserve a s i m i l a r evolution in I n d i a , fro m individual Brahman world-renouncers, fo rest sages, and wandering mendicants with theories about the nature

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 3 7

of the soul or the composition of the material universe; to p h i l o soph­ ical movements of the Buddhists, Jains, Ajrvika , and others mostly long forgotten ; to, finally, mass religious movements with thousands of monks, shrines, school s , and networks of l a y supporters.

I n China, while many of the founders of the " hundred school s " of philosophy that blossomed under the Warring States were w andering sages who spent their days moving fro m city to city trying to catch the ears of princes, others were leaders of social movements from the very start. Some of these movements didn't even have leaders, like the School of the T i llers, an anarchist movement of peasant intellectua l s w h o s e t out to create egalitarian communities in t h e cracks and fissures between state s . 50 The Mohists, egalitarian ratio n a l i sts whose social base seems to have been urban arti s a n s , not only were philosophically opposed to w a r and m i l itarism, but organized battalions of m i litary en­ gineers who would actively discourage conflicts by volunteering to fight in any war against the side of the aggressor. Even the Confucians, for all the importance they attached to courtly ritu a l , were i n their early days mainly known for their efforts in popular education.51

M a t e r i a l i s m 1 :

The Pursu it of Profit

What is one to make of a l l thi s ? The popular education campaigns of the period perhaps provide a clue. The Axial Age w a s the first time in human h istory when fa mili arity with the written word was no lon­ ger l i m ited to priests, administrators, and merchants, but had become necessary to ful l participation i n civic l i fe . In Athens , i t was taken for granted that only a country bumpkin would be entirely i l literate.

Without mass literacy, neither the emergence of mass intel lectua l movements, nor t h e spread of A x i a l A g e i d e a s w o u l d h a v e been pos­ sible. By the end of the period, these ideas h a d produced a world where even the leaders of barbarian armies descending on the Roman empire felt o b liged to take a position on the question of the Mystery of the Trinity, and where Chinese monks could spend time debating the rela­ tive merits of the eighteen schools of Classical Indian Buddhi s m .

N o doubt t h e growth of markets pl ayed a r o l e t o o , n o t only help­ ing to free people from the proverbi a l shackles of status or community, but encouraging a certain habit of rati o n a l calculation, of measuring inputs and outputs, means and ends, a l l of which must inevitably have found some echoes i n the new spirit of rational inquiry that begins to

2 3 8 D E B T

appear in all the same times and places. Even the word " ration a l " is tel ling: it derives, of course, from " ra t i o "-how many of X go into Y-a sort of mathematical calculation previously used mainly by ar­ c h i tects and engineers, but which, with the rise of m arkets, everyone who d i d n ' t want to get cheated at the marketplace had to learn how to d o . S ti l l , we must be ca reful here. A fter a l l , money in itself w a s n o t h i n g new . S u m e r i a n fa rmers and tradesmen w e r e a l ready perfectly capable of making such calculations in 3500 Be; but none, as fa r a s we know, were so impressed that they concluded, like Pythagoras, that mathematical ratios were the key to understanding the nature of the u n iverse a n d the movement of celestial bodies, and that a l l thi ngs were ulti mately composed of numbers-and they certa inly h a d n ' t formed secret societies based on sharing this understanding, debating and purg­ ing and excommunicating one another.52

To understand what h a d changed, w e have to look, aga i n , at the particular kind of m a rkets that were emerging at the beginning of the Axial Age: i mpersonal markets, born of war, in which it w a s possible to treat even neighbors as if they were strangers.

Within human economies, motives are assumed to be complex . When a lord gives a gift to a reta iner, there is no reason to doubt that it i s inspired by a genuine desire to benefit that retainer, even if i t i s a l s o a strategic move designed to ensure loyalty, and an a c t of magnifi­ cence meant to remind everyone else that he i s great and the retainer s m a l l . There i s no sense of contradiction here. S i m i l a rly, gifts between equals are usually fraught with many layers of love, envy, pride, spite, communal solidarity, or any of a dozen other things. Speculating on such matters i s a m a j o r form of d a i l y enterta inment. W h a t ' s missing, though, i s any sense that the most selfish ( " self- i nterested " ) motive i s necessarily the r e a l one: t h o s e specu lating on h i d d e n motives a r e j u st as likely to assume that someone is secretly trying to help a friend or harm an enemy a s to acquire some advantage for him- or herself.53 Neither i s any of this likely to have cha nged much i n the rise of early credit markets, where the value of an IOU was as m uch dependent on assessments of its issuer's character as on h i s disposable income, and motives of love, envy, pride, etc. could never be completely set aside.

Cash transactions between strangers were d i fferent, a n d a l l the more so when trading i s set against a background of war and emerges fro m disposing of loot and provisioning soldiers; when one often had best not ask where the obj ects traded came fro m , and where no one i s much interested in forming ongoing personal relationships anyway. Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y , of calculating proporti o n s , estimating

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 3 9

quality, a n d trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivati o n , a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speak­ ing of concepts like " p rofit" and " advantage"-and imagining that this i s what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the vio lence of war or the impersonal ity of the m a rketplace h a s simply al lowed them to drop the pretense that they ever ca red about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human l i fe to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation, and hence some­ thing that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies .54 If the underlying assumption very much resembles those of contemporary economists, i t ' s no coincidence--but with the difference that, in an age when mon­ ey, m a rkets, states, and mil itary a ffairs were all intrinsically connected, money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold to produce money; when " cutthroat competition " often did involve the literal cutting of throats, it never occurred to anyone to i m agine that selfish ends could be pursued by peacefu l means . Certainly, this picture of humanity does begin to appear, with startling consistency, across Eurasia, wherever we a l s o see coinage and philosophy appear.

China provides an unusually transparent case in point. A l ready in Confuci u s ' s time, Chinese thinkers were speaking of the pursuit of profit as the d riving force in human life . The actual term used was li, a word first used to refer to the increase of grain one h a rvests from a field over and above what one originally p l a n ted (the pictogram represents a sheaf of wheat next to a knife) .55 From there it came to mean commerc i a l profit, and thence, a general term for " benefit" or " p a y b a ck . " The following story, which p u rports to tell the reaction of a merch ant's son named Li.i Buwei on learning that an exiled prince was living nearby, i l l u strates the progression nicely:

On returning home, he said to his father, " What is the profit on investment that one can expect from plowing fields ? "

" Ten times the investment, " replied his father. "And the return on investment in pearls and j ades is how

much ? " "A hundredfold . " "And the return o n investment from establishing a ruler and

securing the state would be how much ? " " I t would be incalcul able. "56

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Lti adopted the prince's cause and eventua l l y contrived to make him King of Qin. He went on to became first minister for the king's son, Q i n S h i Huang, helping h i m defeat the other Warring States to became the first Emperor o f Chin a . We still have a compen d i u m of political wisdom that Lti commissioned for the new emperor, which contains such m i l i tary advice a s the following:

As a general principle, when an enemy's army comes, it seeks some profit. Now if they come and find the prospect of death instead, they will consider running away the most profitable thing to do. When all one's enemies consider running to be the most profita ble thing to do, no blades will cross.

This is the most essential point in military matters .57

In such a world, heroic considerations of honor and glory, vows to ·gods or desire for vengeance, were at best weaknesses to be manipu­ lated. I n the numerous m a n u a l s on statecraft produced at the time, everything was cast as a m a tter of recognizing i n terest and advantage, calcul ating how to balance that which will profit the ruler against that which w i l l profit the people, determining when the ruler's interests are the same as the peop le's and when they contradict.58 Technical terms drawn fro m politics, econo mics, and m i l itary strategy ( " return on in­ vestmen t , " " s trategic advantage " ) blended and overlapped .

The predominant school of political thought under the Warring States was that o f the Lega lists, who i n s i sted that i n matters of state­ craft, a ruler's i nterests were the only consideratio n , even if rulers would be unwise to admit this. Sti l l , the people could be easily ma­ nipulated , since they had the same motivati o n s : the people's pursuit of profit, wrote Lord S h ang, i s utterly predictable, " j ust like the tendency of water to flow downhi l l . "59 Shang was harsher than most of his fel­ low Legal i sts in that he believed that widespread p rosperity would ulti mately harm the ruler's a b i l i ty to mobilize h i s people for war, and therefore that terror was the most efficient i nstrument of governance, but even he insisted that this regime be clothed as a regime of l a w and j ustice.

Wherever the m i litary-coinage-slavery complex began to take hold, we find political theorists propounding similar ideas. Kautilya w a s no different: the title of h i s book, the Arthasastra, i s usually translated as " m anual o f statecraft , " since i t consists of advice to rulers, but its more literal translation i s " the science of m aterial gain. "60 Like the Legalists, Kautilya emphasized the need to create a pretext that governance w a s a matter of morality and j ustice, but in addressing the rulers themselves ,

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 4 1

he insisted that " w a r and peace are cons idered solely from the point o f view of profit "-of a m a s s i n g w e a l t h to create a m o r e effective a r m y , of u s i n g the army to domin ate markets and c o n t r o l resources to a m a s s m o r e w e a l t h , and so o n . 6 1 In G reece we've a l ready m e t Thrasyma­ chos. True, G reece w a s slightly different. G reek city-states d i d not have kings, and the collapse of private interests a n d affairs of state w a s i n principle universally denounced as tyra n n y . S t i l l , in practice, what t h i s meant w a s t h a t city-states, and even political facti ons, e n d e d up acting in precisely the same coldly calculating way as Indian or Chinese sov­ ereign s . Anyone who has ever read Thucyd ides' Melian d i a logue--in which Athen ian generals present the population of a previously friendly city with elegantly reasoned a rguments for why the Athenians have determined that it i s to the advantage of their empire to threaten them with col lective massacre if they are not w i l l ing to become tribute­ paying subj ects, and why it is equally in the interests of the Melians to submit-i s aware of the results.62

Another striking feature of this literature is its resolute materia l ­ i s m . Goddesses and g o d s , m a g i c and oracles, sacrificial ritu a l , ancestral cults, even caste and ritual status systems a l l either disappear or are sidelined, no longer treated as ends in themselves but a s yet mere tools to be used fo r the pursuit of materi al gain.

That intell ectu a l s willing to produce such theories should w i n the ears of pri nces i s hardly surprising. Neither is it particularly surpris­ ing that other intel lectu als should have been so offended by this sort of cyn icism that they began to make common cause with the popular movements that inevitably began to form against those princes . But as is so often the case, oppositional intellectu a l s were faced with two choices : either adopt the reigning terms of debate, or try to come up with a d i a metri cal inversion . Mo Di, the founder of M o h i s m , took the first approach. He turned the concept of li, p rofit, into something more like " social uti l i ty , " and then he attempted to demonstrate that war itself is, by definition, an unprofitable activity . For example, he wrote, campaigns can only be fought in spring and autumn, and each had equally deleterious effects:

I f in the spring then the people miss their sowing and planting, if in the autumn, they miss their reaping and harvesting. Even if they miss only one season, then the number of people who will die of cold and hunger is incalculable. Now let us calcul ate the army's equi pment, the arrows , standards, tents , armor, shields, and sword hilts; the number of these which will break and per­ ish and not come back . . . So also with oxen and horses . . . 63

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H i s conclusion: if one could add up the total costs of aggression i n h u m a n lives, a n i m a l lives, a n d material d a m age, o n e would be forced to the conclusion that they never outweighed the benefits-even for the victor. I n fact, Mo Di took this sort of logic so far that he ended up ar­ guing that the only way to optimize the overall profit of h u m a nity w a s to a b a n d o n the p u r s u i t of private p r o fi t entirely and a d o p t a principle of what he c a lled " u n iversal love "-essentially arguing that i f one takes the principle of market exchange to its logical conclusion, i t can only lead to a kind of communis m .

T h e Confucians took t h e opposite approach, rejecting t h e initial premise. A good example i s most of the opening of Menci u s ' much­ remembered conversation with King Hui:

"Venerable Sir, " the King greeted him, " since you have not counted a thousand miles too far to come here, may I suppose that you also have something with which you may profit my kingdom?"

Mencius replied: "Why must Your Majesty necessarily use this word 'profit' ?

What I have are only these two topics: benevolence and righ­ teousness, and nothing else."64

Sti l l , the end-point w a s roughly the same. The Confuci a n ideal of re n , of humane benevolence, was basically j ust a more complete i nver­ sion of pro fit-seeking calculation than Mo D i ' s universal love; the main difference was that the Confuci ans added a certain aversion to calcula­ tion itself, preferring what might a l m ost be c a lled an art of decency . Taoists were later to take this even further with their embrace of intu­ ition and spontaneity. A l l were so many attempts to provide a m i rror im age of market logic. S t i l l , a mirror i mage is, ultimately, j ust that: the same thing, only backward s . Before long we end up with an endless maze of paired opposites-egoi s m versus altruism, profit versus char­ ity, materia l i s m versus idealism, calculation versus spontaneity-none of which could ever h ave been i m agined except by someone starting out fro m pure, calcul ating, self-interested m a rket transacti o n s .65

M a t e r i a l i s m I I :

Su bsta nce

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 4 3

As in the near p resence of death, de­ spise p o o r fles h , this refuse of blood and bones, this web and tissue of nerves and veins and a rteries .

-Marcu s Aurel i u s , Meditations 2 . 2

Taking pity on the h u n g ry wo lf, Wen­ s h u a ng a n n o u nced, " I do not covet th is filthy bag of meat. I give it over to you that I may q u ickly acquire a b o dy of m o re enduring s trength . Th is donation will h elp benefit us b o th . "

-Discourse o n the Pure Land 2 I . I 2

A s I ' ve a l ready o bserved, China w a s unusual because p h ilosophy there began with debates a bout ethics and only l ater turned to speculations about the nature of the cosmos. I n both G reece and India, cosmological speculation came first. I n each, too, questions a bout the n ature of the physical u niverse quickly give way to speculation about mind, truth, consciousness, meaning, language, i l l u s i o n , world-spirits, cosmic intel­ l igence, and the fate of the human s o u l .

This particular maze of mirrors i s so complex and dazzling that i t ' s extraordinarily difficult to di scern the starting point-th at is, what, precisely, i s being reflected back and forth . Here anthropology can be helpfu l , as anthropologists have the unique advantage of being a b l e to observe how human beings who have not previously been part of these conversations react when first exposed to Axial Age concepts. Every now and then too, we are presented with moments of exceptional cl arity : ones that reveal the essence of our own thought to be a l most exactly the opposite of what we thought it to be.

M a urice Leenh a rdt, a Catholic missionary who had spent many long years teaching the Gospel i n New Ca ledon i a , experienced such a moment in the 1920s, when he asked one of h i s students, a n aged sculptor n a med Boesoou, how he felt about having been introduced to spiritual ideas:

2 4 4 D E B T

Once, waiting to assess the mental progress of the Canaques I had taught fo r many years, I ri sked the fo llowing suggestion: " In short, we introduced the notion of the spirit to your way of th inking ? "

H e obj ected , "Spirit? B a h ! Y o u didn ' t bring us the spirit. We already knew the spirit existed . We have always acted in accord with the spirit. What you ' ve brought us is the body . "6 6

T h e notion t h a t h u m a n s had s o u l s appea red to Boesoou to be self­ evident. The notion that there was such a thing as the body, apart from the s o u l , a mere materi a l col lection o f nerves and tissues-let alone that the body i s the prison of the s o u l ; that the mortification of the body could be a means to the glorificati on or li beration of the soul-all this, it turns out, struck h i m a s utterly new and exoti c .

A x i a l A g e spirituality, then, i s b u i l t on a bedrock of materi a l i s m . This i s i t s secret; one m i g h t a l m o s t say, t h e thing t h a t h a s become invisible to usY But if one looks at the very beginnings of philosophi­ cal inquiry in G reece and India-the point when there w a s a s yet no d i fference between what w e ' d now call " p h i l o sophy" and what w e ' d now c a l l " science"-th is i s e xactly what one finds. "Theory , " i f we c a n c a l l i t that, b e g i n s with the questi o n s : "What s u b s t a n c e i s the w o r l d made o f ? " " W h a t i s the u n d e r l y i n g m a teri a l b e h i n d the p h y s i c a l fo rms of obj ects in the world ? " "Is everything made up o f varying combina­ tions of certain b a s i c elements (earth , a i r , water, fire, stone, motion, mind, n u m ber . . . ), or are these b a s i c elements j ust the fo rms taken by some even more elementary substance ( for instance, a s Nyaya a n d l a ter Democritus proposed, atomic particles . . . ) "6 8 I n j ust a b o u t every c a se, some notion of God, Mind, Spirit, some active orga nizing principle that gave form to and w a s not itself substance, emerged as wel l . B u t this w a s the kind o f s p i r i t that, like Leenhardt's G o d , only emerges i n r e l a t i o n to i n e r t m a tter.69

To connect this impulse, too, with the invention of coinage might seem like pushing things a bit far but, at least for the Classical world, there is an emerging scholarly l i terature--first set off by H a rv a rd liter­ ary theo rist Marc Shell, and more recently set fo rth by British classicist Richard Seaford in a book called Money and the Early G reek Mind­ that a i m s to do exactly that.70

In fact, some of the hi storical connections are so uncannily close that they a re very h a rd to expl a i n any other way. Let me give an ex­ ample. After the first coins were minted a round 6oo BC in the kingdom of Lyd i a , the practice quickly spread to Ionia, the Greek cities of the adj acent coast. The greatest of these w a s the great wa l led metropol i s of

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 4 5

Mi letu s , which a l s o appears to have been the first Greek city to strike its own coins. It w a s Ionia, too, that provided the bulk of the G reek mercenaries active in the Mediterranean at the time, with M i letus their effective headquarters. Miletus was a l s o the commerc i a l center of the region, and, perh a p s , the first city i n the world w here everyday mar­ ket transactions came to be carried out primarily in coins instead of credit.71 G reek philosophy, in turn, begins with three men: Thales, of Mi letus ( c . 624 BC-c . 546 BC) , Anaxi mander, of M iletus ( c . 610 BC-c . 546 BC) , and Anaximenes, of M i letus ( c . 585 BC-C . 525 BC)-in other words, men who were living in that city at exactly the time that coin­ age was first introduced.72 A l l three are remembered chiefly for their speculations on the n a ture of the physical s u b stance fro m which the world ultimately sprang. Thales proposed water, Anaximenes, a i r . Anaximander m a d e up a new t e r m , apeiron, " the u n l i mited , " a kind of pure abstract substance that could not itself be perceived but w a s the materia l basis of everything that could b e . I n each case, the assumption was that this primal substance, by being heated, cooled , combined, di­ vided, compressed , extended , or set in motion, gave rise to the endless particul a r stuffs and substances that humans actually encounter in the world, from which physical obj ects are composed-and was also that into which a l l those forms would eventually dissolve.

It was something that could turn into everything. A s Seaford em­ phasizes, so was money. Gold, shaped into coins, i s a materi a l s u b ­ stance that is also an abstract i o n . It i s b o t h a lump of m e t a l and s o m e ­ t h i n g more t h a n a lump of metal-i t ' s a d r a c h m a or an o b o l , a unit of currency which ( a t least i f col lected i n sufficient quantity, taken to the right place at the right time, turned over to the right person) could be exchanged for a b s o l utely any other obj ect whatsoever.73

For Seaford, what was genuinely new about coins was their double­ sidedness: the fact that they were both valuable pieces of metal and, at the same time, something more. At least within the communities that created them, ancient coins were always worth more than the gold, silver, or copper of which they were composed . Seaford refers to this extra value by the inelegant term " fiduciarity , " which comes from the term for public trust, the confidence a community places in its curren­ cy.74 True, at the height of Classical G reece, when there were h undreds of city-states producing different currencies according to a number of different systems of weights and denominations, merchants often did carry scales and treat coins-particularly foreign coins-like so many chunks of s i lver, j u st as Indian merchants seem to have treated Roman coins; but within a city, that city ' s currency had a spec i a l statu s , since it was always acceptable at face value when used to pay taxes, public

2 4 6 D E B T

fee s , or legal penalties . This i s , incidenta l l y , why ancient governments were so often able to introduce base metal into their coins without leading to i m mediate inflation; a debased coin might have lost value when traded oversea s , but at home, it w a s still worth just as much when purchasing a license, or entering the public theater .75 This i s also why, during pubic emergencies, G reek city-states would occa sionally strike coins made entirely of bronze or t i n , which everyone would agree, while the emergency lasted, to treat as if they were really made of silver.76

This is the key to Seaford's argument about materi alism and G reek philosophy. A coin was a piece of meta l , but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not u n l i mited . Bronze coin s could not be used fo rever; if one debased the coinage, i n fl a tion would eventu a l l y set in. It was as if there was a ten sion there, between the w i l l of the community and the physical nature of the obj ect itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of obj ect, one of extraordinary importance-as evidenced by the fact that so many men were w i l l i ng to risk their lives to get their h a n d s on it-but whose nature w a s a profound enigm a .

Consider this word , " m ateri a l i s m . " What does it mean t o adopt a " materi a l i st" philosophy? What is " materi a l , " anyway ? Norm a l l y , we speak of " m ateri a l s " when we refer to obj ects that we w i s h to make into something else. A tree i s a living thing. It only becomes " wood" when we begin to think about a l l the other things you could carve out of it. A n d of course you can carve a p i ece of wood into almost any­ thing. The same i s true of clay, or glass, or meta l . They 're solid and real and tangi b l e , but a l s o a bstractio n s , because they have the potenti al to turn into a l most anything el se-o r, not precisely that; one c a n ' t turn a piece of wood into a lion or an o w l , but one can turn it into an i m age of a lion or an o w l-it can take on almost any conceivable for m . So a l ready i n any m a terialist philosophy, we are dealing with a n opposi­ tion between form and content, sub stance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator's mind, and the physical qual ities of the materi a l s on which it is to be stamped, built, or im­ posed , fro m which it w i l l be brought into rea lity.77 With coins this rises to an even more ab stract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one pers o n ' s head, but i s rather the mark of a collective agreement. The i m ages stamped on Greek coins ( M i letus' lion, Athens' owl) were typically the emblems of the city's god , but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens assured one another that not only would the coin be accepta ble in payment of

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 4 7

p u b l i c debts, but in a l a rger sense, that everyone would accept them , for any debts, and thus, that they could be use to acquire anything anyone wanted .

The problem is that this collective power is not unlim ited . It only really applies within the city . The fa rther you go outside, into places d o m i n a ted by violence, sl avery, and war-the sort of place where even philosophers taking a cruise might end up on the a uction b lock-the more it turns into a mere lump of precious metaJ .78

The war between Spirit and Flesh, then, between the noble Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and c o m m unity are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material n a tures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal-all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophi­ cal traditions of the A x i a l Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since--c a n a l ready be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new fo rm of money.

It would be foo lish to argue that a l l Axial Age phi losophy was s i m ­ ply a meditation on the nature of c o i n a g e , but I think Seaford is right to a rgue that this is a critical starting place: one of the rea sons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the pecu l i a r way t h e y d i d , a s k i n g ( for instance) : What are Idea s ? Are t h e y merely collective conventio n s ? Do they exist, as Plato insi sted, in some d i v i n e d o m a i n b e y o n d materi a l existenc e ? O r do t h e y exist in our mind s ? O r do o u r m i n d s themselves ultim ately partake of that d i v i n e immate­ rial dom a i n ? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bod i e s ?

I I I I I

In India and China, the debate took d i fferent for m s , but materi a l i s m w a s always the starting p o i n t . We only know the ideas of m o s t truly materi alist thinkers fro m the works of their intellectual enemies: a s is the case with the Indian king Paya s i , who enj oyed debating Buddhist and Jain phi losophers, taking the position that the soul does not exist, that human bodies are nothing but particular configurations of air, wa­ ter, earth, and fire, their consciousness the result of the elements ' mu­ tual interacti o n , and that when we d i e , the elements simply dissolve .79 Clearly, though , such ideas were commonplace. Even the Axial Age religions are often startlingly lacking in the plethora of supernatural fo rces seen before and after: as witnessed by continued debates over whether Buddhism even is a religion , since it rejects any notion of a

2 4 8 D E B T

s upreme being , or whether Confucius ' a d monitio n s that one should

continue to venerate one's a ncestors w a s merely a w a y of encouraging

filial piet y , or b a sed on a belief that dead a ncestors did, in some sense,

continue to exist. The fact that we have to ask says everything . Yet at

the s a me time, what e n d u res , a bove all, from that age--in institutional

term s-are what we c all the " world religion s . "

What w e see then i s a stra nge kind o f b a c k - a n d - forth , attack a n d

riposte, whereby t h e m arket, t h e state, w a r , a n d religion all continually

sep a rate and merge with one a n other. Let me s u m m a rize it as briefly

as I c a n :

1) Ma rkets appear t o have first emerged , i n the Near East a t least, a s a side effect o f govern ment administrative systems . Over time, how­ ever, the logic o f the m arket bec a me entangled i n m i l itary affa i r s , where it became a l most indistinguishable from t h e mercena ry logic of Axial Age warfare, and then , finally, that logic came to conquer govern ment itself; to define its very purpose.

2) A s a result: everywhere we see the m i l itary-coi nage-slavery complex emerge, we also see the b i rth of materialist p h i losophies. They are materialist, i n fact, in both senses of the ter m : in that they envision a worl d made up of mater i a l forces, rather than d ivine powers, and i n that they i m agine the ultimate end of human existence to be the accu m u l ation of materi a l wealth, with ideals like morality and j us­ tice being reframed as tools designed to satisfy the masses .

3) Everywhere, too, we find p h ilosophers who react to thi s by explor­ ing ideas of h u manity and the soul, attempting to find a new foun­ dati o n for ethics and morality .

4) Everywhere some of these p h i losophers made c o m mon c ause with social movements that inevitably formed in the face of these new and extraordinarily violent and cynical elites . The result was some­ thing new to h u m a n h istory : popular movements that were also i ntellectual movements, due to the assumption that those opposing existing power arrangements did so i n the n a me of some kind of theory a bout the n ature o f real ity .

5) Everywhere, these movements were first and foremost peace move­ ments, in that they rejected the new conception of violence, and espec i a l l y aggressive war, as the foundation of p o l itics .

6) Everywhere too, there seems to have been an i n itial i m p u l se to use the new i ntellectua l tools provided b y i m personal markets to come u p with a new b a s i s fo r mora l i t y , and everywhere, it fo undered . M o h i s m , w ith its notion of soc i a l p rofit, flou r i s hed b r iefly and then c o l lapsed . It was rep l a ced b y Confuc i a n i s m , which rejected such ideas outright. We h a ve a l ready seen that rei magining moral

T H E A X I A L A G E 2 4 9

respon s i b i l ity i n terms of debt-a n i mpulse that cropped up in both Greece and I n d ia-while a l most inevitable given the new economic circumstances, seems to p rove u n i formly unsati sfying.80 The strong­ er impulse i s to i magine another world where debt-and with i t , a l l o t h e r worldly connections-can be entirely a n n i h i lated, where social attach ments are seen as fo rms of bondage; j ust as the body is a pnson .

7) Rulers' attitudes changed over t i m e . At first, most appear to have affected an attitude of bemused tolerance toward the new philo­ sophical and religious movements while privately embracing some version of cynical realpolitik, But as warring cities and principalities were replaced by great empires, a n d especi a l l y , as those e m p i res began to reach the l i mits of their exp a n s i o n , sending the m i l itary­ c o i n age-slavery complex into crisis, a l l this suddenly changed . In India, Asoka tried to re-found h i s kingdom o n Bud d h i s m ; i n R o m e , Constantine turned to the Christi a n s ; in C h i n a , the H a n emperor Wu-Ti ( 157-87 B C ) , faced with a similar m i l i tary and financial crisis, adopted Confuc i a n i s m as the p h i l o sophy of state. O f the three, o n l y W u Ti was ultim ately successfu l : the C h i n e s e empire e n d u r e d , i n one form or another, for two thousand years, a l most always with Con­ fucianism as its offici a l ideology. I n Constantine's case the Western empire fel l apart, but the Roman church endured . A s o k a ' s project could be said to be the least successfu l . Not only d i d h i s empire fa l l a p a r t , replaced by an endless series of weaker, u s u a l l y fragmentary kingdoms, but Budd h i s m itself was l a rgely driven out of his one-time territories, though it d i d esta b l i s h itself much more firmly i n C h i n a , Nepal, T i b e t , Sri L a n k a , K o r e a , Japan, and m u c h o f Southeast A s i a .

8 ) The u l t i m a t e effect was a kind o f i d e a l d i v i s i o n of spheres o f h u m a n activity that end ures to this d a y : on the one hand the m a rket, o n the other, religi o n . To put the matter crudel y : if one relegates a certain soci al space si mply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is a l most inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside an other d o m a i n in which to preach that, fro m the perspective o f ul­ tim ate values, material things are uni mportant; that selfishness-or even the self-are i llusory, and that to give i s better than to receive. I f nothing else, it i s surely significant that a l l the A x i a l Age religions emphasized the importance of charity, a concept that had b a rely exi sted before. Pure greed and pure generosity are complementary concepts; neither could really be i magined without the other; both could only arise i n in stitution a l contexts that i n s i s ted on such pure and single-minded behavior; and both seem to have appeared to­ gether wherever i m person a l , physica l , cash money also appeared on the scene.

2 5 0 D E B T

As for the religious movements : it would be easy enough to write them off as escapist, a s promising the victims of the Axial Age em­ pires liberation in the next world as a way of letting them accept their lot i n this one, and convincing the rich that a l l they rea l l y owed the poor were occasi o n a l charitable donations. Radical thinkers almost invariably do write them off i n this w a y . S urely, the w i l l i ngness of the governments themselves to eventua l l y embrace them would seem to support this conclusion. But the issue i s more complicated . First of all, there i s something to be said for escap i s m . Popular uprisings i n the ancient w o r l d usually ended in the massacre of t h e rebels . A s I ' v e already o bserved, p h y s i c a l e s c a p e , such a s v i a e x o d u s or defection, h a s always been the most effective response to oppressive conditions since the earliest times we know about. Where physical escape i s not possible, what, exactly, i s an oppressed peasant supposed to do ? Sit and contemplate her m i sery ? A t the very least, otherworldly religions provided gli mpses of radical a l ternatives. Often they allowed people to create other worlds within this one, l i berated spaces of one sort or another. I t i s surely significant that the only people who succeeded i n a b o l i s h i n g s l avery i n the ancient w o r l d were religious sects, s u c h as t h e Essenes-who did s o , effectively, by defecting from the l a rger s o c i a l order and forming t h e i r own utopian communities . 8 1 O r , i n a s m a ller but more enduring example: the democratic city-states of northern In­ d i a were all eventu a l l y stamped out by the great empires ( K a utilya provides extensive advice on how to subvert and destroy democratic constituti o n s ) , but the Buddha admired the democratic organization of their public assemblies and adopted it a s the model for h i s followers . 82 Buddhist monasteries are still called sangha, the ancient name for such rep u b l ic s , and continue to operate by the same consensus- finding pro­ cess to this day, preserving a certain egalitarian democratic ideal that would otherwise have been entirely forgotten .

Finally, the larger hi storical achievements of these movements are not, in fact, i n s ignificant. A s they took hold, things began to change. Wars became less brutal and less frequent. S lavery faded as an in­ stitution, to the point at which, by the Middle Ages, i t h a d become i n s ignificant or even nonexistent across most of Eura s i a . Everywhere too, the new religious authorities began to seriously address the social d i slocations introduced by debt.

C h a p t e r Te n

T H E M I D D L E A G E S

( 6 0 0 - 1 4 5 0 AD)

Artificial wealth comp rises the things

which of themselves sa tisfy no natu­

ral need, fo r example m o ney, which is a

h u m a n con trivan c e .

-St . T h o m a s A q u i n a s

I F T H E AX I A L A G E saw the emergence of comp lementary ideals of commodity markets and universal world religio n s , the Middle Ages were the period i n which those two institutions began to merge .

Everywhere, the age began with the collapse of empires . Eventua l ­ l y , n e w states formed, but i n t h e s e new states, the n e x u s between war, bullion, and slavery was broken; conquest and acquisition for their own sake were no l onger celebrated as the end of all political life . At the same time, economic l i fe , from the conduct of intern ational trade to the organization of local m a rkets, came to fa l l increasingly under the regulation of religious authorities . One result was a widespread movement to contro l , or even forbid, predatory lending. Another was a return, across E u r a s i a , to various forms of virtual credit money.

Granted, this i s not the way we're used to thinking of the Middle Age s . For most of u s , "Mediev a l " remains a synonym for superstition, intolerance, and oppres s i o n . Yet for most of the earth ' s inhabitants, it could only be seen a s an extraordin ary improvement over the terrors of the Axial Age .

One reason for our skewed perception is that we're used to think­ ing of the Middle Ages as something that happened primarily i n West­ ern Europe, i n territories that h a d been l ittle more than border outposts of the Roman Empire to begin with. According to the convention­ a l wisdom, with the collapse of the empire, the cities were l a rgely

2 5 2 D E B T

abandoned and the economy " reverted to ba rter , " taking at least five centuries to recover. Even fo r Europe, though, this i s based on a series of unq uestioned assumptions that, a s I've said, crumble the moment one starts seriously poking at them. Chief among them i s the idea that the a b sence of coins means the a b sence of money. True, the destruction of the Roman w a r machine also meant that Roman coins went out of circu lation; and the few coins produced within the Gothic or Frankish kingdoms that estab l i s hed themselves over the ruins of the old empire were largely fiduciary in nature . 1 S t i l l , a glance at the " barbarian l a w codes " revea l s that e v e n a t the h e i g h t of the D a rk A g e s , p e o p l e w e r e s t i l l carefully keep ing accounts in Roman m o n e y a s t h e y calcul ated interest rates, contracts, and mortgages. Again, cities shriveled , and many were abandoned, but even this was something of a mixed blessing. Certa i n l y , it had a terrible effect o n l i t e r a c y ; but one must also bear in mind t h a t a n c i e n t c i t i e s could only be maintained by extracting resources from the countryside. Roman G a u l , for instance, had been a network of cities, connected by the fa mous Roman roads to an endless succession of slave plantations, which were owned by the urban grandees . 2 After around 400 AD, the population of the towns declined radically, but the plantations also d i sappeared . In the following centuries, many came to be replaced by manors, churches, and even later, castles-where new local lords extracted their own dues from the surrounding fa rmers. But one need only do the math : since Medieval agriculture was no less ef­ ficient than ancient agriculture (in fact, it rapidly became a great deal more so) , the amount of work requi red to feed a handful of mounted warriors and clergymen could not possibly have been anything like that req u i red to feed entire cities. However oppressed Medieval serfs might have been, their plight was nothing compared with that of their A x i a l A g e equivalents.

S t i l l , the Middle Ages p roper are best seen as having begun not i n Europe but in India and China, between 400 and 6oo A D , and then sweeping across much of the western half of Eurasia with the advent of Islam. They only really reached Europe fou r hundred years later. Let us begin our story, then, in Indi a .

M e d i e v a l I n d i a

( Fl i ght i nto H iera rchy)

I left off in India w i th A s o k a ' s e m b race of Buddhism, but I noted that ultimately, his proj ect foundered . Neither his empire nor his church

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 5 3

was to endure. It took a good deal of time, however, for this fa i l u re to occur.

The Mauryans represented a high watermark of empire. The next five h undred years saw a succession of kingdoms, most o f them strong­ ly supportive of Buddhi s m . Stupas and monasteries sprang up every­ where, but the states that sponsored them grew weaker and weaker; centralized armies d i s solved; soldiers, like offici a l s , increasingly came to be paid by land grants rather than s a l a ries . As a res u l t , the number of coins in circulation steadily declined.3 Here too, the early Middle Ages witnessed a dramatic decline of cities : where the G reek ambassa­ dor Megasthenes descri bed A s oka ' s capital of Patna as the l a rgest city i n the world of h i s day, Medieval Arab and Chinese travelers described India as a land of endless tiny v i l l ages .

As a result, most h i storians h ave come to write, much as they do i n Europe, of a collapse of the money economy; of commerce becom­ ing a " revers ion to barter . " Here too, this appears to be s i mply untrue. What vanished were the m i litary means to extract resources from the peasants . I n fact, Hindu law-books written at the time show i ncrea sing attention to credit arrangements, with a sophi sticated language of sure­ ties, collateral , mortgages, pro m i s sory notes, and compound interest.4 One need only consider how the Buddhist esta b l i s h ments popping up all over India during these centuries were funded . While the earliest monks were wandering mendicants, owning l ittle more than their beg­ ging bowls, early Medieval monasteries were often magni ficent estab­ l i s h ments with vast treasuries. Sti l l , in principle, their operations were financed a l most entirely through cred i t .

T h e k e y innovation was the creation of what w e r e cal led t h e " per­ petual endowment s " or " inexhaustible treasuries . " Say a lay supporter wi shed to make a contribution to her local monastery . Rather than offering to provide candles for a specific ritua l , or servants to attend to the upkeep of the monastic grounds, she would provide a certa in sum of money-or something worth a great deal of money-that would then be loaned out i n the n a m e of the mona stery, at the accepted 15 -percent annual rate. The interest on the loan would then be earmarked for that specific purpose.5 An inscription d iscovered at the Great Mon­ astery of Sanci sometime around 450 AD provides a handy i l l u stration . A woman na med Harisvamini donates the relatively modest sum of twelve dinaras to the " Noble Community of Monks . % The text care­ ful l y inscribes how the income i s to be divided up: the interest on five of the dinaras was to provide daily meals for five different monks, the interest from another three would pay to light th ree l a m p s for the Buddha , i n memory of her parents, and so fort h . The i n scription

2 5 4 D E B T

ends by saying that this was a permanent endowment, " created with a document in stone to l a st as long as the moon and the su n " : since the principal would never be touched , the contribution would last forever . 7

Some o f t h e s e loans p r e s u m a b l y went to individuals, others were commercial loans to "guilds of bam boo-workers, braziers, and pot­ ters , " or to v i l lage assemblies . 8 We have to assume that i n most cases the money i s an accounting u n i t : w h a t were really being trans acted were a n i m a l s , wheat, silk, butter, fruit, and all the other goods whose appropriate rates of interest were so ca refully stipulated in the law­ codes of the time. S t i l l , l a rge a mounts of gold d i d end up fl owing into monastic coffers. When coins go out of circulation, after all, the metal doesn ' t s i m p l y disappear. In the Middle Ages-a nd this seems to have been true across Eurasia-the v a s t maj ority of it ended up in religious establishments, churches, monasteries, and temples, either stockpiled in hoards and treasuries or gilded onto or cast into altars, sanctu m s , and sacred instruments. A b o v e a l l , it w a s shaped into im ages of god s . A s a result, those rulers w h o d i d try to p u t an A x i a l Age-style coin­ age system back into circulati on-invariably, to fund some project of m i l i t a ry expansi on-often h a d to pursue self-consciously anti-religious policies in order to do s o . Probably the most notorious w a s one Harsa, who ruled Kashmir from 1089 to nor A D , who i s said to have ap­ pointed an officer cal led the " S uperintendent fo r the Destruction of the God s . " According to later histories, Harsa employed leprous monks to systematically desecrate divine i m ages with urine and excrement, thus neutralizing their power, before d ragging them off to be melted down . 9 He i s s a i d to h a v e destroyed m o r e t h a n fo ur thousand Buddhist estab­ lishments before being betrayed and killed, the last of his dynasty-an d h i s miserable fate w a s l o n g h e l d out as an example of where t h e revival of the old ways was likely to lead one in the end.

For the most part, then, the gold remained sacrosanct, laid up in the sacred p l aces-though i n I n d i a , over time these were increasingly Hindu ones, not Buddhist. What we now see as traditional Hindu­ v i l l age India appears to have been largely a creation of the early Middle Ages . We do not know precisely how it h appened . A s kingdoms contin­ ued to rise and fa l l , the world inh a b i ted by kings and princes became increasingly distant from that of most people's everyday a ffa i r s . During much of the period i m mediately fol l o w ing the collapse of the Mau­ ryan empire, for instance, much of India w a s governed by foreigners . 1 0 Apparently, this increasing d i stance a l l owed local Brahmins t o begin reshaping the new-increasingly rural-society along strictly hierarchi­ cal principles.

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 5 5

They did i t a bove a l l by seizing control of the a d m i n i stration of l a w . The Dharmas astra, law-codes produced by Brahmin scholars be­ tween rough ly 200 BC and 400 AD, give us a good idea of the new vision of society. I n it, old ideas like the Ved i c conception of a debt to god s , sages, and ancestors w e r e resuscitated-b ut n o w , they applied only a n d specifically to B r a h m i n s , whose d uty and privi lege i t was t o s t a n d in fo r all h u m anity before the forces that controlled the universe . 1 1 F a r from being required to attain learning, members of the inferior classes were forbidden to do so: the Laws of M a n u , for instance, set down that any Sudra (the lowest caste, a ssigned to farming and material production) who so much as li stened i n on the teaching of the l a w or sacred texts should have molten lead poured into their ears; on the occasion of a repeat offense, have their tongues cut out . 12 At the same time Brahmins, however ferociously they guarded their privi leges, also adopted aspects of once-radical Buddhist and Jain ideas like karma, reincarn ation, and ahimsa. Brahmins were expected to refrain from any sort of physical violence, and even to become vegeta rians. In alli ance with representa­ tives of the old warrior caste, they also m a naged to win control of most of the land in the ancient v i l l ages . Artisans and craftsmen fleeing the decline or destruction of cities often ended up a s suppliant refugees , and, gradu a l l y , low-caste clients. T h e result w e r e increasi ngly complex local patronage systems in the countryside--jajmani syste m s , as they came to be known-where the refugees provided services for the land­ owning castes, who took on many of the roles once held by the state, providing protection and j u stice, extracting labor dues, and so on-but also protected local communities from actual roy a l representatives . 1 3

This latter fu nction i s cruci a l . Foreign visitors were later t o b e awed b y the self-sufficiency of the traditional I n d i a n v i l l age, with its elaborate system of l a ndowning castes, fa rmers, and such " service caste s " as b a rbers, smiths, tanners, drummers, and washermen, a l l ar­ ranged in hierarchical order, each seen as making its own unique and necessary contribution to their little society, all of i t typic a l l y operat­ ing entirely without the use of metal currency. I t was only possible for those reduced to the status of Sudras and Untouchables to have a chance of accepting their lowly position because the exaction of lo­ cal landlords w a s , again, on nothing like the same scale as that under earlier governmen ts-under which v i l lagers had to support cities of up­ wards of a million people--and because the v i l l age commun ity became an effective means of holding the state and its representatives at least partially at bay.

We don ' t know the mechanisms that b rought this world about, but the role of debt was surely significant. The creation of thousands of

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Hindu temples alone must have involved h undreds of thousands, even m i l l i o n s , of interest-bearing loans-since, while Brahmins were them­ selves forbidden to lend money at interest, temples were not. We can already see, i n the earliest of the new law-codes, the Laws o f M a n u , the way that local authorities were struggling to reconcile old customs like debt peonage and chattel s lavery with the desire to esta b l i s h a n over­ arching hierarchical system in which everyone knew their place. The Laws of Manu carefu l l y classify slaves into seven types depending on how they were reduced to s lavery ( w a r , debt, self-sale . . . ) and exp l a i n t h e conditions u n d e r which e a c h m i g h t be emancipated-but t h e n go on to say that Sudras can never really be emancipated , since, after a l l , they w e r e created to serve t h e other castes . 14 S i m i l arly, where earlier codes had establ ished a rs -percent annual rate of i n terest, with excep­ tions for commerc i a l l o a n s , 1 5 the new codes organized interest by caste: stating that one could charge a maximum of 2 percent a month for a Brahmin, 3 percent fo r a Ksatriya ( w arrior) , 4 percent for a Vaisya ( merchant) , and 5 percent for a Sudra-which i s the difference between 24 percent a n n u a l l y on the one extreme and a hefty 6o percent on the other . 1 6 The laws also identify five different ways interest can be paid, of which the most significant for our concerns i s " bodily i n terest" : physical l a bor in the cred ito r ' s house or fields, to be rendered until such time a s the principal i s cleared . Even here, though , caste considerations were paramount. No one could be forced into the service of anyone of lower caste; moreover, since debts were enforceable on a debtor's children and even grandchildren, " until the principal i s cleared " could mean quite some ti me-as the Indian h i storian R . S . Sharma notes, such stipulations " remind us of the present practice accord ing to which sev­ eral generations of the same fa mily have been reduced to the position of heredi tary p l o ughmen in consideration of some paltry sum advanced to them . " 17

Indeed, India h a s become notorious as a country, in which a very l a rge part of the working population i s laboring i n effective debt peon­ age to a landlord or other creditor. Such arrangements became even easier over time. By about rooo A D , restrictions on usury by members of the upper ca stes i n Hindu law-codes l a rgely disappeared. O n the other hand, rooo AD w a s about the same time that I s l a m appea red in India-a religion dedicated to eradicating usury a l together. So at the very least w e can say that these things never stopped being con­ tested . And even Hindu l a w of that time w a s fa r more humane than a l most anything found in the ancient world. Debtors were not, gener­ ally speaking, reduced to s l avery, and there i s no widespread evidence of the selling of women or childre n . I n fact, overt sl avery had largely

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 5 7

vani shed from the countryside by th i s time. A n d debt peons were not even p a w n s , exactly ; by law, they were simply paying interest on a freely contra cted agreement. Even when that took generati ons, the l a w stipu lated t h a t e v e n if t h e principal w a s n e v e r p a i d , in t h e t h i r d genera­ tion, they would be free d .

There i s a pec u l i a r tension h e r e : a k i n d of paradox. D e b t a n d credit arrangements may w e l l have p l ayed a crucial r o l e in creating the I n d i a n vil lage syste m , but they could never rea lly become their b a s i s . It might have made a certain sense to declare that, j ust a s Brahmins had to d i spatch their debts to the gods, everyone should be, in a certain sense, in debt to those above them. But in another sense, that would have comp letely subverted the very idea of caste, which w a s that the uni verse was a vast hierarchy in which d i fferent so rts of people were assumed to be of fundamentally d i fferent natures, that these ranks and grades were fixed forever, and that when goods and services moved up and down the hierarchy, they fo llowed not principles of exchange at all but (as in all hierarchical systems) custom and precedent. The French anthropologist Louis Dumont made the fa mous a rgument that one cannot even really talk about " i n equality" here, because to use that phrase implies that one believes people should or could be equal, and this idea was comp letely alien to Hindu conceptions . 1 8 For them to have i m agined their respo n s i b i l i ties a s debts would have been pro­ fo undly s u bversive, since debts are by definition arrangements between equals-at least in the sense that they are equal parties to a contract­ that could and should be rep a i d . 1 9

Politic a l l y , it i s never a particularly good idea t o first tell people they a re your eq u a l s , and then humil iate and degrade them . This i s p r e s u m a b l y why p e a s a n t insu rrecti ons, from Chiapas t o J a p a n , h a v e so regu la rly aimed to wipe out debts, rather than focus on more structu ral issues like caste system s , or even s l a very . 20 The British Raj discov­ ered this to their occasional chagrin when they used debt peonage­ superimposed on the ca ste system-as the basis of their l a b o r system in colonial I n d i a . Perhaps the paradigmatic popular insu rrection was the Deccan riots of 1875 , when indebted fa rmers rose up to seize and systematically destroy the account books of local money-lenders. Debt peonage, it would appear, i s fa r more likely to i n s p i re outrage and col­ lective action than i s a system premised on pure inequality.

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C h i n a :

B u d d h ism and the Economy of I nfi n ite Debt

By Medieval standards, India w a s u n u s u a l for resisting the appeal of the great A x i a l Age religi o n s , but we o bserve the basic pattern : the decline of empire, armies, a n d cash economy, the rise of religious au­ thorities, independent of the state, who win much of their popular legitimacy through their ability to regu late emerging credi t syste m s .

China m i g h t be s a i d to represent the opposite extreme. This w a s the one place w h e r e a late A x i a l A g e attempt to y o k e empire and re­ ligion together was a complete succes s . True, here a s elsewhere, there w a s a n i n i t i a l period of breakdown: a fter the collapse of the Han dy­ nasty around 220 AD, the central state broke apart, cities shrank, coins disappeared, and so o n . But i n China this was only temporary . As M a x W e b e r long a g o pointed out, o n c e one s e t s up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it's a l most impossible to get rid of i t . A n d the Chinese burea ucracy was uniquely effective. Before long, the o l d Han system reemerge d : a centr a l i zed state, run by Confucian scholar-gentry trained i n the literary c l a s s i c s , selected through a national exam system, work­ ing i n meticulously organized national a n d regional bureaus where the money supply, like other economic matters, was contin u a l l y mon itored and regulated . Chinese monetary theory was always chartalist. This w a s partly j ust an effect of size: the empire and its intern a l m a rket were so h uge that foreign trade w a s never especially i mportant; therefore, those running the government were w e l l aware that they could turn p retty much anything into money, simply by i n s i sting that taxes be paid i n that for m .

The two g r e a t threats to the authorities w e r e always the s a m e : the n o m a d i c peoples to t h e north (who t h e y systematica l l y b r i b e d , b u t who nonetheless periodically s w e p t o v e r and conq uered sections o f C h i n a ) and p o p u l a r unrest a n d rebell i o n . T h e latter w a s a l most c o n ­ s t a n t , and on a s c a l e u n k n o w n anywhere else i n h u m a n h i story . There were decades i n Chinese h istory when the rate of recorded peasant uprisings w a s roughly 1 . 8 p e r h o u r.21 What's more, such upris ings were frequently successfu l . Most of the most fa mous Chi nese dynasties that were not the product of barbarian invasion (the Yuan or Q i ng) were origi n a l l y peasant i n surrectio n s (the Han, Tang, Sung, and Ming) . I n no other p a r t of t h e w o r l d do w e s e e anything like thi s . A s a result, Chinese statecraft ultim ately came down to funneling enough resources to the cities to feed the urban population and keep the nomads at

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 5 9

bay, without causing a notoriously contumacious rural population to rise up i n a r m s . The official Confucian ideology of patriarchal au­ thority, equal opportunity, promotion of agriculture, light taxes, and careful govern ment control of merchants seemed expressly designed to appeal to the interests and sensibilities of a (potentially rebellious) rural patriarch . 22

One need h a rdly add that in these circumstances, l i m iting the dep­ redations of the local v i l l age loan s h ark-the traditional bane of rural fa m i l ies-was a constant government concern . Over and over we hear the same fa m i l i a r story : peasants down on their luck, whether due to natural disaster or the need to pay for a parent's funeral-would fal l i n t o t h e hands of predatory lenders, who w o u l d seize their fields and houses, forcing them to work or pay rent i n what h a d once been their own lands; the threat o f rebellion would then drive the government to i n stitute a dram atic program of reform s . One of the first we know about came i n the form of a coup d ' etat i n 9 AD, when a Confucian offic i a l n a med Wang Mang seized the throne to deal ( s o he c l a i med) with a nationwide debt cri s i s . According to procla mations made at the time, the practice of usury h a d caused the effective tax rate (that is, the amount of the average peasant's h a rvest that ended up being carried off by someone else) to rise fro m j ust over 3 percent, to so percent .23 In reaction, Wang Mang i n stituted a program reforming the currency , nation a l i zing l a rge estates, promoting state-run industries-including public granaries-and banning private holding of slaves. Wang Mang also establi shed a state loan agency that would offer i n terest-free fu­ neral loans for up to ninety days for those caught unprepared by the death of relatives, as well as long-term loans of 3 percent monthly or ro percent annual income rates for commercial or agricultural i n vest­ ments . 24 "With this schem e , " one h i storian remarks, " W a ng w a s confi­ dent that all business transactions would be under his scrutiny and the abuse of usury would be forever eradicated. " 25

Needless to say, i t w a s not, and later Chinese h i story i s ful l of s i m i l a r stories : widespread ineq u a l ity and unrest fol l o wed by the ap­ pointment of official commissions of inquiry, region a l debt relief (either blanket amnesties or annul ments of all loans i n which i n terest had ex­ ceeded the princip a l ) , cheap grain loans, fa mine relief, laws against the selling of children . 26 All this became the standard fare of government policy. It was very unevenly successfu l ; i t certainly did not create an egalitarian peasant utop i a , but i t prevented any widespread return to Axial Age condition s .

We a r e used to thinking of such bureaucratic i n terventions­ particularly the monopolies and regulations-as state restriction on

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"the ma rket"-owing to the prevailing prej udice that sees m a rkets as quasi-natural phenomena that emerge by themselves , and governments as having no role other than to squelch or siphon from them . I have repeatedly pointed out how mi staken this i s , but China provides a particularly striking example. The Confucian state may have been the world ' s greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, b u t it actively pro­ moted ma rkets , and as a result, commercial l i fe in China soon became fa r more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world .

This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy w a s overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive i tself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fru its of speculation. What this meant in practice w a s that they were pro-ma rket but anti-capita l i s t .

Again, this s e e m s biza rre, s i n c e w e ' r e used to assuming that capital­ ism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braude! pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as oppos ites . While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of mon ey-hi storically, ways fo r those with a sur­ plus of grain to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M - C ' , for commodity-money-other commodity)-cap italism i s first and foremost the art of using money to get more money ( M - C - M ' ) . Norm a l l y , the easiest way t o do this i s b y esta b l i s h i ng some k i n d of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether mer­ chant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally them­ selves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier fo r them to do s o Y From this perspective, China was fo r most of its h i story the ultimate anti-capitalist market state .28 Unlike l a ter European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed ) . Instead, like their offic i a l s , they s a w them a s destructive parasi tes-th ough , un­ like the usurers, ones whose fund a mentally selfish and antisocial mo­ tivations could still be put to use in certain ways. I n Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a ca reer in the m i l i tary were assumed to be driven l a rgely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people; but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. S i m i l a r l y , merchants were d r i ven by greed and basically im­ mora l ; yet if kept under ca reful a d m i n i strative superv i s i o n , they could be made to serve the public good . 29 Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its hi story, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world-even England

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 6 1

only really overtook i t in perhaps the r82os, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution .30

Confucianism i s not precisely a religion, perhaps; i t i s u s u a l l y con­ sidered more an ethical and philosophical syste m . So C h i n a too could be considered something of a departure from the common Medieval pattern , whereby commerce w a s , a l most everywhere, brought under the control of relig i o n . But it wasn't a complete departure. One need only consider the remarkable economic role of Buddhi s m i n thi s s a m e period. B u d d h i s m had arrived in C h i n a through the Central A s i a c a r a ­ van routes and in its e a r l y days w a s l a rgely a religion promoted by mercha nts, but in the chaos following the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 AD, it began to take popular roots. The Liang (502-557) and Tang ( 6 r 8-907) dyna sties s a w outbreaks of passi o nate religious fervor, in which thousands of rural young people across C h i n a would re­ nounce their far m s , shops, and fam i l i e s to seek ordination a s Buddhist monks and n u n s ; where merchants or landed magnates p ledged thei r entire fo rtunes to t h e propagation of t h e D h a r m a ; b u i l d i ng proj ects hollowed out whole mounta i n s to create bodhisattvas and giant statues of the Buddha; and pageants where monks and devotees ritually b u rned their heads and hands or, i n some instances, set themselves on fire. By the mid-fifth century, there were dozens of such spectacular suicides; they became, as one h i storian put it " a macabre kind of fashion . "3 1

Historians differ over their meaning. Certa inly t h e passions u n ­ leashed provided a dramatic alternative t o t h e staid orthodoxy of the Confucian l i terati , but it's also surprising, to say the least, to see this in a religion promoted above all by the commercial classes . The French Sinologist Jacques Gernet ob serves :

It is clear that these suicides, so contrary to traditional moral­ ity, aimed to redeem the sins of all beings, to compel the gods and men at one and the same time. And they were staged : usually, in the fifth century, a pyre was erected on a mountain. The suicide took place in the presence of a large crowd uttering lamentations and bringing forward rich offerings. People of all social ranks attended the spectacle together. After the fire had burned out, the ashes of the monk were collected and a stupa, a new place of worship, was created to house them.32

Gerner ' s picture of dozens of Christ-like redeemers seems overstat­ ed, but the precise meaning of these suicides was unclear-and widely debated-even in the Middle Ages . Some contemporaries saw them as the ultimate expression of contempt for the body; others as recognition

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of the i l lusory nature of the self a n d all material attachments; yet oth­ ers , as the ultimate form of charity, the giving of that which can only be most precious, o n e ' s very physical existence, as a sacrifice to the benefit of a l l living things; a sentiment that one tenth-century biogra­ pher expressed in the fo llowing verses:

To give away the thing that is difficult to part with, I s the best offering amongst the alms. Let this i mpure and sinful body, Turn into something like a dia mond Y

That i s , an obj ect of eternal value, an investment that can b e a r frui t for all eternity.

I draw attention to this because this sentiment provides a n elegant illustration of a problem that seems to have first appea red in the world with notions of pure c h a rity that always seemed to accompany Axial Age religions, and which provided endless philosophical conundru m s . In human economies , it d o e s not a p p e a r to h a v e occurred to anyone that any act could be either purely selfish o r p u rely altruistic. As I noted in chapter five, an act of absol ute selfless giving can only also be absol utely antisocial-hence in a w a y , i n h u m a n . I t is merely the mirror image of an act of theft or even murder; hence, i t makes a certa i n sort of sense that suicide be conceived as the ultim ate selfless gift . Yet this is the door that necessarily opens a s soon as one develops a notion of "profit" and then tries to conceive its opposite.

This ten sion seems to hang over the economic life of Medieval ·Chinese Buddhism, w h i c h , true to its commercial origins, retained a striking tendency to employ the la nguage of the m a rketplace. " On e purchases felicity, and sells o n e ' s sins , " wrote one m o n k , " j ust as in commerc i a l operati o n s . "34 Nowhere w a s this so true a s in those sch o o l s , such as the School of the Three Stages, that adopted the notion of " k armic debt"-th at each of the sins of one's accumul ated past lives continues as a debt needing to be discharged . An obscure and unusual view in classical Indian Buddh i s m , the notion of karmic debt took on a powerfu l new life in C h i n a . 31 A s one Three S tages text puts it, we all know that in solvent debtors will be reborn a s a n i m a l s or slaves; but in reality, we are a l l insolvent debtors, because acquiring the money to repay o u r temporal debts necessarily means acquire new, spiritual ones, since every means of acquiring wealth w i l l necessarily involve exploit­ ing, d a maging, and causing suffering to other living beings.

Some use their power and authority as officials in order to bend the law and seize wealth . Some prosper in the marketplace . . .

T H E M I D D L E A G E S

They engage in an excess of lies and cheat and extort prof­ its from others . Still others, fa rmers , burn the mountains and marshes, flood the fields, plough and mill, destroying the nests and bu rrows of animals . . .

There is no avoiding the fact of our past debts, and it is difficult to comprehend the number of separate lives it would require if you wanted to pay them one by one.36

2 6 3

As Gernet remarks, the idea of l i fe as an endless bu rden of debt would surely have struck a chord with Chinese v i l l agers, for whom this was a l l too often literally true; but, a s h e a l s o points out, like their counterparts in ancient Israel, they were also fa m i l i a r with that sense of sudden l i beration that came with official amnesti e s . There w a s a way to achieve that too . A l l that w a s requi red was to make regular donations to some monastery ' s Inexhaustible Treasury. The moment one does so, the debts fro m every one of one's past lives are instantly blotted out. The author even provides a little parable, not unlike Je­ sus's parable of the ungra teful servant, but fa r more opti misti c . How, it might be asked, would a poor m a n ' s tiny contribution possibly have such cosmic effects ?

Answer: In a parable it is like a poor man bu rdened by a debt of one thousand strings of coins to another person . He always suffers from his debt, and the poor man is afraid whenever the debt- master comes to collect.

He visits the rich man's house and confesses he is beyond the time-limit and begs forgiveness for his offense--he is poor and without a station in life. He tells him that each day he makes a single coin he will return it to the rich man . On hear­ ing this, the rich man is very pleased and forgives him for being overd ue; moreover, the poor man is not dragged away to j a i l .

Giving t o t h e Inexhaustible Storehouse is also l i k e this .37

One might almost call this salvation on the installment plan-but the implication i s that the payments shall be made, like the interest payments on the wealth when it is subsequently loaned out, for all eternity.

Other schools concentrated not on karmic debt, but on one's debt to one's pa rents . Where Confuci a n s built their system of moral ity above a l l on fi l i a l p i ety to fathers, C h i nese Buddhi sts were p r i m a rily concerned with mothers; with the care and suffering requi red in rais­ ing, feeding, and educating children. A mothe r ' s kindness i s unli mited, her selflessness absolute; th i s was seen to be embodied above a l l in the

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act of breastfeed ing, the fact that mothers transform their very flesh and blood into milk; they feed their chi ldren with their own bodies. In doing s o , however, they allow unlimited love to be precisely quantified . One author calculated that the average infant absorbs preci sely 180 pecks of mother's milk in its first three years of life , and this consti­ tutes its debt as a n adult. The figure soon became canonical. To repay this milk debt, or indeed one's debt to one's parents more generally, was simply impossible. "If you stacked up j ewels from the ground up to the twenty-eighth heaven , " wrote one Buddhist author, " it would not compare" with the value of your parent's nurturance.38 Even if you were to "cut your own flesh to offer her three times a day for fo ur bil­ lion years , " wrote another, " i t would not pay back even a single d a y " of what your m o t h e r did f o r y o u . 3 9

The s o l u t i o n , however, i s the s a m e : d o n a t i n g m o n e y t o the Inex­ haustible Treasuries. The result was an e l a borate cycle of debts and forms of redemption . A man begins with a n unpayable milk-debt. The only thing of comparable value i s the Dharma, the Buddhist truth it­ self. One can thus repay o n e ' s parents by bringing them to Buddhism; indeed, this can be done even a fter death , when one's mother w i l l oth­ erwise wind up a s a hungry ghost i n h e l l . I f one makes a donation to the Inexhaustible Treasuries in her n a m e , sutras will be recited for her; she will be delivered; the money, i n the meantime, will be put partly to work as charity, as pure gift, but partly, too, a s in I n d i a , as i nterest­ bearing l o a n s , earm arked for specific purposes for the furtherance of Buddhist education, ritu a l , or monastic l ife .

The Chinese Buddhist approach to charity was nothing if not mul­ tifaceted . Festi v a l s often led to vast outpourings of contri bution s , with wealthy adherents vying with one another i n generosity, often driving their entire fortunes to the monasteries, in the forms of oxcarts laden with millions of strings of cash-a kind of economic self-immol ation that paralleled the spectacular monastic suicides. Their contributions swelled the Inexhaustible Treasuries . Some would be given to the needy, particularly in times of hardship . Some would be loaned. One practice that hovered between charity and business was providing peasants with a lternatives to the local moneylender. Most monasteries h a d attendant pawnshops where the local poor could place some valuable posses­ sion-a robe, a couch, a mi rror-in hock in exchange for low-interest loans .4° F i n a l l y , there was the business of the monastery itself: that por­ tion of the Inexhaustible Treasury turned over to the management of lay brothers, and either put out at loan or invested. Since monks were not allowed to eat the products of their own fields, the fruit or grain h a d to be put on the market, further swelling monastic revenues . Most

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 6 5

monasteries came to be surrounded not only by commercial fa rms but veritable industrial complexes of o i l presses, flour mills, shops, and hostels, often with thousands of bonded workers . 4 1 At the s a m e time, the Treasuries themselves became-as Gerner w a s perhaps the first to point out-the worl d ' s first genuine fo rms of concen trated finance capi­ t a l . They were, after all, enormous concentrations of wealth managed by what were in effect monastic corporation s , which were constantly seeking new opportunities fo r profitable investment. They even s h a red the quintessential capitalist imperative of conti nual growth; the Trea­ suries h a d to exp a n d , since according to Mahayana doctrine, genu­ ine l i beration would not be possible until the whole world embra ced the Dharma .42

This was precisely the situation-huge concentrations of capital i n ­ terested in nothing more than profit-th at Confucian economic policy w a s supposed to prevent. S t i l l , it took some time fo r Chinese govern­ ments to recogn ize the threa t . Government attitudes veered back and fo rth . A t first, espec i a l l y in the chaotic years of the early Middle Ages, monks were welcomed-even given generous land grants and provided with convict laborers to reclaim fo rests and marshes, and tax-exempt status for their business enterprises .41 A few emperors converted, and while most of the bureaucracy kept the monks at a r m ' s length, Bud­ d h i s m became espec i a l l y popular with court women, a s well as with eunuchs and many scions of wealthy fa milies. A s time went o n , though , admini strators turned from seeing monks as a boon to rural society to its potential ruinati o n . Already, by 5II AD, there were decrees condemn­ ing monks for diverting grain that was supposed to be used for charita­ b l e purposes to high-interest l o a n s , and altering debt contracts-a gov­ ernment commission had to be appointed to review the accounts and n u l l ify any loans in which interest w a s found to have exceeded princi­ pal. In 713 AD we have another decree, confiscating two Inexhaustible Treasuries of the Th ree Stages sect, whose members they accused of fraudulent solicitation .44 Before long there were major campaigns of govern ment repre s s i o n , at first often lim ited to certain regi o n s , but over time, more often empire-wide. During the most severe, carried out in 845 AD, a total of 4,6oo monasteries were razed a long with their shops and mills, 26o,ooo monks and nuns forcibly defrocked a n d returned to their fa m i l ies-but at the same time, according to govern ment reports, 15o,ooo temple serfs released fro m bondage.

Whatever the real rea sons behind the waves of repression ( a n d t h e s e w e r e no doubt many) , the offici a l r e a s o n w a s a l w a y s t h e s a m e : a n e e d to restore the m o n e y s u p p l y . The mona steries w e r e beco ming

2 6 6 D E B T

so l a rge, and so rich, administrators i n s i s ted, that China w a s simply running out of meta l :

The great repressions o f Buddhism under the Chou emperor Wu between 574 and 577, under Wu-tsung in 842-845 , and finally in 955 , presented themselves primarily as measures of economic recovery: each of them provided an opportunity for the imperial government to procure the necessary copper for the minting of new coins.45

One reason is that monks appear to have been system atically melt­ ing down strings of coins, often hundreds of thousands at a time, to b u i l d colossal copper or even gilded copper statues of the Buddha­ along with other o b j ects such as bells and copper chimes, or even such extravagances as mi rrored h a l l s or gilded copper roof tiles. The result, according to official commissions of inquiry, was economi­ cally disastro u s : the price of metals would soar, coinage d i sappear, and rural marketplaces cease to function, even a s those rural people whose children had not beco me monks often fel l deeper into debt to the monasteries .

I I I I I

It perhaps stands to reason that Chinese Budd h i s m , a religion of mer­ chants that then took popular roots, should have developed in this di­ recti o n : a genuine theology of debt, even perhaps a practice of absol ute self-sacrifice, of abandoning everything, one's fortune or even one's l i fe , that ultimately led to collectively m anaged finance capita l . The reason that the result seems so weird, so ful l of paradoxes, i s that it i s again an attempt to apply the logic of exchange to questions of Eternity.

Recall a n idea fro m earlier in the book: exchange, unless i t ' s an instantaneous cash transaction, creates debts. Debts l inger over time. If you i magine a l l human relations as exchange, then insofar as people do have ongoing relations with one another, those relations are l aced with debt and sin. The only way out i s to annihilate the debt, but then soc i a l r e l a t i o n s vanish too. This i s q u i t e i n accord with Buddhi s m , w h o s e u l ­ timate a i m i s indeed the attainment of " emptiness , " absolute l i beratio n , the a n n i h i l ation of a l l human and materi a l attach ments , s i nce t h e s e a r e all ultim ately c a u s e s of suffering. For Mahayana B u d d h i s t s , however, absol ute liberation cannot be achieved by any one being independently; the l i beration of each depends on a l l the others; therefore, until the end of time, such matters are i n a certain sense always i n suspen s i o n .

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 6 7

I n the meanti me, exchange dominates: " O ne purchases felicity, and sells one's sins, j ust as i n commercial operation s . " Even acts of charity and self-sacrifice are not purely genero u s ; one i s purc h a s i ng " merit" from the bodhi sattv a s . 46 The notion of i n finite debt comes i n when this logic s l a m s up against the A b solute, or, one might perhaps better say, against something that u tterly defies the logic of exchange. Because there are things that d o . This would expl a i n , for i n stance, the odd urge to first quantify the exact amount of milk one has absorbed at o n e ' s mother's b r e a s t , and t h e n to say that there i s no conceivable w a y t o repay i t . Exchange i m p lies interaction between e q u i v a l e n t b e i n g s . Your mother, on the other hand, i s not a n equivalent being. She created you out of her own flesh. This is exactly the point that I suggested the Vedic authors were subtly trying to make when they talked about "debts" to the god s : of course you carinot real l y " p ay your debt to the u n i verse"-that would imply that ( r ) you and (2) everything that exists (including you) are i n some sense equivalent entities. This is clearly absurd. The closest you can come to repayment i s to simply recognize that fact. Such recogn ition i s the true meaning o f sacrifice. Like Ros­ pabe's origi n a l money, a sacrifici a l offering i s not a way to pay a debt, but a way to acknowledge the impossibility of the idea that there could ever be repayment:

The parallel was not missed in certain mythological tr'aditions . According to one fa mous Hindu myth, two gods, the brothers Kartikeya and Ganesha, had a quarrel over who should be the first to marry . Their mother Parvati suggested a contest: the winner would be the one to most quickly circle the entire universe. Kartikeya set off on the back of a giant peacock . It took him three years to transverse the limits of the cosmos . Ganesha bided his time, then, finally, walked in a circle around his mother, remarking, " You are the universe to me. "

I ' ve a l s o argued that any system of exchange is always necessarily founded on something else, something that, i n its social manifesta­ tion at least, i s ultim ately communi s m . With a l l those things that we treat as etern a l , that we assume w i l l a l w ays be there-our mother ' s love, true friends h i p , sociality, humanity, belonging, t h e exi stence o f t h e cosmos-no calculation i s necessary, o r even ultim ately possible; i n sofar a s there i s give and take, they fol l o w completely d i fferent prin­ ciples. What, then, h appens to such a b s o lute and u n l i mited phenomena when one tries to imagine the world as a set of transactions-as ex­ change? Generally, one of two things. We either ignore or deify them.

2 6 8 D E B T

(Mothers, and c a regiving women in genera l , are a c l a s s i c case in point . ) O r we do both . What we treat a s eternal in o u r actual relations with one another vanishes a n d reappears as an a b stractio n , an a b s o l u te.47 In the case of Buddhism, this w a s framed as the inexhaustible merit of bodhisatt-vas, who exist, in a certa in sense, outside of time. They are a t once the model fo r the Inexhaustible Treasuries, and a l s o their practical fo undation: one can only repay o n e ' s endless karmic debt, or o n e ' s i n finite mi lk-debt, by drawing on this equ a l l y infinite pool of redemptio n , w h i c h , in turn, becomes the b a s i s for the actual material funds of the monasteries , which are equally eternal-a pragmatic fo rm of communism, in fact, since they were vast pools of wealth col lec­ tively owned and col lectively ma naged : the center of vast proj ects of human cooperation, which were assu med to be s i m i l a rly etern a l . Yet a t the same time--here I t h i n k Gernet is right-this communi s m became the basis, in turn, of something very much like capita l i s m . The rea­ son was, above all, the need fo r constant exp ansion. Everything-even charity-w as an opportunity to proselytize; the Dharma had to grow, ultimately, to encompass everyone and everyth ing, in order to effect the salvation of all living beings.

I I I I I

The M i d d le Ages were ma rked by a general move toward abstracti o n : r e a l g o l d and s i l v e r e n d e d up l a rgely in c h u rches, monasteries , a n d temples, money became virtual again, and a t the same time, the ten­ dency everywhere was to set up overarching moral i n stitutions meant to regulate the process a n d , i n particular, to establish certa i n protec­ tions fo r debto r s .

China was u n u s u a l in that it w a s one p l ace w h e r e an A x i a l Age empire managed to survive--though a t first, only barely. Chinese gov­ ernments d i d manage to keep coins in circulation in most places most of the time. This w a s made easier by their r e l i a n c e e x c l u s i v e l y on s m a l l - d e n o m i n a t i o n coins made of bronze. Even so, it c l e a r l y took enormous effo r t s .

A s u s u a l , we d o n ' t know a lot about how everyday economic transactions took place, but what we do know suggests that in small­ scale transacti o n s , coins were probably most often used i n dealing w i th strange r s . As elsewhere, local shopkeepers and merchants extended cred i t . Most accounts seem to have been kept through the use of tally sticks, strikingly similar to those used in England, except that rather than h a zelwood they were usually made of a split piece of notched b a m b o o . Here, too, the creditor took one h a l f, and the debtor held the

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 6 9

other; they were j oined at the moment of repayment, and often broken afterw a rd to mark the cancellation of the debt .48 To what degree were they transfera ble ? We don't really know. Most of what we do know is fro m casual references in texts that are mainly a bout something e l s e : anecdotes , j okes, and poetic a l l u s i o n s . The g r e a t collection of T a o i s t wisdom, the Leizi, p r o b a b l y written d u r i n g the Han d y n a s t y , contains one such :

There was a man of Sung who was strolling in the street and picked up a half tally someone had lost . He took it home and stored it away, and secretly counted the indentations of the broken edge . He told a neighbor: " I shall be rich any day now. "49

Rather like someone who finds a key and figures " j ust as soon as I can figure out which lock . . . "50 Another story tells of h o w Liu Bang, a bibulous local constable and future founder of the Han dynasty, used to go on a l l - n ight drinking binges, running up enormous tabs. Once, while he lay collap sed i n a drunken stupor in a wine-shop, the owner saw a dragon hovering over h i s head-a sure sign of future greatness-and i m mediately " broke the tally , " forgiving him his ac­ cumulated drinking debts .51

Tallies weren ' t j u st used fo r loans, but for any sort of contract­ which is why early paper contracts also had to be cut in half and one half kept by each partyY With paper contracts, there w a s a definite tendency for the credito r ' s half to function as an I O U and thus be­ come transferable. By 8o6 AD, for instance, right around the apogee of Chinese Buddhi s m , merchants moving tea over long d i stances from the fa r south of the country and offici a l s transporting tax payments to the capital, all of them concerned with the dangers of carrying bullion over long distances, began to deposit their money with bankers i n the capital and devised a system of promi ssory notes. They were c a l led "Flying C a s h , " also divided in h a l f, like tallies, and redeemable for cash in their branches in the provinces. They quickly started passing from hand to hand and operated something like currency. The govern­ ment first tried to fo rbid their use, then a year or two l ater-a nd this became a fa m i l i a r pattern in China-when it realized that i t could not suppress them , switched gears and established a bureau empowered to issue such notes themselves .53

By the early Song dyna sty ( 96o-1279 AD ) , local banking operations all over China were running s i m i l a r operations, accepting cash and bullion for safekeeping and allowing depositors to use their receipts as

2 7 0 D E B T

promissory notes, as well as trading in government coupons for salt and tea . Many of these notes came to circulate as de facto money .54 The govern ment, as u s u a l , first tried to ban the practice, then control it (granting a monopoly to sixteen leading merchants ) , then, finally, set up a government monopoly-the Bureau of Exchange Med i u m , estab­ l i s hed i n 1023-a nd before long, aided by the newly invented printing press, w a s operating facto ries in several cities employing thousands of workers and producing litera lly millions of notes .55

At first, this paper money w a s meant to circulate for a l i m ited time ( n otes would expire after two, then three, then seven years ) , and was redeemable in bullion . Over time, especi ally a s the Song came under increasing m i l i tary pressure, the temptation to simply print money with little or no backup became overwhelming-and, moreover, Chinese governments were rarely completely w i l l i ng to accept their own pa­ per money fo r tax purposes. Combine this with the fact that the b i l l s w e r e worthless outside China, and i t ' s rather surprising that t h e system worked at a l l . Certa inly, inflation was a constant problem and the money would have to be recal led and reissued . Occasionally the whole system would break down, but then people would resort to their own expedients : " p rivately i s sued tea checks, noodle checks, b a m boo tallies, wine tallies, etc. "56 Still, the Mongo l s , who ruled China from 1 271 to 1368 AD, chose to maintain the system, and it w a s only a b andoned i n t h e seventeenth century.

This i s important to note because the conventional account tends to represent China ' s experiment with paper money as a fa i l ure, even, for Meta l l ists, proof that "fiat money , " backed only by state power, will always eventually collapse .57 This is especially odd, since the cen­ turies when paper money was in use are usually considered the most economically dynamic in Chinese h i story. Surely, if the United States government was eventually forced to abandon the use of federal re­ serve notes in 2400 AD, no one would be arguing that this showed that the very idea was always intrinsically unworkable. Nonetheles s, the m a i n point I'd like to emphasize here i s that terms like " fiat money , " however common, a r e deceptive. Almost a l l of the new forms o f paper money that emerged were not origi n a l l y crea ted by governments at all; they were simply ways of recogn izing and expanding the use of credi t instruments that emerged from everyday economic transacti o n s . I f it was only China t h a t developed p a p e r money in t h e M i d d l e Ages, this was l a rgely because only i n China was there a government large and powerful enough, but a l s o , sufficiently suspicious of its mercantile classes, to feel it had to take cha rge of such operations.

T h e N e a r W e s t :

Islam ( Capita l as Cred it)

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 7 1

Prices depend o n the will of Allah; it is h e who raises and lowers them .

-Attri buted to the

Prophet M o h a m med

The p rofit of each p a rtner must be in p ropo rtion to the s h a re of each in the adventure.

I s l a m i c l e g a l p recept

For most of the Middle Ages, the economic nerve center of the world econ omy and the source of its most dramatic financial innovations w a s neither China nor India, but t h e W e s t , which, fro m the perspective of the rest of the world , meant the world of Islam. D u ring most of this period, Christendo m , lodged i n the declining empire of Byzantium and the obscure semi-barbarous principal ities of Europe, was l a rgely insig­ nificant.

Since people who live in Western Europe have so long been i n t h e habit of thinking of I s l a m as t h e v e r y definition of "the E a s t , " i t ' s e a s y to forget t h a t , from the perspective of any other great tradi­ tion, the difference between Christianity and Islam i s a l most negligi ble. One need only pick up a book o n , say, Medieval Islamic philosophy to di scover di sputes between the Baghdad Aristoteleans and the neo­ Pythagoreans in Basra, or Persian Neo-Platoni sts-essentially, scholars doing the same work of trying to square the revealed religion tradi­ tion begin ning with Abraham and Moses with the categories of Greek philosophy, and doing so in a larger context of mercantile capita l i s m , universalistic missionary religi o n , scientific ratio n a l i s m , poetic celebra­ tions of romantic love, and periodic waves of fascination with mystical wisdom fro m the East.

From a world-historical perspective, it seems much more sensible to see Jud a i s m , Christianity, and I s l a m a s three different manifestations of the same great Western intel lectu a l traditio n , which fo r most of human history has centered on Mesopota mia and the Levant, extend­ ing into Europe as far as G reece and into Africa as fa r a s Egypt, and sometimes fa rther west across the Mediterranean or down the N i l e . Economically, most of Europe w a s u n t i l perhaps t h e H i g h M i d d l e Ages

2 7 2 D E B T

in exactly the same s i tuation as most of Afri c a : p l ugged into the l a rger world econ o m y , if at a l l , largely a s an exporter of slaves, raw materia l s , and t h e occasional exotica ( amber, elephant t u s k s . . . ) , and importer of manufactured goods ( C h i nese silks and porce l a i n , Indian calicoes, Arab steel ) . To get a sense of comparative economic development ( even if the examples are somewhat scattered over time) , consider the fol­ lowing table :58

Po pu l a t i o n s and Tax Reve n u e , 350 BC-1200 AD

Population Revenue Revenue per Head

Millions Tons of Silver Grams of Silver

Persia, c. BC 350 I7 697 4I

Egypt, c. B C 2oo 7 3 84 55

Rome, c. r AD so 8 25 I7

Rome, c. rso AD so r , oso 2I

Byzantiu m , c. 850 AD 10 rs o 15

Abbasids, c. 8so AD 26 1 , 260 48

T' ang, c. 8so AD so 2 ,145 43

France, 1221 AD 8 .s 20.3 2.4

England, 1203 AD 2.5 1 ! .5 4 · 6

What's more, for most of the Middle Ages, I s l a m was not only the core o f Western civilization; it was its expansive edge, working its way into India, expanding in Africa and Europe, sending missionaries and winning converts across the Indian Ocea n .

T h e prev a i l ing I s l a mic attitude toward l a w , govern ment, a n d eco­ nomic matters was the exact opposite of that prevalent i n C h i n a . Con­ fuc i a n s were suspicious of governance through strict codes of law, preferring to rely on the inherent sense of j ustice of the cultivated scholar-a scholar who was simply a s s u med to also be a government offic i a l . Medieval I s l a m , on the other hand, enth u s i a stically embraced law, which w a s seen as a religious institution derived from the Prophet, but tended to view government, more often than not, a s an unfortunate necessity, an institution that the truly pious would do better to avoid.59

I n part this was because of the pecul i a r nature of Islamic govern­ ment. The Arab m i litary leaders who, after Moha mmed ' s death in 6 3 2 AD, conquered the Sassanian empire and esta b l i shed the Abbasid C a l iphate, always continued to see themselves as people of the desert,

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 7 3

and never felt entirely part of the urban civilizations they had come to rule. This discomfort was never quite overcome-on either side. It took the bulk of the population severa l centuries to convert to the conquero r ' s religion, and even when they d i d , they never seem to have rea lly identified with their rulers . Government was seen a s mil itary power-necessary , perh aps, defend the fa ith, but fu ndamentally exte­ rior to society .

In part, too, it was because of the peculiar a l l i ance between mer­ chants and c o m m o n folk that came to be a ligned against them . After Caliph al-M a ' m u m ' s abortive attempt to set up a theocracy i n 832 A D , the govern ment took a hands-off position o_n questions of religion. T h e v a r i o u s schools of I s l a m i c law w e r e free to create t h e i r o w n educational institutions and maintain their own separate system of religious j ustice. Cruc i a l l y , it was the ulema, the legal scholars, who were the principal agents in the conversion of the bulk of the empire ' s population to I s l a m in Mesopota m i a , Syri a , Egypt, and North Africa in those same years .60 But-l ike the elders in charge of guilds, civic associations, commerc i a l s o d a l i t i e s , and religious brotherhoods-they did t h e i r b e s t to keep t h e government, with its a r m ies and ostentation, at a r m ' s length . 61 " The best princes are those who visit religious teacher s , " one proverb put it, "the worst religious teachers are the those who a l l ow themselves to be visited by princes . "62 A Medieval Turkish story brings i t home even more pointed l y :

T h e king once summoned Nasruddin t o court. "Tell m e , " said the king, "you are a mystic, a philosopher,

a man of unconven tional understandings . I have become in­ terested in the issue of value. It' s an interesting phi losophical question. How does one establish the true worth of a person, or an obj ect ? Take me for exa mple. If I were to ask you to esti mate my value, what would you say ? "

" O h , " Nasruddin said, " I 'd say about two hundred dinars. " The emperor was fl ab bergasted . "What ? ! But this belt I ' m

wearing is worth two hundred dinars ! " " I know," said Nasruddin. " Actua lly, I was taking the value

of the belt into consideration . "

This d i s j u ncture had profound economic effects . It meant that the Caliphate, and later Muslim empires, could operate in many ways much like the old Axial Age empi res-creating professional armies, waging wars of conquest, capturing slaves, melting down loot and distributing it in the form of coins to soldiers and offici a l s , demanding

2 7 4 D E B T

that those coins be rendered back as taxes-but at the same time, with­ out having nearly the same effects on ordinary people ' s lives.

O ver the course of the wars of exp ansion, for example, enormous quantities of gold and s i lver were indeed looted fro m palaces, temples, and mon asteries and stamped into coinage, allowing the C a liphate to produce gold dinars and silver dirhams of rem arkable purity-that i s , w i t h next to no fiduciary element, t h e v a l u e of e a c h c o i n corresponding a l most precisely to its weight i n precious metal .63 A s a result, they were able to pay their troops extraordinarily wel l . A soldier i n the C a l i p h ' s army, f o r e x a m p l e , received almost four t i m e s the wages o n c e received by a Roman legionary.64 We can, perha p s , speak of a kind of " m i l itary­ coinage-slavery" complex here-but it exi sted i n a kind of bubble. Wars of expansion, and trade with Europe and Africa, did produce a fa irly constant flow of s l aves, but in dramatic contrast to the ancient world, very few of them ended up laboring i n farms or worksh o p s . Most ended up as decoration i n the h o u s e s of the rich, or, increasingly over time, as soldiers. Over the course of the Abbasid dynasty (75o- 125 8 AD) in fact, the empire came to rely, for its m i litary forces , almost exclusively on M a m l u k s , highly trained military slaves captured or purcha sed fro m the Turkish steppes. The policy of employing slaves as soldiers w a s maintained by a l l of the I s l a m i c successor states, includ­ ing the Mugh a l s , and culminated i n the fa mous Mamluk sultanate i n Egypt i n the thi rteenth century, but historically, i t was unprecedented . 65 In most times and p l aces slaves are, for obvious reasons, the very last people to be a l lowed anywhere near weapon s . Here i t was system atic. But i n a strange way, it also made perfect sense: i f s l aves are, by defini­ tion, people who have been severed from society, this w a s the logical consequence of the w a l l created between society and the Medieval I s l a m i c state.66

Religious teachers appear to have done everything they could to prop up the w a l l . One reason for the recourse to slave soldiers was their tendency to di scourage the faithful from serving i n the m i litary ( since i t m i g h t m e a n fighting fel l o w believers ) . The l e g a l system t h a t t h e y created also ensured that it was effectively impossible for M u s l i m s-or for that m a tter Christian or Jewish subj ects of the Caliphate-to be reduced to s l avery . Here a l -Wahid seems to h ave been l a rgely correct. I s l a m i c l a w t o o k a i m at j ust about a l l t h e most notorious a b u s e s of e a r l i e r , A x i a l A g e societie s . S lavery through kidnapping, j udicial p u n i s h m e n t , d e b t , and the exposure or sale of children, e v e n through the voluntary sale of one's own person-al l were forbidden, or rendered unenforceable.67 Likewise with a l l the other forms of debt peonage that h a d loomed over the heads of poor Middle Eastern farmers and their fam i l i es

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 7 5

si nce the dawn of recorded h i story. F i n a l l y , I s l a m strictly forbade usu­ ry, which it interpreted to mean any arrangement i n which money or a com modity w a s lent at interest, for any purpose whatsoever .68

In a w a y , one can see the esta b l i s hment of I s l a m i c courts as the ulti mate triumph of the patriarchal rebel lion that had begun so many thousands of years before: of the ethos of the desert or the steppe, real or i m agined , even as the fa i thful did their best to keep the heavily armed descendants of actual nomads confined to their camps and p a l ­ aces . It w a s made p o s s i b l e by a profound s h i ft in class a l l i ances . T h e g r e a t urban c i v i l i z a t i o n s of t h e M i d d l e East had always b e e n dominat­ ed by a de facto a l l i ance between administrators and merchants , both of whom kept the rest of the population either in debt peonage or in constant peril of fa l l i ng into i t . In converting to Islam, the commerc i a l c l a s s e s , so l o n g the arch-vi l l a i n s i n t h e e y e s of ordinary fa rmers and townsfo l k , effectively agreed to change sides, abandon a l l their most h ated practices, and become i nstead the leaders of a society that now defined itself aga inst the state.

