Notes

People :

Author : David Graeber

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[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 from the plantations to ports to earn foreign exchange to pay for building the roads and railways to begin with.

[2] The United States, for example, only recognized the Republic of Haiti in 1860. 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, during most of which time they were under U.S. military occupation.

[3] Hallam 1866 V: 269–70. Since the government did not feel it appropriate to pay for the upkeep of improvidents, prisoners 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 related, since over the course history, the need to assemble money for tax payments has always been the most frequent reason for falling into debt.

[5] Finley 1960:63; 1963:24; 1974:80; 1981:106; 1983:108. And these are only the ones I managed to track down. What he says for Greece and Rome would appear 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:36

[10] ibid:37.

[11] Simon Johnson, the IMF’s chief economist at the time, put it concisely in a recent article in The Atlantic: “Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as ‘picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,’ this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.” (Johnson 2010) Johnson of course passes over the possibility that AIG knew perfectly well what was eventually 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 attempt to create a U.S. federal bankruptcy law in 1800 foundered; there was one briefly in place between 1867 and 1878, aimed to relieve indebted Civil War veterans, but 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 claimants, 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, 2010, www.startribune.com/local/95692619.html.

[15] “IMF warns second bailout would ‘threaten democracy.’ ” Angela Jameson and Elizabeth Judge, business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6928147.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1185799, accessed November 25, 2009

[16] Case, Fair, Gärtner, & Heather 1996:564. Emphasis in the original.

[17] op cit.

[18] Begg, Fischer, and Dornbuch (2005:384); Maunder, Myers, Wall, and Miller (1991:310); Parkin & King (1995:65).

[19] Stiglitz and Driffill 2000:521. Emphasis again in the original.

[20] Aristotle Politics I.9.1257

[21] Neither is it clear we are really speaking of barter here. Aristotle used the term métadosis, 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 introducing an entirely new meaning for the term. Theorists of the origin of Greek money from 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 development of Greek currency. (For a critique of the Aristotelian tradition, which does assume Aristotle is talking about barter, see Fahazmanesh 2006.)

[22] See Jean-Michel Servet (1994, 2001) for this literature. He also notes that in the eighteenth century, these accounts suddenly vanished, to be replaced by endless sightings of “primitive barter” in accounts of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas.

[23] Wealth of Nations I.2.1–2. As we’ll see, the line seems to be taken from much older sources.

[24] “If we should inquire into the principle of human mind on which this disposition 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 assumption 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).

[25] The reference to shepherds implies he may be referring to another part of the world, but elsewhere his examples, for instance of trading deer for beaver, make it clear he’s thinking of the Northeast woodlands of North America.

[26] Wealth of Nations I.4.2.

[27] Wealth of Nations I.4.3.

[28] Wealth of Nations I.4.7.

[29] The idea of an historical sequence from barter to money to credit actually seems to appear first in the lectures of an Italian banker named Bernardo Davanzati (1529–1606; so Waswo 1996); it was developed 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 Bücher (1907). The sequence has now become universally accepted common sense, and it reappears in at least tacit form in Marx, and explicitly in Simmel—again, despite the fact that almost all subsequent historical research has proved it wrong.

[30] Though they did make an impression on many others. Morgan’s work in particular (1851, 1877, 1881), which emphasized both collective property rights and the extraordinary importance of women, with women’s councils largely in control 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 communism and primitive matriarchy.

[31] Anne Chapman (1980) goes if anything further, noting that if pure barter is to be defined as concerned only with swapping objects, and not with rearranging relations between people, it’s not clear that it has ever existed. See also Heady 2005.

[32] Levi-Strauss 1943; the translation is from Servet 1982:33.

[33] One must imagine the temptation for a sexual variety must be fairly strong, for young men and women accustomed to spending almost all of their time with maybe a dozen other people the same age.

[34] Berndt 1951:161, cf. Gudeman 2001: 124–25, who provides an analysis quite similar to my own.

[35] Berndt 1951:162.

[36] Though as we will note later, it’s not exactly as if international business deals now never involve music, dancing, food, drugs, high-priced hookers, or the possibility of violence. For a random example underlining the last two, see Perkins 2005.

[37] Lindholm 1982:116.

[38] Servet 2001:20-21 compiles an enormous number of such terms.

[39] The point is so 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 might have made barter unnecessary is Ralph Hawtrey (1928:2, cited in Einzig 1949:375). All others simply assume, for no reason, that all exchanges even between neighbors must have necessarily been what economists like to call “spot trades.”

[40] Bohannan 1955, Barth 1969. cf. Munn 1986, Akin & Robbins 1998. A good summary of the concept can be found in Gregory 1982:48–49. Gregory gives one example of a highland Papua New Guinea system with six ranks of valuables, with live pigs and cassowary birds on the top rank, “pearl-shell pendants, pork sides, stone axes, cassowary-plume headdresses, and cowrie-shell headbands” on the second, 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.

[41] See Servet 1998, Humphries 1985.

[42] The classic essay here is Radford 1945.

[43] In the 1600s, at least, actually called the old Carolingian denominations “imaginary money”—everyone persisting in using pounds, shillings, and pence (or livres, deniers, and sous) for the intervening 800 years, despite the fact that for most of that period, actual coins were entirely different, or simply didn’t exist (Einaudi 1936).

[44] Other examples of barter coexisting with money: Orlove 1986; Barnes & Barnes 1989.

[45] One of the disadvantages of having 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, people will continue to cite you as an authority anyway.)

[46] Innes 1913:378. He goes on to observe: “A moment’s reflection shows that a staple commodity could not be used as money, because ex hypothesi, the medium of exchange is equally receivable 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.”

[47] The temples appear to have come first; the palaces, which became increasingly important over time, took over their system of administration.

[48] Smith was not dreaming about these: the current technical term for such ingots is “hacksilber” (e.g., Balmuth 2001).

[49] Compare Grierson 1977:17 for Egyptian parallels.

[50] e.g., Hudson 2002:25, 2004:114

[51] Innes 1913:381

[52] Peter Spufford’s monumental Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (1988), which devotes hundreds of pages to gold and silver mining, mints, and debasement of coinage, makes only two or three mentions of various sorts of lead or leather token 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” (1988:336). An even more dramatic example 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 subject, especially outside England.

[53] Heinsohn & Steiger (1989) even suggest the main reason their fellow economists haven’t abandoned the story is that anthropologists have not yet provided an equally compelling alternative. Still, almost all histories of money continue to begin with fanciful accounts of barter. Another expedient is to fall back on pure circular definitions: if “barter” is an economic transaction that does not employ currency, then any economic transaction that doesn’t involve currency, whatever its form or content, must be barter. Glyn Davies (1996:11–13) thus describes even Kwakiutl potlatches as “barter.”

