Table Of ContentPRAISE FOR DAVID GRAEBER AND
DEBT: THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS
Winner of 2012 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing
Winner of 2012 Gregory Bateson book prize, awarded by the Society
for Cultural Anthropology ——————————— “A brilliant,
deeply original thinker.”
—REBECCA SOLNIT, AUTHOR OF A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL
“Fresh … Fascinating … Graeber’s book is not just thought-
provoking, but also exceedingly timely. His sweeping narrative
history essentially argues that many of our existing ideas about
money and credit are limited, if not wrong.”
—GILLIAN TETT, FINANCIAL TIMES
“A lengthy �eld report on the state of our economic and moral
disrepair. In the best tradition of anthropology, Graeber treats debt
ceilings, subprime mortgages and credit default swaps as if they
were the exotic practices of some self-destructive tribe. Written in a
brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into
the nature of debt—where it came from and how it evolved.”
—THOMAS MEANEY, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Exhaustive … Engaging … An authoritative account of the
background to the recent crisis. Both erudite and impertinent,
[Graeber’s] book helps illuminate the omissions of the current
debate and the tacit political con�icts that lurk behind technical
budget questions.”
—ROBERT KUTTNER, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
“The book is more readable and entertaining than I can indicate …
It is a meditation on debt, tribute, gifts, religion, and the false
history of money. Graeber is a scholarly researcher, an activist, and
a public intellectual. His �eld is the whole history of social and
economic transactions.”
— PETER CAREY, THE OBSERVER
“Fascinating …[An] extraordinary book, at once learned and
freewheeling.”
—BENJAMIN KUNKEL, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
“An engaging book. Part anthropological history and part
provocative political argument, it’s a useful corrective to what
passes for contemporary conversation about debt and the economy.”
—JESSE SINGAL, BOSTON GLOBE
“An alternate history of the rise of money and markets, a sprawling,
erudite, provocative work.”
—DRAKE BENNETT, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
“Terri�c … In the best anthropological tradition, [Graeber] helps us
reset our everyday ideas by exploring history and other civilizations,
then boomeranging back to render our own world strange, and more
open to change.”
—RAJ PATEL, THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“Fascinating … One of the year’s most in�uential books. Graeber
situates the emergence of credit within the rise of class society, the
destruction of societies based on ‘webs of mutual commitment,’ and
the constantly implied threat of physical violence that lies behind all
social relations based on money.”
—PAUL MASON, THE GUARDIAN
“A formidable piece of anthropological scholarship …[A] sweeping
global history … In tracing the genealogy of the noxious form of
debt that we are familiar with today and contrasting it against an
ancient, society-grounding conception of human indebtedness,
Graeber has given us a signi�cant piece of historical scholarship,
one that demonstrates how a new understanding of debt might
provide us with some clues for the future.”
— JUSTIN E. H. SMITH, BOOKFORUM
“Debt may assume for the Occupy movement the theoretical
importance that Michael Hardt and Antonio’s Negri’s Empire (2000)
did for anti-globalisation campaigners during the past decade.
Moving between ancient Mesopotamia, the medieval Crusades, the
Atlantic slave trade, and innumerable other historical epochs, his
500-page study argues that although debt has always been the basis
of human society, it is not the same thing as money.”
—SUKHEV SANDHU, THE TELEGRAPH
“David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years can be seen both as an
anthropologist’s contribution to the new global history and as the
intellectual credo of an anti-capitalist scholar-activist. The project of
writing a history of �nancial contrivances nicely combines a
deconstruction of debt and the case for seeing the crash of 2008 as a
critical turning point. In this optic, recent events are a further twist
in an age-old contest between rich and poor, creditors and debtors,
the money machine and the cause of human survival and
�ourishing. It is written with engaging good humour and a winning
radical generosity.”
—ROBIN BLACKBURN, NEW LEFT REVIEW
“If anthropology consists of making the apparently wild thought of
others logically compelling in their own cultural settings and
intellectually revealing of the human condition, then David Graeber
is the consummate anthropologist. Not only does he accomplish this
profound feat, he redoubles it by the critical task—now more urgent
than ever—of making the possibilities of other people’s worlds the
basis for understanding our own.”
— MARSHALL SAHLINS, CHARLES F. GREY DISTINGUISHED SERVICE PROFESSOR
EMERITUS OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
CHICAGO
“I am grateful to David Graeber, an anthropologist and the
intellectual leader of the Occupy movement, for his Debt, which is
brilliant, unexpectedly funny, and provides many bracing
perspectives on the subject.”
— LEWIS JONES, THE SPECTATOR
“An absolutely indispensable—and enormous—treatise on the
history of money and its relationship to inequality in society.”
— CORY DOCTOROW, BOINGBOING
“Controversial and thought-provoking, an excellent book.”
—BOOKLIST
“A dazzlingly syncretic, coherent, and multi-faceted e�ort to re-
narrate virtually the entirety of human history, by starting from a
concept and opening outward to include everything else … A
deconstruction of the terms through which we have learned to think
about what human civilization, history, and society are and are
supposed to be (which is to say, the language we use to make claims
upon it) … It’s a really fucking good book.”
— AARON BADY, THE NEW INQUIRY
“Graeber’s body of anthropological work is highly regarded, yet his
style of writing is not academic but almost chatty. Some scholars
use academic language to reach and extract the deepest of ideas;
Graeber is able to do this—reach, extract, exchange deep and
startling ideas—with plain language … The book is a dense mix of
economics, history, and anthropology. And always, these visits to
di�erent times and cultures reveal something surprising about debt
and money.”
—CHARLES MUDEDE, THE STRANGER
“A grand intellectual project and a call for action.”
—JEFFERY ATIK, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
“The world of borrowing needs a little demysti�cation, and David
Graeber’s Debt is a good start.”
—THE L MAGAZINE
“This timely and accessible book would appeal to any reader
interested in the past and present culture surrounding debt, as well
as broad-minded economists.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL
“I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation
from anywhere in the world.”
—MAURICE BLOCH, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE LONDON SCHOOL OF
ECONOMICS
DAVID GRAEBER teaches anthropology at the London School of
Economics. He is the author of Toward an Anthropological Theory of
Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar,
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Possibilities: Essays on
Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, and Direct Action: An Ethnography.
He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, The Ba�er, The Guardian, Al
Jazeera, and the New Left Review.
In the summer of 2011, he worked with a small group of activists
to plan Occupy Wall Street. In Time’s 2011 “Person of the Year”
feature on the “Protestor,” Kurt Andersen wrote that Graeber
“nudged the group to a fresh vision: a long-term encampment in a
public space, an improvised democratic protest village without
preappointed leaders, committed to a general critique—the U.S.
economy is broken, politics is corrupted by big money—but with no
immediate call for speci�c legislative or executive action. It was also
Graeber, a lifelong hater of corporate smoke and mirrors, who
coined the movement’s ingenious slogan, ‘We are the 99%.’ ”
DEBT
© 2011, 2012, 2014 David Graeber First published in hardcover in 2011
First Melville House printing of this edition: October 2014
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse
ISBN: 978-1-61219-420-2
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Graeber, David.
Debt : the �rst 5,000 years / David Graeber.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2 (alk. paper)
1. Debt—History. 2. Money—History. 3. Financial crises—History. I. Title.
HG3701.G73 2010
332–dc22
2010044508
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