It w a s possible because from the beginning, Islam h a d a positive view toward commerce. Mohammed h i m self had begun h i s adult l i fe as a merchant; and no I s l a m i c thinker ever treated the honest pursuit of profit as itself intrinsically i m m o ra l or inimical to faith. Neither did the prohibitions against u sury-which for the most part were scrupulously enforced , even i n the case o f commerc i a l loans-in any sense mitigate against the growth of commerce, or even the development of complex credit i n struments.69 To the contrary, the early centuries of the Caliph­ ate saw an immedi ate efflorescence in both .

Profits were still possible because I s l a m i c j urists were careful to allow for certain service fees , and other considerations-nota b l y , al­ lowing goods bought on credit to be priced s l ightly higher than those bought for cash-that ensured that bankers and traders still h a d an incentive to provide cred it services .70 Still, these incentives were never enough to allow banking to become a full-time occup ation: instead, almost any merchant operating on a sufficiently large scale could be expected to combine banking with a host of other moneymaking activi­ ties . A s a result, credi t i n struments soon became so essential to trade that a l most anyone of prominence was expected to keep most of his or her wealth on deposit, and to make everyday transactions, not by counting out coins, but by inkpot and paper. Prom i s s ory notes were cal led sakk, "check s " , or ruq ' a, " notes . " Checks could bounce. One German histori a n , picking through a multitude of old Arabic l i terary sources, recounts that:

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About 900 a great man paid a poet in this way, only the banker refused the check, so that the disappoi nted poet composed a verse to the effect that he would gladly pay a m i l l i on on the same plan. A patron of the same poet and singer (936) dur­ ing a concert wrote a check in his favor on a banker for five hundred dinars . When paying, the banker gave the poet to un­ derstand that it was custom ary to charge one dirham discount on each dinar, i . e . , about ten per cent. Only if the poet would spend the afternoon and evening with him, he would make no deduction . . .

By about moo the banker had made himself indispensable in Basra: every trader had his banking account, and paid only in checks on his bank in the bazaar . . . . 7 1

Checks c o u l d be countersigned and tran sferred , and letters o f cred­ i t (suftaja) could travel across the Indian Ocean o r the Sahara .72 I f they did not turn into de facto paper money, it was because, si nce they oper­ ated completely independent o f the state (they could not be used to pay taxes, for instance) , their value was b ased almost entirely on trust and reputation .73 Appeal to the I s l a m i c courts was generally voluntary o r mediated by merchant guilds and c i v i c association s . In s u c h a context, having a famous poet compose verses making fun of you for bouncing a check was probably the ulti m a te d i s aster.

When it came to finance, instead o f interest- bearing investments , the p referred approach w a s p a rtnerships, where (often) one party would supply the capita l , the other carry out the enterprise. Instead o f fixed return, the investor would receive a s h a re of the profits . Even labor a rrangements were often organized on a profit-sharing b a s i s .74 In a l l such matters, reputation w a s crucial-in fact, one lively debate i n early commercial l a w w a s over the question o f whether reputation could (like land, labor, money, o r other resources) itself b e consid­ ered a form of capita l . I t sometimes happened that merchants would form pa rtnerships with no capital at a l l , b u t only their good names. This was cal led " p a rtnership o f good reputation . " As one legal scholar explained:

As for the credit pa rtnership, it is also cal led the "partnership of the penniless " (sharika al-mafalis) . It comes about when two people fo rm a partnership without any capital in order to buy on credit and then sel l . It is designated by this name partner­ ship of good reputations because their capital consi sts of their

T H E M I D D L E A G E S

status and good reputations ; for credit is extended only to him who has a good reputation among people.75

2 7 7

Some legal scholars obj ected to the idea that such a contract could be considered lega lly binding, since i t w a s not based on an initial out­ lay of materi a l capit a l ; others considered i t legitimate, provided the p a rtners make an equitable p a rtition of the pro fits-since reputation cannot be quantified . The remarkable thing here i s the tacit recog­ nition that, i n a credit economy that operates l a rgely without state mecha n i s m s of enforcement ( without police to a r rest those who com­ mit fraud, o r b a i l i ffs to seize a debtor's property ) , a significant part of the value of a p r o m i s sory note i s indeed the good name of the signa­ tory. As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out i n describing a s i m i l a r economy of t r u s t in contemporary Algeri a : i t ' s quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor .76

These networks of trust, in turn, were l a rgely responsible for the spread of I s l a m over the ca ravan routes of Central Asia and the S a h a r a , and especi a l l y a c r o s s the Indian O c e a n , t h e main c o n d u i t of Medieval world trade. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the Indian Ocean ef­ fectively became a M u s l i m lake. M u s l i m traders appear to have p layed a key role i n establishing the principle that kings and their armies should keep their quarrels on dry land; the seas were to be a zone of peaceful commerce. A t the same time, Islam gained a toehold i n trade emporia from Aden to the Moluccas because I s l a m i c courts were so perfectly suited to p rovide those functions that made such ports at­ tractive: means of estab l is h ing contracts, recovering debts, creating a banking sector capable of redeeming or transferring letters of credit.77 The level of trust thereby c reated between merchants in the great M a ­ lay entrepot M a lacca, gateway to t h e s p i c e i s l a n d s of Indonesi a , w a s legendary. T h e c i t y had S w a h i l i , A r a b , Egypti a n , Eth i o p i a n , a n d Arme­ nian q u a rters , a s well a s q uarters for merchants from different regions of India, China, and Southeast Asia. Yet it was said that its merchants shunned enforceable contracts , p referring to seal transactions " with a handshake and a glance at heaven . "78

In Islamic society, the merchant became not j ust a respected figure, but a kind of pa ragon : like the warrior, a man of honor able to pursue fa r-flung adventures; unlike h i m , able to do so i n a fa shion d a m aging to no one. The French h istorian Maurice Lombard draws a striking, if perhaps rather idealized, picture of h i m " i n his stately town-house, surrounded by s laves and h angers-on, in the midst of h i s collections of book s , travel souven i r s , and rare ornaments , " along with h i s ledgers, correspondence, and letters of credit, skilled in the arts of double-entry

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book-keeping along with secret codes and ciphers, giving a l m s to the poor, supporting p l aces of worship, perhaps, dedicating h i m self to the writing of poetry, while sti l l able to translate his general cred itworthi ­ n e s s into great capital reserves by appealing t o fa mily a n d partners.79 Lombard ' s picture is to some degree inspi red by the fa mous Thousand and One Nights description of Sindbad, who, having spent his youth in peri lous mercantile ventures to faraway lands, finally reti red , rich beyond dreams, to spend the rest of h i s l i fe amidst gardens and dancing girl s , telling tall tales of his adventure s . Here's a glimpse, from the eyes of a humble porter (also named Sindbad) when first sum moned to see h i m by the m a ster ' s page:

He found i t to be a goodl y man sion , radiant and ful l of m a j es­

ty, t i l l he brought him to a grand s i tting room wherein he saw a company of nobles and great lords seated at tables garnished

with a l l manner of flowers and sweet-scented herbs, besides

great plenty of d a inty viands and fruits dried and fresh and

confections and wines of the choicest vintages . There a l so were

instruments of music and m i rth and lovely slave girls p l aying

and singing. All the company was ranged according to rank,

and i n the highest p l ace sat a man of worsh i p ful and noble

aspect whose bearded sides hoa riness had stricken, and he was

stately of stature and fa i r of favor, agreeable of aspect and

ful l of gravity and dignity and maj esty . So Sindbad the Porter

was confounded at that wh ich he beheld and said in h i mself,

" By A l l a h , this must be either some king's p a l ace, or a p i ece of Paradise! " 80

I t ' s worth quoting not only because it represents a certain idea l , a picture of the perfect l i fe, but because there ' s no real Christian parallel. I t would be impossible conceive of such an i mage appearing i n , say, a Medieval French romance.

The veneration of the merchant was matched by what can only be called the world's first popular free-market ideology. True, one should be careful not to confuse ideals with rea lity. Markets were ever entirely independent from the govern ment. I s l a m i c regimes did employ all the usual strategies of manipulating tax policy to encourage the growth of markets, and they periodically tried to intervene in commercial law . 8 1 Sti l l , there was a very strong popular feeling that they shouldn ' t . Once freed from its ancient scourges of debt and s lavery , the local bazaar had beco me, for most, not a place of moral danger, but the very opposite :

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 7 9

the highest expression of the human freedo m and communal solidarity, and thus to be protected assiduously fro m state intrusion .

There was a particular hostility to anything that smacked of price­ fixing. One much-repeated story held that the Prophet h i mself had refu sed to force merchants to lower prices during a shortage in the city of Med i n a , on the grounds that doing so would be sacrilegi o u s , s i n c e , in a free-market situation, " p r i c e s depend on t h e w i l l of G od . " 82 Most lega l scholars in terpreted Mohammed ' s decision to mean that any government interference in market mechanisms should be con­ sidered s i m i larly sacri legious, since markets were designed by God to regul ate themselve s . 83

I f a l l this bears a striking resem b l ance to Adam Smith's " invisible hand" (which was a l s o the hand of Divine Providence ) , it might not be a comp lete coincidence. In fact, many of the specific arguments and examples that Smith uses appear to trace back d i rectly to economic tracts written in Medieval Pers i a . For instance, not only does his argu­ ment that exchange i s a natural outgrowth of h u m a n rationality and speech a l ready appear both in both Ghazali ( ws 8-1 n1 AD) , and Tusi (1201-1274 AD) ; both use exactly the same i l lustration : that no one has ever observed two dogs exchanging bones . 84 Even more dramatica l l y , Smith's most fa mous e x a m p l e of division of labor, the pin factory, where it takes eighteen separate operati ons to produce one pin, a l ready appears in G h a z a l i ' s Ihya, in which he describes a needle factory, where it takes twenty-five different operations to produce a need l e . 85

The differences , however, are j ust as significant as the s i m i l a rities. One tel ling example: like Smith, Tusi begins h i s treatise on economics with a discussion of the division of l a bor; but where for Smith, the division of labor i s actually an outgrowth of our " n atural propensity to truck and ba rter" in pursuit of individual advantage, for Tusi, it was an extension of mutual aid :

Let us suppose that each individual were required to busy h i m s e l f w ith providing his own sustenance, clothing, d w e l l ing­ place and weapons, .first acquiring the tools o f carpentry and the smith's trade, then readying thereby tools and i m p l e ments for sowing and reaping, grinding and kneading, spinning and weaving . . . Clearly, he w o u l d not be capable of doing j u stice to any one of the m . But when men render aid to each other, each one performing one of these important tasks that are be­ yond the measure o f his own capacity, and observing the law of j u stice in transactions by giving grea tly and receiving in exchange of the labor of others, then the means of livelihood

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are realized, and the succession of the individual and the sur­ vival of the species are assured.86

As a result, he argues, divine providence h a s arranged us to have different a b i lities, desires, and inclinations. The market i s simply one m a nifestation o f this m o re general principle o f mutual aid, o f the matching o f, abilities (supply) and needs (demand)-o r to tra n s late i t into my o w n earlier terms , it i s not o n l y founded o n , but i s i t s e l f an extens i o n o f the kind o f baseline c o m m u n i s m o n which any s o ciety must u l t i mately rest.

A l l this i s not to say that Tusi was in any sense a radical egalitar­ i a n . Quite the contrary. " I f men were equa l , " he insists, " they would a l l perish . " We need differences between rich and poor, he i n s i sted, j ust as much as we need differences between fa rmers and c a rpenters . S t i l l , once y o u s t a r t fro m the initial p r e m i s e that markets a r e p r i m a r i l y about c ooperatio n rather than c o mpetitio n-and while M u s l i m economic thinkers did recognize and accept the need for market competitio n , they never saw c ompetition as its essence87-the m o r a l implications are very differen t . Nasruddin's story a b o ut the quail eggs might have been a j oke, but M u s l i m ethicists did o ften enj oin merchants to drive a hard bargain with the rich so they could charge less, o r pay more, when dealing with the less fortunate.88

Ghaza l i ' s take o n the division o f l a b o r i s s i m i l ar, and h i s account o f the origins o f money i s i f anything even m o re revealing. It begins with what looks much like the myth o f barter, except that, like a l l Middle Eastern writers, he starts not w i t h i m aginary pri mitive tribes­ men, but with strangers meeting in an i m aginary marketp lace.

Sometimes a person needs what he does not own and he owns what he does not need . For example, a person h�s saffron but needs a camel for transportation and one who owns a camel does not presently need that camel but he wants saffron. Thus, there is the need for an exchange. However, for there to be an exchange, there must be a way to measure the two obj ects , for the camel-owner cannot give the whole camel for a quantity of saffron . There is no similarity between saffron and camel so that equal amount of that weight and form can be given . Likewise is the case of one who desires a house but owns some cloth or desires a slave but owns socks, or desires flour but possesses a donkey. These goods have no direct proportional­ ity so one cannot know how much saffron will equal a camel's worth . Such barter transactions would be very difficult.89

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 8 1

Ghazali a l s o notes that there might a l s o be a problem of one per­ son not even needing what the other h a s to offer, but this i s a l most an afterthought; for him, the real problem is conceptu a l . How do you compare two things with no common qual ities ? H i s conc l u s i o n : it can only be done by comparing both to a third thing with no qualities at all. F o r this reason, he explains, God created dinars and d i r h a m s , coins made out of gold and silver, two metals that are otherwise no good for anyth i n g :

Dirhams a n d dinars a r e n o t created for a n y particular purpose; they are useless by themselves; they are j ust like stones. They are created to circul ate from hand to hand, to govern and to facilitate transactions. They are symbols to know the value and grades of good s . 90

They can be symbols, units of measure, because of this very lack of usefulness, indeed lack of any particu l a r feature other than value:

A thing can only be exactly linked to other things if it has no particu lar special form or feature of its own-for example, a mi rror that has no color can reflect all colors. The same is the case with money-it has no purpose of its own, but it serves as medium for the purpose of exchanging goods. 91

From this it also follows that lending money at interest must be i l legitimate, since it means using money a s an end in itself: " Money i s not created to earn money . " In fact, he says, "in relation to other goods, dirhams and dinars are like prepositions i n a sentence, " words that, as the grammarians inform u s , are used to give meaning to other words, but can only do because they have no meaning i n themselves . Money is a thus a unit of measure that provides a means of assessing the value of goods, but also one that operates a s such only i f it stays in constant motion. To enter in monetary transactions in order to obtain even more money, even if i t ' s a matter of M-C- M ' , let alone M - M ' , w o u l d b e , according to G h a z a l i , t h e equivalent o f kidnapping a post­ m a n . 92

Whereas Ghazali speaks only of gold and silver, what he descri bes­ money as symbol, a s a b stract measure, having no qualities of its own, whose value is only m a i ntained by constant moti on-is something that would never have occurred to anyone were it not in an age when it was perfectly normal fo r money to be emp loyed i n purely v i rtual for m .

I I I I I

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Much of o u r free- m a rket doctrine, then, appears to have been origi n a l l y borrowed piecemeal from a very different s o c i a l and moral univers e . 93 The mercantile classes of the Medieval Near West had pulled off an ex­ traordin a ry feat. By a b andoning the usurious practices that had made them so obnoxious to their neighbors for untold centuries before, they were able to become-alongside religious teachers-the effective lead­ ers of their communities : comm unities that are still seen a s organ i zed, to a large extent, around the twin poles of mosque and bazaar.94 The spread of Islam a l lowed the m a rket to become a glob a l phenomenon, operating largely i ndependent of governments , according to its own internal laws. But the very fact that this was, i n a certain w a y , a genu­ ine free m arket, not one created by the govern ment and backed by its police and prisons-a world of handshake deals and paper pro m i ses backed only by the i ntegrity o f the signer-meant that i t could never really become the world imagined by those who later adopted many of the same ideas and arguments: one of purely self-interested individuals vying for material advantage by any means at hand .

T h e Fa r West :

C h ristendom ( Commerce, Len d i ng, and Wa r)

Where there is justice in war, there is also justice in u s u ry .

-S a i n t Ambrose

Europe, as I mentioned, came rather late to the Middle Ages and for most of i t was something of a h i nterl and. S t i l l , the period began much as i t did elsewhere, with the d i sappearance of coinage. Money re­ treated into virtuality. Everyone continued to calculate costs i n Roman currency, then, later, i n Carolingian " i m aginary money "-the purely conceptual system o f pounds, s h i l l ings, and pence used across Western Europe to keep accounts well into the seventeenth century .

Local mints did gradually come back into operatio n , producing coins i n an endless variety of weight, purity, and deno mination s . How these related to the pan -European system, though, was a m a tter of manipulati o n . Kings regu larly i ssued decrees reva luing their own coins in relation to the money of account, "crying u p " the currency by, say, declaring that henceforth, one of their ecus or escudos would no longer be worth 1 / 1 2 but now 1 /s of a s h i l ling (thus effectively raising taxes) or " crying down" the value o f their coins by doing the reverse (thus

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 8 3

effectively reducing their debts ) . 95 The real gold or silver content of coins was endlessly readj usted, and currencies were frequently called i n f o r re-minting. Meanwhile, most everyday transactions d i spen sed w i t h cash entirely, operating through t a l l i e s , tokens , ledgers , or transactions in kind. A s a result, when the Scholastics came to address such m atters i n the thi rteenth century, they quickly adopted Aristotle's position that money was a mere social conventio n : that it was, basically, whatever h u m a n beings decided that i t w a s . 96

All this fit the broader Medieval pattern : actual gold and s i lver, such of i t as was still around, w a s increasingly laid up i n sacred places; as centralized states d i sappeared, the regulation of m a rkets was i n ­ creasingly i n t h e hands of the Church .

At first, the Catholic attitudes toward usury were j ust as harsh a s M u s l i m o n e s , a n d attitudes toward merchants, considerably h arsher. I n t h e fi r s t c a s e , they had little choice, as many B i b l i c a l texts were quite explicit. Consider Exodus 22:25 :

I f you lend money to M y people, t o the poor among you, you are not to act as a creditor to him; you shall not charge him interest.

Both the Psalms ( 15 :5 , 54:12) and Prophets (Jeremiah 9 . 6 , Nehemiah 5:n) were explicit i n assigning u surers to death and hellfire. What's more, the early Christian Fathers, who laid the foundation of Church teachings on social issues in the waning years of the Roman empire, were writing amidst the ancient world ' s last great debt cri s i s , one that was effec­ tively in the process of destroying the empire ' s remaining free peasant­ ry . 97 While few were willing to condemn slavery, a l l condemned usury.

Usury w a s seen above a l l a s an assault on Christian charity, on Jesus's inj unction to treat the poor a s they would treat the Christ h i m ­ self, giving without expectation of return and a llowing t h e borrower to decide on recompense ( Luke 6 : 3 4-35 ) . In 3 65 AD, for i n stance, St. B a s i l delivered a sermon on usury i n Cappadocia that set the standard for such i s s u e s :

T h e L o r d gave His o w n inj unction quite p l a i n l y in t h e words, "from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. "98

But what of the money lover ? He sees before him a man under stress of necessity bent to the ground in supplication. He sees him hesitating at no act, no words, of humiliation. He sees him suffering undeserved misfortune, but he is merciless. He does not reckon that he is a fel low-creature. He does not

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give in to his entreaties. He stands stiff and sour. He is moved by no prayers; his resolution is broken by no tears. He persists in refusal . . . 99

That is, until the suppliant mentions " i nteres t . " B a s i l was particularly offended by t h e c r a s s dishonesty by which

moneylenders operated; their a b u s e of Christian fel l o w s h i p . The man i n need comes seeking a friend, the rich man pretends to be one. I n fact h e ' s a secret enemy, and everything he says is a lie. Witness, St. Basil s a i d , how the rich man w i l l always a t first swear mighty oaths that he has no money to h i s n a m e :

Then t h e suppl iant mentions interest, a n d utters t h e word secu­ rity. All is changed . The frown is relaxed; with a genial smile he recal l s old fa mily connecti on. Now it is " my friend . "

" I will see, " says he, " if I have any money by me. Yes, there is that sum which a man I know has left in my hands on deposit for profit. He stipu lated a very heavy rate of interest. However, I shall certa inly take so mething off, and give it to you on better terms. " With pretences of this kind and talk like this he fawns on the wretched victi m, and induces him to swal­ low the bait. Then he binds him with a wri tten security, adds loss of li berty to the trouble of his pressing poverty, and is off. The man who has made himself responsible fo r interest that he cannot pay has accepted vol untary slavery for life . 100

The borrower, coming home with his newfound money, at first rej o i ces . B u t quickly, " the money slips away , " i n terest acc u m u l a te s , and h i s p o s s e s s i o n s are sold off. B a s i l g r o w s poetic in describing t h e debtor' s p l i g h t . I t ' s a s if time i t s e l f h a s b e c o m e h i s e n e m y . E v e r y day and night conspires against him, as they a re the p a rents of interest. His l i fe becomes a " s l eepless daze of anxious uncerta i n t y , " a s he is h u m i l i ­ ated in p u b l i c ; w h i l e at home, he is constantly h i d i n g u n d e r t h e couch at every unexpected knock on the door, and can b arely sleep, startled awake by n ightmare visions of h i s creditor standing over his p i l low . 10 1

Probably t h e m o s t fa m o u s ancient h o m i l y on u s u r y , though, was S a i n t Ambrose's De Tobia , pronounced over several days in M i l a n i n 3 8 0 BC. He reproduces t h e same v i v i d details a s Basi l : fathers fo rced to sell their children, debtors who h anged themselves out of s h a m e . Usury, he observes, must be considered a fo rm of v i o l e n t robbery, even m u rder . 1 02 Ambrose, though, added one small proviso that was later to have enormous influence. His sermon was the first to ca refu l l y examine

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 8 5

every B i b l i c a l reference to moneylending, which meant that he had to address the one problem l a ter authors always had to struggle with-the fact that, i n the Old Testament, usury is not q u ite forbidden to every­ one. The key sticking point i s always Deuteronomy 2J : I 9-2 0 :

T h o u shalt n o t lend upon usury t o thy brother; usury of mon­ ey, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury.

Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.

So who then i s this " stranger" or ( a better translation of the He­ brew nokri, " foreigner " ) ? Presu m a b l y , one against whom robbery and murder would have been j ustified a s wel l . After all, the ancient Jews lived amidst tribes like the A m a lekites, on whom God had specifically instructed them to m a ke war. I f by extracting i nterest one i s , as he puts it, fighting without a sword, then i t i s only legitimate to do so from those " whom it would not be a crime to k i l l . " 103 For A mbrose, living in Milan, a l l this w a s something of a technicality. He incl uded a l l Chris­ tians and a l l those s u b j ect to Roman l a w as " b rothers " ; there weren 't, then, lot of Ama lekites aroun d . 1 04 Later, the " Exception of St. Am­ brose , " a s it came to be known, w a s to become extremely important.

All of these sermons-and there were many of them-left certain critical questions unanswered . What should the rich man do when receiving a visit fro m his troubled neighbo r ? True, Jesus had said to give without expectation of return , but it seemed unrealistic to expect most Christians to do that. And even i f they did, what sort of ongoing relationships would that create ? St. Basil took the radical position. God had given us a l l things i n common, and he had speci fically i n structed the rich to give their possessions to the poor. The communism of the Apostles-who pooled all their wealth, and took freely what they needed-was thus the only p roper model for a truly Christian soci­ ety . 105 Few of the other Christian Fa thers were willing to take things this fa r. Communism was the idea l , but i n this fa llen and temporary world, they argued , i t was simply unrealistic. The Church must accept existing property arrangements, but also come up with spiritu a l argu­ ments to encourage the rich to nonetheless act with Christian charity. Many of these employed d istinctly commercial metaphors. Even Basil was willing to indulge i n this sort of thing:

Whenever you provide for the destitute on account of the Lord, it is both a gift and a loan. It is a gift because you entertain no

2 8 6 D E B T

hope in recovering it, a loan because of our Lord 's muni ficence in paying you back on his behalf, when, having taken a small sum for the poor, he will give you back a vast sum in return. " For he who takes pity on the poor, lends to God . " 106

S ince Christ is in the poor, a gift of cha rity is a loan to Jesus, to be repaid with interest inconceivable on ea rth .

Charity, however, is a way of maintaining hierarchy, not under­ mining it. What Basil i s talking about here rea l l y has nothing to do with debt, and playing with such metaphors seems ultim ately to serve only to underline the fact that the rich man does n ' t owe the poor sup­ pliant anything, any more than God i s i n any way legally bound to save the soul of anyone who feeds a begg a r . " D ebt" here dissolves into a p u re hierarchy ( hence, "the Lord " ) where utterly different beings provide each other utterly different kinds of benefit. Later theologians were to explicitly confirm this: human beings live i n time, noted St. Thomas A q u i n a s , so it makes sense to say that sin i s a debt of punish­ ment we owe to G o d . But God l ives outside of time. By definition , he cannot owe anything to anyone. His grace can therefore only be a gift given with no obligation . 1 07

This, in turn, provides an answer to the question: What are they rea lly asking the rich man to do? The Church opposed usury, but it had l i ttle to say about relations of feudal dependency, where the rich man provides charity and the poor suppliant shows his gratitude in other ways. Neither, when these kinds of arrangements began to emerge across the Christian West, did the Church offer significant obj ections . 1 08 Former debt peons were gradu a l l y tran sfo rmed into serfs or v a s s a l s . I n some ways, the relationship w a s not m u c h different, since vassa lage was, in theory, a volu ntary, contractual relati o n s h i p . Just as a Chris­ tian h a s to be able to freely choose to s u b m i t hi mself to "the Lord , " so did a vassal have to agree to make himself someone else's man. All this proved perfectly consonant with Christianity.

Com merce, on the other hand, rem a ined a problem . There was not much of a leap between condemning u s u ry as the taking of "what­ ever exceeds the amount loa ned " and condemning any form of profit­ taking. Many-Saint Ambrose among them-were w i l l i ng to take that leap. Where Mohammed declared that an honest merchant deserved a place by the seat o f God in heaven, men like Ambrose wondered if an " honest merchant" could actually exist. Many held that one simply could not be both a merchant and a Christian . 1 09 In the early Middle Ages, this was not a pressing issue--especially since so much com merce was condu cted by foreigners . The conceptual problems, however, were

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 8 7

never resolved . What did it mean that one could only lend to " s trang­ ers " ? Was i t j ust u s u ry , or was even com merce tantamount to w a r ?

I I I I I

Probably the most notori o u s , and often catastrophic, way that this problem worked itself out in the High Middle Ages was in relations between Christians and Jews. In the years since Nehemiah, Jewish attitudes toward lending had themselves changed . In the time of Au­ gustus , Rabbi H i l lel had effectively rendered the sabbatical year a dead letter, by allowing two parties to place a rider on any parti c u l a r loan contract agreeing that it would not apply. While both the Torah and the Talmud stand opposed to loans on interest, exceptions were made in dealing with Gentiles-pa rticularly a s , over the course of the elev­ enth and twelfth centuries, E u ropean Jews were excluded fro m a l most any other line of work . 1 1 0 This i n turn made it harder to contain the practice, as witnessed in the common j oke, current in twelfth-century ghettos to j ustify u s u ry between Jews. It consi sted, it i s said, of reciting Deuteronomy 23 : 20 in interrogative tones to make it mean the opposite of its obvious sense: ' Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon u s u ry , but u n t o t h y brother t h o u s h a l t n o t lend u p o n u s u ry ? ' 1 1 1

O n the Christian side, i n n4o A D the " Exception o f Saint A m brose" found its way into Grati a n ' s Decretu m , which came to be considered the definitive col lection of canon l a w . At the time, economic l i fe fel l very m u c h under t h e j urisdiction of t h e Church. While t h a t might ap­ pear to leave Jews safely o utside the system, in rea lity, matters were more compl icated . For one thing, while both Jews and Gentiles would occasionally attempt to make reco urse to the Exception, the prevail­ ing opinion was that it only rea lly applied to Saracens or others with whom Christendom was literally at war. After a l l , Jews and Christians lived in the same towns and villages . If one were to concede that the Exception allowed Jews and Christians the right to lend to each other at interest, it would also mean that they had the right to murder one another . 1 12 No one really wanted to say that. O n the other hand, rea l relations between Christians and Jews often did seem to skate perilous­ ly close to this unfortunate ideal-though obviously the actual m u rder ( apart from mere economic aggression) was all on one side.

In part th i s was due to the habit of Christian princes of exploit­ ing, for their own purposes, the fact that Jews did sit s lightly outside the system . Many encou raged Jews to operate as moneylenders, under their protection, simply because they also knew that protection could be withdrawn at any time. The kings of England were notori o u s in

2 8 8 D E B T

this regard . They i n s isted that Jews be excluded fro m merchant and craft guilds, but granted them the right to charge extravagant rates of i nterest, backing up the loans by the ful l force of I a w . 1 13 Debtors in Medieval England were regularly thrown in prisons until their fa milies settled with the creditor . 1 14 Yet the same regu larly h appened to the Jews themselves . I n 1210 AD, for example, King John ordered a t a l l age, or emergency levy, to pay for his wars i n France and Ireland. Accord­ ing to one contemporary chronicler " a l l the Jews throughout England, of both sexes, were seized, i mprisoned, and tortured severely, i n order to do the king's will with their money . " Most who where put to torture offered all they had and m ore-but on that occasion, one particularly wealthy merchant, a certai n Abraham o f Bristo l , who the king decided owed h i m ten thousand marks of s i lver ( a s u m equivalent to about a sixth of J o h n ' s total annual revenue) , became fa mous for holding out. The king therefore ordered that one of h i s molars be p u l led out daily, until he p a i d . After seven had been extracted, Abraham finally gave i n . 1 15

J o h n ' s successor, Henry I I I (1216-1272 AD) , was in the habit of turn­ ing over Jewish victims to his brother the Earl of Corn w a l l , so that, as another chronicler put it, " those whom one brother had flayed, the other might embowel . " 1 16 Such stories a bout the extraction of Jewish teeth , skin, and intestines are, I think, important to bear i n mind when thinking about Sh akespeare ' s i m aginary Merchant of Venice demand­ ing his "pound of fles h . " 1 17 It a l l seems to have been a bit of a guilty proj ection of terrors that Jews had never real l y vi s ited on Christia n s , but t h a t had been d irected t h e other way around .

The terror inflicted by kings carried in it a peculiar element of identification : the persecutions and appropri ations were an exten sion of the logic whereby kings effectively treated debts owed to Jews a s ul­ timately owed to themselves, even setting up a branch of the Treasury ( " the Exchequer of the Jew s " ) to m a nage them . 1 18 This was of course much i n keeping with the popular English impression of their kings as themselves a· group of rapacious Norman foreigners. But i t also gave the kings the opportunity to periodically play the populist card, dramatically snubbing or h u m i l i ating their Jewish financiers, turning a b l i nd eye or even encouraging pogroms by townsfolk who chose to take the Exception of Saint Ambrose literally, and treat moneylenders as enemies of Christ who could be m u rdered i n cold blood . Particularly gruesome mass acres occurred i n Norwich in 1 144 AD, and i n France, i n Blois i n 1171. Before long, as Norman Cohn put it, " w h a t had once been a flourishing Jewish culture had turned into a terrorized society locked in perpetua l warfare with the greater society around it. " 1 19

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 8 9

One mustn ' t exaggerate the Jewish role in lending. Most Jews had nothing to do with the business, and those who did were typ ically bit players, making minor loans o f grain o r cloth fo r a return in kind. Others weren ' t even rea lly Jews . A l ready in the 1190s, preachers were complaining a b o u t l o rds who would work hand in g l o ve with Christian moneylenders claiming they were " ou r Jews "-a nd thus under their spec i a l protectio n . 1 20 By the 11oos, most Jewish moneylenders had long since been displaced by Lombard s ( from N o rthern Italy) and C a h o r s i n s ( from the F r e n c h town o f C a h o rs )-who esta blished them selves a c r o s s Western E u r o p e , and b e c a m e notorious rural usurers . 121

The rise o f rural usury was itself a sign o f a growing free peasantry (there had been no point in making l o a n s to serfs, since they had noth­ ing to repossess ) . It acco mpan ied the rise o f c o m merci a l fa rming, urban craft guilds, and the " c o m mercial rev o l u t i o n " o f the High Middle Ages, a l l o f which finally brought Western Europe to a level o f economic activity comparable to that long since considered normal in other pa rts o f the world. The Church q u ickly came under considerable popular pressure to do s o m ething about the problem, and at first, it did try to tighten the clamps. Existing l oopholes in the usury l a w s were system­ atically closed , particularly the use o f mortgage s . These latter began as an exped ient: as in Medieval Islam, those determi ned to dodge the law could simply present the money, c l a i m to be buying the debto r ' s h o u se or field, and then " rent" it back to the debtor until the principal was rep a i d . In the case o f a m ortgage, the house w a s i n theory not even purcha sed but p ledged as security, but any income fro m i t accrued to the lender. In the eleventh century this became a favorite trick o f mon­ asteries . In 1148 it was made illeg a l : henceforth, all income was to be subtracted fro m the princi p a l . Similarly, in 1187 merchants were forbid­ den to c h a rge higher prices when selling on credit-the C h u rch thereby going much further than any sch o o l o f I s l a m i c law ever had. In 1179 u s u ry was made a m o rtal sin and usurers were excommun icated and denied C h ristian buri a l . 122 Before long, new o rders o f itinerant friars like the Franciscans and D o m i nicans organized preaching campaigns, traveling town to town, vil lage to v i l l age, threatening m o neylenders with the loss o f their eternal souls if they did not make restituti o n to their victi m s .

A l l t h i s w a s echoed by a heady intellectu al debate in t h e newly founded universities, not s o much a s to whether usury was sinful and i l lega l, but precisely why. Some argued that it was theft o f another's material possess i o n s ; others that it constituted a theft o f time, c h a rg­ ing others for so mething that belonged only to G o d . Some held that it embodied the sin o f Sloth, since like the Confuci a n s , Catholic thinkers

2 9 0 D E B T

usually held that a mercha n t ' s profit could only be j ustified a s payment for his l a b o r ( i . e . , i n transporting goods to wherever they were needed ) , whereas interest accrued even if the lender did nothing at a l l . Soon the redi scovery of Aristotle, who returned i n Arabic transl ation (and the influence of Muslim sources like Ghazali and I b n Sin a ) , added new ar­ guments : that treating money a s an end i n itself defied its true purpose; that charging interest was unnatura l , i n that i t treated mere metal as i f it w e r e a l i v i n g t h i n g t h a t c o u l d breed or b e a r frui t . 1 23

But as the C hurch a uthorities soon discovered, when one starts something like this, it's very hard to keep a lid on it. Soon, new popu­ l a r religious movements were appearing everywhere, and many took up the same direction so many had i n late Antiquity, not only chal leng­ ing commerce but questioning the very legitimacy of private property. Most were l a beled heresies and violently suppressed, but many of the s a m e arguments were taken up amongst the mendicant orders them­ selves. By the thirteenth century, the great intellectual debate w a s be­ tween the Franciscans and the Dominicans over " apostolic poverty"­ basically, over whether Christian ity could be reconciled with property of any sort.

At the same time, the revival of Roman l a w-which, a s we've seen, began from the assumption of a bsolute private property-put new i n ­ tellectual w e a p o n s i n the hands of t h o s e who w i s h e d to a r g u e that, at least in the case of commerci a l loans, usury l a w s should be relaxed . The great d iscovery in this case was the notion of interesse, which i s where our word " interest" originally comes fro m : a compensation for l o s s suffered because of late payment. 124 The argument soon became that i f a merchant made a commercial loan even for some minimal pe­ riod ( s a y , a month ) , i t was not usurious for h i m to charge a percentage for each month a fterward, s i nce this w a s a penalty, not rental for the money, and it was j ustified as compensation for the profit he would have made, had he p laced it in some profitable investment, as any mer­ chant would ordinarily be expected to d o . 1 25

I I I I I

The reader may be wondering how it could have been possible for usury laws to move in two opposite d i rections s i multaneously. The answer would seem to be that politica l l y , the situation i n Western Europe w a s remarkably chaoti c . Most kings were weak, their holdings fractured and uncertai n ; the Continent w a s a checkerboard of baronies, principalities, urban communes, manors, and church estates. Jurisdic­ tions were constantly being renegotiated-usually by war. Merchant

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 9 1

capitalism of the sort long fa m i l i a r in the M u s l i m Near West only real ­ l y m a naged to esta b l i s h itself-quite late, compared with t h e situation i n the rest of the Medieval world-when merchant capitalists man aged to secure a political foothold i n the independent city- states of northern Italy-most fa mously, Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Milan-fo l lowed b y the German cities of the Hanseatic Leagu e . 1 26 Italian bankers ulti­ mately managed to free themselves fro m the threat of expropriation by them selves taking over govern ments, and by doing so, acquiring their own court systems (capable of enforcing contracts) and even more criti­ cally, their own armies. 127

What j umps out, in comparison with the M u s l i m world , are these links of finance, trade, and violence. Whereas Persi a n and Arab think­ ers assumed that the m a rket emerged as an extension of mutual a i d , Christians never comp letely overcame the suspicion that commerce w a s r e a l l y an extension of usury, a form of fraud only t r u l y legitim ate when directed against one's mortal enemies. Debt was, indeed, s i n-an the part of both p a rties to the transactio n . Competition w a s essential to the nature of the market, but competition was ( u s u a l l y ) nonviolent war­ fare. There was a reason why, a s I ' ve already ob served , the words for " truck and b a rter" i n almost a l l European l anguages were derived fro m terms meaning " swindle, " " bamboozle , " or " deceive . " S o m e d i sdained com merce for that rea s o n . Others embraced it. Few would h ave denied that the connection w a s there.

One need only examine the way that I s l a m i c credit instru ments­ or for that m a tter, the I s l a mic ideal of the merchant adventurer-were eventually adopted to see j ust how intimate this connection rea lly w a s .

It i s often held t h a t t h e first p ioneers of modern banking were the M i litary O rder of the K n ights of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known a s the K nights Templar. A fighting order of monks, they played a key role i n financing the Crusades. Through the T emplars, a lord in southern France might take out a mortgage on one of his tenements and receive a "draft" (a bill of exchange, modeled on the M u s l i m suf­ taja, but written in a secret code) redeemable for cash from the Temple in Jerusalem . I n other words, Christians appear to have first adopted I s l a m i c financi a l techniques to finance attacks against I s l a m .

The Templars lasted from 1 n 8 to 1 3 0 7 , b u t t h e y fi n a l l y w e n t the way of so many Medieval trading minorities : King Phillip I V , deep i n debt to the order, turned on them , accusing them of unspeakable cri mes; their leaders were tortured and ultimately k i l led, and their wealth was expropriated . 128 Much of the problem w a s that they l a cked a powerful home base. Italian banking houses such as the Bardi, Pe­ ruzz i , and Medici did much better. I n banking history, the Italians are

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most fa mous for their complex j oint-stock organization and fo r spear­ heading the use of I s l a m ic-style bills of exchange . 129 At first these were simple enough : basically j ust a form of long-distance money-ch anging. A merchant could present a certain amount in florins to a banker in Italy and receive a notarized b i l l registering the equivalent in the in­ tern ational money o f account ( Carolingian derniers ) , due in, say, three months' time, and then after it came due, either he o r his agent could cash it for an equivalent amount of local currency in the Champagne fa i r s , which were both the great yearly comm erci al empo r i a , and great financial clearing houses, of the European H igh Middle Ages. But they quickly morphed into a plethora o f new, creative forms, mainly a way of navigati ng-or even profiting from-the endlessly compl icated Eu­ ropean currency situation . 1 30

Most of the capital for these banking enterp rises derived fro m the Mediterranean trade in Indian Ocean spices and Ea stern luxuries. Yet unlike the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean was a constant war zone. Venetian gal leys doubled as both merchant vessels and warships, re­ plete with cannon and marines, and the d i fferences between trade, cru­ sade, and p i racy often depended on the bala nce of forces at any given moment. 1 3 1 The same was true on land: where Asian empires tended to separate the sphere of warriors and merchants, in Europe they o ften overlapped :

All up and down Central Europe, from Tuscany to Flan­ ders, from Brabant to Livonia, merchants not only supplied warriors-as they did all over Europe--they sat in govern­ ments that made war and, sometimes, buckled on armor and went into battle themselves. Such places make a long list: not only Florence, Milan, Venice, and Genoa, but also Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Zurich; not only Lubeck, Ham­ burg, Bremen, and Danzig, but also Bruges, Ghent, Leiden, and Cologne. Some of them-Florence, Nuremberg, Siena, Bern, and Ulm come to mind-built considerable territo rial states. 1 32

The Veneti ans were o n l y the most fa m o u s in this regard. They created a veritable mercantile empire over the course of the eleventh century, seizing islands like Crete and Cyprus and esta b l i shing sugar pla ntations that eventual ly-anticipating a pattern eventu a l l y to be­ come all too fa m i l i a r i n the New World-came to be staffed l a rgely by African slaves. 133 Genoa soon fol l o wed suit; one of their most lucra­ tive businesses was raiding and trading along the Black Sea to acquire slaves to sell to the Mamluks in Egypt or to work mines lea sed from

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 9 3

the Turks . 134 The Genoese republic w a s also the inventor of a unique mode of m i l itary financing, which might be known as w a r by subscrip­ tion, whereby those planning expeditions sold s h a res to investors i n exchange for t h e rights to an equivalent percentage of the spoi l s . It was precisely the same galley s , with the same " merchant adventurers" aboard, who would eventually pass through the p i l l ars of Hercules to follow the Atlantic coast to F l anders or the Champagne fai r s , carrying cargoes of nutmeg or cayenne, silks and woolen goods-a long with the inevitable b i l l s of exchange . 1 35

I I I I I

It would be i nstructive, I think, to pause a moment to think about this ter m , " merchant adventurer. " Originally it j ust meant a merchant who operated outside his own country . It was around this same time, however, at the height of the fairs of C h a mpagne and the Italian mer­ chant empires, between n6o and 1172, that the term " adventure" be­ gan to take on its contemporary meaning. The m a n most responsible for it w a s the French poet Chretien de Troyes, author of the famous Arthurian romances-most fa mous, perhaps, for being the first to tell the story of Sir Percival and the Holy G ra i l . The romances were a new sort of l i terature featuring a new sort of hero, the "knight-errant, " a warrior who roamed the world in search of, precisely, " a dventure"-in the contemporary sense of the word : perilous challenges, love, trea­ sure, and renown. Stories of knightly adventure q u ickly became enor­ mously popular, C hretein was followed by innumerable i mitators, and the central characters in the stories-Arthur and Guinevere, Lance­ lot, Gawain, Perciv a l , and the rest-became known to everyone, as they are sti l l . This courtly ideal of the gallant knight, the quest, the j oust, romance and adventure, rem a i n s central to our i m age of the Middle Ages. 136

The curious thing i s that i t bears almost no relation to reality. Nothing remotely like a real " knight-errant" ever existed. " Knights" h a d origi n a l l y been a term for freelance warriors, drawn fro m the younger or, often , b a stard sons of the minor nobility. Unable to in­ herit, many were forced to band together to seek their fortunes. M a n y became l i ttle m o r e than r o v i n g b a n d s of t h u g s , i n an e n d l e s s pursuit of plunder-precisely the sort of people who made merchants' lives so dangero u s . Culminating i n the twelfth century, there w a s a concerted effort to bring this dangerous population under the control of the civil authorities : not only the code of chivalry, but the tournament, the j oust-al l these were more than anything else ways of keeping them

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out of trouble, as it were, in part by setting knights against each other, in part by turning their entire existence into a kind of stylized ritua l . 137 The ideal of the lone wandering knight, in search of some gallant ad­ venture, on the other hand, seems to have come out of nowhere.

This is imp o rtant, since it lies at the very heart of our i mage of the Middle Ages-a nd the explanation, I think, i s revea ling. We have to recall that merchants had begun to achieve unp recedented social and even political power a round this time, but that, in dramatic contrast to Islam, where a figure like Sindbad-the successful merchant adventurer­ could serve as a fictional exemplar of the perfect life, merchants, unlike warriors, were never seen as paragons of much of anything.

It's likely no coincidence that Chretien was living in Troyes, at the very heartland of the Cha mpagne fa irs that had become, in turn, the commercial hub of Western Europe . 1 38 While he appears to have mod­ eled his vision of Camelot on the ela borate court life under h i s patron Henri the Liberal ( n5 2-n 8 I ) , Count of Cha mpagne, and h i s wife Ma­ rie, da ughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the real court was staffed by low­ born commer�ants, who served as serjeants of the fa i r s-leaving most real knights i n the role of onlookers, guards, o r-at tournaments­ enterta iners.

This is not to say that tournaments did not become a kind of economic focus in their own right, accord ing to one early twentieth­ century Medievalist, Amy Kelly:

The biographer of Guil laume le Marechal gives an idea of how this rabble of courtly routiers amused itself on the j ousting fields of western Europe. To the tournaments , occurring in a brisk season about twice a month from Pentecost to the feast of St John, flocked the young bloods, sometimes three thousand strong, taking possession of the nearest town. Thither also flocked horse dealers from Lombardy and Spain, from Brittany and the Low Countries, as well as armorers, ha berdashers for man and beast, usurers, mimes and story-tellers, acrobats, nec­ romancers, and other gentlemen of the lists, the field, the road . Enterta iners of every stripe found li beral patronage . . . There were feasts in upper chambers, and forges rang in the smithies all night long. Brawls with grisly incidents-a cracked skull, a gouged eye--occurred as the betting progressed and the dice flew. To cry up their champions in the field came ladies of fair name and others of no name at all.

The hazards, the concourse, the prizes , keyed men to the pitch of war. The stakes were magnificent, for the victor held

T H E M I D D L E A G E S

his prize, horse and man, for ranso m . And for these ransoms fiefs went in gage or the hapless victim fel l into the hands of usurers, giving his men, and in extremity, hi mself, as hostages. Fortunes were made and lost on the point of a lance and many a mother's son fai led to ride home . 1 39

2 9 5

So, it w a s not only that the merchants supplied the materi a l s that made the fa irs possible; Since vanquished knights techn ically owed their lives to the victors, merchants ended up, in their capacity as moneylender s , making good business out of liquidating their assets . Alternately, a knight might borrow vast sums to outfit himself in mag­ ni ficence, hoping to i m p ress some fa i r lady (with h andsome dowry) with h i s victories; others, to take part in the continual whoring and gambling that always surrounded such events. Losers would end up having to sell their a r m o r and horses, and this created the danger that they would go back to being highwaymen, fo ment pogroms (if their creditors were Jews) o r , if they had lands, make new fiscal demands on those unfortunate enough to live on the m .

O thers turned to w a r , w h i c h itself tended to d r i v e t h e creation o f new markets . 140 I n one of t h e most d r a m atic of s u c h incidents, in No­ vember II99, a l a rge number of knights at a tournament at the castle of Eery in C h a m p agne, sponsored by Henry ' s son, Theobald, were seized by a great religious passion, abandoned their games, and swore a vow to in stead retake the Holy Land . The crusader army then proceeded to commission the Venetian fleet for transport in exchange fo r a promise of a so-percent share in all resulting profits. In the end, rather than proceeding to the Holy Land, they ended up sacking the (much wealth­ ier, O rthodox) Christian city of Constantinople after a prolonged and bloody siege. A Flemish count na med Baldwin w a s i n stalled as "Latin Emperor of Constantinop l e , " but attempting to govern a city that had been l a rgely destroyed and stripped of everything of value ensured that he and his barons soon ended up in great financial difficulties. I n a gigantic version of w h a t was happening on the s m a l l scale in so many tournaments, they were u l t i m ately reduced to stripping the metal off the church roofs and auctioning holy relics to pay back their Venetian creditor s . By 1 25 9 , Baldwin had sunk to the point of taking out a m o rt­ gage on his own son, who was taken back to Venice as security for a loan . 1 4 1

A l l this does not r e a l l y a n s w e r the question : Whence, t h e n , t h i s i mage of t h e solitary knight-errant, wandering t h e fo rests of a mythic Albion, chal lenging rivals, confronting ogres, fa iries, wizards, and mys­ terious beasts ? The answer should be clear by now. Really, this i s j ust a

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s u b l i mated, romanticized i m age of the traveling merchants themselve s : men w h o did, after a l l , s e t off on lonely ventures through w i l d s a n d forests, w h o s e outcome was anything but certai n . 142

And what of the G r a i l , that mysterio u s obj ect that all the knights­ errant were ulti mately seeking? Oddly enough, Richard Wagner, com­ poser of the opera Parzifal, first suggested that the Grail was a sym­ bol inspired by the new forms of finance . 143 Where earlier epic heroes sought after, and fo ught over, piles of rea l , concrete gold and silver­ the Nibelung's hoard-these new ones, born of the new commercial economy, pursued purely abstract forms of value. No one, after a l l , k n e w precisely w h a t t h e G r a i l w a s . Even t h e e p i c s d isagree : sometimes it's a plate, sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone. (Wolfram von Eschen­ bach imagined it to be a j ewel knocked fro m Lucifer's hel met in a bat­ tle at the dawn of t i me . ) In a way it does n ' t m atter. The point i s that i t ' s invisible, intangi ble, but at the same time of infinite, inexhaustible value, containing everything, capable of making the wasteland flower, feeding the world, providing spiritual sustenance, and healing wounded bodies. Marc Shell even suggested that it would best be conceived as a blank check, the ultim ate financial abstraction. 144

W h a t , T h e n , We re t h e M i d d l e A g e s ?

Each o f us i s a mere symbolon o f a

man, the result of bisectio n , like the

flat fish , two o u t of o n e , and each of

us is constan tly sea rching fo r h is co rre­

sponding symbolo n .

-Pl a t o , The Symposium

There is one way that Wagner got it wrong: the introduction of finan­ c i a l abstraction was not a sign that Europe was leaving the Middle Ages, but that i t w a s finally, belatedly , entering it.

Wagner' s not really to blame here. Almost everyone gets this wrong, because the most characteristic Medieval institutions and ideas arrived so late in Europe that we tend to mistake them for the first stirrings of m odernity. We've a l ready seen this with bills of exchange, already i n use i n the East by 700 or 8oo AD, but only reaching Europe several centuries later. The i n dependent university-perhaps the quint­ essential Medieval institution-is another case i n point. N a landa w a s founded i n 4 2 7 A D , and there w e r e i n dependent i nstitutions of higher

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 9 7

learning all over China and the Near West ( from Cairo to Constanti­ nople) centuries before the creation of similar institutions in O x ford, Paris, and Bologn a .

If t h e A x i a l A g e was t h e a g e of materi a l i s m , t h e Middle Ages were above all else the age of transcendence. The collapse of the ancient em­ p i res did not, for the most part, lead to the rise of new ones. 141 Instead, once-su bversive popular religious movements were catapulted into the status of dominant institutions. S l a very declined or d i sappeared, as did the overa l l level of violence. As trade picked up, so did the pace of technological innovation ; greater peace brought greater possibil ities not only for the movement of silks and spices, but also of people and ideas. The fact that monks in Medieval China could devote themselves to translating ancient treatises in Sanskrit, and that students in madrasas in Medieval Indonesia could debate legal terms in Arabic, is testimony to the profound cosmopolitanism of the age.

Our i m age of the Middle Ages a s an " age of fa ith "-and hence, of blind obedience to authori ty-is a legacy of the French En lightenment. Again, it makes sense only if you think of the " M iddle Ages" a s some­ thing that h appened primarily in Europe. Not only w a s the Far West an unusually violent place by world standards, the Catholic Church was extraordinarily intolerant. I t ' s hard to find many Medieval Chinese, Indian, or Islamic parallels, for example, to the burning of " w itches " or the massacre of heretics. More typical w a s the pa ttern that prevailed in certain periods of Chinese h i story, when it w a s perfectly acceptable for a scholar to dabble in Taoism in h i s youth, become a Confucian in mid­ dle age, then become a Buddhist on retiremen t . If there is an essence to Medieval thought, it lies not in blind obedience to authority, but rather in a dogged insi stence that the values that govern our ordinary daily a ffairs-particularly those of the court and m a rketplace-are confused, mistaken, illusory, or perverse. True value lay elsewhere, in a domain that cannot be di rectly perceived, but only approached through study or contemplation. But this in turn made the faculties of contemplation, and the entire question of knowledge, an endless problem. Consider for example the great conund rum, pondered by M u s l i m , Christi a n , and Jewish phi losophers alike: What does it mean to s i m ultaneously say that we can only know God through our faculties of Reason , but that Reason itself partakes of God ? Chinese phil osophers were struggling with s i m i l a r conundrums when they asked, "Do we read the classics or do the c l a s s ics read us?" Almost a l l the great intellectual debates of the age turned on this question in one way or another . I s the world crea ted by our minds, or our minds by the world ?

2 9 8 D E B T

We can see the same tensions within predominant theories of mon­ ey. Aristotle had argued that gold and s i lver had no intrinsic value in themselves, and that money therefore w a s j ust a social convention, invented by h u m a n communities to facilitate exchange. S i nce it had "come about by agreement, therefore it i s within our power to change i t or render it useless " i f we all decide that that's what we want to d o . 1 46 This position gained little traction i n the m a teri alist intellectual environment of the Axial Age, but by the l ater Middle Ages, it had become standard wisdom. Ghazali was among the first to embrace it. I n h i s own way he took it even further, insisting that the fact that a gold coin has no intrinsic value is the basis of its value as money, since this very lack of intrinsic value i s what a l lows i t to " govern , " measure, and regulate the value of other things . But at the same time, Ghazali denied that money was a social conventio n . It was given us by God. 147

G h a z a l i w a s a mystic, and a political conservative, so one might argue that he ultim ately shied away from the most radical impl ications of h i s own idea s . But one could a l s o ask whether, in the Middle Ages, arguing that money w a s an arbitrary social convention was really a l l t h a t r a d i c a l a p o s i t i o n . After a l l , w h e n C h r i s t i a n and Chinese think­ ers i n s i sted that it w a s , it was almost always as a way of saying that money i s wh atever the king or the emperor wished i t to b e . In that sense, Ghaza l i ' s position was perfectly consonant with the Islamic de­ sire to p rotect the market from political interference by saying that it fel l properly under the aegis of religious authorities .

I I I I I

The fact that Medieval money took such abstract, virtual fo rms­ checks, tallies, paper m oney-meant that questions like these ( " What does i t mean to say that money i s a symbo l ? " ) cut to the core o f the philosophical issues of the day. Nowhere i s this so true as in the h i s ­ t o r y of t h e w o r d " sy m b o l " itself. H e r e we encounter s o m e p a r a l l e l s so extraordinary that they can only be described as startling.

When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions, the term he used was sym bolon-from which our own word " symbol " is derived. Symbolon w a s origin a l l y the G reek word for " t a l l y "-an obj ect broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or m a rked and broken to record a debt. So our word " sy m b o l " traces back originally to obj ects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another. This i s striking enough. What's rea l l y , remarkable, though, i s that the contemporary Chinese word for " symbo l , " fu , or fu hao, has a l most exactly the s a m e origi n . 148

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 9 9

Let ' s start with the Greek term "symbolo n . " Two friends at dinner might create a symbolon i f they took some obj ect-a ring, a knuckle­ bone, a piece of crockery-and broke it i n h a l f. Any time i n the future when either o f them had need of the other's help, they could bring their h a lves a s reminders of the friendship. Archeologists have found hundreds of l i ttle broken friendship tablets of this sort i n Athens, often made of clay. Later they became ways of sealing a contract, the o b ­ j ect standing i n t h e place of witnesses . 149 The w o r d w a s also u s e d for tokens of every sort: those given to Atheni a n j urors entitling them to vote, or tickets for admission to the theater. It could be used refer to money too, but only i f that money had no intrinsic v a l u e : bronze coins whose value w a s fixed only by local conventio n . 150 Used for written documents, a symbolon could also be passport, contract, commission, or receipt. By extension, it came to mea n : omen, portent, sympto m , or finally, i n the now-fa m i l i a r sense, symbol.

The path to the latter appears to have been twofo l d . Aristotle fixed on the fact that a tally could be anything: what the obj ect was didn't matter; a l l that m attered w a s that there was a way to break it i n half. It i s exactly so with l a nguage : words are sounds we use to refer to ob­ j ects, or to ideas, but the relation i s arbitrary : there ' s no particular rea­ son, for example, that English- speakers should choose "dog" to refer to an a n i m a l and "god" to refer to a deity, rather than the other way around . The only rea son i s social conventio n : an agreement between all speakers of a l anguage that this sound shall refer to that thing. In this sense, a l l words were arbitrary tokens of agreemen t . 1 5 1 So, of course, i s money-for Aristotle, not only worthless bronze coins that we agree t o treat as if t h e y were worth a certain a m o u n t , but a l l m o n e y , e v e n gold, i s j u st a symbolon, a social conventi o n . 152

A l l this came to seem almost commonsensical i n the thirteenth century of Thomas A q u i n a s , when rulers could change the value of currency simply by issuing a decree. S t i l l , Medieval theories of symbols derived less fro m Aristotle than from the Mystery Religions of Antiq­ uity, w here " symbolon" came to refer to certain cryptic formulae or talismans that only initiates could understan d . 153 It thus came to mean a concrete token, perceptible to the senses, that could only be under­ stood i n reference to some hidden real i ty entirely beyond the domain of sensory experience. 154

The theorist of the symbol whose work was most widely read and respected i n the Middle Ages was a sixth-century G reek Christian mystic whose real name h a s been lost to h i story, but who i s known by h i s pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite . 155 Dionysius took up the notion i n this latter sense to confront what was to become the great

3 0 0 D E B T

intellectual problem of the age : How is it possible for humans to have knowledge of God ? How can we, whose know ledge i s confined to what our senses can perceive of the materi a l universe, have know ledge of a being whose nature is absolutely alien to that material uni verse--" th a t i n finity beyond bei ng, " as he p u t s it, " that oneness that i s beyond intel­ ligence " ? 1 56 It would be impossible were it not fo r the fact that God, being all-powerfu l , can do anything, and therefore, j ust as he places h i s own body in the Eucharist, so can he reveal hi mself to our minds through an endless variety of material shapes. Intriguingly, Dionysius warns us that we cannot begin to understand how symbols work until we rid ourselves of the notion that divine things are likely to be beauti­ fu l . I m ages of luminous angels and celesti al chariots are only likely to confuse us, s i nce we will be tempted to imagine that that's what heaven i s actu a l l y like, and in fact we cannot possibly conceive of what heaven i s like. Instead , effective symbols are, like the origi nal symbolon, home­ ly obj ects selected apparently at rando m ; often, ugly, ridiculous things, whose very incongruity rem inds us that they are not God; of the fact that God " transcends all materi a l i t y , " even as, in another sense, they are G o d . 1 57 But the notion that they are in any sense tokens of agree­ ment between equals i s gone entirely. Symbols are gifts, absolute, free, h ierarchical gifts, presented by a being so fa r above us that any thought of reciprocity, debt, or mutual obl igation is simply inconceiv a b l e . U 8

Compare t h e Greek dictionary a b o v e to t h e following, from a Chi­ nese di ctionary:

FU. To agree with, to ta lly. The two halves of a tally. o evidence; proof of identity, credentials o to fu l fi l l a promise, to keep o n e ' s word o to reconcile o the mutual agree ment between Heaven ' s appointment

and human a ffa irs o a tally, a check o a n imperial seal or stamp o a w a rrant, a commission, credent i a l s o l i k e fitting t h e t w o h alves of a tally, in exact agreement o a s y m b o l , a sign . . . 159

The evo lution is a l most exactly the same. Like symbola, fu can be ta llies, contracts, official seals, warrants, passports, or creden t i a l s . As promises, they can embody an agreement, a debt contract, or even a relation of feudal vassalage--s ince a minor lord agreeing to beco me

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 3 0 1

another man ' s vassal would split a tally j ust as he would i f borrowing grain or money . The common feature seems to be a contract between two parties that begin a s equal, in which one agrees to become subordi­ nate. Later, as the state became more centralized, we mainly hear about fu presented to offici a l s a s a means of conveying order: the offic i a l would t a k e the left half with h i m w h e n posted to the provinces, a n d w h e n the emperor wished to s e n d an i mportant command, he would send the right half with the messenger to make sure that the offici al knew i t was actually the i mperi a l w i l l . 160

We've already seen how paper money seems to have developed fro m paper versions of such debt contracts, ripped i n half and reunited. For C h inese theorists, of course, Aristotl e ' s argument that money was simply a socia l convention was hardly radica l ; it w a s simply assumed. Money was wh atever the emperor esta b l i s hed it to be. Though even here there was a s l ight proviso, a s evidenced i n the entry above, that " fu " could also refer to " the mutual agreement between heaven ' s ap­ pointment and human affa i rs . " Just a s officials were appointed by the emperor, the emperor w a s ultimately appoi nted by a higher power, and he could only rule effectively a s long as he kept its mandate, which i s why propitio u s o m e n s w e r e cal led " fu , " s i g n s t h a t heaven approved of the ruler, j ust a s natural d i s asters were a sign that he had strayed . 161

Here Chinese ideas did grow a bit closer to the Christian ones. But Chinese conceptions of the cosmos had one crucial difference: since there was no emphasis on the absolute gulf between our world and the one be­ yond it, contractual relations with the gods were by no means out of the question. This was particularly true in Medieval Taoism, where monks were ordained through a ceremony called " rending the tally, " ripping apart a piece of paper that represented a contract with heaven . 162 It was the same with the magical talismans, also called " fu , " which an adept might receive from his master. These were literally tallies: the adept kept one; the other half was said to be retained by the gods. Such talismanic fu took the form of diagrams, said to represent a form of celestial writ­ ing, comprehensible only to the gods, which committed them to assist the bearer, often giving the adept the right to call on armies of divine protec­ tors with whose help he could slay demons, cure the sick, or otherwise attain miraculous powers. But they could also become, like Dionysius' symbol a , obj ects of contemplation, by which one's mind can ultimately attain some knowledge of the invisible world beyond our own . 163

Many of the most compelling visual symbols to emerge fro m Me­ dieval China trace back to such t a l i s m a n s : the River Symbol, or, for that matter, the yin-yang symbol that seems to have developed out of i t . 164 Just looking at a yin-yang symbol, it is easy enough to i magine

3 0 2 D E B T

the left and right ( s o metimes, too, called " m ale" and " female" ) halves of a tally.

I I I I I

A tally does away with the need for witnesses; if the two surfaces agree, then everyone knows that the agreement between the contracting par­ ties exists as wel l . This i s why Ari stotle saw i t a s a fit metaphor for word s : word A corresponds to concept B because there is a tacit agree­ ment that we shall act as if i t does. The striking thing about tallies is that even though they might begin as simple tokens of friendship and solida rity, in a l most all the later examples, what the two parties actu­ a l l y agree to create i s a relation of ineq u a l i t y : of debt, obligation, sub­ ordination to another ' s orders . This i s in turn what makes it possible to use the metaphor fo r the relation between the materi a l world and that m ore powerful world that ultimately gives i t meaning. The two sides are the same. Yet what they create i s absolute difference. Hence for a Medieval Christian mystic, as fo r Medieval Chinese magici a n s , symbols could be l i t e r a l fragments of heaven-even if for the fi r s t , they provided a language whereby one could have some understanding of beings one could not possibly interact with; while for the second, they provided a way of interacting, even making practical arrangements, with beings whose langu age one could not possibly understand.

O n one level, this i s j ust another version of the dilemmas that always arise when we try to reimagine the world through debt-th at pecu l i a r agreement between two equals that they shall no longer be equ a l s , until such time as they become equals once agai n . Still, the problem took on a peculiar piquancy in the Middle Ages, when the economy became, a s it were, spiritualized . A s gold and si lver migrated to holy places, ordinary transactions everywhere came to be ca rried out primarily through credit. Inevitably, arguments about wealth and mar­ kets became arguments about debt and morality, and arguments about debt and morality became arguments about the nature of our place in the universe. As we've seen, the solutions varied considera b l y . Europe and India saw a return to h ierarchy : society became a ranked order of Priests, Warriors, Merchants, and Farmers (or i n Chri stendom, j ust Priests, Warriors, and Farmers ) . Debts between the orders were con­ s idered threatening because they impl ied the potential of equality, and they often led to outright violence. In C h i n a , in contrast, the principle of debt often became the govern ing principle of the cosmos : karmic debts, milk-debts, debt contracts between human beings and celesti al powers. From the point of view of the authorities, all these led to

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 3 0 3

excess, and potentially to vast concentrations of capital that might throw the entire social order out of balance. It was the respon s i b i l i ty of government to intervene constantly to keep markets running smoothly and equitably, thus avoiding new outbreaks of popular unrest. In the world of Islam, where theologians held that God recreated the en­ tire universe at every instant, m a rket fluctuations were instead seen as merely another manifestation o f divine will.

The striking thing i s that the Confucian condemnation of the mer­ chant, and the I s l a m i c celebration of the merchant, ultimately led to the same thing: prospero u s societies with flourishing m a rkets, but where the elements never came together to create the great merchant banks and industrial firms that were to become the h a l l mark of modern capi­ talism. It's especi ally striking in the case of Islam. Certa inly, the I s l a m i c w o r l d produced figures who would be h a rd to describe a s anything but capital i s t s . Large-scale merchants were referred to as sahib al-mal, "owners of capita l , " and legal theorists spoke freely about the creation and expansion of capital funds . At the height of the Caliphate, some of these merchants were in possession of m i l l ions of dinars and seeking profitable investment. Why did nothing like modern capita l i s m emerge ? I would highlight two factors. First, I s l a m i c merchants appear to have taken their free-m arket ideology serio u s l y . The m a rketplace did not fa l l under the d i rect supervision of the govern ment; contracts were made between individu a l s-ideally, "with a handshake and a glance at heaven "-and thus honor and credit became largely indistinguishable. This i s inevita b l e : you can't have cutthroat competition where there i s no one stopping people from litera lly cutting one another ' s throats. Second , Islam also took seriously the principle, later enshrined in clas­ sical economic theory but only unevenly observed in practice, that profits are the reward for risk. Trading enterp rises were a s s u med to be, quite l i tera l l y , adventures, in which traders exposed themselves to the dangers o f storm and shipwreck, savage nomads, forests, steppes, and deserts, exotic and unpredictable foreign customs, and arbitrary government s . Financial mech a n i s m s designed to avoid these risks were cons idered i m p i o u s . This was one of the o b j ections to u s u r y : if one demands a fixed rate of interest, the profits are gua ranteed . Similarly, com mercial investors were expected to share the risk. This made most of the forms of finance and in surance that were to later develop in Europe impossibl e . 1 65

In this sense the Buddhist mona steries of early Medieval China represent the opposite extreme. The Inexhaustible Treas uries were in­ exhaustible because, by conti n u a l l y lending their money out at inter­ est and never otherwise touching their capita l , they could guarantee

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effectively risk-free investments. That was the entire point. By doing so, Buddhi s m , unlike Islam, produced something very much like what we now call " corporatio n s "-entities that, through a charming legal fic­ tion, we imagine to be persons, j ust like human beings, but i m mort a l , never h a v i n g to go through a l l the h u m a n untidiness of marri age, re­ production, i n firmity, and death . To put it i n properly Medieval terms, they are very much like angels.

Legal l y , our notion of the corporation i s very much a product of the European High Middle Age s . The legal idea of a corporation as a " fictive person " (persona ficta)-a person w h o , as Maitland, the great British legal historian, put it, "is i m morta l , who sues and i s sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those natural persons of whom he i s composed " 166-wa s first esta b l i shed i n c a n o n law by P o p e Innocent I V i n 1250 AD, and one of t h e fi r s t k i n d s of entities it applied to were monasteries-as also to universities, church­ es, municipalities, and guilds . 167

The idea of the corporation as an angelic being is not mine, inci­ denta l l y . I borrowed i t from the great Medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, who pointed out that a l l this w a s happening right around the same time that T h o m a s Aquinas was developing the notion that angels were real l y j ust the personification o f Pl atonic Idea s . 168 " According to the teachings of A q u i n a s , " he notes, " every angel represented a species . "

Little wonder then that finally the personi fied collectives of the j urists, which were j uristically immortal species, displayed all the features otherwise attributed to angels . . . The j urists themselves recognized that there was some simi larity between their abstractions and the angelic beings. I n this respect, it may be said that the political and legal world of thought of the later Middle Ages began to be populated by immaterial angelic bod­ ies, large and small: they were invisible, ageless, sempiternal , immortal, a n d sometimes even ubiquitous; a n d they were en­ dowed with a corpus intellectuale or mysticum [an intellectual or mystical body] which could stand any comparison with the "spiritual bodies " of the celestial beings . 169

A l l this is worth emphasizing because while we are used to assum­ ing that there ' s something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations, i n h i storical terms, they are actually strange, exotic crea­ ture s . N o other great tradition came up with anything like i t . 170 They are the most peculiarly European addition to that endless proliferation

T H E M I D D L E A G E S 3 0 5

of metaphysical entities so cha racteristic of the Middle Ages-as well a s the m o s t enduring.

They have, of course, changed a great deal over time. Medieval cor­ porations owned property, and they often engaged in complex financial arrangements, but in no case were they profit-seeking enterprises i n the modern sense. The ones that came closest were, perhaps unsurpris­ ingly, monastic orders-a bove all, the Cistercians-whose mona ster­ ies became something like the Chinese Buddhist ones, su rrounded by m i l l s and s m i thies, practicing ration a l i zed commercial agriculture with a workforce of " l ay brothers" who were effectively wage laborers, spinn ing and exporting wool . Some even talk about " monastic capi­ t a l i s m . " 17 1 Still, the ground was only really prepa red fo r capita l i s m in the fa m i l i a r sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopo lies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade. An excellent case in point was the Soci ety of Merchant Adventurers, cha rted by King Henry IV in London i n 1407, who, despite the romantic-sounding name, were mainly in the business of buying up British woolens and selling them in the Fla nders fa i r s . They were not a modern j o int-stock company, but a rather old-fa s h ioned Medieval merchant g u i l d , but they provided a structure whereby older, more substantial merchants could simply provide loans to younger ones, and they man aged to secure enough of an exclusive control over the woolen trade that substantial profits were pretty much guaranteed. 1 72 When such companies began to engage in armed ventures overseas, though, a new era of h u m a n h i story m ight be said to have begun .

C h a p t e r E l e v e n

A G E O F T H E G R EAT C A P I TA L I ST E M P I R E S

( 1 4 5 0 - 1 9 7 1 AD)

"Eleven pesos, then; and as you can 't pay me the eleven pesos, that makes an­ other eleven pesos-twenty-two in all: eleven fo r the serape and the petate and eleven because you can 't pay. Is that right, Crisiero ? "

C risiero had no k n o wledge of fig­ u res, so it was very natural that he

sa id, " Th a t is righ t, patro n . "

Don Arnulfo was a decent, honor­ able man. Other landowners were a good

deal less softhearted with their peons.

" Th e s h irt is five p e s o s . R i.ght?

Very well. And as y o u can ' t pay fo r it,

that's five p es o s . And as you remain in

my debt fo r the five pesos, t h a t 's five

p e s o s . And as I s h all never have the

m o ney fro m you, that's five p e s o s . S o

th a t m a k e s fi v e and fi v e and fi v e a n d

fi v e . Tha t ' s twenty p es o s . Agree d ? "

" Yes, patron, agreed . "

The p e o n can get the s h irt n o ­

where else when h e needs o n e . H e

can get credit n o wh ere b u t fro m h is

m as ter, fo r wh o m he wo rks and fro m

wh o m h e can n e v e r get a w a y as long

as he o wes h i m a centavo . -B . Traven, The Carreta

3 0 8 D E B T

T H E E P O C H T H AT B EG A N with what we're used to c a l l ing the " Age of Exploration " was marked by so many things that were genuinely new-the rise of modern science, capita l i s m , humanism, the nation­ state-that it may seem odd to frame it as j u st another turn of an hi storical cycle. Still, from the perspective I've been developing in this book, that is what it was.

The era begins around 1450 with a turn away from virtual curren­ cies and cred it economies and back to gold and silver. The subsequent flow of bullion fro m the Americas sped the process im mensely, spark­ ing a " p rice revolution" in Western Europe that turned traditional society upside-down . What's more, the return to bullion was accompa­ nied by the return of a whole host of other conditions that, during the Middle Age s , had been largely suppressed or kept at b a y : vast empires and professional armies, massive predatory wa rfare, untram meled usu­ ry and debt peonage, but a l s o materi a l i s t philosophies, a new burst of scientific and philo sophical creativi ty-even the return of chattel slav­ ery . It was in no way a simple repeat performance. All the Axial Age pieces reappeared, but they came together in an entirely diffe rent w a y .

I I I I I

The 14oos are a peculiar period in European hi story . It was a century of endless cata stroph e : large cities were regu larly decim ated by the Black Death; the com mercial economy sagged and in some regions col­ l a p sed entirely; whole cities went bankrupt, defaulting on their bonds; the knightly classes squab bled over the rem nants, leaving much of the countryside devastated by endemic wa rfare. Even in geopolitical terms Christendom was staggering, with the Otto man Empire not only scooping up what remained of Byzantium but pushing steadily into central Europe, its fo rces expanding on land and sea .

At the same time, from the perspective of many ordinary farmers and urban la borers, times couldn 't have been much better. One of the perverse effects of the bubonic p l ague, which k i l led off about one-third of the European workforce, was that wages increased dram atica l l y . It didn't happen immediately, but this was largely because the first reac­ tion of the authorities was to enact legislation freezing wages, or even attempting to tie free peasants back to the land aga i n . Such efforts were met with powerful resistance, culminating in a series of popular upris­ ings across Europe . These were squelched, but the authorities were also fo rced to compro m i s e . Before long, so much wealth was flowing into the hands of ordinary people that governments had to start introducing

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 0 9

new laws fo rbidding the lowborn to wear s i lks and ermine, and to limit the number of feast days, which, in many towns and parishes, began eating up one-third or even half of the year. The fifteenth century is, in fact, considered the heyday of Medieval festive life, with its floats and dragons, maypoles and church ales, its Abbots of Unreason and Lords o f Misru le . 1

Over the next centuries, a l l this w a s t o be destroyed . I n Engl and, the festive l i fe was system atically attacked by Puritan reformers; then eventually by reformers everywhere, Catholic and Protestant alike. At the same time its economic basis in popular p rosperity dissolved .

Why this happened h a s been a matter of intense historical debate for centuries. This much we know: it began with a massive inflation. Between rs oo and r6s o , for instance, prices in England increased soo percent, but w ages rose much more slowly, so that in five generatio n s , real w a g e s fel l to perhaps 40 percent of what t h e y had been . The same thing happened everywhere i n Europe.

Why ? The favorite explanation, ever since a F rench l a wyer n amed Jean Bodin first proposed i t in 156 8 , was the vast influx of gold and s i lver that came pouring into Europe a fter the conquest of the New World. As the value of precious meta l s collapsed, the argument went, the price of everything else skyrocketed , and w ages simply couldn't keep up .2 There i s some evidence to support t h i s . The height of popular prosperity around 145 0 did correspond to a period when b u l lion-and therefore, coin-wa s i n particularly short supply.3 The lack of cash p layed havoc with international trade in partic u l a r ; i n the 146os , we hear of ships fu l l of wares forced to turn back fro m major ports, a s no one had any cash on hand to buy fro m them. The problem only started to turn around later i n the decade, with a sudden burst of s i lver mining i n Saxony and the Tirol, fol l owed by the opening of new sea routes to the Gold Coast of West Africa. Then came the conquests of Cortes and Pizarro. Between 1520 and r64o , untold tons of gold and s i lver fro m Mexico and P e r u w e r e transpo rted across t h e Atlantic and P a c i fi c i n S p a n i s h treasure s h i p s .

The p r o b l e m with t h e conventional s t o r y i s that v e r y l i ttle of t h a t gold and silver l ingered v e r y long in E u r o p e . Most of the gold ended up i n temples in I n d i a , and the overwhelming maj ority of the s ilver b u l l i on was ultimately s hipped off to China. The latter i s cruc i a l . I f we really want to understand the origins of the modern world economy, the p lace to start i s not in Europe at all. The real story i s of how China abandoned the use of paper money. I t ' s a story worth telling briefly, because very few people know it.

3 1 0 D E B T

I I I I I

After the Mongo l s conquered China in 127 1 , they kept the system of paper money in place, and even made occasional (if u s u a l l y d i s astrous) attempts to introduce it in the other parts of their empire. In 1368 , however, they were overthrown by another of C h i n a ' s great popular insurrecti ons, and a former peasant leader was once again instal led m power.

During their century o f rule, the Mongol s had worked closely with foreign merchants, who became widely detested . Partly as a result, the former rebels , now the Ming dynasty, were suspicious of com merce in any form, and they promoted a romantic vision of self-sufficient agrar­ ian communities. This had some unfortunate consequences. For one thing, it meant the maintenance of the old Mongol tax system, paid in labor and i n kind; especially since that, in turn , was ba sed on a quasi­ caste system in which subj ects were registered as fa rmers, craftsmen, or soldiers and fo rbidden to cha nge their j o b s . This proved extraordi­ narily unpopu l a r . While government investment in agriculture, roads, and canals did set off a commerc i a l boom, much of this com merce was technically i l lega l , and taxes on crops were so high that many indebted fa rmers began to flee their ancestral lands.4

Typically, such floating populations can be expected to seek j ust about anything but regular industrial employment; here as in Europe, most preferred a combin ation of odd j o b s , peddling, entertainment, p i racy, or banditry . In China, many also turned prospector. There was a minor si lver rush, with i l legal mines cropping up everywhere. Uncoined si lver ingots, . i nstead of official paper money and strings of bronze coins, soon became the real money of the off-the-books infor­ m a l econo m y . When the government attempted to shut down i l legal mines in the 1430s and 1440s, their efforts spa rked local insu rrecti ons, in which miners would make common cause with displ aced peasants, seize nearby cities, and sometimes threaten entire provinces .5

In the end, the government gave up even trying to suppress the informal economy. Instead , they swung the other way entirel y : stopped i s s u ing paper money, lega l i zed the mines, allowed si lver bullion to become the recognized currency fo r large transactions, and even gave private mints the authority to produce strings of cash.6 T h i s , in turn, a l lowed the government to gradually abandon the system of labor ex­ actions and su bstitute a uniform tax system payable in silver.

Effectively, the Chinese govern ment had gone back to its old policy of encouraging markets and merely intervening to prevent any undue concentrations of capita l . It quickly proved spectacularly successful,

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 1 1

and Chinese m a rkets boomed . Indeed, many speak of the Ming a s having accomplished something almost unique in world h i s tory : t h i s was a time whe.n the C h i n e s e population w a s exploding, but l i v i n g standards markedly i mproved .7 The p r o b l e m was that the n e w pol icy meant that the regime had to ens ure an abundant supply of silver in the country, so as to keep its price low and m i n i m i ze popular unrest­ but as it turned out, the C h i nese mines were very quickly exhau sted . In the 153 0 s , new silver mines were d i scovered in Japan, but these were exhau sted in a decade or two a s wel l . Before long, China had to turn to Europe and the New World .

Now, s ince Roman times, Europe h a d been exporting gold and si lver to the East: the problem was that Europe had never produced much of anything that Asians wanted to buy, so it was forced to pay in specie for s i lks, spices, steel, and other imports . The early years of European expansion were largely attempts to gain access either to East­ ern luxuries or to new sources of gold and silver with which to pay for them. In those early days, Atlantic Europe rea lly had only one substan­ tial advantage over its Muslim riva l s : an active and advan ced trad ition of naval wa rfa re, honed by centuries of conflict in the Mediterranean . T h e moment when Vasco da G a m a entered t h e Indian Ocean i n 149 8 , t h e principle t h a t t h e seas should b e a zone of pea ceful trade c a m e to an i m med i a te end. Po rtuguese floti l l a s began bombarding and sack­ ing every port city they came across, then seizing control of strategic points and extorting protection money from una rmed Indian Ocean merchants for the right to ca rry on their business unmolested .

At a l most exactly the same time, Christopher Columbus-a Geno­ ese mapm aker seeking a short-cut to C h i n a-touched land in the New World, and the Spanish and Portuguese empires stumb led into the greatest economic windfall in human h i story : entire continents fu ll of unfathomable wealth, whose i n h abitants, armed only with Stone Age weapons, began conveniently dying al most as soon as they arrived . The conquest of Mexico and Peru led to the di scovery of enormous new sources of precious meta l , and these were exp loited ruthlessly and sys­ tematica l l y , even to the point of largely exterminating the surrounding populations to extract as much precious metal a s quickly as possible. As Kenneth Pomeranz h a s recently poi nted out, none of this would have been possible were it not for the practica l l y u n l i m i ted Asian de­ mand for precious meta l s .

H a d China in particular not h a d s u c h a dynamic economy that changing its meta llic base could absorb the staggering quanti­ ties of si lver mined in the New World over three centuries,

3 1 2 D E B T

those mines might have become unprofitable within a few de­ cades . The massive infl ation of silver-denominated prices in Europe from 1500 to 1640 indicates a shrinking value for the metal there even with Asia draining off much of the supply.8

By 1540 , a s ilver glut caused a collapse i n p rices across Europe; the American mines would, at this point, simply have stopped functioning, and the entire proj ect of A merican colonization foundered , h a d i t not been for the demand fro m China.9 Treasure galleons moving toward Europe soon refrained fro m unloading their cargoes, i nstead rounding the horn of Africa and proceeding across the Indian Ocean toward Canton . After 1571, with the foundation of the Spanish city of M a n i l a , t h e y b e g a n to m o v e directly a c r o s s t h e Pacific. By the late s ixteenth century, China was i mporting a l m o s t fifty tons of s i lver a year, about 90 percent of its s i lver, and by the early seventeenth century, n6 tons, or over 97 percen t . 10 Huge amounts of silk, porce l a i n , and other Chi­ nese products had to be exported to pay for i t . Many of these Chinese products, in turn, ended up i n the new cities of Central and South Ameri c a . This Asian trade became the single most significant factor in the emerging global economy, and those who ultimately controlled the financial levers-particularly I t a l i a n , Dutch, and German merchant bankers-became fantastically rich.

But how exactly did the new global economy cause the collapse of living standards in Europe ? One thing we do k n o w : it clearly w a s not by m a k i n g l a rge a m o unts of precious m e t a l available f o r everyday transaction s . I f anything, the effect w a s the opposite. While E uropean mints were stamping out enormous numbers of r i a l s , thalers, ducats, and doubloons, which became the new medium of trade fro m Ni­ caragua to Beng a l , a l most none found their way into the pockets of ord i n a ry Europeans. Instead, we hear constant complaints about the shortage of currency. I n Englan d :

F o r much o f the Tudor period the circulating medium w a s so small that the taxable population simply did not have sufficient coin in which to pay the benevolences, subsidies, and tenths levied upon them, and time and time again household plate, the handiest near money that most people possessed, had to be surrendered . 1 1

T h i s w a s the case i n most of Europe. Despite t h e massive influx of metal fro m the Ameri c a s , most fa milies were so l o w on cash that

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 1 3

they were regu l a rly reduced to melting down the fa m i l y silver to pay their taxe s .

This w a s because t a x e s h a d to be paid in meta l . Everyday business i n contrast contin ued to be trans acted much as it had in the Middle Ages, by means of various for m s of virtual credit money: tallies, prom­ issory notes, or, within smaller c o m m u nities, s i m p l y by keeping track of who owed what to whom . What really caused the inflation is that those who ended up in control of the bullion-governments, bankers, l a rge-scale merchants-were able to use that control to begin chang­ ing the rules, first by i n s i sting that gold and silver were money, and second by introducing new fo r m s of credit-money fo r their own use while slowly undermining and destroying the local systems of trust that had al lowed s m a ll-scale c o m m unities across Europe to operate largely without the use of metal currency.

This was a political battle, even if it was also a conceptual a rgu­ ment about the nature of money . The new reg i m e of bullion money could only be i mposed through almost unpa ralleled vio lence-not only oversea s , but at home a s wel l . In much of Europe, the first reaction to the " price revolution" and accompanying enclosures of common lands w a s not very different fro m what had so recently happened i n Chin a : thousands of one-time peasants fleeing o r being forced out of their v i l ­ l a g e s to beco me v a g a b o n d s or " m a sterless m e n , " a process that c u l m i ­ nated in p o p u l a r insurrecti o n s . The reaction of European govern ments, however, w a s entirely different . The rebellions were crushed , and this time, no subsequent concessions were fo rthcoming. Vagabonds were rounded up, expo rted to the colonies as indentured la borers, and draft­ ed into colonial armies and navies-or, eventu a l l y , set to work in factories at h o m e .

A l m ost a l l of this w a s carried out through a m a n ipulation of debt. As a result, the very n a ture of debt, too, beca me once again one of the principal bones of contention.

P a r t 1 :

G reed , Terror, I n d ignatio n , Debt

No doubt scholars w i l l never stop arguing about the reasons for the great " p rice revolution "-l argely because it's not clear what kind of too l s can be applied . Can we really use the methods of modern econom­ ics, which were designed to understand how contemporary econ omic

3 1 4 D E B T

institutions operate, to describe the political battles that led to the creation of those very institutions ?

This is not j ust a conceptual problem. There are moral dangers here. To take what might seem an " o b j ective , " macro-economic ap­ proach to the origins of the world economy would be to treat the behavior of early European explorers, merchants , and conquerors as if they were simply rational responses to opportunities-as i f this were j ust what anyone would have done i n the same situati o n . This i s what the use of equations so often does : make i t seem perfectly natural to assume that, i f the price of silver i n China i s twice what i t i s i n Seville, and inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on l a rge quantities of s ilver and transporting i t to China, then clearly they w i l l , even if d o i n g so requires t h e destruction of entire civilizations. O r i f there is a demand for s u g a r i n Engl and, a n d enslaving m i l l ions i s t h e easiest way to acquire l a b o r to produce it, t h e n i t i s inevitable that some w i l l enslave them. In fact, h i story makes i t quite clear that this is not the case. Any number o f c i v i l i zations have probably been i n a posi­ tion to wreak havoc on the scale that the European powers did i n the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ( Ming China itself w a s an obvious candidate} , but almost none actually did s o . 12

Consider, for i n stance, how the gold and s ilver from the American mines were extracted . Mining operations began almost i m mediately upon the fal l of the Aztec capital of Tenochtithin i n 152 1 . While we are used to assuming that the Mexican population was devastated s i m ­ ply a s an effect of n e w l y i n troduced European diseases, contemporary observers fel t that the dragooning of the newly conquered natives to work in the mines was at least equally respo n s i b l e . U In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan T odorov offers a compendi u m of some of the most chilling reports, mostly fro m Spanish priests and friars who, even when committed i n principle to the belief that the extermination of the Indians w a s the j udgment of God, could not d i sguise their horror at scenes of Spanish soldiers testing the blades of their weapons by eviscerating random passers-by, and tearing babies off their mother ' s b a c k s t o be eaten by d o g s . S u c h acts m i g h t perhaps be written off a s what o n e w o u l d expect w h e n a collection of heavily armed men-many of v i o lent criminal background-are given absolute impunity; but the reports fro m the mines imply something far more systematic. When Fray Toribio de Motolinia wrote of the ten p l agues that he believed God had v i si ted on the i n h a b i tants of Mexico, he l isted s m allpox, war, fa mine, labor exactions, taxes (which caused many to sell their chi ldren to moneylenders, others to be tortured to death i n cruel prisons ) , and

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 1 5

the thousands who died in the building of the capital city . Above a l l , he i n s isted, were the uncountable n u m bers who died i n the mines:

The eighth plague was the slaves whom the Spaniards made in order to put them to work in the mines . At first those who were already slaves of the Aztecs were taken ; then those who had given evidence of insubordination; finally all those who could be caught. D uring the first years after the conquest, the slave traffic fl ourished, and slaves often changed master. They pro­ duced so many marks on their faces, in addition to the royal brand, that they had their faces covered with letters, for they bore the marks of all who had bought and sold them .