[54] We often forget that there was a strong religious element in all this. Newton 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.

[55] Smith first uses the phrase “invisible hand” in his Astronomy (III.2), but in Theory of Moral Sentiments IV.1.10, he is explicit that the invisible hand of the market 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.

[56] Samuelson 1948:49. See Heinsohn and Steiger 1989 for a critique of this position; also Ingham 2004.

[57] Pigou 1949. Boianovsky 1993 provides a history of the term.

[58] “We do not know of any economy in which systematic barter takes place without the presence of money” (Fayazmanesh 2006:87)—by which he means, in the sense of money of account.

[59] On the government role of fostering the “self-regulating market” in general, see Polanyi 1949. The standard economic orthodoxy, that if the government just gets out of the way, a market will naturally emerge, without any need to create appropriate legal, police, and political institutions first, was dramatically disproved when free-market ideologues tried to impose this model in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.

[60] 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 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).

[61] 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 anthropologists seem to have missed it.

[62] 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.

[63] “State theory may be traced to the early nineteenth century and to [Adam] Muller’s New Theory of Money, which attempted to explain money value as an expression of communal trust and national will, and culminated in [G.F.] Knapp’s State Theory of Money, 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 exchange. It is rather a means for accounting for and settling debts, the most important of which are tax debts” (Ingham 2004:47.) Ingham’s book is an admirable statement of the Chartalist position, and much of my argument 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.

[64] In French: livres, sous, and deniers.

[65] Einaudi 1936. Cipolla (1967) calls it “ghost money.”

[66] On tallies: Jenkinson 1911, 1924; Innes 1913; Grandell 1977; Baxter 1989; Stone 2005.

[67] Snell (1919:240) notes that kings while touring their domains would sometimes seize cattle or other goods by right of “preemption” and then pay in tallies, but it was very difficult to get their representatives 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 matter to recover under this system, which lent itself to the worst exactions, and is the subject of numerous complaints in our early popular poetry.”

[68] It is also interesting to note, in 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 practice in 1826.

[69] See Engels (1978) for a classic study of this sort of problem.

[70] Appealing particularly to debtors, who were understandably drawn to the idea that debt is simply a social arrangement that was in no sense immutable but created by government policies that could just as easily be reshuffled—not to mention, who would benefit from inflationary policies.

[71] On the tax, Jacob 1987; for the Betsimisaraka village study, Althabe 1968; for analogous Malagasy case studies, Fremigacci 1976, Rainibe 1982, Schlemmer 1983, Feeley-Harnik 1991. For colonial tax policy in Africa more generally, Forstater 2005, 2006.

[72] So, for instance, Heinsohn & Steiger 1989:188–189.

[73] 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 resisted, with the centralization of the banking system being a major field of struggle, and mutualism—popular democratic (not profit oriented) banking and insurance arrangements—one of the main forms of resistance. The bi-metalists were the more moderate successors of the Greenbackers, who called for a currency detached from money altogether, such as Lincoln briefly imposed in wartime (Dighe (2002) provides a good summary of the historical background.)

[74] They only became ruby slippers in the movie.

[75] Some have even suggested that Dorothy herself represents Teddy Roosevelt, since syllabically, “dor-o-thee” is the same as “thee-o-dor”, only backwards.

[76] See Littlefield 1963 and Rockoff 1990 for a detailed 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 political references in the stage version of 1902, only two years after the book’s original publication.

[77] Reagan could as easily be argued to be a practitioner of extreme military Keynesianism, using the Pentagon’s budget to create jobs and drive economic growth; anyway, monetary orthodoxy was abandoned very quickly even rhetorically among those actually managing the system.

[78] See Ingham 2000.

[79] Keynes 1930: 4–5

[80] The argument is referred to as the paradox of banking. To provide an extremely 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 money would still have to put it into the bank again. Keynes pointed out the existence of multiple banks didn’t really change anything, provided bankers coordinated their efforts, which, in fact, they always do.

[81] I might note that this assumption echoes the logic of neoclassical economic theory, which assumes that all basic institutional arrangements that define the context of economic activity were agreed to by all parties at some imaginary point in the past, and that since then, everything has and will always continue to exist in equilibrium. Interestingly, Keynes explicitly rejected this assumption 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.

[82] Aglietta is a Marxist, and one of the founders of the “Regulation School,” Orléans, an adherent of the “economics of convention” favored by Thevenot and Boltanski. Primordial debt theory has been mainly developed by a group of researchers surrounding economists Michel Aglietta and André Orléans, first in La Violence de la Monnaie (1992), which employed a psychoanalytic, Giradian framework, and then in a volume called Sovereignty, Legitimacy and Money (1995) and a collection called Sovereign Money (Aglietta, Andreau, etc. 1998), co-edited by eleven different scholars. The latter two volumes abandon the Girardian framework for a Dumontian one. In recent years the main exponent of this position has been another Regulationist, Bruno Théert (1992, 1995, 2007, 2008). Unfortunately almost none of this material has ever been translated into English, though a summary of many of Aglietta’s contributions can be found in Grahl (2000).

[83] For instance, Randall Wray (1990, 1998, 2000) and Stephanie Bell (1999, 2000) in the United States, or Geoffrey Ingham (1996, 1999, 2004) in the United Kingdom. Michael Hudson and others in the ISCANEE group have taken up elements of the idea, but have never to my knowledge fully embraced it.

[84] *rna. Malamoud (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 fault, crime, or guilt—often at the same time.” It is not however the same as the word for “duty.” For a typical example of early prayers for release from debt, see Atharva Veda Book 6 Hymns 117, 118, and 119.

[85] Satapatha Brahmana 3.6.2.16

[86] As Sylvain Lévi, Marcel Mauss’s mentor, remarked, if one takes the Brahmanic doctrine seriously, “the only authentic sacrifice would be suicide” (1898:133; so also A.B. Keith 1925:459). But of course no one actually took things that far.

[87] More precisely, it offered the sacrificer a way to break out of a world in which everything, including himself, was a creation of the gods, to fashion an immortal, divine body, ascend into heaven, and thus be “born into a world he made himself” (Satapatha Brahmana VI:2.2.27) where all debts could be repaid, buy back his abandoned mortal body from the gods (see, i.e., Lévi 1898:130–32, Malamoud 1983:31–32). This is certainly one of the most ambitious claims ever made for the efficacy of sacrifice, but some priests in China around that time were making similar claims (Puett 2002).

[88] 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.

