Debt – Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years

Here anthropologist David Graeber, one of the early organizers of Occupy Wall Street and a major scholar, presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. A revised and updated edition of the international bestseller. The groundbreaking international best-seller that turns everything you think about money, debt, and society on its head-from the "brilliant, deeply original political thinker" David Graeber (Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me) Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods-that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors-which lives on in full force to this day. So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments abo