The ninth plague was the service in the mines, to which the heavily laden Indians traveled sixty leagues or more to carry provisions . . . When their food gave out they died, either at the mines or on the road, for they had no money to buy food and there was no one to give it to them . Some reached horne in such a state that they died soon after. The bodies of those Indians and of the slaves who died in the mines produced such a stench that it caused a pestilence, especially at the mines of Oaxaca. For half a league around these mines and along a great part of the road one could scarcely avoid walking over dead bodies or bones, and the flocks of birds and crows that carne to fatten themselves upon the corpses were so numerous that they darkened the sun . " 14

S i m i l a r scenes were reported in Peru, w here whole regions were depopulated by forced service i n the mines, and Hispaniola, where the indigenous population was eradicated entirel y Y

W h e n d e a l i n g with conquistadors, we a r e speaking not j ust of simple greed, but greed raised to mythic proporti o n s . This i s , a fter all, what they are best remembered for . They never seemed to get enough . Even a fter the conquest of Tenochtitlan or Cuzco, and the acquisition of h itherto-unimaginable riches, the conquerors almost invariably re­ grouped and started off i n search of more treasure.

Moralists throughout the ages have i n veighed against the endless­ ness of human greed, j ust as they have against our supposedly endless lust for power. What h i s tory actually reveal s , though, is that while humans may be j u stly accused of having a proclivity to accuse others o f acting like conquistadors, few r e a l l y a c t this way themselves . E v e n for the most ambitious of u s , our dreams are more like Sindbad ' s : to have adventures, to acquire the means to settle down and live an enjoyable

3 1 6 D E B T

life , and then, to enjoy it. M a x Weber of course argued that the es­ sence of capitalism i s the u rge--which he thought first appeared in Calvinism-never to settle down, but to engage in endless expansion. But the conquistadors were good Medieval Cath o l i c s , even if ones usu­ a l l y drawn fro m the most ruthless and unprincipled elements of Span­ ish society . Why the unrelenting drive fo r more and more and more ?

It might help, I think, to go back to the very onset of Hernan Cor­ tes ' s conquest of Mexico : What were h i s immediate motives ? Cortes h a d migrated to the colony of H i spaniola in 1504, dreaming of glory and adventure, but fo r the first decade and a ha lf, his adventures had largely consi sted of seducing other peop l e ' s wives. In 15 1 8 , however, he man aged to finagle h i s way into being named commander of an expedition to establish a Spanish presence on the main land . As Bernal D i a z del Casti l l o , who accompanied h i m , later wrote, around this time

He began t o adorn hi mself and be more ca reful o f h i s appear­ ance than before . He wore a plume of feathers, with a medal­

l ion and a gold chain, and a velvet cloak trim med with loops

of gold . In fact he looked like a bold and gallant Capta i n .

However, he h a d n o money t o defray t h e expenses I h a v e spo­

ken a bout, for a t the time he was very poor and much in debt,

despite the fact that he h a d a good estate of Indians and was

getting gold from the mines. But a l l this he spent on his person,

on finery for his w i fe , whom he h a d recently married, and on

enterta ining guests . . .

When some merchant friends of h i s heard that he had ob­

tained his com mand as Captain Genera l , they lent him four

thousand gold pesos in coin and another four thousand in

goods secured on h i s Indians and estate s . He then ordered two

standards and banners to be made, worked in gold with the

royal arms and a c ross on each side with a legend which s a i d ,

" Comrades, l e t us follow the s i g n o f the Holy Cross with true

faith, and through i t we shall conquer. " 16

In other word s , he'd been living beyond h i s means, got himself in trouble, and decided, like a reck less gambler, to double down and go for broke. Unsurprising, then, that when the governor at the last minute decided to cancel the exped ition, Cortes ignored h i m and sai led for the mainland with six hundred men, offering each an equal share in the expedition ' s profits. On landing he burned h i s boats, effectively staking everyth ing on victory.

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 1 7

Let us skip, then, fro m the beginning of D i a z ' s book to its final chapter. Three years later, thro ugh some of the most ingeni o u s , ruth­ less, · brilliant, and utterly dishonorable behavior by a m i litary leader ever recorded, Cortes had h i s victory. After eight months of grueling house-to-house warfare and the death of perh aps a hundred thousand Aztecs , Tenochtit l a n , one o f the greatest cities of the world, lay entirely destroyed . The imperial treasury was secured, and the time had come, then, for i t to be divided in shares a mongst the surviving soldiers.

Yet according to D i a z , the result a mong the men w a s outrage. The officers connived to sequester most of the gold, and when the final tally was announced , the troops learned that they would be receiving only fifty to eighty pesos each . What's more, the better part of their shares was i m mediately seized again by the officers i n their capacity of creditors-since Cortes h a d i n s isted that the men be billed for any rep l acement equipment and medical care they had received during the siege. Most found they had actually lost money on the dea l . Diaz write s :

W e were all very deeply in debt. A crossbow w a s n o t to be purchased for less than forty or fifty pesos, a musket cost one hundred, a sword fifty , and a horse from 8oo to 1000 pesos , and above. Thus extravagantly did we have to pay for every­ thing! A surgeon, who called himself Mastre Juan, who had tended some very bad wounds, charged wildly infl ated fees, and so did a quack named Murcia, who was an apothecary and a barber and also treated wounds, and there were thirty other tricks and swindles for which payment was demanded of our shares as soon as we received them .

Serious complaints were made about this, and the only rem­ edy that Cortes provided was to appoint two trustworthy per­ sons who knew the prices of goods and could value anything that we had bought on credit. An order went out that whatever price was placed on our purchases or the surgeon 's cures must be accepted , but that if we had no money, our creditors must wait two years for paymentY

Spanish merchants soon arrived charging wildly inflated prices for basic necessities, causing further outrage, unti l :

O u r general becoming weary o f the continual reproaches which were thrown out against him, saying he had stolen everything for himself, and the endless petitions for loans and advance

3 1 8 D E B T

in pay, determined at once to get rid of the most troublesome fellows, by forming settlements in those p rovinces which ap­ peared most eligible for this purpose. 1 8

These were the men who ended u p in control of the provinces, and who esta b l i shed local a d m i n istration, taxes, and labor regimes. Which makes it a little easier to understand the descriptions of Indians with their faces covered by n a m e s like so many counter-endorsed checks , o r the m i n e s s u r rounded by m i l e s o f rotting corpses . We are n o t deal­ ing with a p sychology of cold, calculating greed , but of a m u c h more compl icated m i x of shame and righteous indign ation, and of the frantic u rgency of debts that would only compound and acc u m u l ate ( these were, almost certa inly, interest- bearing loans) , and outrage at the idea that, after all they had gone thro ugh , they should be held to owe any­ thing to begin with.

And what of Cortes ? He had j u s t pul led off perhaps the greatest act of theft in world history. Certai n l y , his original debts had now been rendered inconsequent i a l . Yet he somehow always seemed to find h i m self in new ones . Creditors were al ready starting to repossess h i s holdings w h i l e he w a s off on an expedition to Honduras i n 1526; on h i s return, he wrote the E m p e r o r C h a r l e s V that h i s expenses w e r e such that "all I have received has been insufficient to relive me from m i sery a n d poverty, being at the m o m ent I write in debt for u p w ards of five hundred ounces o f gold, without possessing a single peso towards i t . " 1 9 D i s ingen u o u s , no doubt ( Cortes at the time owned h i s own personal palace) , but only a few years l a ter, he was reduced to p awning his wife ' s j ewelry to help finance a series of expeditions to Californ i a , hop­ ing to restore his fortunes . When those failed to turn a profit, he ended up so besieged by creditors that he had to return to Spain to petition the emperor in perso n . 20

I I I I I

If a l l this seems suspiciously reminiscent of the fourth Crusade, with its indebted knights stripping whole foreign cities of their wealth and still somehow w i n ding up only one step ahead of their creditors, there i s a reason. The financial capital that backed these expeditions c a m e fro m more or less the s a m e p l ace ( i f in this c a s e Geno a , not Venice) . W h a t ' s m o r e , t h a t relationship, between the d a ring adventurer on t h e o n e hand, the g a m b l e r w i l l i ng to t a k e any sort o f risk, and on the other, the ca reful financier, whose entire operations are organi zed around

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 1 9

producing steady, mathem atical, inexorable growth of income, lies a t the very h e a r t of what we now call "capita l i s m . "

A s a result, our current economic system h a s always been marked by a pecu l i a r dual character. Scholars have long been fascinated by Spanish debates that ensued, in Spanish universities like Santander, about the humanity of the Indians ( D i d they have sou l s ? Could they have lega l rights ? Was it legitim ate to forcibly ensl ave them ? ) , j ust a s t h e y h a v e argued a b o u t t h e r e a l attitudes of t h e conquistadors ( w a s it contempt, revulsion, or even grudging admiration for their adversar­ ies ? ) 2 1 The rea l point i s that at the key moments of decision, none of this ma ttered . Those making the decisions did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the deta i l s . To take a telling example: after the earliest years of the gold and silver mines descri bed by Moto l i n i a , where millions of Indians were simply rounded up and marched off to their death s , colonists settled on a policy of debt peonage: the usual trick of demanding heavy taxes, lending money at interest to those who could not pay, and then demanding that the loans be repaid with work. Royal agents regu larly a ttempted to forbid such practices, arguing that the Indians were now Christian and that this violated their rights as loyal subj ects of the Spanish cro w n . But as with a l most all such royal efforts to act a s protector o f the Indians, the result w a s the same. Financial exigen­ cies ended up taking precedence. Charles V hi mself was deeply i n debt to banking firms in Florence, Genoa, and Naples, and gold and silver fro m the Americas made up perhaps one-fifth of his total reven u e . In the end, despite a lot of initial noise and the ( u s u a l l y quite sincere) moral outrage on the part of the king's emissaries, such decrees were either ignored or, a t best, enforced for a year or two before being al­ lowed to slip into abeyance.22

I I I I I

A l l of this helps exp l a i n why the Church had been so uncompromising i n its attitude toward usury. It w a s not j u st a phi losophical questi o n ; it was a matter of m o r a l r i v a l r y . M o n e y a l w a y s h a s t h e potenti a l t o become a m o r a l imperative u n t o itself. A l l o w it t o expan d , and it c a n quickly become a morality so imperative t h a t a l l others s e e m frivolous in compari s o n . For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential da ngers, potential tools, and potenti a l merch andiseY Even h u m a n relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly this i s the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer.

3 2 0 D E B T

It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social ar­ rangements that essentially force u s to think this w a y . The structure of the corporation i s a telling case i n p o int-and it i s no coincidence that the first major j o int-stock corporations i n the world were the Engli s h and D utch East I n d i a companies, o n e s that pursued t h a t v e r y s a m e combin ation of exploration, conquest, and extraction as did the con­ quistadors . It i s a structure designed to e l i minate a l l moral imperatives but profit. The executives who make decisions can argue--and regu­ larly do--that, if i t were their own money, of course they would not fire l i felong employees a week before reti rement, or dump carcinogenic waste next to school s . Yet they are morally bound to ignore such con­ siderations, because they are mere employees whose only respons i b i l i ty is to provide the maximum return on investment for the company's stockholders . (The stockholders, of course, are not given any s ay . )

T h e figure o f Cortes i s instructive for another reason . W e are speaking of a man who, in 152 1 , had conquered a kingdom and was sitting atop a vast pile of gold. Neither did he have any i n tention of giving i t away-even to h i s followers. Five years later, he was claiming to be a penniless debtor. How was this possible ?

The obvious answer would b e : Cortes w a s not a king, he was a subj ect of the King of S p a i n , living within the legal structure of a king­ dom that insi sted that, if he were not good at managing h i s money, he would lose it. Yet a s we've seen, the king's laws could be ignored in other case s . What's more, even kings were not entirely free agent s . C h a r l e s V was conti n u a l ly i n d e b t , and w h e n his son P h i l i p 11-h i s a r m i e s fighting on three different fronts ar once--attempted t h e old Medieval trick of defaulting, all h i s creditors, from the Genoese Bank of St. George to the German Fuggers and Welsers, closed ranks to insist that he would receive no further loans until he sta rted honoring h i s commitments .24

Capita l , then, is not simply money. It is not even j ust wealth that can be turned into money. But neither i s it j ust the use of political pow­ er to help one use one's money to make more money. Cortes w a s trying to do exactly that: in classical Axial Age fa shion, he was attempting to use his conquests to acquire p l under, and s l a ves to work the mines, with which he could pay h i s soldiers and suppl iers cash to embark on even further conquests . I t was a tried-and-true formu l a . But for a l l the other conquistadors, it provided a spectacular failure.

This would seem to mark the difference. I n the Axial Age, money was a tool of empire. It might have been convenient for rulers to pro­ mulgate markets i n which everyone would treat money as an end in itself; at times, rulers might have even come to see the whole apparatus

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 2 1

of government a s a profit-making enterprise; but money always re­ mai ned a political i n strument. This i s why when the empires co llapsed and armies were demobilized, the whole apparatus could simply melt away. Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and m i l itary power were then gradu­ a l l y reorgani zed around it. True, this was a financial logic that could never have exi sted without states and armies behind it in the first place. A s we have seen in the case of Medieval Islam, under gen uine free-ma rket conditions-in which the state is not involved in regulat­ ing the m a rket in any significant way, even i n enforcing commercial contracts-purely competitive m a rkets will not develop, and loans at interest w i l l become effectively impossible to collect. I t w a s only the I s l a m i c prohibition against usury, rea l l y , that made it possible for them to create an econo mic system that stood so fa r apart fro m the state.

Martin Luther was making this very point in 15 24, right around the time that Cortes was first beginning to have trouble with h i s creditors. I t is a l l very well, Luther s a i d , for us to i m agine that a l l might live as true Christi a n s , in accordance with the dictates of the Gospel. But in fact there a re few who are really capable o f acting this w a y :

Christians are rare in this world; therefore t h e world needs a strict, hard, temporal govern ment that will compel and con­ strain the wicked not to rob and to return what they borrow, even though a Christian ought not to demand it, or even hope to get it back . This is necessary in order that the world not become a desert, peace may not perish , and trade and society not be utterly destroyed; all of which would happen if we were to rule the world according to the Gospel and not drive and compel the wicked , by laws and the use of fo rce, to do what is right . . . Let no one think that the world can be ruled without blood; the sword of the ruler must be red and bloody; for the world will and must be evi l , and the sword is God's rod and vengeance upon it.ZS

" Not to rob and to return what they borrow "-a tel ling j uxtaposi­ tion, considering that in Scholastic theory, lending money at interest had itself been considered theft.

And Luther was referring to interest-bearing loans here. The story of how he got to this point i s tel l i n g . Luther began his career a s a re­ former in 15 20 with fiery campaigns against usury; in fact, one of his obj ections to the sale of Church indu lgences was that it was itself a form of spiritual usury. These positions won h i m enormous popu l a r

3 2 2 D E B T

support in towns and v i l l ages. However, he soon realized that h e ' d un­ leashed a genie that threatened to turn the whole world upside-down . More radical reformers appeared, arguing that the poor were not mor­ ally o b liged to repay the interest on usurious loans, and proposing the revival of Old Testa ment institutions like the sabbatical year. They were fol lowed by outright revolutionary preachers who began once again questi oning the very legitimacy of aristocratic privi lege and pri­ vate property . I n 1525 , the year a fter Luther's sermon, there w a s a mas­ sive uprising of peasants, miners, and poor townsfolk across Germany : the rebe l s , in most cases, representing themselves as simple Christians aiming to restore the true communism of the Gospel s . Over a hundred thousand were s l a ughtered . Already in 1524, Luther h a d a sense that matters were s p i l l ing out of control and that he would have to choose sides: i n that text, he did s o . Old Testament laws like the Sabbatical year, he argued, are no longer binding; the Gospel merely describes ideal behavior; humans are sinful creatures, so law i s neces sary; while usury i s a s i n , a four to five-percent rate of i nterest i s currently legal under certain circumstances; and w h i l e collecting that i nterest is sinfu l , under no circum stances i s it legitimate to argue t h a t for t h a t rea son, borrowers h ave the right to break the l a w .26

The Swiss Protestant reformer Zwingli was even more explicit. God, he argued , gave us the divine law: to love thy neighbor as thyself. If we truly kept this law, humans would give freely to one another, and private property would not exist. However, Jesus excepted, no human being h a s ever been a b l e to live up to this pure communistic standard . Therefore, G o d h a s a l s o given us a second, i nferior, human l a w , t o b e enforced b y t h e civil authoritie s . While t h i s inferior l a w cannot com­ pel us to act as we real l y ought to act ( " the magi strate can force no one to lend out what belongs to h i m without hope of recompense or profit" )-at least i t can make us follow the lead of the apostle P a u l , who s a i d : "Pay a l l m e n what you owe. "27

Soon afterward, Calvin was to rej ect the blanket ban on usury entirely , and by 1650, a l most a l l Protestant denominations had come to agree with his position that a reasonable rate of interest ( u s u a l l y five percent) was not sinfu l , provided the lenders act i n good conscience, do not make lending their exclusive business, and do not exploit the poor.28 ( C atholic doctrine was slower to come around, but it did ulti­ mately accede by passive acquiescence . )

If o n e looks at h o w a l l this w a s j u stified, two things j u mp out. First, Protestant thinkers a l l continued to make the old Medieval argument about interesse: that " i nterest" i s really compensation for the money that the lender would have made had he been able to place his money

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 2 3

i n some more profita ble investment. Originally, this logic was j ust ap­ plied to commercial loans. Increasingly, it was now applied to a l l loans. Far from being unnatur a l , then, the growth of money was now treated as completely expected . All money was a s s u med to be capitaJ .29 Second, the assumption that usury is something that one properly practices on one's enemies, and therefore, by exten s i o n , that a l l commerce pa rtakes something of the nature of war, never entirely d i sappears . Calvin, for instance, denied that Deuteronomy only referred to the A m alekites; clearly, he said, i t meant that usury was acceptable when dealing with Syrians or Egyptians; indeed with a l l nations with whom the Jews traded .30 The result o f opening the gates was, at least tacitly, to sug­ gest that one could now treat anyone, even a neigh bor, as a foreignerY One need only observe how European merchant adventurers of the day actua l l y were treating foreigners, i n Asia, Africa , and the Americas, to understand what this might mean i n practice.

O r , one might look closer to home. Take the story of another well-known debtor of the time, the Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg­ Ansbach (I48I-I5 27) , of the fa mous Hohenzollern dynasty :

Casimir w a s the son of Margrave Friedrich the Elder of Branden­ burg, who h a s come to be known as one of the "mad princes" of the German Renaissance . Sources differ on j ust how mad he actually w a s . One contemporary chronicle describes h i m as " somewhat deranged in h i s head fro m too much racing and j ousting ; " most agree that he w a s g i v e n to fi t s of inexplicable r a g e , a s well as to the sponsorship of w i l d , extravagant festivals, said often to have degenerated i n t o wild baccha­ nalian orgies.32

A l l agree, however, that he was poor at m a n aging h i s money . At the beginning of ISIS , Friedrich was in such financial trouble-he i s said to have owed 2oo,ooo guilders-that he a lerted his creditors, mostly fel low nobles, that he might soon be forced to temporarily sus­ pend i nterest payments on his debts . This seems to have caused a crisis of fa ith, and within a matter of weeks , h i s son C a s i m i r staged a palace coup-moving, i n the early hours o f February 26, ISIS , to seize control of the castle of Plassenburg while h i s father was di stracted with the celebration of Carnival, then forcing him to sign papers abdicating for reason of mental infirmity. Friedrich spent the rest of his l i fe confined in P l a s senburg , denied a l l vis itors and correspondence. When at one point h i s guards requested that the new Margrave provide a couple gui lders so he could p a s s the time gambling with them , Casimir made a great public show of refu s a l , stating (ridiculously, of course) that his father had left his affairs in such disastrous shape that he could not possibly afford toY

3 2 4 D E B T

Casimir dutifu l l y doled out governorships and other prize offices to his father's creditors . He tried to get his house in order, but this proved �urprisingly d i fficult. His enthusiastic embrace of Luth er's reforms in 1521 clearly had as much to do with the prospect of getting his hands on Church lands and monastic assets than with any particu lar religious fervor. Yet a t first, the d i sposition of Church property remained moot, and C a s i m i r himself compounded h i s problems by running up gambling debts of h i s own said to have amounted to nearly 5o,ooo gui lders .34

Placing his creditors in charge of the civil administration had pre­ dictable effects: increasing exactions on his subj ects, many of whom became hopelessly indebted themselves . Unsurprisingly, C a s i m i r ' s lands i n the Tauber Valley in Franconia became one of the epicenters of the revolt of 1525 . Bands of armed vil lagers assembled, declaring they would obey no l a w that did not accord with " the holy word of G od . " A t first, the nobles, isolated i n their scattered castles, offered little re­ sistance. The rebel leaders-m any of them local shopkeepers, butchers, and other prominent men from nearby towns-began with a largely orderly campaign of tearing down castle forti fication s , their knightly occupants being offered guarantees of safety if they cooperated, agreed to abandon their feud al privileges, and swore oaths to abide by the reb­ els' Twelve Articles . Many complied . The rea l venom of the rebels was reserved for cathedrals and monasteries, dozens of which were sacked, p i l l aged , and destroyed.

C a s i m i r ' s reaction was to hedge h i s bets. At first he bided his time, assembling a n armed force of about two thousand experienced soldiers, but refusing to intervene as rebels p i l l aged several nearby monasteries; i n fact, negotiating with the various rebel bands in such apparent good faith that many bel ieved he was preparing to j o in them " a s a Christian brother . " 35 In May, however, after the kn ights of the Swabian League defeated the rebel s of the Christian Union to the south, Casimir swung into action, h i s forces brushing aside poorly disciplined rebel bands to sweep through h i s own territories like a conquering army, burning and p i l l aging v i l l ages and towns, slaughtering women and children . In every town h e set up punitive tribun a l s , and seized all looted property, which he kept, even as his men also expropriated any wealth still to be found i n the regio n ' s cathedra l s , ostensibly as emergency loans to pay his troops .

I t seems significant that Casimir w a s , of a l l t h e German princes, both the longest to waver before intervening, and the most savagely vengeful once he did. H i s fo rces became notorious not only for execut­ ing accused rebels, but systematically chopping off the fingers of ac­ cused collaborators, h i s executioner keeping a grim ledger of amputa ted

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body p a rts for later reimbursement-a kind of carnal inversion of the account ledgers that had caused him so much trouble in his l ife . At one point, i n the town of Kitzingen, Casimir ordered the gouging out of the eyes of fifty-eight b u rghers who had, he declared, " refused to look at h i m a s their lord . " Afterward he received the following b i l l : 36

8o beheaded

69 eyes put out or fingers cut off

fro m this to deduct

received from the Rothenburgers

received fro m Ludwig von Hutten

Remainder

Plus 2 months ' pay at 8 fl. per month

Total

I I 4 'lz fl .

1 0 fl .

2 fl .

1 6 fl .

n 8 'h fl .

[S igned] Augustin, the executioner, who the Kitzingers call "Master Ouch . "

The repression eventua l l y inspired C a s i m i r ' s brother Georg ( later known a s " the Pious " ) to write a letter asking h i m if C a s i m i r was in­ tending to take up a trade-since, as Georg gently reminded h i m , he could not very well continue to be a feudal overlord i f his peasants were a l l dead .37

With such things happening, it is hardly surprising that men like Thomas Hobbes came to i magine the basic nature of society a s a war of all against all, from which only the a b s o l ute power of monarchs could save u s . At the same time, C a s i m i r ' s behavior-combining as i t d o e s a general attitude of unprincipled, cold-blooded calculation w i t h outbursts of a l most inexp licably vindictive cruelty-seem s , like that of Corte s ' s angry foot soldiers when unleashed on the Aztec provinces, to embody something essential about the psychology of debt. O r , more preci sely, perhaps, about the debtor who feels he h a s done nothing to deserve being p laced in h i s position : the frantic urgency of having to convert everything around oneself into money, and rage and indigna­ tion at having been reduced to the sort of person who would do s o .

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P a rt I I :

The World of Credit and the World of I nterest

Of all the beings that have existence o nly in the m inds of m e n , n o th ing is m o re fa n tas tical and nice than Credit; it is never to be fo rced; it ha ngs u p o n o p i n i o n ; it dep ends upon o u r passions of h o p e and fea r; it comes many times

unsough t-for, and often goes away with o u t reason; and once lost, it is ha rdly to be q u ite recovered.

-Charles Davenant, 1696

He that has lost h is credit is dead to the wo rld .

-English a n d German Proverb

The peasants' visions of communistic brotherhood did not come out of nowhere. They were rooted in real daily experience: of the main­ tenance of com mon fields and forests, of everyday cooperation and neighborly solidarity . I t i s out o f such homely experience of everyday communism that grand mythic visions are always built.38 Obviously, rural communities were also divided, squabbling places, since com­ munities always are-but insofar as they are communities at a l l , they are necessarily founded on a ground of mutual aid. The same, inci­ denta l l y , can be said of members of the aristocracy, who might have fought endlessly over love, land, honor, and religion, but nonetheless still cooperated remarkably well with one another when it rea lly mat­ tered ( most of all, when their position a s aristocrats was threatened ) ; j ust a s the merchants and bankers, much a s they competed with one another, man aged to close ranks when it really mattered . This i s what I refer to as the "communism of the rich , " and it i s a powerful force i n human history .39

The same, a s we've seen repeatedly, applies to credit. There are always different standards for those one considers friends or neighbor s . T h e inexorable n a ture of interest-bearing d e b t , and the alternately s a v ­ a g e and calculating behavior of t h o s e enslaved to it, are typical above all of dealings between strangers: it's unlikely that Casimir felt much more kinship with his peasants than Cortes did with the Aztecs (in

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 2 7

fact, most likely less, since Aztec warriors were a t least ari stocrats ) . Inside the s m a l l towns and rural h a m lets, where the state w a s mostly far away, Medieval standards survived intact, and " credit" w a s j u st as much a matter of honor and reputation as it had ever been . The great untold story of o u r current age i s of how these ancient credit systems were ultim ately destroyed .

Recent historical resea rch , notably that of Craig M u ld rew , who h a s sifted through t h o u s a n d s of inventories and c o u r t cases from sixteenth­ and seventeenth-century England, h a s caused us to revise almost a l l our old ass umptions about what everyd ay economic life a t that time was like. O f course, very l i ttle of the American gold and silver that reached Europe actually ended up in the pockets of ordinary fa rmers, mercer s , or h a berdashers .40 T h e lion ' s s h a r e stayed in t h e coffers of either the a r ­ i stocracy or t h e great London merchants, or else in t h e r o y a l trea sury.41 Small change was almost nonexistent. As I've already pointed out, in the poorer neighborhoods of cities or large towns, shopkeepers would issue their own lead, leather, or wooden token money; in the sixteenth century this became something of a fad , with artisans and even poor widows producing · their own currency as a way to make ends meet .42 Elsewhere, those frequenting the local butcher, baker, or shoemaker would simply put things on the t a b . The same was true of those a ttend­ ing weekly m a rkets, or selling neighbors milk o r cheese or candle-wax. In a typical vil lage, the only people likely to pay cash were passing travelers, and those considered riff-raff: p a upers and ne'er-do-wells so notoriously down on their luck that no one would extend credit to the m . Since everyone was involved i n selling something, however j ust about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most fa mily income took the form of promises from other fa m i l i e s ; everyone knew and kept count of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months or year or s o , communities would held a general public " reckoning , " cancelling debts o u t against each other in a great circle, with o n l y those differences then remaining when a l l was done being settled by use of coin or goods .43

The reason that this upends our assumptions is that w e ' re used to b l a m ing the rise of capita l i s m on something vaguely cal led "the market"-the breakup of older systems of mutual aid and solidarity, and the creation of a world of cold calculation, where everything had its price. Really, Engl ish v i l l agers appear to have seen no contradiction between the two . On the one hand, they believed strongly i n the col­ lective stewardship of field s , stre a m s , and forests, and the need to help neighbors i n difficulty . O n the other hand, m a rkets were seen as a kind of attenuated version of the same principle, since they were entirely

3 2 8 D E B T

founded on trust. Much like the Tiv women with their gifts of y a m s and o k r a , neighbors assumed t h e y o u g h t to be constantly s l ightly i n d e b t t o one another. At t h e same time, most s e e m to have been q u ite comfortable with the idea of buying and selling, or even with market fluctuations , provided it didn't get to the point of threatening honest fa milies' livelihoods.44 Even when loans at i nterest began to be legal ized i n 1545 , that did not ruffle too many feathers, a s long as it took place within that same larger moral framework : lending was considered an appropriate vocation, for example, for widows with no other source of income, or as a way for neighbors to share i n the profits fro m s o m e minor commercial venture. W i l l i a m Stout, a

· Quaker merchant

from Lancashire, spoke glowingly of Henry Coward, the tradesman in whose shop he first apprenticed :

My master then had a full trade of groceries, iron mongerware, and several other goods, and very much respected and trusted , not only by the people of his own religious profession, but by all others of all professions and circumstances . . . His credit was so much, that any who had money to dispose of lodged it with him to put out to interest or to make use of it.45

In this world, trust was everything. Most money literally was trust, since most credit arrangements were handshake deal s . When people used the word "credit, " they referred above a l l to a reputation for hon­ esty and i ntegrity ; and a m a n or woman ' s honor, virtue, and respect­ a b i l ity, but also, reputation for generosity, decency , and good-natured sociability, were at least as i mportant considerations when deciding whether to make a loan as were assessments of net income .46 A s a result, financial terms became indistinguishable fro m moral ones . One could speak of others as "worthies , " as "a woman of high estimation " or " a man of no account , " and equally of "giving credit" to someone's words when one believes what they say ( " credit" i s from the same root as "creed " or " cred i b i l i ty " ) , or of "extending credit" to them, when one takes them at their word that they will pay one back.

One should not idealize the situation . This w a s a highly patriar­ chal world : a man ' s w i fe or daughter ' s reputation for cha stity was as much a part of his " credit" a s h i s own reputation for kindness or piety. What's more, almost a l l people below the age of 3 0 , male or female, were employed as servants i n someone else's household-a s farmhands, milkmaids, apprentices-and a s such, were of " n o account" at a l l Y Fi­ n a l l y , those who lost credi b i lity in the eyes of the community became, effectively, pariahs, and descended into the criminal or semi-cri m i n a l

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classes of rootless l a borers, beggars, harlots, cutpurses, hawkers , ped­ lars, fortune-tellers, minstrel s , and other such " m a sterless men" or " women of i l l repute . "48

Cold cash was employed l a rgely between strangers, or when pay­ ing rents, tithes, and taxes to landlords, bailiffs , priests, and other superiors. The landed gentry and wealthy merchants, who eschewed handshake deals, would often use cash with one another, especi a l l y to pay off b i l l s of excha nge d r a w n on London ma rkets .49 Above a l l , g o l d and s i l v e r were u s e d by t h e govern ment t o purchase a r m s a n d pay soldiers, and amongst t h e c r i m i n a l c l a s ses themselves . This meant that coins were most likely to be used both by the sort of people who ran the legal system-the magistrates, constables, and j ustices of the peace--and by those violent elements of society they saw i t a s their business to contro l .

I I I I I

Over time, this led to an increasing disj uncture of moral un iverses . For most, who tried to avoid entanglement in the legal system j u st as much as they tried to avoid the affairs of soldiers and cri m i n a l s , debt rem a ined the very fa bric of sociability. But those who spent their work­ ing lives within the halls of government and great commercial houses grad ually began to develop a very different perspective, whereby cash excha nge w a s normal and it was debt that came to be seen as tinged with criminality.

Each perspective turned on a certain tacit theory of the n a ture of society. For most English vill agers, the real font and focus of social and moral l i fe was not so much the church as the local ale-house--a nd community was embodied above a l l in the conviviality of popular festi­ vals like Christmas or May Day, with everything that such celebrations entailed : the sharing o f pleasures, the communion of the senses, all the physical embodiment of what w a s c a l led "good neighborhood . " Society was rooted above in the " love and amity" of friends and kin, and it found expression in a l l those fo rms of everyday communism (helping neighbors with chores, providing milk or cheese for old widows) that were seen to flow fro m i t . M a rkets were not seen as contradicting this ethos of mutual a i d . It w a s , much a s i t w a s for T u s i , an extension of mutual aid-a nd for much the same reason : because it operated en­ tirely through trust and credit.50

England might not have produced a great theorist like T u s i , but one can find the same assumptions echoed in most of the Scholastic writers, as fo r in stance in Jean Bod i n ' s De Republica, widely c i rculated

3 3 0 D E B T

in Engli s h translation after 1605 . " Amity and friendship , " Bodin wrote, " are the foundation of all human and civil society "-they constitute that " true, natural j ustice" on which the whole legal structure of con­ tracts, courts, and even government must necessarily be built.51 S i m i lar­ l y , when economic thinkers reflected on the origins of the money, they spoke of " trusting, exchanging, and trading. "52 It was simply assumed that human rel ations came first.

As a result, all moral relations came to be conceived as debts. " For­ give us our debts "-this w a s the period, the very end of the Middle Ages, that this translation of the Lord ' s Prayer gained such universal popularity . Sins are debts to G o d : unavoidable, but perhaps m a n age­ a b l e , since at the end of time our moral debts and credits will be a l l canceled out against e a c h other in God ' s fi n a l Reckoning. T h e notion of debt i n serted itself into even the most intimate of human relation s . L i k e t h e T i v , Medieval v i l l agers would sometimes refer to " flesh debts , " b u t t h e notion w a s completely different: it referred t o t h e right of either partner in a marriage to demand sex from the other, which in principle either could do whenever h e or she desired. The phrase "paying one's debts" thus developed connotations, much as the Roman phrase "doing one's duty " had, centuries before. Geoffrey Cha ucer even makes a pun out of " t a l l y " (Fren c h : taille) and " t a i l " i n the S h i p m a n ' s Tale, a story about a woman who pays her husband ' s debts with sexual favors: " and if so I be fa ille, I a m youre wyf, score i t upon my taille. "53

Even London merchants would occa sionally appeal to the l anguage of sociability, insi sting that i n the final analysis, all trade i s built on credit, and credit i s really j ust an exten sion of mutual aid. In 1696, for instance, Charles Davenant wrote that even if there were a general col­ lapse of con fidence i n the credit syste m , it could not last long, because eventu a l l y , when people reflected on the matter and rea l i zed that credit i s simply an extension of human society,

They will find, that no trading nation ever did subsist, and carry on its business by real stock [that is, j ust coin and mer­ chandi se] ; that trust and confidence in each other, are as nec­ essary to link and hold a people together, as obedience, love, friendship, or the intercourse of speech. And when experience has taught man how weak he is, depending only on himself, he will be willing to help others, and call upon the assistance of his neighbors, which of course, by degrees, must set credit again afloat.54

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Davenant was an unusual merchant (his father was a poet) . More typical of his class were men like Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan, published in r6s r , was in many ways an extended attack on the very idea that society i s built on any sort of prior ties of communal solidarity.

Hobbes might be considered the opening salvo of the new moral perspective, and it w a s a devastating one. When Leviathan came out, i t ' s not clear what scandal ized its readers more: its relentless materi­ alism ( H obbes i n s i sted that humans were basically machines whose actions could be understood by one single principle: that they tended to move toward the prospect of pleasure and away from the prospect of p a in ) , or its resultant cyn i c i s m (if love, amity, and trust are such powerful forces, Hobbes asked, why i s i t that even within our fa m i l i e s , we l o c k our m o s t v a l u a b l e possessions i n strongboxes ? ) S t i l l , H o b b e s ' ulti mate argument-that humans, b e i n g d r i v e n by self-interest, cannot be trusted to treat each other j ustly of their own accord, and therefore that society only emerges when they come to realize that it is to their long-term advantage to give up a portion of their l i b erties and accept the absolute power of the King-di ffered l i ttle fro m arguments that theologians like Martin Luther had been making a century earlier. Hobbes simply substituted scientific language for b i b l i ca l references .55

I want to draw particu l a r attention to the underlying notion of " s elf-interest. "56 I t i s in a real sense the key to the new p h i losoph y . The term fi r s t appears in English right around H o b b e s ' t i m e , a n d it i s , indeed, di rectly borrowed from interesse, the Roman l a w term for interest payments. When it w a s first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that a l l human l i fe can be explai ned as the pur­ suit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional Engl ish mores . By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense.

But why " i nterest " ? Why make a general theory of h u m a n motiva­ tion out o f a word that origi n a l l y meant " penalty for late payment on a loan " ?

Part o f the term ' s appeal was that i t derived fro m bookkeeping. It w a s mathemati c a l . T h i s made it seem obj ective, even scienti fic. Saying we are a l l rea lly pursuing our own self- i n terest provides a way to cut past the welter of passions and emotions that seem to govern our d a i l y existence, and to motivate most of what we actu a l l y ob serve people to do (not only out of love and amity, but also envy, spite, devotion, pity, lust, embarrassment, torpor, indignation, and pride) and discover that, despite all thi s , most rea l l y i mportant dec i s i o n s are based on the rational calculation of material advantage-which means that they are fairly predictable a s wel l . "Just as the physical world i s ruled by the

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laws of movemen t , " wrote Helveti u s , i n a passage re mini scent of Lord Shang, "no less i s the moral u n iverse ru led by laws of interest. "57 And of course it was on this assu mption that all the quadratic equations of economic theory could ultim ately b e b u i lt.ss

The problem i s that the origin of the concept is not rational at a l l . I t s roots are theologi c a l , and t h e theological a s s u mptions underpinning it never really went away. "Self-interest" is first attested to in the writ­ ings of the Italian historian Francesco Guicciadini (who was, i n fact, a friend of Machiavel l i ) , around 15 1 0 , as a euphemism for St. Augusti n e ' s concept of " self-love . " For Augusti n e , t h e " love of God" l e a d s us t o benevolence tow a rd our fellows; self-love, i n contrast, refers to the fact that, since the F a l l of M a n , we are cu rsed by endles s , insatiable desires for self-gra tification-so much so that, if left to our own devices, we will necessarily fa l l into universal competiti o n , even war. S u b stituting " i nterest" for " love" must have seemed an obvious move, s i nce the as­ sumption that love is the primary emotion was precisely what a uthors like G u icciadini were trying to get away fro m . But it kept that same assumption of i n s a t i a b l e desires under the guise of impersonal math, since what is " i nterest" but the demand that money n e v e r c e a s e to grow ? T h e same w a s true when it became the term for i nvestments­ " I have a twelve-percent interest in that venture"-it is money placed in the continual pursuit of profit.59 The very idea that h u m a n beings are motivated p r i m a rily by " self-interes t , " then , was rooted in the pro­ foundly Christian assumption that we are all i ncorrigi b l e sinners; left to o u r own devices, we will not simply pursue a certain level of comfort and happiness and then stop to enjoy it; we will never cash i n the chips, like S i n d b a d , let alone question why we need to b u y chips to begin with. And as Augustine a l ready anticipated , i n finite desires i n a fin ite world means endless competition, which i n turn i s why, a s H o b bes i n sisted, o u r only hope of social peace lies i n contractu al arrangements and strict enforcement b y the apparatus of the state.

I I I I I

The story of the ongms of capit a l i s m , then, is not the story of the grad u a l destruction of traditional communities b y the i mperson a l pow­ er of the market. It i s , rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted i nto an economy of i nterest; of the gradual tran sforma­ tion of moral networks b y the intrusion of the impersonal-and often vindicti ve--power of the state. English villagers in E l i z a b ethan or Stu­ art times did not like to appeal to the j u stice syste m , even when the law was i n their favor-partly on the principle that neighbors should

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work things out with one another, but m a i n l y , because the l a w was so extraordinarily harsh. Under E l i za beth, for example, the puni shment for vagrancy ( unemployment) was, for first offense, to have one's ears nailed to a p i l lory; for repeat offenders, death .60

The same w a s true of debt l a w , espec i a l l y since debts could often, if the creditor was sufficiently vindictive, be treated as a cri m e . I n Chel­ sea around r66o,

M a rgaret S h a rples was prosecuted for stealing cloth, " which she had converted into a petticoat for her own wearing , " fro m Richard Bennett' s s h o p . H e r defense was that s h e had bar­ gained with Bennett ' s servant for the cloth, " but having not money sufficient i n her purse to pay for it, took it away .with purpose to pay for i t so soon as she could: and that she a fter­ wards agreed with M r Bennett of a price for i t . " Bennett con­ firmed that this was s o : after agreeing to pay h i m 22 s h i l l i ngs, M a rgaret " delivered a h a mper with goods in i t a s a pawn for security of the money, and four s h i l lings ninepence in mon­ ey . " But " soon after he disl iked upon better consideration to hold agreement with her: and delivered the hamper and goods back," and commenced formal legal proceedings against her.61

A s a result, Margaret Sharples was hanged . Obviously, it was the rare shopkeeper who w i s hed to see even h i s

m o s t irritating client on t h e g a l l o w s . Therefore decent people tended to avoid the courts entirely. One of the most interesting d iscoveries of Craig Muldrew 's research i s that the more time pa ssed, the less true this became.

Even i n the late Middle Ages, in the case of really l a rge loans, it w a s not unusual for creditors to lodge claims i n local courts-b ut this was rea lly j ust a way of ensuring that there was a public record (remember that most people at the time were i l l i terate) . Debtors were willing to go along with the proceedings i n part, i t would seem, because if there was any interest being charged, it meant that if they d i d default, the lender w a s j ust as guilty in the eyes of the l a w a s they were. Less than one-percent of these cases were ever brought to j udgment.62 The legali zation of i nterest began to change the nature of the playing fiel d . In t h e rs 8os, when interest-bearing loans began to become common between v i l lagers, creditors a l s o began to insist on the use of signed, legal bonds; this led to such an exp losion of appea l s to the courts that in many s m a l l towns, a l most every household seemed to be ca ught up in debt l i tigation of some sort or other. O n l y a tiny proportion of these

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suits were ever brought to j udgment, either: the usual expedient was still to rely on the simple threat of punishment to encou rage debtors to settle out of court.6l S t i l l , as a result, the fea r of debto r ' s prison-or worse--came to hang over everyone, and sociabil ity itself came to take on the color of crime. Even Mr. Coward, the kindly shopkeeper, was eventu a l l y laid l o w . H i s good cred it itself became a problem, especi ally as he felt honor-bound to use it to help the less fortunate:

He also dealt in merch andise with loose pa rtners, and beca me concerned much with persons of declining circumstances, where neither profit nor credit could be got; and he gave uneasiness to his wife, by his frequenting some houses of no good character. And she was a very indolent woman, and drew money pri­ vately from him, and his circumstances became so burdensome that he daily expected to be made a prisoner. Which, with the shame of forfeiting his former reputati on, it drew him into de­ spair and broke his heart, so that he kept to his house for some time and died of grief and shame . 64

It i s perhaps not surprising, when one consults contemporary sourc­ es about what those prisons were like, particularly for those who were not of ari stocratic origi n s . Mr. Coward would surely have known, as the conditions at the most notori o u s , like Fleet and Marshalsea, cau sed periodic scand a l s when exposed i n parli ament or the popular press, fill­ ing the papers with stories of shackled debtors " covered with filth and vermin, and suffered to die, without p i ty, of hunger and jail fever , " as the ari stocratic roues pl aced in the elite side of the same j ai l s l ived lives of comfort, visited by man icurists and prostitutes .65

The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminal ization of the very b a s i s of h u m a n society . It cannot be overemphasi zed that in a s m a l l community, everyone normally was both lender and borrower. One can only i m agine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a communities-and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact, because they are based on love, will always also be fu l l of hatred, r i v a l ry and passion-when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strate­ gic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they h a ted im­ prisoned o r even hanged . What w a s it that Richard Bennett really had against M a rgaret Sharples ? W e ' l l never know the back-story, but i t ' s a pretty s a fe bet that there was one. The effects on communal solida rity must have been devastating. The sudden access i b i l i ty of violence really did threaten to transform what had been the essence of sociality into a

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war of a l l against a l l .66 I t ' s not surprising then, that by the eighteenth century, the very notion of personal credit had acqu ired a bad name, with both lenders and borrowers considered equally suspect.67 The use of coins-at least among those who had access to them-h ad come to seem moral in itself.

I I I I I

Understanding all this allows us to see some of the European authors considered in earlier chapters in an entirely new l ight. Take Pan urge ' s encomium on d e b t : it turns out t h a t the r e a l j oke i s n o t t h e suggestion that debt ties communities together (any English or French peasant of the day would have simply assu med this) , or even that only debt ties communities together; it is putting the sentiment in the mouth of a wealthy scholar w h o ' s rea lly an inveterate criminal-that i s , holding up popular morality as a mi rror to make fun of the very upper classes who clai med to disa pprove of i t .

O r consider Adam Smith :

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their h u mani ty but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but o f their advantages .68

The bizarre thing here i s that, a t the time S m i th was writing, this simply w a s n ' t true. 69 Most Engl ish shopkeepers were still carrying out the main part of their business on credit, which meant that customers appea led to their benevolence a l l the time. S m i th could hardly have been unaware of this. Rather, he i s drawing a utopian picture. He wants to i m agine a world in ,which everyone used cash, i n part because he agreed with the emerging middle-class opinion that the world would be a better place if everyone really did conduct themselves this way, and avoid confusing and potentially corrupting ongoing entanglements . We should a l l j ust pay the money, say "please" and "thank you , " and leave the store. What's more, he uses this utopian image to make a l a rger point: that even if all businesses operated like the great commer­ cial companies, with an eye only to self-i nterest, it wouldn't matter. Even the " n a tural selfishness and rapacity " of the rich, with a l l their "vain and insatiable desires" will sti l l , through the logic of the invisible hand, lead to the benefit of a l J .7°

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In other words, Smith simply i m agined the role of consumer credi t i n h i s own day, j ust a s he had h i s account of t h e o r i g i n s of money.71 This a l lowed him to ignore the role of both benevolence and ma levo­ lence i n economic a ffa i r s ; both the ethos of mutual aid that forms the neces sary foundation of anything that would look like a free m a rket (that is, one which i s not simply created and maintained by the state) , and the violence and sheer vindictiveness that had actually gone into creating the competitive, self-interested m arkets that he was using as his model .

Nietzsche, in turn, w a s taking up S m i t h ' s prem ises, that life i s exchange, but l a y i n g bare everything ( t h e torture, murder, mutilation) that Smith preferred not to h ave to talk about. Now that we have seen j ust a l i ttle of the social context, i t ' s difficult to read Nietzsche ' s oth­ erwise puzzling descriptions of ancient h u nters and herdsmen keeping accounts of debts and demanding each others' eyes and fingers without immediately thinking of C a s i m i r ' s executioner, who actually did pres­ ent h i s m aster with a bill for gouged eyes and severed fingers. What he i s really describing i s what i t took to produce a world i n which the son of a prosperous middle-class reverend, such a s hi mself, could simply assume that a l l human l i fe i s premi sed on calculated, self-in terested exchange.

P a r t I l l :

I m personal Cred it-money

One reason that h istori ans took so long to notice the elaborate popular­ cred it systems of Tudor and Stuart England i s that intel lectua l s of the time spoke about money i n the abstract; they rarely mentioned it. For the educated classes, " money" soon came to mean gold and silver. Most wrote as if it could be taken for granted that gold and si lver had always been used as money for a l l nations i n h i story a n d , pres u m a b l y , always w o u l d be.

This not only flew in the face of Aristotle; it di rectly contradicted the d i scoveries o f European explorers of the time, who were finding shell money, bead money, feather money, salt money, and an endless variety of other currencies everywhere they went .72 Yet a l l this j ust cau sed economic thinkers to dig i n their heel s . Some appealed to al­ chemy to argue that the monetary status of gold and si lver had a natu­ ral b a s i s : gold ( w h ich partook of the sun) and s i lver (which p a rtook of the moon) were the perfected , eternal forms of metal toward which

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a l l baser metals tend to evolve .73 Most, however, didn't feel that much explanation was req u i red ; the intrinsic value of precious metals was simply self-evident. As a result, when royal advisors or London p a m ­ phleteers discussed economic p r o b l e m s , the i s s u e s t h e y debated were always the s a m e : How do we keep bullion fro m leaving the country ? What do we do about the crippling s h o rtage of c o i n ? For most, ques­ tions like "How do we maintain trust in local credit system s ? " simply did not arise.

This was even m o re extreme in Britain than on the Continent, where " c rying up" or " c rying down" the cu rrency was still an opti o n . In Britain, after a disa strous attempt at devaluation u n d e r the Tudors, such expedients were a b andoned . Henceforth, deba sement became a moral issue. For the government to mix base metal into the pure eter­ nal substance of a coin was clearly wrong. So, to a lesser extent, was coin-clipping, a near-universal practice in England, which might be thought of as a kind of popular version of deva luation, since it involved secretly s h a ving silver off the edges of coins and then pressing them down so they seemed like they were still the original size.

What's more, those new forms of v i rtual money that began to emerge in the new age were firmly rooted in these same assumptions. This i s critica l , because it helps explain what might otherwise seem a biza rre contradiction : How is it that this age of ruthless materi a l i s m , in which the notion that money was a social convention was definitively rej ected , a l s o saw the rise of paper money, along with a whole host of new credit i n struments and fo rms of financial abstraction that have become so typical of modern capita l i s m ? True, most of these-checks, bonds, stock s, annuiti es-h ad their origins in the metaphysical world of the Middle Ages. Yet in this new age, they underwent an enormous efflorescence.

If one looks at the actual h i story, though, i t quickly becomes clear that a l l of these new fo rms of money i n no way undermined the as­ sumption that money was fo unded on the " i ntri n s i c " value of gold and silver: in fact, they reinforced it. What seems to have happened is that, once credit became unl atched from real relations o f trust between indi­ viduals (whether merchants or vil lagers ) , it became apparent that mon­ ey could, i n effect, be produced simply by say ing it w a s there; but that, when this i s done in the amoral world of a competitive m a rketplace, it would almost inevitably lead to scams and confidence games of every sort-causing the guardians of the system to period ically panic, and seek new ways to latch the value of the various forms of paper back onto gold and silver.

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This is the story normally told as " the ongms of modern bank­ i ng . " From our perspective, though , what it reveals i s j ust how closely bound together war, bullion, and these new credi t instruments were . One need only consider the paths not traveled . For instance: there was no intrinsic reason why a b i l l of exchange couldn't be endorsed over to a third party, then become generally transferable--thus, i n effect turning it into a form of paper money . This is how paper money first emerged i n C h i n a . In Medieval Europe there were periodic movements i n that direction, but for a variety of reasons, they did not go far . 74 Al­ ternately, b a nkers can produce money by issuing book credits for more than they have on cash reserve. This i s considered the very essence of modern banking, and it can lead to the circulation of private bank notes .75 Some moves were made in this direction as wel l , espec i a l l y i n I t a l y , b u t i t was a risky proposition, since there w a s always t h e danger of depositors panicking and making a run, and most Medieval govern­ ments threatened extremely harsh penalties on bankers unable to make restitution i n such cases : as witnessed by the example of Francesch Castel l o , beheaded i n front of his own bank i n B a rcelona i n 1360 .76

Where bankers effectively controlled Medieval governments, it proved safer and more profitable to m a n ipul ate the government ' s own finances. The hi story of modern financial instruments, and the ultimate origins of paper money, rea lly begin with the issuing of municipal bonds-a practice begun by the Veneti an government in the twelfth century when, needing a quick infusion of income for m i l itary pur­ poses, it levied a compulsory loan on its taxpaying citizen s , for which it promised each of them five percent annual interest, and a llowed the " bonds" or contracts to become negotiable, thus, creating a m a rket in government debt. They [the Veneti an govern men t ? ] tended to be quite meticulous about interest payments, but since the bonds h a d no specific date of maturity, their m a rket prices often fluctuated wildly with the city ' s political and m i l itary fortunes, and so did resulting assessments of the likel ihood that they would be able to be rep a i d . S i m i l a r practices quickly spread to the other Italian states and to northern European merchant enclaves as wel l : the United Provinces of Holland financed their long war of i ndependence against the Hapsburgs (1568-1648) l a rgely thro ugh a series of forced l o a n s , though they flo ated numerous vol untary bond issues as w e l l ? 7

F o r c i n g taxpayers t o make a loan i s , i n one s e n s e , simply demand­ ing that they pay their taxes early; but when the Venetian state first agreed to pay interest-and i n legal terms, this was again interesse, a penalty for late payment-it was in principle penalizing itself for not i m mediately giving the money back. It's easy to see how this might

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raise a l l sorts of questions about the legal and moral relation between people and govern ment. Ultimately, the com merc i a l c l asses i n those mercantile republics that pioneered these new forms of financing did end up seeing themselves a s owning the government more than they saw them selves as being i n its debt. Not only the c o m merc i a l c l a s ses : by r6s o , a maj ority of D utch households held at least a little govern­ ment debt.78 However, the true paradox only appears when one begins to " monetize" this debt-that is, to take govern ment promises to pay and allow them to circulate as currency.

While already by the sixteenth century, merchants were using bills of excha nge to settle debts, govern ment debt bonds-rentes, juros , annuities-were the real credit money of the new age. I t ' s here that we have to look for the real origins of the " price revolution" that h a m ­ mered once-independent townsfo l k and v i l l agers i n t o t h e ground and opened the way for most of them to u l t i m ately be reduced to wage laborers, working for those who had access to these higher fo rms of cred i t . Even i n Seville, where the treasure fleets fro m the New World first touched port in the O l d , bullion was not much used in day-to-day tran sactions. Most of it w a s taken d i rectly to the warehouses of Geno­ ese bankers operating fro m the port and stored for ship ment east. But i n the process, i t became the basis for complex credit schemes whereby the value of the bullion w a s loaned to the emperor to fund m i litary op­ erati ons, in exchange for papers entitling the bearer to interest-bearing annuities fro m the government-p apers that could i n turn be traded as if they were money . By such means, bankers could almost end­ lessly multiply the actual value of gold and s i lver they held. A l ready in the rs7os , we hear of fairs i n places like Medina del Campo, not far fro m Seville, that had become "veritable factories of certificate s , " with transactions carried out exclusively through paper.79 Since whether the Spanish govern ment would actually pay their debts, or how regularly, were always s l ightly uncertain, the b i l l s would tend to circulate at a d i scount-especially as juros began circulating throughout the rest of Europe--causing conti n u a l inflation. 80

It was only with the creation of the Bank of England in r694 that one can speak of genuine paper money, si nce its banknotes were i n no sense bonds. They were rooted, like a l l the others , in the king's war debts. This can't be emphasized enough . The fact that money w a s no l onger a debt owed to the king, but a debt owed by the king, made it very different than what it had been before. In many ways i t had be­ come a m irror i m age of older fo rms of money .

The reader w i l l rec a l l that the Bank of England was created when a consorti u m of forty London and Edinburgh merchants-mostly a l ready

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creditors to the crown-offered King W i l l i a m I I I a £ 1 . 2 m i l l i o n loan to help finance h i s war aga i n st France. In doing so, they also convi nced him to allow them i n return to fo rm a corporation with a monopoly on the issuance of banknotes-which were, in effect, promissory notes fo r the money the king now owed them. This w a s the first independent national central b a n k , and it became the clearinghouse fo r debts owed between smaller b a n k s ; the notes soon developed into the first Euro­ pean national p a p e r currency . Yet the great p u blic debate of the time, a debate about the very nature of money, was about not p a p e r but meta l . T h e 169os were a t i m e of c r i s i s fo r British coinage. T h e v a l u e of s i lver had risen so high that new British coins (the mint had recently devel­ oped the " m i l led edge " fa m i l i a r from coins nowadays, which made them c l i p - p roof) were actually worth less than their silver content, with p redicta ble res u l t s . Proper silver coins vanished; all that remained in circulation were the old c l i p p ed ones, and these were becoming increas­ ingly scarce. Something had to be done. A w a r of p a m p h lets ensued, w h ich came to a head in 1695 , one year after the founding of the bank. Charles Davenant's essay on credit, which I ' v e already cited, w a s ac­ tually p a rt of this p a rticular p a m p h let-war: h e p roposed that Britain move to a p u re credit money based on p u b l i c trust, and h e was ignored. The Treasury proposed to call in the coinage and reissue it at a 20- to 25 -percent lower weight, so as to bring it back below the market p rice fo r silver. Many who supported this position took explicitly C h a rtalist positions, i n sisting that silver has no intrinsic value anyway, and that money i s simply a measure established by the state . 8 1 The man who won the a rgument, however, was John Locke , the Liberal p h i losopher, at that time acting as advisor to S i r Isaac Newton, then Warden of the M i n t . Locke insi sted that one can no more make a s m a l l p i ece of silver worth more by relabeling it a " s h i l l i n g " than one can make a short m a n taller by declaring there are now fifteen inches in a foot. Gold and si lver had a value recogn i zed by everyone on earth; the government stamp simply attested to the weight and p u rity of a coin, and-as he added i n words veritably shivering with indignation-for governments to tamper with this for their own advantage w a s j u st as criminal as the coin-clippers themselves :

The use and end of the public stamp is only to be a guard and voucher of the quali ty of s i lver which men contract for ; and the inj ury done to the pub lic faith , i n this point, i s that which in clipping and fa lse coining heightens the rob b e ry into treaso n . 82

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Therefore, he argued, the only recourse was to recall the currency and restrike it at exactly the same value that it had before.

This w a s done, and the results were disastro u s . In the years im­ mediately following, there was a l most no coinage i n circulation; prices and wages collapsed; there was hunger and unrest. Only the wealthy were insul ated , since they were able to take advan tage of the new credi t money, trading b a c k and fo rth portions of t h e k i n g ' s d e b t i n t h e form of banknotes. The value of these notes, too, fluctuated a bit at first, but eventua l l y sta b i l i zed once they were made redeemable in precious meta l s . For the rest, the situation only really improved once paper money, and, eventua l l y , s m a ller-denomination currency, became more widely a v a i l a b l e . The reforms proceeded top-down, and very slowly, but they did proceed , and they gradu a l l y came to create the world where even ordinary, everyday transactions with butchers and bakers were carried out in polite, imperso n a l terms, with small change, and therefore i t became possible to imagine everyday l i fe itself as a matter o f self-interested calculation.

I t ' s easy enough to see why Locke would adopt the position that he d i d . He was a scientific materi a l i s t . For him, " fa i t h " i n government­ as in the q uote above-w as not the citizen s ' belief that the govern­ ment will keep its promises, but simply that i t won't lie to them ; that i t would, like a good scientist, give them accurate informati o n , and who wanted to see human behavior a s founded in natural laws that­ like the laws of physics that Newtoq had so recently described-were higher than those of any mc:;re govern ment. The real question i s why the British government agreed with him and resolutely stuck to this position despite a l l the i m mediate d i s asters . Soon afterward, in fact, Britain adopted the gold standard (in 1717) and the British Empire maintained it, and with it the notion that gold and si lver were money, down to its final d a y s .

T r u e , Locke ' s materia l i s m also came t o be b r o a d l y accepted-even to be the watchword of the age. 83 Mainly, though, the rel i a nce on gold and si lver seemed to provide the only check on the dangers involved with the new forms of credit-money, which multiplied very quickly­ especially once ordin ary banks were a l lowed to create money too . It soon became apparent that financial speculation, unmoored fro m any legal or community constraints, w a s capable of producing results that seemed to verge on insanity. The Dutch Republic, which pioneered the development of stock markets, had already experienced this in the tulip mania of 1637-the first of a series of specu lative " bubbles , " as they c a m e to be known, i n w h i c h future prices w o u l d fi r s t be bid through the ceiling by investors and then collapse. A whole series of

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such bubbles hit the London m a rkets in the 169os, in a l m ost every case built around a new j oint-stock corporation formed, in i m itation of the East India Company, around some prospective colonial venture. The fa mous South Sea Bubble i n q2o-in which a newly formed trad­ ing company, granted a monopoly of trade with the Spanish colonies, bought up a considerable portion of the British national debt and saw its s h a res briefly skyrocket before collapsing in ignom iny-was only the c u l m i n a t i o n . Its collapse w a s fo l lowed the next year by the collapse of John La w ' s fa mous Banque Royale in France, another centra l-bank experiment-s i m i l a r to the Bank of Engla nd-that grew so quickly that within a few years it had a b sorbed a l l the French colonial trading companies, and most of the French crow n ' s own debt, issu ing its own paper money, before crash ing into nothingness i n 172 1 , sending its chief executive fleeing fo r h i s life . In each case, this w a s fo l lowed by legi s l a ­ tion : in B r i t a i n , t o fo rbid t h e creation of n e w j oin t-stock companies (other than for the bui lding of turnpikes and canal s ) , and in France, to e l i m inate paper money ba sed in govern ment debt entirel y .

I t ' s unsurprising, t h e n , t h a t Newton ian eco n o m i c s ( i f we m a y c a l l it that)-the a s s u mption t h a t one c a n n o t simply create m o n e y , or even , rea l l y , tinker with it-c a m e to be accepted by a l m ost everyone. There had to be some solid, m a terial foundation to all this, or the entire sys­ tem would go insane. True, economists were to spend centu ries arguing about what that foundation might be (was i t rea l l y gold, or w a s it land, human labor, the utility or desirability of commodities in genera l ? ) but a l most no one returned to anything like the A ristotelian v i e w .

I I I I I

Another way to look at this m ight be to say that the new age c a m e to be increasingly uncomfortable w i t h t h e political nature of money . Politics, a fter a l l , is the a rt of persuasion; the political is that d i mension of social life i n which things really do become true if enough people believe them . The problem i s that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it m a y be true that, if I could con­ vince everyone in the world that I was the King of F rance, I would i n fact b e c o m e the K i n g of F r a n c e ; but it would n e v e r w o r k if I w e r e t o admit t h a t this was t h e only b a s i s of my c l a i m . I n t h i s s e n s e , politics i s very similar to magic-one reason both politics and m agic tend , j ust about everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain h a l o of fraud . These suspicions were widely vaunted at the time. In 17I I , the satirical essayist Joseph Addison penned a little fa ntasy about the Bank of England ' s­ and as a result, the British monetary syste m ' s-dependence on public

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fa ith i n the political stabil ity of the throne. (The Act of Settlement of 1701 was the bill that guaranteed the royal succession, and a sponge was a popu l a r symbol fo r default) . In a dream, he s a i d ,

I s a w P u b l i c Cred it, s e t on h e r throne in the Grocer' s Hall, the Great Ch arter over her head, the Act of Settlement ful l in her view. Her touch turned everyth ing to gold . Behind her seat, bags filled with coin were piled up to the cei ling. On her right the door flies open. The Pretender rushes in, a sponge in one hand, and in the other a sword, which he shakes at the Act of Settlement. The beautiful Queen sinks down fa inting. The spell by which she has turned all things aro und her into treasure is broken . The money bags shrink like pricked bladders . The p iles of gold pieces are turned into bundles of rags or faggots of wooden tallies. 84

If o n e d o e s not b e l i eve m t h e k i n g , then t h e m o n e y v a n i s h e s w i t h h i m .

T h u s k ings, mag1c1 a n s , markets, and alchemists all fused in the public imagination during this era, and we still talk about the " a lche­ my" of the m a rket, or " financial magician s . " In Goethe's Faust ( 1 8 o 8 ) , h e actually h a s h i s hero--in his capacity a s alchemi st-magici an-pay a visit to the Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor is sinking under the weight of endless debts that he h a s piled up paying for the extravagant pleasures of h i s court. Faust, and his a s s i stant, Mephistopheles, con­ vince him that he can p a y off h i s creditors by creating paper money. I t ' s represented a s an act of pure prestidigitation. " Y o u have plenty of gold lying somewhere underneath your l a n d s , " notes Faust. "Just issue notes promising your creditors y o u ' l l give it to them later. Since no one knows how much gold there really i s , there ' s no limit to how much you can promise. "85

This kind of magical language a l most never appears in the Middle Ages .86 It would appear that it's only in a resolutely materi alist age that this a b i l ity to simply produce things by saying that they are there comes to be seen as a scandalous, even diabolica l . And the surest sign that one h a s entered such a materialist age i s precisely the fact that it i s seen s o . We have a l ready observed Rabelais, at the very beginning of the age, reverting to language a l most identical to that used by Plu­ tarch when he railed against moneylenders in Roman times-" laughing at those natural philosophers who hold that nothing can be made of nothing," as they manipulate their books and ledgers to demand back money they never actu a l l y had. Panurge j u st turned it around : no, i t ' s

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by borrowing that I make something out of nothing, and become a kind of god.

But consider the following lines, often attributed to Lord Josiah Charles Stamp, d i rector of the Bank of England :

The modern banking system manufactures money out of noth­ ing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in in­ iquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth; take it away from them, but leave them with the power to create credit, and with the stroke of a pen they will create enough money to buy it back again . . . If you wish to remain slaves of Bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits. 87

It seems extremely unlikely that Lord Stamp ever really said this, but the passage h a s been cited endlessly-in fact, it's probably the sin­ gle most often-quoted p a s s age by critics o f the modern banking sys­ tem . However apocryp h a l , it clearly strikes a chord, and apparently for the same reason : bankers are creating something out of nothing. They are not only frauds and magici a n s . They are evil, because they 're playing God.

But there ' s a deeper scandal than mere prestidigitation. I f Medieval moralists did not raise such obj ecti o n s , it was not j ust because they were comfortable with metaphys i c a l entities. They had a much more funda mental problem with the m arket: greed . Market motives were held to be inherently corrupt. The moment that greed was v a l i dated, and u n l i mited profit was considered a perfectly viable end in itself, this politic a l , magical element became a genuine problem, because it meant that even those actors-the brokers, stock-j obbers, traders-who ef­ fectively made the system run had no convincing loyalty to anything, even to the system itself.

Hobbes, who first developed this vision of human nature i n to an explicit theory of society, was well aware of this greed d i l e m m a . It formed the b a s i s of his political p h ilosoph y . Even, he a rgued , if we are a l l rational enough to understand that it's i n our long-term i nterest to live i n peace and security, our short-term interests are often such that killing and plundering are the most obviously profitable courses to take, and all it takes i s a few to cast a s ide their scruples to create utter i n security and chaos. This was why he felt that markets could only ex­ ist under the aegis of an absolutist state, which would force us to keep our promises and respect one another's property . But what happens

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when we're talking a bout a market in which it i s state debts and state o b l igations themselves that are being traded; when one cannot really speak of a state monopoly on force because one is operating in an in­ ternational m a rket where the primary currency i s bonds that the state depends on for its very a b i l ity to marshal military force ?

Having made incessant war on a l l remaining forms of the commu­ nism of the poor, even to the point of criminalizing cred i t , the masters of the new m a rket system d i scovered that they h a d no obvious j u sti­ fication left to maintain even the communism of the rich-that level of cooperation and solidarity requi red to keep the economic system running. True, for all its endless strains and periodic b reakdown s , the system h a s held out so fa r. But as recent events have dramatically testi­ fied , it h a s never been resolved .

P a r t I V :

S o What I s Capita l is m , Anyway?

We are used to seeing modern capitalism ( a l ong with modern tradi­ tions of democratic govern ment) as emerging only later: with the Age of Revolutions-the industrial revolution, the American and French revolutions-a series of profound breaks at the end of the eighteenth century that only became fu lly institutional ized a fter the end of the N a ­ poleonic Wars . H e r e we c o m e face to face w i t h a pecu l i a r p a r a d o x . It would seem that a l m o s t all elements of financial apparatus that we've come to associ ate with capita l i s m-central banks, bond m a rkets, short­ selling, brokerage houses, speculative b u b bles, securizati o n , annu iti es­ came into being not only before the science of economics (which is per­ haps not too surprising) , but also before the rise of facto ries, and wage labor itself.88 This i s a genuine chal lenge to fa m i l i a r ways of thinking. We like to think of the factories and workshops a s the " real economy , " a n d t h e rest as superstructure, constructed on top of i t . B u t if this were rea lly so, then how can it b e that the superstructure came first? Can the dreams of the system create its body ?

All this raises the question of what " capita l i s m " is to begin with, a question on which there is no consensus at a l l . The word was origi­ n a l l y invented by socialists, who saw capitalism a s that system where­ b y those who own capital command the labor of those who do not. Proponents, in contrast, tend to see capita l i s m as the freedom of the m a rketplace, which allows those with potentially marketa ble visions to pull resou rces together to bring those visions into being. Just about

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everyone agrees, however, that capitalism is a system that demands constant, endless growt h . Enterprises have to grow i n order to remain viable. The same i s true of nations. Just a s five percent per annum was widely accepted , at the dawn of capita l i s m , as the legi timate commer­ cial rate of interest-that is, the a mount that any investor could nor­ mally expect her money to be growing by the principle of interesse-so i s five percent now the annual rate at which any n a t i o n ' s GOP really ought to gro w . What w a s once an i mperson a l mechanism that com­ pelled people to look at everything around them as a potential source of profit has come to be considered the only obj ective measure of the health of the h u m a n community itself.

Starting fro m our baseline date of 1700, then, what we see at the dawn of modern capita l i s m i s a gigantic financial apparatus of credit and debt that operates-i n practical effect-to pump more and more labor out of j u st about everyone with whom it comes into contact, and as a result produces an endlessly expanding volume of m ateri a l goo d s . It does so n o t j ust by moral compuls i o n , b u t above a l l by using moral compulsion to m o b i l i ze sheer physical force. At every point, the fam i l i a r but peculiarly Eu ropean entanglement of war and com merce reappears-often i n startling new for m s . The first stock markets i n Hol­ land and Britain were b a sed mainly i n trading shares of the East and West India companies, which were both m i litary and trading ventures. For a century, one such private, profit-seeking corporation governed In­ d i a . The national debts o f Engl and, France, and the others were based i n money borrowed not to dig canals and erect bridges, but to acquire the gunpowder needed to bombard cities and to construct the camps required for the holding of prisoners and the training of recruits. A lmost all the bubbles of the eighteenth century involved some fantastic scheme to use the proceeds of colonial ventures to pay for European wars . Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case. Those who financed Europe's endless military conflicts also employed the government's police and prisons to extract ever-increasing productivity from the rest of the population.

As everybody knows, the world market system i n i tiated by the Spaniards and Portuguese empires first arose i n the search for spices. It soon settled into three broad trades, which might be la beled the arms trade, the slave trade, and the drug trade. The last refers mostly to soft drugs, of course, like coffee, tea, and the sugar to put in them, and tobacco, but distilled liquor first appears at this stage of human h i story as wel l , and as we all know, Europeans had no compunctions a bout aggressively marketing opium in China a s a way of finally putting an end to the need to export b u l l i o n . The cloth trade only came later, after

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the East I n d i a Company used m i l itary force to shut down the ( more efficient) Indian cotton export trade. One need only take a gl ance at the book that preserves Charles Davenant's 1696 essay on credi t and hu­ man fel l o w s h i p : The p olitical and commercial works of that celebrated writer Charles D' Avenant: relating to the trade and revenue of England, the Plantation trade, the East-India trade and African trade. " O bedience, love, and friendshi p " might suffice to govern relations between fellow Englishmen, then, but i n the colonies, it was mainly j ust obedience.

As I ' ve described, the Atlantic slave trade can be i m agined as a giant chain of debt-obligations, stretching fro m Bristol to Calabar to the headwaters of the Cross R i ver, where the Aro traders sponsored their secret societies; j u st as in the Indian Ocean trade, s i m i l a r chains connected Utrecht to Capetown to Jakarta to the Kingdom of Gelge l , where B a l inese k i n g s arranged t h e i r cock fights to l u r e t h e i r own sub­ j ects to gamble their freedom away. I n either case, the end product w a s the same: human beings so entirely ripped from t h e i r contexts , a n d h e n c e so thoroughly dehuman ized, that t h e y w e r e pl aced outside t h e rea l m of d e b t entirely .

T h e middlemen i n these chains, t h e various commerc i a l l i n k s of the debt chain that connected the stock-j obbers i n London with the Aro priests i n Nigeria , pearl divers i n the Aru i s l a nds of Ea stern Indo­ nesia, Benga l i tea plantations, or Amazonian rubber-tappers, give one the impression of having been sober, calcul ating, unimaginative men . At either end of the debt c h a i n , the whole enterprise seemed to turn on the a b i l i ty to manipul ate fantasies, and to run a constant peril of slipping into what even contemporary observers considered varieties of phantas magoric madnes s . O n the one end were the periodic bubbles, propelled in part by rumor and fantasy and i n part by the fact that j u st about everyone i n cities like Paris and London with any disposable cash would suddenly become convinced that they would somehow be able to profit from the fact that everyone else was succumbing to rumor and fantasy.

Charles MacKay has left us some i m mortal descriptions of the first of these, the fa mous "South Sea B u b b l e " of J7IO . Actu a l l y , the South Sea Company itself (which grew so l a rge that at one point it bought up most of the national debt) was j ust the anchor for what h appened , a giant corporation, its stock constantly ballooning in value, that seemed, to put i t i n contemporary term s, " too big to fai l . " It soon became the model for hundreds of new start-up offering s :

Innumerable j oint-stock companies started up everywhere. They soon received the name Bubbles, the most appropri ate

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imagination could devise . . . Some of them l asted a week or a fortnight, and were no more heard of, w h i l e others could not even live out that span of existence. Every evening prod uced new schemes, and every morning new proj ects . The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most p l odding j obber in Cornh i l l .89

The author l i s t s , as arbitrary exa m ple s , e ig hty- s ix schemes, ranging fro m the manufacture of soap or sai lcloth, the provi sion of insurance for horses, to a method to " m a k e deal-boards out of sawdust. " Each i ssued stock ; each issue would appear, then be scooped up and avidly traded back and forth i n tavern s , coffee-houses , a l le ys , and h a berdash­ eries across the city . In every case their price was quickly bid through the cei ling-each new buyer betting, effectively, that he or she could u n l o ad them t o s o m e even more gullible sucker before the inevitable collapse. So metimes people bid o n c a rd s and coupons that would allow them no more than the right to bid on other shares later. Thousands grew rich . Thousands m o r e were ruined .

The most absurd and preposterous of a l l , and which shewed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the peo­ ple, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "A company for the carrying on of an undertaking of great advan­ tage, but nobody to know what it is . "

The man o f genius who essayed this bold and successful in­ road upon public credu lity merely stated in h i s prospectus that the requi red capital was h a l f a m i l l i o n , in five thousand shares of wol. each, deposit 2!. per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to wo l . per annum per share. How this i m mense profit was to be obtained, he would not condescend to i n form them at that time, but promised that in a month the fu l l particulars would be duly announced , and call made fo r the remaining 9 8 ! . of the su bscription . Next morning, at nine o ' clock, this great man opened an office in Corn h i l l . Crowds beset h i s d o o r , and w h e n he shut up at three o ' clock, he fo und that no less than one thousand shares had been sub­ scribed for, and the deposits paid .

He w a s p h i l osopher enough to be contented with h i s ven­ ture, and set o ff that same evening fo r the Continent. He was never heard of aga i n . 90

If one is to believe MacKay, the entire population of London conceived the simultaneous delusion, not that money could rea lly

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be manufactured out of nothing, but that other people were fool i s h enough to bel ieve that it could-and t h a t , by that very fact, t h e y actu­ ally could make money out of nothing after a l l .

Moving t o t h e other s i d e of t h e d e b t c h a i n , we fi n d fantasies rang­ ing fro m the charming to the apocalyptic. In the anthropological lit­ erature, there i s everything fro m the bea utiful " sea wives" of Aru pearl divers, who will not yield up the treasures of the ocean unless courted with gifts bought on credit from local Chinese shops/1 to the secret markets where Benga l i landlords purchase ghosts to terrorize ins ubor­ dinate debt peons; to Tiv flesh-debts, a fantasy of human society canni­ balizing itself; to finally, occasions at which, the Tiv nightmare appears to have very nearly become tru e . 92 O n e the most fa mous and disturbing was the great Putum ayo scandal of 1909-1911, i n which the London reading public w a s shocked to discover that the agents of the subsid­ iary of a British rubber company operating in the Peruvian rainforest had created their very own Heart of D arkness, exterminating tens of thousands of Huitoto Indians-who the agents insisted on referring to only as " c a n n i b a l s "-in scenes of rape, torture, and mutilation that recalled the very worst of the conquest four h undred years earlier.93

In the debates that fol lowed, the first i m p u l se was to blame every­ thing on a system w hereby the Indians were said to have been ca ught i n a debt trap, made completely dependent on the company store :

The root of the whole evil was the so called patron or "peon­ age" system-a variety of what used to be called in England the "truck system "-by which the employee, forced to buy all his supplies at the employer's store, is kept hopelessly in debt, while by law he is unable to leave his employment until his debt is paid . . . The peon is thus, as often as not, a de facto slave; and since in the remoter regions of the vast continent there is no effective government, he is wholly at the mercy of his master.94

The "cann i b a l s " who ended up flogged to death, crucified, tied up and used for target practice, or h acked to pieces with machetes for fai l u re to bring in sufficient quantities of rubber, h a d , the story went, fallen into the ulti mate debt tra p ; seduced by the w a res of the com­ pany's agents , they ' d ended up b a rtering away their very lives.

A later Parlia mentary inquiry di scovered that the real story was nothing of the sort. The H u i toto had not been tricked into becoming debt peons at all. It was the agents and overseers sent into the region who were, much like the conquistadors, deeply indebted-in their case,

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to the Peruvian company that had commissioned them, which was ul­ timately receiving its own credit from London financiers . These agents had certainly arrived with every intention of extending that web of credi t to include the Indians, but di scovering the H u i toto to have no interest in the cloth, machetes, and coins they had brought to trade with them , they 'd finally given up and j u st started rounding Indians up and forcing them to accept loans at gunpoint, then tabulating the amount of rubber they o wed . 95 Many of the Indians massacred , in turn, had simply been trying to run away.

In reality, then, the Indians had been reduced to s lavery; i t ' s j ust that, by 1907, no one could open ly admit th i s . A legitimate enterprise had to have some moral basis, and the only morality the company knew was debt. When it became clear that the Hu itoto rej ected the premise, everyth ing went haywire, and the company ended up, like Ca­ simir, caught in a spiral of indignant terror that ulti mately threatened to wipe out its very economic bas i s .

I I I I I

It is the secret scandal of capita l i s m that at no point h a s it been or­ ganized primarily around free l a b o r . 96 The conquest of the Americas began with mass enslavement, then grad ually settled into various forms of debt peonage, African sl avery, and " i ndentured service "-th at is, the use of contract labor, workers who had received cash in advance and were thus bound for five-, seven - , or ten -year terms to pay it back. Needless to s a y , indentured servants were recrui ted l a rgely from a m o n g people who were a l ready debtors. I n the 16oos there were at times almost a s many w h i te debtors as African s l a ves working in southern p l a n t a t i o n s , and legally they were a t first i n a l most the same situation, since in the begi nning, p l antation societies were working within a European legal tradition that assumed s l avery did not exist, so even Africans in the Carolinas were classified, as contract l a borers .97 Of course this later cha nged when the idea of " race" was introduced. When African slaves were freed, they were rep laced, on plantations from Barbados to Mauritius, with contract la borers aga i n : though now ones recrui ted mainly in India or C h i n a . Chinese contract laborers built the North American rai lroad system, and Indian "coolies" built the South African mines. The peasants of Russia and Poland, who had been free landholders in the Middle Ages, were only made serfs at the dawn of capita l i s m , when their lords began to sell grain on the new world m a rket to feed the new industrial cities to the west.98 Colonial regimes in Afri ca and Southeast Asia regu larly demanded forced labor

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from their conq uered subjects, or, alternately, created tax systems de­ signed to force the population into the labor market through debt. British overlords i n India, starting with the East India Company but continuing under Her Majesty's govern ment, institution a l i zed debt pe­ on age as their primary means of creating products fo r s a l e abroad .

This is a scandal not j ust because the system occasionally goes haywire, as it did in the Putumayo, but because i t plays h avoc with our most cherished assumptions about what capita l i s m really i s­ particularly that, in its basic nature, capita l i s m h a s something to do with freedo m . For the capitalists, this means the freedo m of the mar­ ketplace. For most workers , it means free labor. Marxists have ques­ tioned whether wage labor is u l timately free in any sense ( since some­ one with nothing to sell but his or her body cannot in any sense be considered a gen uinely free agent) , but they still tend to assume that free wage labor is the basis of capita l i s m . And the dominant i m age i n the history of capita l i s m i s the Engl ish workingman t o i l i n g in t h e facto­ ries of the industrial revolution, and this image can be traced forward to Silicon Valley, with a straight line in betwee n . All those millions of slaves and serfs and coolies and debt peons dis appear, or i f we must speak o f them, we write them off as temporary bumps along the road . Like sweatshops, this is assu med to be a stage that indu stri alizing na­ tions had to pass through, j u st as i t i s still assu med that a l l those mil­ lions of debt peons and contract l a borers and sweatshop workers who still exist, often in the same places, w i l l surely live to see their chi ldren become regular wage la borers with health insurance and pensions, and their children, doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs .

When one looks at the actual h i story of wage labor, even in coun­ tries like England, that picture begi ns to melt away. In most of Medieval northern Europe, wage labor had been mainly a lifestyle phenomenon. From roughly the age of twelve or fourteen to roughly twenty-eight or thirty, everyone was expected to be employed as a servant in someone else's household-usually on a yearly contract basis, for which they re­ ceived roo m , board, professional training, and usually a wage of some sort-until they accumul ated enough resources to marry and set up a household of their own . 99 The first thing that " proleta rianization" came to mean was that millions of young men and women across Europe found themselves effectively stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence. Apprentices and j ourneymen could never become " m a sters , " and thus, never actually grow up. Eventua l l y , many began to give up and marry early-to the great scandal of the moralists, who i n s i sted that the new proletariat were starting fa mi lies they could not possibly support . 100

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There i s , and h a s always been, a curious affinity between w age labor and slavery. This is not j ust because i t was s laves on Carib­ bean sugar p lantations who supplied the quick-energy products that powered much of early wage laborers' work; not j ust because most of the scientific m a nagement techniques applied i n factories in the in­ dustrial revolution can be traced back to those sugar p l antation s ; but also because both the relation between ma ster and slave, and between employer and employee, are i n principle impersonal : whether you've been sold or you're simply rented yourself out, the mo ment money changes hands, who you are i s supposed to be uni mportant; a l l that's important i s that you are capable of understanding orders and doing what y o u ' re told . 10 1

This i s o n e r e a s o n , perhaps, t h a t i n principle, there was always a feeling that both the buying of slaves and the hiring of la borers should rea lly not be on credit, but should employ cash . The problem, a s I ' ve noted, was t h a t for m o s t of t h e h i story of British capita l i s m , the cash simply didn't exist. Even when the Royal Mint began to produce s m a ller-denomination s i lver and copper coins, the supply was sporadic and inadequate. This i s how the " truck syste m " developed to begin with: during the industrial revolution, factory owners would often pay their workers with tickets or vouchers good only i n local shop s , with whose owners they had some sort of informal arrangement, or, i n more i s o l a ted parts of the country, which they owned themselve s . 102 Tradi­ tional credi t relations with one's local shopkeeper clearly took on an entirely new complexion once the shopkeeper w a s effectively an agent of the boss. Another expedient was to pay workers at least partly in kind-and notice the very richness of the vocabul ary for the sorts of things one w a s assumed to be a l l owed to appropriate from one's work­ place, particularly fro m the waste, excess , and side products : cabbage, chips, thru m s , sweepings, buggings, gleanings, sweepings, potchings, vails, poake, coltage, knockdown s, tinge. 103 " Cabbage , " for instance, w a s the cloth left over from t a i loring, "chips" the pieces of board that dockworkers had the right to carry fro m their workplace (any piece of timber less than two feet long) , "thru m s " were taken fro m the warping­ bars of looms, and so o n . And of course we have a l ready heard about pay ment i n the form of cod, or n a i l s .

Employers had a final expedient: wait for the m o n e y to s h o w up, and i n the meanti me, don't pay anything-leaving their emp loyees to get by with only what they could scrounge fro m their shop floors, or what their fa milies could finagle i n outside employment, receive i n charity, preserve in savings p o o l s w i t h friends and fa m i l i e s , or, when all else failed, acquire on credi t fro m the loan sharks and pawnbrokers who rapidly came to be seen as the perennial scourge of the working

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poor. The situation beca me such that, by the n i neteenth century, any time a fire destroyed a London pawnshop, working-class neighbor­ hoods would brace for the wave of domestic violence that would in­ evitably ensue when many a wife was fo rced to confess that she'd long since secretly hocked her husband ' s Sunday s u i t . 104

We are, nowadays, used to associating factories eighteen months in arrears for wages with a nation in economic free-fa l l , such as occu rred during the collapse of the Soviet Union; but owing to the hard-money policies of the British govern ment, who were always concerned above a l l to ensure that their paper money didn't float away in another specu­ lative bubble, in the early days of industrial capitalism, such a situation w a s in no way unusual. Even the government was often unable to find the cash to pay its own empl oyees . In eighteenth-century London, the Royal Admira lty was regu larly over a year behind in paying the wages of those who labored at the Deptford docks-one reason that they were w i l l ing to tolerate the appropriation of chips, not to mention hemp, canvas, steel bolts, and cordage. In fact, as Linebaugh h a s shown, the situation only really began to take recogn izable form around 18oo, when the government stabilized its finances, began paying cash wages on sched ule, and therefore tried to abolish the practice of what was now relabeled " workplace pilfering"-which, meeting outraged resis­ tance on the part of the dockworkers, was made punishable by whip­ ping and i mprisonment. Samuel Benth a m , the engineer put in charge of reforming the dockyards, had to turn them into a regu lar police state in order to be able to institute a regime of pure w age labor-to which purpose he ultimately conceived the notion of b u i lding a giant tower in the middle to guara ntee constant surveillance, an idea that was later borrowed by his brother Jeremy for the fa mous Pa nopticon . 105

I I I I I

Men like Smith and Benth a m were idealists; even utop i a n s . To under­ stand the h i s tory of capita l i s m , however, we have to begin by rea lizing that the picture we have in our heads, of workers who dutifully punch the clock at 8 : oo a . m . and receive regu lar remuneration every Friday, on the b a s i s of a temporary contract that either pa rty i s free to break off at any time, began as a utopi an vision, was only gradually put into effect even in England and North America, and has never, at any point, been the main way of organizing production fo r the market, ever, anywhere.