[89] I am fusing here two slightly different versions: one in Tattiriya Sarphita (6.3.10.5), 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 in 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 full discussion: see Malamoud 1983 and Olivelle 1993:46-55, also Malamoud 1998.

[90] Théert 1999:60–61

[91] “The ultimate discharge of this fundamental debt is sacrifice of the living to appease and express gratitude to the ancestors and deities of the cosmos” (Ingham 2004:90).

[92] op cit. He cites Hudson 2002:102–3, on the terms for “guilt” or “sin,” but as we’ll see the point goes back to Grierson (1977:22–23).

[93] Laum 1924. His argument about the origin of money in Greece 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.

[94] 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 outdated in their analysis but contain a great deal of useful material.

[95] English “pay” is from French payer, which in turn is derived from Latin pacare, “to pacify,” “to make peace with.” Pacare in turn is related to pacere, “to come to terms with an injured party” (Grierson 1977:21).

[96] Grierson 1977:20.

[97] In fact, as Grierson notes, the authors 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).

[98] We have plenty of myths and hymns from ancient Mesopotamia, too, for instance—but most were discovered in the ruins of ancient libraries that were also full of records of court trials, business contracts, and personal correspondence. In the case of the oldest 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.

[99] Interest-bearing loans certainly existed in Mesopotamia, but they only appear 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,” but the comprehensive review of early Indian legal sources in Kane’s History of Dharmasastra (1973 III:411–461) comes to no clear conclusion on when interest first appeared; Kosambi (1994:148) estimates that it might have appeared in 500 bc but admits this is a guess.

[100] Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China come most immediately to mind. The notion that life is a loan from the gods does occur elsewhere: it seems to crop up spontaneously 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 500 bc. “The sentiment that life was a loan to be repaid by death [became] an almost proverbial saying” (Millet 1991a:6). No Greek author to my knowledge connects this explicitly to sacrifice, though one could conceivably argue that Plato’s character Cephalus does so implicitly in one passage of the Republic (331d).

[101] Hubert and Mauss (1964) provide a good survey of the ancient literature in this regard.

[102] Finley 1981:90

[103] This was something of a legalistic 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)

[104] Pharaonic Egypt and imperial China certainly did levy direct taxes, in money, kind, or labor, in different proportions 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.

[105] I am following what I believe is still the predominant view; though at least in some places Palaces were in charge of pretty much everything from quite early on, and Temples quite subordinate (see Maekawa 1973–1974). There is lively debate about this, as with the balance of temple, palace, clan, and individual holdings in different times and places, but I have avoided going into such debates, however interesting, unless they have a direct bearing on my argument.

[106] I am following Hudson’s interpretation (2002), though others—e.g. Steinkeller 1981, Mieroop 2002:64—suggest that interest may have instead originated in rental fees.

[107] For a good summary, Hudson 1993, 2002. The meaning of amargi is first noted in Falkenstein (1954), see also Kramer (1963:79, Lemche (1979:16n34).

[108] 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 suggestive. Chinese theories of money were always resolutely Chartalist; and in the standard story about the origins of coinage, since at least Han times, the mythic founder of the Shang dynasty, upset to see so many families having to sell their children during famines, created coins so that the government could redeem the children and return them to their families (see chapter 8, below).

[109] What is sacrifice, after all, but a recognition that an act such as taking an animal’s life, even if necessary for our sustenance, is not an act to be taken lightly, but with an attitude of humility before the cosmos?

[110] Unless the recipient is owed money by the creditor, allowing everyone to cancel their debts in a circle. This might seem an extraneous point, but the circular 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 11 below.

[111] I am not ascribing this position to the authors of the Brahmanas necessarily; only pursuing what I take to be the internal logic of the argument, in dialogue with its authors.

[112] Malamoud 1983:32.

[113] Comte 1891:295

[114] In France, particularly by political thinkers like Alfred Fouillé and Léon Bourgeois. The latter, leader of the Radical Party in the 1890s, made the notion of social debt one of the conceptual foundations for what his philosophy of “solidarism”—a form of radical republicanism that, he argued, could provide a kind of middle-ground alternative to both revolutionary Marxism and free-market liberalism. The idea was to overcome the violence of class struggle by appealing to a new moral system based on the notion of a shared debt to society—of which the state, of course, was merely the administrator and representative (Hayward 1959, Donzelot 1994, Jobert 2003). Emile Durkheim too was a Solidarist politically.

[115] As a slogan, the expression is generally attributed to Charles Gide, the late-nineteenth-century French cooperativist, but became common in Solidarist circles. It became an important principle in Turkish socialist circles at the time (Aydan 2003), and, I have heard, though I have not been able to verify, in Latin America.

[116] Hart 1986:638.

[117] The technical term for this is “fiduciarity,” the degree to which its value is based not on metal content but public trust. For a good discussion of the fiduciarity of ancient currencies, see Seaford 2004:139–146. Almost all metal coins were overvalued. If the government 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 Théert (2008:826–27) points out, although Locke’s reforms, which set the value of the British sovereign at exactly its weight in silver, were ideologically motivated, they had disastrous economic effects. Obviously, if coinage 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 currency was ultimately destroyed by debasement, is clearly false, since it took centuries for inflation to occur (Ingham 2004:102–3).

[118] Einzig 1949:104; similar gambling chits, in this case made of bamboo, were used in Chinese towns in the Gobi desert (ibid: 108).

[119] On English token money, see Williamson 1889; Whiting 1971; Mathias 1979b.

[120] On cacao, Millon 1955; on Ethopian salt money, Einzig 1949:123–26. Both Karl Marx (1857:223, 1867:182) and Max Weber (1978:673–74) were of the opinion that money had emerged from barter between societies, not within them. Karl Bücher (1904), and arguably Karl Polanyi (1968), held something close to 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 currencies of trade and the local accounting 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 Mesopotamia this must have happened long before the use of writing, and hence the history is effectively lost to us.

[121] Einzig (1949:266), citing Kulischer (1926:92) and Ilwof (1882:36).

[122] Genealogy of Morals, 2.8.

[123] As I remarked earlier, both Adam Smith and Nietzsche thus anticipate Levi-Strauss’s famous argument that language is the “exchange of words.” The remarkable thing here is that so many have managed to convince themselves that in all this, Nietzsche is providing a radical alternative 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 Morals. 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 alternative to bourgeois ideologies of exchange, that, she claims, assume the prior autonomy of the person. Of course what Nietzsche proposes is not an alternative at all. It’s another aspect of the same thing. All this is a vivid reminder of how easy it is to mistake radicalized forms of our own bourgeois tradition as alternatives to it (Bataille \[1993\], who Deleuze and Guattari praise as another alternative to Mauss in the same passage, is another notorious example of this sort of thing).

