Debt: The First 5,000 Years

In this chapter, Graeber starts to explore his perspective on economic history where credit occurs first, followed by money, and then barter happens much later.

He begins by taking issue with the anthropological literature that uses the phrase “primitive money” (129) to describe the kind of currency (e.g., the Iroquois wampum or Solomon Island feather money) used by marketless or stateless places. The term “primitive money” suggests a crude version of the currency we use today. Graeber underscores that both the archaeological and ethnographic record do not support this belief. These currencies were:

never used to buy and sell anything at all. Instead, they were used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers—almost anything but trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry (130).

These currencies were important to the very fabric of the human communities, which is why Graeber uses the term “social currencies” (130) to describe them. He also uses the term “human economies” (130) to describe the economies that employ the social currencies. Human economies dominated most of human history.

Graeber next addresses the role of money in human economies. In human economies, money recognizes that “debts cannot possibly be paid” (131). Bride-price (renamed bridewealth), as one example, is when a suitor’s family delivers the local social currency to a woman’s family. The woman’s family would then present the daughter as the bride to the suitor’s family. While it may seem like the suitor’s family is trying to buy a wife, this is not the case. Bridewealth is about “rearranging relations between people” (131). The social currency used in the bridewealth is an acknowledgement that: 1) the husband now has moral obligations to the wife, just as she does to him; 2) the husband cannot sell his wife and, therefore, is not purchasing her; and 3) the debt to the bride’s family can never be repaid.

The Tiv of central Nigeria represent a modern example of the principles of bridewealth in action. The Tiv used their most prestigious form of currency, brass rods, as bridewealth. Men continuously give their wife’s family brass rods throughout their lives. The Tiv know that no object is equivalent to a human. Instead, only a woman can be traded for another woman. The brass rods, thus, became a symbol of a life-debt.

Blood feuds are like bridewealth. While a person might have to pay the family of the individual they harmed, the payment does not wipe clean the debt. An item does not equate to a life, instead “one life can only be paid for with another” (135).

Graeber acknowledges that the role of currency in human economies is like that in primordial debt theory. Money acknowledges that there is a life debt (or absolute debt) that can never be repaid. The difference between the two is that debt in the former is to someone else whereas debt in the latter is to society or the cosmos.

In human economies, each person is unique because of their relations with others. Their uniqueness means they cannot be mathematically quantified and exchanged, until the human economy begins to break-down and transforms into something else. The subtitle of this chapter hints that this happens through violence.

Graeber discusses how violence changes human economies. He begins with the Lele, a group from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lele men came to gain control over Lele women through blood debts. As one example, a man would sell his claim on a woman to another group. This group could come and rip the woman from her community. Within the community, “a woman may be a daughter, sister, lover, rival, companion, mother, age-mate, and mentor to many different people in different ways” (158). By tearing a woman from these relations, which is a form of violence, she no longer has unique value. Instead, she becomes something quantifiable and can be bought and sold.

Graeber concludes by reiterating that people become “subject to the logic of debt” (162) when they are torn from the contexts that make them who they are. Violence is the primary mechanism that breaks down human economies.

In Chapter 7, Graeber focuses on when human economies naturally transform to market economies. To Graeber, our concept of honor helps explain this transition. The notion of honor, however, makes no sense without degradation or slavery.

Graeber defines slavery as “the ultimate form of being ripped from one’s context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being” (168). In a sense the enslaved person is dead. In fact, in most societies that allowed slavery, laws treated the enslaved person as legally dead. Since enslaved people are socially dead, they are not able to form “binding moral relations with anyone else” (170). The enslaved person cannot form relationships. Slavery strips a person’s basic dignity as a human from them. The enslaved person becomes honorless. At the same time, the master’s (Graeber’s terminology) ability to strip someone of their dignity represents the foundation of their honor.

Honor has two contradictory meanings. The first is the dignity of being human, as reflected in the ability to form moral relationships with others. The second is “the value of power to turn others into money” (171) by removing a person’s dignity, which changes them into commercial objects. A person of honor in the second sense understands the fragility of their power and is often willing to defend it “with the knife or sword” (170).

Graeber suggests that in human economies, money is akin to honor in the first sense since it helps rearrange relations. When human economies turn to market economies, however, money becomes more like honor in the second sense. Here, money rips people from their unique social relationships. Graeber uses examples from several parts of the world to support this idea.

He first turns to medieval Ireland, which “was a human economy perched uncomfortably on the fringe of an expanding commercial one” (171). Cumal, known as “the slave-girl money” (171), was a form of currency used to rearrange relationships, especially to settle honor prices. People had to pay an honor price whenever they insulted another person’s honor. Social rank determined the price. It initially seems odd that medieval Europe used enslaved girls as a form of currency. By this time, the Catholic church disapproved of slavery. However, the enslaved girls’ lack of honor is precisely what made them an allowable form of currency to settle honor prices, since it shows that the master was powerful enough to extract their honor from them.

Graeber also examines ancient Greece, specifically the time of Homer around 1,000 BCE. Graeber considers Greece to be a heroic society where wealth and the ability to degrade others determines a person’s honor and “the role of violence is not hidden—it’s glorified” (209). Like in medieval Ireland and Mesopotamia, the introduction of markets led to “extreme moral confusion” (195) in ancient Greece. Debt crises, an increase in military campaigns and slavery, and an enlarged population due to the military campaigns and slavery represents the first effects of the arrival of a commercial economy. Turmoil amongst the aristocrats and everyday people also increases. The aristocrats even go so far as to change their view on honor. Honor is no longer associated with wealth accumulation but with the disdain for money. Traditional relations of communism and hierarchy also implode. Graeber suggests that all the moral confusion around how to pay debt spurred many ancient Greek philosophers to contemplate this challenge. Their philosophies remain part of our core tradition of moral and political theory.

Graeber ends with Ancient Rome. In this example, he focuses more on slavery and freedom instead of honor or the moral confusion that arose from the introductions of markets. Roman law uniquely defines property as “the relation between a person and a thing, characterized by absolute power of that person over that thing” (198). Private property is the basic form of property under Roman law. Romans had absolute power over their possessions. Graeber suggests the Romans derived “the notion of absolute private property” (199) from slavery.