This is actually why Smith ' s work is so important. He created the vision o f an im aginary world al most entirely free of debt and credit,

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and therefore, free of guilt and s i n ; a world where men and women were free to simply calcul ate their interests i n ful l knowledge that ev­ erything had been prearranged by God to ensure that it w i l l serve the greater good. Such i magi nary constructs are of course what scientists refer to as " model s , " and there ' s nothing intrinsically wrong with them. Actually I think a fa i r case can be made that we cannot think without them . The problem with such models-at least, it always seems to happen when we model something cal led "the market"-is that, once created , we have a tendency to treat them as obj ective realities, or even fa l l down before them and start worshipping them as god s . "We must obey the dictates of the m a rket ! "

Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fal l down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we do start fro m the economists' utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control pro­ ductive capital, and, aga i n , leave others with nothing to sell but their brains and bodies, the results will be in many ways barely distinguish­ a b l e from s l avery, and the whole system will eventu ally destroy i tself. What everyone seems to forget i s the "as if" nature of his a n a l y s i s . 106 Marx was well aware that there were fa r more bootblacks, prostitutes, butlers, soldiers, pedlars, chimneysweep s , flower girl s , street musicians, convicts , nannies, and cab drivers in the London of h i s day than there were factory workers. He was never s uggesting that that's what the world was actu a l l y like.

Stil l , if there i s anything that the last several hundred years of world hi story have shown, i t ' s that utop ian visions can have a certa in appea l . This is a s true of Adam Smith's as of those ranged against it. The period from roughly r 8 25 to 1975 i s a brief but determined effort on the part of a l a rge number of very powerful peop le-with the avid support of many of the least powerful-to try to turn that vision into something like rea lity. Coins and paper money were, fin a l l y , produced i n sufficient quantities that even ordinary people could conduct their daily lives without appeal to tickets , tokens, or credit. Wages started to be paid on time. New sorts of shops, arcades, and gal leries appeared, where everyone paid in cash, or alternately, as time went on, by means of imperson a l fo rms of credit like instal lment plans. A s a res ult, the old puritanical notion that debt was s i n and degradation began to take a profound hold on many of those who came to consider themselves the " respecta ble" working classes, who often took freedom fro m the clutches of the pawnbroker and loan shark a s a point of pride, which separated them fro m drunkards, hustlers, and ditch-diggers as surely as the fact that they weren 't m i s sing teeth .

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Speaking a s someone brought up i n that sort of working-class fa m ­ i l y ( m y brother d i e d at the a g e of 5 3 , h a v i n g refused t o h i s dying d a y to acquire a credit card ) , I can attest to t h e degree t h a t , fo r those w h o spend most of their w a k i n g h o u r s working at someone else's orders, the a b ility to p u l l out a wallet fu l l of banknotes that are uncondition­ ally one's own can be a compel ling form of freedo m . It's not surprising that so many of the economists' assumptions-most of those for which I have been taking them to task over the course of this book-have been embraced by the leaders of the h i storic workers' movements, so much so that they have come to shape our visions of what alternatives to capita l i s m might be like. The problem i s not j u st-a s I demon strated in chapter 7-that i t i s rooted i n a deeply flawed, even perverse, con­ ception of h u m a n freedom . The real problem i s that, like all utopian drea m s , i t i s impossible. We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a systtlm i n which everyone who wasn't a capitalist w a s somehow able to become a respecta ble, regularly paid wage la borer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that h a s never exi sted and never could exist. W h a t ' s more, the moment that even the prospect that this might happen begins to materi alize, the whole system starts to come apart.

P a rt I V :

Apoca lypse

Let us return, finally, to where we began : with Cortes and the Aztec treasure. The reader might have asked herself, What did happen to i t ? D i d Cortes real l y steal it fro m h i s o w n men ?

The answer seems to be that by the time the siege was over, there was very l i ttle o f it left . Cortes seems to have gotten his hands on much of i t long before the siege even bega n . A certain portion he had won by gambling.

This story, too, i s i n Bern a l Diaz, and it i s strange and puzzling, but also, I suspect, profound. Let me fi l l i n some of the gaps i n our story. After burning h i s boats, Cortes began to assemble an army of lo­ c a l allies, which was easy to do because the Aztecs were widely h a ted , and then he began to march on the Aztec capit a l . Moctez u m a , the Az­ tec emperor, who h a d been monitoring the situation closely, concluded that he needed to at least figure out what sort of people he was dealing with, so he invited the entire Spanish force (only a few hundred men) to be his official guests i n Tenochtitl a n . This eventually led to a series

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of pa lace intrigues during which Corte s ' s men briefly held the emperor hostage before being forcibly expelled .

During the time when Moctez u m a was being held captive in his own palace, he and Cortes pas sed a good deal of their time playing an Aztec g a m e cal led totoloque. They played fo r gold, and Cortes, of course, cheated. At one point, Moctez u m a ' s men brought the m atter to the king's attention, but the king j u st laughed and made a j oke of it-neither w a s he concerned la ter when Pedro de Alvarado, Corte s ' s c h i e f lieutenant, began cheating e v e n m o r e flagrantly, demanding gold for each point lost and when he lost, paying only in worthless pebbles. Why Moctezuma behaved so has rem a i ned something of an historical m ystery . D i a z took it as a gesture of lordly magnanimity, perhaps even a way of putting the petty- m inded Spaniards in their place . 1 07

One historian, Inga Clenn inden , suggests an alternate interpreta­ tion. Aztec games, she notes , tended to have a peculiar feature: there was always a way that, by a freak stroke of luck, one could achieve to­ tal victory . This seems to have been true, for instance, of their fa mous b a l l games. O b servers always wonder, viewing the tiny stone hoops set high above the court, how anyone could ever possibly have managed to score. The answer seems to be: they didn't, a t least not that way. Normally the game had nothing to do with the hoop . The game was p l ayed between two opposing squads, attired a s fo r battle, knocking the b a l l back and forth :

The normal method of scoring was through the slow accumu­ lation of points. But that process could be dramatically pre­ empted . To send the ball through one of the rings-a feat, given the size of the ball and the ring, presumably rarer than a hole in one in golf-gave instant victory, ownership of all the goods wagered , and the right to pil lage the cloaks of the onlookers . 108

Whoever scored the point won everything, down to the audience ' s clothing.

There were similar rules in board games, such as Cortes and Moct­ ezuma were playing: if, by some freak stroke of luck, one of the dice landed on its edge, the game was over, and the winner took everyth ing. T h i s , Clenninden suggests , must have been what Moctez u m a w a s re­ a l l y waiting for. After a l l , he was clearly in the middle of extraordinary events. Strange creatures had appeared, apparently from nowhere, with unheard-of powers . Ru mors of epide m i c s , of the destruction of nearby nations, had pres u m a bly already reached him. If ever there was a time

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that some grandiose revelation w a s due fro m the gods, then surely this was it.

Such an attitude does seem to fit perfectly with the spirit of Az­ tec c ulture gleaned fro m its l i terature, which exuded a sense of i m ­ pending catastrophe, p e r h a p s astrologically determ ined, j ust possibly avoidable-but probably not. Some have s uggested that Aztecs must have somehow been aware that they were a civilization skating on the brink of ecological catastrophe; others , that the apocalyptic tone i s retrospective-s ince, a fter all, what we know of Aztec l i terature i s a l m o s t entirely gleaned from m e n and w o m e n who actually did expe­ rience its complete destructio n . S t i l l , there does seem to be a certa in frantic quality i n certain Aztec practices-the sacrifice of a s many as tens of tho'usands of war prisoners, most notably i n the apparent belief that, were the Sun not continually fed with human hearts, it would die and world with it-that i t ' s hard to explain i n any other way.

I f Clenninden i s right, for Moctezuma, he and Cortes were not simply gambling for gol d . Gold was triv i a l . The stakes were the entire umverse.

Moctezu m a w a s a bove all a warrior, and a l l warriors are gam­ blers; but unlike Cortes, he was clearly i n every way a man of honor. As we've also seen, the quintessence of a warrior's honor, which is a greatness that can only come from the destruction and degradation of others, is his w i l lingness to throw h i mself into a game where he risks that same destruction and degradation himself-and, unl ike Cortes, to play graciously, and by the rules. 109 When the time came, it meant be­ ing w i l l i n g to stake everything.

He d i d . And as it turns out, nothing h appened . N o die landed on its edge . Cortes continued to cheat, the gods sent no revelation, and the universe was eventu ally destroyed .

If there 's something to be learned here-and as I s a y , I think there i s-it i s that there may be a deeper, more profound relation between gambling and apocalypse. Capitalism i s a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, i n a way that no other ever h a s ; yet at the same time, capita lism seems to be uniquely incapa­ ble of conceiving of its own etern ity. Could these two facts be l i nked ?

I should be more precise here . I t ' s not entirely true that capitalism i s incapable of conceiving of its own eternity. On the one hand, its exponents do often feel o b l iged to present it a s etern a l , because they insist that i s it is the only possible viable economic system : one that, as they still sometimes like to say, "has exi sted for five thousand years and will exist for five thousand more . " O n the other hand, it does seem that the moment a significant portion of the population begins to actually

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bel ieve this, and particu larly, starts treating cred it institutions as if they rea lly w i l l be around forever, everything goes haywire. Note here how it was the most sober, cautious, responsible capitalist regimes­ the seventeenth -century Dutch Republic, the eigh teenth-century British Commonwealth-the ones most ca reful about managing their public debt-that saw the most bizarre explosions of speculative frenzy , the tulip manias and South Sea bubbles .

Much of th i s seems to turn on the nature of national deficits and credit money . The national debt is, a s politicians have complained practica lly since these things first appeared, money borrowed from future generation s . Sti l l , the effects have always been strangely double­ edged . O n the one h a n d , deficit financing i s a way of putting even more m i litary power i n the hands of princes, gener a l s , and politici a n s ; on the other, it suggests that government owes something to those it govern s . I nsofar as our money i s ulti mately an extension of t h e p u b l i c debt, then whenever we buy a newspaper or a cup of coffee , or even place a bet on a horse, we are trading in promises, representations of something that the government will give us at some time i n the future, even if we d o n ' t know exactly what it i s . 1 10

I m m anuel Wal lerstein likes to point out that the French Revolu­ tion introduced several profoundly new ideas i n politics-ideas which, fifty years before the revolution, the vast maj ority of educated Europe­ ans would have written off a s crazy, but which, fifty years afterward, j ust about anyone felt they had to at least pretend they thought were true. The first is that social change i s inevitable and desirable: that the natural d i rection of hi story i s for civilization to gradually improve. The second i s that the appropriate agent to manage such change i s t h e govern ment. The third i s t h a t t h e government g a i n s its legitimacy fro m an entity c a l led " the people . " 1 1 1 I t ' s easy t o see how the very idea of a national debt-a promise of conti n u a l future improvement ( a t the very least, five percent annual improvement} made by government to people--m ight itself have pl ayed a role in inspiring such a revolution­ ary new perspective. Yet at the same time, when one looks at what men like Mirabeau, Voltaire, D iderot, Sieyes-the philosophes who first proposed that notion of what we now call " c i v i lization"-were actu­ a l l y arguing about i n the years immed iately leading up to the revol u ­ tion, it was even m o r e a b o u t t h e d a nger of apoca lyptic catastrophe, of the prospect of civilization as they knew it being destroyed by default and economic collapse.

Part of the problem was the obvious one: the national debt is, first, born of war; second, it i s not owed to a l l the people equally, but above a l l to capita l i s ts-and in France at that time, "capitalist" meant,

A G E O F T H E G R E A T C A P I T A L I S T E M P I R E S 3 5 9

specifica l l y , " those who held pieces of the national debt . " The more democratically inclined felt that the entire situation was opprobrio u s . "The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt , " T h o m a s Jefferson wrote, around this same time, "has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating . " 1 12 Most Enlighten ment thinkers fea red that i t promi sed even worse. Intrinsic to the new, " modern " notion of impersonal debt, after all, w a s the possi­ b i l i ty of bank ruptcy . 1 1 1 Bankruptcy, at that time, was indeed something of a personal apocalypse: it meant prison, the dissolution of o n e ' s e s t a t e ; fo r the least fortunate, it m e a n t torture, starvation, and death . What national bankruptcy would mean, at that point in h i s tory, no­ body knew . There were simply no precedents . Yet as nations fo ught greater and bloodier wars, and their debts escal ated geometrically, de­ fa ult began to appear unavoidable . 1 14 Abbe Sieyes first put forward his great scheme for representative govern ment, fo r i n stance, primarily as a way of reforming the national finances, to fend off the inevitable cata strophe. And when it happened, what would it look like ? Would the money become worth l es s ? Would m i l i tary regimes seize power, regimes across Europe be likewise forced to default and fa l l like domi­ nos, plunging the continent into endless barbari s m , darkness, and w a r ? M a n y were a l ready anticipating t h e prospect of t h e Terror l o n g before the revolution itself. 1 1 5

I t ' s a strange story because we are used to thinking of the Enlight­ enment a s the dawn of a unique phase of human opti m i s m , borne on assumptions that the advance of science and human knowledge would inevitably make life wiser, safer, and better fo r everyone--a na"ive fa ith said to have peaked in the Fabian soci a l i s m of the 189os, only to be annihilated in the trenches of World War I. In fact, even the Victorians were haunted by the dangers of degeneration and dec l i n e . Most of a l l , Victori ans sha red t h e near-universal assumption t h a t capita l i s m itself would not be around forever. Insurrection seemed im minent. Many Victorian capitalists operated under the si ncere belief that they might, at any moment, find themselves h anging fro m trees . In Chicago, for instance, a friend once took me on a drive down a beautiful old street, fu ll of mansions from the 187os: the reason, he expl ained, that it looked like that, was that most of Chicago ' s rich industrialists of the time were so convinced that the revolution was i m m a nent that they collectively relocated along the road that led to the nearest m i l i tary base. A l most none of the great theorists of capita l i s m , fro m anywhere on the politi­ cal spectru m , from Marx to Weber, to Schumpeter, to von M i s e s , felt that capitalism w a s likely to be around for more than another genera­ tion or two at the most.

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One could go fu rther: the moment that the fear of i m minent social revolution no longer seemed plausible, by the end of World War I I , we were immed i ately presented with the specter of nuclear holocaust . 1 16 Then, when that no longer seemed plausible, we discovered global warming. This i s not to say that these threats were not, and are not, rea l . Yet it does seem strange that capita l i s m feels the constant need to i magine, or to actually m a nufacture, the means of its own i m m i ­ n e n t extincti o n . I t ' s in dramatic contrast to t h e behavior of t h e leaders of socialist regimes , from Cuba to A l b a n i a , who, when they came to power, i m m edi ately began acting as i f their system would be around forever-ironically enough, cons idering they i n fact turned out to be something of an hi storical b l i p .

Perhaps the reason i s because what was t r u e in 1 7 1 0 i s still true. Presented with the prospect of its own eternity, capitalism-or any­ w a y , financial capita l i s m-si m p l y explodes . Because if there ' s no end to it, there' s absolutely no reason not to generate credit-that i s , future money-infinitely . Recent events would certainly seem to confirm t h i s . The period leading up to 2 o o 8 was one i n w h i c h many began to believe that capitalism rea l l y w a s going to be around forever; at the very least, no one seemed any longer to be able to i m agine an alternative. The i m ­ mediate effect was a series of increasingly reckless bubbles t h a t brought the whole apparatus crashing down.

C h a p t e r Tw e l v e

( 1 9 7 1 -T h e B e g i n n i n g o f S o m e t h i n g Ye t t o B e D e t e r m i n e d )

L o o k at all these b u m s : If o n ly there were a way of finding out how much

they o w e .

Free y o u r mind of t h e idea of deserv­ ing, of the idea of earning, and you will b egin to b e able to think.

-Ur s u l a K . Le G u i n , The Dispossessed

ON A U G U ST 1 5 , 1 9 7 1 , United States President Richard Nixon a n ­ nounced that foreign-held U . S . d o l l a rs would no longer be convertible into gold-thus stripping away the last vestige of the international gold standard . 1 This was the end of a policy that had been effective since I 9J I , and con firmed by the Bretton Woods accords at the end of World War II: that while United States citizens might no longer be allowed to cash i n their dollars for gold , all U . S . currency held outside the country was to be redeemable at the rate of $35 an ounce . By doing so, Nixon initiated the regime of free-floating currencies that continues to this day.

The consensus among historians is that Nixon had little choice. His hand was forced by the rising costs of the Vietnam War-one that, like all capitalist wars, had been financed by deficit spending. The United States was in possession of a large proportion of the world ' s gold re­ serves in its vaults in Fort Knox (though increasingly less in the late 196os, as other governments, most fa mously Charles de Gaulle's France, began demanding gold for their dollars) ; most poorer countries, in con­ trast, kept their reserves in dollars. The immediate effect of Nixon 's unpegging the dollar was to cause the price of gold to skyrocket; it hit a peak of $6oo an ounce in 1980. This of course had the effect of causing

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U . S . gold reserves to increase dramatically in value. The value of the dol­ lar, as denominated in gold, plummeted . The result was a massive net transfer of wealth from poor countries, which lacked gold reserves, to rich ones , like the United States and G reat Britain, that maintained them . In the United States, it also set off persistent inflation .

Whatever Nixon ' s reasons, though, once the global system of cred­ it money w a s entirely unpegged from gold, the world entered a new phase of financial history-one that nobody completely understan d s . While I w a s growing up in New Y o r k , I w o u l d hear occa sional rumors of secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers i n Manhattan. Sup­ posedly, these vaults contai ned not j ust the U . S . gold reserves, but those of a l l the major economic powers . The gold was said to be kept i n the form of bars, pi led up in sep a rate vaults, one for each country, and every year, when the b a l ance of accounts w a s calcul ated, workmen with dollies would adj ust the stocks accordingly, carting, say, a few m i l l ion in gold out of the vault marked "Brazi l " and transfering them to the one m a rked " Germany , " and so o n .

Apparently a lot of people had h e a r d these stories . At l e a s t , right after the Towers were destroyed on September n, 200 1 , one of the first questions many New Y o rkers asked was: What h appened to the money ? Was i t safe ? Were the vaults destroyed ? Pres u m a b l y , the gold h a d melted . Was this the real a i m of the attackers ? Conspiracy theo­ ries abounded. Some spoke of legions of emergency workers secretly s u m moned to make their way through miles of overheated tunnels , desperately carting off tons of bullion even as rescue workers labored overhea d . One particularly colorful conspiracy theory suggested that the entire attack w a s really staged by speculators w h o , like Nixon, expected to see the value of the dollar crash and that of gold to skyrocket-either because the reserves had been destroyed, or because they themselves had laid prior plans to steal them .2

The truly remarkable thing about this story i s that, after having be­ l i eved it for years, and then, in the wake of 9/n, having been convinced by some more knowing friends that it w a s a l l a great myth ( " N o , " one of them said resignedl y , as if to a child, "the United States keeps its gold reserves in Fort Knox " ) , I did a little research and di scovered that, n o , actua l l y , it's true. The Un ited States trea sury's gold reserves are i ndeed kept at Fort Knox, but the Federal Reserve' s gold reserves, and those of more than one hundred other central banks, govern ments, and organ izations, are stored in vaults under the Federal Reserve building at 33 Liberty Street in M a n h atta n , two blocks away from the Tow­ ers. At roughly five thousand metric tons (266 million troy ounces ) , these combined reserves represent, according t o t h e Fed's o w n website,

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . ) 3 6 3

somewhere between one- fifth and one-quarter of a l l the gold that h a s e v e r b e e n t a k e n fro m the earth :

" The gold stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is se­ cured in a most unusual vault. It rests on the bedrock o f Manhattan I s l a nd-one of the few foundations considered adequ ate to support the weight of the vault, its door, and the gold inside-eighty feet below street level and fifty feet below sea level . . . To reach the vault, bullion­ laden pal lets must be loaded into one of the B a n k ' s elevators and sent down five floors below street level to the vault floor . . . I f everything i s i n order, the gold i s either moved to one or more of the vault's 122 compartments as signed to depositing countries and official i nternation­ a l organizations or p l aced on shelves . ' G old stacker s , ' using hydrau l i c l i fts, do indeed shift t h e m b a c k and forth between compartments t o b a l ance credits and d e b t s , t h o u g h the vaults have only n u m b e r s , so even the workers don't know who is paying whom . "3

There is no rea son to believe, however, that these vaults were i n any way a ffected by the events of September u , 200 1 .

Reality , then, h a s become so odd that i t ' s h a rd t o guess which ele­ ments of grand mythic fantasies are really fa ntasy, and which are tru e . The i m age of collapsed v a u l t s , t h e melted b u l l i o n , o f secret workers scurrying deep below Manh attan with underground forklifts evacuat­ ing the world economy-a l l this turns out not to be. But is it entirely surprising that people were w i l l i ng to consider i t ?4

In America, the banking system since the days of Tho m a s Jefferson has shown a remarkable capacity to inspire paranoid fantasies : whether centering on Freemasons, or Elders of Zion, or the Secret O rder of the I l l uminati, or the Queen of Engl a n d ' s drug-money - l aundering opera­ tions, or any of a thousand other secret conspiracies and c a b a l s . I t ' s the m a i n reason why it t o o k so long for an American central b a n k t o be established to begin with. In a way there ' s n o t h i n g surprising here. The United States h a s always been domin ated by a certain market populism, and the a b i l i ty of banks to " c reate money out of nothing"­ and even more, to prevent anyone else fro m doing so--has always been the bugaboo of market populists, since it directly contradicts the idea that markets are a simple expres sion of democratic equality. S t i l l , since Nixon's floating of the dollar, it h a s become evident that i t ' s only the wizard behind the screen who seems to be maintain ing the v i a b i l ity of the whole arrangement . Under the free-market orthodoxy that fo l­ lowed, we have a l l being asked, effectively, to accept that " the market" is a self- regu lating system, with the rising and fa l l i ng of prices akin to a force of nature, and sim ultaneously to ignore the fact that, in the business pages, it is simply assu med that markets rise and fa l l mainly

3 6 4 D E B T

in anticipation of, or reaction to, deci sions regarding interest rates by Alan G reen span, or Ben Bernanke, or whoever is cu rrently the c h a i r­ man of the Federal Reserve .5

I I I I I

O n e element, however, tends to go flagrantly m i s s i ng in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking syste m , let alone in official accounts : that i s , the role of war and m i l i tary power. There ' s a reason why the wizard h a s such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him, there's a man with a gun .

True, in one sense, h e ' s been there fro m the start. I have a l ready pointed out that modern money is based on government debt, and that govern ments borrow money in order to finance wars. T h i s i s j u st as true today as it was in the age of K i ng Phillip II. The creation of central banks represented a permanent instituti o n a l i zation of that mar­ riage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had a l ready begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy, and that eventually became the foundation of financ i a l capita l i s m . 6

N i x o n floated the dollar i n o r d e r to pay for the c o s t of a war in w h i c h , during the period of 1 970-1972 alone, he ordered more than four m i l l ion tons of explosives and incendiaries dropped on cities and v i l l ages across Indochina-causing one senator to dub h i m "the great­ est bomber of all time. "7 T h e debt crisis was a di rect result of the need to pay for the bombs, or to be more precise, the vast m i litary infrastructure requi red to deliver them. This w a s what was causing such an enormous strain on the U.S. gold reserves. Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon con verted the U . S . cu rrency into pure " fia t money "-mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated a s money only because the United States government insi sted that it should be. In that case, one could well argue that U . S . military power was now the only thing backing up the currency. In a certain sense this i s true, but the notion of " fiat money " assumes that money really "was" gold in the first p l ace. Really we are deal ing with another variation of credit money.

Contrary to popular belief, the U . S . govern ment c a n ' t " j ust print money , " because American money is not issued by the government at all, but by private banks, under the aegis of the Federal Reserve Sys­ tem . The Federal Reserve--despite the name--i s techn i c a l ly not part of the government at all, but a pecu l i a r sort of pub lic-private hybrid, a consortium of privately owned banks whose c h a i rman i s appoint­ ed by the Uni ted States president, with Congressional approva l , but

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . ) 3 6 5

which otherwise operates without public oversight. A l l dollar b i l l s in circulation i n America are "Federal Reserve Notes "-the Fed i s sues them a s promissory notes, and commissions the U . S . mint to do the actual printing, paying it four cents for each b i l l . 8 The arrangement i s j ust a variation of the scheme origi n a l l y pioneered by the Bank of Engla n d , whereby the Fed " loans" money to the United States govern­ ment by purchasing treasury bonds, and then monetizes the U . S . debt by lending the money thus owed by the government to other banks. 9 The difference is that while the Bank of England origi n a l l y loaned the king gold, the Fed simply whisks the money into exi stence by saying that it's there . Thus, it's the Fed that has the power to print money . 10 The banks that receive loans from the Fed are no longer permitted to print money themselves, but they are allowed to create virtual money by making loans at a fractional reserve rate establi shed by the Fed­ though in the wake of the current credit cri s i s , at time of this writing, there h a s been a move to remove even these restriction s .

A l l t h i s i s a bit of a simplification: monetary policy i s endlessly arcane, and i t does sometimes seem, intentionally s o . ( Henry Ford once rema rked that i f ordinary Americans ever found out how the banking system really worked, there would be a revol ution tomorrow . ) What i s remarkable for present purposes i s not so much that American dol­ lars are created by banks, but that one apparently paradoxical result of Nixon ' s floating the currency was that these bank-created dollars themselves replaced gold a s the world ' s reserve currency : that i s , a s the ultimate store of value i n the world, yielding the United States enor­ mous economic advantage s .

Meanwh ile, t h e U . S . d e b t rem a i n s , a s it h a s been s i n c e 1790, a war debt: the United States continues to spend more on its m i litary than do all other nations on earth put together, and mil itary expenditures are not only the basis of the govern ment's industrial policy; they also take up such a huge proportion of the b udget that by many estimations, were it not for them, the United States would not run a deficit at a l l .

The U . S . mil itary, u n l i k e a n y other, maintains a doctrine of global power proj ecti o n : that it should have the a b i lity, through roughly 8oo overseas mil itary bases , to i ntervene with deadly force absolutely any­ where on the planet. I n a way, though, land forces are secondary; at least since World War II, the key to U . S . m i l itary doctrine h a s always been a reliance on air power. The United States h a s fought no war in which it did not control the skies, and it h a s relied on aerial bombard­ ment far more systematically than any other military-in its recent oc­ cupation of Iraq, for instance, even going so far as to bomb residenti al neighborhoods of cities ostensibly under its own control. The essence

366 DEBT

- Federal Debt - Defense Budget

$900.00

$800.00

$700.00

$600.00

$500.00

$400.00

$300.00

$200.00

$100.00

�0 �

g,O �

PP ,o;

00 ,o o 'b

,o

of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours' notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet.11 No other government has ever

had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together.

Because of United States trade deficits, huge numbers of dollars circulate outside the country; and one effect of Nixon's floating of the dollar was that foreign central banks have little they can do with these dollars except to use them to buy U.S. treasury bondsY This is what

is meant by the dollar becoming the world's "reserve currency." These bonds are, like all bonds, supposed to be loans that will eventually mature and be repaid, but as economist Michael Hudson, who first began observing the phenomenon in the early '7os, noted, they never really do:

To the extent that these Treasury IOUs are being built into

the world's monetary base they will not have to be repaid, but are to be rolled over indefinitely. This feature is the essence of

America's free financial ride, a tax imposed at the entire glob<s

expense. 13

What's more, over time, the combined effect of low interest pay­ ments and the inflation is that these bonds actually depreciate in

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . ) 3 6 7

value-add ing to the tax effect, or a s I p referred to put it in the first chapter, "tribute . " Economists p refer to c a l l it " seigniorage . " The effect, though, i s that American imperial power i s ba sed on a debt that w i l l never-can never-be rep a i d . Its n a t i o n a l d e b t h a s become a promise, not j ust to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows w i l l not be kept.

At the same time, U . S . p o l icy was to insist that those countries relying on U . S . treasury bonds a s their reserve cu rrency behaved in ex­ actly the o p p osite way a s they did: observing tight money p o l icies and scrupulously repaying their debts .

As I ' v e a l ready observed , since N i x o n ' s time, the most significant overseas buyers of U . S . treasury bonds have tended to be banks in countries that were effectively under U.S. military occupation . In Eu­ rope, N i x o n ' s most enthusiastic ally i n this respect was West Germany, which then hosted more than three hundred thousand U.S. troo p s . In more recent decades the focus has shifted to A s i a , p a rticularly the cen­ tral banks of countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea-aga i n , a l l U . S . mil itary p rotectorates . What's m o r e , t h e g l o b a l status of the d o l l a r i s maintained i n large p a rt by the fact that it is, again since 1971 , the only cu rrency used to buy and sell petroleum, with any attempt by OPEC countries to begin trading in any currency stubbornly resisted by OPEC members Saudi Arabia and Kuwait-also U . S . m i l itary p r o ­ tectorate s . W h e n Saddam H u s s e i n made t h e bold m o v e of singlehand­ edly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2ooo , fo llowed by Iran i n 2001 , this was quickly fol lowed by American bombing and m i l itary occupation . 14 How much Hussein's decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U . S . decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a p o s ition to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers p a rticularly in the global South, i s widespread terro r . 1 5

I I I I I

In a l l t h i s , the advent of the free-floating d o l l a r marks not a break with the a l l i ance o f warriors and financiers on which capitalism itself was origi n a l l y founded, but its ulti mate apotheo s i s . Neither has the return to virtual money led to a great return to rel ations of honor and trust : quite the contrary. By 1971 , the change had only j ust begun . The American Express card, the first genera l - p urpose credit card, had been invented a mere thi rteen years before, and the modern national credit-card system had only rea lly come into being with the advent of Visa and Ma ster C a rd i n 1968 . Debit cards were later, creatures of the

3 6 8 D E B T

1970s, and the current, largely cashless economy only came into being in the 1990 s . All of these new credit arrangements were medi ated not by i nterpersonal relations of trust but by profit-seeking corporations, and one of the earliest and greatest political victories of the U.S. credit­ card industry was the elimin ation of all legal restrictions on what they could charge a s interest.

I f history holds true, an age of virtual money should mean a movement away from war, empire-bui lding, sl avery, and debt peon­ age ( waged or otherwise) , and toward the creation of some sort of overarching i n stituti o n s , global in scale, to protect debtors. What we have seen so far i s the opposite. The new global currency i s rooted in m i litary power even more firmly than the old w a s . Debt peonage con­ tinues to be the main principle of recru iting labor g l o b a l l y : either i n the l iteral sense, i n much of East Asia or Latin Americ a , or in the subj ective sense, whereby most of those working for wages or even s a l a ries feel that they are doing so primarily to pay off interest-bearing l o a n s . The new transportation and communications technologies have j ust made it easier, making it possible to charge domestics or factory workers thousands of dollars i n transportation fees, and then have them work off the debt in distant countries where they lack legal protection s . 16 I n sofar as overarching grand cosmic i n stitutions have been created that might be cons idered i n any way parallel to the divine kings of the an­ cient Middle East or the religious authorities of the Middle Ages , they have not been created to protect debtors, but to enforce the rights of creditors. The I ntern ational Monetary Fund is only the most dramatic case i n point here. It stands at the pinnacle of a great, emerging global bureaucracy-the first genuinely global admin istrative system i n human h i story, enshri ned not only in the United Nation s , the World Bank, and the World Trade O rganizati o n , but also the endless host of economic unions and trade organizations and non -govern mental organizations that work in tandem with them-created largely under U.S. patron­ age. A l l of them operate on the principle that ( u n less one i s the United States Trea sury ) , "one has to pay one's debts"-since the specter of default by any country is assumed to i mperil the entire world monetary system , threatening, in Addi s o n ' s colorful i m age, to turn a l l the worl d ' s s a c k s of ( v i r t u a l ) g o l d i n t o worthless s t i c k s and paper.

A l l true. Still, we are speaking of a mere forty years here. But Nixon's gambit, what Hudson calls " debt imperi a l i s m , " has already come under considerable stra i n . The first casualty was precisely the i mperi a l bureaucracy dedicated to the protecti on of creditors (other than those that were owed money by the United States) . IMF policies of insi sting that debts be repaid almost exclusively from the pockets

(1971-THE BEGINNING ... ) 369

of the poor were met by an equally global movement of social rebel­ lion (the so-called "anti-globalization movement"-though the name is profoundly deceptive), followed by outright fiscal rebellion in both

East Asia and Latin America. By 2ooo, East Asian countries had begun a systematic boycott of the IMF. In 2002, Argentina committed the ultimate sin: they defaulted-and got away with it. Subsequent U.S.

military adventures were clearly meant to terrify and overawe, but they do not appear to have been very successful: partly because, to finance them, the United States had to turn not just to its military clients, but

increasingly, to China, its chief remaining military rival. After the near­ total collapse of the U.S. financial industry, which despite having been very nearly granted rights to make up money at will, still managed to end up with trillions in liabilities it could not pay, bringing the world

economy to a standstill, eliminating even the pretense that debt impe­ rialism guaranteed stability.

Just to give a sense of how extreme a financial crisis we are talking about, here are some statistical charts culled from the pages of the St.

Louis Federal Reserve web page.17

"' ...

.!!! 0 C> 0 "'

c: � �

Here is the amount of U.S. debt held overseas:

3,600

3,200

2,800

2,400

2,000

1,600

1,200

BOO

400

0 (1.0

�

Federal Debt Held by Foreign & International Investors (FDHBFIN) Source: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Financial Management Service

(\"' � Shaded areas indicate U.S. recessions.

Meanwhile, private U.S. banks reacted to the crash by abandon­

ing any pretense that we are dealing with a market economy, shifting all available assets into the coffers of the Federal Reserve itself, which

purchased U.S. Treasuries:

370

1,200

1,000

� 800 � 0 Cl 0 600 VI c::

.Q

@ 400

200

0 f?o .e;

DE BT

Board of Governors Total Reserves. Adjusted for Changes in Reserve Requirements

(TRARR); Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

reP �0 p,O �:P .e; ,q !?>0

,q .e; ,o o' o

..

Shaded areas indicate U.S. recessions.

Allowing them, through yet another piece of arcane magic that none of us could possibly understand, to end up, after an initial near-$4oo­ billion dip, with far larger reserves than they had ever had before.

1,000

800

� 600

� 0 400 Cl 0 VI c:: �

200

!§ 0

-200

-400 f?o ,q

Non-Borrowed Reserves of Depository Institutions (BOGNONBR)

Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

roo '"'

�0 .e;

!?>0 .e; p,O '"' c

o ,o

Shaded areas indicate U.S. recessions.

0� ..

At this point, some U.S. creditors clearly feel they are finally in a posi­ tion to demand that their own political agendas be taken into account.

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . )

C H I NA WA R N S U . S . A B O U T D E BT M O N ET I ZAT I O N

Seemingly everywhere he went on a recent tour of China, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher was asked to deliver a message to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke: " stop cre­ ating credit out of thin air to purchase U . S . Treasuries . " 18

3 7 1

Again, i t ' s never clear whether the money siphoned from A s i a to support the U . S . war machine is better seen a s " lo a n s " or as " tribute . " Still, t h e sudden advent of China as a m a j o r holder of U . S . treasury bonds h a s clearly altered the d y n a m i c . Some might question why, if these really are tribute payments, the United States' m a j o r rival would be buying treasury bonds to begin with-let alone agreeing to various tacit monetary arrangements to maintain the value of the dollar, and hence, the buying power of A merican consumers . 1 9 B u t I think this is a perfect case in point of why taking a very long-term historical perspec­ tive can be so helpfu l .

F r o m a longer-term perspective, C h i n a ' s behavior i s n ' t puzzling a t all. In fact it's quite true to for m . The unique thing about the Chi­ nese empire i s that it has, since the Han dynasty a t least, adopted a pec u l i a r sort of tribute system whereby, in exchange for recognition of the Chinese emperor a s world-sovereign, they have been w i l l i ng to shower their client states with gifts far greater than they receive i n re­ turn . The technique seems to have been developed a l m o s t as a kind of trick when dealing with the " northern barbarians" of the steppe s , who always threatened Chinese frontiers : a way to overwhelm them with such luxuries that they would become complacent, effeminate, and unwarlike. I t w a s systematized i n the " trib ute trade" practiced with client states like Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and various states of Southeast Asia, and for a brief period fro m 1405 to 143 3 , it even extended to a world scale, under the fa mous eunuch admiral Zheng He. He led a series of seven expeditions across the Indian Ocean, h i s great " treasure fleet"-in dramatic contrast to the Spanish treasure fleets of a cen­ tury later-carrying not only thousands of armed marines, but endless quantities of silks, porce l a i n , and other Chinese luxuries to present to those local rulers willing to recognize the authority of the empero r . 20

All this was osten sibly rooted in an ideology of extraordinary chauvin­ i s m ( " What could these barbarians possibly have that we really need, anyway ? " ) , but, applied to China's neighbors, it proved extremely wise policy for a wealthy empire surrounded by much smaller but poten­ tially troublesome kingdo m s . I n fact, it was such wise policy that the U . S . govern ment, during the Cold War, more or less had to adopt i t ,

3 7 2 D E B T

creating remarkably favorable terms of trade for those very states­ Korea, Japan, Taiwan, certain favored a l l ies in Southeast Asia-th at had been the traditional Chinese tributaries; in this case, in order to contain Chin a . 2 1

Bearing a l l this i n m i n d , t h e current picture begins to fa l l easily back into place. When the United �tates was fa r and away the predom­ inant world economic power, it could affo rd to maintain Chi nese-style tributaries. Thus these very states, alone a mongst U . S . mil itary protec­ torates, were a l lowed to catapult themselves out of poverty and into first-world statu s . 22 After 1971 , as U . S . economic strength relative to the rest of the world began to decline, they were gradually transtormed back into a more old-fashioned sort of tributary. Yet China ' s getting in on the game introduced an entirely new element. There i s every reason to beli eve that, from C h i n a ' s point of view, this i s the first stage of a very long process of reducing the United States to something like a traditional Chinese client state. And of course, Chinese rulers are not, any more than the rulers of any other empire, motivated primarily b y benevolence. T h e r e i s a l w a y s a political c o s t , and what that headline ma rked was the first glimmerings of what that cost might ultim ately b e .

I I I I I

All that I have said so fa r merely serves to underline a reality that h a s come up constantly over the course of this book: that money has no essence. I t ' s not " re a l l y " anything; therefore, its nature h a s always been and presumably always will be a matter of political conten­ tion. This was certa inly true throughout earlier stages of U . S . history, incidentally-as the endless ni neteenth-century battles between gold­ bugs, green backers, free b ankers , b i - metallists and s i l verites so vividly attest-or, fo r that matter, the fact that American voters were so suspi­ cious of the very idea of central banks that the Federal Reserve system was only created on the eve of World W a r I , three centuries a fter the Bank of England. Even the monetization of the national debt is, as I ' v e already noted , doub le-edged. It can be seen-as Jefferson saw it-as the ulti mate pernicious a l l iance of warriors and financiers; but i t also opened the way to seeing government itself a s a moral debtor, of free­ dom a s something literally owed to the nation. Perhaps no one put i t so eloquently a s M a rtin Luther King Jr., in his "I Have a Drea m " speech, del ivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 :

In a sense we've come to our nation 's capital to cash a check . When the architects of our republic wrote the magni ficent words

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . )

of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every A merican was to fal l heir. This note was a promise that a l l men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalien­ able Rights" of " L i fe , L iberty and the pursuit of Happiness . " It i s obvious today that America h a s defaulted on this promissory note, i nsofar a s her citizens of color are concerned . Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back m a rked " i n s ufficient fund s . "

3 7 3

One can see the great crash of 2oo8 i n the same light-a s the out­ come of years of political tussles between creditors and debtors, rich and poor. True, on a certa in level, it was exactly what it seemed to be: a scam, an incredibly sophisticated Ponzi scheme designed to col­ lapse i n the fu l l knowledge that the perpetrators would be able to force the victims to bail them out. On another level it could be seen as the c u l mination of a battle over the very definition of money and credi t .

B y t h e e n d of W o r l d War I I , the specter of an i m m i n e n t working­ class upri sing that h a d so h a unted the ruling classes of Europe and North America for the previous century had largely disappeared. T h i s w a s b e c a u s e c l a s s war was s uspended by a t a c i t settlement. To put it crudely : the white working class of the North Atlantic countries, from the United States to West Germany, were offered a deal. If they agreed to set aside any fantasies of fundamentally changing the nature of the system, then they would be a l lowed to keep their unions, enjoy a wide variety a social benefits (pen s i o n s , vacation s , health care . . . ) , and, per­ haps most important, through generously funded and ever-expanding public educational institutions, know that their children had a reason­ able chance of leaving the working c l a s s entirely. One key element i n a l l this was a t a c i t guarantee t h a t increases in workers ' productivity would be met by increases in wages : a guarantee that held good until the late 1970 s . Largely a s a res ult, the period saw both rapidly rising productivity and rapidly rising incomes, laying the basis for the con­ sumer economy of tod a y .

Economists c a l l this t h e " Keynesian era " since it w a s a time i n which John Maynard Keynes' economic theorie s , w h i c h a lready formed the b a s i s of Roosevelt's New Deal i n the United States, were adopted by industrial democracies pretty much everywhere. With them came Keynes' rather casual attitude toward money . The reader will rec a l l that Keynes fully accepted that b a n k s d o , indeed , create m o n e y " out of thin air, " and that for this reason, there was no intrinsic reason that

3 7 4 D E B T

government policy should not encourage this d u ring economic down­ turns a s a way of stimu lating demand-a position that had long been dear to the heart of debtors and anathema to creditors .

Keynes h i m self had in h i s day been known to make some fa irly radical noises, for instance c a l l i ng for the complete elimination of that class of people who l ived off other peop l e ' s debts-the "the euthanasia of the rentier, " as he put it-though a l l he rea lly meant by this w a s t h e i r e l i m i n a t i o n through a g r a d u a l reduction of in terest rate s . As in so much of Keynes i a n i s m , this was much less radical than it first ap­ peared . Actually it was thoroughly in the great tradition of political economy, hearkening back to Adam Smith's ideal of a debtless utopia but especially David Ricardo ' s condemnation of landlords as parasites, their very exi stence inimical to economic growt h . Keynes w a s simply proceeding along the same lines, seeing rentiers a s a feudal holdover inconsi stent with the true spirit of capital accu m u l ation . Far fro m a revolution, he saw it as the best way of avoiding one:

I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transi­ tional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden . . . and will need no revolution.23

When the Keynesian settlement was finally put into effect, a fter World War I I , it was offered only to a relatively s m a l l slice of the world ' s population. As time went on, more and more people wanted in on the dea l . Almost a l l of the popular movements of the period fro m 1945 to 1975 , e v e n perhaps revol utionary movements, could be seen a s demands fo r inclusion: demands for political equality t h a t assumed equality was meaningless without some level of economic security. This was true not only o f movements by minority gro ups in North Atlantic countries who had first been left out of the deal-such as those for whom Dr. King spoke--but what were then cal led "national libera­ tion" movements from Algeria to Chile, or, finally, and perhaps most dramatically, i n the l ate 196os and 1970 s , femin i s m . At some point i n t h e ' 7 o s , things reached a breaking p o i n t . It w o u l d appear t h a t capital­ i s m , a s a syste m , simply cannot extend such a deal to everyone. Quite possibly it wouldn't even remain viable if all its workers were free wage l a borers; certa inly it w i l l never be able to provide everyone in the world the sort of life l ived by, say, a 196os auto wo rker in M ichigan or Turin

(1971-THE BEGINNING ... ) 375

with his own house, garage, and children in college-and this was true even before so many of those children began demanding less stultifying lives. The result might be termed a crisis of inclusion. By the late 1970s, the existing order was clearly in a state of collapse, plagued simultane­ ously by financial chaos, food riots, oil shock, widespread doomsday prophecies of the end of growth and ecological crisis-all of which, it turned out, proved to be ways of putting the populace on notice that all deals were off.

The moment that we start framing the story this way, it's easy to see that the next thirty years, the period from roughly 1978 to 2009, follows nearly the same pattern. Except that the deal, the settlement, had changed. Certainly, when both Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK launched a systematic attack on the power of labor unions, as well as on the legacy of Keynes, it was a way of explicitly declaring that all previous deals were off. Everyone could now have political rights-even, by the 1990s, mos't everyone in Latin America and Africa-but political rights were to become economically meaningless. The link between productivity and wages was chopped to bits: productivity rates have continued to rise, but wages have stag­ nated or even atrophied:24

- Productivity - Wages

This was accompanied, at first, by a return to "monetarism": the doctrine that even though money was no longer in any way based in gold, or in any other commodity, government and central-bank policy should be primarily concerned with carefully controlling the money supply to ensure that it acted as if it were a scarce commodity. Even as, at the same time, the financialization of capital meant that most money

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being invested in the m a rketplace was completely detached from any relation to production of com merce at all, but had become pure specu­ lation.

A l l this i s not to say that the people of the world were not be­ ing offered something: j ust that, as I say, the terms had changed . In the new d i spensation, wages would no longer rise, but workers were encouraged to buy a piece of capita l i s m . Rather than euthanize the rentiers, everyone could now become rentiers-effectively, could grab a chunk of the profits created by their own increasingly dramatic rates of exploitatio n . The means were many and fa m i l i a r . In the United States, there were 401 ( k ) retirement accounts and an endless variety of other ways of encouraging ordinary citizens to play the market; but at the same time, encouraging them to borrow . One of the guiding principles of Thatcherism and Reaganism alike was that econom i c reforms would never gain widespread support unless ordinary working people could at least aspire to owning their own homes; to this was added, by the 1990s and 2ooo s , endless mortgage-refinancing schemes that treated houses, whose v a l ue it was assumed would only rise, " l ike A TMs"­ a s the popular catchphrase h a d it, though it turns out, i n retro spect, it was really m o re like credit card s . Then there was the pro liferation of actual credit cards, j uggled against one another. Here, for many, " b uying a piece of capita l i s m " s l ithered undetecta bly into something indistinguishable from those fa m i l i a r scourges of the working poor: the loan shark and the pawnbroker. It did not help here that in 1 9 8 0 , U . S . federal usury l a w s , which h a d previously l i m ited i nterest t o between 7 and 10 percent, were eliminated by act of Congress. Just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political cor­ ruption by making the bri bery of legislators effectively legal (it was redefined a s " lobbying " ) , so the problem of loan-sharking was brushed aside by making real interest rates of 25 percent, so percent, or even in some cases (for i nstance for payday loans) 120 percent annually, once typical only of organized crime, perfectly legal-and therefore, enforce­ able no longer by j ust hi red goons and the sort of people who place mutilated animals on their victi m s ' doo rstep s , but by j udges , lawyers, bailiffs , and police.25

Any n u mber of names have been coined to describe the new d i s ­ pensatio n , fro m the "democratization of fi n a n c e " to the " financializa­ tion of everyday l i fe . "26 O utside the United States, it came to be known as " neolibera l i s m . " As an ideology, it meant that not j ust the market, but capitalism ( I must continually remind the reader that these are not the same thing) became the organizing principle of almost every­ thing. We were all to think of ourselves as tiny corporations, organ i zed

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around that same relationship of investor and executive: between the cold, calculating math of the banker, and the warrior who, indebted, has abandoned any sense of person a l honor and turned himself into a kind of di sgraced machine.

In this world, "paying one's debts" can well come to seem the very definition of morality, if only because so many people fa i l to do it. For instance, i t has become a regu l a r feature of many sorts of business in America that large corporati ons o r even some s m a l l businesses, faced with a debt, will almost automatically simply see what happens if they do not pay-complying only if reminded, goaded, or presented with some sort of legal writ. In other words, the principle of honor has thus been almost completely removed from the marketplaceY As a result, perhaps, the whole subj ect of debt becomes surrounded by a halo of religion .

Actu a l l y , one might even speak of a double theology, one for the creditors, another for the debtors . I t i s no coincidence that the new phase of American debt imperi a l i s m h a s also been accom panied by the rise of the evangel ical right, who-in defiance of a l most all previ ously existing Christian theology-h ave enthusiastically embraced the doc­ trine of " s upply-side economics , " that creating money and effectively giving it to the rich i s the most Biblically appropriate way to bring about national prosperity. Perhaps the most a m b i tious theologian of the new creed was George G i lder, whose book Wealth and Poverty became a best-seller in 1 9 8 1 , at the very dawn of what came to be known as the Reagan Revoluti o n . Gilder's argument w a s that those who felt that money could not simply be created were mi red i n an old-fashioned, godless materi a l i s m that did not rea l i ze that j u st as God could create something out of nothing, His greatest gift to h u m a n i ty was creativity itself, which proceeded in exactly the same way. Inves­ tors can i ndeed create v a l u e out of nothing by their w i l l ingness to ac­ cept the risk entailed in placing their fa ith in others' creativity. Rather than seeing the i m i tation of G o d ' s powers of creation ex nihilo as hubris, G i lder argued that it was precisely what God intended : the cre­ ation of money was a gift , a blessing, a channeling of grace; a promise, yes, but not one that can be fu lfilled, even if the bonds are conti n u a l l y r o l l e d o v e r , because through fa ith ( " i n God we t r u s t " aga i n ) t h e i r value becomes reality:

Economists who themselves do not believe in the future of capitalism will tend to ignore the dynamics of chance and fa ith that largely will determine that futu re . Economists who distrust religion will always fa il to comp rehend the modes of worship

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by which progress is achieved. Chance I S the foundation of change and the vessel of the divineY

Such effu s i o n s inspired evangelists like Pat R obertson to de­ clare supply-side economics " the first truly divine theory o f money­ creatio n . "29

Meanwhile, for those who could not simply create money, there was a quite different theological dispensati o n . "Debt i s the new fat , " Margaret A t w o o d recently remarked, struck by how m u c h t h e adver­ tisements that surround her daily o n the bus i n her native Toronto h a d abandoned their e a r l i e r attempts to m a k e riders panic a b o ut t h e creep­ ing terrors o f sexual un attractivene s s , but instead turned to providing advice o n how to free oneself fro m the much m o re i m mediate terrors o f the repo man :

There are even debt TV shows, which have a familiar religious­ revival ring to them. There are accounts of shopaholic binges during which you don't know what came over you and ev­ erything was a blur, with tearful confessions by those who've spent themselves into quivering insomniac j ellies of hopeless indebtedness, and have resorted to lying, cheating, stealing, and kiting cheques between bank accounts as a result. There are testimonials by families and loved ones whose lives have been destroyed by the debtor's harmful behaviour. There are compassionate but severe admonitions by the television host, who here plays the part of priest or revivalist. There's a mo­ ment of seeing the light, followed by repentance and a promise never to do it again. There' s a penance imposed-snip, snip go the scissors on the credit cards-followed by a strict curb­ on-spending regi men; and finally, if all goes well , the debts are paid down, the sins are forgiven , absolution is granted , and a new day dawns, in which a sadder but more solvent man you rise the morrow morn .30

Here, risk-taking is i n no sense the vessel of the divine. Quite the opposite. But for the p o o r i t ' s always different. In a way, what At­ wood describes might be seen as the perfect inversion o f the prophetic voice o f R everend King's "I Have a Dream" speech : whereas the first postwar age was about c o llective c l a i m s o n the nati o n ' s debt to its humblest citizens, the need for those who have made false promises to redeem themselves, n o w those s a me humble citizens are taught to think o f themselves a s sinners, seeking some kind o f purely individual

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redemption to have the right to any sort of moral relations with other human beings a t a l l .

At t h e same t i m e , there i s something profoundly deceptive going on here. All these moral dramas start fro m the assumption that personal debt i s ulti mately a matter of self-indulgence, a sin against one's loved ones-and therefore, that redemption must necessarily be a m atter of purging and restoration of ascetic self-den i a l . What's being shunted out of sight here i s first of a l l the fact that everyone i s now i n debt ( U . S . household debt i s n o w estimated at on average 1 3 0 percent of income ) , a n d that very little of this debt w a s accrued b y those determined t o find money to bet on the horses or toss away on fripperi e s . I n sofar a s i t was borrowed for what economists like to call discretionary spending, it w a s mainly to be given to children, to share with friends, or otherwise to be able to build and maintain relations with other h u m a n beings that are b a sed on something other than sheer material calculatio n . 3 1 One m u s t go into d e b t to achieve a life t h a t goes i n a n y way beyond sheer surv i v a l .

Insofar as there i s a politics, here, i t s e e m s a variation on a theme seen since the dawn of capital i s m . Ultimately, it's sociality itself that's treated a s abusive, cri m i n a l , demonic. To this, most ordinary Americans-including B l ack and Latino America n s , recent i m migran ts, and others who were formerly excluded from credit-have responded with a stub born insi stence on continuing to love one another. They continue to acquire houses fo r their fa m i l i e s , liquor and sound systems for parties, gifts for friends; they even insist on continuing to hold weddings and funer a l s , rega rdless of whether this i.s likely to send them skirting default or bankruptcy-apparently figuring that, as long as everyone now has to remake themselves as m i n i a ture capitalists, why shouldn't they be a l lowed to create money out of nothing too ?

Granted, the role of d i scretionary spending itself should not be exaggerated . The chief cause of bankruptcy in America is catastrophic i l lness; most borrowing i s simply a matter of survival ( i f one does not h ave a car, one cannot work ) ; and increasingly, s i mply being able to go to col lege now almost necessarily means debt peonage for at least h a l f one's subsequent working l i fe.32 Sti l l , it i s useful to p o i n t out t h a t for real human beings survival is rarely enough . Nor should it be.

By the 1990s, the same tensions had begun to reappear on a global scale, as the older penchant for loaning money for grandiose, state­ d irected proj ects like the Aswan D a m gave way to an emphasis on m icrocredit. Inspired by the success of the Gra meen Bank i n Bangla­ desh, the new model was to identify budding entrepreneurs i n poor communities and provide them with small low-interest loans. " Cred i t , "

3 8 0 D E B T

the Grameen Bank insisted, " i s a human right. " At the same time the idea was to draw on the " social capita l "-the knowledge, network s , connectio n s , a n d ingenu ity t h a t t h e p o o r people of t h e world a r e a l ­ ready u s i n g to g e t by in difficult circumsta nces-a nd convert it i n t o a way of generating even more (expansive) capital, able to grow at 5 to 20 percent a n n u a l l y .

As anthropologists like J u l i a E l y a c h a r d i scovered , t h e r e s u l t is double-edged . As one unusually candid N G O consultant explai ned to her in Cairo i n 1995 :

Money is empowerment. This is empowerment money . You need to be big, need to think big. Borrowers here can be im­ prisoned if they don't pay, so why be worried ?

In America we get ten offers for cred it cards in the mail every day. You pay incredible rea l interest rates for that cred it, something like 40 percent. But the offer is there , so you get the card, and stuff your wallet fu ll of credit cards. You feel good . It should be the same thing here, why not help them get in to debt? Do I really care what they use the money for, as long as they pay the loan back ?-B

The very incoherence of the quote i s tel ling. The only unifying theme seems to be: people ought to be in debt. I t ' s good in itself. It's empowering. Anyway, if they end up too empowered , we can also have them arrested . Debt and power, sin and rede mption, become a l most indistinguishable. Freedom i s slavery . Sl avery i s freedom. D uring her time i n Cairo, Elyachar witnessed young graduates of an N G O train­ ing program go on strike for their right to receive start-up l o a n s . At the same time, j u st about everyone involved took it fo r granted that most of their fellow students, not to mention everyone else involved in the progra m , was corrupt and exploiting the system as their personal cash cow. Here too, aspects of economic l i fe that had been based on longstanding relations of trust were, through the intrusion of cred it bureaucracies, becoming effectively criminalized.

Within another decade, the entire proj ect-even i n South A s i a , where it began-began to appear suspiciously s i m i l a r to t h e U . S . s u b ­ p r i m e mortgage cri s i s : a l l sorts of unscrupulous lenders pi led i n , a l l s o r t s of deceptive fi n a n c i a l appraisals were passed off to investors, interest accumulated, borrowers tried to collectively refuse payment, lenders began sending in goons to seize what little wealth they had (corruga ted tin roofs , for example) , and the end result h a s been an

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epidemic of suicides by poor farmers caught in traps fro m which their fa m i lies could never, possibly, escape.34

Just as in the 1 945-1975 cycle, this new one culminated in another crisis of inclusion . It proved no more possible to really turn everyone i n the w o r l d into micro-corporatio n s , or to " democratize credit" in s u c h a way t h a t every fa m i l y t h a t wanted to c o u l d have a h o u s e (and if you think about it, i f we have the means to build them, why shouldn't they ? are there fa milies who don't " deserve" houses ?) than it had been to a l l o w all wage laborers to have unions, pensions, and health benefits. Capita l i s m doesn't work that w a y . It i s ulti mately a system of power and excl u s i o n , and when it reaches the breaking point, the symptoms recur, j ust as they had in the 1970 s : food riots, oil shock, financial crisis, the sudden startled rea l i zation that the current course was eco­ logical unsustainable, attendant apocalyptic scenarios of every sort.

In the wake of the subprime collapse, the U . S . government was forced to decide who really gets to make money out of nothing: the financiers, or ordinary citizen s . The results were predicta ble. Financiers were " b a i led out with taxpayer money "-which basically means that their imaginary money was treated as if i t were rea l . Mortgage holders were, overwhelmingly, left to the tender mercies of the courts, under a bankruptcy law that Congress had a year before (rather suspiciously presciently, one might add) made far more exacting against debtors . Nothing w a s altered . A l l m a j o r deci sions were postponed . The Great Conversation that many were expecting never happened .

I I I I I

We live, now, at a gen uinely pecu l i a r h istorical j uncture. The credi t c r i s i s has provided us w i t h a v i v i d i l l u stration of the principle s e t out in the last chapter: that capita l i s m cannot really operate in a world where people believe it w i l l be around forever.

For most of the last several centuries, most people assumed that credit could not be generated infinitely because they assumed that the economic system itself was unlikely to endure fo rever. The future was likely to be fund amentally different. Yet somehow, the anticipated rev­ o l utions never happened . The basic structures of financ i a l capita l i s m l a rgely remained i n place. I t ' s only now, at t h e v e r y moment w h e n i t ' s becoming increasingly c l e a r that current arrangements are not v i a b l e , that we suddenly have hit t h e w a l l i n t e r m s of our collective imagina­ tion.

There i s very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capita l i s m itself w i l l no longer exi st-most obviously, a s ecologists

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keep reminding u s , because i t ' s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetu al growth forever on a finite planet, and the current fo rm of capitalism does n ' t seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobil izations that would be req u i red for us to start finding and colonizing any other p l a nets. Yet faced with the prospect of capita lism actually ending, the most common reaction-even fro m those who call themselves " p rogressives"-is sim­ ply fea r . We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even worse.

How did we get here ? My own suspicion i s that we are looking at the final effects of the m i l itarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thi rty years have seen the con­ struction o f a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and m a inte­ na nce of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative future s . At its root is a veri­ table obsession on the part of the rulers of the world-in response to the upheavals of the 196os and 197os-with ensuring that social move­ ments cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win .15 To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prison s , police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intell igence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alter­ natives d i rectly so m uch a s create a pervasive cli mate of fear, j ingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more i mportant, to exponents of the " free market , " even than main­ taining any sort of viable market ecanomy. How else can one explain what h appened i n the former Soviet Union ? One would ordinarily have i m agined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the disman­ tling of the army and the K G B and rebuilding the factories , but i n fact what happened was precisely the other way around . This is j u st an ex­ treme example of what has been happening everywhere . Econo mically, the apparatus is pure dead weight; a l l the guns, survei l l ance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and rea lly pro­ duce nothing, and no doubt it's yet another element dragging the entire capita l i s t system down-along with producing the i l l u s i o n of an end­ less capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with. Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedo m , fo r most of u s , w a s reduced to the right to buy a s m a l l piece of one's own permanent subordinati o n .

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . ) 3 8 3

I n other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of esta b l i s hing capitalism a s the only possible way to manage anything, and capita l i s m ' s own unacknowl­ edged need to limit its future horizons lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine i mploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged . About the only thing we can i m agine is catastroph e .

I I I I I

To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see our­ selves again as h i storical actors, as people who can make a difference i n the course of world events. This i s exactly what the militarization of history i s trying to take away.

Even i f we are at the beginning of the turn of a very long historical cycle, i t ' s still l a rgely up to us to determine how i t ' s going to turn out. For instance: the last time we shifted fro m a bullion economy to one of virtual credi t money, at the end of the Axial Age and the beginning of the Middle Ages, the i m m ediate shift was experienced largely as a series of great catastrophes. Will it be the same this time around ? Presumably a lot depends on how consciously we set out to ensure that i t won't be. Will a return to virtual money lead to a move away from empires and vast standing armies, and to the creation of larger structures limiting the depredations of creditors ? There i s good reason to believe that all these things w i l l happen-and if humanity i s to survive, they w i l l prob­ ably have to--but we have no idea how long it will take, or what, if it does, it would really look like. Capita l i s m has tran sformed the world i n many w a y s that a r e clearly i rreversible. What I have been trying to do in this book i s not so much to propose a vision of what, precisely, the next age will be like, but to throw open perspectives, enlarge our sense of possibilities; to begin to ask what i t would mean to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropri ate to the times .

Let me give an example. I ' v e spoken of two cycles of popular movements since World War II: the first ( 1945-1978 ) , about demanding the rights of national citizenship, the second ( 1978-2oo 8 ) , over access to capita l i s m itself. It seems significant here that in the Middle East, i n t h e fi r s t r o u n d , those p o p u l a r movements t h a t most d irectly chall enged the global status quo tended to be insp ired by Marxi s m ; in the sec­ ond, largely, some variation on radical I s l a m . Considering that I s l a m h a s a l w a y s p laced d e b t at t h e center of its s o c i a l doctrines, it's easy to understand the appea l . But why not throw things open even more

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widel y ? O ver the last five thousand years , there have been at least two occasions when m a j o r , dramatic moral and financial innovations have emerged from the country we now refer to as Iraq. The first w a s the invention of interest- bearing debt, perhaps sometime around 3000 sc; the second, around 8oo AD, the development of the first sophisticated commercial system that explicitly rej ected it. I s it possible that we are due for another ? For most Americans, i t w i l l seem an odd ques­ tion, since most Americans are used to thinking of Iraqis either as vic­ tims or fanatics (this i s how occupying powers always think about the people they occupy ) , but it i s worthy of note that the most prominent working-cla s s I s l a m i s t movement opposed to the U . S . occupation, the Sadrists, take their name fro m one of the founders of contemporary I s l a m i c economics, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. True, much of what has since come to pass for I s l a m i c economics nowadays has proved decid­ edly uni mpressive.36 Certainly i n no sense does i t pose a direct c h a llenge to capita l i s m . S t i l l , one has to assume that among popular movements of this sort, all kinds of i nteresting conversations about, say, the status of wage labor must be taking place. O r perhaps it's n aive to look for any new breakthrough fro m the puritanical legacy of the old patriar­ chal rebe l l i o n . Perhaps i t will come out of fem i n i s m . O r Islamic femi­ n i s m . O r from some as yet completely unexpected quarter. W h o ' s to say ? The one thing we can be confident of i s that hi story i s not over, and that surprising new ideas will certainly emerge .

I I I I I

The one thing that's clear is that new ideas won't emerge without the j ettisoning of much of our accustomed categories of thought-which have become mostly sheer dead weight, i f not intrinsic parts of the very apparatus o f hopelessness-and formulating new ones . This i s why I spent so much of this book talking about the m a rket, but a l s o about the false choice between state and m a rket that so monopolized political ideology for the l a s t centuries that i t made i t difficult to argue about anything else.

The real hi story of m a rkets i s nothing like what we're taught to think it is. The earlier m a rkets that we are able to observe appear to be spillovers, more or less; side effects of the elaborate administrative systems of ancient Mesopotam i a . They operated primarily on credit. Cash markets arose through war: again, largely through tax and trib­ ute policies that were origi n a l l y designed to provision soldiers, but that later became usefu l i n a l l sorts of other ways besides . It w a s only the Middle Ages , with their return to credit systems, that saw the first

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manifestations of what might be cal led m a rket pop u l i s m : the idea that ma rkets could exist beyond, against, and outside of states, a s in those of the Muslim Indian Ocean-an idea that was l a ter to reappear in China with the great silver revolts of the fifteenth centu ry. It usually seems to arise in situations where merchants, for one reason or anoth­ er, find themselves making common cause with common people against the admini strative machinery of some great state. But m a rket pop u l i s m i s always riddled with paradoxes, b e c a u s e it still d o e s depend t o s o m e degree on t h e existence of t h a t state, and a b o v e a l l , because it requ i res founding ma rket relations, ultimately, i n something other than sheer calculati o n : i n the codes of honor, trust, and ultimately community and mutual a i d , more typ ical of human economies . 37 This i n turn means relegating competition to a relatively minor element. In this light, we can see that what Adam Smith ultim ately did, i n creating his debt-free m a rket utop i a , was to fuse elements of this u n l i kely legacy with that unusually m i l itaristic conception of m a rket behavior characteri stic of the Christian West. In doing so he was surely prescient. But like a l l ex­ traordi narily influential writers, he was also j ust capturing something of the emerging spirit of h i s age. What we have seen ever since i s an end­ less political j ockeying back and fo rth between two sorts of populism­ state and m arket populism-without anyone noticing that they were talk ing about the left and right flanks of exactly the same a n i m a l .

T h e m a i n reason t h a t w e ' re u n a b l e to notice, I th i n k , i s t h a t the legacy of violence h a s twisted everyth ing around u s . War, conquest, and s l avery not only played the central role in converting human econ­ omies i n to m a rket ones; there is literally no institution in o u r society that has not been to some degree affected . The story told at the end of chapter 7, of how even our conceptions of " freed o m " itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of s l a very, fro m the a b i l ity to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others , into inco­ herent drea ms of a b s o l ute power, is only perhaps the most dramatic insta nce-a nd most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningfu l h u m a n freedo m would even be like.38

I f this book h a s shown anything, it's exactly how much violence it h a s taken, over the course of human hi story, to bring us to a situation where i t ' s even possible to i m agine that that's what life i s really about. Especially when one considers how much of our own daily experience flies d i rectly i n the face of it. As I ' ve emphasized, communism may be the foundation of all human relations-that communism that, i n our own d a i l y life, manifests itself a bove all in what we call " love "-b ut there ' s always some sort of system of exchange, and usually, a system of hierarchy built on top of it. These systems of exchange can take

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an endless variety of forms, many perfectly innocuous . S t i l l , what we are speaking of here is a very particular type of calculating exchange. As I pointed out in the very beginning: the difference between owing someone a favor, and owing someone a debt, i s that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated . Calcul ation demands equivalence. And such equiva lence-especially when i t involves equivalence between h u m a n beings (and it a l ways seems to start that way, because at first, human beings are always the ulti mate v a l ues)-only seems to occur when people have been fo rcibly severed fro m their contexts, so much so that they can be treated as identical to something else, as in: " seven martin skins and twelve large si lver rings for the return of your cap­ tured brother, " "one of your three daughters as surety fo r this loan of one h u ndred and fifty bushels of grai n " . . .

This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact that haunts a l l attempts to represent t h e market a s t h e highest form of h u m a n free­ d o m : that h i storica l l y , impersona l , commercial m a rkets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of ba rter, employed much like an incantation , is the economists' way of fending off any possibil ity of having to confront it. But even a mo­ ment ' s reflection makes it obvious. Who w a s the first man to look at a house ful l of obj ects and to im mediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them i n for in the m arket likely to have been ? Surely, he can only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. It w a s only in the hands of soldiers, fresh fro m looting towns and cities , that chunks of gold or silver-mel ted down, in most cases, from some heirloom treasure, that like the Kashmiri gods, or Aztec breastplates, or Babylonian women ' s ankle bracelets, was both a work of art and a l i ttle compendium of history-could become simple, u n i form bits of currency, with no h i story, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they could be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. And i t continues to be t r u e . Any system t h a t reduces t h e w o r l d to numbers can only be held i n place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or nowadays, " s mart bombs" fro m unmanned drones .

It can a l s o only operate by conti n u a l l y converting love into debt. I know my use of the word " love" here i s even more provocative, i n its own way, t h a n " c o m m u n i s m . " Sti l l , i t ' s important to h a m mer t h e point home. Just as markets, w h e n a l lowed t o drift entirely free fro m t h e i r violent origi n s , invariably begin to g r o w i n t o something differ­ ent, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness, so does the maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite : turn the products of human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love, and

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . ) 3 8 7

trust back into num bers once again. In doing s o , they make it possible to imagine a world that i s nothing more than a series of cold-bl ooded calculations. Even more, by turning human sociality itself into debts, they transform the very fo undations of our being-since what else are we, ultimately, except the s u m of the relations we have with others­ into matters of fa ult, s i n , and crime, and making the world into a place of iniquity that can only be overcome by completing some great cosmic transaction that w i l l annihil ate everything.

Trying to flip things around by asking, " W h a t do we owe soci­ ety ? " or even trying to talk about our " debt to nature" or some other manifestation of the cosmos i s a false solution-rea lly j ust a desperate scramble to salvage something from the very moral logic that h a s sev­ ered us fro m the cosmos to begin with. In fact, it's if anything the cul­ mination of the process, the process brought to a point of veritable de­ menti a , since it's premi sed on the a s s umption that we're so absolutely, thorough ly d isentangled fro m the world that we can j ust toss a l l other human beings-or a l l other living creatures, even, or the cosmos-in a sack, and then start negotiating with the m . It's hardly surprising that the end resul t , h i storically, i s to see our life itself as something we hold on false premises, a loan long since overdue, and therefore, to see exi stence itself as cri m i n a l . Insofar a s there 's a real crime here, though, it's fraud. The very premise i s fraudulent. What could possibly be more presumptuous, or more ridiculous, than to think it would be possible to negotiate with the grounds of one's existence ? Of course it isn't. Insofar as it i s i ndeed possible to come into any sort of relation with the Absolute, we are confronting a principle that exists outside of time, or human-scale time, entirel y ; therefore, as Medieval theologians correctly recognized, when dealing with the Absolute, there can be no such thing as debt.

C o n c l u s i o n :

Perh a ps the World Really Does Owe You a Livi ng

Much of the existing economic literature on credit and banking, when i t turns to the kind of larger h i storical questions treated in this book, strikes me as little more than spec i a l pleading. True, earlier figures like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were suspicious of credit systems, but already by the m id-nineteenth century, economists who concerned themselves with such matters were largely i n the business of trying to demonstrate that, despite appearances , the banking system really

3 8 8 D E B T

w a s profoundly democratic. One of the more common a rguments was that i t w a s rea lly a way of funneling resources from the " i dle rich , " w h o , t o o unimagin ative to do the work of investing their o w n money, entrusted i t to others, to the " industrious poor"-who had the energy and initi ative to produce new wealth. This j u stified the existence of banks, but it also strengthened the hand of populi sts who dema nded easy money policies, protections for debtors, and so on-since, if times were rough, why should the industrious poor, the fa rmers and artisans and small businessmen, be the ones to suffe r ?

This g a v e rise to a second line of argument : t h a t no d o u b t t h e rich were the major creditors i n the ancient world, but now the situation has been reversed . So Ludwig von Mises, writing i n the 1 93 0 s , around the time when Keynes was calling fo r the euth a n a s i a of the ren tiers :

P u b l i c opinion has always been biased against cred i tors . I t identi fies creditors w i t h t h e idle r i c h and debtors w i t h t h e in­ dustrious poor. It abhors the former as ruthless exploiters and

pities the latter as in nocent victims of opp ression. It considers government action designed to curtail the claims of the credi­ tors as measures extremely beneficial to the im mense m a j o rity at the expense of a small minority of hardboi led usurers . It d i d not n o t i c e at a l l that nineteenth-century capitalist i n novations have wholly changed the composition of the classes of credi­ tors and debtors . I n the days o f Solon the Athen i a n , of ancient Rome's agrarian l a w s , and of the Middle Ages, the creditors were by and l a rge the rich and the debtors the poor. But in this age o f bonds and debentures, mortgage banks, saving banks, l i fe insurance policies, and social security benefits, the masses of people with more moderate income are rather themselves creditors . 39

Whereas the rich, with their leveraged companies, a re now the principal debto r s . This i s the "democratization of finance" argument and it i s nothing new: whenever there are some people calling for the e l i m i n ation of the class that lives by collecting interest, there will be others to obj ect that this will destroy the l iveli hood of widows and pensiOners .

The remarkable thing is that nowadays, defenders of the financial system are often p repared to use both arguments, appealing to one or the other according to the rheto rical convenience of the moment. O n t h e one hand, we have " p undits " l i k e T h o m a s Fried m a n , celebrating the fact that "everyone" now owns a piece of Exxon or Mexico, and

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . ) 3 8 9

that rich debtors are therefore answerable to the poor. O n the other, Niall Fergu son, author of The Ascent of Money, p u b l i shed i n 2009 , can still announce as one of h i s m a j o r di scoveries that:

Poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institu­ tions, with the absence of banks, not their presence . Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channeled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.40

Such i s the state of the conversation in the main stream literature. My purpose here h a s been less to engage with it directly than to show how i t h a s con s i s tently encouraged us to ask the wrong questi o n s . Let' s t a k e this l a s t pa ragraph as an i l lustration . What i s Ferguson re­ ally saying here ? Poverty i s caused by a lack of cred i t . I t ' s only if the industrious poor have access to loans from stable, respectable banks­ rather than to loan sharks, or, pres umably, credit card companies, or payday loan operations, which now charge loan-shark rates-that they can rise out of poverty. So actually Ferguson i s not really concerned with " poverty" a t a l l , j ust with the poverty of some people, those who are industrious and thus do not deserve to be poor. What about the non-industrious poor ? They can go to hell, presumably ( q u i te literally, according to many branches of Christianity) . O r maybe their boats will be lifted somewhat by the rising tide. Sti l l , that's clearly incidenta l . They 're undeserving, since they ' re not industri o u s , and therefore what happens to them i s really beside the point.

For me, this i s exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financ i a l i mperatives constantly try to reduce us a l l , despite ourselves, to the equivalent of p i l l agers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money-and then tell us that it's only those who are willing to see the world a s p i l l agers who deserve access to the resources requi red to pursue anything i n life other than money. I t i ntroduces moral perversions on a l most every level . ( " Cancel a l l student loan debt? But that would be unfa i r to all those people who struggled for years to pay back their student loans ! " Let me assure the reader that, a s someone who struggled for years to pay back his student loans and finally did so, this argument makes about as much sense a s saying it would be " unfa i r " to a mugging victim not to mug their neighbors too . )

3 9 0 D E B T

The argument m ight perhaps make sense if one agreed with the un­ derlying assu mption-that work is by definition virtuous, since the ulti­ m ate measure of h u m anity's success as a species i s its a b i l ity to increase the overa l l global output of goods and services by at least 5 percent per yea r . The problem is that it is beco m i ng increasingly obvious that if we continue a long these lines much longer, we're l ikely to destroy everything. That giant debt machine that has, for the last five centuries, reduced increasing proportions of the world's population to the m o r a l e q u i v a l e n t of conquistadors w o u l d a p p e a r to be c o m i n g up against its soci a l and ecological limits. Capita l i s m ' s i nveterate propensity to i m agine its own destruction has morphed, in the last h a l f-century, into scenarios that threaten to bring the rest of the world down with i t . And there ' s no r e a s o n to b e l i e v e that this propensity i s e v e r g o i n g t o go away. The r e a l question now is how to ratchet things d o w n a b i t , to move toward a society w h e r e p e o p l e can live m o re by working less.

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non­ industrious poor.41 At least they aren ' t h u rting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work i s being spent with friends and fa m i l y , enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably im­ proving the world m o re than we acknowledge . Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current o n e ' s penchant for self-destructio n .

I I I I I

In this book I have l a rgely avoided making concrete propos a l s , but let m e end with one. It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of B i b l ical- style Jubilee: one that would a ffect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not j ust because it would relieve so much gen uine h u m a n suffering, but a l s o because it would be our way of reminding ou rselves that money i s not ineffable, that paying o n e ' s debts i s not the essence of morality, that a l l these things are human arrangements and that if democracy i s to mean anything, it i s the a b i l i ty to a l l agree to arrange things in a different w a y . It i s significant, I t h i n k , that s i n c e H a m m u r a b i , g r e a t i mperial states h a v e i n v a r i a b l y resi sted this kind of p o l i t i c s . Athens and Rome establi shed the paradig m : even when confronted with conti nual debt crises, they insi sted on legislating around the edge s , softening the i mpact, e l i m i ­ n a t i n g o b v i o u s a b u s e s l i k e d e b t slavery, u s i n g t h e s p o i l s of e m p i r e t o t h r o w a l l so rts of e x t r a benefits at t h e i r poorer citizens (who, after a l l , provided t h e r a n k and file of t h e i r armies ) , so as to keep t h e m m o r e or less afloat-b ut a l l in such a way as never to allow a challenge to the

( 1 9 7 1 - T H E B E G I N N I N G . . . ) 3 9 1

principle of debt itself. The governing class of the United States seems to have taken a re markably s i m i l a r approach : e l i m i n ating the worst abuses ( e . g . , debtors' prisons ) , using the fruits of empire to provide subsidies, v i s i b l e and otherwise, to the bulk of the poulation; i n more recent years, manipulating currency rates to flood the country with cheap goods fro m China, but never allowing anyone to question the sacred principle that we must a l l pay our debts.

At this point, however, the principle h a s been exposed a s a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we don't " a l l " have to pay our debts. Only some of us d o . Nothing would be more i mportant than to wipe the s l ate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start aga i n .

W h a t i s a debt, anyway ? A d e b t is j u st t h e perversion o f a promise. It i s a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedo m ) i s the a b i lity to make friends, then it i s a l s o , necessarily, the a b i l i ty to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another ? At this point we can't even say. It's more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that j o u rney, i n turn, i s to accept that i n the l a rgest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell u s our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

NOTES

Chapter O n e

1 . With the predictable results that they weren 't actually built to make it easier for Malagasy people to get around in their own country, but mainly to get products fro m the plantations to ports to earn foreign exchange to pay for bui lding the roads and railways to begin with.

2. The Un ited States, for example, only recognized the Republic of Haiti in 186o. France doggedly held on to the demand and the Republic of Haiti was finally forced to pay the equivalent of $21 billion between 1925 and 1946 , du ring most of which time they were under U . S . mi litary occupation.

3· Hallam 1866 V : 269-70. Si nce the government did not feel it appropriate to pay for the upkeep of improvidents, pris­ oners were expected to furnish the full cost of their own imprisonment. If they couldn't, they simply starved to death.

4- If we consider tax responsibilities to be debts, it's the overwhelming majority­ and if nothing else the two are closely re­ lated, since over the course history, the need to assemble money for tax pay ments has always been the most frequent reason for falling into debt.

5 · Finley 1960:63 ; 1963 : 24; 1974:8o; 198 1 : 106; 1983 :108 . And these are only the ones I managed to track down. What he says for G reece and Rome would ap­ pear to be equally true of Japan, India, or China.

6 . Galey 1983 .

7· Jacques de Vitry, in Le Goff 1990 : 64. 8. Kyokai, Record of Miraculous

Events in Japan (c. 822 AD), Tale 26, cited in LaFleur 1986:36 . Also Nakamura 1996 : 257-59·

9· ibid:J6 10. ibid:J7· 1 1 . Simon Johnson, the IMF's chief

economist at the time, put it concisely in a recent article in The Atlantic: " Regula­ tors, legislators, and academics al most all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn't. AIG's Financial Products di­ vision, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005 , largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often descri bed as 'picking up nickels in front of a stea mroll­ er,' this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fa ll, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an ef­ fort to rescue the company, has commit­ ted about $18o billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG's sophisti­ cated risk modeling had said were virtu­ ally i mpossible . " (Johnson 2010) Johnson of course passes over the possibility that AIG knew perfectly well what was even­ tually going to happen, but simply didn't care, since they knew the steamroller was going to flatten someone else.

12. In contrast, England already had a national bankruptcy law in 1571. An at­ tempt to create a U . S . federal bankruptcy

3 9 4 N O T E S

law in 18oo foundered ; there was one briefly in place between 1867 and 1878, ai med to relieve indebted Civil War vet­ erans, bur it was eventually abolished on moral grounds (see Mann 2002 for a good recent history ) . Bankruptcy reform in America is more likely to make the terms harsher than the other way around, as with the 2005 reforms, which Congress passed, on industry urgings, just before the great credit crash.

13· The mortgage relief fund set up after the bailout, for example, has only provided aid to a tiny percentage of claim­ ants, and there has been no movement toward liberalization of bankruptcy laws that had, in fact, been made far harsher, under financial industry pressure, in 2005 , just two years before the meltdown.

14. "In Jail for Being in Debt," Chris Serres & Glenin Howatt, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, June 9, 201o, www .startribune . com/local/95692619 .html.

15 . "IMF warns second bailout would 'threaten democrac y . "' Angela Jameson and Elizabeth Judge, business . ti m e s o n l i n e . c o . u k / t o l!b u s i n e s s / e c o n o m i c s / a r t i c l e 6 9 2 8 1 47 . e c e#c i d = O T C -RSS&attr=n85799, accessed November 25 , 2009

Chapter Two

I. Case, Fair, Gartner, & Heather 1996 :564. Emphasis in the original.

2 . op cit.

3 · Begg, Fischer, and Dornbuch (2oo5 :384) ; Maunder, Myers, Wall, and Miller (I991:3 Io) ; Parkin & King (1995 : 6s ) .

4· Stiglitz a n d Driffill 2ooo :su. Em- phasis again in the original.

5 · Aristotle Politics !. 9 . 1 257 6. Neither is it clear we are really

speaking of barter here. Aristotle used the term metadosis, which in his day normally meant " sharing" or "sharing out . " Since Smith, this has usually been translated " barter," but as Karl Polanyi (1957a: 93)

has long since emphasized, this is probably inaccurate, unless Aristotle was introduc­ ing an entirely new meaning for the ter m . Theorists of t h e origin of G reek money fro m Laum (1924) to Seaford (2004) have emphasized that customs of apportioning goods (e.g., war booty, sacrificial meat) , probably did play a key role in the devel­ opment of G reek currency . (For a critique of the Aristotelian tradition, which does assume Aristotle is talking about barter, see Fahazmanesh 2oo6 . )

7· See Jean-Michel Server (1994, 2001) for this literature. He also notes that in the eighteenth century, these accounts sud­ denly vanished, to be replaced by endless sightings of "primitive barter" in accounts of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas.

8 . Wealth of Nations ! . 2 . 1-2 . As we'll see, the line seems to be taken from much older sources.

9 · "If we should enquire into the prin­ ciple of human mind on which this dispo­ sition of trucking is founded, it is clearly the natural inclination every one has to persuade. The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest" (Lectures on Jurisprudence,

56) It's fascinating to note that the as­ sumption that the notion that exchange is the basis of our mental functions, and manifests itself both in language (as the exchange of words) and economics (as the exchange of material goods) goes back to Smith. Most anthropologists attribute it to Claude Levi-Strauss (1963 : 296) .

10. The reference to shepherds implies he may be referring to another part of the world, but elsewhere his examples, for in­ stance of trading deer for beaver, make it clear he's thinking of the Northeast wood­ lands of North America.

n . Wealth of Nations ! .4.2. 12. Wealth of Nations 1 .4·3 · 13· Wealth of Nations !.4.7· 14 · The idea of an historical sequence

fro m barter to money to credit actually seems to appear first in the lectures of an

N O T E S 3 9 5

Italian banker named Bernardo D avanzati (1SZ9-16o6; so Waswo 1996 ) ; it was de­ veloped as an explicit theory by German economic historians: Bruno Hildebrand (1864) , who posited a prehistoric stage of barter, an ancient stage of coinage, and then, after some reversion to barter in the Middle Ages, a modern stage of credit economy . It took canonical form in the work of his student, Karl Biicher (1907) . The sequence has now become universally accepted common sense, and it reappears in at least tacit form in Marx, and ex­ plicitly in S i mmel-again, despite the fact that almost all subsequent historical re­ search has proved it wrong.

IS . Though they did make an impres­ sion on many others. Morgan ' s work in particular (18sl, 1877, 1 8 8 1 ) , which empha­ sized both collective p roperty rights and the extraordinary i mportance of women, with women's councils largely in con­ trol of economic life, so impressed many radical thinkers-included Marx and Engels-that they became the basis of a kind of counter-myth, of primitive com­ munism and primitive matriarchy.

16. Anne Chapman' (1980) goes if any­ thing further, noting that if pure barter is to be defined as concerned only with swapping objects, and not with rearrang­ ing relations between people, it's not clear that it has ever existed . See also Heady zoos .

17. Levi-Strauss 1943 ; the translation is from Servet 198z:33 ·

1 8 . One must i magine the temptation for a sexual variety must be fa irly strong, for young men and women accustomed to spending al most all of their time with maybe a dozen other people the same age.

19. Berndt 19S1:161, cf. Gudeman zoo1 : 1z4-zs, who provides an analysis quite similar to my own.

zo. Berndt 19SI:I6z. ZI. Though as we will note later, it's

not exactly as if international business deals now never involve music, danc­ ing, food, drugs, high-priced hookers, or the possibil ity of violence. For a random

example underlining the last two, see Per­ kins zoos .

zz. Lindholm 198z:n6. z3 . Server zoo 1 : zo-z1 compiles an enor­

mous number of such terms . z4. T h e point is s o obvious that it's

amazing it hasn't been made more often. The only classical economist I ' m aware of who appears to have considered the possibility that deferred payments m ight have made barter unnecessary is Ralph H awtrey (19z8:z, cited in Einzig 1949 =37S l · All others simply assume, for n o reason, that all exchanges even between neighbors must have necessarily been what econo­ mists like to call " spot trades . "

zs . Bohannan 19SS , Barth 1969. cf. Munn 1986, Akin & Robbins 1998 . A good summary of the concept can be found in G regory 198z:48-49· G regory gives one example of a highland Papua New Guinea system with six ranks of valuables, with live p igs and cassowary birds on the top rank, "pearl-shell pendants, pork sides, stone axes, cassowary-plume headdresses, and cowrie-shell headbands" on the sec­ ond, and so on. Ordinarily items of items of consumption are confined to the last two, which consist of luxury foods and staple vegetable foods, respectively.

z6. See Server 1998 , Hu mphries 198s . z7. The classic essay here is Radford

194S · z8. In t h e 16oos, at least, actually

called the old Carolingian denominations " imaginary money "-everyone persist­ ing in using pounds, shillings, and pence (or livres, deniers, and sous) for the in­ tervening Boo years, despite the fact that for most of that period, actual coins were entirely different, or simply didn't exist (Einaudi 1936) .

z9 . Other examples of barter coexist­ ing with money: Orlove 1986; Barnes & Barnes 1989.