[124] Genealogy of Morals 2.5.

[125] 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 mutilation of slaves, but they were by definition people who could not be in debt. Mutilation 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.

[126] Genealogy of Morals 2.19.

[127] Genealogy of Morals 2.21.

[128] Freuchen 1961:154. It’s not clear what language this was said in, considering 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 emphasizing is that it was felt important that this logic did not extend to the basic means of human existence, such as food.

[129] To take an example, the Ganges Valley in the Buddha’s time was full of arguments about the relative merits of monarchical and democratic constitutions. 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 not for this we would not know anything about them, or even be entirely sure that such democratic polities existed.

[130] For instance, buying back one’s ancestral land (Leviticus 25:25, 26) or anything one had given to the Temple (Leviticus 27).

[131] Here too, in the case of complete insolvency, the debtor might lose his own freedom as well. See Houston (2006) for a good survey of the contemporary literature on economic conditions in the time of the prophets. I here follow a synthesis of his and Michael Hudson’s (1993) reconstruction.

[132] See for instance, Amos 2.6, 8.2, and Isaiah 58.

[133] Nehemiah 5:3–7.

[134] There continues to be intense scholarly debate about whether these laws were in fact invented by Nehemiah and his priestly 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 actually enforced, until overwhelming evidence was produced that they were. The bulk of the evidence now indicates that the laws in Deuteronomy were enforced as well, though we can never know for certain how effectively.

[135] “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. Every 49 (or in some readings 50) years came the Jubilee, when all family land was to be returned to its original owners, and even family members who had been sold as slaves set free (Leviticus 25:9).

[136] Unsurprisingly, since the need to borrow was most often sparked by the need to pay taxes imposed by foreign conquerors.

[137] Hudson notes in Babylonian, clean slates were “called hubullum (debt) masa’um (to wash), literally ‘a washing away of the debt [records],’ that is, a dissolving of the clay tablets on which financial obligations were inscribed” (1993:19).

[138] Matthew 18: 23–34.

[139] To give a sense of the figures involved, ten thousand talents in gold is roughly equivalent to the entire Roman tax receipts from their provinces in what’s now the Middle East. A hundred denarii is 1/60 of one talent, and therefore worth 600,000 times less.

[140] Opheilēma in the Greek original, which meant “that which is owed,” “financial debts,” and by extension, “sin.” This was apparently used to translate the Aramaic hoyween, which also meant both “debt” and, by extension, “sin.” The English here (as in all later Bible citations) follows the King James version, which in this case is itself based on a 1381 translation of the Lord’s prayer by John Wycliffe. Most readers will probably be more familiar with 1559 Book of Common Prayer version that substitutes “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” However, the original is quite explicitly “debts.”

[141] Changing these to “spiritual debts” doesn’t really change the problem.

[142] The prospect of sexual abuse in these situations clearly weighed heavily on the popular imagination. “Some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already” protested the Israelites to Nehemiah. Technically, daughters taken in debt bondage were not, if virgins, expected to be sexually available to creditors who did not wish to marry them or marry them to their sons (Exodus 21:7–9; Wright 2009:130–33) 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 account of the abolition of debt bondage in Rome in 326 bc, for instance, featured a handsome young man named Caius Publilius 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 8.28). When he appeared on the streets and announced what had happened to him, crowds gathered and marched on the Senate to demand that they abolish the institution.

[143] Particularly if the slaves were foreigners 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.

[144] Hudson (2002:37) cites the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (i.79) who attributes this motive to the Egyptian pharaoh Bakenranef, though he too emphasizes that military considerations were not the only ones, but that cancelations reflected broader feelings about justice.

[145] Oppenheim 1964:88. 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 brother charges another” (op cit). In ancient Greece, friendly loans between social 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 1981:67–68; Millet 1991:153–155). Aristocrats 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 tendency, 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.

[146] 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).

[147] As we’ll see in chapter seven, Plato begins The Republic in exactly the same way.

[148] For a polite but devastating assessment, see Kahneman 2003.

[149] 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 famous by Malinowski (1922).

[150] One reason no known law code has ever been known to enforce the principle; the penalty was always there to be commuted to something else.

[151] Atwood (2008:1). 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 exchange or forcible appropriation (ibid:49). Despite the brilliance of many of its arguments, 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 imagining the world as simple human nature.

[152] Seton’s father, a failed shipping magnate turned accountant, was, Seton later wrote, so cold and abusive that his son spent much of his youth in the woods trying to avoid him; 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.

[153] Rev. W.H. Beatley in Levy-Bruhl 1923:411

[154] Rev. Fr. Bulléon, in Levy-Bruhl 1923:425

[155] This phrase was not coined by Marx, incidentally, but was apparently a slogan current in the early French workers’ 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 Program in 1875, and even then used it in a rather idiosyncratic way: for the principle he imagined could apply on the level of society as a whole once technology had reached the point of guaranteeing absolute material abundance. For Marx, “communism” was both the political movement aiming to bring about such a future society, and that society itself. I am drawing here more on the alternate strain of revolutionary theory, evident most famously perhaps in Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902).

[156] At least, unless there is some specific reason not to—for instance, a hierarchical division of labor that says some people get coffee and others do not.

[157] What this means of course is that command economies—putting government bureaucracies in charge of coordinating 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 alternatives. This is obviously true, though if it “just doesn’t work” at all, it’s hard to imagine how states like the Soviet Union could have existed, let alone maintain themselves as world powers, in the first place.

[158] Evans-Pritchard 1940:182

[159] 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.

[160] Ibid, p. 183.

[161] Richards 1939:197. Max Gluckman, remarking on such customs, concludes that insofar as it is possible to speak of “primitive communism,” it exists in consumption, rather than production, which tends to be much more individually organized (1971:52).

[162] A typical example: “if a cabin of hungry people meets another whose provisions 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 II:61.

[163] Jesuit Relations (1635) 8:127, cited in Delâge 1993:54.

[164] This is a common arrangement 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 essential to human life. One can only marry someone from the other side of the village, 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.

[165] As I have suggested elsewhere, Graeber 2001:159–60; cf. Mauss 1947: 104–5.

[166] I’m side-stepping the whole question of one-sided examples discussed in Graeber 2001:218.

[167] Marshall Sahlins (1972) coined the phrase “generalized reciprocity” to describe this sort of relation, on the principle 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 problems: while this might be true of Iroquois moieties, some relationships never balance out—for instance, between mother and child. His solution, “alternating 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 already decided that all relations are based on reciprocity, one can always define the term so broadly as to make it true.

[168] Hostis: see Benveniste 1972:72. The Latin terminology concerning hospitality emphasizes the absolute mastery of the house by its (male) owner as the precondition of any act of hospitality; Derrida (2000, 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 might 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 documented in societies—such as the Iroquois—that were anything but patriarchal.

[169] Evans-Pritchard 1940:154, 158.

[170] This is of course one reason why the very rich like to associate mainly with one another.

[171] In a less hostile vein one can speak of an exchange of prisoners, notes, or compliments.

[172] A good source on haggling: Uchendo 1967.

[173] Bohannan 1964:47.

[174] Not even a real business deal, since these may often involve a great deal of collective wining and dining and giving of presents. More the sort of imaginary business deal that appears in economics textbooks.

[175] One need only glance at the vast anthropological literature on “competitive feasting”: e.g., Valeri 2001.

[176] Bourdieu 1965 is the key text, but he repeats the main points in Bourdieu 1990:98–101.

[177] Onvlee 1980:204.

[178] Petronius 51; Pliny Natural History 36.195; Dio 57.21.5–7.

[179] “This king is of all men the most addicted to the making of gifts and the shedding of blood. His gate is never without some poor man enriched or some living man executed.”

[180] Or even the very rich. Nelson Rockefeller, for example, used to pride himself 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 Rockefeller 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 Portuguese monarch Dom Manuel, newly rich from the Indies trade, adopted the title ‘Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India.’ Others called him the “grocer king.” (Ho 2004:227).

[181] See Graeber 2001:175–76.

[182] Even between strangers it’s a bit unusual: as Servet (1981, 1982) has emphasized, most “primitive trade” takes place through trade partnership and specialized regional middlemen.

[183] I frame things this way because I am mainly interested here in economics. If we were thinking simply of human relations, I suppose one might say that at one extreme is killing, and at the other, giving birth.

[184] In fact, it seems essential to the nature of charity that, like a gifts to a king, it can never lead to reciprocity. Even if it turns out that the pathetic-looking beggar is really a god wandering the earth in mortal form, or Harun al-Rashid, your reward will be entirely disproportionate. Or consider all those stories about drunken millionaires on a binge who, when they got their life back together, hand out fancy cars or houses to their earlier benefactors. It’s easier to imagine a panhandler giving you a fortune than returning an exact equivalent to the dollar that you gave him.

[185] Xenophon Cyropedia VIII.6, Herodotus 3.8.9; see Briant 2006:193–194, 394–404, who acknowledges that something broadly along these lines probably did take place, with a more impromptu gift system under Cyrus and Cambyses being systemized under Darius.

[186] Marc Bloch (1961:114–15), who adds “every act, especially if it was repeated three or four times, was likely to be transformed into a precedent—even if in the first instance it had been exceptional or even frankly unlawful.”

[187] The approach is often identified with British anthropologist A.M. Hocart (1936). The important thing is that this does not necessarily mean that these became 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 essential nature, their identity within the whole.

[188] In fact, we may become indignant at her for an act of stinginess we would never even consider stingy in anyone else—especially, ourselves.

[189] A version has been published as: Sarah Stillman, “The missing white girl syndrome: disappeared women and media activism” (Stillman, 2007): publications.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam/display.asp?K=002J1246&sf_01=cat_class&st_01=620&sort=SORT_DATE/d&m=84&dc=719

[190] Karatani (2003:203–205) makes this point compellingly. The Kwakiutl and other First Nations of the Northwest Coast are something of an intermediary case—aristocratic, but at least in the period we know about, using non-coercive means to gather resources (though Codere 1950.)

[191] Georges Duby (1980) provides the definitive history of this concept, which goes back to much older Indo-European ideas.

[192] For a typical example of imaginary reciprocity between father and son, see Oliver 1955:230. Anthropological theory buffs will notice that I am here endorsing Edmund Leach’s (1961) position on the “circulating connubium” problem. He later applied the same argument to the famous “kula chain” (1983).

[193] Actually, there are hierarchical relations 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 further basis for inequality.

[194] Freuchen 1961: 154. It’s not clear what the original language was here, considering 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 accrued. What the hunter is emphasizing is that it was felt important that this logic did not extend to basic needs like food.

[195] Firth 1959:411–12 (also in Graeber 2001:175). His name was Tei Reinga.

[196] For one famous example: Chagnon 1996:170–76.

[197] Similarly, two groups might form an alliance by contracting a “joking relation,” in which any member of one could at least in theory make similar outrageous demands of the other (Hébert 1958).

[198] Marcel Mauss, in his famous “Essay on the Gift” (1924), often did, and the results have sometimes confused debate for generations to come.

[199] Mauss 1925, the Greek source being 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.

[200] As retold by William Ian Miller (1993:15–16). The first quote is directly from the original, Egil’s Saga, chapter 78. Egil remained ambivalent about the shield: he later took it to a wedding party and contrived to drop it into a vat of sour whey. Afterwards, concluding it was ruined, he stripped it for its raw materials.

[201] See, for instance, Wallace-Hadrill 1989.

[202] Blaxter 1971:127–28.

[203] Another anthropologist, for instance, 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 1977:115). Again, it both is and isn’t an exchange, it’s both a matter of accounting and not a matter of accounting.

[204] 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 “Krispy Kreme.”

[205] For instance the word “should,” in English, originally derives from German schuld, meaning “guilt, fault, debt.” Benveniste provides similar examples from other Indo-European languages (1963:58). 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 documented (Malamoud 1988).

[206] Plutarch Moralia 303 B, also discussed in Finley 1981:152, Millett 1991a:42. Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas made it a matter of Catholic doctrine that sins were “debts of punishment” owed to God.

[207] This is one reason why it’s so easy to dress up other sorts of relationships as debts. Say one wishes to help out a friend in desperate need of money but doesn’t want to embarrass her. Usually, the easiest 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.

[208] One could argue that some equivalent 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 equivalent of the English “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.”

[209] In Spanish one first asks a favor (por favor), and then says gracias, in order affirm you recognize one has been done for you, since it derives from the Latin word gratia, meaning “influence, or favor.” “Appreciate” is more monetary: if you say “I really appreciate your doing that for me,” you are using a word that derives from Latin appretiare, “to set a price.”

[210] “You’re welcome,” first documented in Shakespeare’s time, derives from Old English wilcuma, wil being “pleasure” and cuma being “guest.” This is why people are still 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 obligations is a pleasure in itself. Still, it’s significant that moralists rarely chide anyone for failure to say “you’re welcome”—that one is much more optional.

[211] Book I.12. This and other quotes are from the 2006 Penguin Screech translation, in this case, p. 86.