30 . One of the disadvantages of hav­ ing your book becomes a classic is that often, people will actually check out such examples. (One of the advantages is that even if they discover you were mistaken,

3 9 6 N O T E S

people will continue to cite you as an au­ thority anyway.)

31 . Innes 1913 :37 8 . He goes on to ob­ serve: " A moment's reflection shows that a staple commodity could not be used as money, because ex hypothesi, the medi­ um of exchange is equally recei vable by all members of the community. Thus if the fishers paid for their supplies in cod, the traders would equally have to pay for their cod in cod, an obvious absurdity . "

32. T h e temples appear t o have come first; the palaces, which became increas­ ingly important over time, took over their system of administration.

33 · Smith was not dreaming about these: the current technical term for such ingots is "hacksilber" (e.g., Balmuth 2001 ) .

34· Compare G rierson 1977 :17 for Egyptian parallels.

35 · e . g . , Hudson 2002:25 , 2004 :u4 36 . Innes 1913 :3 81

37· Peter Spufford ' s monumental Mon­ ey and Its Use in Medieval Europe ( 198 8 ) , which devotes hundreds o f pages t o gold and silver mining, mints, and debasement of coinage, makes only two or three men­ tions of various sorts of lead or leather to­ ken money or minor credit arrangements by which ordinary people appear to have conducted the overwhelming majority of their daily transactions. About these, he says, "we can know next to nothing" (198 8 :336 ) . An even more dramatic exam­ ple is the tally-stick, of which we will hear a good deal: the use of tallies instead of cash was widespread in the Middle Ages, but there has been almost no systematic research on the su bject, especially outside England.

Chapter Three

1. Heinsohn & Steiger (1989) even sug­ gest the main reason their fellow econo­ mists haven't abandoned the story is that anthropologists have not yet provided an equally compelling alternative. Still,

al most all histories of money continue to begin with fanciful accounts of barter. Another expedient is to fa ll back on pure circular definitions: if "barter" is an eco­ nomic transaction that does not employ cu rrency, then any economic transaction that doesn 't involve currency, whatever its form or content, must be barter. Glyn Davies (1996 : u-13 ) thus descri bes even Kwakiutl potlatches as "barter . "

2. W e often forget that there w a s a strong religious element in all this. New­ ton himself was in no sense an atheist­ in fact, he tried to use his mathematical abilities to confirm that the world really had been created, as Bishop Ussher had earlier argued, sometime around October 23 , 4004 BC.

3 · Smith first uses the phrase "invis­ ible hand" in his Astronomy ( 1 1 1 . 2) , but in Theory of M o ral Sentiments I V . r . 1o, he is explicit that the invisible hand of the mar­ ket is that of "Providence. " On Smith's theology in general see Nicholls 2003 :35-

43 ; on its possible connection to Medieval Islam, see chapter 10 below.

4· Sa muelson 1948 :49 . See Heinsohn and Steiger 1989 for a critique of this posi­ tion; also Ingham 2004.

5 · Pigou 1949· Boianovsky 1993 pro­ vides a history of the term.

6. "We do not know of any economy in which systematic barter takes place without the presence of money" (Fay­ azmanesh 2006 : 87)-by which he means, in the sense of money of account.

7· On the government role of fostering the "self-regulating market" in general , s e e Polanyi 1949. T h e standard economic orthodoxy, that if the government just gets out of the way, a market will natu­ rally emerge, without any need to create appropriate legal, police, and political institutions first, was dramatically dis­ proved when free-market ideologues tried to impose this model in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.

8 . Innes as usual puts it nicely: "The eye has never seen, nor the hand touched a dollar. All that we can touch or see is a

N O T E S 3 9 7

promise to pay or satisfy a debt due for an amount called a dollar." In the same way, he notes, "All our measures are the same. No one has ever seen on ounce or a foot or an hour. A foot is the distance between two fixed points, but neither the distance nor the points have a corporeal existence" (1914 : 155 ) .

9 · Note that this does assume some means of calculating such values-that is, that money of account of some sort already exists . This might seem obvious, but remarkable numbers of anthropolo­ gists seem to have m issed it.

10. To give some sense of scale, even the relatively circumscribed commercial city-state of Hong Kong currently has roughly $23 .3 billion in circulation. At roughly 7 million people, that's more than three thousand Hong Kong dollars per inhabitant.

n. "State theory may be traced to the early nineteenth century and to [Adam] Muller's New Theory of M oney, which attempted to explain money value as an expression of communal trust and nation­ al will, and culminated in [ G . F . ] Knapp 's State Theory of M oney, first published in German in 1905 . Knapp considered it absurd to attempt to understand money 'without the idea of the state . ' Money is not a medium that emerges from ex­ change. It is rather a means for account­ ing for and settling debts, the most i m ­ portant of w h i c h are t a x d e b t s " (Ingham 2004:47 . ) Ingham's book is an admirable statement of the Chartalist position, and much of my a rgument here can be found in much greater detail in it. However, as will later become apparent, I also part company with him in certain respects.

12. In French: livres, sous, and deniers. 13 . Einaudi 1936 . Cipolla (1967) calls it

"ghost money . '' 14. On tallies: Jenkinson 1911, 1924;

Innes 1913 ; Grandell 1977; Baxter 1989; Stone 2005 .

15 . Snell (1919 : 240) notes that kings while touring their domains would some­ times seize cattle or other goods by right

of "preemption " and then pay in tal\ies, but it was very difficult to get their rep­ resentatives to later pay up: "Subjects were compelled to sell; and the worst of it was that the King's purveyors were in the habit of paying not in cash down, but by means of an exchequer tally, or a beating . . . In practice it was found no easy m atter to recover under this system, which lent itself to the worst exactions, and is the subject of numerous complaints in our early popular poetry . "

1 6 . I t i s also interesting t o note, i n this regard, that the Bank of England still kept their own internal accounts using tally sticks in Adam Smith's time, and only abandoned the p ractice in 1826.

q . See Engels (1978) for a classic study of this sort of proble m .

1 8 . Appealing particularly to debtors, who were understandably drawn to the idea that debt is simply a social arrange­ ment that was in no sense i m m utable but created by government policies that could just as easily be reshuffled-not to men­ tion, who would benefit from inflationary policies.

19. On the tax, Jacob 1987; for the Betsimisaraka village study, Altha be 196 8 ; for analogous Ma lagasy c a s e studies, Fremigacci 1976, Rainibe 1982, Schlemmer 1983 , Feeley-Harnik 1991 . For colonial tax policy in Africa more generally, Forstater 2005 , 2006 .

20. So, for instance, Heinsohn & Stei­ ger 1989 : 1 8 8-18 9.

21. Silver was mined in the Midwest itself, and adopting bi-metallism, with both gold and silver as potential backing for currency, was seen as a move in the direction of free credit money, and to allow for the creation of money by local banks . The late nineteenth century saw the first creation of modern corporate capitalism in the United States and it was fervently re­ sisted, with the centralization of the bank­ ing system being a major field of struggle, and mutualism-popular democratic (not profit oriented) banking and insurance arrangements-one of the main forms of

3 9 8 N O T E S

resistance. The bi-metallists were the more moderate successors of the G reenback­ ers, who called for a currency detached from money altogether, such as Lincoln briefly i mposed in wartime (D ighe (2002) provides a good summary of the historical background . )

2 2 . They o n l y became ruby sl ippers i n the movie.

23 . Some have even suggested that Dorothy herself represents Teddy Roos­ evelt, si nce syllabically, "dor-o-thee" is the same as "thee-o-do r " , only backwards.

24· See Littlefield 1963 and Rockoff 1990 for a detai led argument about The Wizard of Oz as " monetary allegory . " Baum never admitted that the book had a political subtext, but even those who doubt he put one in intentionally (e.g. , Parker 1994; cf. Taylor 2005) admit that such a meaning was quickly attributed to it-there were already explicit politi­ cal references in the stage version of 1902, only two years after the book's original publication.

25 . Reagan could as easily be argued to be a practitioner of extreme mi litary Keynesianism, using the Pentagon's bud­ get to create jobs and drive economic growth ; anyway, monetary orthodoxy was abandoned very quickly even rhetori­ cally among those actually managing the system.

26. See Ingh a m 2000 . 27. Keynes 1930: 4-5 2 8 . The argument is referred to as the

paradox of banking. To provide an ex­ tremely simplified version : say there was only one bank. Even if that bank were to make you a loan of a trillion dollars based on no assets of its own of any kind whatever, you would ultimately end up putting the money back into the bank again, which would mean that the bank would now have one trillion in debt, and one trillion in working assets, perfectly balancing each other out. If the bank was charging you more for the loan than it was giving you in interest (which banks always do) , it would also make a profit.

The same would be true if you spent the trillion-whoever ended up with the mon­ ey would still have to put it into the bank agai n . Keynes pointed out the existence of multiple banks didn't really change any­ thing, p rovided bankers coord inated their efforts, which, in fact, they always do.

29. I might note that this assumption echoes the logic of neoclassical economic theory, which assu mes that all basic in­ stitutional arrangements that define the context of economic activity were agreed to by all pa rties at some imaginary point in the past, and that since then, everything has and will always continue to exist in equilibrium. Interestingly, Keynes explic­ itly rejected this assu mption in his theory of money (Davidson 2006) . Contemporary social contract theorists incidentally make a similar argument, that there's no need to assume that this actually happened; it's enough to say it could have and act as if it did.

30. Aglietta is a M a rxist, and one of the founders of the " Regulation School , " Orleans, an adherent of t h e " economics of convention" favored by Thevenot and Boltanski. Primordial debt theory has been mainly developed by a group of research­ ers su rrounding economists Michel Agliet­ ta and Andre Orleans, first in La Violence de Ia Monnaie (1992) , which employed a psychoanalytic, Giradian framework, and then in a volume called Sovereignty, Legitimacy and M oney ( 1995 ) and a col­ lection called Sovereign Money (Aglietta, Andreau , etc. 1998 ) , co-edited by eleven different scholars. The l atter two volumes abandon the Girardian framework for a Dumontian one. In recent years the main exponent of this position has been another Regulationist, Bruno Theret (1992, 1995, 2007, 2008 ) . Unfortunately almost none of this material has ever been translated into English, though a sum mary of many of Aglietta's contri butions can be found in Grahl (20oo) .

3 1 . For instance, Randall Wray (1990, 1998, 2ooo) and Stephanie Bell (1999, 2ooo) in the United States, or Geoffrey

N O T E S 3 9 9

Ingham (1996, 1999, 2004) in the United Kingdom. Michael Hudson and others in the IS CANEE group have taken up ele­ ments of the idea, but have never to my knowledge fully embraced it.

32. *Rna . Mala moud (1983 : 22) notes that already in the earliest text it had both the meaning of "goods received in return for the promise to hand back either the goods themselves or something of at least equivalent value " , as well as "crime" or " fault. " So also Olivelle 1993 :48 , who notes *rna "can mean fa ult, crime, or guilt-often at the same time. " It is not however the same as the·word for "duty . " F o r a typical example of early prayers for release from debt, see Atharva Veda Book 6 Hymns 117, uS, and 119 .

33· Satapatha Brahmana 3 . 6 . 2.16

34· As Sylvain Levi, Marcel Mauss's mentor, remarked, if one takes the Brahmanic doctrine seriously, "the only authentic sacri fice would be suicide" (1898 : 133 ; so also A . B . Keith 1925 :45 9) . But o f course n o one actually took things that far.

35 . More precisely, it offered the sac­ ri ficer a way to break out of a world in which everything, including hi mself, was a creation of the gods, to fashion an im­ mortal, divine body, ascend into heaven , and thus be " born into a world he made hi mself" (Satapatha Brahmana VI:2.2.27) where all debts could be repaid, buy back his abandoned mortal body from the gods (see, i . e . , Levi 1 898 : 130-32, Malamoud 1983 :3 1-32) . This is certa inly one of the most ambitious claims ever made for the efficacy of sacrifice, but some priests in China around that time were making sim­ ilar claims (Puett 2002) .

36 . Translated " saints" in the text with which I began the chapter, but since it refers to the authors of the sacred texts, the usage seems appropriate.

37· I am fusing here two slightly d i f­ ferent versions: one in T attiriya Sarphita ( 6 .3 . 1 0 .5) , which says that all Brahmans are born with a debt, but only lists gods, Fathers, and sages, leaving out the duty

of hospitality, and the other i n Satapatha Brahmana (1.7.2.1-6) that says all men are born as a debt, listing all four-but which seems really to be referring to males of twice-born castes. For a fu ll discussion: see Malamoud 1983 and Olivelle 1993 :46-

55 , also Mala moud 1998 .

3 8. Theret 1999 : 6o-61

39· "The ultimate discharge of this fundamental debt is sacrifice of the liv­ ing to appease and express gratitude to the ancestors and deities of the cosmos" (Ingham 2004: 90) .

40 . op cit. He cites Hudson 2oo2: 1o2-

3, on the terms for "guilt" or "sin," but as we'll see the point goes back to Grierson (1977: 22-23 ) .

41 . Laum 1924. His a rgument about the origin of money in G reece in temple distributions is intriguing and has found contemporary exponents in Seaford (2004) and partly in Hudson (e.g. , 2003 ) but is really a theory of the origin of coinage.

42. More than I would ever dream of trying to cite. There are two standard survey works on "primitive money , " by Quiggin and by Einzig, both of which, curiously, came out in 1949 . Both are out­ dated in their analysis but conta in a great deal of useful material.

43 · English "pay" is from French pay­ er, which in turn is derived from Latin pa­ care, " to pacify , " "to make peace with . " Pacare i n turn i s related t o pacere, "to come to terms with an injured party" ( Grierson 1977= 21 ) .

44· Grierson 1977: 20.

45 . In fact, as Grierson notes, the au­ thors often seemed to be intentionally making fun of themselves, as in the Irish text that specifies that one can demand compensation for a bee-sting, but only if one first deducts the cost of the dead bee (Grierson 1977= 26 ) .

46 . W e have plenty of myths and hymns from ancient Mesopotamia, too, for ipstance--but most were discovered in the ruins of ancient libraries that were also fu ll of records of court trials, business contracts, and personal correspondence.

4 0 0 N O T E S

In the case of the o ldest Sanskrit texts, religious literature is all we have. What's more, since these were texts passed on verbatim from teacher to student for thousands of years, we can't even say with any precision when and where they were written .

47· Interest-bearing loans certa inly ex­ isted in Mesopotamia, but they only ap­ pear in Egypt in Hellenistic times, and in the Germanic world even later. The text speaks of "the tribute that I owe to Yama," which could refer to " interest, " b u t t h e comprehensive review of early Indian legal sources in Kane's History of Dharmasastra ( 1973 I l 1 :4n-461) comes to no clear conclusion on when interest first appeared; Kosambi (1994: 148 ) estimates that it might have appeared in soo BC but admits this is a guess .

48 . Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China come most i mmediately to mind. The no­ tion that life is a loan from the gods does occur elsewhere: it seems to crop up spon­ taneously in ancient Greece, around the same time as money and interest-bearing loans do. "We are all owed as a debt to death , " wrote the poet Simonides, around soo BC. "The sentiment that life was a loan to be repaid by death [became] an almost proverbial saying" (Mi llet 1991a:6) . No Greek author to my knowledge con­ nects this explicitly to sacrifice, though one could conceivably argue that Plato's character Cephalus does so implicitly in one passage of the Republic (331d) .

49· Hubert and Mauss (1964) provide a good survey of the ancient l iterature in this rega rd.

so. Finley 1981: 90

51 . This was something of a legalis­ tic distinction; what it really meant in practice was that funds levied in Persia were technically considered "gifts, " but it shows the power of the principle (Briant 2006 :398-99)

52. Pharaonic Egypt and imperial China certainly did levy direct taxes, in money, kind, or labor, in different pro­ portions at different times. In early India,

the gana-sangha republics do not seem to have demanded taxes of their citizens, but the monarchies that ultimately replaced them did (Rhys Davies 1922:198-200) . My point is that taxes were not inevitable and were often seen as marks of conquest.

53 · I a m following what I believe is still the predominant view; though at least in some p laces Palaces were in charge of pretty much everything from quite early on, and Temples quite subordinate (see Maekawa 1973-1974) . There is lively de­ bate about this, as with the balance of temple, pa lace, clan, and individual hold­ ings in different times and places, but I have avoided going into such debates, however interesting, unless they have a direct bearing on my argument.

54· I a m following Hudson's interpre­ tation (2002) , though others-e.g, Stein­ keller 198 1 , M ieroop 2002: 64-suggest that interest may have instead originated in rental fees.

55 · For a good summary, Hudson 1993 , 2002. The meaning of amargi is first not­ ed in Falkenstein (1954) , see also Kramer (1963 :79, Lemche ( 1979 :16n34) .

56 . In ancient Egypt there were no loans at interest, and we know relatively little about other early empires, so we don't know how unusual this was. But the Chinese evidence is at the very least sug­ gestive. Chinese theories of money were always resolutely Chartalist; and in the standard story about the origins of coin­ age, since at least Han times, the mythic founder of the Shang dynasty, upset to see so many fa milies having to sell their chil­ dren during fa mines, created coins so that t�e government could redeem the children and return them to their fam ilies (see chapter 8, below) .

57· What is sacrifice, after all, but a recogn ition that an act such as taking an animal's life, even if necessary for our sus­ tenance, is not an act to be taken lightly, but with an attitude of humility before the cosmos ?

58 . Unless the recipient is owed mon­ ey by the creditor, allowing everyone to

N O T E S 4 0 1

cancel their debts in a circle. This might seem an extraneous point, but the circu­ lar cancellation of debts in this way seems to have been quite a common practice in much of history: see, for instance, the description of " reckonings" in chapter n below.

59· I am not ascribing this position to the authors of the Brahmanas necessarily; only pursuing what I take to be the in­ ternal logic of the argument, in dia logue with its authors.

6o. Malamoud 1983:32. 61. Comte 1891: 295 62. In France, particularly by politi­

cal thinkers like Alfred Fouille and Leon Bou rgeois. The latter, leader of the Radi­ cal Party in the 189os, made the notion of social debt one of the conceptual foundations for what his phi losophy of "solidarism"-a form of radical republi­ canism that, he argued, could provide a kind of middle-ground alternative to both revol utionary Marxism and free-market libera lism. The idea was to overcome the violence of class struggle by appealing to a new moral system based on the notion of a sha red debt to society-of which the state, of course, was merely the adminis­ trator and representative (Hayward 1959, Donzelot 1994, Jobert 2003 ) . Emile Durk­ heim too was a Solidarist politically.

63 . As a slogan, the expression is gen­ erally attributed to Charles Gide, the late­ ni neteenth-century French cooperativist, but became common in Solidarist circles. It became an important principle in Turk­ ish socialist circles at the time (Aydan 2003 ) , and, I have heard, though I have not been able to verify, in Latin America.

Chapter Four

1. Hart 1986:638. 2. The technical term for this is " fi ­

duciarity , " t h e degree t o w h i c h i t s value is based not on metal content but pub­ lic trust. For a good discussion of the

fiduciarity of ancient currencies, see Sea­ ford 2004 : 139-146 . Almost all metal coins were overval ued . I f the govern ment set the value below that of the metal, of course, people would simply melt them down; if it's set at exactly the metal value, the results are usually deflationary. As Bruno Theret (200 8 : 8 26-27) points out, although Locke's reforms, which set the value of the British sovereign at exactly its weight in silver, were ideologica lly motivated , they had disastrous economic effects. Ob­ viously, if coin age is debased or the value otherwise set too high in relation to the metal content, this can produce inflation. But the traditional view, where, say, the Roman cu rrency was ultimately destroyed by debasement, is clearly fa lse, since it took centuries for inflation to occur (In­ gham 2004 :102-3 ) .

3· Einzig 1949 :104; similar gambling chits, in this case made of bamboo, were used in Chinese towns in the Gobi desert (ibid : 10 8 ) .

4 · On English token money, see Wil­ liamson 18 89; Whiting 1971; Mathias 1979b.

5· On cacao, Millon 1955; on Ethopian salt money, Einzig 1949: 123-26. Both Karl Marx ( 1 857:223 , 1867:1 82) and Max We­ ber (1978: 673-74) were of the opinion that money had emerged from barter between societies, not within them. Karl Bucher (1904 ) , and arguably Karl Polanyi (1968 ) , held so mething close t o this position, at least insofar as they insisted that modern money emerged from external exchange. Inevitably there must have been some sort of mutually reinforcing process between cu rrencies of trade and the local account­ ing system. Insofar as we can talk about the "invention" of money in its modern sense, presumably this would be the place to look, though in places like Mesopota­ mia this must have happened long before the use of writing, and hence the history is effectively lost to us.

6 . Einzig (1949 : 266) , citing Kulischer (1926:92) and Ilwof (1882:36) .

7· Genealogy of Morals, 2 . 8 .

4 0 2 N O T E S

8 . As I remarked earlier, both Adam Smith and Nietzsche thus anticipate Levi­ Strauss 's famous argument that language is the "exchange of words . " The remark­ able thing here is that so many have man­ aged to convince themselves that in all this, Nietzsche is providing a radical alter­ native to bourgeois ideology, even to the logic of exchange. Deleuze and Guattari, most embarrassingly, insist that " the great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss' The Gift as Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of M o rals . At least it should be, " since, they say, Nietzsche succeeds in interpreting "primitive society" in terms of debt, where Mauss still hesitates to break with the logic of exchange ( 1972:224-25) . On their inspiration, Sarthou-Lajus ( 1997) has written philosophy of debt as an al­ ternative to bourgeois ideologies of ex­ change, that, she claims, assume the prior autonomy of the person. Of course what Nietzsche proposes is not an a lternative at all. It's another aspect of the same thing. All this is a vivid reminder of how easy it is to mistake radica lized forms of our own bourgeois tradition as a lternatives to it (Bataille [1993], who Deleuze and Guat­ tari praise as another alternative to Mauss in the same passage, is another notorious example of this sort of thing) .

9· Genealogy of Morals 2.5. 10. Nietzsche had clearly been reading

too much Shakespeare. There is no record of the mutilation of debtors in the ancient world; there was a good deal of mutila­ tion of slaves, but they were by definition people who could not be in debt. Mutila­ tion for debt is occasionally attested to in the Medieval period, but as we'll see, Jews tended to be the victims, since they were largely without rights, and certainly not the perpetrators. Shakespeare turned the story around.

n. Genealogy of M o rals 2.19. 12. Genealogy of Morals 2.21. 13. Freuchen 1961 : 154· It's not clear

what language this was said in, consid­ ering that Inuit did not actually have an institution of slavery. It's also interesting

because the passage would not make sense unless there were some contexts in which gift exchange did operate, and therefore, debts accrued. What the hunter is empha­ sizing is that it was felt important that this logic did not extend to the basic means of human existence, such as food.

14. To take an example, the Ganges Valley in the Buddha's time was full of arguments about the relative merits of monarchical and democratic constitu­ tions. Gautama, though the son of a king, sided with the democrats, and many of the decision-making techniques used in democratic assemblies of the time remain preserved in the organization of Buddhist monasteries (Muhlenberger & Paine 1997 . ) Were it n o t for t h i s we would n o t know anything about them, or even be entirely sure that such democratic polities existed .

15 . For instance, buying back one's an­ cestral land (Leviticus 25 : 25, 26) or any­ thing one had given to the Temple (Leviti­ cus 27) .

16. Here too, in the case of complete insolvency, the debtor might lose his own freedom as well. See Houston (2oo6) for a good survey of the contemporary litera­ ture on economic conditions in the time of the prophets . I here follow a synthe­ sis of his and Michael Hudson's (1993) reconstruction.

17· See for instance, Amos 2.6, 8 . 2, and Isaiah 5 8 .

1 8 . Nehemiah 5 : 3-7. 19. There continues to be intense

scholarly debate about whether these laws were in fact invented by Nehemiah and his p riestly allies (especially Ezra ) , and whether they were ever actually enforced in any period: see Alexander 1938; North 1954; Finkelstein 1961, 1965; Westbrook 1971; Lemke 1976, 1979; Hudson 1993; Houston 1996 for a few examples. At first there were similar debates about whether Mesopotamian "clean states" were actual­ ly enforced, until overwhelming evidence was p roduced that they were. The bulk of the evidence now indicates that the laws in Deuteronomy were enforced as well,

N O T E S 4 0 3

though we can never know for certain how effectively.

20 . "Every seventh year you shall make a cancellation. The cancellation shall be as follows: every creditor is to release the debts that he has owing to him by his neighbor" (Deuteronomy 15 : 1-3) . Those held in debt bondage were also freed. Ev­ ery 49 (or in some readings 50) years came the Jubilee, when all fa mily land was to be returned to its original owners, and even fa mily mem bers who had been sold as slaves set free (Leviticus 25 : 9) .

21. Unsurprisingly, since the need to borrow was most often sparked by the need to pay taxes i mposed by foreign conquerors .

22. Hudson notes in Babylonian, clean slates were "cal led hubullum (debt) masa'um (to wash}, literally 'a washing away of the debt [ records ] , ' that is, a dis­ solving of the clay tablets on which finan­ cial obl igations were inscri bed " (1993 : 19) .

23 . Matthew 1 8 : 23-34. 24· To give a sense of the figures in­

volved, ten thousand talents in gold is roughly equiva lent to the entire Roman tax receipts from their provinces in what's now the Middle East. A hundred denarii is 1/6o of one talent, and therefore worth 6oo,ooo times less.

25 . Opheilema in the G reek original, which meant " that which is owed," "fi­ nancial debts, " and by extension, "sin." This was apparently used to translate the Aramaic hoyween, which also meant both "debt" and, by extension, "sin . " The Eng­ lish here (as in all later Bible citations) fol­ lows the King James version, which in this case is itself based on a 13 81 translation of the Lord 's prayer by John Wycliffe. Most readers will probably be more familiar with 1559 Book of Common Prayer ver­ sion that substitutes " And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that tres­ pass against u s . " However, the original is quite explicitly "debts . "

2 6 . Changing these t o " spiritual debts " doesn't really change the problem.

27. The prospect of sexual abuse in these situations clearly weighed heavily on the popular imagination. "Some of our daughters are brought unto bond­ age already" protested the Israelites to Nehemiah. Technically, daughters taken in debt bondage were not, if virgins, ex­ pected to be sexually available to creditors who did not wish to marry them or marry them to their sons (Exodus 21:7-9 ; Wright 2009 : 13o-33 ) though chattel slaves were sexually available (see Hezser 2003}, and often the roles blurred in practice; even where laws theoretically protected them, fathers must often have had little means to protect them or cause those laws to be enforced . The Roman historian Livy's ac­ count of the abolition of debt bondage in Rome in 326 BC, for instance, featured a handsome young man named Caius Pub­ lilius placed in bondage for a debt he'd inherited from his father, and who was savagely beaten for refusing the sexual advances of his creditor (Livy 8 . 2 8 ) . When he appeared on the streets and announced what had happened to him, crowds gath­ ered and marched on the Senate to de­ mand that they abolish the institution.

28. Particularly if the slaves were for­ eigners captured in war. As we'll see, the common belief that there were no moral objections to slavery in the ancient world is false. There were plenty. But aside from certain radicals such as the Essenes, the institution was accepted as an unfortunate necessity.

29 . Hudson (2002:37) cites the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus ( i . 79) who at­ tributes this motive to the Egyptian pha­ raoh Bakenranef, though he too empha­ sizes that mil itary considerations were not the only ones, but that cancellations reflected broader feelings about justice.

30 . Oppenheim 1964: 8 8 . Oppenheim suggests that interest-free loans were more common in the Levant, and that in Mesopotamia social equals were more likely to charge each other interest but on easier terms, citing an Old Assyrian merchant who speaks of "the rate one

4 0 4 N O T E S

brother charges another" (op cit) . In an­ cient G reece, friendly loans between so­ cial equals were known as eranos loans, usually of sums raised by an impromptu mutual-aid society and not involving the payment of interest (Jones 1956 : 171-73 ; Vondeling 1961 ; Finley 198 1 : 67-68 ; Millet 1991 : 153-155 ) . Ari stocrats often made such loans to one another, but so did groups of slaves trying to pool money to buy back their freedom (Harrill 1998 : 167) . This ten­ dency, for mutual aid to be most marked at the very top and very bottom of the social scale is a consistent pattern to this day.

3 1 . Hence the constant invocation of the phrase "your brother," particularly in Deuteronomy, e . g . , "you shall not lend at interest to your brother" (23 :20) .

Chapter Five

LAs we'll see in chapter seven, Plato begins The Republic in exactly the same way.

2. For a polite but devastating assess­ ment, see Kahneman 2003 .

3 · Homans 1958 , also Blau 1964; Levi­ Strauss 1963 : 296 . In anthropology, the first to propose reciprocity as a universal principle was Richard Thurnwald (1916) , but it was made fa mous by Malinowski (1922) .

4· One reason no known law code has ever been known to enforce the principle; the penalty was always there to be com­ muted to something else.

5 · Atwood (20o8 : 1 ) . The author then proceeds to explore the nature of our sense of economic morality by comparing the behavior of caged apes with middle­ class Canadian children to argue that all human relations are indeed either ex­ change or forcible appropriation (ibid:49) . Despite the brilli ance o f many o f its argu­ ments, the result is a rather sad testimony to how difficult it is for the scions of the North Atlantic professional classes not to

see their own characteristic ways of i m ag­ ining the world as si mple human nature.

6 . Seton's father, a fa iled shipping mag­ nate turned accountant, was, Seton later wrote, so cold and abusive that his son spent much of his youth in the woods try­ ing to avoid h i m ; after paying the debt­ which incidentally came to $537.50, a tidy but not insurmountable sum in 1881-he changed his name and spent much of the rest of his life trying to develop more healthy child-rearing techniques.

7· Rev. W.H. Beatley m Levy-Bruhl 1923 :411

8 . Rev. Fr. Bul li:on, m Levy-Bruhl 1923 :425

9 · This phrase was not coined by Marx, incidenta lly, but was apparently a slogan current in the early French work­ ers' movement, first appearing in print in the work of socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. Marx only took up the phrase in his Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875 , and even then used it in a rather id­ iosyncratic way: for the principle he imag­ ined could apply on the level of society as a whole once technology had reached the point of gua ranteeing absolute mate­ rial abundance. For Marx, "communism " was both the political movement aiming to bring about such a future society, and that society itself. I a m drawing here more on the alternate strain of revolutionary theory, evident most fa mously perhaps in Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902) .

10. At least, unless there is some spe­ cific reason not to--for instance, a hier­ archical division of labor that says some people get coffee and others do not.

11. What this means of course is that command economies-putting govern­ ment bureaucracies in charge of coordi­ nating every aspect of the production and distribution of goods and services within a given national territory-tends to be much less efficient than other available al­ ternatives. This is obviously true, though if it "just doesn't work" at all, it's hard to i m agine how states like the Soviet Union could have existed, let alone maintain

N O T E S 4 0 5

themselves as world powers, in the first place.

12. Evans-Pritchard 1940 : 1 8 2 13 . Similarly, a middle-class pedestrian

would be unlikely to ask a gang member for directions, and might even run in fear if one approached him to ask for the time, but this is again because of an assumption of a tacit state of war existing between them.

14 . Ibid, p . 1 83 . 15 . Richards 1939: 197 . Max Gluckman,

remarking on such customs, concludes that insofar as it is possible to speak of "primitive communis m , " it exists in con­ sumption, rather than production, which tends to be much more individually orga­ nized (1971:52) .

16. A typical example: " i f a cabin of hungry people meets another whose pro­ visions are not entirely exhausted, the latter share with the newcomers the little which remains to them without waiting to be asked, although they expose themselves thereby to the same danger of perishing as those whom they help . . . " Lafitau 1974 Volume I I : 6 1 .

1 7 · Jesuit Relations (1635 ) 8 : 127, cited in Delage 1993 :54.

1 8 . This is a common a rrangement in certain parts of the world (particularly the Andes, Amazonia, insular Southeast Asia, and Melanesia) , and invariably there is some rule whereby each half is dependent on the other for something considered es­ sential to human life . One can only marry someone from the other side of the vil lage, or maybe one can only eat pigs raised on the other side, or perhaps one side needs people from the other side to sponsor the rituals that initiate its male children into manhood .

19 . As I have suggested elsewhere, Graeber 2oo 1 : 159""6o; cf. Mauss 194T 104-5 ·

20. I ' m side-stepping the whole ques­ tion of one-sided examples discussed in G raeber 2001 :218.

21 . Marshall Sahlins (1972) coined the phrase "generalized reciprocity " to

describe this sort of relation, on the prin­ ciple that if everything circulates freely, eventually, all accounts will balance out. Marcel Mauss was already making such an argument in lectures back in the 1930s (1947 ) , but he also recognized the prob­ lems: while this might be true of Iroquois moieties, some relationships never bal­ ance out-for instance, between mother and child. His solution, " a lternating reciprocity "-that we repay our parents by having children ourselves-is clearly drawn from his study of the Vedas, but it ultimately demonstrates that if one has al­ ready decided that all relations are based on reciprocity, one can always define the term so broadly as to make it true.

22. Hostis: see Benveniste 1972:72. The Latin terminology concerning hospitality emphasizes the absolute mastery of the house by its (male) owner as the precon­ dition of any act of hospitality; Derrida (2ooo, 2001) argues that this points to a central contradiction in the very concept of hospitality, since it implies an already­ existing absolute dominium or power over others, the kind that m ight be seen as taking its most exploitative form in Lot's offering his own daughters up to a crowd of Sodomites to dissuade them from raping his houseguests. However, this same principle of hospitality can be equally well docu mented in societies­ such as the Iroquois-that were anything but patriarchal.

23 . Evans-Pritchard 1940 : 154, 158 . 24· This is of course one reason why

the very rich like to associate mainly with one another.

25 . In a less hostile vein one can speak of an exchange of prisoners, notes, or compliments.

26. A good source on h aggling: Uchen­ do 1967.

27. Bohannan 1964:47 . 28. N o t even a r e a l business d e a l , since

these may. often involve a great deal of collective wining and dining and giving of presents. More the sort of i m aginary

4 0 6 N O T E S

business deal that appears in economics textbooks .

29. One need o n l y glance at t h e vast anthropological literature on "co mpetitive feasting " : e . g . , Valeri 200 1 .

30 . Bourdieu 1965 is t h e k e y text, but he repeats the main points in Bourdieu 1990 : 98-ror.

31 . Onvlee 1980:204.

32. Petroni us 51; Pliny Natural History

36 . 195; Dio 57.21.5-7·

33 · "This king is of all men the most addicted to the making of gifts and the shedding of blood. His gate is never with­ out some poor man enriched or some liv­ ing man executed . "

34· O r even the very rich. Nelson Rockefeller, for example, used to pride hi mself on never carrying a wallet. He didn't need one. Every now and then when he was working late and wanted cigarettes , he would borrow some from the security people at the desk at Rock­ efeller Center, who would then be able to boast that they had lent a Rockefeller money and would rarely ask for it back. In contrast, "the sixteenth-century Portu­ guese monarch Dam Manuel, newly rich from the Indies trade, adopted the title ' Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Com merce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and Indi a . ' Others called him the "grocer king. " (Ho 2004:227) .

35 · See G raeber 200 1 : 175-76.

36 . Even between strangers it's a bit unusual: as Servet (198 1 , 1982) has empha­ sized, most " p rimitive trade" takes place through trade partnership and specialized regional middlemen.

37· I frame things this way because I am mainly interested here in economics. If we were thinking simply of human rela­ tions, I suppose one might say that at one extreme is killing, and at the other, giving birth.

38 . In fact, it seems essential to the na­ ture of charity that, like a gifts to a king, it can never lead to reciprocity. Even if it turns out that the pathetic-looking beg­ gar is really a god wandering the earth in

mortal form, or Harun al-Rashid, your re­ ward will be entirely disproportionate. Or consider all those stories about d runken millionaires on a binge who, when they got their life back together, hand out fan­ cy cars or houses to their earlier benefac­ tors. It's easier to imagine a panhandler giving you a fortune than returning an ex­ act equivalent to the dollar that you gave h i m .

3 9 · Xenophon Cyrop edia V l l l . 6 , Herodotus 3 . 8 . 9; see Briant 200 6 : 193-194,

394-404, who acknowledges that some­ thing broadly a long these lines probably did take place, with a more impro mptu gift system under Cyrus and Cambyses be­ ing systematized under Darius.

40 . Marc Bloch (196 1 : n4-15 ) , who adds "every act, especially if it was re­ peated th ree or four times, was likely to be transformed into a precedent-even if in the first instance it had been exception­ al or even frankly unlawfu l . "

41 . T h e approach is often identified with British anthropologist A . M . Hocart (1936 ) . The i mportant thing is that this does not necessarily mean that these be­ came their main or exclusive occupations: most of the time, such people remained simple farmers like everybody else. Yet what they did for the king, or later, on ritual occasions, for the community, was seen as defining their essenti al nature, their identity within the whole.

42. In fact, we may become indignant at her for an act of stinginess we would never even consider stingy in anyone else-especially, ourselves.

43 · A version has been published as: Sarah Stillman, "The missing white girl syndrome: disappeared women and media activism" (Stillman, 2007) : p u b l i c a t i o n s . o x fa m . o r g . u k / o x f a m / d i s p i a y . a s p ? K = o o 2j 1 2 4 6 & s f_ o 1 = c a t

c l a s s & st_o1=620 & s o rt=S O R T _DATE/ d& m=84&dc=719

44· Karatani (2oo3 : 2o3-205) makes this point compellingly. The Kwakiutl and other First Nations of the Northwest Coast are something of an intermediary

N O T E S 4 0 7

case--aristocratic, but at least in the pe­ riod we know about, using non-coercive means to gather resources (though Codere 1950 . )

45 · Georges Duby (1980) provides the definitive history of this concept, which goes back to much older Indo-European ideas.

46 . For a typical example of imaginary reciprocity between father and son, see O liver 1955 :2)0. Anthropological theory buffs will notice that I a m here endors­ ing Edmund Leach 's (1961) position on the "circulating connubium" proble m . He later applied the same argument to the fa­ mous "kula chain" ( 1983 ) .

47. Actually, there are hierarchical re­ lations that are explicitly self-subverting: the one between teacher and student, for example, since if the teacher is successful in passing her knowledge to the student, there is no fu rther basis for inequality.

48 . Freuchen 196 1 : '154. It's not clear what the original language was here, con­ sidering that the Inuit did not have an institution of slavery. Also, the passage would not make sense unless there were some contexts in which gift exchange did operate, and therefore, in which debts ac­ crued . What the hunter is emphasizing is that it was felt important that this logic did not extend to basic needs like food.

49 · Firth 1959 =4n-12 (also in G raeber 200 1 : 175 ) . His name was Tei Reinga .

so. For one fa mous example: Chagnon 1996 : qo-76 .

s r . Similarly, two groups might form an alliance by contracting a " j oking rela­ tion , " in which any member of one could at least in theory make similar outrageous demands of the other (Hebert 1958 ) .

52. Marcel Mauss, i n h i s famous "Es­ say on the G i ft " (1924) , often did, and the results have sometimes confused debate for generations to come.

53 · Mauss 1925 , the G reek source be­ ing Posidonius. As usual one does not know how literally to take this account . Mauss thought it likely accurate; I suspect it might have happened once or twice.

54· As retold by William Ian Miller (I99J : rs-r6) . The first quote is directly from the original, Egil ' s Saga, chapter 78. Egil remained am bivalent about the shield: he later took it to a wedding party and contrived to drop it into a vat of sour whey. Afterward, concluding it was ru­ ined, he stripped it for its raw materials.

55 · See, for instance, Wallace-Hadrill 1989 .

56 . Blaxter 1971: 127-28. 57· Another anthropologist, for in­

stance, defines patron-client relations as " long-term contracted relations in which the client's support is exchanged for the patron's protection; there is an ideology which is morally charged and appears to rule out strict, open accounting, but both parties keep some tacit rough account; the goods and services exchanged are not similar, and there is no implication of fair exchange or balance of satisfactions, since the client is markedly weaker in power and needs the patron more than he is needed by him" (Loizos 1977: ns ) . Again, it both is and isn't an exchange, it's both a matter of accounting and not a matter of accounting.

58 . It's exactly the same if one takes a job at a doughnut shop; legally, it must be a free contract between equals, even if in order to be able to say this we have to maintain the charming legal fiction that one of them is an imaginary person named " K rispy K reme. "

59· For instance the word "should , " in English, originally derives from German schuld, meaning "guilt, fault, debt . " Ben­ veniste provides similar examples from other Indo-Eu ropean languages (1963 :5 8 ) . East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese rarely conflate the actual words, but a similar identification of debt with sin, shame, guilt, and fault can be easily docu mented (Ma lamoud 198 8 ) .

6o. Plutarch Moralia 303 B, also dis­ cussed in Finley 198 r : r52, Millett 199r a :42. Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas made it a matter of Catholic doctrine that sins were "debts of punishment" owed to God.

4 0 8 N O T E S

6 r . This is one reason why it's so easy to dress up other sorts of rel a tionships as

debts. Say one wishes to help out a friend in desperate need of money but doesn't want to embarrass her. Usually, the easi­ est way to do it is to provide the money and then insist that it's a loan (and then let both parties conveniently forget it ever happened ) . Or think of all the times and places where the rich acquire servants by advancing what is ostensibly a loan.

62. One could argue that some equiva­ lent of "please" and " thank you" could be identified in any human language, if one were determined to find them , but then the terms you find are often used so differently-for instance, only in ritual contexts, or to hierarchical superiors- . that it's hard to attach much significance to the fact. It is significant that over the last century or so just about every human language that is used in offices or to make transactions in shops has had to create terms that do function as an exact equiva­ lent of the English "please , " "thank you," and "you're welcome."

63 . In Spanish one first asks a favor (par favor) , and then says gracias, in order affirm you recogn ize one has been done for you, since it derives from the Latin word gratia, meaning " influence, or fa­ vor. " " Appreciate" is more monetary: if you say " I rea lly appreciate your doing that for me," you are using a word that derives from Latin appretiare, "to set a price . "

64. "You're welcome," first document­ ed in Shakespeare's time, derives from Old English wilcuma, wil being " pleasure" and cuma being "guest. " This is why people are sti ll welcomed into a house. It is thus like "be my guest," implying that, no, if there is an obligation it's on my part, as any host is obliged to be generous to guests, and that dispatching such obliga­ tions is a pleasure in itself. Still, it's sig­ nificant that moralists rarely chide anyone for failure to say " you're welcome"-that one is much more optional.

65 . Book !.12. This and other quotes are from the 2oo6 Penguin Screech trans­ lation, in this case, p . 86.

66. Compare the Medieval Arab phi­ losopher Ibn Miskaway: "The creditor de­ sires the well-being of the debtor in order to get his money back rather than because of his love for him. The debtor, on the other hand, does not take great interest in the creditor. " (in Hosseini 2003 :36) .

67. Appropriate, since Panurge's entire discourse is nothing but a comical elabo­ ration of Marcelo Ficino's argument that the entire universe is driven by the power of love.

Chapte r Six

r. From: Peter Carlson, "The Rela­ tively Charmed Life of Neil Bush , " The Washington Post, Sunday December 28, 2003 , Page Do1.

2. G rierson 1977:20.

3· To be fa ir to Grierson, he does later suggest that slavery played an i mportant part in the origins of money-though he never speculates about the gender, which seems significant: slave girls also served as the highest denomination of currency in Medieval Iceland (Williams 1937 ) , and in the Rig Veda, great gifts and payments are regularly designated in "gold, cattle, and slave girls" (Chakravarti 198s :s6-57) . By the way, I say " young" because elsewhere, when slaves are used as monetary units, the unit is assumed to be a slave about 18- 20 years old. A cumal was considered the equivalent in value of three milch cows or six heifers.

4· On cumal see Nolan 1926, Einzig 1949 : 247-48 , Gerriets 1978, 198 1 , 1985 , Patterson 1982:168-69 , Kelly 1998 :112-13 . Most merely emphasize that cumal were just used as units of account and we don't know anything about earlier practices. It's notable, though , that in the law codes, when several different commodities are used as units of account, they will include

N O T E S 4 0 9

that country ' s most significant exports, and trade currency (that's why in Russian codes, the units were fur and silver) . This would imply a significant trade in female slaves in the period just before wrirren records.

5 · So Bender 1996 . 6. Here I am drawing on t h e detailed

ethnographic su rvey work of Alain Te­ starr (2ooo, 2oor, 2002) . Testarr does a magni ficent job synthesizing the evidence, though he roo--as we' ll see in the next chapter-has some equally strange blind spots in his conclusions.

7· "Although the rhetorical phrase 'selling one's daughter into prostitution' has wide cu rrency . . . the actual arrange­ ment is more often presented as either a loan ro the fa mily or an advance pay­ ment for the girl's (usually unspeci fied or misrepresented ) services. The interest on these 'loans' is often roo percent, and the principal may be increased by other debts-for living expenses, medical care, bribes to officials-accrued once the girl has begun work" (Bishop & Robinson 1998 : ro5) .

8 . S o Michael Hudson (cited i n Wray 1999) , but it's clear enough if one looks at the language of the original: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his ma idservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's" (Exodus 20 :17, Deuter­ onomy 5 :21 ) .

9· Wampum i s a good example: In­ dians never seem to have used it ro buy things from other members of the same community, although it was regularly used in conducting trade with settlers (see Graeber 20o 1 : r q-r5o) . Others, like Yurok shell money or some Papuan currencies, are widely used as currencies in addi­ tion to their social functions, bur the first seems to have emerged from the second.

10. The most i mportant texts on the " brideprice debate " : Evans-Pritchard 193 1, Raglan 193 1, Gray 196 8 , Corna­ ro££ 1980, Valeri 1994. One reason why

Evans-Pritchard originally proposed ro change the name from "brideprice" ro " bridewealth " because the League of Na­ tions had in 1926 outlawed the p ractice as a form of slavery (G uyer 1994) .

r r . On . Tiv kinship and economy: Dug­

gan 193 2; Abraham 1933 ; Downes 1933 ; Akiga 1939; L. Bohannan 1952; P. Bohan­ nan 1955 , 1957, 1959; P . & L. Bohannan 1953 , 1968, Tseayo 1975 ; Keil 1979.

12. Akiga Sai 1939 : 106 for a good analysis of how this could happen . For a later comparative rea nalysis in regional perspective, see Fardon 1984, 1985 .

13 . Paul Bohannan puts it: "The kern relationship of debt between a man and his wife' s guardian is never broken, be­ cause kern is perpetual, the debt can never be fully paid . " ( I95T73 · ) Otherwise the account is from Akiga (1939 :126-I27) .

14. Rospabe 1993 :35 . 15 . Evans-Pritchard 1940 : 153 · r6. As the ethnographer puts it, "that

they are accepting the cattle only in order to honour him and not because they a re ready to take cattle for the life of their dead kinsman . " (1940 : 153 )

q. Op cit 154-155 . r 8 . Morgan 1851 :332. Morgan, a law­

yer by training, is using a technical term here, "condonation," which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "the volun­ tary overlooking of an offence . "

19 . Morgan 1851 :333 . T h e baseline was five fathoms for a man, ten for a woman, bur other factors might intervene (T. Smith 1983 : 236; Morgan 1851 :331-

34; Parker 1926) . On " mourning wars" see Richter 1983 ; the expression "purring his name upon the mat" is from Fenton 1978 :315 . Incidenta lly I am assuming it's a man who dies, since these are the ex­ amples in the sources. It's not clear if the same was done for women who died naturally.

20 . Evans-Pritchard 1940 : 155 , 1951 : rocr­ n ; Howell 1954: 71-80, Gough 1971 , Hutchinson 1996 : 62, 175-76 .

21. Rospabe 1995 :47-48 , citing Peters 1947·

4 1 0 N O T E S

22. O n mourning war: Richter 1983 . Interestingly, something similar occurred among the Nambikwara. I mentioned in chapter 3 that the feasts held after barter could lead to seductions and jealous mur­ ders; Levi-Strauss adds that the ordinary way of resolving such murders is for the killer to marry the victi m ' s wife, adopt his children, and thus, efft!ctively, become the person the victim used to be (1943 :12.3 ) .

23 . Though people did use them to commission certa in fancy craft goods (say, musical instruments) from specia lists in other vill ages (1963 :54-55 ) .

24. Douglas 195 8 : 112; also 1982:43 . 25 . Douglas (1963 :58 ) estimates that a

successful man will have spent at mini­ mum 300 raffia cloths i n payments, and given away at least 300 more as gifts, by the time he reached ful l social maturity.

26. As anthropologists often note, the fact that one traces descent through the female line does not necessarily mean that women themselves have a lot of power. It can; it did among the Iroquois, and it does a mong Minangkabau right now. But it doesn 't necessarily.

27. Douglas 1963 : 144-45 , which is an adoption of 1960:3-4.

28. She was in fact a conservative Catholic, married a Tory economist, and tended to look with disdain on all liberal concerns.

29 . As if to hammer this home, a man was actually considered to be owed a life­ debt for fathering female children (Doug­ las 1963 :115)-that could only be paid by allowing him to take one of his own daughters' daughters as a pawn. This only makes sense if we assume a principle that only men can be owed a life, and there­ fore, in the case of women, the creation · of life was assumed to be given free. Men, as noted, could be pawns and many were, but they were never traded .

30 . Douglas 196 6 : 150 .

31 . O n "village-wives , " s e e particularly Douglas 1951, also 1963 : 1 2.8-40 .

32. Douglas 1963 :76; compare 1951 : 1 1 . T h e author is clearly simply repeating her

informants' explanation for the custom : the Lele didn't "have t o " make such a n arrangement; in fact, most African societ­ ies did not.

33 · Some village wives were literally princesses, since chiefs' daughters invari­ ably chose to marry age-sets in this way. The daughters of chiefs were allowed to have sex with anyone they wanted, re­ gardless of age-set, and also had the right to refuse sex, which ordinary village wives did not. Princesses of this sort were rare: there were only three chiefs in all Lele ter­ ritory. Douglas estimates that the number of Lele women who became village wives, on the other hand, was about 10 percent (1951 ) .

34· F o r instance: 1960:4, 1963 :145-46, 168-73 , 1964:303 . Obviously, men could sometimes put a great deal of physical pressure on women, at least, if everyone else agreed they had a moral right to do so, but even here Douglas emphasizes most women had a good deal of room for maneuver.

35 · O n peacefulness, particularly, 1963 :70-71 .

36 . 1963 :170 .

37 · 1963 :171 .

3 8 . Cost of slaves: 1963 :36, 1982:46--47.

39 · Partly, though, this was because the main purpose of male slaves was to be sacrificed at important men's funerals (1963 :36 ) .

40 . S e e Graeber 2001, chapter 4· The great exception m ight seem to be the cat­ tle money of the Nuer, and similar pasto­ ral peoples. Yet even these were arguably adornment of the person of a sort.

41 . Akiga Sai 1939 : 12.1, 158--6o. 42. So too when Tiv practiced mar­

riage by capture: Akiga Sai (1939 : 137-41) . 43 · Here I ' m drawing on the classic

"spheres of exchange" analysis by Paul Bohannan (1955 , 1959) , supplemented by Dorward ( 1976) and G uyer (2004: 27-31 ) .

44· S o Akiga S a i 1939: 241 ; P . Bohannan 1955 :66, P . & L. Bohannnan 196 8 : 233 , 235 · As charisma in general: East in Akiga Sai 1939 : 236, Downes 1971 : 29 .

N O T E S 4 1 1

45 · See Abraham 1933 :26; Akiga Sai 1939: 246 ; P . Bohannan 1958 :3 ; Downes 1971 : 27.

46 . On witches in genera l : P. Bohan­ nan 1957: 1 87-88, 195 8 ; Downes 1971 : 32- 25 . On flesh debts (or ikipindi): Abraham 1933 : 8 1-84; Downes 1971 :36-40 .

47· Akiga Sai 1939: 257. 48 . Akiga Sai 1939 :260.

49· Following here Wilson 1951 . s o . Paul Bohannan ( 1958 :4) makes a

similar but not identical argument. sr. Tiv migration stories (e.g. Abra­

ham 1933 :q-26; Akiga & Bohannan 1954; P. Bohannan 1954) do not explicitly say this, but they could easily be read this way. Akiga's story (1939 :137) about Tiv migrants painting what looked like sores on their women's bodies so raiders would not take them is particularly suggestive. Despite their lack of government, Tiv did have a notoriously effective war organi­ zation, and as Abrahams notes ( 1933 : 19) , managed t o successfully play the Fulani and Jukun against each other by interven­ ing in their own wars with each other.

52. Some of these raids were not en­ tirely unsuccessfu l . For a while, it would appear, the nearby Jukun kingdom, which made several ultimately unsuccessful ef­ forts to incorporate the Tiv in the eigh­ teenth century, appear to have been sell­ ing Tiv captives to slave dealers operating on the coast (Abraham 1933 : 19; Curtin 1965 : 255 , 298 ; Latham 1973 : 29; Tambo 1976 : 201-3 . ) It's doubtless significant here that many Tiv insisted in the 1930s that the Jukun were themselves cannibals, and that the origins of the mbatsav " organi­ zation" lay in certain chiefly titles that Tiv acquired from them when they finally came to a political rapprochement (Abra­ ham 1933 :33-35 ) .

53 · Jones 195 8 ; Latham 1971 ; Northrup 1978 : 157-64; Herbert 2003 : 196 . The fa­ mous Medieval Arab traveler Ibn Batruta, who we've already met at the court of the King of Singh in chapter 2, saw people using them as money in the N iger region, not far away, in the 1340s.

54· Herbert (2003 : 1 8 1 ) esti mates that Europeans imported about 2o,ooo tons of English brass and copper into Africa be­ tween 1699 and 1865 . It was manufactured in Bristol, Cheadle, and Birmingh a m . The vast maj ority was exchanged for slaves

55 . I base this number on the fact that 152,076 slaves are known to have been ex­ ported from the Bight of Biafra as a whole in those years (Eitis, Behrent, Richardson & Klein 2ooo) . The slave trade at Old Calabar lasted roughly from 1650 to 1 841 , during which t i m e t h e p o r t was by f a r the largest in the Bight, and the exports from the Bight itself during its height represent about 20 percent of all Africa (Lovejoy & Richardson 1999 :337) .

56 . Sheridan 195 8 , Price 198o, 1989, 1991 .

57. A larger variety of beads.

58 . Barbot in Talbot 1926 1 : 185-186. 59 · Inkori (1982) demonstrates that in

the late eighteenth century, British ships docking in Old Calabar brought on aver­ age 400 muskets each, and that between 1757 and 18o6, the total number imported into the Calabar-Cameroons region was 22,986. R u m and other liquor was, how­ ever, a very minor import.

6o. One common expedient, especially in the early years, was for merchants to arrive at village markets with canoes full of wares, exchange them for slaves, and then, i f they didn't come up to quota, wait until nightfall and simply attack home­ steads along the river, carrying off anyone they could find (Clarkson in Northrup 1978 : 66, also cited in Noah 1990 : 94. )

6 1 . T h e existing scholarly l iterature is of little help in reconstructing the his­ tory of how one form was transformed into the other, since there are only works treating pawnship either as a matter of kinship (e.g., Douglas 1964, Fardon 1985 , 1986) , or of commerce (e.g., Faiola & Lovejoy 1994) , but never comparing the two. As a result, many basic questions remain unasked. Faiola and Lovej oy, for instance, suggest that pawns' labor func­ tions as interest, but the book contains no

4 1 2 N O T E S

information on whether interest-bearing loans even existed in the pa rts of Africa where pawnship was p racticed .

62. It's also clear that this sort of pawn­ ship must have developed from something like the Lele institution. Many of the rules are the same: for instance, much as among the Lele, i f a girl was pledged, the credi­ tor often had the option of ma rrying her when she reached maturity, thus cancel­ ling the debt.

63 . Lovejoy & Richardson 1999 :349-

51; 200 1 . 64. Equiano 1789 :6-13 . 65 . Others incl uded the Akunakuna,

and the Efik, who were based in Calabar itself. The Aro were Igbo-speakers, and the reg_ion a patchwork of speakers of lgbo and Ibibio languages.

66. O n the Aro in general, see Jones 1939; Ottenberg 1958 ; Afigbo 1971 ; Ekejiu­ ba 1972; Isichei 1976 ; Northrup 1978 ; D ike & Ekej iuba 1990; Nwauwa 1991 .

67. D i k e a n d Ekej iuba (1990 : 150) es­ timate that 70 percent of the slaves sold to Europeans in the Bight of Biafra came from the Aro. Most of the rest came from the other merchant societies.

6 8 . One twentieth-century elder re­ called, " a woman who commited adultery would be sold by her husband and the husband kept the money . Thieves were sold, and the money went to the elders whose responsibi lity it was to make the decision . " (Northrup 1978 : 69)

69 . Northrup 1978 :73 70 . On Ekpe as debt enforcement in

Calabar itself: Jones 196 8 , Latham 1973 :35- 41, Lovej oy & Richardson 1999 :347-49 . On the spread of Ekpe to Arochukwe and throughout the region: Rue! 1969: 25o-258 , Northrup 1978 : 109-IIO, Nwaka 1978 , Ottenberg & Knudson 1985 . Nwaka (1978 : 18 8 ) writes: "The Ekpe society, the most widespread in the Cross River area, formed the basis of local government. It performed executive and j udicial functions in areas where it operated . Th rough the agency of its members, punish ments were administered to public offenders, customs

enforced and the authority of the elders upheld. Ekpe laws to some extent regulat­ ed the lives of most members of the com­ munity in such matters as the cleaning of towns and streets, collection of debts and other measures of public benefit . "

71 . Latham 1963 :3 8 . 72. Taken from Walker 1 875 :120 73 · O ttenberg & Ottenberg 1962:124. 74· Partridge 1905 72. 75 · If one were seeking a pawn, one

could n't simply take a random child from a neighboring vil lage, as his or her parents would quickly track the child down.

76 . In Lovejoy & Richardson 2001 74· For a parallel case in Ghana, see Getz 2003 : 85 .

77 · Remarkably, Akiga Sai (1 939 :379- So) insists that, among the Tiv, this was the origin of slavery: the seizing of hos­ tages from the same lineage as someone who refused to pay a debt. Say, he says, the debtor still refuses to pay. They will keep their hostage fettered for a while, then, finally, sell them in another country. "This is the origin o f slavery . "

78 . So Harris 1972:128 writing of an­ other Cross River district, Ikom: one of the major suppliers of slaves for Cala­ bar. There, she notes, debtors were often obliged to pawn themselves when mater­ nal and paternal kin intervened to prevent them from selling off any more of their relatives, with the result that they were finally enslaved and sent to Calabar.

79 · We do not know what proportion . King Eyo II told a British missionary that sl aves "were sold for different reasons­ some as prisoners of war, some for debt, some for breaking their country's laws and some by great men who hated them" (in Noah 1990 : 95 ) . This suggests that debt was not insignificant, especially since as Pier Larson (2ooo : 1 8 ) notes, all sources at the time would list "war," since it was considered the most legitimate. Compare Northrup (1978 :76-S o ) .

So. R e i d 1983 : 8 8 1 . op cit. 82. Reid 1983 :10

N O T E S 4 1 3

83 . Vickers (1996) provides an excel­ lent history of Bali's i m age in the North Atlantic imagination, from " savage Bali" to terrestrial paradise.

84. Geertz & Geertz 1975 ; Boon 197]:121-24. Belo (1936 : 26) cites infor­ mants in the 1920s that insisted that mar­ riage by capture was a fairly recent in­ novation, which emerged fro m gangs of young men stealing women from enemy villages and, often, demanding that their fathers pay money to get them back.

85 . Boon 197T 74 8 6 . Covarrubias (1937:12) notes that

as early as 1619, Balinese women were in great demand in slave markets in Reunion.

87. Boon 1977 :28, van der Kraan 1983 , Wiener 1995 : 27

8 8 . Vickers 1996 : 6 1 . I need only re­ mark that the anthropological literature on Bali, most notably Clifford Geertz's fa mous essay on the Balinese cockfight as "deep play" (1973 ) , a space where Balinese people can express their inner demons and tell stories about themselves, or his conception of pre-colonial governments as " theater states" ( 1980) whose politics cen­ tered around gathering the resources to create magnificent rituals, might well be rethought in the l ight of all of this. There is a peculiar blindness in this literature. Even Boon, after the above quote about men hiding their daughters, proceeds on the very next page (1977:75 ) to refer to that government's " subjects" as really j ust a " s lightly taxed audience for its ritu­ als," as if the likely prospect of the rape, murder and enslavement of one's children didn't really matter, or, anyway, was not of explicitly political import.

89 . A l l this is meant in part as a cri­ tique of Louis Dumont's arguments (1992) that the only truly egalitarian societies are modern ones, and even those only by de­ fault: since their ultimate value is individ­ ualism, and since each individual is valu­ able above all for the degree to which he or she is unique, there can be no basis for saying that anyone is intrinsically superior to anybody else. One can have the same

effect without any doctrine of " Western individualism" at a l l . The entire concept of "individualism" needs to be seriously rethought.

90 . Beattie 1960: 61. 91 . True, in many traditional societies,

penalties a re given to men who beat their wives excessivel y . But again, the assump­ tion is that s o m e such behavior is at least par for the course.

92 . On charivari, see for instance Da­ vis 1975 , Damron 1984. Keith Thomas (1972 : 630 ) , who cites this very Nyoro story in an account of English villages of that time, recounts a whole series of social sanctions, such as dunking the "village scold , " that seem almost entirely aimed at the violent control of women, but oddly, he claims that charivari were directed at men who beat their wives, despite the fact that all other sources say the opposite.

93 · Not quite all. Again, one might cite Iroquois society of the same period as an example: it was in many senses a matriarchy, particularly on the everyday household level, and women were not exchanged .

94· Taken from Trawick 2000 : 1 85 , fig­ ure n .

95 · The diagram is reproduced from P. Bohannan 195] : 87 .

96 . Akiga Sai 1939: 1 6 1 . 97· So t o o a m o n g t h e L e l e , where

Mary Douglas (1963 : 131 ) remarks that it was considered acceptable to whip a vil­ lage wife for refusing work or sex, but this was no reflection on her status, since the same was true of Lele wives married to j ust one man, too.

Chapter Seve n

1. http.sumerianorg/prot-sum.htm, from a "Proto-Sumerian dictionary"

2. Florentius in Justinian's Institutes ( 1 .5 .4. 1 ) . It is interesting to note that when attempts are made to j ustify slavery, start­ ing with Aristotle, they generally focus

4 1 4 N O T E S

not on the institution, which is not in it­ self j ustifiable, but on the inferior qualities of some ethnic group being enslaved.

3 · Elwahid I93L Clarence-Smith (2oo 8 : I7n56) notes that ai-Wahid's book itself emerged from within lively debates in the Middle East about the role of slav­ ery in Islam that had been going on at least since the mid-ni neteenth century.

4· Elwahid I93 I : IOI-IO, and passim. An analogous list appears in Patterson I98 2 : I05 .

5 · The sale of children was always felt to be a sign of economic and moral breakdown; even later Roman emperors like Diocletian, notes ai-Wahid, supported charities ai med to provide relief for poor fa milies explicitly so they would not have to resort to thi ngs like this (Eiwahed I93I : 8�I ) .

6 . Mitamura I970 . 7· Debt slavery, he notes, w a s practiced

in early Roman history, but this is because according to the laws of the twelve tab­ lets, insolvent debtors could actually be killed. In most places, where this was not possible, debtors were not fu lly enslaved by reduced to pawns or peons (see Testart 20oo, 2002, for a fu ll explanation of the different possibilities ) .

8 . AI-Wahid cites examples from Ath­ enaeus of G reek patients who offered themselves as slaves to doctors who had saved their lives (op cit:234)

9· Ulpian is precise: " I n every branch of the law, a person who fa ils to return from enemy hands is regarded as having died at the moment when he was captured . " (Di­ gest 49. I5 . I 8 ) The Lex Cornelia of 84-8I sc specifies the need for remarriage.

IO. Meillassoux I996 : w6 I I . Patterson I982. " Slavery , " as he de­

fines it, "is the permanent, violent domi­ nation of natally a l ienated and generally dishonored persons . " (I982:I3)

I2. He quotes Frederick Douglass here to great effect: "A man without force is without the essential d ignity of human­ ity. Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it

can pity him; and even that it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise . " ( i n Patterson I982:I3 )

I3 . Presumably an honorable woman as well, though in the case of women, as we shall see, the question became inex­ tricably caught up in questions of fidelity and chastity.

I4. Paul Houlm (in Duffy, MacSham­ hrain and Maynes 2005 =431 . ) True, the balance of trade seems to have shifted back and forth ; at some periods Irish ships were raiding English shores, and after 8oo AD the Vikings carried off thou­ sands, briefly making Dublin the largest slave market in Europe. Still, by this time, cumals do not appear to any longer have been used as actual currency. There are some parallels here with Africa, where in certain times and places affected by the trade, debts were tallied up in slaves as well (Einzig I949 : I53 ) .

IS . St. Patrick, one o f the founders of the Irish church, was one of the few of the early Church Fathers who was overtly and unconditionally opposed to slavery.

I6. Doherty I98o:y8-83 . I7. Gerriets I978 : n8 , I98 I : I7I-72,

I985 :33 8. This was in dra matic contrast, incidentally, to Welsh laws from only two or three centuries later, where the prices of all such obj ects are fastid iously speci­ fied (Ellis I9.26:379-8I ) . The list of items incidentally is a random selection from the Welsh codes.

I8. Doherty I98o:y3-74 I9 . This was true in Irish and in Welsh,

and apparently , other Celtic languages as well. Charles-Edwards ( I978 : I30, I993 =555 ) actually translates " honor price" as " face value . "

20 . The o n e exception being an early ecclesiastical text: Einzig I949 : 247-48 , Gerriets I978 =71 .

2 1 . T h e m a i n source on t h e monetary system is Gerriets (I978 ) , a dissertation that unfortunately was never published as a book. A table of standard rates of ex­ change between cumal, cows, silver, etc,

N O T E S 4 1 5

are also to be found in Charles-Edwards 1993 :478-85 .

22. Gerriets 1978 :53 . 23 . If you had lent a man your horse or

sword and he didn't return it in time for a battle, causing loss of face, or even if a monk lent his cowl to another monk who didn't return it in time, causing h i m not to have proper attire for an important synod, he could demand his honor price (Fergus 198 8 : 1 18 ) .

24. The honor price of Welsh kings was far higher (Ellis 1926:144) .

25 . Provincial kings, who ranked higher, had an honor price of 14 cumals, and in theory there was a high king at Tara who ruled all Ireland, but the posi­ tion was often vacant or contested (Byrne 1973 ) .

26. All o f this i s a simplification of what's in fact an endlessly complicated system, and some points, especially con­ cerning marriage, of which there a re sev­ eral varieties, with different integrations of brideprice and dowry, remain obscure. In the case of clients, for example, there were two initial payments by the lord, the honor price being one of them; with " free clients , " however, the honor price was not paid and the client was not reduced to servile status, (See Kelly 198 8 for the best general summary . )

27. Di metian Code 1 1 . 24.12 (Howe! 2oo6:55 9) . A similar penalty is specified for the kil ling of public officials from cer­ tain districts (Ellis 1926:362) .

2 8 . "There is no evidence that goods themselves could be assigned prices. That is, while Irish moneys could quantify the status of an individual, they were not used to quantify the value of goods . " (Gerriets 1985 = 33 8 ) .

29 . Sutton 2004:374·

30 . Gallant 2000 . One might also con­ sider here the phrase "affa i r of honor," or for that matter, "honor kill ing"-which also make clear that such sentiments are hardly confined to rural G reece.

3 1 . In fact, one could j ust as easily turn the question around, and ask: Why is it so

insulting to suggest that a man's sister is trading sex for money i n the first p lace ? This one reason I say that concepts of honor still shape our perceptions in ways we're not aware of-there are plenty of places in the world where the suggestion that a man's wife is trading sex for profit, or that his sister is engaged with multiple partners, is more likely to be greeted with bemused good humor than with murder­ ous rage. We've already seen examples in the Gunwinggu and the Lele.

32. Obviously I a m distinguishing the term here fro m the broader sense of pa­ triarchy used in much feminist literature, of any social system based on male subor­ dination of women. Clearly the origins of patriarchy in this broader sense must be sought in a much earlier period of history in both the Mediterranean and Near East.

33 · The "Semitic infiltration" model is already to be found in such classic sources as Saggs (1962) . Generally speaking, the pattern seems to be one of periodic urban crisis, the near-breakdown o f riverine so­ ciety being followed by revival, apparently after the advent of a new wave of Semitic pastoralists (Adams et a l . 1974) .

34· Rohrlich 1980 i s a compelling example.

35 · This is of course a vast simplifica­ tion of a thesis mainly identified with the anthropologist Jack Goody ( 1976 , 1983 , 1990) . The basic principle is that dowry is not so much a payment by the bride's father (it might come equally from both sides) but a kind of premature inheritance. Goody has had very little to say about Mesopotamia, though, and that little (1990 :315-17) focuses al most exclusively on upper-class practice.

36 . Wilcke 1985 , Westbrook 198 8 , Greengus 1990, Stol 1995 : 1 25-27. For Mari: Lafont 1987; for Old Babylonian practice: G reengus 1966, 1969; for Nuzi, Grosz 1983 , 1989 .

37· O u r best sources are from the city of Nuzi c1500 sc, though Nuzi was atypi­ cal in certain ways, mainly due to Hur­ rian influence. There, marriage payments

4 1 6 N O T E S

appear to have been made in stages, for instance, at the birth of a first child ( G rosz 198 1 : 176)-a pattern familiar to anthro­ pologists from Melanesia, Africa, and nu­ merous other parts of the world.

3 8 . Finkelstein 1966, VerSteeg 2000 :121, 153n9r . A father could claim monetary damages against someone who falsely claimed that his daughter was not a vir­ gin, presumably because it would lower the bride-price ( Cooper 2002:101 ) .

39 · Bottero 1992:113 . 40 . Stol 1995 : 126. 41 . Cardascia 1959 on " matrimonial

adoption" (also Mendelsohn 1949 : 8-12, G reengus 1975 ) . During times of famine, sometimes even the brideprice was dis­ pensed with, and a starving family might turn over their daughter to a rich house­ hold in exchange for a promise to keep her alive.

42. Evans-Prichard 1931 , Raglan 1931 . It's a little ironic that t h e debate w a s oc­ curring in England, since this was one of the few places where it was, techni­ cally, legal to sell or even auction off one's wife (Menefee 198 1 ; Stone 1990 : 143- 48 ; see Pateman 198 8 ) . Stone notes that while public "wife-sales" in English vil­ lages were apparently really prearranged divorces, "the details of the ritual were designed to emphasize the final nature of the transfer of p roperty, by imitating as closely as possible the sale of a cow or a sheep. A halter was used to lead the wife from her home to the market, and from the market to the house of her pur­ chaser . " (1990 : 145) The p ractice, confined to the popular classes, caused a scandal when documented in Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, but it was only completely abandoned in 1919 .

43 · Finley 198 1 : 153-55 ; Stienkeller 2003 ; M ieroop 2005 : 27-28 . Mieroop notes that the earliest such contract is documented fro m twenty-first-century Babylonia. This is an interesting example for the early his­ tory of wage labor. As I've written else­ where (Graeber 2oo6 :66-69 ; 2007: 91--94) , wage-labor contracts i n the ancient world

were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves-a practice that in Mesopotamia is first documented only in neo-Ba bylonian times (Oppenheim 1964:78 , VerSteeg 2ooo:7o-71 ; for an Egyptian parallel Ver­ Steeg 2002:197) .

44· The entire issue has been compli­ cated by Herodotus' claim ( r . 199) that all Babylonian women other than daughters of the elite were expected to prostitute themselves at temples, once, to earn the money for their dowries. This was cer­ tainly false, but it has caused the terms of debate to become rather confused between people insisting on the importance of "hi­ erodules" or even claiming that all prosti­ tution was effectively sacred (e.g., Kramer 1969, Lambert 1992) and those rejecting the entire notion as Orientalist fantasy (Arnaud 1973 , Westenholz 1989, Beard & Henderson 1997, Assante 2003 ) . However, recently published texts from Kish and Sippar make clear that sexual rituals in­ volving temple women, at least some of whom were paid for their services, defi­ nitely did take place (Gallery 198o; Y offee 1998 ; Stol 1995 : 13 8-39) The devadasi anal­ ogy incidentally was first to my knowl­ edge proposed in Yoffee 1998 :336 . On devadasis in genera l : Orr zooo, Jordan 2003 , Vijaisri 2004.

45 · Kramer 1963 :116, Bahrani 2001 :

59-"60. 46 . A similar reading can be found in

Bottero 1992: 96, but without the a mbiva­ lence, which Lerner (198 0 : 247) emphasizes.

47 · See Lerner 1980, Van Der Toorn 1989, Lambert 1992.

48 . Also, in many places, small-scale female traders are likened to or confused with prostitutes, simply because they have multiple ongoing relationships with unre­ lated men (for a contemporary Kazakh ex­ ample: Nazpary 2001)-and the roles can sometimes overlap.

49 · Diakonoff (1982) . Loose bands of pastoral nomads or refugees, who also sometimes doubled as soldiers, were of­ ten referred to generically as hapiru or habiru, both in Mesopota mia and to the

N O T E S 4 1 7

West. This might be the origin of the term " Hebrew , " another group that according to their own histories had fled from bond­ age, wa ndered with their flocks in the des­ ert, and eventually descended as conquer­ ors on urban society.

so. Herodotus 1 . 1 99 , also S t r a b o 16.1 .20.

51 . Revel ations 17.4-5 · Revelations seems to follow the perspective of the fol­ lowers of Peter more than those of Paul. I observe in passing that Rastafarian­ ism, the main prophetic voice today that makes use of the image of Babylon as cor­ ruption and oppression-though i t does tend to play down the i m agery of sexual corruption-has in practice been very much about the reassertion of patriarchal authority among the poor.

52. 1980:249-54; r989 : 1 2J-40 . The main textual source is D river & M i les 1935 ; also Cardascia 1969.

53 · In Sumerian weddings, a bride's father would cover her with a veil, and the groom would remove it-it was by this act that he made her his wife (Stol 1995 : 1 28 ) . Not only does this demonstrate the degree to which the veil was a sym­ bol of encompassment in some man's do­ mestic authority; it might also have been the source from which the later Assyrian practice was eventually adopted.

54· My take on Confucianism follows Deng's (1999) somewhat unconventional approach. See Watson 1980 on the com­ moditization of women; Gates 1989 on its relation to general decline of women's freedoms during the Song; there seems to have been another major setback during the Ming dynasty-for a recent overview, Ko, Haboush, and Piggott (2003 ) . Testart (2ooo , 2001 :148-49, 190) emphasizes that the case of China confirms his "general sociological law," that societies that prac­ tice brideprice will also allow debt slavery (Testart, Lecrivain, Karadimas & Govo­ roff 2oor ) , since this was a place where the government vainly tried to stop both. Another aspect of Confucianism was that male slavery was seen as much more

dubious than female slavery; though it never went as fa r as in Korea, where af­ ter the invasion of H ideyoshi, a law was passed decreeing that only women could be enslaved.

55 · Tambiah (1973 , 1989) was the first to make what is now the standard critique of Goody's a rgument. Goody prefers to see these as indirect dowry payments since they were normally passed to the fa mily (1990 : 178-97) .

56 . O n Homeric honor: Finley 1954: u 8-r9, Adkins 1972 : 14-16 Seaford 1994 : 6-7. Cattle are again the main unit of account, and silver. Is also apparently used As Classicists have noted, the only actual acts of buying and selling in the Homeric epics are with foreigners (Von Reden 1995 :58-76 , Seaford 2004:26-3o, Finley 1954= 67-70 ) . Needless to say, Ho­ meric society lacked the lega listic preci­ sion of the Irish notion of "honor price" but the principles were broadly the same, since tfme could mean not only "honor" but "penalty" and "compensation . "

57 · Tfme is not used for the "price" of commodities in the Iliad or the Odys­ sey, but then prices of commod ities a re barely mentioned . It is, however, used for "compensation, " in the sense of wergeld or honor-price (Seaford 2004: 198n46 ) . The first attested use of time as purchase price is in the slightly later Homeric Hymn to Demeter (132) where, as Seaford notes, it seems significant that in fact it refers to a slave.

58 . Aristotle, Constitution of the Athe­ nians 2.2. He is referring to the great cri­ sis leading to Solon's reforms, the famous "shaking off of burdens" of c . 594 BC.

59· G reek chattel slavery was in fact much more extreme than anything that appears to have existed in the ancient Near East at the time (see e . g . , Wester­ mann 1955 ; Finley 1974, 198 1 ; Wiede­ mann 198 r ; Dandamaev 1984; Westbrook 1995 ) , not only because most Near East­ ern "slaves" were not technically slaves at all but redeemable debt pawns, who therefore at least in theory could not be

4 1 8 N O T E S

arbitrarily abused, but because even those who were absolute private property had greater rights .

6o. "Self-sufficiency is an end and what is best" ( Aristotle Politics 1256-5 8 ; see Fin­ ley 1974: 10cr-n , Veyne 1979, for classic dis­ cussions of what this meant in practice . )

6r. T h e a rgument h e r e follows K urke 2002. On the public brothels, see Hal­ perin 1990 , Kurke 1996 . There actually were Temple prostitutes in G reece too, mostly fa mously in Corinth, where Strabo ( 8 . 6 . 20) claimed that the Temple of Aph­ rodite owned a thousand of them, appar­ ently, slaves who had been dedicated to the temple by pious worshippers.

62. As noted in the quote from David Sutton (2004) above. For a sampling of the anthropological literature on honor in contemporary Greek society, see: Camp­ bell 1964, Peristiany 1965 , Schneider 1971 , Herzfeld 1980, 1985 , J u s t 2001.

63 . On the impropriety of women's work outside the household, see Brock 1994· O n segregation of women in general: Keuls 1985 , Cohen 1987, Just 1989, Loraux 1993 ·

64. The evidence is overwhel ming, but until recently has been largely ignored . Llewellyn-Jones (2003 ) notes that the practice began as an a ristocratic affecta­ tion, but that by the fifth century, all re­ spectable women " were veiled daily and routinely, at least in public or in front of non-related men" ( i b i d : 14) .

65 . van Reden 1997 : 174, referencing Herodotus 7 . 233 , Plutarch 's Pericles, 26-4-

66. A woman who one of them, Achil­ les, had personally reduced to slavery. Bri­ seis was from the Troj an town of Lyrnes­ sus, and after Achilles killed her husband and three brothers in the Greek attack on the town, she was awarded to him as a prize. (On learning of this, her father later hanged himself. ) In the Iliad, Achilles in­ sists he loves her. Briseis' opinions were not considered worth recording, though later poets, uncomfortable with the idea that the greatest epic of antiquity was a celebration of simple rape, concocted a

story whereby Briseis had actually long been in love with Achilles from afar, and somehow manipulated the course of events so as to cause the battle to begin with.

67. Homeric warriors weren 't really a ristocrats at all, or if they were, as Cal­ houn puts it (1934:30 8 ) they were aris­ tocrats "only in the loosest sense of the word . " Mostly they were j ust a collection of local chieftains and ambitious warriors.

6 8 . See Kurke 1997 : 112-13 , 1999 : 197--98 for Greek elaborations on the theme. So too Seaford : " Whereas the Homeric gift is invested with the personality of its he­ roic donor, the only kind of person that money resembles is the prostitute . For Shakespeare it is 'the common whore of all mankind"' (2002: 156, emphasis in the original. For what it's worth, Seaford is slightly off here: Shakespeare descri bed the earth as the "common whore of all man­ kind," whose womb produces gold, which is money [Timon of Athens 4·3 ·42-45 ] . )

69 . Seaford 2002 i n his review o f Kurke notes that Greek sources regularly go back and forth on this.

70 . In the Odyssey (11 .488--91 ) , fa­ mously, Achilles, when trying to invoke the lowest and most miserable person he can possibly imagine, invokes not a slave but a thete, a mere laborer unattached to any household.

71 . Free porne were always the daugh­ ters of fo reigners o r resident a l i e n s . S o , inciden t a l l y , w e r e the a r i stocrats' cou rtesa n s .

72 . T h e reader w i l l observe that even in the anecdotes that follow, women sim­ ply don't appear. We have no idea who Polemarchus' wife was.

73 · Recall here that pederasty was technica lly against the law. Or, to be more exact, for a man to submit to the passive role in sodomy was illegal ; one could be stripped of one's citizenship for having done so. While most adult men were involved in love affairs with boys, and most boys with men, all did so un­ der the pretense that no intercourse was

N O T E S 4 1 9

actually taking place; as a result, almost anyone could be accused of former im­ propriety. The most famous case here is Aeschines' Against Timarchus (see van Reden 200J :I2o-2J , also Dillon 200J : I I7- 28 . ) Exactly the same dilemmas resurface in Rome, where Cicero, for instance, ac­ cused his rival Marc Antony of having once made his living as a male prostitute (Philippics 2.44-45 ) , and Octavian, the later Augustus, was widely reputed to have "prostituted " hi mself, as a youth, to Julius Caesar, among other powerful pa­ trons (Suetonius Augustus 68) .

74· The most fa mous cases were Ath­ ens, Corinth, and Megara (Asheri 1969; St. Croix 198 1 ; Finley 198 1 : 156-57·)

75 · The law was called the palinto­ kia and is known mainly fro m Plutarch (Moralia 295D , apparently drawing on a lost Aristotelian Constitution of the Megarians . ) A l most everything about it is at issue in current scholarship (Asheri 1969 : 14-16; Figueria 1985 : 14<f-56, Mil­ lettt 1989 : 21-22; Hudson 1992 :31; Bryant 1994: 10o-o44) . Hudson for instance ar­ gues that since the event is said to have happened around 540 sc, at a time when interest-bearing loans might not even have existed, the whole story is likely to be later propaganda . Others suggest that it really happened much later. It's interest­ ing that all G reek sources treat this as a most radical and outrageous populist measure--despite the fact that similar measures became standard Catholic pol­ icy during most of the European Middle Ages .

76 . It is entirely unclear whether loans at interest even existed in this early pe­ riod, since the first apparent reference to interest is from roughly 475 sc, and the first utterly clear ones from the later part of that same century (Bogaert 1966, 1968; Finley 198 1 ; Millett 1991 a : 44-45 ; Hudson 1992) .

77· Compare for example Leviticus 25 :35-37, which stipulates that it is per­ missible to make an i mpoverished " fellow

countryman" a client or tenant, but not to give him an interest-bearing loan.

78 . As Hesiod emphasizes in Works and Days (II 344-63 ) ; he's our main source on such matters. Paul Millett (1991a:]o-35 ) provides a close reading of this passage, to illustrate the a mbiguities between gifts and loans. Millett's book Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (op cit) is the basic work on that topic. Scholarship on the G reek economy has long been pre­ occupied by what's still (rather anachro­ nistically) called the Primitivist-Modernist debate; Millett takes a strong Primitivist position and has taken predictable heat from the other side (e.g., Cohen 1995 , Shipley 1997, 2001 ) . Most of the debate, though, turns on the prevalence of com­ mercial lending, which is tangential to my present concerns .

79 · T h e story is so striking because Nasruddin al most never elsewhere be­ haves in a way that a contemporary au­ dience would consider unfair or exploit­ ative. Those stories that do always focus on his relations with his neighbor the miser-the listener is presumed to know that being a miser, he must, necessarily, be up to no good .

So. "Against Nicostratus " (Demos­ thenes 53 ) . My version largely follows Millet (1991 a :53-59) but also draws on Trevett 1992, Dillon 2oo2: 94-100, Har­ ris 20o6: 261-63 ) . The interpretation of Nicostratus' motives is my own; Dil­ lon, for example, suspects that the en­ tire story of his kidnapping and ransom at Aegina was made up--though if that were the case, one would imagine Apol­ lodorus would have eventually found out and told the j urors. The text doesn't explicitly say that Nicostratus was an a ristocrat, but this seems the most plau­ sible explanation of why someone might have a comforta ble country estate but no money. Apollodorus, though, was known, from other contexts, to have feared that his fellow citizens would have contempt for his lowly background, and tried to compensate by lavish-and some felt,

4 2 0 N O T E S

over-lavish-generosity (see Ballin 1978 ; Trevett 1992) .

8 1 . Athenians when trying to be high­ minded at least spoke as if fellow citizens should behave this way to one another; to loan money at interest to a citizen in dire need was treated as obviously rep­ rehensible behavior (Millett 1991 a : 26) . All philosophers who touched on the subj ect, starting with Plato (Laws 742c, 921c) and Aristotle (Politics 125 8c) denounced inter­ est as immoral. Obviously not everyone felt that way. Here as in the Middle East, from whence the custom had spread (Hud­ son 1992) , the dilemma was that charging interest made obvious sense in the case of commercial loans, but easily became abu­ sive in the case of consumer loans.

82. It's not clear whether debt slavery, or at least debt peonage, was anywhere entirely eli minated, and debt crises contin­ ued to occur at regular intervals in cities other than Athens (Asheri 1969; St. Croix 198 1 ) . Some (Rhodes 198 1 : 1 1 8-27; Cai rns 1991 ; Harris 2oo6 : 249-8o) believe that debt bondage was not even entirely elimi­ nated in Athens. Millett (1991 a 76) is prob­ ably right to say that i mperial capitals like Athens, and later Rome, fended off the dangers of debt crises and resulting un­ rest less by forbidding the practice than by funneling tribute money into social pro­ grams that provided a constant source of funds for the poor, making usury largely unnecessary.

83 . Millett 1991 b : 1 8 9-92. The same was true in Roman Galilee (Goodman 1983 :55 ) , and presumably in Rome as well (Howgego 1992 : 13 ) .

84. the Furies, who pursue Orestes to avenge his killing of his mother, insist that they are collecting a debt due in blood (Aeschylus, Eumenides 26o, 3 19. ) Millett (1991 a : 6-7) compiles a number of exam­ ples. Korver (1934, cf. Mil let 1991 : 29-32) demonstrates that there was never any formal distinction between "gift" and "loan"; the two continually shaded into each other.

85 . The two were seen to be connect­ ed: Herodotus, fa mously, argued that for the Persians, the greatest crime was to lie, and that they therefore forbade the loan­ ing of money at interest since it would necessarily give rise to untruthful behavior ( 1 . 138 ) .

8 6 . Plato Republic 33 1c. 87 . Plato Republic 345d. My reading is

strongly influenced here by that of Marc Shell (1978 ) . Shell's essay is important, but sadly neglected, as Class icists only seem to cite each other (at least, on the subj ect of the Classics ) .

8 8 . What Polemarchus is invoking o f course is the logic of t h e heroic gift, and of the feu d . If someone helps or harms you, you pay them back the same or bet­ ter. Polemarchus actu ally says that there are two circumstances when it's easiest to do this: in war, and in banking.