[212] Compare the Medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Miskaway: “The creditor desires 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).

[213] Appropriate, since Panurge’s entire discourse is nothing but a comical elaboration of Marcelo Ficino’s argument that the entire universe is driven by the power of love.

[214] From: Peter Carlson, “The Relatively Charmed Life of Neil Bush,” The Washington Post, Sunday December 28, 2003, Page D01.

[215] Grierson 1977:20.

[216] To be fair to Grierson, he does later suggest that slavery played an important 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 1985:56–57). 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.

[217] On cumal see Nolan 1926, Einzig 1949:247–48, Gerriets 1978, 1981, 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 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 written records.

[218] So Bender 1996.

[219] Here I am drawing on the detailed ethnographic survey work of Alain Testart (2000, 2001, 2002). Testart does a magnificent job synthesizing the evidence, though he too—as we’ll see in the next chapter—has some equally strange blind spots in his conclusions.

[220] “Although the rhetorical phrase ‘selling one’s daughter into prostitution’ has wide currency … the actual arrangement is more often presented as either a loan to the family or an advance payment for the girl’s (usually unspecified or misrepresented) services. The interest on these ‘loans’ is often 100 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 1998:105).

[221] So Michael Hudson (cited in Wray 1999), but it’s clear enough if one looks at the language of the original: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17, Deuteronomy 5:21).

[222] Wampum is a good example: Indians never seem to have used it to buy things from other members of the same community, although it was regularly used in conducting trade with settlers (see Graeber 2001:117–150). Others, like Yurok shell money or some Papuan currencies, are widely used as currencies in addition to their social functions, but the first seems to have emerged from the second.

[223] The most important texts on the “brideprice debate”: Evans-Pritchard 1931, Raglan 1931, Gray 1968, Comaroff 1980, Valeri 1994. One reason why Evans-Pritchard originally proposed to change the name from “brideprice” to “bridewealth” because the League of Nations had in 1926 outlawed the practice as a form of slavery (Guyer 1994).

[224] On Tiv kinship and economy: Duggan 1932; Abraham 1933; Downes 1933; Akiga 1939; L. Bohannan 1952; P. Bohannan 1955, 1957, 1959; P. & L. Bohannan 1953, 1968, Tseayo 1975; Keil 1979.

[225] Akiga Sai 1939:106 for a good analysis of how this could happen. For a later comparative reanalysis in regional perspective, see Fardon 1984, 1985.

[226] Paul Bohannan puts it: “The kem relationship of debt between a man and his wife’s guardian is never broken, because kem is perpetual, the debt can never be fully paid.” (1957:73.) Otherwise the account is from Akiga (1939:126–127).

[227] Rospabé 1993:35.

[228] Evans-Pritchard 1940:153.

[229] As the ethnographer puts it, “that they are accepting the cattle only in order to honor him and not because they are ready to take cattle for the life of their dead kinsman.” (1940:153)

[230] Op cit 154–155.

[231] Morgan 1851:332. Morgan, a lawyer by training, is using a technical term here, “condonation,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the voluntary overlooking of an offense.”

[232] Morgan 1851:333. The baseline was five fathoms for a man, ten for a woman, but other factors might intervene (T. Smith 1983:236; Morgan 1851:331–34; Parker 1926). On “mourning wars” see Richter 1983; the expression “putting his name upon the mat” is from Fenton 1978:315. Incidentally I am assuming it’s a man who dies, since these are the examples in the sources. It’s not clear if the same was done for women who died naturally.

[233] Evans-Pritchard 1940:155, 1951:109–11; Howell 1954:71–80, Gough 1971, Hutchinson 1996:62, 175–76.

[234] Rospabe 1995:47–48, citing Peters 1947.

[235] On 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 murders; Levi-Strauss adds that the ordinary way of resolving such murders is for the killer to marry the victim’s wife, adopt his children, and thus, effectively, become the person the victim used to be (1943:123).

[236] Though people did use them to commission certain fancy craft goods (say, musical instruments) from specialists in other villages (1963:54–55).

[237] Douglas 1958: 112; also 1982:43.

[238] Douglas (1963:58) estimates that a successful man will have spent at minimum 300 raffia cloths in payments, and given away at least 300 more as gifts, by the time he reached full social maturity.

[239] 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 among Minangkabau right now. But it doesn’t necessarily.

[240] Douglas 1963:144–45, which is an adoption of 1960:3–4.

[241] She was in fact a conservative Catholic, married a Tory economist, and tended to look with disdain on all liberal concerns.

[242] As if to hammer this home, a man was actually considered to be owed a life-debt for fathering female children (Douglas 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 therefore, 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.

[243] Douglas 1966:150.

[244] On “village-wives,” see particularly Douglas 1951, also 1963:128–40.

[245] Douglas 1963:76; compare 1951:11. The author is clearly simply repeating her informants’ explanation for the custom: the Lele didn’t “have to” make such an arrangement; in fact, most African societies did not.

[246] Some village wives were literally princesses, since chiefs’ daughters invariably chose to marry age-sets in this way. The daughters of chiefs were allowed to have sex with anyone they wanted, regardless 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 territory. Douglas estimates that the number of Lele women who became village wives, on the other hand, was about 10 percent (1951).

[247] For 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.

[248] On peacefulness, particularly, 1963:70–71.

[249] 1963:170.

[250] 1963:171.

[251] Cost of slaves: 1963:36, 1982:46–47.

[252] Partly, though, this was because the main purpose of male slaves was to be sacrificed at important men’s funerals (1963:36).

[253] See Graeber 2001, chapter 4. The great exception might seem to be the cattle money of the Nuer, and similar pastoral peoples. Yet even these were arguably adornment of the person of a sort.

[254] Akiga Sai 1939: 121, 158–60.

[255] So too when Tiv practiced marriage by capture: Akiga Sai (1939:137–41).

[256] Here I’m drawing on the classic “spheres of exchange” analysis by Paul Bohannan (1955, 1959), supplemented by Dorward (1976) and Guyer (2004:27–31).

[257] So Akiga Sai 1939:241; P. Bohannan 1955:66, P. & L. Bohannnan 1968:233, 235. As charisma in general: East in Akiga Sai 1939:236, Downes 1971:29.

[258] See Abraham 1933:26; Akiga Sai 1939:246; P. Bohannan 1958:3; Downes 1971:27.

[259] On witches in general: P. Bohannan 1957:187–88, 1958; Downes 1971: 32–25. On flesh debts (or ikipindi): Abraham 1933:81–84; Downes 1971:36–40.

[260] Akiga Sai 1939:257.

[261] Akiga Sai 1939:260.