89 . The Republic was written in 38o BC, and these events took place in 3 88/7. See Thesleff 1989 :5 , DuBois 2003 : 153-54, for the dates and references to ancient and contemporary scholarship on the is­ sue, which concur that these events did take place. It's not entirely clear if Plato was taken in an act of piracy, sold on the orders of an angry ex-patron, or seized as a prisoner of war (Aegina-Plato's birth­ place, incidentally-was then at war with Athen s . ) But the lines blurred. Curiously, Diogenes the Cynic, a younger contempo­ rary of Plato, was also captured by pirates on a trip to Aegina around the same time. In his case no one came to his aid (un­ surprising considering that he rej ected all worldly attachments and tended to insult everyone he met) . He ended up spending the rest of his life as a slave in Corinth (Diogenes Laertius, 4- 9) . Plato, Aristotle, and Diogenes were the three most famous philosophers of the fourth century; the fact that two of the th ree had the expe­ rience of standing on an auction block demonstrates that such things really could happen to anyone.

N O T E S 4 2 1

90 . Plato recounts the events in his Seventh Letter to Dian, but Annikeris only appears in D iogenes Laertius 3 ·I'r20.

91 . I he ring 1877 . 92. Rights "in rem," or " i n the thing,"

are considered to be held " against all the world," since " a duty is incumbent on all persons whatsoever to abstain from acts inj urious to the right"-this is opposed to rights " in personem," which are held against a specific individual or group of individuals (Digby & Harrison 1897=301) . Garnsey (2oo7: 177-I78) notes that Proud­ hen ( 1 840) was correct in insisting that the " a bsolute" nature of property rights in the F rench Civil Code and other paradig­ matic modern legal documents goes back directly to Roman law, both to the notion of absolute private property, and to that of the emperor's absolute sovereignty.

93 · The idea that Roman property was not a right goes back to Villey ( 1946 ) , and became mainstream in English scholarship with Tuck (1979 =7-13 ) and Tierney (1997) , though Garnsey (2007= 177-95) has recently made a convincing case that Roman j u ­ rists d i d s e e property as a right (ius) in the sense that one had a right of alienation, and to defend one's claims in court. It's an interesting debate, largely turning on one's definition of " right," but somewhat tangential to my own argument.

94· "The paradigmatic relation be­ tween a person and a thing is that of own­ ership, yet the omans themselves seemed never to have defined it. To them, it was a power relation-a form of potestas­ d irectly exercised over the physical thing itself" (Samuel 2003 :302) .

95 · In earliest Roman law (the Twelve Tablets of qso sc) slaves were still peo­ ple, but of diminished worth, since inju­ ries against them counted as so percent those of a free person (Twelve Tablets VIII.1o) . By the late Republic, around the time of the emergence of the concept of dominium, slaves had been redefined as res, things, and inj uries to them had the same legal status as inj uries to farm ani­ mals (Watson 1987 :46)

96 . Patterson: "it is difficult to under­ stand why the Romans would want to in­ vent the idea of a relation between a per­ son and a thing (an almost metaphysical notion, quite at variance with the Roman way of thinking in other areas) . . . unless we understand that, for most purposes, the 'thing' on their minds was a slave" (1982:31) .

97 · It does not appear in the Twelve Tablets or early legal documents.

98 . Dominus first appears in 111 BC, dominium, sometime later (Birks 1985 :26) . Keith Hopkins (1978 ) estimates that by the end of the Republic, slaves made up between 30 and 40 percent of the Italian population, perhaps the highest propor­ tion of any known society .

99 · Digest 9 . 2 . 1 1 pr., Ulpian in the 1 8'h book on the Edict.

100. The examples are from Digest

47.2.36 p r . , Ulpian in the 41" book on Sa­ binus, and Digest 9.2.33 pr, Paulus' sec­ ond book to Plautius, respectively.

101. See Saller (1984) on domus ver­ sus familia. The word familia, and its various later European cognates, famille in French, family in English, and so on, continued to refer primarily to a unit of authority and not necessarily of kinship until at least the 18th century (Stone 196 8 , Flandrin 1979 , Duby 1982: 22o-23 , Ozment 1983 ; Herlihy 1985 )

102. Westbrook 1999 :207 goes through the three known cases of this really hap­ pening. It would seem that the father's authority here was considered identical to that of the state. If a father was found to have executed his child i llegiti mately, he could be punished.

103 . O r to enslave them . In fact the Law of the Twelve Tablets ( I I L I ) itself seems to be an attempt to reform or mod­ erate even harsher practices, as a!-Wahid (Elwahed 1931 : 8 I-82) was perhaps the first to point out.

104. Finley notes that the sexual avail­ ability of slaves "is treated as a common­ place in the Graeco-Roman literature"

4 2 2 N O T E S

(198o:143 ; see Saller 1987: 98---99, Glancey wo6:5o-57) .

105 . There i s a lively debate about whether breeding slaves was ever exten­ sively practiced in Rome: one common theory of slavery (e.g., Meillassoux 1996, Anderson 1974) arguing that it is never profitable to do so, and when a supply of new slaves is cut off, slaves will ordinarily be converted into serfs. There seems no reason to weigh in on this here, but for a summary, see Bradley 1987.

106. True, Roman citizens could not legally enslave one another; but they could be enslaved by foreigners, and pirates and kidnappers rarely put too fine a point on such things.

107. The Chinese emperor Wang Mang was so fastidious on this point, for in­ stance, that he once ordered one of his own sons put to death for the arbitrary murder of a slave (Testart 1998 : 23 . )

108. T h e lex Petronia. Technically it bans owners from ordering slaves to " fight the wild beasts , " a popular public enterta inment: " fight," though, is usually a euphemism, si nce those fighting hungry lions were not provided with weapons, or obviously inadequate ones. It was only a century later, under Hadrian (117-I3 8 AD) , that owners were forbidden to kill their slaves, ma intain p rivate dungeons for them or p ractice other cruel and excessive punishments. Interestingly, the gradual li mitation of the power of slave-owners was accompanied by increasing state pow­ er, expansion of citizenship, but also the return of various forms of debt-bondage and the creation of dependent peasantry (Finley 1972 : 92---93 ; I981:164-65 ) .

109. Thus Livy (41 . 9.11) notes i n 177 BC the senate actually passed a law to pre­ vent Italians who were not Roman citizens from selling relatives into slavery in this way in order to become citizens.

no. The phrase is preserved in the work of the elder Seneca ( Controversias 4.7) and noted by Finley (198 0 : 96 ) , among others. There is a detai led d i scussion in Butrica 2oo6 : 21o-23 .

111. Wirszubski 1950 . On the etymol­ ogy , see Benveniste 1963 :262-72 . Similar­ ly Kopytoff and Miers (1977) emphasize that in Africa, " freedom" always meant incorporation into some kin group--only slaves were "free" (in our sense) of all so­ cial relations.

112. Florentius in Justinian's Institutes (1.5 ·4· 1 ) . Some suggest that the word "natura l " in the first sentence was only inserted in later editions, perhaps in the fourth century. The position that slavery is a product of force enshri ned in law, contrary to nature, however, goes back at least to the fourth century BC, when Aris­ totle (Politics 1253 b2o-23) explicitly takes issue with it (see Cambiano 1987) .

113 . A l ready i n the that century, law­ yers like Azo and Bracton began asking: If this is true, wouldn't that mean a serf is a free man too? (Harding 198 0 :424 note 6; see also Buckland 19o 8 : 1 , Watson 1987) .

114. Ulpian wrote that " everyone was born free under the law of nature" and that slavery was a result of the ius gen­ tium ( " law of nations " ) , the common le­ gal usages of mankind. Some later j u rists added that property was originally com­ mon and the ius gentium was responsible for kingdoms, property, and so on ( Digest 1 . 1 .5) . As Tuck notes (1979= 19) , these were really scattered ideas, only systematized by Church thinkers like Gratian much later, during the twelfth-century revival of Roman law.

115 . Princeps legibus solutus est ( " the sovereign is not bound by the laws " ) , a phrase initially coined by Ulpian and re­ peated by Justinian ( 1 .3 pr.) This was a very new notion in the ancient world; the G reeks, for instance, had insisted that while men could do as they liked with their women, children, and slaves, any ruler who exploited their own subj ects in the same way was the definition of a ty­ rant. Even the basic principle of modern sovereignty, that rulers hold the ultimate power of life and death over their subjects (which modern heads of state still hold in their power to grant pardons) , was looked

N O T E S 4 2 3

on with suspiCion. Similarly, under the Republic, Cicero argued that rulers who insisted on holding the power of life and death were by definition tyrants, " even if they prefer to be called kings" (De Re Pu­ blica 3 . 23 , Westbrook 1999 : 204. )

n6. In the Chronicle of Walter of Guis­ borough (1957 =216 ) ; see Clanchy 1993 :2-5 .

n7. Aylmer 1980. n 8 . To be fair, a classical liberal

would insist that this is the logical conclu­ sion with starting out from the notion of freedom as active instead of passive (or as philosophers put it, that there are "sub­ j ective rights " )-that is, seeing freedom not j ust as others' obligations to allow us to do whatever the law or custom says we can do, but to do anyth ing that is not specifically forbidden, and that this has had tremendous li berating effects. There is certainly truth in this. But historically, it has been something of a side effect, and there are many other ways to come to the same conclusion that do not require us to accept the underlying assumptions about property.

n9. Tuck 1979 :49 , cf. Tully 1993 : 252, Blackburn 1997 = 63-64.

120. Note here that in this period, the j ustification was not based on any assumption of racial inferiority-racial ideologies came later-but rather on the assumption that African laws were legiti­ mate and should be considered binding, at least on Africans.

121 . I ' ve made the argument that wage labor is rooted in slavery extensively in the past-see e.g., Graeber 2oo6.

122. This is the reason, as C.B. MacPherson (1962) explained, that when "human rights abuses" are evoked in the newspapers, it is only when govern­ ments can be seen as trespassing on some victim's person or possessions-say, by raping, torturing, or kil ling them. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like j ust about all similar documents, also speaks of universal rights to food and shelter, but one never reads about govern­ ments committing "human rights abuses"

when they eliminate price supports on basic foodstuffs, even if it leads to wide­ spread maln utrition, or for razing shan­ tytowns or kicking the homeless out of shelters .

123 . One can trace the notion back as least as far back as Seneca, who in the first century AD, a rgued that slaves could be free in their minds, since force only ap­ plied to the "prison of the body" (De ben­ eficiis 3 .20)-this appears to have been a key point of transition between the notion of freedom as the ability to form moral relations with others, and freedom as an internalization of the master's power.

124. See Roitman 2003 :224 for one au­ thor who explicitly relates this to debt. For objects as unique points in a human history, there is a vast literature, but see Hoskins 1999, Graeber 2oo r .

125 . One can t e l l how unusual slav­ ery was by informants' assu mptions that slaves would have no idea that this was to be their fate.

126. Significantly, at the very moment when his social existence was the only ex­ istence he had left. The mass killing of slaves at the funerals of kings, or gran­ dees, has been docu mented from ancient Gaul, to Sumer, China, and the Americas.

127 . Iliad 9 :342-44. 128. · Evans-Pritchard 1948 :36; cf. , Sah­

lins 198 1 . For a good example of identifi­ cation of kings and slaves, Feeley-Harnik 1982. Obviously, everyone is well aware that kings do have families, friends, lov­ ers, etc-the point is that this is always seen as something of a problem, since he should be king to all his subj ects equally.

129. Regarding the influence of Roman law on the liberal tradition, it is fascinat­ ing to note that the very earliest author we have on record who laid out some­ thing like Smith's model, where money, and ultimately coinage, is invented as an aid to commerce, was another Roman j u ­ r i s t , P a u l u s : Digest 1 8 . r . r .

130 . B u t it h a s by no means been elimi­ nated. (If anyone is inclined to doubt this, I recommend they take a stroll through

4 2 4 N O T E S

their neighborhood ignol'ing all property rights, and see j ust how long it takes for the weapons to come out.)

Chapter Eight

1. "Debt, n . An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver, " wrote t h e notorious cynic Ambrose Bierce ( The Devil's Dictionary, 1911=49 ) . Certain­ ly for those Thai women who appeared at Neil Bush's door, the difference between having been sold by one's parents, and working off one's parents' debt contract, was as much a technicality as it would have been two thousand years ago.

2. One of the few authors I know who's confronted the question head-on is Pierre Docki:s (1979 ) , who makes a con­ vincing statement that it has to do with the power of the state: at least, slavery as an institution was briefly revived under the Carolingian empire and then vanished again afterward. It is certainly interesting that since the nineteenth century at least, the "transition from feudalism to capital­ ism" has become our historical paradigm for epochal social change, and no one much addresses the transition from ancient slavery to feudalism, even though there is reason to believe that whatever is happening now may much more closely resemble it.

3· Robin Blackburn m akes this argu­ ment quite convincingly in The Making of New World Slavery (1997) . There were some exceptions, notably the Italian city­ states. The story is of course more compli­ cated than I'm representing it: one reason for the hostility was that during much of the Middle Ages, Europeans were largely victims of slave-raiders rather than their beneficiaries, with many captives market­ ed in North Africa and the Middle East.

4· The Aegean coins were stamped; the Indian, punched; and the Chinese, cast. This suggests that we are not talking about diffusion here. Speaking of Indian coins, for instance, one historian remarks : " I f there is one thing that seems clear from

a punch-marked coin, it is that the person who thought it up had never seen a G reek coin-or if he had seen one, it had not impressed h i m . The punch-marked coin is made by an entirely different metallurgical process " (Schaps 2006:9) .

5· Pruessner (1928) was perhaps the first to point this out.

6. They appear to have been widely used by Old Assyrian merchants operating in Anatolia (Veenhof 1997) .

7· Powell ( 1978 , 1979, 1999 :14-18) pro­ vides an excellent assessment of the evi­ dence, emphasizing that Babylonians did not produce scales accurate enough to measure the tiny a mounts of silver they would have had to use to make ordinary household purchases like fried fish or cords of firewood in cash. He concludes that silver was largely used in transactions between merchants. Market vendors there­ fore presumably acted as they do in small­ scale markets in Africa and Central Asia, today, building up lists of trustworthy cli­ ents to whom they could extend credit over time (e.g., Hart 1999:201, Nazpary 2001) .

8. Hudson 2002: 21-23 , who hypoth­ esizes that the time element was important as merchants would presumably otherwise delay to employ the funds as long as pos­ sible. See Renger 1984, 1994; Meiroop 2005.

9· I ' m referring here to Qirad and Mudaraba a rrangements, similar to the ancient and Medieval Mediterranean Commenda ( Udovitch 1970, Ray 1997) .

10. Herodotus 1 . 13 8 . n . Herodotus 3 . 102-5. 12. Mieroop 2002 :63 , 2005 :29. He

notes that En metena's total grain income in any one year was roughly 37 million li­ ters, making the sum he claims to be owed more than one thousand times his own palace's annual revenue.

13. Lambert 1971; Lemche 1979:16. 14- H u d s o n 1993 provides t h e m o s t de­

tailed overview of this literature. 15 . Hudson 1993 : 2o . 16. G rierson 1977:17, citing Cerny

1954= 907. 17· Bleiberg 2002

N O T E S 4 2 5

1 8 . One authority states categorically: " I do not know of debt-annulment decrees issued by any Pharaoh" (Jasnow 2001 :42 ) , a n d a d d s that there is no evidence for debt-bondage until the very late Demot­ ic period. This is the same period when G reek sources begin to speak of both .

19 . VerSteeg 2002 : 199; see Lorton 1977:42-44.

20. This in certain ways resembles the legal loopholes created in both the Medi­ eval Christian and Islamic worlds, where interest was formally banned: see chapter 10 below.

21. Diodorus Siculus 1 .79 . See Wes­ termann 1955 :5o-51 for a comparison of G reek and Egyptian sources on the subject.

22. The h istory of the dissemination of interest-bearing debt is only beginning to be reconstructed. It does not yet appear in Ebla (c. 2500 Be) , in Old o r Middle Kingdom Egypt, or in Mycenaean G reece, but it eventually becomes common in the Levant in the late Bronze Age, and also in Hittite Anatolia. As we'll see, it came quite late to Classical G reece, and even later to places like Germany.

23 . In Chinese historiography, in fact, this whole epoch is known as "the feudal period . " )

24 . The Guanzi, cited in Schaps 2006 : 20 .

25 . Yung-Ti (20o6) has recently argued that they weren 't, though we wouldn't really know. Thierry (1992:39-41) simply assumes they were, providing much evi­ dence of their use both as units of account and means of payment, but none of their use for buying and selling.

26. At any rate, cowries were definitely being used as the equivalent of coins in later periods, and the government periodi­ cally either suppressed their use or reintro­ duced them (Quiggin 1949, Swann 1950, Thierry 1992:39-41, Peng 1994. ) Cowrie money survived, alongside tally sticks, as a common form of currency in Yunnan province in the far south until relatively recent times (B. Yang 2002) , and detailed

studies exist, but-as far as I can tell­ only in Chinese.

27. Scheidel 2004:5 . 28. Kan 1978 : 92, Martzloff 2002:178 . I

note in passing that a study of the Inca khipu system itself would itself be quite fascinating in this rega rd ; the strings were used to record both obligations we would consider financial, and others we would consider ritual, since as in so many Eur­ asian languages, the words "debt" and "sin" were the same in Quechua as well (Quitter & Urton 2002:270) .

29. L. Yang (1971 :5 ) finds the first reli­ able literary reference to loans at interest in the fourth century BC. Peng ( 1994: 98- 101) notes that the earliest surviving re­ cords {the oracle bones and inscriptions) do not mention loans, but there's no rea­ son they would; he also assembles most of the available literary references, finds many references to loans in early peri­ ods, and concludes that there's no way to know whether to take them seriously. By the Warring States period, however, there is abundant evidence for local usurers, and all the usual abuses.

30 . Y an tie lun I 2/4b2-6, in Gale (1967) : 12.

31 . Guanzi (73 12) , Rickett (1998 :397)

32. So around 100 BC, " when flood and drought come upon them . . . those who have grain sell at half value, while those who have not borrow at exorbitant usury. Then paternal acres cha nge hands; sons and grandsons are sold to pay debts; mer­ chants make vast profits, and even petty tradesmen set up business and realize un­ heard of gains" (in Duyvendak 1928:32) . Loans at interest are first documented in the fourth century BC in China but may have existed before that (Yang 1971 :5) . For a parallel case of child-selling for debt in early India, Rhys Davids 1922:21 8 .

Chapter Ni n e

1 . ] aspers 1949. 2. Parkes 1959 :71 .

4 2 6 N O T E S

3 · O r , if one must be even more p re­ cise, we should probably end it in 632 AD, with the death of the Prophet.

4· Obviously Vedic Hinduism is ear­ lier; I a m referring to Hinduism as a self­ conscious religion, which is genera lly seen as having taken shape in reaction to Bud­ dhism and Jainism around this time.

5 · The date used to be set much earlier, at 650 or even 700 sc, but recent archaeol­ ogy has called this into question. Lydian coins still seem to be the earliest, though, as most of the others have been seem to be the earliest though .

6. Prakash & Singh 196 8 , Dhavalikar 1974, Kosambi 198 1 , Gupta & Hardaker 1995 . The latest accepted dates for the ap­ pearance of coinage in India, based on ra­ diocarbon analysis, is circa 400 sc (Erdosy 198 8 : 115, 1995 :113 ) .

7· Kosambi ( 1981) notes that there seems to be a direct connection between the first of these and Bronze Age Harap­ pan cities: " even after the destruction of Mohenjo Daro, which is entirely a trade city as shown by its fine weights and poor weapons, the traders persisted, and con­ tinued to use the very accurate weights of that period . " (ibid: 91 ) . Given what we know of Mesopotamia, with which the Harappan civilization was in close con­ tact, it also seems reasonable to assume that they continued to employ older com­ mercial techniques, and, indeed, "promis­ sory notes" do appear as fa miliar practices in our earliest literary sources, such as the Jakatas (Rhys Davids 1901:16, Thapar 1995 : 1 25 , Fiser 2004: 194) , even if these are many centuries later. Of course, in this case, the marks were presumably meant to confirm the accuracy of the weight, to show that it hadn't been fu rther trimmed, but the inspiration of earlier credit prac­ tices seems likely. Kosambi later con­ firms this: "The marks would correspond to modern countersignatures on bills or cheques cleared through business houses . " (1996 : 178-79)

8. Our first literary record of coinage in China is of a kingdom that reformed its

currency system in 524 Be-which means that it already had a currency system, and presumably had for some time (Li 1985 =372) .

9· Schaps 2006 :34. For a similar recent a rgument, Schoenberger 200 8 .

10. Of course t h e very fi r s t coins were of fairly high denominations and quite possibly used for paying taxes and fees, and for buying houses and cattle more than for everyday purchases ( K raay 1964, Price 1983 , Schaps 2004, Vickers 1985 ) . A real market society i n G reece, for in­ stance, could only be said to exist when, as in the fifth century, ordinary citizens went to the m arket carrying minuscule coins of stamped silver or copper in their cheek s .

u. First proposed by Cook (195 8 ) , t h e explanation h a s since lost favor (Price 1983, Kraay 1964, Wallace 1987, Schaps 2004:96-1o1; though cf. Ingham 2004: 1oo)-largely, on the a rgument that one cannot pay soldiers with coins un­ less there are already markets with people willing to accept the coins. This strikes me as a weak obj ection, since the absence of coinage does not imply the absence of either money or markets; al most all par­ ties to the debate (e.g., Balmuth [1967, 1971 , 1975 , 2001) who argues that irregular pieces of silver were already in wide use as currency, and Le Rider (2001 ) , Seaford (2004:318-37) or for that matter Schaps (2004:222-35 ) , who argue that they were not numerous enough to be a viable every­ day currency, seem to give much consid­ eration to the possibility that most market trade took place on credit. Anyway, as I ' ve noted earlier, it would be easy enough for the state to ensure that the coins be­ came acceptable currency simply by in­ sisting that they were the only acceptable means of payment for obligations to the state itself.

12. Most of the earliest known G reek bankers were of Phoenician descent, and it's quite possible that they first intro­ duced the concept of interest there (Hud­ son 1992) .

N O T E S 4 2 7

IJ . Elayi & Elayi 1992. 14. Starr 1977:H]; see Lee 2000. 15 . It's interesting to note that, to our

knowledge, the great trading nations did not produce much in the way of great art or philosophy.

r6. The great exception was of course Sparta, which refused to issue its own coinage but developed a system whereby aristocrats adopted a strict mi litary life­ style and trained permanently for war.

q. Aristotle hi mself noted the con­ nection when he emphasized that the constitution of a G reek state could be predicted by the main army of its mili­ tary: aristocracies if they relied on cavalry (since horses were very expensive) , oligar­ chies in the case of heavy infantry (since armor was not cheap ) , democracy in the case of light infantry or navies (since any­ one could wield a sling or row a boat) (Politics 4· J . I289bJJ-44, I J . I 297b16-24, 6 .7.IJ2Ia6-I4) .

r 8 . Keyt (1997 :IoJ) summarizin " g Poli­

tics I)04b27-3I . 19 . Thucydides (6. 97·7) claimed that

2o,ooo escaped from the mines in 421 sc, which i s probably exaggerated, but most sources estimate at least ro,ooo for most of that century, generally working shack­ led and under atrocious conditions (Rob­ inson 1973 ) .

20 . Ingham 2004: 99-Ioo. 21. MacDonald 2oo6 :43 . 22. On Alexander's armies monetary

needs, Davies 1996 : 8 o in turn, 83 ; on his logistics more generally, Engels 1978 . The figure no,ooo includes not only actual troops but servants, camp-followers, and so forth .

23 . G reen 1993 :366. 24· The Roman institution was called

nexu m , and we don't know entirely how it worked: i . e . , whether it was a form of labor contract, whereby one worked off the debt for a fixed term, or something more like African pawn systems, where the debtor-and his or her children­ served in conditions roughly like those of a slave until redemption (see Testart 2002

for the possibilities ) . See Buckler 1895 , Brunt 1974, Cornell 1994: 266-67, JJo--J2.

25 . Hence, most of the scandalous sto­ ries that sparked uprisings against debt bondage centered on dramatic cases of physical or sexual abuse; of course, once debt bondage was abolished and house­ hold labor was instead supplied by slaves, such abuse was considered normal and acceptable.

26. The first bronze coins paid to sol­ diers seem to have been coined around

400 BC (Scheidel 2oo6) , bur this was the traditional date according to Roman historians.

27. What I am a rguing flies in the face of much of the conventional scholarly wisdom, summed up best perhaps by Mo­ ses Finley when he w rote " i n G reece and Rome the debtor class rebelled; whereas in the Near East they did not"-and therefore reforms like those of Nehemiah were at least minor, temporary palliatives. Near Eastern rebellion took a different form; moreover, G reek and Roman solu­ tions were both more l i mited and more temporary than he supposed.

28. Ioannatou 2006 for a good exam­ ple. Cataline's conspiracy of 63 BC was an alliance of indebted aristocrats and des­ perate peasants. On continued Republican debt and land redistribution campaigns: Mitchell I993 ·

29. Howgego makes this point: " I f less is heard of debt under the Principate it may well be because political stability re­ moved the opportunity for the expression of discontent. This argument is supported by the way i n which debt re-emerges as an issue at times of open revolt" (1992 : 1J ) .

30. Plutarch, M o ralia, 828f-83 r a . J I . There is, needless t o s a y , a vast

and conflicting literature, but probably the best source is Banaji (2001) . He em­ phasizes in the late empire, "debt was the essenti al means by which employers en­ forced control over the supply of labour, fragmenting the solidarity of workers and 'personalizing' relations between owners

4 2 8 N O T E S

and employees" (ibid:205 ) , a situation he compares interestingly to India.

32. Kosambi I966, Sharma I96 8 , Misra I976 , Altekar I977 :mcr3 8 . Contemporary Indian historians, who refer to them as gana-sanghas ( " tribal assemblies " ) , tend to dismiss them as warrior aristocracies supported by populations of helots or slaves, though of course, G reek city-states could be described the same way.

33 · In other words, they looked more like Spa rta than like Athens . The s l aves were also col lectively owned (Chakravarti I985 :48-49. ) Again, one has to wonder how much this was really the general rule, but I yield to the predominant scholarly opinion on such matters.

34· Arthasastra 2.12.27. See Sc­ haps 2oo6 : I 8 for a nice comparative commentary.

35 · Thapar 2002:34, Dikshitar I 948 .

36 . There were also taxes, of course, usually ranging from I/6 to II 4 of total yield (Kosambi I996:3 I6; Sihag 2005 ) , but taxes also served as a way to bring goods to the market.

37· So Kosambi I96 6 : I52-57.

3 8 . And wage labor, two phenomena that, a s so often in the ancient world, largely overlapped: the common phrase for workers used in texts from the peri­ od was dasa-karmakara, "sl ave-hireling" with the assu mption that slaves and la­ borers worked together and were barely distinguishable (Chakravarti I985) . On the predominance of slavery, see Sharma I958 , Rai I98L T h e extent i s contested, b u t ear­ ly Buddhist texts do seem to assume that any wealthy fa mily would normally have domestic slaves-which certa inly wasn't true in other periods .

39 · Punch-marked coins were also eventu ally replaced, after Alexander's brief conquest of the Indus Valley and his establishment of G reek colonists in Afghanistan, by Aegean-style coins, ulti­ mately causing the entire Indian tradition to disappear ( K osambi I98 I , Gupta & Hardaker I985 . )

40 . I t ' s referred t o as t h e "Pillar Edict" (Norman I975 :I6) .

41 . There' s a good deal of debate as to when: Schopen ( I994) emphasizes there is little evidence for substantial Buddhist monasteries until the first century AD, per­ haps three centuries later. This has a great deal of bearing on monetarization too, as we'll see.

42. "The private trader was regarded as a thorn ( kantaka ) , a public enemy j ust short of a national calamity, by Arth. 4 .2, taxed and fined for malpractices of which many a re taken for granted " (Kosambi I996 = 243 ) .

43 · Those wishing t o become monks had to first affirm that they were not themselves debtors (just as they also had to promise they weren 't runaway slaves ) ; b u t there w a s no rule saying the monas­ tery itself could not lend money . In China, as we'll see, providing easy credit terms for peasants came to be seen as a form of charity :

44· Similarly, Buddhist monks are not allowed to see an army, if they can pos­ sibly avoid it (Pacittiya, 48-5I ) .

45 · Lewis I990 . 46 . Wilbur I 943 , Yates 2002. The state

of Qin, during the Warring States period, not only allowed for army officers to be allocated slaves by rank, but for mer­ chants, crafts men, and the "poor and idle" to themselves be "confiscated as slaves" (Lewis I99o:6I-62) .

47 · Scheidel (2oo6, 2007, 2009) has considered the matter at length and con­ cluded that Chinese currency took the unusual form that it did for two maibn reasons : (I) the historical coi ncidence that Qin (which used bronze coins) defeated Chu (which used gold) in the civil wars, and su bsequent conservatis m , and (2) the lack of a highly paid professional army, which allowed the Chinese state to act like the early Roman republic, which also limited itself to bronze coins for peasant conscripts-but unlike the Roman repub­ lic, was not surrounded by states accus­ tomed to other forms of currency.

N O T E S 4 2 9

48 . Pythagoras was, as far as we know, the first to take the latter course, found­ ing a secret political society that for a while had control over the levers of politi­ cal power in the Greek cities of southern Italy.

49· Hadot 1995, 2002. In the ancient world, Christianity was recognized as a philosophy largely because it had its own forms of ascetic practice.

so. O n the Tillers: Graham 1979, 1994: 67-11 0 . They seem to have flour­ ished around the same time as Mo Di, the founder of Mohism ( roughly 47o-391 sc) . The Tillers ultimately vanished, leav­ ing behind mainly a series of treatises on agricultural technology, but they had a tremendous influence on early Taoism­ which, in turn, became the favorite phi­ losophy for peasant rebels for many cen­ turies to come, sta rting with the Yellow Turbans of 184 AD. Eventually, Taoism was displaced by messianic forms of Bud­ dhism as the favorite ideology of rebel­ lious peasants.

51 . Wei-Ming 1986, Graham 1989, Schwartz 1986.

52. Legend has it that after one Py­ thagorean mathematician discovered the existence of irrational numbers, other members of the sect took him on a cruise and dropped him overboard . For an ex­ tended discussion of the relation of early Pythagoreanism (53o-4oo sc) to the rise of a cash economy, see Seaford 2004:266-75 ) .

53 · A t least i f m y own experience in Madagascar is anything to go on.

54· War is quite similar: it's also an a rea in which it's possible to imagine ev­ eryone as playing a game where the rules and stakes are unusually transparent. The main difference is that in war one does care about one's fellow soldiers. On the origins of our own notion of "self­ interest," see chapter n below.

55 · Not to be confused with the unre­ l ated Confucian term /i, meaning " ritual" or "etiquette . " Later, /i became the word for " interest"-that is, not only " self­ interest, " but also "interest payment"

(e.g., Cartier 198 8 : 26-27) . I should note that my argument here is sl ightly uncon­ ventional. Schwartz (1985 : 145-51 ) notes that in Confucius, "profit" has a purely pejorative meaning, and he argues that it was subversively reinterpreted by Mo D i . I fi n d it unlikely t h a t Confucius represents conventional wisdom at this time; while his writings are the earliest we have on the subj ect, his position was clearly marginal for centuries after his death. I a m assum­ ing instead that the Lega list tradition re­ flected the common wisdom even before Confucius-or certa inly, Mencius.

56 . Zhan Guo Ce ( " Strategies of the Warring States " ) no. 109, 7. 175

57 · Annuals of Lii Buwei, 815 ·4·

58 . See Ames (1994) for a discussion of key terms: si li (self-interest) , shi (strategic advantage ) , and /i min (public profit) .

59· Book of Lord Shang 947-48, Duyvendak 1928:65 .

6o. Kosambi's translation (1965 : 142) ; the Encyclopedia Britannica prefers " hand­ book on profit" (entry for " Carvak a " ) ; Al­ tekar (1977:3 ) , "the science of wealth . "

6 1 . Nag & Dikshitar 1927: 15 . Kosambi argues that the Mauryan polity was thus based on a fundamental contradiction: "a moral law-abiding popul ation ruled by a completely amoral king" (1996 : 237) . Yet such a situation is hardly unusual, before or smce.

62. Thucydides 5 · 85 -113 (cf. 3 .36-49) . The event took place i n 416 sc, around the same time that Lord Shang and Kautilya were writing. Significantly, Thucydides' own obj ections to such behavior are not explicitly moral but center on showing that it was not to the " long-term prof­ it" of the empire (Kallet 200 1 : 19) . On Thucydides' own utilitarian materialism more generally, see Sahlins 2004.

63 . Mozi 6 :7B, in Hansen 2000 : 137 64. Mencius 4. 1 , in Duyvendak

1928:76-77. He appears to be referring to a distinction originally made by Confucius hi mself: " the superior person understands what is right while the inferior person

4 3 0 N O T E S

only understands what is personally prof­ itable" (Analects 7·4·16) .

65 . The Mohist path--overtly embrace financial logic-was the less well trod­ den. We've already seen how in India and Greece, attempts to frame moral ity as debt went nowhere: even the Vedic principles are ostensibly about liberation from debt, which was also, as we've seen, a central theme in Israel.

66. Leenhardt 1979 :164. 67. This interpretation does fly fa irly

di rectly in the face of the main thrust of scholarship on the issue, which tends in­ stead to emphasize the "transcendental" nature of Axial Age ideas (e.g., Schwartz 1975 , Eisenstadt 198z, 1984, 1986, Roetz 1993 , Bellah zoos ) .

6 8 . The G reek system actually began with Fire, Air, and Water, and the Indian with Fire, Water, and Earth, though in each case there were numerous elabora­ tions. The Chinese elemental system was fivefold: Wood, Fire, Earth, Meta l, Water.

69. In Christianity, at least in the Au­ gustinian tradition, this is quite explicit: the material world does not in any sense partake of God; God is not in it; it was simply made by Him (De civitate dei

4. 12)-this radical separation of spirit and nature being-according to Henri Frank­ fort (1948 :34Z-44)-a peculiarity of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. That same Augustinian tradition, though, also drew on Plato to insist that reason, on the other hand-the abstract principle which allows us to understand such things, and which is entirely separate from matter-does par­ take of the divine (see Hoitenga 1991:nz- 14, for the conflict in Augustine's own ideas here) .

70 . Shell's essay "The Ring of Gyges" (1978) has already been cited in the last chapter, in my discussion of Plato; Seaford 1998 , 2004·

71 . This is based on the fact that Mi­ letus was one of the cities, if not the first city, to produce coins of small enough

denominations that they could be used for everyday transactions ( K raay 1964: 67) .

7z. Heraclitus was from the nearby Io­ nian city of Ephesus and Pythagoras origi­ nally from the Ionian island of Samos. After Ionia was incorporated into the Persian empire, large numbers of Ionians fled to southern Italy, which then became the center of G reek phi losophy, again, at j u st the period when the G reek cities there became thoroughly monetarized. Athens became the center of G reek philosophy only in the fifth century, which is also when Athens was militarily dominant and the Athenian "owl" coinage became the main international currency of the Eastern Mediterranean.

73 · Or as Seaford (zoo4: zo8) puts it, echoing Anaximander's description of his primal substance, "a distinct, eternal, im­ personal, all-embracing, unlimited, homo­ geneous, eternally moving, abstract, regu­ lating substance, destination for all things as well as their origin" (or, at least, " a l l things " that were available for purchase.)

74· Seaford zoo4: 136-46; see Picard 1975 ; Wallace 1987; Harris zoo8a:10. Pure­ ly " fiduciary" money is of course what a metallist would call "fiat" or "token" money, or a Keynesian, "charta! money . " Despite Finley's arguments t o the con­ trary (1980:141 , 196 ) , j ust about all ancient money was fiduciary to some extent. It's easy to see why coins would ordinarily circulate at a higher face value than their weight in gold or silver, since the price of the latter would tend to fluctuate, but the moment the coin's face value was lower than that of its metal content, there would be no reason not to melt it down.

75 · In the case of truly large states like the Roman or Mauryan empires, inflation did eventually result, but the fu ll effects were not felt for at least a century (see In­ gham zooz : 1o1-4, Kessler & Temin zooS , H a rris zoo8b for some good discussions o f t h e Roman situatio n . )

76 . Seaford zoo4 :13 8-39 ·

N O T E S 4 3 1

77· I am partly inspired here by Marcel Mauss's arguments about of the concept of substance (Allen 1998 ) .

78 . Hence, as we'll see Aristotle's posi­ tion that a coin was only a social con­ vention (Nicomachean Ethics 1133 a2<r-31 ) remained very m u c h a minority v i e w i n t h e ancient world. It d i d become t h e pre­ dominant view later, in the Middle Ages.

79· He is known as Payasi in the Buddhist scriptures, Paesi in the Jaina (see Bronkhorst 2007:143-159 for a good discussion of these earliest Indian mate­ rialists; for the later materialist school, to which Kautilya is said to belong, see Chattopadhyaya 1994. Jaspers (1951 : 135 ) , writing o f India, notes the appearance of "all phi losophical trends, including skep­ ticism and materialism, soph istry and nihilism "-a significant list, since it's ob­ viously not a list of "all" philosophical trends at all, but only the most materialist.

So. In The Republic it is rejected out of hand. In India, as I've a rgued, the Hin­ du tradition only appears to embrace it. Buddhists, Jains, and other oppositional phi losophies didn't use the term at all.

8 1 . Philo of Alexandria, writing around the time of Christ, says of the Essenes : "not a single slave is to be found � mong them, but all are free, exchanging services with each other, and they denounce the owners of slaves, not merely for their inj ustice in outraging the law of equality, but also for their impiety in annulling the statute of nature" (Quod o mnis probus liber sit 79) . The Therapeutae, another Jewish group, group rej ected all forms of property, but looked on slavery "to be a thing abso­ lutely and wholly contrary to nature, for nature has created all men free" (De Vita Contemplativa 70) . The simi larity to Ro­ man law ideas is notable. Jewish groups are unusually well documented; i f similar sects existed in, say, Thrace, or Numidia, we probably wouldn't know.

82. Later legend had it that his father was a king and he grew up in a palace, but the Sakya "king" of the time was in fact

a elected and rotating position ( Kosambi 1965 : 96 ) .

Chapter Te n

1. Coins produced by the barbarian successor states generally did not have a great deal of gold or silver in them ; as a result they tended to circulate only within the principality of the king or baron who issued them and were largely useless for trade.

2. Dockes (1979:62-70) provides a good overview of the situation-l iterally, since current understandings of the extent of Roman slave estates in France are based largely on aerial photography. Over time even the free communities largely ended up in debt peonage of one sort or another, or bound to the land as serfs (in Latin, coloni) .

3 · As we've seen, Kosambi saw Magadha as a peak of monetarization. R.S. Sharma (2oo1 :n<r-62) argues that coinage remained commonplace under the Guptas (28o to 550 AD) but then abruptly disappeared almost everywhere thereaf­ ter. However, even if he is right that the total number of coins in circulation did not diminish until then, he hi mself points out (ibid:143 ) that the total population of the Ganges Plain almost tripled over this period, so even this would mark a steady decline.

4· For an overview: R . S . Sharma 1965 , Kane 1968 I I I :4n-6 r , Chatterjee 1971 . Schopen (1994) especi ally emphasizes that the techniques grow more sophisticated over the course of the Middle Ages, for instance, developing bookkeeping tech­ niques for combining compound interest with partial repayments.

5 · Documents on the regulation of mo­ nastic affairs pay a great deal of atten­ tion to the details: how when the money was lent out, contracts would be signed, sealed, and deposited in the temple before

4 3 2 N O T E S

witnesses; how a surety or pledge worth twice the amount of the loan should be turned over, how "devout lay brothers " should be assigned to manage the invest­ ment, and so forth (Schopen 1994) .

6 . From the Arab dinar, which i n turn derives from the Roman denarius. It is unclear whether such sums were actually paid in coins at this point: one early mo­ nastic manual, for example, speaking of objects that might be relegated to the In­ exhaustible Treasuries and thus put out at interest, mentions "gold and silver, wheth­ er in the form of coins, finished or raw, in large or small quantities, pure or a lloyed, or whether in the form of utensils, finished or unfinished" (Mahasamghika Vinaya, in Gerner 1956 [ 1995 :I65 ] ) .

7· Fleet 1 8 8 8 : 26o-62, a s translated in Schopen 1994:532-33 . One need hardly remark on the irony of this emphasis on eternity emerging within Buddhism, a re­ ligion founded on the recognition of the impermanence of all worldly attachments.

8 . The commercial loans are docu­ mented from an inscription at the West Indian monastery at Karle (Levi 193 8 : 145 ; Gerner 1956 [ 1995 :164] ; Barreau 196 1 :444- 47) , the assemblies from later Tamil temples (Ayyar 1982:4o-6 8 , R.S. Sharma 1965 . ) It is not clear whether some of these were commercial loans, or more like the later Buddhist custom of jisa still current in Tibet, Bhutan, and Mongolia, where an individual, or collective, or group of fami­ lies wishing to support a specific ceremony or, say, an educational proj ect might re­ ceive a soo-rupee loan "in perpetuity" and then be expected to provide 8oo rupees a year to organize the ceremony . The re­ sponsibilities are then inherited, though the "loan" can be transferred (Miller 1961, Murphy 1961) .

9 · Kalhana, Rajatarangini 7 ·1091-98 ; s e e Basham 1948 , Riepe 196 1 :44n49 · ) The monks were apparently Aj ivkas, who still existed at this time.

1 0 . Naskar 1996, R.S. Sharma 2oo 1 :4s- 66, on the Puranic description of the "Kali age , " which seems to be the way

later Brahmins referred to the period from roughly Alexander's reign to the early Middle Ages, a period of insecurity and unrest when foreign dynasties ruled much of India, and caste hierarchies were widely challenged or rej ected .

n. Manusmrti 8 .5 . 257· Significantly, the debt to other humans vanishes entirely in these texts.

12. Manusmrti 8 .5 . 27o--72. A Sudra's tongue would also be cut off for insulting a member of the twice-born castes ( 8 . 270) .

13 . R . S . Sharma 195 8 , 1987, Chauhan 2003 .

14. "A Sudra, though emancipated by his master, is not released from a state of servitude, for a state which is natural to him, by whom can he be divested ? " (Manusmrti, Yajfiavalkya S mrti 8 .5 .419) , o r even "Sudras must b e reduced to slav­ ery, either by purchase or without pur­ chase, because they were created by God for the sake or serving others ( 8 .5 .413 ) .

15 . Kautilya allowed 6 o percent for commercial loans, 120 percent "for enter­ prises that involve j ourneys through for­ ests , " and twice that for those that involve shipping goods by sea (Arthasastra 3 . n ; o n e later code, Yajfiavalkya Smrti 2 .3 8 follows thi s . )

16. Yajfiavalkya S m r t i 2 .37, Manusmrti 8 . 143 , Vi�I:Jusmrti 5 .6.2, see Kane 1968 I I I :421.

I?· R.S. Sharma 1965 : 6 8 . Similarly, early law-codes specified that anyone who defaulted on a debt should be reborn as a slave or even a domestic animal in their creditor's household: one later Chinese · Buddhist text was even more exact, speci­ fying that for each eight wen defaulted, one must spend one day as an ox, or for each seven, one day as a horse (Zhuang Chun in Peng 1994: 244n17)

1 8 . Dumont (1966) . 19 . Gyan Prakash (2003 : 1 84) makes

this point for the colonial period: when one-time caste h ierarchies began to be treated instead as matters of debt bond­ age, subordinates turned into persons who

N O T E S 4 3 3

had equal rights, but whose rights were temporarily " suspended . "

2 0 . T o b e fair, one could also argue that indebted peasants are also likely to be in comm and of more resources, and thus be more capable of organizing a rebel­ lion. We know very little about popular insurrections in Medieval India (though see Guha (1999) . Palat (1986, 198 8 : 205-15 ; Kosambi 1996 :392-93 ) , but the total num­ ber of such revolts seems to have been rel­ atively low in comparison to Europe and certainly in comparison to China, where rebellion was almost ceaseless.

21. "No one knows j ust how many re­ bellions have taken place in Chinese his­ tory. From the official record there were several thousand incidents within just th ree years from 613 to 615 AD, probably one thousand events a year (Wei Z . AD 656 : t:h. " Report of the I mperial Histori­ ans" ) . According to Parsons, during the period 1629-44, there were as many as 234,185 insu rrections in China, averaging 43 events per day, or 1.8 outbreaks per hour" (Deng 1999 :220) .

22. Following Deng (1999) . 23 . Huang 1999 : 231 . 24. These loans appear t o h a v e been

an extension of the logic of the state gra­ naries, which stockpiled food; some to sell at strategic moments to keep prices low, some to distribute free in times of fa mine; some to loan at low interest to provide an alternative to usurers .

25 . Huang op cit; cf. Zhuoyun & Dull 1980: 22-24. For his complex currency re­ forms: Peng 1994 :1n-14 .

26. Genera lly, interest rates were set at a maximum of 20 percent and compound interest was banned. Chinese authorities eventually also adopted the Indian prin­ ciple that interest should not be allowed to exceed the principal (Cartier 198 8 : 2 8 ; Y a n g 1971 : 92-103 ) .

27. Braude! 1979; Wal lerstein 1991, 2001.

28. I a m here especially following the work of Boy Bin Wong (1997, 2002; also Mielants 2001, 2007. ) G ranted , most

Braudelans only see later dynasties like the Ming as fu lly embodying this principle, but I think it can be proj ected backwards.

29 . So, for instance, while markets themselves were considered beneficial, the government also systematically intervened to prevent price fl uctuations, stockpiling commodities when they were cheap and releasing them if prices rose. There were periods of Chinese history when rulers made common cause with merchants, but the result was usually a major popular backlash (Deng 1999 : 146) .

30 . Pommeranz 1998 , Goldstone 2002 for an introduction to the vast literature on comparative standards of living. India was actually doing rather well also for most of its history.

31 . Zurcher 1958 : 282.

32. Gernet 1956 (1999 : 241-42 ) ; for the fo llowing discussion see Gernet 1960, Jan 1965 , Kieschnick 1997, Benn 1998 , 2007 .

33 · Tsan-ning (919-1001 AD) quoted in Jan 1965 : 263 . O thers appealed to the history of bodhisattvas and pious kings who had made gifts of their own bodies, such as the king who, in time of famine, leapt to his death to be transformed into a mountain of flesh, replete with thousands of heads, eyes, lips, teeth, and tongues, which for ten thousand years only grew larger no matter how much of it humans and animals ingested (Benn 200T 95 , m 8 ; c f . O h n u m a 2007) .

34· Tu Mu, cited i n Gerner 1956 (1995 : 245 ) -

35 · This might come a s something of a surprise, since the phrase is used so often in contemporary Western popular usage, "karmic debt" becoming something of a New Age cliche. But it seems to strike a much more intuitive chord with Euro­ Americans than it ever did in India. De­ spite the close association of debt and sin in the Indian tradition, most early Bud­ dhist schools avoided the concept-largely because it implied a continuity of the self, which they saw as ephemeral and ulti­ mately illusory. The exception were the Sammitiya, called "personalists" as they

4 3 4 N O T E S

did believe in an enduring self, who de­ veloped the notion of avipra:�asa, where­ by the results of good or bad actions­ karma-"endure like a sheet of paper on which a debt is inscribed" as an uncon­ scious element of the self that passes from one life to another (Lamotte 1997:22-24, 86---9o; Lusthaus 20o2:209-10) . The idea m ight have died with that sect had it not been taken up by the famous Mahayana philosopher Nagarj una, who compared it to an " i mperishable promissory note" (Kalupahana 1991:54-55, 249; Pasadika 1997) . His Madhya maka school in turn became the Sanlun or "Three Treatise" school i n China; the notion of karmic debt was taken up in particular by the " Three Stages " or " Three Levels" school created the monk Hsin-Hsing (540'-94 AD) (Hub­ bard 2001) .

36. Commentary o n the Dharma of the Inexhaustible Storeh ouse of the Mahay­ ana Universe, as trans lated by Hubbard (2oo1:265), with a few changes based on Gerner ( 1956 [1995:246]) .

37· I n H ubbord 2001:266. 38. Dao Shi, in Cole 1998:117. Cole's

book provides an excellent summary of this literature (see also Ahern 1973, Teiser 1988, Knapp 2004, Oxfeld 2005 ) . Some Medieval texts focus exclusively on the mother, others on p arents generally. Interestingly, the same notion of an infi­ nite and unpayable " m ilk-debt" to one's mother also appears in Turkey (White 2004=75!6) .

39· Sutra fo r the Recompense of Grati­ tude cited i n Baskind 2007=166. My " four billion years" translates "kalpa," which is technically 4.32 billion years. I also changed "them " for parents to "her" for mother since the context refers to a man who cut his own flesh speci fically for his mother's sake. '

40 . Chinese Buddhists did not invent the pawnshop, but they appear to have been the first to sponsor them on a large scale. On the origins of pawnbroking i n general, see Hardaker 1892, Kuznets 1933· On China speci fically: Gerner 1956

[1995 = 17o--73], Yang 1971:71-73, Whelan 1979· I n a remarkable parallel, the first " forma l " pawnshops in Europe also emerged from monasteries for similar purposes : the monti di pieta or " banks that take pity" created by the Franciscans in Italy in the fifteenth century. (Peng 1994:245, also makes note of the parallel . )

4 1 . Gerner 1956 [1995:142-86], Ch'en 1964:262--65; Collins 1986:66-;1; Peng 1994:243-45. It would seem that Taoist mon­ asteries, which also multiplied in this period, banned making loans (Kohn 2002:76), per­ haps in part to mark a distinction.

42. Gerner 1956 [1995:228], where he famously wrote, "the donors to the In­ exhaustible Treasuries were sharehold­ ers, not in the economic domain but that of religion . " As far as I know, the only contemporary scholar who has fully em­ braced the premise that this was indeed an early form of capitalism is Randall Collins (1986) who sees similar monastic capitalism in later Medieval Europe as well. The accepted Chinese historiogra­ phy has tended to see the first " shoots of capitalism" developing later, in the Song, which was much less hostile to merchants than other dynasties, followed by a full embrace of the ma rket-but firm rej ection of capitalism-in the Ming and Qing. The key question is the organization of labor, and in Tang times this remains somewhat opaque, since even if statistics were avail­ able, which they're not, it's difficult to know what terms like " serf, " "slave," and "wage-laborer" actually meant i n practice.

43· Gerner 1956 [1995: n6-39], Ch'en 1964:269-71, on land reclamation and mo­ nastic slaves.

44· " I t is claimed that the purpose of this generosity is to relieve the poor and orphans. But in fact there is nothing to it but excess and fraud. This is not a legitimate business" Gerner 1956 (1995:104-5• 211 ) .

45 · Gerner 1956 [1995:22]. 46. See Adamek 2005, Walsh 2007. 47· This is probably why abstractions

like Truth, Justice, and Freedom are so often represented as women.

N O T E S 4 3 5

48 . Marco Polo observed the practice in the southern p rovince of Yunnan in the thirteenth century: "But when they have any business with one another, they take a round or square piece of stick, and split it in two; and one takes one half and the other takes the other half. But be­ fore they split it, they make two or three notches in it, or as many as they wish. So, when one of them comes to pay another, he gives him the money or whatever it i s , and gets back the p iece of stick the other had" (Benedetto 1931 : 193 ) . See also Yang 1971 : 92, Kan 1978 , Peng 1994:320,

3JO, so8, Trombert 1995 :12-15 . Tallies of this sort seem, according to Kan, to have p receded writing; and one legend claims that the same man, a minister to the Y el­ low Emperor, invented both writing and tally contracts simultaneously (Trom bert 199PJ ) .

49· Graham I96 o : q9 . so. Actually the simila rity was noticed

in antiquity as well: Laozi (Daodejing 27) speaks of those who can "count without a tally, secure a door without a lock . " Most famously, he also insisted " when wise men hold the left tally pledge, they do not press their debtors for their debts . Men of virtue hold on to the tally; men lacking virtue pursue their claims" (stanza 79) .

51 . O r one might better say, turning them at one snap fro m monetary debts to moral ones, s ince the very fact that we know the story implies he was eventually rewarded (Peng 1994: 100) . It is probably significant that the word fu, meaning "tally," also could mean "an auspicious omen granted to a prince as a token of his appointment by Heaven" (Mathews 1931 : 283 ) . Similarly, Peng notes a passage from Strategems of the Warring States, about a lord attempting to win popular support: "Feng hurried to Bi, where he had the clerks assemble all those people who owed debts, so that his tallies might be matched against theirs. When the tal­ lies had been matched , Feng brought forth a false order to forgive these debts, and he burned the tallies. The people all cheered "

(ibid:1oon9) . For Tibetan parallels, see Uebach 2oo8 .

52. Similar things happened in Eng­ land, where early contracts were also bro­ ken in half in i mitation of tally sticks: the phrase " i ndentured servant" derives from this practice, since these were contract laborers; the word actually derives from the " indentations" or notches on the tally stick used as a contract (Blackstone 1827 1 : 21 8 ) .

53 · L. Yang 1971 :52; Peng 1994:329-31 . Peng perceptively notes "this method of matching tallies to withdraw cash was ac­ tually an outgrowth of the process used in borrowing money, except that the move­ ment over time of loans was transformed into a movement over space" ( 1994:330) .

54· They were called "deposit shops"­ and L. Yang (1971 :78-8o) calls them "proto-banks . " Peng (1994:323-27) notes something along these lines was already operating, at least for merchants and trav­ elers, under the Tang, but the government had strict controls preventing bankers from reinvesting the money.

55 · The practice began in Sichuan, which had its own peculiar form of cash, in iron, not bronze, and therefore much more unwieldy.

56 . Peng 1994 :50 8 , also 515 , 833 . All this is very much like the token money that circulated in much of Europe in the Middle Ages .

57· The most important scholarly ex­ ponent of this view i s von Glahn (1994, though Peng [1994] holds to something close) , and it seems the prevailing one among economists, popular and otherwise.

58 . Diagram from MacDonald 2oo3 : 6s .

59 · O n e of the favorite images em­ ployed when remembering the rule of the Legalists, under the much-hated F i rst Dynasty, was that they constructed great brass cauldrons, in which each law was openly and explicitly spelled out-then used them to boil criminals alive.

6o. See Bulliet 1979 (also Lapidus 200J : 141-46) on the process of conver­ sion. Bulliet also emphasizes (ibid:129)

4 3 6 N O T E S

that the main effect of mass converswn was to make the ostensible j ustification of government, as protector and expander of the faith, seem increasingly hollow. Mass popular support for caliphs and political leaders only reemerged in periods, like the Crusades or during the reconquista in Spain, when Islam itself seemed under at­ tack; as of course, for similar reasons, it has in much of the Islamic world today.

6 r . " Most of the time the lower circles paia their taxes through their heads, and looked after themselves. S i m ilarly the gov­ ernment received the taxes and p rovided some sort of security, and apart from this, occupied itself with matters of concern to itself: external war, patronage of learning and the arts, a life of luxmious ostenta­ tion" (Pearson 1982:54) .

62. The proverb appears, attributed to the Prophet hi mself, in al-Ghazali's Ihya ', kitab al- 'Ilm, 284, followed by a long list of similar statements: "Sa'id Bin Musaiyab said, 'When you see a religious scholar visiting a prince, avoid him, for he is a thief. ' Al-Auza'i said, 'There is noth­ ing more detestable to Allah than a reli­ gious scholar who visits an official' . . . " etc. This attitude has by no means disap­ pea red . A strong maj ority of Iranian aya­ tollahs, for example, oppose the idea of an Islamic state, on the grounds that it would necessarily corrupt religion.

63 . Lombard 1947, Grierson 1960. This is often represented as a wise policy of re­ fusal to "debase" the coinage, but it might equally be read as meaning that the ca­ liph's signature added no additional value. An experiment with Chinese-style paper money in Basra in 1294 failed, as no one was willing to accept money backed only by state trust (Ash tor 1976 : 257) .

64. MacDonald 2003 :64. Gradually this became unsupportable and Muslim empi res adopted the more typically Me­ dieval iqta' system, whereby soldiers were granted the tax revenues from specific territories .

65 . Neither have slaves been employed as soldiers since, except in temporary

and anomalous circumstance (e.g., by the Manchus, or in Barbado s ) .

66. It seems significant t h a t ( 1 ) t h e "in­ quisition" of 832, the fa iled Abbasid at­ tempt to take control of the ulema; (2) the most important mass conversion of the Caliphate's subj ects to Islam, peaking around 825-85o; and (3 ) the definitive as­ cent of Turkish slave soldiers in Abbasid armies, often dated to 83 8 , all roughly corresponded in time.

67. Elwa hed I9J I : I I I-35· As he puts it (ibid:127) , "the inalienability of liberty is one of the fundamental and uncon­ tested principles of Isl a m . " Fathers do not have the right to sell their children, and individuals do not have the right to sell themselves-or at least, if they do, no cou rts will recognize any resultant owner­ ship claims. I note that this is the dia­ metrical opposite of the " natural law" ap­ proach that later developed in Europe.

6 8 . There is a certain controversy here: some scholars, including some contem­ porary Muslim scholars opposed to the Islamic economics movement, insist that riba, which is unequivocally condemned in the Koran, did not originally refer to " interest" in general, but to a pre-Islamic Arabian practice of fining late payment by doubling the money owed, and that the blanket condemnation of interest is a mis­ interpretation (e.g., Rahman 1964, Kuran 1995 ) . I am in no position to weigh in but, if true, this would suggest that the ban on usury really emerged in I raq itself as part of the process of the creation of grassroots Islam, which would actually reinforce my general argument.

69. The best records we have are ac­ tually from a community of Jewish mer­ chants in Geniza, i n twelfth-century Egypt, who observed the ban on interest even in dealings with one another. The one area where we regu larly hear of interest being charged is the one a rea where coercion was also regularly employed: that is, in dealings with kings, viziers, and officials, who often borrowed large sums of money at interest-especially, but not excl usively,

N O T E S 4 3 7

from Jewish or Christian bankers-to pay their troops. Obliging a request for such an il legal loan was a dangerous business, but refusing even more so (for Abbasid examples, see Ray 1997=6S-7o, mainly drawing from Fischel 1937) .

70 . There were also a whole host of legal subterfuges (called hiyal) that one might undertake if one were absolutely determined to charge interest: for in­ stance, buying one's debtor's house for the a mount of the loan, charging them rent for it, and then al lowing them to buy it back for the same sum; having one's debtor agree to buy a certain product monthly and sell it to one at a discount, and so forth. Some schools of Islamic law banned these outright; others merely dis­ approved. It used to be assumed that these methods were widely employed, since most economic historians assumed inter­ est to be a necessary element of credit, but recent research provides no evidence that they were especially common (for the older view: Khan 1929, for the new: Ray 1997 :5S-59) .

71 . Mez 1922:44S , quoted i n Labib 1969: S9 . Note that Basra, the city where everyone in the m arket paid by check, was also the city where, a century later, Mon­ gol attempts to introduce government­ issue paper money were so doggedly re­ sisted . The word sakk is incidentally the origin of the English "check . " The ulti­ mate origins of sakk are contested : Ashtor (1972:555 ) suggests they were Byzantine; Chosky (19S S ) , Persian.

72. Goitein (1966, 1967, 1973 ) provides a detailed summary of financial practic­ es among Jewish merchants in twelfth­ century Egypt. Al most every transaction involved credit to some degree. Checks, remarkably similar even in appearance to the kind used today, were i n common usage--though sealed bags of metal coins were even more common in everyday transactions.

73 · Though apparently governments sometimes paid wages by check (Tag El­ Din 2007= 69. ) I am no doubt underplaying

the government role in all this: there were, for instance, attempts to set up central government banks, and certainly usually a commitment in principle that the gov­ ernment should enforce commercial stan­ dards and regulations. It seems, however, that this rarely came to much in practice.

74· Udovitch 1970 :71-74· 75 · Sarakhsi in Udovitch 1975 : n , who

has a good discussion of the issues in­ volved . Likewise Ray 1997=59"--60 .

76 . T h i s should surely also be of inter­ est to students of Pierre Bourdieu, who made a famous a rgument, based on his study of Kabyle society in A lgeri a , that a man's honor in such a society is a form of "symbolic capita l , " analogous to but more important than economic capital, since it is possible to turn honor i nto money but not the other way around (Bourdieu 1977, 1990 ) . True, the text above does not quite say this, but one does wonder how much this is Bourdieu 's own insight, and how much simply reflects the common sense of his informants.

77· Following K.N. Chaudhuri (19S5 : 197) . The expansion of Islam was spearheaded by both Sufi brotherhoods and legal scholars; many merchants dou­ bled as either or both. The scholarly lit­ erature here is unusually rich. See, for in­ stance: Chaudhuri 19S5 , 1990 ; Risso 1995; Subrahmanyam 1996; Barendtse 2002; Beaujard 2005 .

7S . In Goody 1996 : 91 . 79 · M . Lombard 2003 : 177-79 · So. Burton 's translation; 1934 I V :2013 . S r . And what's more, officials em-

ployed their own person bankers, and themselves made extensive use of credit instruments such as suftaja both for trans­ fer of tax payments, and the secreting away of ill-gotten gains ( Hodgson 1974 I :3o1, Udovitch 1975 : S , Ray 1994=69-71 . )

S 2 . " F o r Mohammed this natural regu­ lation of the market corresponds to a cos­ mic regulation. Prices rise and fall as night follows day, as low tides follow high, and price imposition is not only an inj ustice

4 3 8 N O T E S

to the merchant, but a disordering of the natural order of things" (Essid 1995 : 153 ) .

83 . Only very limited exceptions were made, for instance in times of disaster, and then most scholars insisted it was always better to provide direct relief to the needy than to interfere with market forces. See Ghazanfar & Islahi 2003 , Islahi 2004:31-32; for a fu ller discussion of Mo­ hammed's views on price formation, see Tuma 1965 , Essid 198 8 , 1995 .

84. Hosseini 1998 : 672, 2003 :37 : "Both indicate that animals, such as dogs, do not exchange one bone for another. "

85 . Hosseini 1998 , 2003 . S m ith says he vis ited such a factory hi mself, which may well be true, but the example of the eigh­ teen steps originally appears in the entry "Epingle" in Volume 5 of the French En­ cyclopedie, published in 1755 , twenty years earlier. Hosseini also notes that "Smith's personal library contained the Latin trans­ lations of some of the works of Persian (and Arab) scholars of the medieval pe­ riod" (Hosseini 1998 : 679) , suggesting that he might have lifted them from the origi­ nals di rectly . Other important sources for Islamic precedents for later economic theory include: Rodison 1978 , Islahi 1985 , Essid 198 8 , Hosseini 1995 , Ghazanfar 1991 , 2000, 2003 , Ghazanfar & Islahi 1997, 2003 . It is becoming more and more clear that a great deal of Enlightenment thought traces back to Islamic phi loso­ phy: Decartes' cogito , for example, seems to derive from Ibn Sina ( a . k . a . Avicen na) , Hume's fa mous point that the observance of constant conjunctions does not itself prove causality appears in Ghazali, and I have myself noticed Immanuel Kant's definition of enlightenment in the mouth of a magic bird in the fourteenth-century Persian poet Rumi.

8 6 . Tusi's Nasirean Ethics, in Sun 2008:409.

87. Gh azanfar & Islahi 2003 :58 ; Gha­ zanfar 2003 :32-33 .

8 8 . So for example among Ghazali's ethical principles, we find " the buyer should be lenient when bargaining with

a poor seller and strict when transacting with a rich seller," and " a person should be willing to sell to the poor who do not have the means and should extend credit to them without the expectation of repay­ ment" (Ghazali Ihya Ulum a/ Din I l : 7<r-82, cited in Ghazanfar & Islahi 1997 :22)-the latter of course recalling Luke 6 :35 .

89. Ghazali in Ghazanfar & Islahi 1997 = 27 .

90 . Ibid:32. 91. Ibid:32. 92. Ibid:35 . On postmen in Medieval

Islam: Goitein 1964. Ghazali's position here recalls and is no doubt influenced by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (n21b ) : that since money is a social convention meant to facilitate exchange, diverting it into usury defies its purpose; but its ul­ timate thrust is quite different, closer to Thomas Aquinas' argument that money is basically a measure and that usury distorts it, and Henry of Ghent's argument that " money is a medium in exchange and not a terminus "-unsurprisingly, since Aqui­ nas was likely directly influenced by him (Ghazanfar 20oo ) .

93 · It's hard t o overstate this. Even the fa mous "Laffer Curve," by which the Reagan Administration in the 198os tried to argue that cutting taxes would increase government revenue by stimulat­ ing economic activity, is often cal led the Khaldun-Laffer curve because it was first proposed, as a general principle, m Ibn Khaldun's 1377 Muqaddimah.

94· Goitein 1957 for the rise of the " M iddle Eastern bourgeoisie . "

95 · " Crying down" acted as a de facto tax increase, since one would now need to pay more ecus to make up a tax rate fixed in shillings . Since wages were fixed in pounds, shillings, and pence, this also had the effect of raising their value, and hence it was usually popular. " Crying up" by contrast had the effect of lowering the effective value of the units of account. This could be useful to reduce a king's­ or his allies'-personal debt measured in such units, but it also undercut the income

N O T E S 4 3 9

of wage-earners and those on any sort of fixed income and so was often protested .

96 . Langholm 1979, Wood 2002:73-76 . 97 · On t h e patristic literature on usury:

Ma loney 1983 ; Gordon 1989; Moser 20oo; Holman 2002 :112-26 ; Jones 2004:25-30 .

98 . Matthew 5 :42 99· St Basil of Caesarea , Homilia 11 in

Psalmum XIV (PG 29, 268-69) . 100. o p cit. 101. op cit. 102. Ambrose De Officiis 2 . 25 .89 . 103 . Ambrose De Tobia 15 :51 . See Nel­

son 1949:3-5 , Gordon 1989 : 1 14-118. 104. Though not entirely. It's worthy

to note that the main supply of slaves to the empire at this time came from Ger­ manic barbarians outside the empire, who were acquired either through war or debt.

105 . "If each one," he wrote, " a fter having taken from his personal wealth whatever would satisfy his personal needs, would leave what was superfluous to those who lack every necessity, there would be no rich or poor" (In llliud Lu­ cae 49D )-Basil himself had been born an aristocrat, but he had sold off his landed estates and distributed the p roceeds to the poor.

106. Homilia 11 in Psalmum XI V (PG 29, 277C) . The reference is to Proverbs 19 . 17.

107. Summa 8 .3 . 1 .3 : " since grace is free­ ly given, it excludes the idea of debt . . . In [no] sense does debt imply that God owes anything to another creature . "

1 0 8 . Clavero (1 986) sees t h i s as a basic conflict over the nature of the contract, and hence the legal basis of human rela­ tions in European history: usury, and by extension profit, was denounced, but rent, the basis of feudal relations, was never challenged .

109. Gordon 1989: 1 15 . " What is com­ merce , " wrote Cassiodorus (485-5 85) , "ex­ cept to want to sell dear that which can be bought cheap ? Therefore those merchants are detestable who, with no consideration of God's j u stice, burden their wares more with perj ury than value. Them the Lord

evicted them from the Temple saying, 'Do not make my Father's house into a den of thieves " (in Langholm 1996 :454) .

no. O n the Jewish legal tradition concerning usury, see Stein 1953 , 1955 ; Kirschenbaum 1985 .

111. Poliakov 1977:21. 112. Nelson (1949) assumed that the

"Exception" was often held to apply to re­ lations between Christians and Jews, but Noonan (195TIOI-2) insists that it was mainly held to apply only to " heretics and infidels, particularly the Saracens , " and by some, not even to them.

113 . Up to 52 percent with security, up to 120 percent without (Homer 1987: 91 ) .

114. Debtor's prisons, in the sense o f prisons exclusively for debtors, exi sted in England only after 1263 , but the im­ prisonment of debtors has a much longer history. Above all, Jewish lenders seem to have been emp loyed as the means of transforming virtual, credit money into coinage, collecting the fa mily silver from insolvent debtors, and turning it over to royal mints. They also won title to a great deal of land from defaulting debtors, most of which ended up in the hands of barons or monasteries (Singer 1964; Bowers 1983 ; Schofield & Mayhew 2002) .

115 . Roger of Wendower, Flowers of History 252-53 . Roger doesn't name the victim; in some later versions his name is Abraham, in others, Isaac.

116. Matthew Prior, in Bolles 1837: 13 . 117. Or even, for that matter, Ni­

etzsche's fantasies of the origins of j u stice in mutilation. Where one was a projection onto Jews of atrocities actually commit­ ted against Jews, Nietzsche was writing in an age where actual "savages" were often puni shed by similar tortures and mutila­ tions for fa ilure to pay their debts to the colonial tax authorities, as later became a most notorious scandal in Leopold's Bel­ gian Congo.

n8. Mundill (2002 ) , Brand (2003) . 119. Cohn 1972:80. 120. Peter Cantor, in Nelson 1949: 1 o-n .

4 4 0 N O T E S

121 . It was a firm from Cahors, for in­ stance, who received the property of the English Jews when the latter were finally expelled in 1290 . Though for a long time, Lombards and Cahorsins were themselves dependent on royal favor and hardly in much better position than the Jews. In France, the k ings seemed to expropriate and expel Jews and Lombards alternately (Poliakov 1977 :42) .

122. Noonan 1957: 1 8-19; Le Goff 1990 : 23-27.

123 . There are two sorts of wealth­ getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retai l trade: t h e former necessary a n d honorable, while that which consists in exchange is j ustly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men profit from one an­ other. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, i s usury, which makes a profit out of money itself, and not from the natural obj ect of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term " in­ terest" ( takas), which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. "Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural" (Aristotle, Politics 1258b) . The Nicomachean Ethics (u21b) is equally damning. For the best general analysis of the Aristotelean tradition on usury: Lang­ holm 1984.

124. Noonan 1957 =!05-12; Langholm 1984=5o .

125 . T h e technical term for t h e l o s t in­ come is lucrum cessans: see O ' Brien 1920: ro7-10, Noonan 1957 =u4-28, Langholm 1992 :6o-61; 1998 :75 ; Spufford 1989:260.

126. As German merchants also did in the Baltic cities of the Hanseatic alliance. On the Medici bank as a case i n point, see de Roover 1946, 1963 , Parks 2005 .

127. The situation in Venice, a pio­ neer i n these matters, is tel ling: there was no merchant guild, but only craft guilds, since guilds were essentially created as protection against the government, and

in Venice, the merchants were the gov­ ernment ( MacKenney 1987; Mauro 1993 = 259"-60) .

128. They were accused of both heresy and sodomy: see Barber 1978 .

129 . O n e cannot "prove" t h e Islamic inspiration of European bills of exchange, but considering the amount of trade be­ tween the two sides of the Mediterra­ nean, denying it seems bizarre. Braude! (1995 :816-17) proposes that the idea must have reached Europe through Jewish mer­ chants, who we know to have long been using them in Egypt.

130 . On bills of exchange: Usher 1914; de Roover 1967; Boyer-Xambeu, Deleplace, and Gill ard 1994; Munro 2oo3 b :542-46; Denzel 2006. There were innumerable cur­ rencies, any of which might at any time be "cried up," "cried down, " or otherwise fluctuate in value. Bills of exchange also allowed merchants to effectively engage in currency speculation, and even get around usury laws, once it became pos­ sible to pay for one bill of exchange by writing a different bill of exchange, due in several months' time, for a slightly higher sum. This was called "dry exchange" (de Roover 1944) , and over time the Church became increasingly skeptical, causing yet another round of financial creativity to get around the laws. It's worthy of note that the rates of interest on such commercial loans were generally quite low: twelve percent at the highest, in dramatic con­ trast to consumer loans. This is a sign of the increasingly lower risk of such trans­ actions (see Homer 1987 for a history of interest rates) .

131 . Lane 1934· 132. " I n very many respects, such as

the organization of slave labor, manage­ ment of colonies, imperial administration, commercial institutions, maritime tech­ nology and navigation, and naval gun­ nery, the Italian city-states were the direct forerunners of the Portuguese and Span­ ish empires, to the shaping of which the Italians contributed so heavily, and in the

N O T E S 4 4 1

profits of which they so largely shared" (Brady I99T ISO) .

IJ3 · They appear to have used Greek serfs at first, and sometimes Arabs cap­ tured in the Crusades, and only later, Af­ ricans. Still, this was the econo mic model that was eventually transported by Portu­ guese merchants to Atlantic islands like the Canaries, then eventually to the Carib­ bean (Verlinden r 9yo, Phillips r 985 : 93-97, Solow r 987, Wartburg r 995 ) .

IJ4· Scammell I98 r : r y3-75 · IJS · Spufford r 98 8 : r42 r36 On the notion of adventure: Auer­

bach r 946, Nerlich I977 · I37 · Duby ( r 973) makes this point. The

" round table" was originally a type of tournament, and especially in the IJoos, it became common to make such tourna­ ments explicit im itations of King Arthur's court, with knights entering the contests taking on roles from them: Galahad, Ga­ wain, Bors, etc.

rJ8. Also at a time when technologi­ cal changes, especially the invention of the crossbow and the rise of professional armies, were beginning to render knights' role in combat increasingly irrelevant (Vance r 973 ) .

IJ9 · Kelly I9JTIO. r4o . See Schoenberger 2oo8 for a re­

cent and compelling take: comparing the role of war mobi lization in creating mar­ kets in Greece and Rome to Western Eu­ rope in the High Middle Ages.

r4r . Wolf I954· r42. A point originally made by Vance

( r 98 6 :48 ) . The similarity is more obvious in the German poet Wolfram von Eschen­ bach's Parzifal, written perhaps twenty years later, in which knights " roam freely over Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, to Baghdad, Armenia, India, Ceylon" (Ad­ olf I957 : UJ )-and Islamic references are legion (Adolf r947, I95?)-that is, areas known to Europeans of the time only through trade. The fact that actual mer­ chants, on those rare occasions when they appear, are never sympathetic characters has little bearing.

I43 · Wagner, Die Wibelungen: Welt­ geschichte aus der Sage ( r 848)-which in English is "World History as Told in Saga . " I am taking my account of Wag­ ner's argument from another wonderful, if sometimes extravagant, essay by Marc Shell cal led " Accounting for the Grail" (r992:J?-3 8 ) . Wagner's argument is re­ ally more complicated: it centers on the fa iled attempt by the Holy Roman Em­ peror Frederick Barbarossa to subdue the Italian city-states and the abandonment of his principle that property can only flow from the king; instead, we have the rise of mercantile private property, which is echoed by financial abstraction.

r44 . Shell sees the Grail as a trans­ formation of the older notion of the cor­ nucopia or inexhaustible purse in an age " j ust beginning to be acquainted with checks and credit"-noting the connec­ tion of the legend with the Templars, and fact that Chretien-whose name means " Christian"-was l ikely, for that reason, to have been a converted Jew. Wolfram also clai med that he got the legend from a Jewish source (Shell r 992:44-45 ) .

I45 · Even China was often split and fractured . Just about all the great empire­ building proj ects of the Middle Ages were the work not of professional armies, but of nomadic peoples: the Arabs, Mongols, Tatars, and Turks.

r46 . Nicomachean Ethics IIJJa2<f-J I . I47· He compares money n o t o n l y to

a postman, but also, to a " ruler," who also stands outside society to govern and regulate our interactions. It's interesting to note that Thomas Aquinas, who might have been d i rectly infl uenced by Ghazali (Ghazanfar 2ooo ) , did accept Aristotle's argument that money was a social con­ vention that humans could j ust as easily change. For a while, in the late Middle Ages, this became the predominant Cath­ olic view.

r48 . As far as I know, the only scholar to have poi nted out the connection is Ber­ nard Faure, a French student of Japanese Buddhism: Faure I998 798 , 2000 :225 .

4 4 2 N O T E S

149 . Later still, as cash transactions be­ came more common, the term was applied to small sums of cash offered as down­ payment, rather in the sense of English "earnest money . " On symbola in gen­ eral: Beauchet 1 897; Jones 1956 : 217; Shell 1978 :32-35 ·

150 . Descat 1995 : 986. 151 . Aristotle On lnterepretation 1 . 16--

17· Whitaker (2002:10) thus observes that for Aristotle, "the �eaning of a word is fixed by convention, j ust as the impor­ tance attached to a tally, token, o r ticket depends on agreement between the parties concerned . "

152. Nicomachean Ethics 1133 a29-31 . 153 . B u t they believed that these for­

mulae sum med up or "drew together" the essence of those secret truths that the Mysteries revealed-" symbolon , " being derived the verb symballein, meaning "to gather, bring together, or compare . "

154· M ii r i 1931 , Meyer 1999 · T h e only knowledge we have of such symbola comes from Christian sources; Christians later adopted their own symbolon, the Creed, and this remained the primary ref­ erent of the term "symbol" throughout the Middle Ages (Ladner 1979) .

155 · Or pseudo-Dionysius, since the real Dionysius the Areopagite was a first­ century Athenian converted to Christian­ ity by St. Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius' works are an attempt to reconcile neo-Platonism, with its notion of philosophy as the process of the liberation of the soul from material creation and its reunification with the di­ vine, with Christian orthodoxy. Unfortu­ nately, his most relevant work, Symbolic Theology, has been lost, but his surviving works all bear on the issue to some degree.

156 . In Barasch 1993 :161. 157. Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Ce­

lestial Hierarchy 141 A-C. On Dionysius' theory of symbolism i n general, and its influence, see Barasch 1993 : 158-8o , also Goux 1990 : 67, Gadamer 2004:63--64.

158 . He calls them, like communion, "gifts that are granted to us in symbolic mode . " On the Celestial Hierarchy 124A .

159 . Mathews 1934 :283 . Compare the definition of symbolon:

A . tally, i.e. each of two halves or corresponding pieces of a knuck­ lebone or other obj ect, which two guest friends, or any two contracting parties, broke between them, each party keeping one piece, in order to have proof of the identity of the pre­ senter of the other.

B . of other devices having the same purpose, e.g. a seal-i mpression on wax,

1. any token serving as proof of identity

2. guarantee 3 . token, esp. of goodwill

After Liddell and Scott 1940 : 1 676--77, without the examples, and with the G reek words for "knucklebone" and "guest­ friend " rendered into English.

160. Rotours 1952:6. O n fu (or qi, an­ other name for debt tallies that could be used more generally for " tokens " ) more generally: Rotours 1952, Kaltenmark 1960, Kan 1978, Faure 2000 : 221-29 : Falkenhau­ sen 2005 .

161. There is a curious tension here: the will of heaven is also in a certain sense the will of the people, and Chinese think­ ers varied on where they placed the em­ phasis. Xunzi, for instance, assumed that the authority of the king is based on the confidence of the people. He also argued that while confidence among the people is maintained by contracts ensured by the matching of tally sticks, under a truly j ust king, social trust will be such that such obj ects will become unnecessary (Roetz 1993 =73-74) .

162. Kohn 2000 :330 . S i milarly i n Ja­ pan: Faure 2ooo:227.

163 . In the Encyclopedia of Taoism they are described as "diagrams, con­ ceived as a form of celestial writing, that derive their power from the matching ce­ lestial counterpart kept by the deities who bestowed them" (Bokenkamp 2oo 8 :35 ) .

N O T E S 4 4 3

On Taoist fu : Ka ltenmark 1960; Seidel 1983 ; Strickmann zooz:190-91; Verellen 2006; on Buddhist parallels, see Faure 1998 ; Robson zoo S .

164. Sasso 1978 ; t h e origins of t h e yin­ yang symbol remain obscure and contest­ ed but those Sinologists I've consulted find this plausible. The generic word for "sym­ bol '' in contemporary Chinese is fuhiw, which is directly derived from fu .

1 65 . Insofa r as I ' m weighing in on the "Why didn't the Islamic world develop modern capita l i s m ? " debate, then, it seems to me that both Udovitc h ' s argu­ ment (1975 : 19-21) that the Islamic world never developed i mpersonal credit mech­ anisms, and Ray's obj ection (1997 :39-40) that the ban on interest and insurance was more important, carry weight. R a y ' s suggestion t h a t differences i n i n heritance laws might play a role also deserves investigation.

166. Maitland 190 8 :54· 1 67. Davis 1904. 1 6 8 . In the Platonic sense: j ust as any

particular, physical bird we might happen to see on a nearby fruit tree is merely a token of the general idea of "bird" (which is immaterial, abstract, angelic ) , so do the various physical, mortal individuals who join together to make up a corporation become an abstract, angelic Idea. Kanto­ rowicz argues that it took a number of in­ tellectual innovations to make the notion of the corporation possible: notably, the idea of the aeon or aevum, eternal time, that is, time that lasts forever, as opposed to the Augustinian eternity which is out­ side of time entirely and was considered the h abitation of the angels, to the revival of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite (1957: z8o-81) .

169 . Kantorowicz 195Tz8z-83 . qo. Islamic law, for instance, not only

did not develop the notion of fictive per­ sons, but steadfastly resisted recognizing corporations until quite recently (Kuran zoos ) .

q r . Mainly Randall Collins (1986:sz-

5 8 ) , who also makes the comparison with China; cf. Coleman 198 8 .

q z . See Nerlich 1987:1z1-z4.

Chapter E l eve n

r. On English wages, see Dyer 1989; on English festive life, there is a vast lit­ erature, but a good recent source is Hum­ phrey 200 1 . Silvia Federici (zoo4) provides a compelling recent synthesis.

z . For a very small sampling of more recent debates over the "price revolution," see Hamilton 1934, Cipolla 1967, Flynn 198z, Goldstone 1984, 1991 , Fisher 1989, Munro zoo3 a, zoo7. The main a rgument is between monetarists who continue to argue that increase in the amount of spe­ cie is ultimately responsible for the infla­ tion, and those who emphasize the role of rapid population increase, though most specific arguments are considerably more nuanced.

3 · Historians speak of " bullion famines "-as most active mines dried up, such gold and silver that wasn't sucked out of Europe to pay for eastern luxuries was increasingly h idden away, causing all sorts of difficulties for commerce. In the 146os, the shortage of specie in cities like Lisbon had been so acute that merchant ships visiting with cargoes ful l of wares often had to return home without selling anything (Spufford 198 8 :339-6z) .

4· Brook 1998 . Needless to say, I ' m simplifying enormously: another prob­ lem was the growth of landlordism, with many smallholders fal ling in debt to land­ lords for inability to pay. As members of the ever-increasing royal family and other favored families gained tax exemptions from the state, the tax burden on small­ holders became so heavy that many felt forced to sell their lands to the powerful fa milies in exchange for tenancy agree­ ments to free those lands from taxes.

4 4 4 N O T E S

5 · Chinese historians count 77 differ­ ent " m iners' revolts" during the 1430s and '4os (Harrison 1965 :103-4; cf. Tong 1992:6o-64; Gerner 1982:414) . Between 1445 and 1449 these became a serious threat as silver miners under a rebel leader named Y e Zongliu made common cause with tenant farmers and the urban poor in overpopulated Fujian and Shaxian, spark­ ing an uprising that spread to a number of different provinces, seizing a number of cities and expelling much of the landed gentry .

6. Von Glahn (1996 7o--82) docu­ ments the process. Gerner (1982:415-16) documents how between 1450 and 1500, most taxes became payable in silver. The process culminated in the "single lash of the whip" method : tax reforms put into place between 1530 and 15 81 (Huang 1974, see Arrighi , Hui, Hung and Seldon 2003 : 272-73) .

7 · Wong 1997, Pomeranz 2000, Arrighi 2007, a mong many others who make this point.

8 . Pomeranz 2000 : 273 · 9 · The value of silver in China (as

measured in gold) remained, through the sixteenth century, roughly twice what it was in Lisbon o r Antwerp (Flynn & Giral­ dez 1995 , 2002) .

10. von Glahn 1996b:44o; Atwell 1998 . n . Chalis 1978 : 157 . 12. China had its own " age of explora­

tion" in the early fifteenth century, but it was not followed by mass conquest and enslavement.

13 . It's possible that they were wrong. Generally populations did decline by 90 percent even in areas where no d i rect genocide was taking place. But in most places, after a generation or so, popula­ tions started recovering; in Hispaniola and many p arts of Mexico and Peru, around the mines, the ultimate death rate was more like 100 percent.

14. Todorov 1984:137-3 8 ; for the origi­ nal, Icazba lceta 2oo 8 : 23-26 .

15 . One historian remarks: "By the close of the sixteenth century bullion,

primarily silver, made up over 95 percent of all exports leaving Spanish America for Europe. Nearly that same percentage of the indigenous population had been de­ stroyed in the process of seizing those riches" (Stannard 1993 : 221 ) .

1 6 . Bernal Diaz 1963 :43 . 17. Bernal Diaz: the quote is a synthesis

of the Lockhart translation (1844 I l : no) and Cohen translation (1963 :412) , though these appear to be based on sl ightly differ­ ent originals.

1 8 . Bernal Diaz op cit. 19 . Cortes 1868 : 141 . 20. M o s t of t h e conquistadors h a d

s i m i l a r stories. B a l b o a c a m e t o t h e Ameri­ cas to flee his creditors; Pizarro borrowed so heavily to outfit his exped ition to Peru that after early reverses, it was only the fear of debtor's prison that prevented his return to Panama; Francisco de Montejo had to pawn his entire Mexican posses­ sions for an eight-thousand-peso loan to launch his expedition to Honduras; Pedro de Alvarado too ended up deeply in debt, finally throwing everything into a scheme to conquer the Spice Islands and China­ on his death, creditors im mediately tried to put his remaining estates to auction.

21. e.g., Pagden 1986. 22. G i bson 1964: 253 . All this is disturb­

ingly reminiscent of global politics nowa­ days, in which the Un ited Nations, for exa mple, will urge poor countries to make education free and available to everyone, and then the International Monetary Fund (which is, lega lly, actually a part of the United Nations) will insist that those same countries do exactly the opposite, impos­ ing school fees as part of broader "eco­ nomic reforms" as a condition of refinanc­ ing the country 's loans.

23 . Following William Pietz (1985 : 8 ) , who studied early merchant adventurer's accounts of West Africa; though Todorov (1984: 1 29-31 ) on the very similar perspec­ tive of the conquistadors.

24. Some did go bankrupt-for in­ stance, one branch of the Fuggers. But this was surprisingly rare.

N O T E S 4 4 5

25 . Martin Luther, Von Kaufshand­ lung und Wucher, 1524, cited in Nelson 1949 :50 .

2 6 . I n Luther's t i m e t h e m a i n issue was a practice called Zinskauf, technically rent on leased property, which was basically a disguised form of interest-bearing loan.

27. In Baker 1974:53-54. The reference to Paul i s in Romans 13 :7.

2 8 . He argued that the fact that Deu­ teronomy allows usury under any circum­ stances demonstrates that this could not have been a universal " spiritual law," but was a political law created for the specific ancient Israeli situation, and therefore, that it could be considered i rrelevant in different ones.

29 . And i n fact, this i s what "capi­ tal" originally meant. The term itself goes back to Latin capitale, which meant "funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money, or money carrying interest" (Brau­ de! 1992 : 232 ) . I t appears i n English in the mid-sixteenth century largely as a term borrowed from Italian bookkeeping tech­ niques ( Cannan 1921 , Richard 1926) for what remained when one squared prop­ erty, credits, and debts; though until the nineteenth century, English sources gener­ ally preferred the word " stock"-in part, one suspects, because "capital" was so closely associated with usury.

30 . Nations that, after all, also prac­ ticed usury on one another: Nelson 1949 :76 .

31 . B e n Nelson emphasized t h i s in an i mportant book, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood.

32. Midelfort 1996 :39.

33 · Zmora 2006 :�8. Public financ­ ing at this period largely meant disguised interest-bearing loans from the minor no­ bility, who were also the stratum from which local administrators were drawn.

34· On church lands : Dixon 2002: 91 . On Casimir's gambling debts: Janssen 1910 I V : 147· His overall debt rose to half a million guilders i n 1528, and over three

quarters of a million by 1541 (Zmora 20o6 : r3n55 . )

35 · H e w a s later accused of conspiring with Count Wilhelm von Henneburg, who had gone over to the rebels, to become secular Duke of the territories then held by the Bishop of Wurzburg.

36 . From " Report of the Margrave's Commander, Michel G ross from Trock­ au," in Scott & Scribner 1991 :30 1 . The sums a re based on a promise of r florin per execution, \lz per mutilation. We do not know i f Casimir ever paid this par­ ticular debt.

37· For some relevant accounts of the revolt and repression: Seebohm 1877: 141-

45 ; Janssen 1910 I V :323-26; Blickle 1977; Endres 1979; Vice 198 8 ; Robisheaux 1989 :48-67, Sea 2007. Casim i r i s said to have ultimately settled into exacting fines, eventually demanding some I04,ooo gul­ dens in compensation from his subjects.

3 8 . Linebaugh (2oo8) makes a beauti­ ful analysis of this sort of phenomenon in his essay on the social origins of the Magna Carta.

39 · It i s telling that despite the end­ less reprisals against commoners, none of the German princes or nobility, even those who openly collaborated with the rebels, was held accountable i n any way.

40 . M uldrew 1993 a, 1993 b, 1996, 1998, 2oor; cf. M acintosh 1988; Zell 1996, Was­ wo 2004, Ingram 2oo6, Valenze 2oo6, Kitch 2007. I find myself strongly agreeing with most of Muldrew's conclusions, only qualifying some: for instance, his rejection of MacPherson's possessive individualism argument ( 1962) strikes me as unneces­ sary, since I suspect that the l atter does identify changes that are happening on a deeper structural level less accessible to explicit discourse (see Graeber 1997) .

41 . Muldrew (2001 : 92) estimates that in c . r6oo, eight thousand London mer­ chants might have possessed as much as one-third of all the cash i n England.

42. Williamson r889; Whiting 1971 ; Mathias 1979b ; Valenze 2oo6 :34-40 .

4 4 6 N O T E S

43 · Gold and silver were a very small part of household wealth: inventories re­ veal on average fifteen shillings of credit for every one in coin (Muldrew 1998 ) .

44· This principle of a right t o live­ lihood is key to what E.P. Thompson famously called " moral economy of the crowd " (1971) in eighteenth-century Eng­ land, a notion that Muld rew ( 1993a ) thinks can be applied to these credit sys­ tems as a whole.

45 · Stout 1742.:74-75 , parts of the same passage are cited in Muldrew 1993a : 178 , a n d 1998 : 152..

46. To be more p recise, either piety (in the Calvinist case) or good natured social­ ity (in the case of those that opposed them in the name of older festive values)-in the years before the civil war, many par­ ish governments were divided between the "godly" and "good honest men" (Hunt 1983 : 146)

47· Shepherd 2.000, Walker 1996; for my own take on "life-cycle service" and wage labor, see, again, G raeber 1997·

48 . Hill 1972. :39-56, Wrightson & Levine 1979, Beier 1985 .

49· Muldrew 2.001 : 84. so. For a classic statement on the con­

nection of Tudor markets , festivals, and morality, see Agnew (1986) .

s r . Johnson 2.oo4:56-5 8 . On the two conceptions of j u stice: Wrightson 1980. Bodin's essay was widely read . It drew on Aquinas' view of love and friendship as prior to the legal order, which, in turn, harkens back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which reached Europe through Arab sources . Whether there was also a direct influence from the Islamic sources themselves we do not know, but consider­ ing the degree of general mutual engage­ ment (Ghazanfar 2.003 ) it seems likely.

52.. Gerard de Malynes's Maintenance of Free Trade (162.2.) , cited in Muldrew 1998 :98 , also Muldrew 2.00 1 : 83 .

53 · Chaucer is ful l of this sort of thing: the Wife of Bath has much to say about conjugal debts (e.g., Cotter 1969) . It was really in the period of about 140o--16oo

that everything came to be so framed as debt, presumably reflecting the first stir­ rings of possessive individualism, and at­ tempts to reconcile it to older moral para­ digms. Guth (2.oo8 ) , a legal historian, thus calls these centuries "the age of debt," one which was then replaced after 16oo by an " age of contract . "

54· Davenant 1771 : 152..

55 · Marshall Sahlins (1996 , 2.oo8) has been emphasizing the theological roots of Hobbes for some time. Much of the fol­ lowing analysis draws on his influence.

56 . Hobbes himself doesn't use the term "self-interest" but does speak of "particu lar," "private , " and "common" interests.

57· De L'Esprit 53 , cited in H i rschman 198 6 :45 . Exploring the contrast between Shang's "profit" and Helvetius' " i nterest" would be a telling history in itself. They are not the same concept.

58 . " Interest" ( from interesse) comes into common usage as a euphemism for usury in the fourteenth century, but it only comes to be used in its more familiar, gen­ eral sense in the sixteenth . Hobbes doesn't use "self-interest," though he speaks of "private" and "common" interests; but that term was already cu rrent, having ap­ pea red in the work of Machiavelli's friend Francesco Guicciadini in 1512.. It becomes commonplace in the eighteenth century (see Hirschman 1977, 1992., especi ally chapter 2., "on the concept of interest"; Du mont 198 1 ; Myers 1983 , Heilbron 1998 ) .

59 · S e e (192.8:187) notes that until around 18oo, " i nteresse" was the common word for "capital" in French; in English the preferred word was " stock . " It is cu­ rious to note that Adam Smith, for one, actually returns to the Augustinian usage, "self-love, " in his fa mous passage about the butcher and the baker (Wealth of Na­ tions 1 . 2..2.) .

6o. Beier 1985 : 159-"63 ; cf. Dobb 1946 : 2.34. Consorting with gypsies was also a capital crime. In the case of va­ grancy, j ustices found it so d ifficult to find anyone willing to press charges against

N O T E S 4 4 7

vagrants that they were eventually forced to reduce the penalty to public whipping.

61. In Walker 1996 : 244. 62. Helmholtz 1986, Brand 2002, Guth

200 8 . 63 . Helmholz 1 9 8 6 , Muldrew 199 8 : 255,

Schofield & Mayhew 2002, Guth 2oo8 ) . 64. Stout 1742:121. 65 . "The horrors of the Fleet and Mar­

shalsea were laid bare in 1729. The poor debtors were found crowded together on the 'common side, '--covered with filth and vermin, and suffered to die, without pity, of hunger and jail fever . . . No at­ tempt was made to distinguish the fraud­ ulent from the unfortunate debtor. The rich rogue--able, but unwilling to pay his debts-might riot in luxury and de­ bauchery, while his poor unlucky fellow­ prisoner was left to starve and rot on the 'common side"' (Hallam 1866 V: 269-70 . )

6 6 . I d o not want t o a rgue that the more familiar na rrative of "primitive ac­ cumulation," of the enclosure of common lands and rise of private property, the dis­ location of thousands of one-time cottag­ ers who became landless laborers, i s false. I simply highlight a less familiar side of the story. It's especially helpful to high­ light it because the degree to which the Tudor and Stuart periods were actually marked by a rise of enclosures is a heated matter of debate (e.g., Wordie 1983 ) . The use of debt to split communities against themselves i s meant in the same vein as Silvia Federici's (2004) brilliant argument about the role of witchcraft accusations in reversing popular gains of the late Middle Ages and opening the way to capitalism.

67. "Personal credit received a bad press in the eighteenth century. It was frequently said that it was wrong to go into debt s i mply to pay for everyday con­ sumption goods . A cash economy was celebrated and the virtues of prudent housekeeping and parsimony extolled. Consequently reta il credit, pawnbroking, and moneylending were all attacked, with both borrowers and lenders the targets" (Hoppit 1990:J I2-IJ . )

68. Wealth of Nations 1.2.2. 69. Muldrew makes this point:

199J : I6J . 70. Theory of Moral Sentiments 4.1.10. 71. "The man who borrows in order

to spend will soon be ruined , and he who lends to h i m will generally have occasion to repent of his folly. To borrow or to lend for such a purpose, therefore, is in all cases, where gross usury is out of the question, contrary to the interest of both parties; and though it no doubt happens sometimes that people do both the one and the other; yet, from the regard that all men have for their own interest, we may be assured that it cannot happen so very frequently as we are sometimes apt to i m agine" (Wealth of Nations 2.4.2) . He does occasionally acknowledge the exis­ tence of retai l credit, but he grants it no significance.

72. Reeves 1999. Reeves, like Servet ( 1994, 2001) shows that many were aware of the variability of money-stuffs : Puffen­ dorf, for example, made a long list of them .

73 · When we attribute value to gold, then, we simply recognize this. The same argument was usually invoked to solve the old Medieval puzzle about diamonds and water: Why is it that dia monds are so ex­ pensive, though useless, and water, which is useful in all sorts of ways, hardly worth anything at a l l ? The usual solution was: dia monds are the eternal form of water. (Galileo, who obj ected to the entire prem­ ise, at one point suggested that those who make such claims should really be turned into statues. That way, he suggested, in inimitable Renaissance style, everyone would be happy, since (1) they would be eternal, and (2) the rest of us would no longer have to listen to their stupid a rgu­ ments . ) See Wennerlind 2003 , who notes, interestingly, that most European govern­ ments employed alchemists in the seven­ teenth century i n order to manufacture gold and silver for coins; it's only when these schemes definitively failed that the governments moved to paper currency.

4 4 8 N O T E S

74· Kindleberger 1984; Boyer-Xambeu, Deleplace, & Gillard 1994; Ingham 2004: 17I . Rather, this path eventually led to the creation of stock markets : the first public bourses, in fifteenth-century Bruges and Antwerp, began not by trading shares in joint-stock ventures, which barely exist­ ed at the time, but by "discounting" bills of exchange.

75 · Usher (1934, 1944) originally intro­ duced the distinction between "primitive banking," where one simply lends out what one has, and " modern banking," based on some sort of fractional reserve system-that is, one lends more than one has, thus effectively creating money. This would be another reason why we have now moved to something other than " modern banking"-see below.

76 . Spufford 198 8 : 25 8 , drawing on Usher 1943 :239-42. While deposit notes were used, private bank notes, based on credit, only appear quite late--from Lon­ don goldsmiths, who also acted as bank­ ers, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

77· See Munro 20o3b for a useful summary.

78 . MacDonald 2oo6 : 156 . 79 · Tomas de Mercado in Flynn

1978 :400. So. See Flynn 1979; Braude! 1992 :522-

23 ; Stein & Stein 2ooo: 501-o5 , 96o-62; Tortella & Comin 2002. The number of juros in circulation went fro m 3 .6 million ducats in 1516 to 80.4 million in 1598 .

8 1 . T h e most famous exponent of this position was Nicholas Barbon (169o) , who argued that " m oney is a value made by law" and a measure in j ust the same man­ ner as inches or hours or fluid ounces . He also emphasized that most money was credit anyway.

82. Locke (169I : I44) also cited in Caffentzis 1989 :46-47, which remains the most insightful summary of the debate and its i mplications. Compare Perlman & McCann 1998 : n7-2o; Letwin 2003 :7118 ; Valenze 20o6 :4o-43 ·

83 . We tend to forget that the ma­ terialism of the Marxist tradition is not some radical depa rture--Marx was, like Nietzsche, taking bourgeois assumptions (though in his case, different ones) and pushing them in directions that would outrage their original proponents . Any­ way, there is good reason to believe that what we now call "historical materialism" is really Engels' addition to the proj ect­ Engels being himself nothing if not bour· geois in background and sensibilities (he was a stalwart of the Cologne stock exchange) .

84. Macaulay 1 8 8 6 :485-the original essay was published in the SpectiHor, March I , qn.

85 . Faust II, Act 1-see Shell 1992, Binswanger 1994 for a detailed analysis. The connection with alchemy is revealing. When in 1300 Marco Polo had remarked that the Chinese emperor " seemed to have mastered the art of alchemy" in his abil­ ity to turn mere paper into something as good as gold, this was clearly meant as a j oke; by the seventeenth century most Eu­ ropean monarchs actually did employ al­ chemists to try to produce gold from base metals; it was only their failure that led to the adoption of paper money (Wennerlend 2003 ) -

86. It's not a s i f suspicions about mon­ ey didn't exist-but they tended to focus, instead, on moral and metaphysical issues (e.g., "the theft of time" ) .

87. Said t o have been given a t a talk at the University of Texas in 1927, but i n fact, while t h e passage is endlessly cited i n recent books a n d especially on t h e inter­ net, it cannot be attested to before roughly 1975 . The first two lines appear to actually derive from a British investment advisor named L L . B . Angas in 1937 : "The mod­ ern Banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The p rocess is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banks can in fact inflate, mint and unmint the modern ledger-entry currency" (Angas 1937:2o-21) . The other p arts o f the quote are probably

N O T E S 4 4 9

later inventions-and Lord Stamp never suggested anything like this in his pub­ lished writings. A similar line, " the bank hath benefit of all interest which it creates out of nothing" attri buted to William Pat­ terson, the first d i rector of the Bank of England, is likewise first attested to only in the 1930s, and i s also almost certainly apocryphal.

8 8 . Joint-stock corporations were created in the beginning of the colonial period, with the fa mous East India Com­ pany and related colonial enterprises, but they largely vanished during the period of the industrial revolution and were mainly revived only at the end of the nineteenth century, and then principally, at first, in America and Germany. As G i ovanni Ar­ righi ( 1994) has pointed out, the heyday of British capitalism was marked by small fa mily firms and high finance; it was America and Germany, who spent the first half of the twentieth century battling over who would replace Great Britain as hegemon, that introduced modern bureau­ cratic corporate capitalism.

89 . MacKay 1854:52. 90 . MacKay 1854:53-54. 91 . Spyer 1997. 92. Prakash 2003 : 209-16 . 93 · Harden burg & Casement 1913 ; the

story has been analyzed most fa mously, and insightfully, by Mick Taussig (1984, 1987) .

94· Encyclopedia Britannica, n'h edi­ tion (1911) : entry for "Putumayo . "

95 · A s Taussig notes (1984:482) , when the head of the company was later asked what he actually meant by "cannibal" he said, simply, that it meant the Indians re­ fused to trade with anybody else.

96 . This is a point demonstrated in great detail in an i mportant book by Yann Moulier-Boutang (1997) , which un­ fortunately has never been translated into English.

97· Davies 1975 =59· " I ndentured " comes from the " i ndentations" or notches on a tally again, since these were widely used as contracts for those who, like most

indentured servants, couldn't read (Black­ stone 1827 I : 218 ) .

98 . Im manuel Wallerstein (1974) pro­ vides the classic analysis of this " second serfdom.

99 · This was true, incidentally, across the class spectru m : everyone was expect­ ed to do this, from lowly milkmaids and apprentices to "ladies in waiting" and knight's pages. This was one reason, inci­ dentally, why indentured-service contracts did not seem like much of a j u mp in the seventeenth century: they were simply lengthening the term of contracted em­ ployment from one to five or seven years. Even in Medieval times there were also adult day-laborers, but these were often considered indistinguishable from simple criminals.

100. The very word "proletariat" in a way alludes to this, as it's taken from a Roman term for "those who have children . "

101. C.L.R. James 1938 ; Eric Williams 1944·

102. "Many devices were available by which businessmen econom i zed in the use of cash in wage payments-payment could be made only at long intervals; pay­ ment might consist in giving claims on others (truck payment, tickets or vouch­ ers to authorize purchasing from shops, etc . , the provision of private notes and tokens) "-Mathias 1979a :95 .

103 . Actually the full list is: "cabbage, chips, waxers, sweepings, sockings, wast­ ages, blessing, lays, dead men, onces, pri­ mage, furthing, dunnage, portage, wines, vails, tinge, huggings, colting, rumps, birrs, fents, thrums, potching, scrapings, poake, coltage, extra, tret, tare, largess, the con, nobbings, knockdown, boot, tommy, trimmings, poll, gleanings, lops, tops, bontages , keepy back, pin money" (Linebaugh 1993 :449; see also Lineba ugh 1982, Rule 1986:n5-17) .

104. Tebbutt 1983 :49. O n pawnbro­ king in genera l : Hardaker 1892, Hudson 1982, Caskey 1994, Fitzpatrick 200 1 .

105 . Lineba ugh 1993 : 371-404 .

4 5 0 N O T E S

106. Usually in order to conclude that today, of course, we are living in an en­ tirely different world, because clearly that's not true any more. It might help here to remind the reader that Marx saw himself as w riting a "critique of political economy "-that is, of theory and practice of economics of his day.

107. See the Lockhart translation of Bernal Diaz (Diaz 1844 I I :396 ) , which gives several versions of the story, drawn from different sources .

108. Clenninden 1991 : 144. 109. It is on these grounds that Testart

distinguishes slavery owing to gambling, where the gambler stakes his own person , and debt slavery, even if these are ulti­ mately gambling debts. "The mentality of the gambler who directly stakes his person in the game is closer to that of the war­ rior, who risks losing his life in war or being taken into slavery, than to that of the poor person willing to sell himself to survive" (Testart 2002 :180) .

no. This is incidentally why com­ p laints about the i mmorality of deficits are so p rofoundly disingenuous: since modern money effectively is government debt, if there was no deficit, the results would be disastrous. True, money can also be generated privately, by banks, but there would appear to be l imits to this. This is why U . S . financial elites, led by Alan Greenspan, p anicked in the late 1990s when the Clinton administration began to run budget surpluses; the Bush tax cuts appear to have been designed specifically to ensure that the deficit was maintained.

III. Wallerstein 1989 . n2. 198 8 : 6oo. I I3 . Britain passed its first bankruptcy

law in 1542. n4. This is no doubt what Goethe was

getting at when he had Faust, specifically, tell the emperor to pay his debts with IOUs. After all, we all know what hap­ pened to h i m when his time came due.

n5 . Sonenscher (2oo7) gives a long and detailed history of these debates.

n6. One might trace a religious ele­ ment here: in the time of Augustus, a

group of religious cultists in the Middle East conceived the idea that fire was about to come from the sky and consume the planet. Nothing seemed less likely at the time. Leave them in charge of a corner of the world for two thousand years, they figure out a way to do it. But still, this is clearly part of a larger pattern .

Chapter Twe lve

1. I was first put on to the signifi­ cance of the date by fellow anthropologist Chris G regory (1998 : 265-96; also H udson 2003 a ) . U . S . citizens had not been able to cash in dollars for gold since 1934. The analysis that follows is inspired by both Gregory and Hudson.

2. One plausible-sounding version, which cites rather small amounts of bul­ lion, can be found at: www. rediff. com/ money/zoo1/nov1I7wtc.htm. For a more entertaining, fictional version: www. rense .com/general73/confess.htm.

3 · "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York: the Key to the Gold Vault" (new yorkfed . o rg/educ a t i o n / a d d p u b / g o l d v a u l .pdf) .

4· As a minor aside, I remember from the time also reading news reports not­ ing that there were, in fact, a number of expensive j ewelry shops in the arcades directly beneath the Towers, and that all the gold in them did in fact disappear. Presumably they were pocketed by res­ cue workers, but considering the circum­ stances, it would seem there were no seri­ ous objections-at least, I 've never heard anything about the matter being further investigated, let alone prosecuted.

5 · It's no coincidence, certainly, that William Greider decided to name his great history of the Federal Reserve (1989) The Secrets of the Temple. This is actually how many of its own officials privately describe it. He quotes one: "The System is j ust like the Church . . . It's got a pope, the chairman; and a college of cardinals, the governors and bank presidents; and

N O T E S 4 5 1

a curia, the senior staff. The equivalent of the la ity is the commercial banks . . . We even have different orders of religious thought like Jesuits and Franciscans and Dominicans only we call them pragma­ tists and monetarists and neo-Keynesians" (ibid:s4l ·

6 . This i s hardly a new claim, and it rests in part on the Braudelian (world­ systems) school, for instance, the recent work of Mielants (2007) . For a more clas­ sically Marxist version developing the connection since Nixon's time, see Custers 2007. For a more mainstream neoclassical treatments of the connection, see Mac­ Donald & Gastman 2oor , MacDonald 2006.

7· Senator Fullbright, in McDermott 2oo 8 : r9o .

8. I note that this fl i e s directly in the face of the intent of the United States Constitution ( r . S .s ) , which specifies that only Congress was relegated the power "to coin money, [and] regulate the value thereof"-no doubt at the behest of the Jeffersonians, who were opposed to cre­ ating a central bank. The United States still observes the letter of the law: Unit­ ed States coins are issued directly by the Treasury. United States paper money, while signed by the head of the Treasury, is not issued by the Treasury but by the Federal Reserve. They are technically banknotes, though as with the Bank of England, one bank is granted a monopoly in issuing them.

9· For those who don't know how the Fed works: technically, there are a series of stages. Generally the Treasury puts out bonds to the public, and the Fed buys them back. The Fed then loans the money thus created to other banks at a special low rate of interest ( " the prime rate " ) , so that those banks can then lend at higher ones . In its capacity as regulator of the banking system, the Fed also establishes the frac­ tional reserve rate: j ust how many dol­ lars these banks can " lend"--effectively, create-for every dollar they borrow from the Fed, or have on deposit, or can other­ wise count as assets . Technically this is ro

to r , but a variety of legal loopholes allow banks to go considerably higher.

ro. Which does raise the rather inter­ esting question of what its gold reserves are actually for.

I I . Indeed, perhaps the greatest com­ promise to United States global power in recent years is the fact that there is now one place-the region of · China facing Taiwan-where air defenses are now so dense and sophisticated that the United States Air Force is no longer certain that it can penetrate at will. The inability to blow up Osama bin Laden is, of course, the most dramatic limit to this power.

12. Or, to put the money in the Unit­ ed States stock market, which ultimately has a similar effect. As Hudson notes, " American diplomats have made it clear that to buy control of U.S. companies or even to return to gold would be viewed as an unfriendly act" (2oo2a :7) , so, unless they want to move out of dollars entirely, which would be considered an even more unfriendly act, there is little alternative. As to how " unfriendly" acts m ight be re­ ceived: see below.

13 . Hudson 2oo2a :12. 14. As many have remarked, the three

countries that switched to the euro around this time-Iraq, Iran, and North Korea­ were p recisely those singled out by Bush as his "Axis of Evi l . " Of course we can argue about cause and effect here. It's also significant that the core euro-using states such as France and Germany uniformly opposed the war, while U.S. allies were drawn fro m euro-skeptics like the U K .

15 . For a f e w representative takes o n t h e relation of t h e d o l l a r and empire: from a neoclassical economic perspec­ tive, Ferguson (2oor, 2004) , from a radical Keynesian perspective, H udson (2003a ) , from a Marxist one, Brenner (2002) .

r 6 . Even the CIA now ordinarily refers to such arrangements as " slavery, " though technically debt peonage is different.

17. Compare this to the deficit/military chart above, on page 366-the curve is ef­ fectively identical.

4 5 2 N O T E S

1 8 . See dailybail .com/home/china­ w a r n s - u s - a bout-debt-moneti zation . h t m l , accessed December 2 2 , 2009. T h e story is based on a piece from the Wall Street Journal, "Don't Monetize the Debt: The p resident of the Dallas Fed on inflation risk and central bank independence " (Mary Anastasia O 'Grady, WS], May 23 , 2009 . ) I should add that in popular us­ age nowadays, "to monetize the debt" is generally used as a synonym for "print­ ing money" to pay debt. This usage has become al most universal, but it's not the original sense of the term, which is to turn the debt itself into money. The Bank of England did not print money to pay the national debt; it turned the national debt itself into money. Here too there is a profound argument going on about the nature of money itself.

19 . The arrangement is sometimes re­ ferred to as Bretton Woods II (Dooley, Folkerts-Landau & Garber 2004, 2009) : effectively, a n agreement since the 1990s at least to use various unofficial means to keep the dollar's value artificially high, and East Asian currencies-particularly the Chinese--artificially low, in order to expedite cheap Asian exports to the Unit­ ed States . Since real wages in the United States have either stagnated or retreated continually since the 1970s, this, and the accu mulation of consumer debt, is the only reason living standards in the United States have not precipitously declined.

zo. On Zheng He, see Dreyer zoo6, Wade 2004, Wake 1997. On the tribute trade in general : Moses 1967, Yii 1967, Hamashita 1994, 2003 ; Di Cosmo & Wy­ att zoos .

21 . The argument here follows Arrighi, Hui, Hung and Selden 2003 , some ele­ ments of which were echoed in Arrighi's last work, Adam Smith in Beijing (2007) .

22. Japan of course was something of an exception, since it had arguably achieved something like First World status even before this.

23 . Keynes 1936 :345 .

24. See www . i rle. berkeley .edu /events/ springo8/fel ler I

25 . The key legislation was the "De­ pository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act" of 1 980, which struck down all federal usury laws: osten­ sibly, in reaction to the rampant inflation of the late . 1 970s , though of course they were never restored when inflation was brought back under control, as it has in the last quarter-century. It left state in­ terest ceilings in place, but institutions like credit-card companies were al lowed to observe the laws of the state in which they a re registered, no matter where they operated. This is why most are registered in South Dakota, which has no maximum interest rate.

26 . The first is fro m Thomas Friedman (1999) in a cocky and vacuous book called The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the second from Randy Martin (zooz) in a book of the same name.

27. In America this "universal other­ ness" is accomplished above all through racism . This is why most small reta iling in the Un ited States is conducted on ethnic lines: say, Korean grocers or dry-cleaners, who pool credit with one another, whose clients, however, are sufficiently socially distant that there is no question of extend­ ing credit outside, or even expecting basic relations of trust-since they themselves ordinarily expect electricians, locksmiths, contractors of various sorts who provide services to at least attempt to shaft them: Essentially the market across racial or eth­ nic lines becomes one where everyone is assumed to be Amalek.

28 . Gilder 198 1 : 266, cited in Cooper zoo 8 = 7 . Cooper's essay is a brilliant ex­ ploration of the relation between debt imperi alism-a phrase she seems to have coined, inspired by Hudson-and evangel­ ical Christianity, and it is heartily reco m­ mended . See also Naylor 1985 .

29. Robertson 1992 : 153 · In Cooper again: op cit.

30 . Atwood zoo 8 :42.

N O T E S 4 5 3

31 . This is, incidentally, also the best response to conventional critiques of the poor as falling into debt because they are unable to delay gratification-another way in which economic logic, with all its human blind spots, skews any possible un­ derstanding of "consumers ' " actual moti­ vations. Rationally, since COs yield around

4 percent annually, and credit cards charge 20 percent, consumers should save as a cushion and only go into debt when they absolutely have to, postponing unnecessary purchases until there's a surplus. Very few act this way, but this is rarely because of improvidence (can't wait to get that flashy new dress) but because human relations can't actually be put off in the same way as imaginary "consumer purchases " : one's daughter will only be five once, and one's grandfather has only so many years left.

32. There are so many books on the subject that one hesitates to cite, but a couple of outstanding examples are Anya Kamentz's Generation Debt (2oo6) , and Brett William's Social History of the Credit Trap (2004) . The larger point about demands for debt as a form of class struggle is in l arge part inspired by the Midnight Notes collective, who argue that, however paradoxically, " neoliberal­ ism has thrown open a new d imension of struggle between capital and the work­ ing class within the domain of credit" (2009 :7) . I have followed this analysis to a degree, but tried to move away from the economistic framing of human life as " reproduction of labor" that hobbles so much Marxist literature-the emphasis on life beyond survival might be distantly Vaneigem-influenced (1967) , but largely falls back on my own work on value the­ ory (Graeber 2001) .

33 · Elyachar 2002:510.

34· See for instance, "India's micro­ finance suicide epidemic," Soutik Biswas, BBC News South Asia, 16 December 2010 , h t t p . b b c . c o . u k / n e w s / w o r l d - s o u t h - a s i a -II997571

35 · I have observed this first hand on any number of occasions in my work as

an activist: police are happy to effectively shut down trade summits, for example, j ust to ensure that there's no possible chance that protestors can feel they have succeeded in doing so themselves.

36. I n practice, it mainly consists of "interest-free" banking a rrangements that pay lip service to the notion of profit­ sharing but in reality operate in much the same way as any other bank. The problem is that i f p rofit-sharing banks are competing with more conventional ones in the same marketplace, those who antic­ ipate that their enterprises will yield h igh profits will gravitate toward the ones of­ fering fixed-interest loans, and only those who anticipate lower profits will turn to the p rofit-sharing option (Kuran 1995 :162) . For a transition to no-interest banking to work, it would have to be total .

37· Under t h e Caliphate, to guarantee the money supply; in China, through sys­ tematic intervention to stabilize markets and prevent capitalistic monopolies; lat­ er, in the United States and other North Atlantic republics, through allowing the monetization of its own debt.

3 8 . True, as I showed in chapter 5 , economic life will always be a matter of clashing principles, and thus might be said to be incoherent to a certain extent. Actu­ ally I don't think this is in any way a bad thing-at the very least, it's endlessly pro­ ductive. The distortions born of violence strike me as uniquely insidious.

39 · von Mises 1949:54o-41 . The origi­ nal German text was published in 1940 and presumably composed a year or two previous.

40 . Ferguson 2007:iv.

41 . I can speak with some authority here since I was myself born of humble origins and have advanced myself in life almost exclusively through my own in­ cessant labors. I a m well known by my friends to be a workaholic-to their of­ ten j ustifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person.

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I N D EX

A Abbasid Caliphate, 1 69, 272-275 , 303 abolitionism, 1 66-1 67 absolute power

in p roperty rights, 1 98-20 1 , 42 1 n92, 42 1 n96

of state and monarchs, 205-207, 325 , 33 1 , 3 85

(abuse/destruction ) , 1 99 Abyssinia, 26 " Accounting for the Grail" (Shell) ,

44 1 n n 1 43-144 Achilles, 1 89, 209, 4 1 8n66, 41 8n70 Act of Settlement of 170 1 , 243 adal-badal (give and take) , 33-34 Addison, Joseph, 242, 368 adultery

biblical view of, 129, 409n8 in Lele culture, 1 3 8

advantage, concept of, 239 Aeschines, 4 1 8-41 9n73 " a ffair of honor," 1 77, 41 5n30 Africa

barter systems in, 24, 394n7 cloth money in, 129 colonialism in, 350 currency in, 150, 152, 4 1 1 n53,

41 1nn53-54 Islam i n , 272, 273 Kabyle Berber men (Algeria) , 106 negative image of, 1 56 reciprocity, examples of in, 92-94 slave trade in, 148-1 55 See also Lele people; slavery; Tiv

people African slavery laws, 1 69 Against Timarchus (Aeschines) , 4 1 8-

419n73 Aga memnon, 1 89

age of debt, 446n53 age of exploration, 308, 444n 12 Age of Revolutions, 345 Aglietta, Michel, 55, 56, 398n30 Agni (god ) , 56 ahimsa, principles of, 234, 255 AIG (American International Group,

Inc . ) , 17, 393n l l Akiga, Sai, 132, 1 6 1-162, 4 1 0n42, 4 1 1 n5 1 ,

412n77 Akkadian language, 178 Akunakuna people, 4 1 2n65 alchemy, 336 , 343 , 448n85 Alexander the Great, 21 9, 227, 229-230,

233 , 427n22, 428n39, 432n 10 Algeria

Kabyle Berber men in, 106, 277, 437n76

national liberation movements in, 374 al-Sadr, Muham mud Baqir, 3 84 "alternating reciprocity , " 405n2 1 "alternative tradition , " 54, 55 Althabe, Gerard, 5 1 Alvarado, Pedro de, 356, 444n20 al-Wahid, Ali ibn &grave;Abd, 1 68- 169,

274, 4 14nn3-8 , 42 1 n l 03 amargi (freedom) , 65 , 2 1 6 Amazonia, burial customs in, 99, 405n 1 8 Am brose, Saint, 282, 284-285 , 286, 287 American dream, ideals of, 374-375 , 3 8 1 American Express, 367 Americas, European conquest of, 3 14-

3 1 8 , 350 Amorite language, 178 Amos, 73 Anaxi mander/ Anaximenes, 230n73 , 245 ancient G reece. See G reece ancient Rome. See Rome Angas, L L . B . , 448n87

4 9 4 I N D E X

Annikeris, 1 97 , 42 1 n90 Antony, Marc, 4 1 8-41 9n73 Aceoka, Emperor, 249, 252-253 apeiron (the unlimited ) , 245 " apostolic poverty ," 290 " appreciate , " etymology of, 408n63 apreitiare (to set a price) , 408 n63 Aquinas, Thomas, 25 1 , 286, 299, 304,

407n60, 43 8n92, 44 1 n 1 47, 446n5 1 Aquitaine, Eleanor of, 294 Arabic terminology

ruq 'a (notes ) , 275 sakk (checks ) , 275 sharika al-mafalis (partnership of the

penniless) , 276 Aramaic l a nguage, 178 Aramaic terminology, hoyween (debt) ,

403 n25 Argentina

collapse of economy i n , 37 default on international debt, 369

aristocracy indebtedness of, 23 1 , 427n28 superiority, notions of, 1 1 2-1 1 3 , 406-

407n44 Aristotle

Baghdad Aristoteleans, 27 1 on barter systems, 394n6 Constitution of the Athenians, 1 87,

417n58 Constitution of the Megarians, 41 9n75 on G reek state, 427n17 On Interpretation, 442n1 5 1 on moneylending, 440n 123 Nicomachean Ethics, 43 1 n78, 43 8n92,

440 n 1 23 , 44 1 n 147, 442n 1 53 , 446n5 1

on origins of money, 24 Politics, 24, 394n6, 4 1 8 n60, 420n 8 1 ,

422n 1 1 2, 427n 17, 440n123 Aro Confederacy, 152, 1 63 , 412nn65--67 Arrighi, Giovanni, 49n 8 8 , 445n21 Arthasasatra (Kautilya ) , 50, 233-234, 240,

432n1 5 Arthur, King, 293 , 44 1 n 137 Aru Islands, 347, 349 Ascent of Money (Ferguson ) , 389 Asoka, Emporer, 234-235 , 249, 252-253 Assyrian law codes, 417n53

on prosti tution, 1 84

Astronomy (Smith ) , 396n3 Athens . See G reece Atlantic, The, 393 n l l Atlantic Slave Trade. See slave trade Atwood, M a rgaret, 92, 378, 404n5 Augustine, Saint, 332, 446n59 Augustinian traditions, 332, 430n69,

443n 1 6 8, 446n59 Augustin the Executioner, 325 Augustus, 287, 4 1 8-4 1 9n73 , 450n 1 1 6 Aurelius, Marcus, 243 Australia

Gunwinggu people, 30-33 , 35 , 127, 4 15n3 1

Maori people, 108, 1 1 6 Axial Age

in China, 235-237 coins, origins of, 225-226 in Egypt, 226 in G reece, 228-232 in India, 232-235 materialism, pursuit of profits and,

237-242 merceneries as currency, 226, 426n 1 1 overview, 223-228 religious thought in, 223-226 rise of coinage in, 2 1 4 wa rfare during, 230-23 1

"Axis of Evil," 45 1 n 14 Aztec people

B

European conquest of, 3 14-3 15 , 3 17, 325-326, 355-357

games of, 356 Moctezu m a , 355-357

Babylonia. See Mesopotamia Baghdad Aristotelea ns, 27 1 bailouts, financial

for corporations, 1 6-17, 3 8 1 , 393n l l mortgage relief funds, 394n l3 (Chap.

1) threat to democracy and, 17, 394n 1 3

(Chap. 1 ) Bakenranef, Pharaoh, 2 1 9 , 403 n29 Balboa, Vasco Nunez de, 444n20 Bali, sl ave trade i n , 156-15 8 , 1 58, 1 63 ,

4 1 3n88 B a n a j i , 427n3 1 Bangladesh, microcredit in, 379-3 80

I N D E X 4 9 5

Bank of England creation of, 339-340, 372, 449n87,

45 1n8 debt monetization and, 452n 1 8 growth o f , 342 loans and, 344, 365, 44H50n87 money, printing of, 339, 452n 1 8 money theories and, 45 , 4 9 , 397n 1 6 politics and, 342-343

Banking Law Journal, 40 banknotes . See paper money bankruptcy

causes of, 379 in France, 359 national bankruptcy, 359, 450n 1 14

bank ruptcy laws in England, 359, 393 n12, 450n1 1 3 in U . S . , 1 6 , 379, 3 8 1 , 393-394nn12-1 3 ,

394n 13 (Chap. 1 ) bankruptcy reform, 16, 393-394nn 12-1 3 banks/banking systems

conspiracy theories about, 363-364 financial crisis of 2008 and, 15-17,

372, 393 n l l global monetary systems, 368-369 "go-go banking," 2 in G reece, 227, 426n12 Islamic law on, 275-280,

436-437nn68-74 in Italy, 291-292, 440n1 32 in medieval Eu rope, 29 1-292,

440n 1 32 modern banking systems, 448n87 "primitive banking, " 448n75 private bank notes, 33 8 , 448n75 ,

449n 102 "proto-banks, " 435 n54 proverbs about, 1 See also central banks; Federal Re-

serve Bank Banque Royal (France) , 342 barbarian coins, 252, 43 1 n 1 "Barbarian L a w Codes," 60, 77, 1 2 8 , 172,

252 Barbarossa, Frederick, 44 1 n n 143 Barbon, Nicholas, 448n8 1 Bardi, 291 bargaining customs

bazaars, haggling in, 102-104 in Islam, 279-280, 329, 43 8n88

in Java, 102 in Madagascar, 104

bar tabs, 1 8 , 3 8 , 40, 47, 85 , 269, 327 barter, myth of

continued belief in, 43-45 , 396n1 dispell ing, 33-4 1 , 36-3 8 , 395n24 overview, 52-62 role in society, 3 86 Smith on utopian barter economy,

22-24, 34-36, 46, 374, 3 83-384, 3 85

barter systems Aristotle on, 24, 3 94n6 division of labor and, 25-26 "double coincidence of wants," 22-23 ,

34, 36 economists' views of, 22-28, 28, 36-

3 8, 395n24 exchange, mental function and, 25-26,

394n9 hospitality values and, 29-34 labor, division of and, 25-26 negative views about, 291 origins of money and, 21, 29, 394n 14,

394nn 14-16 overview, 22-24, 32-33 sociality in, 29-33 violence and, 32, 395n21 vs. using money, 22-24, 44-45, 396n6 women's role in, 29-30, 394n 15,

395nn1 5 barter systems, types of

adal-badal (give and take) , 33-34 in Africa, 24, 35 , 394n7 in the Americas, 24, 394n7 ceremonial ba rter, 3�33 , 35 , 127,

395n 1 8 , 395n2 1 , 41 5n3 1 gift economies, 36, 90, 108 Gunwinggu people, 3�33 , 35 , 127,

4 15n3 1 Inuit people, 1 1 4-1 16, 407n46 in Islam, 279-28 1 , 43 8n88 Kalahari Bushmen, 35 Kwakiutl potlatches, 396n 1 in Madagascar, 28 Na mbikwara people, 29-30, 32-33,

35 , 127, 4 10n22 Native American systems of exchange,

25 , 394n 10 in Oceania, 3 94n7

4 9 6 I N D E X

barter systems, types of (continued) "primitive barter," 394n7 Pukhtun people, 33-34, 37 "spot trades, " 395n24 swapping objects, 29, 37, 44, 85,

395n 1 6 trucking, 25 , 2 8 , 394n7 United States, 24, 394n7 in West Indies, 24

" baseline communi s m , " 97-99, 1 0 1 , 104 Bataille, Georges, 402n8 Battle of Edessa, 1 89 Battuta, Ibn, 107, 4 1 1 n53 Baum, L . Frank, 52-53 , 398nn22-24 bazaars, Middle Eastern

bargaining in, 103-104 Islamic society and, 278-279

bead money, 60, 336 Bedouins, 1 36 Begg, David, 23 Belarus, crime in, 1 09 Bengali people, 347, 349 Bentha m , Jeremy, 353 Bentham, Samuel, 353 Bernanke, Ben, 364 Berndt, Ronald, 30 Bible

on coveting and adultery, 129, 409n8 on debt and redemption, 75, SG-87,

403n25 Exodus, 82, 283 , 403n27, 409n8 forgiveness, concept of in, 84, 403n25 freedom, concept of in, 82 Genesis, 177 on honoring debts, 166 hospitality values in, 405n22 Jubilee, Law of, 2, 82, 390, 403 n20 language of debt in, 75 , 84, 403 n25 ,

404n3 1 Lev iticus, 82, 402n 1 5 , 403 n20,

4 1 9n77 Matthew, 442n1 58 on patriarchy, 1 77 on prostitution, 1 83 , 4 17n5 1 Ten Commandments, 129, 409n8

biblical concepts Deuteronomy, 82, 87, 285, 287, 323 ,

402n17, 403n20, 409n8, 445n28 See also Christianity

Bierce, Ambrose, 424n l

Bight of Biafra, 1 50, 4 1 1 n55 bills of exchange, European

Islamic inspiration for, 292, 440n 129 overview, 29 1-292, 440n 1 30

bimetallism, 52, 397-398n2 1 , 397n2 1 bin Ladin, Osama, 45 1 n 1 1 birth, a s debt, 5 8 Blackburn, Robin, 224n3 Black Death, 308 Blanc, Louis, 404n9 Blaxter, Lorraine, 1 1 9 Bloch, Marc, 1 1 0, 406n40 blood brothers, 100, 1 1 6 blood debts

in Greece, 420n84 Lele people and, 1 37-144, 145 See also life-debts; unpayable debts

blood-feuds, 60, 1 0 1 , 133-1 34, 1 5 8 , 409n 1 6

mourning w a r and, 1 36, 410n22 bloodwealth, 1 33 , 1 35-1 36

vs. wergeld, 133 , 173 , 417n57 Bodin, Jean, 329-330 Boesoou (sculptor), 243 , 247 Bohannan, Laura, 104, 146 Bohannan, Paul, 36, 146, 409n 1 3 , 4 1 0n43 Bolivia

as debtor nation, 5 loans to dictators in, 1 6

Boltanski, Luc, 398n30 bonded workers, 265 "bond-friends , " 100

See also blood brothers bondmaids (cumal), 6 1 , 128

See also cumals bonds, government debt, 33 8-340, 445 bookkeeping, 278 , 33 1 , 43 1 n4, 445n29

interest and, 33 1 Book of the Eskimo (Freuchen ) , 79, 1 15-

1 1 6, 1 1 7, 1 1 9, 402n 1 3 , 407n48 Bosman, William, 1 54 Bourdieu, Pierre, 106, 277, 437n76 Bourgeois, Leon, 40 1 n62 bourgeois ideology, Nietzsche on, 78,

402n 8 , 448n83 Brahamanic doctrine

on freedom, concept of, 68 on moneylending, 9 overview, 56-57, 67--68, 80 primordial debt theory and, 56-57

I N D E X 4 9 7

on " redemption," 80-8 1 Rig Veda, 43 , 56, 408 n3 Satapatha Brahmana, 43 , 399nn33-37 Tattiriya Sarphita, 399n-37 See also Vedas

Brahims, duties of, 255 brass, as cu rrency, 1 54, 4 1 1 n54 Braude(, Ferdinand, 260, 440n 129, 445n29 Braudelians (world systems ) , 433n28 ,

45 1 n6 Brazil, Nambikwara people, 29-30, 32-

33 , 35, 127, 4 10n22 Bretton Woods I I , 452n19

See also treasury bonds, U . S . bridewealth

in China, 1 85 , 417n54 dowries, 179, 41 5n35 a s form of slavery, 409n 1 0 honor price, 1 7 1-176, 414n14, 414n 1 9 ,

41 5n26 Mesopota mian bride payments, 179-

1 80, 41 5-4 1 6nn35-4 1 origins of money and, 1 3 1 overview, 13 1-1 32, 1 3 1-1 33 , 1 35, 1 38 ,

179-1 80, 409n 10 prostitution a s dowry, 1 85-186,

417n55 terhatum ( bride payment) , 179 a s unpayable debt, 132-1 33 vs . " b ride price , " 13 1 , 409n 1 0 " w ife sales , " 1 80, 416n42 See also honor price

Britain. See England British capital ism, 343-345, 35 1-352,

449n87 Bronze Age, 21 0-220, 232, 426n7 bronze coins, 230, 427n26 Bryan, William Jennings, 52-53 bubbles, financi al, 34 1-342, 347-358, 360 Bucher, Karl, 394-395n 14, 40 1 n5 Budda , 223 Buddhism

a b solute liberation in, 266 ahimsa, principles of, 234, 255 Asoka and, 234-235 , 249, 252-253 in Axial Age, 224 Chinese Buddhism, 19, 261-271 debt, duty to repay, 266-267 Dharma, 26 1 , 265 , 268 eternity, beliefs a bout, 254, 432n7

in India, 234-235 , 249, 252-253 , 428n41

Indian Buddhism, 234-235 , 262, 428n41

jisa, custom of, 432n8 Mahayana doctrine, 24 1 , 265-266,

266, 268, 433-434n35 on m a rkets and hu manity, 80, 402n 14 moneylending and, 1 1-12 mothers in, 264-268 sangha (Buddhist monasteries) , 250 self, illusionary nature of, 262, 433-

434n35 on slavery, 233 , 428n36 women in, 265-268 , 434n44, 434n47 See also Vedas

Buddhist monks coins, melting of, 266 restrictions on, 264

bullae (bullion ) , 214 Bulliet, Richard W., 435n60 bullion

in capitalism, 214 defined, 2 1 1 domination of, 1 8 in Middle Ages, 2 1 4 return t o after Middle Ages, 308-309 See also gold and silver

"bullion fa mines , " 309, 443 n3 Bush, George W . , 45 1 n 1 4

t a x c u t s , 450n 1 1 0 Bush, Neil, 127-128, 129, 424n1 Buwei, L ii , 230-240 Byzanti u m empire, 271-272, 308

c Caesar, Julius, 41 8-41 9n73 Cahorsins fa mily, 289, 440n 1 2 1 C a l a b a r , slave t r a d e in, 149-1 53 , 41 1n60 calculation, commercial, 33 1-332, 3 86-

3 87 Caliphate, 169, 272-275 , 303

conversion to I s l a m by, 436n66 m a rket popu lism and, 453 n32 support for, 435-436n60

Calvin, John, 322-323 Calvinism, 3 16, 322-323 , 446n46 Camelot, 293 , 44 1 n 1 37 camwood money, 1 3 8 , 142-144, 1 59 canni balism, 147, 349, 4 1 1 n52, 449n95

4 9 8 I N D E X

capital as credit in Islam, 271-282 investment capital, origins of, 1 9 social capital, 380 " symbolic capita l , " , 437n76

capitale (capital) , 445n29 capitalism

access to, 3 83 British capitalism, 343-345 , 35 1-352,

449n87 bullion in, 214 changes to, ideas about, 373-375 ,

383-3 84 in China, 260, 434n42 current practices, 375-383 debt chain/debt trap and, 53 , 1 55 ,

347, 349 defined, 260 dehumanization i n , 80, 1 94-1 95 , 267,

347, 354 democracy and, 17 financial crisis of 2008 , 1 5-17 financial innovations and, 15-17, 347-

348 , 376, 393n 1 1 flaws of, 3 87-390 future of, 359-360, 377-378, 3 8 1-3 83 gambling and, 357-358 global effects of, 390 growth, need for in, 346, 380 historical views of, 35 1 history's effect on, 3 1 9-320 Marx on, 35 1 , 359, 453n32 in medieval Europe, 434n42 merchant capitalism, 29Q-29 1 ,

440n126 militarization and, 346, 3 82 neoliberalism, 376, 453n32 origins of, 332 overview, 345-355 , 449nn88- 1 04 poverty and, 3 8 8-3 89 prosperity and, 348-349 protests against, 3 82, 452n35 religious ideologies, influence on, 377-

379, 453n28 slave trade and, 349-352, 3 85 supply-side economics, 377 supporters of, 3 88 trading and, 346-347 utopian models for, 354-355 vs. communism, 95-96 , 404nn9-1 1

wage labor and, 345 , 349-353 , 449n88 war and, 346-347, 3 85 See also free-market ideologies; inter­

est "capitalist," defined, 35 8-359 Carolingian empire

derniers in, 292 " imaginary money" in, 37, 383 ,

495n28 slavery in, 424n2

Carreta, The (Traven ) , 307 Carthage, 227-228, 229 Case, Karle E . , 22 cashless economy, modern, 368 Casimir, Margrave, 323-326, 336 , 350,

445nn36-37 Castello, F rancesch, 33 8 caste systems

hierarchy and, 1 1 1 , 432n1 9 in India, 255-257, 432n12 inequality in, 257 vs. slavery, 86

Cataline's conspiracy, 427n28 Catholicism

Augustinian traditions, 332, 430n69, 443n 1 6 8 , 446n59

on English festive life, 309 on moneylending, 10, 283-285 Positivism and, 69-70 on societal interactions, 44 1 n 1 47 See also Christianity

cattle as currency, 59-60, 6 1 , 128, 4 1 0n40 Celtic societies. See Ireland central banks

creation of, 364 money, creation of and, 397n2 1 state-supported central banks, 45,

397n 10 in Sweden, 45 U . S . dollars and, 363 , 366-367, 45 1 n 1 2 U . S . inflation a n d , 452n 1 8 See also Federal Reserve Bank

Cephalus, 400n48 ceremonial barter, 3Q-33 , 35 , 1 27,

395n 1 8 , 395n2 1 , 4 1 5n3 1 Chapman, Anne, 395n 1 6 charisma ( Tsav), 147 charity

Christian charity, 283-287 reciprocity and, 109-1 1 1 , 406n3 8

I N D E X 4 9 9

Charlemagne, King, 48-5 1 Charles V, King, 3 19 Chartalism, 47--48, 50, 54, 258 , 340,

397n 1 1 , 400n56 See also debt-token systems

"charta) money , " 430n74 charta (token) , 47 Chase Bank, 2 chastity, honor and, 1 77- 1 82, 415n3 1 chattel slavery

in China, 236, 428n46 elimination of, 2 1 1-2 1 2 in Greece, 1 87, 417n59 in India, 256 See also slavery

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 330, 446n53 Chaudhuri, K . N . , 437n77 checks, 275-276, 437n7 1 Chicago, industrialization in, 359 children, debt to parents of, 92, 94,

404n6, 405n21 milk-debts, 264-265 , 267-268 , 302,

3 12, 434n3 8 "Children of God . " See Aro Confederacy child-selling

in the Americas, 3 1 4 in China, 22 1 , 425n32 daughters sold to pay loans, 9, 14, 85,

128-129, 403n27, 409n7, 417n17 fathers' rights to, 1 29 , 436n67 in India, 256-257 kidnapping for slavery, 1 54, 1 68-1 69 morality of, 414n5 " natural law" for, 436n67 into slavery, 8 , 129, 1 54, 168, 4 1 2n28,

4 1 2n78 , 4 1 4n5 Chile, national l iberation movements in,

374 China

chattel slavery in, 1 87, 417n59 cheap goods from , 390 coins, origins of, 87, 212, 21 9-22 1 ,

224n4, 225 , 400n56, 425nn23-30, 426n8

communism in, 94 Confucianism in, 224, 248-249, 26 1 ,

417n53 cosmological speculation in, 224,

243-244 dominance of, 369

existential debt in, beliefs about, 399n35 , 400n48

gold and silver in, 3 1 D-3 12, 444nn5-9 inflation in, 270 market populism in, 453n32 m aterialism and substance, 247-250 patriarchal honor in, 178 peasant rebellions in, 25 8-259,

433nn2D-21 population increases in, 3 1 1 , 444n5 slavery in, 259, 422n107 , 444n 12 social currency in, 2 1 9

China, monetary systems in ancient currency in, 74-75 Axial Age, 235-237 brideprice in, 1 85, 417n54 capitalism in, 260, 434n42 Chartalism, 47 , 258 , 400n56 child-selling in, 22 1 , 425n32 commercial loans in, 259, 432n24 credit for peasants, 235 , 428n43 credit systems in, 2 19-22 1 , 269-270,

425n25 , 425n28, 428n43, 435n54 currency in, 236, 428n47 debt, duty to repay, 432n 17,

435nn48-52 debt bondage in, 1 85 interest rates, regulation of in, 259,

432n26 Legalists, School of, 240, 429n55 ,

435n59 loans, 269, 435nn48-53 materialism for profit, 239-242, 429n55 Middle Ages, 258-27 1 , 297

monetary theory in, 25 8 paper money, abandon ment of, 309-

3 13 , 338, 436n63 paper money in, 270, 309-3 1 3 , 338,

435n55 , 436n63 promissory notes in, 269-270, 435n54 taxes in, 269, 3 1 0, 3 13 , 400n52 tax reforms in, 444n6 tribute systems in, 371-372 U . S . debt monetization and, 6, 371-

372, 452nn 1 8-1 9 Chinese Buddhism, 261-266

debt and, 258-271 investment capital, origins of, 1 9 women i n , 265-266, 434n44, 434n47 See also Buddhism

5 0 0 I N D E X

Chinese dynasties Han, 220, 235-236, 249, 258 , 26 1 ,

269, 371 Liang, 26 1 Qing, 258 , 434n42 Shang, 3 8 , 403n22 Song, 269-270, 417n54, 434n42 Sung, 258

.

Tang, 220-22 1 , 26 1 , 434n42, 435n55 Yuan, 25 8

Chinese elemental system, 244, 430n68 Chinese gaming chips, 74, 401n3 Chi nese monetary theory, 400n56 Chinese terminology

fu!fu hao (symbo l ) , 298-302, 442n1 60-164

li min (public profit) , 429n5 8 li (profit) , 239, 429n55 shi (strategic advantage ) , 429n58 ·si li (self-interest) , 429n58

Christian charity, concept of, 283-287 Christian ity

in ancient world, 236, 429n49 equality and debt, views on, 302-303 freedo m , concept of, 286, 439n 1 07 God, notions about, 430n69 Judaism vs . , 287-290 Luther, M a rtin and, 32 1-322, 324,

3 3 1 , 445n26 merchants in, views of, 109, 286-29 1 ,

439 in Middle Ages, 282-296 on moneylending, 283-285, 3 1 9,

339n108 Native American and, 3 1 9 o n poverty, 1 85-186 on property rights, 290 on redemption, concept of, 80-87,

403 n25 on sacrifice, 78 symbols in, 442nn1 54 See also biblical concepts; Catholicism

Christian Union, 324 Cicero, 41 8-4 1 9n73 ciga rettes, a s currency, 37 "circle of sovereignty, " 50 "circulating conn ubium," 407n46 Citibank, 2, 4, 1 6 c i v i l courtesies, 122-124, 408n62 civil ization, notion of, 35 8

Clavero, Bartolome, 439n 108 "clean slates , " 65 , 1 9 1 , 219, 23 1 , 403n22 Clenninden, lnga, 356-357 cloth money, 1 29, 1 3 7- 1 3 8 , 142, 146 cod fish as currency, 26, 37, 3 8 , 398n3 1 Cohn, Norman, 288 coins/coinage

debasing value of, 27, 246, 274, 40 1n2, 43 6n63

defined, 224-225 free peasantry and, 228 government power to issue, 27 history of money and, 22-24 as IOUs, 46-49, 396-397n8 Lydian coins, 224, 227, 426n5 melted for statues, 266 military-coinage-slavery-complex, 229,

234, 240, 248-249, 274 overvaluation of, 73 , 40 1n2 stamping of, 27, 49., 74-75 , 246 two sides of, 73 value of, 245 value of in ancient world, 245-247 vs . credit systems, 2 1 3 v s . virtual money, 40, 2 1 4 , 3 1 3 w a r a n d , 2 1 3-2 14

coins/coinage, origins of in ancient Rome, 230, 427n26 in Axial Age, 224, 426n5 barbarian coins, 252, 43 1 n 1 in China, 2 1 2 , 2 1 9-22 1 , 224n4, 225 ,

425nn23-30, 426n8 in Egypt, 217-2 1 9 , 425n22 first coins, 224, 230, 426n10, 427n26 in G reece, 1 86, 426n 1 0 in I n d i a , 212, 224n4, 225 , 426n6 invention of, 212-2 1 3 , 224n4 in Mesopota mia, 2 1 4-2 17, 424n7 origins of, 40, 399n42, 400n56 overview, 2 1 2-2 14

coins/coinage, types of bronze coins, 230, 427n26 deniers, French, 48, 292, 395n28,

397n12 dinars/dinaras, 273-274, 276, 432n6 francs, M a l agasy, 50 livres, French, 48, 3 95 n28, 3 97n 12 minas, Mesopotamian, 39, 1 97 silver shekels, Mesopotamian, 39, 180,

2 1 4-215

I N D E X 5 0 1

sous, French, 48 , 395n28, 397n12 See also primitive money

Cold War, 37 1 , 3 82 collective p roperty rights, 95 , 395n 15 ,

447n66 college costs, debt and, 379 Collins, Randall, 434n42 colonialism

in Africa, 350 in Americas, 3 1 4-3 1 8 , 350 effect on debtor nations, 5 in Haiti, 6, 393n2 in Madagascar, 5, 50-5 1 , 393n l "pacification" and, 5 in Southeast Asia, 350 See also conquistadors; European

conquests Columbus, Christopher, 1 0 1 , 3 1 1 Coma roff, John, 208 command economies, 404n10 commen;ants (servants ) , 294 commercial economies. See market

economies commercial loans

in medieval China, 259, 432n24 in medieval India, 254, 432n8, 432n15

commercial prostitution, 1 82, 1 84 See also prostitution

commodities, money as, 26, 36, 46, 73-75 , 352-353 , 395n25, 396n3 1 , 449n 1 02, 449n 1 03

communism " baseline communi s m , " 97-99, 1 0 1 ,

104 in China, 94 collective property rights in, 95,

395n l5 , 447n66 in Cuba, 94 defined, 94 fai lures of, 404n 1 1 " from each according t o their

abilities" principle, 95 , 96-98 , 100, 1 15 , 404n9

insulting/competing language in, 96-98

Marx on, 395nn15 , 404n9 myths about, 94-96, 326 overview, 94-102 "pri mitive communism," 95, 395n 15 ,

405n 1 5

as principle of morality, 102 in Russia, 94 Tillers, The, 237, 249n50 vs . capitalism, 95-96, 404nn9-1 1 See also Marx

"communism of the rich , " 326 communities, defined, 77 competitive gift-giving, 106-107, 1 17-1 1 8 compulsory loans, 33 8-33 9 Comte, Auguste, 69-70 "condonation," 1 35 , 409n 1 8 Confucianism, 224, 248-249, 26 1 , 417n53 Confucius, 223-224, 230, 248 , 429n55 ,

429n64 Conquest of America, The (Todorov) ,

3 14 conquests. See European conquests conquistadors

Alvarado, 356 Balboa, 444n20 Columbus, 1 0 1 , 3 1 1 Cortes, 309, 3 1 6-3 17, 320-32 1 , 325-

326, 355-357, 444n20 da Gama, 3 1 1 financial troubles of, 321 financing exploration, 3 1 8 , 323 ,

444n20 Pizarro, 309, 444n20 Polo, 435n3 8 , 448n85 stories about, 444n20 world views held by, 3 1 9-320

conspiracy theories, banking, 363-364 Constantine the Great, 249 Constantinople, 295 , 297 Constitution, U . S . , 45 l n 8 Constitution of t h e Athenians (Aristotle) ,

1 87, 417n58 Constitution of the Megarians (Aristotle) ,

41 9n75 . consumer buying behavior, 378-380 consumer debt, 4, 37 1 , 379, 452n1 9,

453n3 1 consumer motivations, 379, 453n3 1 consumers U . S . , buying power of, 37 1 continual inflation, 339 contract employment, 35 1 , 353 , 449n99 contracts . See credit systems Cook, James, 1 0 1 C o o k , Robert Manuel, 426n 1 1 Cooper, Melinda, 452n28

5 0 2 I N D E X

cooper bars, as currency, 150 copper, 27

copper bars, as currency, 150, 152, 4 l l nn53-54

corporations ba ilouts for, 16-1 7 , 3 8 1 , 393n l l " fictive person" (persona ficta), 304,

443 n 1 70 in India, 346 joi nt-stock companies, 292, 305 , 320,

342, 347 , 449n88 legal idea of, 304 legal recognition of, 304-306, 443n 170 medieval corporations, 303-305 motives of, 368 start-up companies, 347

structure of, 320 corpus intellectuale (intellectua l body ) , 304 Cortes, Hernan, 309, 3 1 6--3 1 7 , 32D--32 1 ,

325-326, 355-357 , 444n20 coveting, biblical view of, 409n8 Coward, Henry, 328, 334 cowries, 60, 13 1 , 220, 225, 425n25,

425n26 credit, as human right, 38D--3 8 1 credit, as meaning " reputation , " 328 credit, economic hi story and, 3 8-40 credit-card companies, 367 , 452n25 credit cards

creation of, 367-368 debit cards, 367

interest charged by, 379, 453 n3 1 offers for, 3 80

credit money. See virtual money credit money system, U.S. dollar and,

36 1 -362 creditors, societal views of, 3 88 credit systems

checks and prom issory notes, 269- 270, 275-276, 435n54, 437n7 1

debit and credit cards, 367

as extension of human society, 33D--33 1 Inca khipu syste m , 220, 425n28 microcredit, 379-3 8 1 Muslim suftaja, 20 1 , 276, 29 1 , 437n 8 1 negative views o f , 335 , 447n66 private bank notes, 33 8 , 448n75,

449n102 proverbs about, 326 shopkeepers and, 352

tally sticks, 48, 268, 396n37 , 397 n 1 6, 425n26, 435nn48-53 , 442n 1 6 1

trust i n , 73 , 328-329, 337, 34D--3 4 1 , 347

utopian ideals about, 335-336 vs. coins/coinage, 40, 2 1 3 See also interest-bearing l o a n s ; virtual

money credit systems, origins of

ancient systems, 18, 37-3 8 in China, 2 1 9-22 1 , 269-270, 425n25 ,

425n28, 428n43 , 435n54 destruction of ancient systems and,

327

in G reece, 23 1 in India, 255-257

in Mesopotamia, 2 1 4-2 17

in Middle East, 21 5, 275-277, 424n9, 436-437nn68-74

Credit Theory of money, 46--52 credtit trap, 453 n32 Creed, the (symbol ) , 442n 154 crime

debt-default as, 17 , 329 gift by stealth, 109-1 1 1 hierarchy and, 1 09-1 1 1 redemption and excha nge, 1 9 societal debt o f criminals, 1 2 1-122

criminalization, as debt, 334, 446n60 criminals, puni sh ments for, 435n59 "crisis," etymology of, 177

Critique of the Gotha Programme ( M a rx) , 404n9

Cross River societies. See merchant soci­ eties, slave trade

Crusades, 29 1 , 3 1 8 "crying down/crying up," 282, 337 ,

43 8n95 , 440n 1 30 Cuba, communism in, 94 cumals, 1 7 1 , 173 , 408nn3-4, 414n14,

41 4n2 1 , 4 15n25 bond maids, 6 1 , 128

_ cuneiform documents, Mesopota mian,

3 8, 54 cu rrency. See coinage; coins/coinage; cur­

rency; money; primitive money

D da Gama, Vasco, 3 1 1 D a m , Aswam, 379

I N D E X 5 0 3

Da Republica (Bod i n ) , 329 Darius, King, 23 1 , 406n3 9 D a r k Ages, 6 0 , 2 1 1 , 252 Das Capital (Marx ) , 354 daughters, as currency for debt, 9, 14, 85 ,

128-129, 403 n27, 409n7, 417n 17 See also female slaves

Davanzati, Bernardo, 394-395n 1 4 Davenant, Charles, 326, 330-33 1 , 340,

347 debit cards, 367 debt, age of, 446n53 debt, concepts

as self-indulgence, 379, 453 n3 1 debt, concepts of

as cause for political instability, 230-231 as central issue in current economic

politics, 4-5 h istoric a rguments about, 8-9, 393 n4 i mpersonal markets and, 1 3-14 language about, 8, 123 , 330, 403 n25 as morality, 242, 430n65 origins of money and, 21-22 redemption and, 75, 80-87, 403n25 societal panic about, 378-379 used to split communities, 447n66 as way to control labor, 427n3 1

debt, duty to repay in Buddhism, 266-267 in China, 432n17, 435nn48-52 concept of, 1 97 in Greece, 430n65 in India, 256-257, 430n65 , 432n17 in Mesopotamia, 81 as moral obligation, 3-4, 77 taxes and, 85-86, 403n28 "to pay," etymology of, 60, 399n43 as value, 368

debt, government, 33 8-340 debt, types of

blood debts, 1 37-144, 145 , 420n84 flesh -debts, 330 "karmic debt," 262-263 , 268, 302,

433-434n35 life-debts, 133-1 36 mi lk-debts, 264-265, 267-268, 302,

3 12, 434n3 8 " moral relations, as debts, 329-330 social debt, 69-71 See also unpayable debt

debt a mnesty "clean slates , " 65 , 1 9 1 , 2 1 9 , 23 1 ,

403n22 Jubilee, Law of, 2, 82, 390, 403 n20

debt bondage abolition of in Rome, 403 n27 in ancient Rome, 201-207 in China, 1 85 conditions in, 129 daughters sold to pay debt, 9, 14, 85 ,

128-129, 403n27, 408n7, 417n17 in G reece, 420n82 indentured service, 3 13 , 335n52, 350,

449nn97-99 Jubilee, Law of, 2, 82, 390, 403n20 pawns/pawnship, 155-1 56 uprisings against, 230-23 1 ,

427nn24-25 debt bonds, 33 8-340, 339-340, 345 ,

448 n80 debt chain/debt trap, 53 , 1 55 , 347, 349,

453 n32 debt-collection

kings and, 3 97n 15 violence and, 7-8, 14, 194-195 See also moneylending

debt crisis economic recessions and, 1 5-17, 370,

393 n 1 1 , 452n25 financial bubbles and, 341-342, 347-

348, 358 global financial crisis of 2008 and,

1 5-17 in G reece, 230-23 1 , 427n27 mortgage crisis and, 15, 380-38 1 , 393n l l private banks crash i n , 369 in Rome, 230-23 1 solved through warfare, 23 1 subprime mo rtgage crisis, U . S . , 380-

3 8 1 in Third World, 2-3 , 5--6 U . S . international debt and, 369 in U.S. ( 1 970s ) , 364

debt-default Argentina and, 369 laws on, 256, 432n17 seen as crime, 17, 329

"debt," defined, 390, 424n1 obligation vs. debt, 13-14, 2 1 in Oxford English Dictionary, 1

5 0 4 I N D E X

"debt, " etymology of, 59 "debt i mperialism," 368 debt l itigation, 333-334 debt monetization, 371-372, 45 1 n n 1 8-1 9 debtor-creditor relationships, 1 24-126,

408nn66-67 debtor protection institutes, 1 8

See also I n ternational Monetary Fund

debtor punishments debt peonage, 4 14n5 execution, 333 loss of freedom, 8 1 , 402n 1 6 mutilation, 1 6 , 77, 2 8 8 , 402n 10 Nehemiah on, 8 1-82, 283 , 402n1 9 pawnship, 41 4n5 sins as, 407n60

debtors' prisons conditions in, 7, 334, 393 n3 , 447n65 in England, 7, 17, 334, 39 1 , 439n l 14,

444n20 Fleet and Marshalsea prisons, 334,

447n65 in U . S . , 17

debt pawns. See pawns/pawnship debt peonage

capitalism, comparisons to, 347, 349 creation of, 349-35 1 duties of peons, 129 in G reece, 228, 427n15 in Haiti, 6, 393 n2 in India, 256-257 as legal punishment, 414n5 as means of recruiting global labor,

368 peons, 349 as slavery, 6, 393n2, 45 1 n 1 6 slavery, comparison t o , 349-350,

45 1 n 1 6 for wives committing adultery, 129

debt records, preservation of in China, 3 8 coins vs. credit arrangements and, 22 in Egypt, 3 8 Indus Va lley civilization, 3 8 in Mesopota mia, 14, 2 1 , 3 8 , 39, 54,

6 1 , 399-400n43 , 399n43 in Sumer, 39, 396n32

"debts of punishment, " 407n60 debt theories. See economic theories

debt-token systems Chartalism, 47-48 , 50, 54, 258 , 340,

397n l l , 400n56 leather token money, 48, 74-75, 327,

396n37 medieval European systems, 40, 48,

74-75 , 435n56 tally sticks, 48, 268, 396n37, 397n 1 6 ,

425n26, 435nn48-53 , 442n 1 6 1 "debt t o nature , " 3 86 Deccan riots, 257 Decretum (Gratia n ) , 287 defense budget, U . S . , 365-366 deficits, government, 358 , 366, 450n 1 1 0 dege (millet) , 1 69 Deleuze, Gilles, 402n8 demagogues, 229 democracy

bailouts, and threat to, 17, 394n 1 3 (Chap. 1 )

in Buddhism, 250 capitalism and, 1 7 credit and debt, i d e a s a b o u t in, 3 87-

3 88 finance, democratization of, 3 88 in G reece, 228 , 427n 1 7 in monarchical hierarchies, 80, 402n1 9

de nada (you're welcome), 1 23 deniers, French, 48 , 292, 395n28, 397n 12 deposit notes, 448n75 Depository I nstitutions Deregulation and

Monetary Control Act of 1 980, 376, 452n25

deregulation, financial, 376, 452n25 de rien (you're welcome) , 123 derivatives, financial, 1 5 De Tobia (Ambrose) , 284 Deuteronomy, views on debt in, 82, 87,

285 , 287, 323 , 402n 17, 403n20, 409n 8 , 445n28

devadasis (temple dancers ) , 1 8 1-1 82, 4 1 6n44

de Vitry, Jacques, 10 Dharma, 26 1 , 265 , 268 Dharmasastra, 255 diamonds vs. water, 447n73 Diaz del Casti llo, Bernal, 3 1 6-3 17, 355-

356, 444n17 dictators, 2-3 didjeridu, 3 1

I N D E X 5 0 5

Die Wibelungen (Wagner) , 44 1 n 143 dignity. See honor Dike, K . Onwuka, 4 12n67 dinars/dinaras, 273-274, 276, 432n6 Diogenes the Cynic, 420n 89 Dionysius' symbola, 30 1 , 442n 1 63 Dionysius the Areopagite, 299-30 1 ,

442n1 57, 443n 1 6 8 Pseudo-D ionysius' works, 442n1 55

dirhams, 274, 276, 28 1 Divine Providence, 44, 279-280, 396n4 Dockes, Pierre, 424n2, 43 1 n 1 0 dollar, U . S .

artificial value of, 37 1 , 452n 1 9 central banks and, 366-367, 45 1 n 1 2 credit money system a n d , 361-362 global status of, 367 gold, exchanged for, 36 1 , 450n1 gold, pegging to, 53 , 214, 361-368,

397n2 1 , 45 1n6 G reenbackers and, 52, 372, 397-

398n21 petroleum sales and, 367 state-money theories and, 53-54 as world " reserve currency , " 366-367,

45 1 n 1 2 S e e dollar, U . S .

Dominicans, 289-290, 450-45 1 n5 dominium (property ) , 198-203 , 200-20 1 ,

42 1 n 95 Dornbuch, Rudiger, 23 double coincidence of wants, 34, 36 "double coincidence of wants," 22-23 ,

34, 36 Douglas, Frederick, 414n12 Dougl as, Mary, 137-144, 41 0n25 ,

41 0n29n34 dowries. See bridewealth Dragon (ship) , 1 5 1 Driffill, John, 23 "dry exchange," 440n1 30 Duby, Georges, 407n45, 42 1 n 1 0 1 , 441n1 37 Dumont, Louis, 257, 398n30, 41 3n89 Durkheim, Emile, 70, 40 1 n62 Dutch Republic. See Holland dzamalag, 3 1-32

E East India Company, 341 , 347, 35 1 , 449n88 economic m a rkets, defined, 1 1 4- 1 1 5

economic morality, 92, 378, 404n5 economic recessions, 15-17, 370, 393 n 1 1 ,

452n25 econ omics, discipline of

ba rter and, 32-33 founding of, 24-25 Newtonian economics, 44, 340-34 1 ,

396n2 place in socia l sciences, 90 " real econo mies," 44, 345 religion and, 44, 279-280 tech nical vocabulary in, 28 See also Smith, Adam

Economics (Begg, Fischer and Dornbuch) , 23

Economics ( Case et a l . ) , 22 Economics Explained (Maunder et a l . ) , 23 Economics (Parkin and King) , 23 economic theories

bi meta llism, 52, 397-398n2 1 , 397n21 Charta lism, 47-48 , 50, 54, 258 , 340,

397n 1 1 , 400n56 Chinese monetary theory, 400n56 Credit Theory, 46-52 Dumontonian theories, 257, 398n30,

4 13 n89 " inexhaustible treasuries , " 253 , 264-

265 , 268, 303 , 432n6, 436n42, 44 1 n 1 44

"invisible hand" theory, 44 Islamic precedents in, 279, 282, 291-

292, 303 , 43 8n85 , 440n 129 Keynesiansim, 53-55 , 373-375 , 376,

3 8 8 , 398n25, 398nn28-29, 430n74 Nietzsche on, 76-78, 336, 402nn8-10,

43 9n1 17, 448n83 primordial debt theory, 55-62, 62-65 ,

1 36, 398n30 ration a l choice theory, 90 Reagnism/Reagan Revolution, 377 social contract theories, 54-55 , 398 n29 Social Exchange Theory, 9 1 Solidarism, 40 1n62 " spheres of exchange , " 36, 146,

41 0n43, 495n25 state-money theories, 48, 397n 1 1 Structu ralism, 9 1 Thatcherism, 376 unpayable debt theory, 13 1-136, 158-159 See also capitalism

5 0 6 I N D E X

economies, types of command economies, 404n 10 gift economies, 36, 90, 108 "real economies," 44, 345 stateless economies, 60 See also barter systems; capital­

ism; human economies; market economies

" economy," concept of, 27-28, 44-45 Edward I, King, 205 Efik people, 4 1 2n65 egalitarian societies, individualism in,

4 1 3n89 Egil (Viking) , 1 1 8 , 407n54 Egypt

in Axial Age, 226 coins, origins of, 217-2 1 9, 425n22 debt, view of in, 2 1 8 , 425n 1 8 debt records i n , 3 8 economic history in, 3 8 existential debt in, beliefs about, 400n48 Greek rule of, 2 19, 230 interest-bearing loans in, 63 , 400n47,

400n56 Islam in, 273 , 274 Jewish merchants in, 437n72 mutual aid in, 2 1 8 Pharaonic Egypt, 3 8 , 452n52 redemption in, concept of, 82 slavery in, 209 taxes in, 63 , 400n52, 452n52 See also Islam; Middle East

Egyptian hieroglyphics, 3 8 Einzig, Paul, 395n24, 399n42, 40 1 n3 ,

414n14 Ekej iuba, Felicia, 4 1 2n67 Ekpe society, 1 53 , 1 63 , 4 12n70 Elders of Zion, 363 electronic money. See virtual money elemental systems, 244--245, 430n68 Elizabeth, Queen, 333 Elyachar, Julia, 3 80 empowerment, credit and, 3 80 Encyclopedia of Taoism, 442n n 1 63 Engels, Friedrich, 395n 15 , 448n83 England

British capitalism, 343-345, 35 1-352, 449n87

credit money in, 47 debt-token system in, 40, 48, 435n56

economic turmoil in, 309 government monetary control , medi-

eval, 48-5 1 , 397nn 1 5- 1 8 slave trade, involvement in, 150--152 Stuart England, 332, 336 , 447n65 " truck system" in, 349, 350, 352,

449n 1 02 Tudor England, 3 12, 336-337, 447n65 Victorian Engl and, 359 wage labor in, 35 1-353 , 449n99

Enkidu story, 1 8 1-1 82, 1 83 enlightenment, 297, 359, 43 8n85 Enmetena , 216, 424n12 Ephesus, 430n72 "epic communi s m , " 95 equality, assumption of in debt, 86-87,

403nn29-30 equality /inequality

gift-giving, equality of status and, 1 06-108 .406nn33-34, 120, 122, 408n6 1

gift-giving and, 122, 408n 6 1 in hierarchial relationships, 1 00, 1 1 5 ,

1 1 9-120, 257, 405n2 1 , 407n57, 407nn-46-48

interest-bearing loans and, 86-87, 403nn29-30

violence as cause for, 1 1 3 Equiano, Olaudah, 1 66-1 67, 1 7 1 eranos loans, 403-404n30 Eskimo people. See Inuit Essenes, 250, 403n28, 43 1 n 8 1 eternity, beliefs about

Augustianian eternity, 443n 1 68 Buddhist beliefs on, 432n7

euro Germany and, 55-56 global adoption of, 367, 45 1 n 1 4

Europe banking systems in, 29 1-292, 440n l 32 Black Death and, 308 capitalism in, 434n42 Dark Ages in, 60, 2 1 1 , 252 debt-token system in, 40, 48, 435n56 economic turmoil in, 308-309 hierarchy in, 302 inflation in, 308-309, 3 12-3 1 3 , 339,

443n2 interest-bearing loans in, 440n 1 30 Islam in, 272

I N D E X 5 0 7

market economies, emergence of, 130 merchant capitalism in, 290-29 1 ,

440n 126 in Middle Ages, 282-296, 434n42 modern capitalism and, 346 "price revolution" in, 304, 308-309 ,

3 1 3 , 339, 443n2 silver, lack of in, 3 1 1 slavery i n Middle Ages i n , 292,

439n 104, 44 1 n 133 slave trade in, 2 1 1-2 12, 224n3 trade in, 292-293 , 303 U . S . treasury bonds and, 367 See also specific countries

European conquests of Americas, 3 14-3 1 8 o f Aztec people, 3 14-3 15 , 3 17, 325-

326, 355-357 morality and, 1 1 0 Spanish/Portuguese empires, 24, 309-

3 1 7, 3 1 9, 355-356, 440n 132 See also conquistadors

European war and conquest, capitalism and, 346-347

.

euro zone, creation of, 55-56 Evans-Pritchard, E . E . , 96-98 , 134, 409n 1 0 exchange, morality i n

impersonal nature o f , 103 " mutuality" and, 103 overview, 102-108

exchange, principle of as basis for human function, 25-26,

394n9 effect of violence and origins of, 1 9 human relations and, 13-14, 1 8-1 9,

6 1�2 language and, 76-77, 402n8 " m utuality," in, 1 03 purpose of exchange, 104 self-interest and, 336 See also gift exchange customs

exchange systems. See barter systems; gift exchange customs

existential debt, 5�3, 67�9, 399nn33-40, 400n47, 400n48

ex nihilo, 377 Exodus, views on debt in, 8?, 283,

403n27, 409n8 expense accounts, 3 8 exploration, a g e o f , 308

exploration, financing, 3 1 8 , 444n20 explorers. See conquistadors "eye for an eye, " 9 1 , 404n4 Eyo I I , King, 412n79

F Fabian socialism, 359, 3 8 8 F a i r , Ray C . , 22 fairs and festivals, medieval, 294-295 ,

323-324, 329-330, 346n46 " faith , " in government, 341 familia (family ) , 20 1 , 421 n 1 0 1 " family," etymology o f , 201 , 42 1 n 10 1 fatidra (blood brotherhood ) , 1 0 0 , 1 1 6 Faure, Bernard, 44 1 n 1 48 Faust (Goethe ) , 343 , 448n85, 450n 1 14 feasts

competitive gift-giving in, 1 06-107, 1 1 7-1 1 8

hospitality during, 99 violence, potential for in, 29-33 , 35,

1 17-1 1 8 , 1 27, 4 1 0n22 feather money, 60, 129, 336 Federal Reserve Bank

loans to government by, 365-366 in New York, 362-364 overview , 364-365 , 450n5 , 45 1 n9,

45 1nn8-9 power to print money, 364-365 ,

45 1 n 8 , 45 1 n 1 8 U . S . international debt and, 369-370

Federal Reserve Notes, 365 female slaves, 4 17n54

activities of, 129, 409n7 bondmaids, 6 1 , 128 cumals, 171, 173, 408 nn3-4, 4 14n 14,

414n21, 415n25 in G reece, 7 1 , 1 89, 41 8n66 in Iceland, 408n3 in Russia, 408-409n5 used as currency, 1 27-129,

408-409nn� feminism, Islamic, 3 84 feminism, rise of, 374 festive life, English, 294-295 , 329-330,

346n46 attack of, 309

festive life, German, 323-324 feudalism, 1 14, 121-124, 172, 286, 324-

325 , 424n2

5 0 8 I N D E X

fiat money, 53 , 270, 364, 430n74 Ficino, Marcelo, 408n67 " fictive person" (persona ficta), 304,

443 n 1 70 " fiduciary , " defined, 73 , 245 , 40 1n2 " fiduciary" money, 430n74 finance, democratization of, 38 8 financial bubbles, 34 1-342, 347-348, 35 8 ,

360 financial deregul ation, 376, 452n25 financial global crisis of 2008

bailouts for, 393n 1 1 overview, 14-17, 372

financial innovations, 1 5-17, 347-348 , 376, 393 n 1 1

virtual money, 17- 1 9 financial instruments, modern, 33 8 Finley, Moses, 8, 63 , 393 n5, 403-404n30,

417n56, 41 9n76, 42 1 n 1 04, 422n 108, 422n 1 1 0, 427n27

on ancient money, 8, 393n5 , 430n74 Fischer, Stanley, 23 Fleet prison, 334, 447n65 flesh-debts, 144-148, 149, 155 , 330, 349 " fl ying cash," 260 food, sharing of, 79, 1 0 1 , 402n1 3

See also feasts forced labor. See debt peonage; slavery Ford, Henry, 365 " forgiveness , " language in debt, 8 Fort Knox, 36 1 , 362 Fouille, Alfred, 40 1 n62 France

Euro and, 45 1 n 1 4 Haiti, conquest o f , 6, 393n2 Madagascar, invasion of, 5 , 50--5 1 moneylending in, 9-10 Solidarism, 40 1 n62 state-supported central banks in, 45 Structuralism in, 9 1

Franciscans, 289-290, 434n40, 450- 45 1 n5

francs, Ma lagasy, 50 Franklin, Benjamin, 63 freedom , concepts of

armargi (Sumerian) , 65, 2 1 6 as basic value, 14 in Bible, 82 in Brahamanic doctrine, 68 capitalism and, 35 1 , 354-355 , 3 85

in Christian ity, 286, 439n 107 first recorded in history, 2 1 6 in I s l a m , 279 language about in debt, 8, 203 libertus (free ) , 203 in Mesopota mia, 82 in Roman law, 203-206, 2 1 0 ,

422 n 1 09 , 422n 1 1 3 , 423 n 1 1 8 , 423 nn 122-123

utopian models of capitalism and, 354-355

See also slavery " free," etymology of, 203 , 422n 1 1 1 free labor. See slavery free-ma rket ideologies

ideas a bout, 382 Islamic precedents in, 279, 282, 291-

292, 303 , 43 8n85 , 440n 129 self-interest in, 282 self-regulating market systems, 44,

363-364, 396n7 Third World debt crisis and, 3 See also capital ism; corporations;

International Monetary Fund Freemasons, 363 free peasants. See peasants Free Silver platform, 52 free wage labor. See wage labor French Enl ightenment, 297, 359 French law codes, on property rights,

42 1 n92 French Revolution, 48, 69, 95 , 345 , 358-

359 French termino logy

de rien (you're welcome), 123 merci (thank you) , 123 rendre service (giving service) , 1 1 9 si vous plait (please) , 1 23 taille {tally ) , 330

Freuchen, Peter, 79, 1 1 5 , 1 1 9, 402n 1 3 , 407n48

Friedman, Thomas, 3 8 8 , 452n26 Friedrich, Margrave, 3 1 8 friendships, as debts, 329-330, 446n5 1 fructus { fruits ) , 199 fu!fu hao (symbol ) , 298-302,

442-443 nn1 60- 1 64 Fugger Family, 320, 444n24 funera ls, as life expense, 9 Furies, The, 125, 420n84

I N D E X 5 0 9

G Gabon, 1 6 Galey, Jean-Claude, 9

Galileo, 447n73 Gallieni, Joseph, 5 , 50 gambling

capitalism as, 357-35 8 slavery and, 450n109

gaming chips, Chinese, 74, 40 1 n3 Ganesha (god ) , 267 Gardiner, Geoffrey W . , 2 1 1 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais ) , 1 24 Gartner, Manfred, 22 Gautama, Siddhartha, 232, 402n14 Geild (English) , 59 Geild (money ) , 59 Geld (German) , 59 "generalized reciprocity , " 405n21 General Motors, 16 Generation Debt ( Kamentz) , 453n32 generosity/sharing, as cultural value, 98-

99, 1 0 1 , 405n 1 6 Genesis, 177 Georg the Pious, 325 "German Historical School , " 47-48 Germanic law codes, 6o-61 German Renaissance, 323-325 , 445n39 German terminology

Geld (money ) , 59 schuld (debt/fault/guilt) , 77, 407n59

Germany Euro and, 45 1 n 1 4 euro a n d , 55-56 reparation payments by, 5 U . S . aid to, 373 U . S . treasury bonds and, 6

Gerner, Jacques, 26 1 , 265 , 268 Ghazali, Prophet, 279-28 1 , 29 1 , 298 ,

43 8n88, 43 8n92 Ihya, 27?, 436 , 438n88 -

"ghost money, " 397n39 See also " i maginary money "

"ghost-wives , " 1 36 Gide, Charles, 40 1 n62 Gift, The (Mauss ) , 402n8 gift economies, 36, 90, 108 gift. exchange customs

"blood brothers, " 1 00, 1 1 6 competitive gift-giving, 96-98 , 106-

1 07, 1 1 7-1 1 8

equality o f status in, 106-1 08.406nn33-34, 120, 122, 408n 6 1

equivalent, concept o f , 1 0 8 "heroic gifts , " 420n8 8 h o n o r a n d , 1 1 8 i n Inuit culture, 1 14-1 1 6 , 407n46 kings, gift-giving to, 106-108, 1 1 0,