[262] Following here Wilson 1951.

[263] Paul Bohannan (1958:4) makes a similar but not identical argument.

[264] Tiv migration stories (e.g. Abraham 1933:17–26; 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 organization, and as Abrahams notes (1933:19), managed to successfully play the Fulani and Jukun against each other by intervening in their own wars with each other.

[265] Some of these raids were not entirely unsuccessful. For a while, it would appear, the nearby Jukun kingdom, which made several ultimately unsuccessful efforts to incorporate the Tiv in the eighteenth century, appear to have been selling 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 “organization” lay in certain chiefly titles that Tiv acquired from them when they finally came to a political rapprochement (Abraham 1933:33–35).

[266] Jones 1958; Latham 1971; Northrup 1978:157–64; Herbert 2003:196. The famous Medieval Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, who we’ve already met at the court of the King of Singh in chapter 2, saw people using them as money in the Niger region, not far away, in the 1340s.

[267] Herbert (2003:181) estimates that Europeans imported about 20,000 tons of English brass and copper into Africa between 1699 and 1865. It was manufactured in Bristol, Cheadle, and Birmingham. The vast majority was exchanged for slaves

[268] I base this number on the fact that 152,076 slaves are known to have been exported from the Bight of Biafra as a whole in those years (Eltis, Behrent, Richardson & Klein 2000). The slave trade at Old Calabar lasted roughly from 1650 to 1841, during which time the port was by far 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).

[269] Sheridan 1958, Price 1980, 1989, 1991.

[270] A larger variety of beads.

[271] Barbot in Talbot 1926 I: 185–186.

[272] Inkori (1982) demonstrates that in the late eighteenth century, British ships docking in Old Calabar brought on average 400 muskets each, and that between 1757 and 1806, the total number imported into the Calabar-Cameroons region was 22,986. Rum and other liquor was, however, a very minor import.

[273] 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, if they didn’t come up to quota, wait until nightfall and simply attack homesteads along the river, carrying off anyone they could find (Clarkson in Northrup 1978:66, also cited in Noah 1990:94.)

[274] The existing scholarly literature is of little help in reconstructing the history 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., Falola & Lovejoy 1994), but never comparing the two. As a result, many basic questions remain unasked. Falola and Lovejoy, for instance, suggest that pawns’ labor functions as interest, but the book contains no information on whether interest-bearing loans even existed in the parts of Africa where pawnship was practiced.

[275] It’s also clear that this sort of pawnship must have developed from something like the Lele institution. Many of the rules are the same: for instance, much as among the Lele, if a girl was pledged, the creditor often had the option of marrying her when she reached maturity, thus canceling the debt.

[276] Lovejoy & Richardson 1999:349–51; 2001.

[277] Equiano 1789:6–13.

[278] Others included the Akunakuna, and the Efik, who were based in Calabar itself. The Aro were Igbo-speakers, and the region a patchwork of speakers of Igbo and Ibibio languages.

[279] On the Aro in general, see Jones 1939; Ottenberg 1958; Afigbo 1971; Ekejiuba 1972; Isichei 1976; Northrup 1978; Dike & Ekejiuba 1990; Nwauwa 1991.

[280] Dike and Ekejiuba (1990:150) estimate 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.

[281] One twentieth-century elder recalled, “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 responsibility it was to make the decision.” (Northrup 1978: 69)

[282] Northrup 1978:73

[283] On Ekpe as debt enforcement in Calabar itself: Jones 1968, Latham 1973:35–41, Lovejoy & Richardson 1999:347–49. On the spread of Ekpe to Arochukwe and throughout the region: Ruel 1969:250–258, Northrup 1978:109–110, Nwaka 1978, Ottenberg & Knudson 1985. Nwaka (1978:188) writes: “The Ekpe society, the most widespread in the Cross River area, formed the basis of local government. It performed executive and judicial functions in areas where it operated. Through the agency of its members, punishments were administered to public offenders, customs enforced and the authority of the elders upheld. Ekpe laws to some extent regulated the lives of most members of the community in such matters as the cleaning of towns and streets, collection of debts and other measures of public benefit.”

[284] Latham 1963:38.

[285] Taken from Walker 1875:120

[286] Ottenberg & Ottenberg 1962:124.

[287] Partridge 1905:72.

[288] If one were seeking a pawn, one couldn’t simply take a random child from a neighboring village, as his or her parents would quickly track the child down.

[289] In Lovejoy & Richardson 2001:74. For a parallel case in Ghana, see Getz 2003:85.

[290] Remarkably, Akiga Sai (1939:379–80) insists that, among the Tiv, this was the origin of slavery: the seizing of hostages 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 of slavery.”

[291] So Harris 1972:128 writing of another Cross River district, Ikom: one of the major suppliers of slaves for Calabar. There, she notes, debtors were often obliged to pawn themselves when maternal 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.

[292] We do not know what proportion. King Eyo II told a British missionary that slaves “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 (2000:18) notes, all sources at the time would list “war,” since it was considered the most legitimate. Compare Northrup (1978:76–80).

[293] Reid 1983:8

[294] op cit.

[295] Reid 1983:10

[296] Vickers (1996) provides an excellent history of Bali’s image in the North Atlantic imagination, from “savage Bali” to terrestrial paradise.

[297] Geertz & Geertz 1975; Boon 1977:121–24. Belo (1936:26) cites informants in the 1920s that insisted that marriage by capture was a fairly recent innovation, which emerged from gangs of young men stealing women from enemy villages and, often, demanding that their fathers pay money to get them back.

[298] Boon 1977:74

[299] Covarrubias (1937:12) notes that as early as 1619, Balinese women were in great demand in slave markets in Reunion.

[300] Boon 1977:28, van der Kraan 1983, Wiener 1995:27

[301] Vickers 1996:61. I need only remark that the anthropological literature on Bali, most notably Clifford Geertz’s famous 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 centered around gathering the resources to create magnificent rituals, might well be rethought in the light 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 just a “slightly taxed audience for its rituals,” 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.

[302] All this is meant in part as a critique of Louis Dumont’s arguments (1992) that the only truly egalitarian societies are modern ones, and even those only by default: since their ultimate value is individualism, and since each individual is valuable 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 all. The entire concept of “individualism” needs to be seriously rethought.

[303] Beattie 1960: 61.

[304] True, in many traditional societies, penalties are given to men who beat their wives excessively. But again, the assumption is that some such behavior is at least par for the course.

[305] On charivari, see for instance Davis 1975, Darnton 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.

[306] 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.

[307] Taken from Trawick 2000:185, figure 11.

[308] The diagram is reproduced from P. Bohannan 1957:87.