406n36 loans vs . gifts , 420n84 of Maori people, 108, 1 1 6 obligations and, 106 reciprocity and, 108- 1 09 , 406n36 self-interest in, 105-106, 405n28 social relationships and, 406n36 Tiv people, 1 04-105 , 328, 405n28 of Tiv people, 104-105 , 108, 328 trust and, 1 17

Gifts and Spoils, 1 1 9 Gilder, George, 377 Gild (Gothic) , 59 Girard, Rene, 398n30 global monetary systems, 367-369

global politics, current, 444n22 Gluckman, Max, 405n 15 goal ( redemption) , 80 God, notions about

in Christianity, 430n69 cosmological speculation and, 224,

243-244, 430nn68-69 Durkheim on, 70 existential debt and, 56-58 , 62-63 ,

67-69, 399nn33-40, 400n47 grace of God, as debt, 286, 439n 1 07 "in God we trust," 377 Islam and price determinations, 279-

280 markets created by God, 303 materialism and, 243-250, 300,

300&grave; in Middle Ages, 297-298 money given by God, 298 , 441 n 147 Newton on, 44 See also religion

god, society and. See existential debt; social debt

godless materialism, 377 Goethe, 343 , 448n85 , 450n 1 14 "go-go banking," 2 gold, infl ation and, 362

5 1 0 I N D E X

gold, U . S . myths about, 362-363 , 450n4 gold and silver

ancient coins made from , 73-74, 40 1 n2

as backing for currency, 53-54, 397n2 1 in China, 3 1 0-3 12, 444nn5-9 debasement of, 337 intrinsic value of, 245, 336-33 8 ,

447n73 , 448n85 mining of, 309, 3 1 1 , 3 1 5, 3 97n2 1 ,

443 n3 , 444n6, 444n 1 5 pegging v a l u e from U . S . d o l l a r , 53,

214, 361-36 8 , 3 97n2 1 , 45 1n6 si lver, as currency, 39, 3 10-3 12,

444nn5-9 used as money, 27

Goldman Sachs, 17 gold reserves, U.S., 36 1 -363 , 364 "gold stackers , " 363 gold standard, 52-53 , 34 1 , 36 1 Goody, Jack, 415n33 , 4 17n55 government-backed money, 53 , 270, 364,

430n74 government debt bonds, 33 8-340, 345 govern ment deficits, 35 8 , 450n 1 1 0 government monetary regulation

debt monetization and, 371-372, 45 1 n n 1 8- 1 9 , 453 n72

" faith, " in government, 3 4 1 human m o r a l relation w i t h , 339 in India, 259-260, 432n26, 432n28 kings control over money, 48-5 1 ,

3 97n 15 in medieval England, 48-49,

397nn15-18 overview, 44-45, 70 property rights and, 206 stateless economies and, 60 of taxes, 48-5 1 , 397n 1 9 (See also

Federal Reserve Bank) government power and policies

as administrator or existential debt, 70-71

"command econo mies" and, 404n 1 0 " t h e state," defined, 58 trust in, 340-341

government power and policy, 340-341 govern ment regulation

market economy, Indian, 259-260, 432n26, 432n28

gracias (thank you ) , 408n63 Grameen Bank, 379-3 80 gratia (influence ) , 408n63 Gratian, 287 G reat Depression, 53 G reece

chattel slavery in, 1 87, 417n59 coins, origins of, 87, 426 n 1 0 cosmological speculation in, 224,

230n68, 243-244 debt crisis in, 1 9 1 , 420n82 demagogues in, 229 economic life in, 1 90- 1 93 Egypt, rule of, 2 1 9, 230 existential debt in, beliefs about,

400n48 free peasa ntry in, 228 Homeric honor, 1 1 7nn56-57, 1 86-189,

191, 4 1 8n67nn68 honor and debt in, 1 8 6- 1 97 man's honor in, 1 8 8 patronage i n , 1 9 1 politics in, 229-232, 429n48 prostitution in, 4 1 8n61 self-sufficiency in, 1 87, 1 90, 4 1 8 n60 slavery in, 189, 229, 4 1 8 n65, 420n82 women's honor in, 4 1 8nn63-65

G reece, monetary systems in Axial Age, 228-232 banking systems in, 227, 426n 12 commercial markets, emergence of,

1 86-1 87, 1 9 1 credit systems in, 23 1 currency in, 74-75 debt, duty to repay, 430n65 debt bond age in, 228, 420n82, 427n 1 5 interest-bearing l o a n s in, 86-87, 1 9 1-

1 92, 403n30, 4 1 9nn75nn77, 420n 8 1 mining in, 229, 427n 1 9 patronage, 1 9 1 philosophical inquiry, begi� of,

230n72, 244 taxes in, 63 value of money in, 245-246

Greece, origins of money in, 24, 59, 3 94n6, 399n4 1

Seaford on, 244-247, 394n6, 399n4 1 , 417n57, 4 1 8 nn68-69, 426n 1 1 , 430n73

greed, moral views on, 3 1 5

I N D E X 5 1 1

Greek elemental syste m , 244--245, 430n68 G reek terminology

metadosis (share/sharing) , 394n6 Opheildma (that which is owed ) ,

403n25 Opheilema (that which is owed ) ,

403n25 porne (slave girls ) , 7 1 , 1 87, 1 89,

41 8n66 symbolon (tally ) , 298-299, 442n 1 5 8 ,

442n n 1 53-154 tfme(honor) , 176, 2 1 7n57

G reenbackers, 52, 372, 3 97-398n21 G reenspan, Alan, 364, 450n 1 1 0 G regory, Christopher A . , 395n25, 450n 1 Griedier, William, 450n5 Grierson, Philip, 60, 128, 399nn43--45,

408n2, 436n63 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) , 346 Guanzi, The, 22 1 Guattari, Pierre-Felix, 402n8 Gu icciadin i , Francesco, 332, 446n58 guilt and sin, concepts of

debt viewed as sin, 1 95 , 218, 354 language about in debt, 8 , 56-57,

59-60, 60, 77, 225n28, 399n32, 399n40, 403n25, 407n59

moneylending and, 1 2-1 3 religious moral concepts and debt, 56 schuld (debt/fault/guilt) , 77, 407n59

Gunwinggu people, 30-33 , 35 , 1 27, 415n3 1

Guptas, 43 1 n3 Guth,Del loyd ] . , 446n53 gypsies, 446n60

H " hacksilber," 396n33 Hadot, Pierre, 429n49 haggling. See bargaining customs Haida people, 1 1 7 Haiti

conquest of, 6 , 393 n2 poverty in, 6, 393n2 zombie stories from , 170

Hallam, Henry, 393n3 , 447n65 Han dynasty, 220, 235-236, 249, 258 ,

26 1 , 269, 37 1 Hanseatic alli ance, 29 1 , 440n 1 26 Harappan civilization, 426n7

Hardy, Thomas, 4 1 6n42 Harris, Rosemary, 41 2n78 Harsa, 254 Hart, Keith, 47, 73 Hatian zombie stories, 170 Hawtrey, Ralph, 395n24 He, Zheng, 37 1 Heather, Ken, 22 Hebrew terminology

goal (redemption) , 80 nokri ( foreigner) , 285 padah ( redemption ) , 80

Helverius, 446n57 Henri the Liberal, 294 Henry I I , King, 47--48-5 1 Henry I I I , King, 288 Henry of Ghent, 43 8n92 Heraclitus, 430n72 Herodotus, 1 83 , 2 1 5 , 406n39, 4 1 6n44,

420n85 " heroic gifts," 420n88 " heroic societies," 1 17, 208-209 heroic systems of honor, 1 93-1 95 Hesiod, 4 1 9n77 hierarchial relationships

" blood brothers, " 1 00, 1 1 6 ·caste systems, 86, 1 1 1 , 255-257,

432n 12, 432n14, 432 n 1 9 civil courtesies and, 1 23-124 communistic sharing in, 1 1 6 debtor-creditor relationships, 1 24-126,

408nn66-67 expectations of reciprocity in, 1 1 6-1 1 8 inequality i n , 1 00, 1 1 5 , 1 1 9-120, 257,

405n2 1 , 407n57, 407nn--46--48 "j oking relation," 1 1 7, 407n5 1 mathematical models of, 1 1 3-1 1 5 overview, 1 09-1 1 3 patronage, 1 1 8-120, 407n57 reciprocity, expectations of, 1 1 1-1 1 3 ,

1 14, 406n42 slave owners and slaves, 170-17 1 social ity among strangers and, 1 16 See also patriarchal hierarchy; slavery

Hildebrand, Bruno, 394-395 n 1 4 Hinduism

on debt, 56 eternity, beliefs about, 58 on hospitality, 58, 399n3 8 on interest-bearing loans, 1 1-12

5 1 2 I N D E X

Hinduism (continued ) land ownership in, 255 as major world religion, 224, 226n4 in Middle Ages, 254-255 on prostitution, 1 8 1 temples of, 256 women in, 267 See also Brahamanas; India; Vedas

Hindu law codes, 255-256 on moneylending, 1 1

Hiromushime, story of, 1 1-12, 13 , 14 Hispaniola

European exploration of, 101 si lver mining in, 3 15-3 1 6 , 444n 1 3

"historical materialism , " 448n83 History of Dharmasastra (Kane), 400n47 hiyal, 436n68 Hobbes, Thomas, 206, 206nn55-58 , 210,

325, 344 Leviathan, 33 1 on self-interest, 33 1-332, 446n58

Hod j a , Nasruddin, 102, 1 07, 1 92-1 93 , 273, 280, 4 1 9n79

Hohenzollern dynasty, 323 Holland, stock markets in, 34 1 , 346 Holy Grail, 293 , 295-296 , 441 n n 143-144 Homans, George, 9 1 Homer

Iliad, The, 1 17, 1 89, 417n57, 4 1 8n66 Odyssey, The, 1 89, 417n57, 4 1 8 n70

Homeric honor, 1 1 7nn56-57, 1 86-1 89, 1 9 1 , 4 1 8n67nn68

honor, as money, 437n76 honor, concepts of

as basic value in competitive gift giv­ ing, 1 1 8

blood-feuds and, 60, 1 0 1 , 1 33-134, 158 , 409n 1 6

chastity a n d sexual p ropriety, 177- 1 82, 414n1 3 , 41 5n3 1 , 4 1 6n3 8

contradictory meanings of, 171 dishonesty and, 1 93-1 95 , 1 97, 4 1 9n80 Equiano story about, 1 66-167, 171 in G reece, 1 86-1 97 heroic systems of honor, 1 93-1 95 lack of in current m a rketplace, 377 language and, 1 65, 176, 4 17n57 "loss of face" and, 171-173 , 41 5n23 men of honor, 167, 170-1 7 1 , 1 77, 1 87,

209, 277, 357

in Mesopota mia, 176-186 overview, 1 65-166 value of money and, 171 warrior honor, 357 See also patriarchal hierarchy

honoring debts, concept of, 166 " honor killing," 177, 415n30 honor price, 1 7 1-176, 414n 14, 414n1 9,

4 1 5n26 hospitality, concepts of

ba rter systems and, 29-34 etymology of, 1 0 1 , 405n22 generosity/sharing, as cultural value,

98-99, 101, 405n 1 6 Hinduism o n , 58 , 399n3 8 law of hospitality, 100-1 0 1 , 1 1 8 ,

405n22 reciprocity and social expectations,

96-98 , 405n 1 6 hospitality, expectations o f

reciprocity, concepts of, 96-98 , 405n 1 6

Hosseini, Hamid S . , 43 8n85 " host/hostile/hostage," etymology of,

1 0 1 , 405n22 hostis (hospitality ) , 405n22 household debt, U . S . , 379 household management, for wealthget-

ting, 290, 440n123 Howgego, Christopher, 427n20 h oyween (debt) , 403n25 Huang, Qin Shi, 240 Hudson, Michael, 217, 366, 36 8 , 398-

399n3 1 , 402n 1 6 , 402 n 1 9, 403 n29, 409n8, 4 1 9n75 , 424n8 , 450n 1 , 45 1 n 1 2

"clean slates , " 65, 1 9 1 , 2 1 9, 23 1 , 403n22

H uitoto people, 349-350 human economies, 208

overview, 1 30-1 33, 1 36, 1 58-160 role of money in, 1 30 social currency in, 1 30, 1 58 , 2 1 9 unpayable debt in, 1 3 1-136 vs. market economies, 1 30, 1 58-159

human relations, exchange and, 1 3-14, 1 8-1 9, 6 1-62

human rights abuses, 423n 1 22 Hume, David, 438n85 Humphrey, Caroline, 29

I N D E X 5 1 3

"hundred schools" of phi losophy, 237 Hussein, Saddam, 5 , 367

Iceland, female slaves in, 408n3 "I Have a Dream" ( King) , 372-373 , 378 Ihya (Ghazal i ) , 279, 436, 438n88 Iliad, The (Homer) , 1 1 7, 189, 4 17n57,

4 1 8 n66 illiteracy, 333 illness, bankruptcy and, 379 " i maginary money , " 48 , 282, 38 1 , 395n28

in Carolingian empire, 37, 3 83, 495n28

"ghost money , " 397n39 IMF. See International Monetary Fund i mpersonal markets

violence and, 14 "imp6t moralisateur", 50 Inca khipu system, 220, 425n28 inclusion, crisis of, 374-375, 38 1 indentured service, 3 1 3, 335 n52, 350,

449nn97-99 India

Arthasasatra ( Kautilya) , 50, 233-234, 240, 432n 15

caste systems in, 86, 1 1 1 , 255-257, 432n12, 432n14, 432n 1 9

chattel slavery i n , 256 child-selling in, 256-257 coins, origins of, 212, 2 1 9 , 224n4, 225 ,

426n6 cosmological speculation in, 224,

243-244 hiera rchy in, 302 Islam in, 272 Kosala empire in, 232 Magadha empire in, 232-233 , 235 ,

43 1 n3 Nalanda, 296 patriarchal honor in, 178 philosophical trends in, 244, 247,

43 1 n79 redemption, views on, 232, 402n 14 slavery in, 232-233 , 256, 428n33

India, monetary systems in Axial Age, 232-235 commercial loans in, 253-254, 43 1-

432n5 , 432n1 5 corporations in, 346

credit systems in, 255-257 debt, duty to repay, 256-257, 430n65 ,

432n17 debt peonage in, 256-257 government economic regu lation in,

259-260, 432n26, 432n28 interest-bea ring loans in, 62-63, 256 ,

400n47, 432n15 interest rates, regulation of in, 259,

432n26 land ownership in, 232 materialism and substance in, 247-250 Middle Ages, 252-257 taxes in, 62-63 , 400n52, 428n36 See also Buddhism; Hinduism

Indian Buddhism, 234-235 , 262, 428n41 See also Buddhism

Indian Ocean, trade in, 3 1 1-3 12, 347, 3 85 Indian vil lage system, 255-257 individualism

in ega litarian societies, 4 1 3 n89 possessive individualism, 445n40,

446n53 industrial revolution, 26 1 , 345 , 35 1-352,

359, 449n88 Indus Valley civilization, 3 8 , 232, 428n39 inequality. See equality/inequality " i nexhaustible treasuries, " 253 , 264-265 ,

268, 303 , 432n6, 436n42, 441 n 1 44 infinite debt, 258 inflation

during "age of exploration , " 3 17 central bank independence and,

452n18 in China, 270 continual inflation, 339 debasement of currency and, 27, 246 ,

40 1 n2 in Europe, 308-309, 3 12-3 13 , 339,

443 n2 German banks and, 55 population increases and, 443 n2 " p rice revolution" and, 304, 308-309,

3 1 3 , 339, 443n2 in Roman/Mauryan empires, 430,

430n75 in U . S . , 362, 397n 1 8 , 452n25

Ingham, Geoffrey, 58-59, 74, 229, 397n l l , 398n3 1 , 399n39, 40 1 n2, 426n l l

Innocent I I , Pope, 304

5 1 4 I N D E X

insulting/competing language and in communism, 96--98 in competitive gift-giving, 1 06--107,

1 17-1 1 8 interest, restrictions on

in China, 259, 432n26 in India, 259 , 432n26 in Islam, 436n69, 436n70, 443n 1 65

interest-bearing loans. See loans, interest­ bearing

interest (interesse) bookkeeping and, 33 1 etymology of, 322, 446nn58-59 first appearance of, 63 , 400n47 principle of, 290, 332, 33 8 , 346,

440 n 1 23 , 446n59, 446nn58-59 tokos, 440 n 1 23 See also loans, i nterest-bearing

international debt, 367-369 international gold standard, 52-53 , 341 ,

36 1 International Monetary Fund (IMF) , 2-3

current role of, 1 7- 1 8 global capitalism a n d , 1 7 global p o w e r a n d , 368 insistence on paying debt, 368-369 legal status of, 444n22 opposition to, 368-369 , 369 purpose of, 1 8 , 368 Third World debt and, 2-4, 368-369

intuition, in Taoism, 242 Inuit, 79, 93 , 1 15- 1 1 6 , 1 17, 1 1 9, 1 22,

402 n 13 , 407n48 investment capital, origins of, 1 9 " invisible hand" theory, 44, 279, 335 ,

396n3 IOUs

tallies, 48-5 1 , 396n37, 397n15, 442n15 8

tally sticks as, 48, 268, 396n37, 397n16, 425n26, 435nn48-53 , 442n 1 6 1

See also credit systems iqta ' system, 274, 436n63 Iran

Euro and, 45 1 n 14 Iraq

American views about, 3 84 debt to Kuwait, 5 Euro and, 45 1 n 14

financial innovations from , 3 84, 436n68

Hussein, Saddam, 5, 367 U . S . military i n, 5

Iraq, moneylending laws in, 436n68 Ireland

cumals, 1 7 1 , 1 73, 408nn3-4, 414n14, 414n2 1 , 4 1 5n25

female slaves in, 1 7 1 , 1 72, 173 , 408nn3-4, 414n 14, 414n2 1 , 41 5n25

honor price in, 171-176, 414n 14, 414n 19 , 41 5n26

law codes in, 6 1 , 399n43 Irish law codes, on honor price, 1 7 1-176,

414n 1 9 iron, as precious metal, 27 Iron Age, 223 iron rings, as money, 60 Iroquois people

burial customs of, 99, 405n 1 8 life-debts and, 1 35 overview, 29 , 1 35 , 395n 15 ,

409n n 1 8-1 9 reciprocity in, 1 14 wampum shell money of, 60, 1 29 ,

1 35- 136, 409n9 women ' s social role and value,

410n26, 4 13 n93 irrational numbers, 429n52 Islam

in Axial Age, 224 on barter, 279-28 1 , 43 8n88 bazaars and, 1 03-104, 278-279 capital as credit in Middle Ages,

271-282 currency in, 274--276, 28 1 equality, principles of, 280 Europeans ideas about, 27 1 expansion of, 277, 437n77 Koran, 1 83 , 436n68 in market regulation, ideas about,

279, 437n82 merchants, role in society, 277, 279-

280, 329, 437n72 Mohammed, Prophet, 1 69 , 224,

271-272, 275 , 279, 286, 437-43 8nn82-83

mutual aid in, 2 1 8 , 29 1 , 446n5 1 philosophies of, 271-272 price, bargaining and, 279-280, 329

I N D E X 5 1 5

princes p roverb in, 273 , 436n62 principles of, 274, 436n67 radical Islam, 3 83-3 84

Islamic economic p recedents, 279, 282, 29 1-292, 303 , 43 8n85 , 440n 129

Islamic economics movement, 275-282, 436n68

Islamic law, 272-273 on banking systems, 275-280,

43�37nn68-74 economic policies in, 274, 436n63 on interest, 436n69, 436n70, 443n 1 65 on recognizing corporations, 443n 170 on slavery, 168-169, 1 70, 274,

414nn5-8, 42 1 n 1 03 , 436n65 on taxes, 436n61

Islamic state, idea of, 274, 436n62 Israel, debt as morality in, 430n65 Italian Renaissance, 364 Italy

banking systems in, 29 1-292, 33 8 , 440n132

merchant guilds in, 292, 440n 127 slavery in, 292

ius ( rights) , 1 99, 42 1 n93

J Jainism, 224, 232, 237, 255 , 426n4 Japan, 37 1 , 372, 452n22

central bank in, 367 U . S . treasury bonds and, 6-7

Jaspers, Karl, 223-224, 43 1 n79 Java, bargaining customs in, 102 Java, slave trade in, 157-15 8 Jefferson, Thomas, 359, 363 , 372, 45 1 n 8 Jeremiah (prophet ) , 82, 283 Jevons, Stanley, 28, 29 Jewish people

debts owed to, views of, 288 discrimination and abuse of, 77, 288-

289, 440n l 2 1 exclusion from guilds, 2 8 8 as merchants, 437n72 moneylending, attitudes toward,

287-290 moneylending, roles in, 1 1 , 287-289 as slaves in Islam, 274

Jhering, Rudolf von, 1 98 jisa, custom of, 432n8 John, King, 288

Johnson, Simon, 393 n 1 1 j oint-stock corporations. See corporations " j oking relationships," 1 17, 407n5 1 journal of Consumer Policy, 57 Jubilee, Law of, 2, 82, 390, 403 n20 Judaism

God, notions about, 430n69 overview, 8 1 , 224, 271 on redemption, concept of, 8 1-82 redemption in, concept of, 8 1-82 vs. Christianity, 287-290

Jukun kingdom , 4 1 1 n n5 1-52 juros (debt bonds ) , 448n80 j ustice, concepts of, 9 1-92, 1 14-1 1 5, 332-

333 , 346n5 1 j ustice, origins of, 439n 1 17

K Kabyle Berber people (Algeri a ) , 106, 277,

437n76 Kalahari Bushmen, 35 Kalanoro (spirit) , 28 "Kali age , " 432n10 Kamentz, Anya, 453 n32 Kan, Lao, 435n48 Kane, Pandurang Vaman, 400n47 kantaka (thorn ) , 428n42 Kant,Immanuel, 43 8n85 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 304, 443 n 1 6 8 k a r m a , 255 "karmic debt," 262-263 , 268, 302, 433-

434n35 Kashmir, 254, 386 Kautilya, 250, 429n62, 43 1n79

Arthasasatra, 50, 233-234, 240, 432n15

Kelly, Amy, 294 kem relationship, 409n 13 Keynes, John Maynard

"alternative tradition," 54, 55 Treatise on M oney, 54

" Keynesian era , " 373 Keynesiansim, 53-55 , 373-375 , 376, 3 8 8 ,

398n25, 398nn28-29, 430n74 neo-Keynesians, 55 , 45D-45 1 n5 Reagan and, 398n25

KGB, 3 82 Khaldun, Ibn, 109, 43 8n93 Khaldun-Laffer curve (Laffer Curve) , 90,

43 8n93

5 1 6 I N D E X

khipu system, Inca, 220, 425n28 kidnapping

child-selling and, 154, 1 68-169 ma rriage by capture, 157 , 410n42 for slavery, 1 5 1-152, 154, 157 , 1 68-

169, 41 1 n60, 412n77

King, David, 23 King, Martin Luther, J r . , 372, 37 8 kings

gift-giving to, 1 06-1 08, 1 10, 406n36 honor price of, 1 73-174, 415nn24-25 identification with slaves, 209-2 1 0 ,

423n 1 29 money , valu ations of, 282-283 ,

43 8n95 taxes demanded by, 65

Knapp, G . F . , 48 , 54, 397 n 1 1 knights, medieval

duties of, 441n 1 38 stories about, 293-294, 44 1 n 1 37

tournaments for, 294-295 Kn ights Templar, 29 1 , 44 1 n 1 44 Koran, 1 83 , 436n68 Kpsala empire, 232 Kosambi, Damodar Dharmanand,

400n47 , 426n7 , 429nn60-6 1 40 1 (k) retirement accounts, 376 Kropotkin, Peter, 404n5 Ksatriya republics, 232, 256 , 428n32 Kuwait

euro in, 367

Iraqui debt to, 5 Kwakiutl people, 1 1 7 , 396n 1 , 406n44

L labor, division of

barter systems and, 25-26 in Islam, 279-280, 329

labor unions, 374-375 Laffer curve ( Khaldun-Laffer Curve) , 90,

438 n93 laissez- faire economics. see capitalism;

free-market economies landlordism, 9, 374, 443n4 l anguage, defined, 402n8 Laozi, 435n50 Larson, Pier, 412n79 Latin America, international debt of,

368-369 Latin terminology

abusus ( abuse/destruction ) , 1 99 apreitiare (to set a price) , 408n63 bullae (bullion ) , 21 4 capitate (capita l ) , 445n29 charta (token) , 47

corpus intellectuale (intellectua l body) , 304

dominium (p roperty) , 1 98-203 , 200--- 20 1 , 42 1 n95

familia ( family) , 20 1 , 42 1 n 1 0 1 fructus ( fruits) , 1 99 gratia (influence) , 408n63 hostis (hospitality ) , 405n22 ius gentium (law of nations ) , 1 67 , 204,

422n 1 1 4 ius (rights) , 1 99 , 42 1 n93 juros (debt bonds) , 448n80 libertus (free) , 203 lucrum cessans (lost income) , 440n125 mysticum ( mystical body) , 304 pacare (pacify ) , 399n43 persona ficta (fictive person ) , 304,

443n 1 70 rentes (debt bond s ) , 339 usus (use of a thing) , 1 99

Laum, Bernard, 59, 394n6, 399n4 1 La Violence de Ia Mo nnaie (Orleans) ,

398n30 Law, John, 342 law codes , early, 60-62 law of nations, 1 67, 204, 422n l 1 4 Laws (Plato ) , 420n 8 1 Leach, E d m u n d , 407n46 leather token money, 48 , 74-75 , 327 ,

396n37

Leenhard, M aurice, 243-244 legal debts vs. moral debts, 120 Legalists, School of, 240, 429n55, 435n59 Leh man Brothers, 16 Leizi, 269 Lele people (Africa)

blood debts and, 1 37 , 1 39-144, 1 45 ca mwood money, 1 3 8 , 142-144, 159 cloth money of, 1 37-1 3 8 , 142 marriage expense and customs, 13 8 ,

4 10n25 , 4 12n62 pawns, men as, 4 1 0n29 pawns, women a s , 1 39-1 44, 4 1 2n62 sl avery practices of, 140, 144, 146 ,

2 1 0n39

I N D E X 5 1 7

societal hierarchies in, 142-143 "village-wives , " 141-142, 4 1 0n33 women's social role and value, 1 3 8-

144, 4 1 0n29, 41 0n34, 4 1 0nn25-26, 4 1 3n97

Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Ath- ens (Millett) , 41 9n78

"leopard-skin chiefs , " 1 33 Lerner, Gerda, 1 84 Levi, Sylvain, 399n34 Leviathan (Hobbes ) , 33 1 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 9 1 , 394n9 , 402n8,

4 1 0n22 Leviticus, views on debt in, 82, 402n 15,

403n20, 4 1 9n77 Levy- Bruhl, Lucien, 93 lex Petronia, 422n 108 Lexus and the Olive Tree, The (Fried-

man/Marti n ) , 452n26 Liang dynasty, 261 libertus (free ) , 203 liberty. See freedom, concept of life, as endless debt, 263 life-debts, 1 33-1 36

blood debts, 1 37-144, 145 , 420n84 li min (public profit) , 429n5 8 li (profit) , 239, 429n55 livlihood, right to, 328, 446n44 livres, French, 48 , 395n28, 3 97n12 Livy, (Titus Livius ) , 230, 403n27, 422n 109 Llewellyn-Jones, LLoyd, 41 8n64 loans

in China, 269, 435nn48-53 commercial loans, 253-254, 43 1-

432n5 compulsory loans, 3 3 8-339 eranos loans, 403-404n30 i rresponsible loans and debt crisis,

1 5-17, 393n l l Third World debt crisis and, 2-3 vs. gifts, 420n84 vs. tribute systems, 6, 371-372, 3 84 See also credit systems; moneylend-

ing/ money lenders loans, interest-bearing

effect on fa mi lies, 328 in Europe, 440n130 in Greece, 1 9 1-1 92, 4 1 9nn75nn77,

420n81 Hinduism and, 1 1-12

in India, 256, 432n15 invention of, 3 84 in Middle East, 420n8 1 origins of, 64, 420n 8 1 in Persia, 400n5 1 , 420n85 in Sumer, 2 1 6 in Vedic India, 62-63 , 400n47 wage labor and, 368

loan sharks/loan-sharking, 10, 28, 5 1 , 1 95, 259, 352, 354, 376, 3 89

lobbying policies, U . S . , 376 Locke, John, 24, 45 , 210, 340-341, 3 4 1 ,

40 1 n2 Loizos, Peter, 407n57 Lombard, M aurice, 277 Lombards family, 289, 440n 1 2 1 London. See England lost income, 290, 440n 1 25 " love , " concept of, 3 85 , 3 86, 446n5 1 lucrum cessans ( lost income) , 440n 1 25 Luther, Martin, 321-322, 324, 33 1 ,

445n26 Lydia, kingdom of, 212, 224-225 , 244 Lydian coins, 224, 227, 426n5

M Machiavelli, Niccolo, 33 1-332, 446n5 8 MacKay, Charles, 347-348 MacPherson, C . B . , 423n 1 22, 445n40 Madagascar

bargaining customs in, 1 04 barter systems in, 28 French invasion of, 5 , 50 malaria outbreak in, 4 taxes i mposed on by France, 5-6, so-

5 1 , 393 n 1 Magadha empire, 232-233 , 235 , 43 1 n3 magical language, 343 Mahavira, 232 Mahayana doctrine, 24 1 , 265-266, 266,

268, 433-434n35 Mahyamaka school, 433-434n35 Making of the New World Slavery

(Blackburn ) , 224n3 Malagasy people. See M adagascar Malamoud, Charles, 399n32, 407n59 Malinowski, Bronislaw K . , 404n3 Mamluks, 209, 274, 294 manas (man) , 76 Manuel, Dom, 406n34

5 1 8 I N D E X

Maori people gift exchange customs of, 108, 1 1 6 societal structure of, 1 17

Marduk (god ) 1 2 1 6 Marechal, Guillaume l e , 294 "the market," concepts of, 327

defined, 1 1 4-1 15 dehumanization and, 80, 1 94-1 95 ,

267, 347, 354 as self-regulating, 44, 363-364, 396n7

ma rket economies collapse of, 37 emergence from mutual aid, 2 1 8 , 29 1 historical emergence of, 1 30 See also capitalism

ma rket populism, 363 , 364, 3 85 , 453 n32 market regulation, government role in,

44-45 , 70 markets, origins of

in Axial Age, 238-239 in Madagascar, 50-5 1

ma rriage anthropological pattern diagram of,

1 6 1 as biggest life expense, 9, 13 1 , 133 ,

1 3 8 , 410n25 by capture, 1 57, 41 0n42 in Lele culture, 13 8 , 4 1 0n25 , 412n62 moneylending practices and, 9 in Su merian culture, 417n53 in Tiv culture, 1 32-1 33 , 145, 410n42 See also bridewealth

Marshall, John and Laura, 35 Marshalsea prison, 334, 447n65 Martin, Randy, 452n26 Marx, Karl

on capitalism, 359 on communism, 404n9 Critique of the Gotha Programme,

404n9 Das Capital, 354 on origins of money, 354,

394-395nn14-1 5 utopian ideals of, 354, 359, 395n 1 5 ,

450n106 Marxism

alternatives to, 401n62 influence of, 3 83 labor and, 35 1 , 453n32 materialism of, 448n83

supporters of, 398n30 vs. capitalism, 35 1 , 453 n32 See also communism

Mastercard, 367 " masterless men , " 3 1 3 , 328 materialism

in Axial Age, 237-242 godless materi alism, 377 " h istorical materia lism," 448n83 Marx on, 448n83 modern capitalism and, 337 religious ideologies and, 243-250,

300 substance, spirituality and, 242-250

materi alist philosophy, concept of, 246-- 247

matriarchy, primitive, 395n n 1 5 Matthew (biblical ) , 442n1 58 Maunder, Peter, 23 Mauryan empire

ancient currency in, 74-75 inflation in, 234, 429n6 1 , 43 0,

430n75 in Middle Ages, 253

Mauss, Marcel, 90, 108, 399n34, 402n8 , 405n2 1 , 407nn52-53 , 43 l n77

" Essay on the Gift , " 407n52 on gift economies, 108

Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy ) , 41 6n42 mbatsav (witches) , 147-148 Medici, 29 1 medieval corporations, 303-305 medieval era. See Middle Ages " medieva l , " negative views of, 25 1 Mediterean

Axial Age and, 228-232 patriarchal honor in, 129, 177, 4 15n32

Megasthenes, 234, 253 Mencius, 242, 429n55 , 429n64 Mencken, H . L . , 21 Menger, Karl, 28 men of honor, concept of, 1 67, 170- 1 7 1 ,

1 77, 1 87, 209, 277, 357 Mephistopheles, 343 merceneries, as currency, 226, 426n l l " merchant adventurers, " 2 1 5 , 29 1 , 293-

296, 305 , 323 4merchant capitalism, 290-29 1 merchant guilds, 292, 440n127

Jewish exclusion from, 288

I N D E X 5 1 9

merchants in Christrianity, view of, 109, 286-

29 1 , 43 9 Islam and, 277, 437n72 restrictions on, 289 wealth of English merchants, 327,

445n4 1 merchant societies, slave trade, 152-1 54,

1 63 , 4 1 2nn65--67 merci (thank you ) , 1 23 Mesopotamia

economic hi story of, 38-3 9 existential debt in, beliefs about,

400n48 freedom, concept of in, 82 honor and patriarcy, 176-1 86, 41 5n32 Islam in, 273 money, origins of, 3 8-40, 74--75 ,

401nn2-5 redemption in, concept of, 8 1 , 402n 1 9 See also Sumer

Mesopota mia, monetary systems in ancestoral land recovery, 2, 8 1-82,

390, 402nn 1 9-20 bride payments, 179-1 80,

41 5-4 1 6nn35-4 1 creditor's rights, 8 1 , 402n1 9 credit systems, 21 4--2 17 cu rrency in, 39, 1 80, 1 97, 2 14--21 5 debt, duty to repay, 8 1 debt records about, 14, 2 1 , 3 8 , 39, 54,

6 1 , 399-400n43 , 399n43 interest-bearing loans in, 64--65,

400n47, 403n30 ma rketplaces in, 39 money, valuing, 2 1 moneylending, 8 1

Mesopota mian cuneiform records, 3 8 , 54 Mesopota mian tablets, 2 1 metadosis (share/sharing ) , 394n6 meta ls, precious

crash in value of, 309 mining of in G reece, 229, 427n 1 9

meta ls, used as money in Axial Age, 225-226 bi meta llism, 52, 397-398n2 1 , 397n21 brass, 154, 4 1 1 n54 copper, 27 iron, 27 rude bars, 27, 39

Mexico Aztec people, European conquest of,

3 1 4--3 15 , 3 17, 325-326, 355-357 si lver mining in, 3 1 1 , 444n6, 444n 1 5

microcredit, 379-3 8 1 Middle Ages

about, 25 1-252 abstraction, move toward, 268 begin of, 252 in China, 258-271 Christianity in, 282-296 empire-building in, 297 in India, 252-257 Islam and, 297 medieval institutions in, 296-298 monetary systems, sophistication of

during, 253 , 43 1nn3-5 overview, 296-305 slavery in; 297 transcendence in, 297 virtual credit money in, 98 , 2 14,

282-283 Middle East

cred it systems in, 2 15 , 275, 424n9, 436-437nn68-74

interest-bearing loans in, 420n 8 1 ma rket economies, emergen!=e of, 1 30 Middle Ages in, 297 patriarchal honor in, 1 29, 177, 41 5n32 patron age relationships in, 1 1 9 redemption in, concept of, 82-83 taxes in, 20 1 , 274, 276, 436n64,

437n8 1 wars of expansion and, 274--275 See also Islam

Midnight Notes col lective, 453n32 Mieroop, Marc Van de, 400n54, 416n43 Mi letus, 244--245 , 246, 430n7 1 militarization, global economy and, 346,

368 mi litary aggression, defined, 5 military-coinage-slavery-complex, 229,

234, 240, 248-249, 274 mi litary dominance, U . S . , 365-367,

45 1 n 1 1 Military order of the Knights of the

Temple Solomon, 29 1 , 44 1 n 1 44 military organization. See A x i a l Age milk-debts, 264, 268 , 302, 3 12 Miller, Roger LeRoy, 23

5 2 0 I N D E X

Miller, William Ian, 407n54 Millett, Paul, 41 9n78, 420nn8 1-84

Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens, 4 19n78

minas, Mesopotamian, 39 , 1 97 miners; revolts, 444n5 Ming dyanasty, 258 , J l o-3 1 1 , 3 14,

4 1 7n54, 433 n28, 434n42 Mitcheli-Innes, Alfred, 37, 40, 45--47,

396n8, 396n3 1 Moctezuma, 355-357 modern banking systems, 448n87 Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) . See

Chartalism Mo Di, 241 , 249n50 ·Mohammed, Prophet, 1 69, 224, 271-272,

275 , 279, 286, 437--43 8nn82-83 Mohism, 237, 248 , 249n50, 430n65 monarchical hierarchies

absolute power of, 205-207, 325 , 33 1 , 3 85

democracy in, 80, 402n1 9 See also kings

monasteries, medieval Indian, 253 " monetarism," 375 monetary theories. See economic theories money, concepts of, 397n 1 1

as commodity, 26, 36, 46, 73-75 , 395n25 , 396n3 1

as empowerment, 380 as government creation, 24-25 honor and, 171 as IOU, 73 , 74-75 and language, 1 95 as mathematical concept, 52 measuring value and, 46--48,

396-397nn8- 1 1 philosophical thought about, 244-247 political nature of, 242-345 Rospabe unpayable debt theory on,

13 1-1 36 , 158-159 as social currency, 130, 15 8 , 2 1 9 as symbol, 298-302 as symbol of degradation, 1 8 8- 1 89 ' as unlimited, 245-247 as value made in law, 340, 448n8 1

money, functions of, 22-23 money, origins of

credit systems and, 73-75 , 40 1 n5 early legal practice and, 6o-62

first coins, 224, 230, 426n 10, 427n26 in Greece, 24, 394n6 legends about, 403 n30 in Mesopota mia, 3 8--40, 74-75 ,

401nn2-5 overview, 46--47 primordial debt theory, 55-62, 62-65 ,

1 36 , 398n30 See also barter, myth of

money, types of brass, 154, 4 1 1 n54 cattle, 59-60, 6 1 copper bars, 150, 1 52, 4 1 1 n53 ,

4 1 1 nn53-54 fiat money, 53 , 270, 364, 430n74 " fiduciary" money, 430n74 in prisons and POW camps, 37 silver, 39, J l o-3 12, 444nn5-9 tobacco, 26, 3 8 , 75 , 166

Money and Early Greek Mind (Seaford) , 244

Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Spufford) , 396n37

Mo ney and the Early Greek Mind (Sea­ ford) , 244

moneylending/moneylenders Brahmanic doctrine on, 9 Buddhism and, 1 1-12 Catholic Church on, 1 0 children sold t o , 3 1 4 child-selling and, 9, 14, 128-129,

409n7 Christianity and, 283-285 , 3 1 9,

339n 108 creditor vs. debtor guilt, 12-1 3 dishonesty of, 284 Hindu law codes on, 1 1 Jewish attitudes toward, 287-290 Jewish roles in, 1 1 , 287-289 legal loopholes in, 289 loan sharks/loan-sharking, 10, 28, 5 1 ,

1 95, 259, 352, 354, 376, 3 89 in medieval Europe, 1 1 i n medieval France, 9-10 merchants as, 295 in Mesopotamia, 8 1 i n Middle East, 275-276, 436n68 motivations fo r, 22 negative representations of, 10, 28,

343 ·

I N D E X 5 2 1

negative views of, 290, 440n123 overview, 9-1 3 religious ideologies and, 1 0-1 3 , 289 " u surers , " defined, ·10 violence used in loan collection, 7-8,

14, 1 94-1 95 Mongols, 3 10 Montejo, Francisco de, 444n20 Moralia (Plutarch ) , 407n60 morality, concepts of

banking practices and, 1 5-17, 372, 393 n 1 1

a s basic value, 14 cultural variances in, 1 1 3-1 1 8 debt cancellation and, 3 89 economic morality, 92, 378, 404n5 government deficits as immoral, 35 8 ,

366, 450n 1 1 0 hierarchy and, 1 09-1 13 ma rketplace and human life, 89-90 unpayable debt and, 120-122, 407n60 See also reciprocity

moral relations, as debts, 329-330 Morgan, Henry Lewis

on Iroquois, Six Nations of, 29, 1 35 , 395 n 1 5 , 409n n 1 8-1 9

mortgage crisis, U . S . , 1 5 , 3 80-3 8 1 , 393n 1 1

mortgage-refinancing schemes, 376 mortgage relief funds, 394n 1 3 (Chap. 1 ) Motolinia, Fray Toribio de, 3 14, 3 1 9 mourning war, 1 36, 4 1 0n22 movement, laws of, 332 Mozi, 242, 429n55 Muldrew, Craig, 327, 333 , 445n40,

445nn4D- 1 , 446nn44-46 Muller, Adam, 397n l l murder, a s form o f debt repayment, 1 3 1-

136, 410n22 Musaiyab, Sa'id Bin, 273 , 436n62 Muslim suftaja, 20 1 , 276, 29 1 , 437n81 mutilation, of debtors, 77, 288, 402n10 mutual aid

in English culture, 329 in Islam, 2 1 8 , 29 1 , 446n5 1

mutual aid, concept of, 1 1 9 Mutual Aid (Kropotkin) , 404n5 Myers, Danny, 23 mysticum ( mystical body ) , 304 " mythic communi s m , " 95

N Nagarjuna, 433-434n35 Nalanda, India, 296 Nambikwara people, 29-30, 32-33 , 35 ,

127, 410n22 Nasruddin, 102, 1 07, 1 92-1 93 , 273 , 280,

41 9n79 national bankruptcy, 359, 450 n 1 14 national citizenship, rights to, 3 83 national liberation movements, 374 Native Americans

Aztec people, 3 1 4-3 1 5 , 3 1 7 , 325-326, 355-357

barter systems of, 25 , 394n 1 0 burial customs, 99, 405n 1 8 Christianity, conversion t o , 3 1 9 European conquest and, 3 1 4 Kwakiutl people, 1 1 7, 406n44 reciprocity in, 1 1 4 See also Inuit people; Iroquois people

Nebuchadnezzar, King, 81 Nehemiah (prophet)

on creditors rights and punishments, 8 1-82, 283 , 402n 1 9

on daughters used as debt payment, 128-129, 427n 17

on debtors' rights, 86 reforms in, 427n27

Nelson, Benj amin, 439n 1 1 1 neo-Keynesians. See Keynesiansim neoliberalism, 376, 453 n32 New Deal, 373 Newfoundland, 26, 37-3 8 , 398n3 1 New Testament. See Bible New Theory of M oney, (Muller) ,

397n 1 1 Newton, Isaac, 44, 242, 340, 34 1 , 396n2 Newtonian economics, 44, 242, 340-34 1 ,

396n2 New York City, 362-363 nexum, 230 Nicomachean Ethics ( Aristotle ) , 43 1 n78,

43 8n92, 440n 1 23 , 44 1 n 1 47, 442n 153 , 446n5 1

Nicostratus, 1 93-1 95 , 1 97, 4 1 9n80 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 76-78, 336, 402nn8-

10, 439n 1 17, 448n83 On the Genealogy of Morals, 76-77,

402n8 Nigeri a , slave trade in, 149-1 50

5 2 2 I N D E X

9/ 1 1 , 362, 363 Nixon, Richard, 53 , 214, 36 1-368, 45 1n6 nokri (foreigner) , 285 North Korea, euro and, 45 1 n 14 Nuer people, 96-98

blood-feuds in, 1 34-135 cattle money of, 4 1 0n40

Nuzi people (Mesopota m i a ) , 1 80, 4 1 5 n37

0 obrigado (thank you ) , 123 Oceania, barter systems in, 394n7 ocial debt

American view of, 69 overview, 69-71 "Solidarism" and, 40 1 n62 "We are all born as debtors to soci­

ety , " 70, 40 1 n63 Odyssey, The (Homer) , 1 89, 417n57,

4 1 8 n70 oil crisis ( 1 970s ) , 2 Old English terminology

Geild ( money) , 59 wilcuma (you're welcome) , 408n64

Old Testament. See Bible Olivelle, Patrick, 399n32 On Interpretation (Aristotle) , 442n 1 5 1 on self-interest

Smith on, 336 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) ,

76-77, 402n8 OPEC countries, 2, 367 Opheilama (that which is owed ) , 403n25 Opheilema (that which is owed ) , 403n25 Oppenheim, Leo, 403n30, 4 1 6n43 Orleans, Andre, 55 , 56, 398n30 Ottoman empire, 308 oxen . See cattle

p pacare (pacify ) , 399n43 "pacification," 5 padah ( redemption ) , 80 Pakistan, 33-34

barter systems in, 33-34 Palestine, wife-selling in, 128 Panic of 1 893, 53 Panopticon, 353 Panurge, 1 24, 126, 335 , 343 , 408n67

"panyarring," 1 54 paper money

in China, 270, 309-3 1 3 , 33 8 , 435n55 , 436n63

emergence of, 298 purpose of, 46 See also bullion; coins/coinage; dollar,

u . s . P a p u a New Guinea

currency in, 60, 395n25 , 409n9 social hierarchies in, 1 1 3 social life in, 1 1 3

parents, children 's debt to, 92, 94, 404n6, 405n21

milk-debts, 264-265 , 267-268, 302, 3 12, 434n3 8

Parkin, Michael, 23 "partnership of the penniless," 276 Parzifal (Wagner ) , 296 , 44 1 n 1 42 paterfamilias (family), 42 1 n 1 0 1 patriarchal hierarchy

chastity and sexual propriety, 177- 1 82, 4 14n13 , 4 14n3 1 , 41 5n3 1 , 4 1 6 n3 8

in China, 178 in India, 178 in Mesopotamia, 176-186 in Middle East, 129, 177, 41 5n32 obligatory veiling and, 178, 1 8 8 ,

417n53 , 4 1 8 n 64 origins of, 176, 1 82-1 83 paternal a uthority in Rome, 20 1 ,

42 1 n 1 02 prostitution and, 1 8 1-186, 41 6n44,

4 1 6n48 in Sumer, 177-178 "wife sales," 1 80, 41 6 n42 women's freedom , restriction of, 178-

1 79, 417n54 Patrick, Saint, 414n 1 5 patronage, 1 1 8-120, 349, 407n57

in G reece, 1 9 1 vs. debt bondage, 1 56

Patterson, Orlando, 1 99, 414nn1 1-12, 42 1 n96

Slavery and Social Death, 170 Patterson, William, 448-449n87 Paul (Apostle ) , 126 pawnshops/pawnbroking, origins of, 264,

352, 434n40

I N D E X 5 2 3

pawns/pawnship debt pawns, 1 87, 4 1 7n59 debt pawns for loans, 1 80, 4 1 6n43 debt pawns in slave trade, 1 5 1-154,

1 56, 1 69, 4 1 1-412nn6 1-62, 4 1 2n78 as legal punishment, 4 14n5 in Lele culture, 1 39-144, 4 1 0n29,

412n62 vs. slaves, 140, 144 . See debt bondage; debt peonage

Payasi/Paesi, King, 247, 43 1 n79 peasant rebellions, 257, 25 8-259 , 433n20,

433nn20-21 peasants

credit for, 39, 235 , 428n43 free peasants, 86, 228

pederasty, 4 1 8 n73 penawing (low-caste wife) , 1 57 Peng, Xinwei, 425n29, 435n5 1 ,

435nn53-57 peons, 349 "the people" concept of, 35 8 Percival, Sir, 293 "perpetual endowments, " 253 , 432n6 Persia

coins, origins of, 215-2 1 6 free-market theories i n , 1 9 gift-giving customs in, 1 10 interest-bearing loans in, 400n5 1 ,

420n85 lying, view of in, 2 15 in Middle Ages, 279 taxes in, 63

persona ficta ( fictive perso n ) , 304, 443n 170

personal credit, negative view of, 447n66 personal debt, as self-indulgence, 379,

453n3 1 Peru

Huitoto people in, 349-350 siliver mining in, 3 1 1 , 3 1 5, 444n6,

444n 1 5 Peruzzi, 29 1 Pharaonic Egypt. See Egypt Philippines, as debtor nation, 5 Phillip I I , King, 364 Philo of Alexandria, 23 1 n 8 1 "philosophy," concept of, 244 "Pillar Edict," 428n40 Pizarro, Francisco, 309, 444n20

Plato on angels, 304, 443n 1 68 on God, 247 Laws, 420n8 1 Republic, The, 1 95 - 1 97, 400n48 ,

404n 1 , 420nn87-89, 43 1 n 80 Symposium, The, 296

"please" customs of civility and, 122-124,

408n62 etymology of, 1 23 , 408n63

pledges, redemption of, 8 1 , 402n1 9 Plutarch, 1 2 1 , 23 1 , 343 , 407n60, 41 9n75 Polanyi, Karl, 394n6, 396n7, 40 1 n5 Polemarchus, 1 96, 420n88 politics

in Greece, 229-232, 429n48 m ilitary motives and, 372 nature of money and, 242-345 United Nations and, 36 8 , 444n22

Politics (Aristotle) , 24, 394n6, 4 1 8n60, 420n8 1 , 422n 1 12, 427n 17, 440n123

Polo, Marco, 435n3 8 , 435n48 , 448n85 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 3 1 1 Ponzi schemes, 373 , 376 por favor (please) , 1 23 , 408n63 porne (slave girls) , 7 1 , 1 87, 1 89, 41 8n66 Portugal, " bullion famines" in, 443n3 Portuguese/Spanish empires, 24, 309-3 17,

3 1 9, 355-356, 440n 132 Portuguese terminology, obrigado (thank

you ) , 1 23 "Positive Catechism" ( Comte) , 70 Positivism, 69-70 possessive individualism; 445n40, 446n53 "pound of flesh , " 288 poverty

" apostolic poverty , " 290 capitalism and, 3 8 8-3 89 in Haiti, 6, 393n2 Third World debt crisis and, 2-3, 5-6

Prakash, Gyan, 432n1 9 precious metal s . See bullion; gold and

silver; metals, precious "preemption," 397 n 15 "price revo lution, " 304, 308-309, 3 13 ,

339, 443n2 "prime rate," 35 1 n9 "primitive accu mulation," 447n66 "primitive banking," 448n75

5 2 4 I N D E X

"prim itive barter," 394n7 "primitive communism," 95 , 3 95n 1 5 ,

405n 1 5 primitive money

about, 3 99n42, 425 n26 defined, 60 origins of, 145 , 4 1 0n40 overview, 60, 129-13 1 , 399n42 Rospabe on, 13 1-136, 1 58-1 59 Tiv people and, 145 used as adornment, 145, 410n40 used to build relationships, 130, 409n9 used to pay unpayable debts, 13 1-136 Wampum shell money, 60, 129, 1 35-

136, 409n9 primitive money, types of

bead money, 60, 336 cacao money, 75, 40 1 n 3 camwood m o n e y , 1 3 8 , 142-144, 159 cattle as currency, 59-60, 6 1 , 128,

41 0n40 cloth money, 1 29, 137-1 3 8 , 142, 146 cod fish, 26, 37, 3 8 , 398n3 1 cowries, 60, 1 3 1 , 220, 225, 425n25 ,

425n26 feather money, 60, 129, 336 gaming chips, Chinese, 74, 40 1 n3 human interactions, 122 leather token money, 48, 74--75 , 327,

3 96n37 salt money, 26, 401 n3 shell money, 60, 220, 336, 3 95n25 Wampum shell money, 60, 129, 135-

136, 409n9 woodpecker scalps, 60

"primitive societies," 1 00-101 "primitive trade," 406n36 primordial debt theory, 55-62, 62-65 ,

136, 398n30 Princeps legibus solutus est (the sovereign

is not bound by laws) , 422n 1 15 princeps legibus solutus est (the sovereign

is not bound by laws) , 422n 1 1 5 prisons

conditions in, 334, 447n65 currency in, fo rms of, 37 See also debtors' prisons

private bank notes, 338, 448n75 , 449 n 1 02 private property, 447n66. See property

rights

profit, concepts of in Islam, 275, 303 li, (profit ) , 239, 429n55 li min (public profit) , 429n5 8 materialism in Axial Age and, 239-

242, 429n55 overview, 239, 242, 262, 429n60,

429n64, 446n57 as rew ard for risk, 303 self-interest and, 33 1-332, 446n5 8 shi (strategic advantage) , 429n58 si li ( self-interest) , 429n5 8

"progressives, " 382 "proletariat," etymology of, 53 , 35 1 ,

449 n 1 00 promissory notes

in China, 269-270, 435n54 in Middle East, 275-276

property rights " a bsolute power" in, 199, 42 1 n92 ancestral land recovery, Mesopota­

mian, 2, 8 1-82, 390, 402n n 1 9-20 in ancient Rome, 198-203,

42 1 n n92-94 Christian ity and, 290 collective property rights i n , 95,

3 95n 1 5 , 447n66 French law codes on, 421 n92 landlordism, 9, 374, 443n4 in personem rights, 421 n92 of person vs. thing, 421n96,

42 1 n n92-93 private property, 447n66 in rem rights, 42 1 n92

prostitution devadasis (temple dancers ) , 1 8 1-1 82,

41 6n44 Enkidu story about, 1 8 1-1 82, 183 in G reek and Roman culture, 1 8 8-

1 90, 4 1 8 n 6 1 in H i n d u India, 1 8 1 male prostitution, 1 9 0 , 41 8-4 1 9n73 origins of, 1 8 1- 1 84 patriarchal honor and, 1 8 1-186,

4 16n44, 41 6n48 Protestantism

on English festive life, 309 Luther, Martin, 32 1-322, 324, 33 1 ,

445n26 "proto-banks," 435n54

I N D E X 5 2 5

pseudo-Dionysius, 442n 1 55 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,

442n 1 55 public financing, 323 , 445n33 Pukhtun people, 33-34, 37 Putumayo scandal, 349-35 1 Pythagoras, 223-224, 23 8 , 428n48 , 430n72 Pythagoreanism, 429n52

Q Qin, state of, 235-236, 240, 428nn46-47 Qing dynasty, 258 , 434n42 quantification, human relations and, 1 3-

14, 1 8-1 9, 61--62 Quiggin, A. Hingston, 399n42, 425n26

R Rabelais, Frans;ois, 124, 126, 343

Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais) , 124

race, hierarchy and, 1 1 1-1 13 racism , in small retailing, 452n57 raffia cloth . See cloth money Ramses II, 2 1 7-2 1 9, 425n22 Ramses II, Pharaoh, 2 1 8 Ranavalona I I I , Queen, 5 rational choice theory, 90 " rational," etymology of, 23 8 Reagan, Ronald, 53 , 375-377, 398n25 ,

43 8n93 Reagnism/Reagan Revolution, 366-377 " real economies," 44, 345 rebellions

peasant rebellions, 257-259, 433nn20-21

silver miners, revolts of, 444n5 recessions, economic, 1 5-17, 370, 393 n 1 1 ,

452n25 reciprocity , concepts of

"a lternating reciprocity , " 405n21 charity and, 109-1 1 1 , 406n3 8 defined, 100, 405n21 expectations of, cultural variations in,

92-94, 96-98 , 1 1 6-1 17, 405n 13 "eye for an eye , " 9 1 , 404n4 "generalized reciprocity," 405n21 hospitality, expectations of, 96-98 ,

405n 1 6 j ustice, concept o f a n d , 9 1-92

overview, 9 1-92, 109- 1 1 5 , 1 2 1 , 300, 407n46

saving a life and, 92-93 social hierarchy and, 1 1 1- 1 1 3, 1 14,

406n42 "squaring accounts , " 92 as thank you, 1 1 9 universal principle of, 9 1-93 , 404n3 vs . communistic ideals, 1 00, 102

redemption, concepts of biblical views of debt and, 75, 79-87,

403n25 Egypt, 82 in India, 80-8 1 , 232, 402n14 language about in debt, 8 , 80-8 1 Lord's prayer and, 84, 403n25 in Mesopotamia, 8 1 , 402n1 9 overview, 80-87 See also debt a mnesty

Reeves, Eileen, 447n72 " Regulation School , " 398n30 Reid, Anthony, 1 55-156 reincarnation, 255 relationships

based on buying and selling, 76-78, 336, 402n8 , 439n 1 17, 448n83

debtor-creditor relationships, 1 24-126, 408nn66--67

friends and enemies, 1 0 1 human relations, exchange a n d , 1 3-

14, 1 8-1 9, 61--62 self-interest and, 124-126, 408nn66--67 See also hiearchial relationships

religions, world Confuci anism, 224, 248-249, 26 1 ,

4 17n53 Jainism, 224, 232, 237, 255 , 426n4 Judaism, 8 1 , 224, 27 1 Mohism, 237, 241 , 248, 249n50,

430n65 Taoism, 224, 269, 297, 30 1 , 429n50,

442n 1 63 Zoroastrianism, 80, 224 See also Buddhism; Christianity; Hin­

duism; Islam religious ideologies

Augustinian traditions, 332, 430n69, 443n 1 6 8 , 446n59

during Axial Age, 224, 297, 30 1 , 429n50, 442n163

5 2 6 I N D E X

religious ideologies (continued ) capitalism and, 377-379, 453n28 Divine Providence, 44, 279-280,

396n3 existential debt and, 56-58 , 62-63,

67-69, 1 95 , 399nn33-40, 400n47, 400n48

materialism and, 243-250 moneylending and, 1 (}- 1 3 Newton on, 44 primordial debt theory, 43, 56-62,

399n32 redemption, concept of, 75 , 79-87,

403n20, 403n25 souls, notions of, 244 See also God, notions about

ren, ideal of, 242 rendre service (giving service ) , 1 1 9

rentes (debt bonds ) , 339

reparation payments, 5 repo man, 378 Republic, The (Plato) , 1 95-1 97400n48,

404n 1 , 420nn87-89, 43 1 n80 " respectable women," 1 84-185 , 1 8 8 , 1 90,

328, 4 1 8 n64 retirement accounts, 401 (k) , 376 Revelations, 4 1 7n5 1 Ricardo, David, 374, 387 Richards, Audrey, 98 rich vs. poor, struggle of, 8 Rig Veda, 43, 56 , 408 n3 "Ring of Gyges, The" (Shel l ) , 420n87,

430n70 Robertson, Pat, 378 Rockefeller, Nelson, 406n34 Roman law

on absolute p rivate property, 1 99-20 1 , 205 , 42 1 n96

on domestic authority, 20 1 , 42 1 n n 1 02 "free/freed o m , " concept of, 203-

206, 422n 1 09, 422n 1 1 3 , 423 n 1 1 8 , 423 n n 1 22-123

influence on liberal tradition, 209-2 10, 423 n 1 29

ius gentium (law of nations ) , 1 67, 204, 422n 1 1 4

ius (rights ) , 1 99, 42 1 n93 lex Petronia, 422n 108 on property rights, 1 98-207, 42 1 n95

on slavery, 1 69, 201-207, 4 14n7, 421-422n n 1 03-108

on slave trade and citizenship, 203 , 422n 1 09

Roman slave estates, 252, 43 1n2 Rome

ancient currency in, 74-75 child-selling in, 129 coins, origins of, 87, 230, 427n26 currency in, 27 debt bond age in, 403n27 inflation in, 430, 430n75 nexum labor contracts in, 230, 427n24 paternal authority in, 20 1 , 42 1 n 1 02 property rights in, 1 98-207 slavery in, 201-207, 252,

421-422nn 1 03-108, 43 1 n2 taxes in, 63 wa rfare during Axial Age, 23(}-23 1

Roosevelt, Theodore, 373, 398n23 Rospabe, Philippe, 13 1-136, 1 58-1 59 Royal Admiralty, 353 rude bars, 27, 39 ruq 'a (notes ) , 275 Russia

s

communism in, 94 female slaves in, 408-409n5 free market ideologies in, 396n7 Soviet Union, fa ilure of, 37, 382

sacri fice rituals, 57, 399nn34-39, 400n48 to pay back debt, 77-78

sahib al-miil (merchants ) , 303 Sahlins, Marshall, 405n2 1 , 446n55 sakk (checks) , 275 , 437n7 1 salt, as currency, 26 Samuelson, Paul, 44 sangha (Buddist monasteries) , 250 Sanskrit. See Brahmanic doctrine; Vedas Santa Claus/Sain Nicholas, 1 09 Saracens, 287, 439n 1 1 2 Sarthou-Lajous, Nathalie, 402n8 Sassanian empire, 50, 1 89, 272 Sasso, Michael, 443 n 1 64 Satapatha Brahmana, 43, 399nn33-37 Schaps, David, 226, 426n 1 1 Schopen, Gregory, 428n4 1 , 43 1 n4 schuld (debt/fault/gu ilt) , 77, 407n59 Schumpeter, Joseph, 359

I N D E X 5 2 7

Seaford, Richard, 244-247, 394n6, 399n41 , 4 17n57 , 4 1 8nn68-69, 426n 1 1 , 430n73

Money and Early Greek Mind, 244 " sea wives," 349 Secret Order of the Illuminati, 363 Secrets of the Temple, The (Grieder) ,

450n5 securitization, 1 6 , 393n 1 1 self-interest

commercial self-interest, 78 debtor-creditor relationships and,

124-126, 408nn66-67 in gift exchanges, 105-106, 405n28 Hobbes on, 33 1-332, 446n58 human nature and, 90, 1 96 , 33 1-332,

336, 446n58 in Islam, 282 as motivation for exchange, 44, 238 ,

33 1 , 336 notion of, 33 1-332, 446nn56-59 profit, desire for and, 33 1-332, 446n5 8 si li (self-interest) , 429n58 in war, 429n54 See also profit

self-regulating market systems, 44, 363- 364, 396n7

self-sufficiency, ideal of in China, 3 10 in G reece, 1 87, 1 90, 4 1 8 n60 in Indian vil lages, 255

"Semitic infi ltration" model, 178, 41 5n33 September 11 (200 1 ) , 362, 363 serfs, 252, 350--35 1 , 434n42, 44 1 n 133 Server, Jean-Michel, 394n7, 447n72 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 92, 94, 404n6 sex indu stry . See female slaves; prostitu-

tion Sh akespeare, William

on mutilation of debtors, 77, 288, 402n 10

on prostitution, 4 18n68 Shang dynasty, 3 8 , 403n22 Shapur I, Emperor, 272 sharika al-mafalis (partnership of the

penniless) , 276 shari ng/generosity, as cultural value, 98-

99, 1 0 1 , 405n 1 6 Sharples, Margaret, 333 , 334 shekels (Mesopota mia) , 39, 1 80, 21 4-2 1 5

Shell, Marc, 244 "Accounting for the Grail,"

44 1nn1 43-144 "Ring of Gyges, The," 420n87,

430n70 shell money, 60, 220, 336, 395n25

wampum shell money of, 60, 129, 1 35-136, 409n9

shi (strategic adva ntage) , 429n58 "should , " etymology of, 407n59 Siculus, Diodorus, 403n29 Sidon, 227 , 229 Sieyes, Abbe, 359 si li (self-interest ) , 429n58 silver, as currency, 39, 3 1 0--3 12, 444nn5-9

S�e also bullion; gold and silver silver shekels, Mesopotamian, 39, 180,

2 1 4-2 1 5 Simmel, Georg, 394n 14 sin. See guilt and sin si vous plait (please) , 123 " slave"

defined, 146 etymology of, 20 1 , 42 1 n 1 0 1

slave-owners, power of, 170--17 1 slavery

breeding slaves, 42 1 n 1 05 causes of, 144, 146, 168, 349-35 1 ,

4 12n79 chattel slavery, 1 87, 21 1-212, 236,

256, 4 17n59, 428n46 in China, 422n 1 07 defined, 1 67-17 1 , 170, 4 14nn1 1-12 demise of ancient slavery, 2 1 1-21 4,

224n2 in Egypt, 209 elimination of, 297, 41 0 in Europe, 292, 44 1 n 133 exchange, role in creating� 1 9 in G reece, 1 89, 229, 4 1 8 n65 , 420n82 horrors stories based on, 148 , 169-1 70 in India, 232-233 , 256, 428n33 inhumanity of, 168, 170, 4 14n n l l-12 in Islam, 1 68-169, 170, 274, 41 4nn3-

8, 42 1 n 1 03 , 436n65 in Italy, 292 j u stifications for, 167-168, 41 3n2 killing of slaves, 208, 423 n 1 26 Lele people and, 140, 1 44, 146,

2 1 0n39

5 2 8 I N D E X

slavery (continued ) in medieval Europe, 439n 1 04 in Middle Ages, 297 origins of money and, 1 27-129 ,

408-409nn3-6 in Peru, 349-350 in Rome, 201-207, 252,

421-422n n 1 03-108, 43 1n2 serfs, 252, 434n42, 44 1 n 1 33 Tiv people and, 145-146, 4 1 1 n52 view of slaves as socially dead, 1 69-

170, 4 1 4n9 vs. wage labor, 23 3 , 35 1-352, 428n36,

434n42 See also child-selling; debt bondage;

debt peonage; female slaves slavery, laws on

African laws, 1 69 Islamic law, 168-169, 1 70, 274,

414nn5-8, 42 1 n 1 03 , 436n65 law of nations and, 1 67, 204, 422n 1 14 to p revent cruelty, 422n 108 Roman law, 169, 201-207, 203 , 4 1 4n7,

421-422nn 1 03-108, 422 n 1 09 slavery, opposition to, 2 1 1-212, 4 14n 1 5 ,

43 1 n 8 1 Essenes, 250, 403n28, 43 1n8 1

Slavery and Social Death (Patterson ) , 170

slave trade in Africa, 148-155 , 1 62-163 capita lism and, 349-352, 385 as chain of debt-obligations, 347 debt pawns in, 15 1-1 54, 156, 1 69,

4 1 1-4 1 2nn6 1-62, 412n78 , 414n5 gambling and, 450n109 good used to trade for slaves, 150,

152-153 , 4 1 1 n54, 4 1 1nn59-60 kidnapping for, 15 1-152, 154, 1 57,

1 68-169, 4 1 1 n60, 412n77 merchant societies and, 1 52-154, 1 63 ,

412nn65-67 recruitment methods for, 1 68-1 69 sale of self to, 120, 1 6 8 , 414n6 in Southeast Asia, 1 55-158 violence of, 144, 146, 1 59-160, 162-

1 64, 4 12n79 war and, 4 1 2n79

small retailing, racism in, 452n57 smart bombs, 3 86

Smith, Adam on concept of economy, 27-28 , 33 ,

44-45 on credit systems, 387 Divine Providence, 44, 279-280, 396n3 division of labor and, 279 exchange as basis for mental human

function, 25-26, 336, 394n9 as founder of economics, 24-25 on imaginary barter economy, 22-24,

29, 34-36, 46, 353-354, 374, 3 85 " invisible hand" theory, 44, 279 , 335,

396n3 on language and humanity, 76-77 on money, origins of, 24-25 N ietzsche on, 76-78, 336 , 402nn8-10,

439n 1 17, 448n83 on origins of money, 24 overview, 1 9 on self-interest, 3 36 on social interactions, 335 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 44,

396n3 Wealth of Nations, The, 37, 43-45 ,

446n59, 447n71 Snell, F . J . , 397n 1 5 sociability, language of, 330 social capital, 380 social change, i mportance of, 358 social classes

aristocratic superiority, notions of, 1 12-1 1 3 , 406-407n44

pressure of equality, 102, 452n57 rich vs. poor, struggle of, 8 unrest among during Axial Age, 23Q-

23 1 , 427n28 (See also hierarchial relationships)

social contract theories, 54-55, 398n29 social currency, 1 30, 15 8 , 2 1 9 Social Exchange Theory, 9 1 Social History of the Credit Trap (Wil­

liam) , 453n32 social interaction

Catholicism on, 44 1 n 147 civil courtesies and, 122-124, 408n62 theories of, 9Q-9 1

sociality in barter systems, 29-33 as basic value, 14 Calvinism and, 3 1 6 , 322-323 , 446n46

I N D E X 5 2 9

capitalism and, 379 language of, 446n45 See also relationships

social revolution, fear of, 359-360, 450n 1 1 6

societies, types of "communist societies," 95 "heroic societies," 1 1 7 , 208-209 monarchical hierarchies, 80, 205-207,

325 , 33 1 , 3 85 , 402n 1 9 "p rimitive societies, " 100--101 "traditional societies," 160

" society , " concepts of, 1 1 4 based on eternity assumptions, 100 class divisions and, 1 06--108, 120,

406nn33-34 indebtedness to, ideas of, 65-67 , 1 36,

387

Nietzsche on, 78 san itized middle-class view of, 127-

128 variations in, 1 1 3-1 14

"society," concepts of definitions of, 66-67 , 69

Society of Merchant Adventurers, 305 See also " merchant adventurers"

"Socio-Cultural Dimensions of the Cur- rency, The" (Theret ) , 57

sociology, discipline of," 69-70 Socrates, 67, 1 8 8 , 195-196, 247

sodomy, laws against, 1 90, 203, 4 1 8 n73 Solidarism, 401n62 Solon the Athenian, 3 8 8

reforms o f , 228 , 41 7 n58 Song dynasty, 269-270, 4 1 7n54, 434n42 souls, notions of, 244 sous, French, 48, 395n28, 397n 1 2 South Arabia, 367

South Dakota, 452n25 Southeast Asia

colonialism in, 350 international debt of, 368-369 slave trade in, 1 55-1 58

South Korea , 367 , 37 1 , 372 U . S . treasury bonds and, 6--7

South Sea Company/South Sea Bubble, 34 1 , 347-348 , 35 8

Sovereign M oney, 398n30 Sovereignty, Legitimacy and Money,

398n30

Soviet Union. See Russia Spanish/Portuguese empires, 24, 309-3 17 ,

3 19, 355-356, 440n1 32 Spanish termino logy

de nada (you're welcome) , 123 gracias (thank you ) , 408n63 por favor (please) , 123 , 408n63

Sparta, 27 , 427n 1 6 "sphere of consumption," 3 3 "spheres of exchange , " 36, 146, 4 10n43 ,

495n25 spontaneity, in Taois m , 242 "spot trades , " 395n24 Spufford, Peter, 343n3 , 396n37, 448n76 Stamp, Charles, 444, 448-449n87

stamping, coin, 27 , 49, 74-75, 246 Star Tribune (M inneapolis-St.Pau l ) ,

17-19 start-up companies, 347

stateless economies, 60 state-money theories

Charta lism, 47-48, 50, 54, 2S8 , 340, 397n 1 1 , 400n56

monarchical power and, 205-207 , 325 , 33 1 , 3 85

U . S . dollar and, 53-54 State Theory of Money (Knapp) , 48,

397n 1 1 Stiglitz, Joseph, 23 Stillman, Sarah, 1 1 2 "stock, the , " etymology of, 48 " stock , " etymology of, 445n29 "stock holder," etymology of, 48 stock-j obbers, 347-348 stock markets

creation of, 341-342, 346--348, 448n74 financial bubbles, 34 1-342, 347-348 ,

35 8 , 360 financial innovations and, 15-16, 28,

247-248, 3 93 n 1 1 first markets, 345, 346 ordinary people and, 376 in U . S . , 45 1 n l 2 See also capitalism; corporations

Stout, William, 328 Structuralism, 91 Stuart England, 332, 336, 447n65 subprime mortgage crisis, U . S . , B, 3 80--

38 1 , 393 n 1 1 Sudras caste, 255-256, 432n12, 432n14

5 3 0 I N D E X

suftaja, 20 1 , 276 , 29 1 , 437n8 1 suicide, 227, 262-264, 399n34

as result of credit debt, 3 8 1 Sulawesi, debt bondage i n , 156 Sumer

child-selling in, 129 coins, origins of in, 2 15-2 1 6 debt records i n , 39, 396n32 economic h istory of, 39, 396n32 freedom, concept of i n , 65 , 2 1 6 interest-bearing loans in, 2 1 6 marriage customs in, 417n53 patriarchal honor in, 1 77-178 prostitution in, 1 8 1-182, 416n44, 416n48 temples and palaces, economics of,

39, 396n32 See also Mesopotamia

Sumerian language, changes in, 178 Sumerian term inology

amargi (freedom) , 65 , 2 1 6 ur (honor ) , 1 65

Sung dynasty, 25 8 supply and demand, 102, 1 07

folktales about, 1 02 supply-side economics, 377 swapping obj ects, 29, 37, 44, 85 , 395n 1 6 sweatshops, 35 1 Sweden, central banks in, 45 symbol, money as, 298-302 "symbol," etymology of, 298 ,

442n 160-164 "symbolic capita l , " , 437n76 Symbolic Theology (Pseudo-Dionysius) ,

442n1 55 symbolon (tally ) , 298-299, 442n158 ,

442nn 149-1 54 "symbols," etymology of, 442n n 153-154 Symposium, The (Plato) , 296 Syria, Islam in, 273

T tabs, as credit systems, 1 8 , 38 , 40, 47, 85,

269, 327 taille (tally), 330 Taiwan, 367, 37 1 , 372

U . S . treasury bonds and, 6 tallies

as credit systems, 48-5 1 , 396n37, 397n 1S

defined, 442n15 8

tally stick s , 48, 268, 396n37, 397n16, 425n26, 435nn48-53 , 442n 1 6 1

Tambiah, Stanley J . , 417n55 Taoism, 224, 269, 297, 30 1 , 429n50,

442n 1 63 Tattiriya Sarphita, 399n-37 Taussig, Mick, 449n95 tax cuts, 450n 1 1 0 taxes

in ancient world, 63 , 400nn5 1-52 as cause for debt, 82-83 , 85 , 393n4,

403n21 , 403n23 in China, 269, 3 10, 3 1 3 , 400n52 colonialism and, 5, 50-5 1 , 393n 1 compulsory loans and, 33 8-339 crying down/crying u p " , 282, 337,

43 8n95 , 440n 130 " educational/moralizing tax," 50 in Egypt, 63 , 400n52, 452n52 in India, 62-63 , 400n52, 428n36 in Islamic law, 436n61 Laffer curve and, 90, 43 8n93 in Madagascar, 5-6, 50-5 1 , 393n 1 as marks of conquest, 400n52 in Mesopotamia, 65 in Middle East, 20 1 , 274, 276, 436n64,

437n81 Mongol tax systems, 3 1 0 obj ections t o paying, 85-86, 403n28 overview, 62-65 in Persia, 63 primordial debt and, 59, 63 purpose of, 55-56 in Rome, 63 U . S . international monetary policy

and, 36 1 , 366 used to create markets, 1 79

tax reforms, 444n6 Templars, 29 1 , 44 1 n 144 temple dancers

in G reece, 41 8 n 6 1 in Mesopota mia, 1 8 1-1 82, 4 1 6n44

temples and palaces debt records in, 21 economic systems in, 39, 396n32 interest-bearing loans and, 64-65 ,

400n53 Ten Commandments, 129, 409n8 Tenochtitlan, 3 14-3 15 , 3 17, 355 terhatum (bride payment) , 179

I N D E X 5 3 1

Testart, Alain, 409n6, 417n54, 422n107, 427n24, 450n109

Thailand, debt bondage in, 156 Thailand, U . S . treasury bonds and, 6 "thank you"

custom of civility and, 122-124, 408n62

etymology of, 1 23 , 408n63 Thatcher, Margaret, 53 , 375-376 Thatcheris m , 376 Theory of M o ral Sentiments (Smith ) , 44,

396n3 Theret, Bruno, 55 , 57-58 , 398n30, 40 1 n2 Thevenot, Melchisedech, 398n30 Thierry, Fran<;ois, 425nn25-26 Third World debt, 2-3 , 5-6 Third World debt crisis, 2-3 , 5-6 Thompson, E . P . , 446n44 Thousand and One Nights, 278 Thrasymachus, 1 96, 24 1 Three Stages, School o f , 262, 265, 433-

434n35 Thucydides, 427n1 9, 429n62 Tiberius, King, 73 , 107, 202 " ticket stubs, " etymology of, 48 Tillers, The, 237, 249n50 time (honor ) , 176, 2 17n57 " tit-for-tat, " 1 05 , 405n28 Tiv people (Nigeri a)

cannibalism among, 147, 4 1 l n52 charisma ( Tsav), 147 cultural horror stories of, 148, 1 69-

170 currency in, 1 54, 41 1 n54 currency of, 145 economic life of, 146-148 equality among, 122 flesh-debts, 349 flesh-debts in, 144-148 , 1 49, 1 55 forms of currency used by, 1 32 gift exchange customs of, 104--105 ,

108, 328 history of migration of, 1 49-1 50,

4 1 1 n5 1 m arriage customs and " b ridewealth "

in, 132-133 , 145, 4 1 0n42 mourning warin, 1 36 , 4 1 0n22 sister exchange in, 1 6 1-162 slavery practices of, 145-146 , 41 l n52 slave trade and, 149-153 , 162

" spheres of exchange" in, 36, 1 46 , 4 1 0n43 , 495n25

war organization of, 4 1 1 nn5 1-52 witches (mbatsav) in, 147-148, 4 1 1 n52

Tlingit people, 1 17 tobacco, as currency, 26, 3 8 , 75 , 166 Todorov, Tzvetan, 3 14 tokens. See Chartalism; debt-token sys-

tems; primitive money tokos ( interest ) , 440n 123 "too big to fa il," 347 "to pay," etymology of, 60, 399n43 totoloque (game) , 356 trading

capitalism and, 346-347 for wealthgetting, 290, 440n123 See also barter systems

"traditional societies," 160, 332 Treasury bonds, U . S . , 6, 366-377 Treatise on Money ( Keynes ) , 54 tribute systems, 3 84

in China, 37 1-372 "tribute trade, " 45 1 n 1 8 Troyes, Chretien d e , 293-294, 44 1 n 1 44 "truck and barter," etymology of, 29-34, 291 trucking, 25, 28, 394n7

See also barter systems " truck system," 349, 350, 352, 449n 1 02 trust, concepts of

in credit systems, 73, 328-329, 3 37, 34o-3 4 1 , 347

gift exchange customs and, 1 17 in God, 377 in government, 34o-341 in government power and policies,

34o-34 1 virtual money and, 367-368

Tsav (charisma) , 147 Tuck, Richard, 206, 421n93 , 422n 1 14 Tudor England, 3 12, 336-337, 447n65 tugudu (cloth ) , 146 Turkey

coins in, origins of, 224 Islam and, 273-274 milk-debts in, 434n3 8 stories from , 192

Tusi, 279-280, 329 Twin Towers, gold myths and, 362-363 ,

450n4 Tyre, 227, 229, 230

5 3 2 I N D E X

u ulema (legal scholars ) , 273 uli mited, the (apeiro n), concept of, 245-

247 Ulpian, 200, 414n9, 422n n 1 14-1 1 5

See also Roman law unions, labor, 374-375 United Nations, 368, 444n22 United States

ba rter systems in, 24, 3 94n7 civility, custo ms of, 122-123 debt monetization in, 6, 37 1-372,

452nn 1 8-19, 453 n32 debt of, 365-369 debtors, view of in, 1 6-17 embargo on Haiti by, 6, 393 n2 as "empire," 6 foreign debt of, 6-7, 367-369 global power based on debt in, 367 global strength, decl ine of, 372 gold reserves of, 361-363 household debt in, 379 inflation in, 362, 397n 1 8 , 452n25 international monetary policies of,

36 1 , 366 ma rket populism in, 453 n32 mil itary dominance of, 365-367, 372,

45 1 n l l monetary policies i n , 2 monetary policy in, 365 private banks crash i n , 369 Third World debt policies, 6 war debt of, 365-366

"universal otherness," 376, 452n27 unpayable debt

blood debts, 137-144, 145 , 420n84 blood-feuds and, 60, 1 0 1 , 1 33-1 34,

1 5 8, 409n 1 6 bridewealth as, 1 32-1 33 flesh-debts, 330 in human economies, 1 36 kem relationship and, 409n1 3 life-debts, 133-1 36 mi lk-debts, 264-265, 267-268, 302,

3 12, 434n3 8 money, uselessness of for, 1 3 1-1 36 moral ity and, 120-122, 407n60 overview, 1 3 1-1 36 primitive money used for, 1 3 1-1 36 Rospabe theory on, 1 3 1-1 36, 158-1 59

women used as cu rrency to pay, 135-1 36

ur (honor) , 1 65 Uruinimgina, 2 1 6 U . S . Air Force, 45 1 n l l U . S . debt, Federal Reserve and, 369-370 U . S . Treasury bonds, 366-367, 45 1nn8-9

China and, 37 1-372, 452nn 1 8-19 Usher, Abbot Payson, 448n75 usury/userers . See moneylending /mon-

eylenders usus (use of a thing) , 1 99 utopian communities, 250, 43 1 n 8 1 utop ian i m aginary barter economy, 22-

24, 34-36, 46, 353-354, 374, 3 85 utopian Marxist ideologies, 354, 359,

395n 1 5, 450n106 utopian models of capita l i s m , 354-355

v vagrancy, 446n60 "vanqu ished ones," 9 Veda s

on children's d e b t t o parents, 405n21 on female slavery, 408-409nn3 on history of money, 14 on honoring debts, 166 on i nterest-bearing loans, 62-63,

400n47 primoridial debt theory and, 56, 62,

64 on reciprocity, 405n21 Rig Veda, 43 , 56, 408 n3 on slavery, 408n3

vegetarianism, 255 veiling, obl igatory, 178, 1 8 8 , 4 17n53 ,

4 1 8 n 64 "veil of money , " 44 Vickers, Adria n , 158 , 41 3 n83 Victorian England, 359 Vietna m War, 36 1 , 364 Vikings, slavery and, 4 14n1 5 "vill age-wives , " 14 1-142, 410n33 violence

blood-feuds, 60, 1 0 1 , 133-1 34, 158 , 409n 16, 41 0n22

a s cause for soci a l inequality, 1 13 dehumanization and, 1 94-195 exchange principle origins and, 1 9

I N D E X 5 3 3

feast, gift exchange and, 29-33 , 35 , 1 17-1 1 8 , 1 27, 4 10n22

impersonal m arkets and, 14 loan collection and, 7-8, 14, 1 94- 1 95 murder, as form of debt repayment,

1 3 1-1 36, 41 0n22 phi losophical expressions of, 14 in slave trade, 1 44, 146, 159-1 60, 162-

1 64, 4 1 2n79 used to control women, 1 60, 41 3n97,

4 13nn9 1-92 Virginia, tobacco as currency in, 26, 3 8 ,

75 , 166 virginity. See chastity virtual money

early existence of, 18, 25 1 , 268, 28 1 , 298 , 308, 337

in Middle Ages, 298 new age of, 1 8 as original form o f money, 1 8 overview, 17-1 9 trust and, 367-368 trust in, 367-368 vs. coins/coinage, 40, 214, 3 13

Visa, 367 von Eschenbach, Wolfram , 296, 44 1 n 1 42 von Glahn, Richard, 435n57, 444n6 von Henneburg, Wilhelm, 345n35 von Mises, Ludwig, 359, 3 88

w wage labor

bonded workers, 265 capitalism and, 345 , 349-352, 449n88 cash vs. commodity wage payments,

352-353 , 449n 1 02, 449n 1 03 contract employment, 35 1 , 449n99 debt as way to control, 427n 3 1 free wage labor, 35 1 history of, 35 1-353 , 354, 449n88,

449n99 in India, 256 Marx on, 349-35 1 to pay off debt, 368 Roman nexum labor contracts, 230,

427n24 slavery and, 206, 423n 1 2 1 v s . slavery, 233 , 35 1-352, 428n38 ,

434n42 work, as virtuous, 390

wage-labor contracts, 120, 407n58 wage stagnation, 375-376, 452 n 1 9 Wagner, Richard

Die Wibelungen, 44 1 n 1 43 Parzifal, 296, 44 1 n 142

Wall, Nancy, 23 Wallerstein, I mmanuel, 35 8 Wall Street Journal, 452n 1 8 Wampum shell money, 6 0 , 1 29, 1 35-1 36,

409n9 Wang M ang, 259, 422n107 war debt, U . S . , 365-366 warfare

cash m arkets fro m , 384 exchange, role of creating and, 1 9 militarization and capitalism, 346 , 3 82 See also Axial Age

"Warring States period," 235, 240, 428n46 warrior honor, 357 Way to Wisdom (Jaspers ) , 223 Wealth and Poverty (Gilder) , 377 wealthgetting, types of, 290, 444n 1 23 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith ) , 37, 43-

45, 446n59, 447n71 Weber, Max, 258 , 3 1 6 , 359, 40 1 n5 Weber, Mx, 3 1 6 weddings . See bridewealth; marriage Welsh law codes, 6 1-62, 128, 409n4

on honor price, 1 75, 4 1 4 n 1 9 wergeld, 1 33 , 173 , 417n57 Western Arnhem Land. See Australia West Indies, barter systems i n , 24 "wife sales," 1 80, 416n42 wilcuma (you ' re welcome ) , 408n64 William, Brett, 453 n32 William I I I , King, 340 witches (mbatsav), 1 47-148, 4 1 1 n52 wives

husband's right to sell, 128 women

ba rter systems, role in, 29-30, 394n 15 , 395n n 1 5

Buddhism on, 265-268, 434n44, 434n47

chastity, expectations of, 177-182, 414n1 3 , 4 1 4n3 1 , 4 1 5n3 1 , 4 1 6n3 8

in Chinese Buddhism, 265-266, 434n44, 434n47

"ghost-wives, " 1 36 in Hinduism, 267

5 3 4 I N D E X

women (continued ) patriarchal hierarchy and, 17 8-179,

4 17 n54 as pawns, 1 39-1 44, 4 12n62 primitive matriarchy, 395n n 15 " respectable women , " notion of, 1 84-

1 85 , 1 8 8 , 1 90, 328, 41 8n64 used as cu rrency to p a y debt, 9,

14, 85 , 128-1 29, 403n27, 408n7 , 4 17n 1 7

violence used to control, 160, 413n97 , 4 13nn9 1-92

See also female slaves Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum) ,

52-53 , 363-364, 3 98nn22-24 woodpecker scalps, as cu rrency, 60 Woods, Breton, 361 "workplace pi lfering," 353 Works and Days (Hesiod ) , 4 1 9n77

World Bank, 368 world ma rket system, 346 World Trade O rganization, 368 World War I , 359, 372 World War I I , 360, 373 , 374, 383 "worthies," 328

Wright, David P., 403n27

Wright, Steven, 7

Wu-ti, Emporer, 249 Wycliffe, John, 403n25

X Xenophon, 1 1 0, 406n3 94

y Yama (god ) , 56, 400n47

Yang, Lien-sheng, 425n26, 425n29, 435n54, 435nn53-54

yin-yang symbol, 301 , 443 n 1 64 "you're welco me"

customs of civility and, 123, 408n62, 408n64

etymology of, 408n64 Yuan dynasty, 258 Yung-Ti, Li, 425n25

z Zhou empire, 225 Zinskauf (leased property) , 445n26 Zongl iu, Y e, 444n5 Zoroastrianism, 80, 224