[309] Akiga Sai 1939:161.

[310] So too among the Lele, where Mary Douglas (1963:131) remarks that it was considered acceptable to whip a village wife for refusing work or sex, but this was no reflection on her status, since the same was true of Lele wives married to just one man, too.

[311] http.sumerianorg/prot-sum.htm, from a “Proto-Sumerian dictionary”

[312] Florentius in Justinian’s Institutes (1.5.4.1). It is interesting to note that when attempts are made to justify slavery, starting with Aristotle, they generally focus not on the institution, which is not in itself justifiable, but on the inferior qualities of some ethnic group being enslaved.

[313] Elwahid 1931. Clarence-Smith (2008:17n56) notes that al-Wahid’s book itself emerged from within lively debates in the Middle East about the role of slavery in Islam that had been going on at least since the mid-nineteenth century.

[314] Elwahid 1931: 101–10, and passim. An analogous list appears in Patterson 1982:105.

[315] The sale of children was always felt to be a sign of economic and moral breakdown; even later Roman emperors like Diocletian, notes al-Wahid, supported charities aimed to provide relief for poor families explicitly so they would not have to resort to things like this (Elwahed 1931: 89–91).

[316] Mitamura 1970.

[317] Debt slavery, he notes, was practiced in early Roman history, but this is because according to the laws of the twelve tablets, insolvent debtors could actually be killed. In most places, where this was not possible, debtors were not fully enslaved by reduced to pawns or peons (see Testart 2000, 2002, for a full explanation of the different possibilities).

[318] Al-Wahid cites examples from Athenaeus of Greek patients who offered themselves as slaves to doctors who had saved their lives (op cit:234)

[319] Ulpian is precise: “In every branch of the law, a person who fails to return from enemy hands is regarded as having died at the moment when he was captured.” (Digest 49.15.18) The Lex Cornelia of 84–81 bc specifies the need for remarriage.

[320] Meillassoux 1996:106

[321] Patterson 1982. “Slavery,” as he defines it, “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” (1982:13)

[322] He quotes Frederick Douglass here to great effect: “A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. 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.” (in Patterson 1982:13)

[323] Presumably an honorable woman as well, though in the case of women, as we shall see, the question became inextricably caught up in questions of fidelity and chastity.

[324] Paul Houlm (in Duffy, MacShamhráin and Moynes 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 800 ad the Vikings carried off thousands, 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 1949:153).

[325] St. Patrick, one of the founders of the Irish church, was one of the few of the early Church Fathers who was overtly and unconditionally opposed to slavery.

[326] Doherty 1980:78–83.

[327] Gerriets 1978:128, 1981:171–72, 1985:338. This was in dramatic contrast, incidentally, to Welsh laws from only two or three centuries later, where the prices of all such objects are fastidiously specified (Ellis 1926:379–81). The list of items incidentally is a random selection from the Welsh codes.

[328] Doherty 1980:73–74

[329] This was true in Irish and in Welsh, and apparently, other Celtic languages as well. Charles-Edwards (1978:130, 1993:555) actually translates “honor price” as “face value.”

[330] The one exception being an early ecclesiastical text: Einzig 1949:247–48, Gerriets 1978:71.

[331] The main source on the monetary system is Gerriets (1978), a dissertation that unfortunately was never published as a book. A table of standard rates of exchange between cumal, cows, silver, etc, are also to be found in Charles-Edwards 1993:478–85.

[332] Gerriets 1978:53.

[333] 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 him not to have proper attire for an important synod, he could demand his honor price (Fergus 1988:118).

[334] The honor price of Welsh kings was far higher (Ellis 1926:144).

[335] 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 position was often vacant or contested (Byrne 1973).

[336] All of this is a simplification of what’s in fact an endlessly complicated system, and some points, especially concerning marriage, of which there are several 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 1988 for the best general summary.)

[337] Dimetian Code II.24.12 (Howel 2006:559). A similar penalty is specified for the killing of public officials from certain districts (Ellis 1926:362).

[338] “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 1985:338).

[339] Sutton 2004:374.

[340] Gallant 2000. One might also consider here the phrase “affair of honor,” or for that matter, “honor killing”—which also make clear that such sentiments are hardly confined to rural Greece.

[341] In fact, one could just 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 in the first place? 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 murderous rage. We’ve already seen examples in the Gunwinggu and the Lele.

[342] Obviously I am distinguishing the term here from the broader sense of patriarchy used in much feminist literature, of any social system based on male subordination 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.

[343] 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 of riverine society being followed by revival, apparently after the advent of a new wave of Semitic pastoralists (Adams et al. 1974).

[344] Rohrlich 1980 is a compelling example.

[345] This is of course a vast simplification 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 almost exclusively on upper-class practice.

[346] Wilcke 1985, Westbrook 1988, Greengus 1990, Stol 1995:125–27. For Mari: Lafont 1987; for Old Babylonian practice: Greengus 1966, 1969; for Nuzi, Grosz 1983, 1989.

[347] Our best sources are from the city of Nuzi c1500 bc, though Nuzi was atypical in certain ways, mainly due to Hurrian influence. There, marriage payments appear to have been made in stages, for instance, at the birth of a first child (Grosz 1981:176)—a pattern familiar to anthropologists from Melanesia, Africa, and numerous other parts of the world.

[348] Finkelstein 1966, VerSteeg 2000:121, 153n91. A father could claim monetary damages against someone who falsely claimed that his daughter was not a virgin, presumably because it would lower the bride-price (Cooper 2002:101).

[349] Bottéro 1992:113.

[350] Stol 1995:126.

[351] Cardascia 1959 on “matrimonial adoption” (also Mendelsohn 1949:8–12, Greengus 1975). During times of famine, sometimes even the brideprice was dispensed with, and a starving family might turn over their daughter to a rich household in exchange for a promise to keep her alive.

[352] Evans-Prichard 1931, Raglan 1931. It’s a little ironic that the debate was occurring in England, since this was one of the few places where it was, technically, legal to sell or even auction off one’s wife (Menefee 1981; Stone 1990:143–48; see Pateman 1988). Stone notes that while public “wife-sales” in English villages were apparently really prearranged divorces, “the details of the ritual were designed to emphasize the final nature of the transfer of property, 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 purchaser.” (1990:145) The practice, confined to the popular classes, caused a scandal when documented in Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, but it was only completely abandoned in 1919.

[353] Finley 1981:153–55; Stienkeller 2003; Mieroop 2005:27–28. Mieroop notes that the earliest such contract is documented from twenty-first-century Babylonia. This is an interesting example for the early history of wage labor. As I’ve written elsewhere (Graeber 2006:66–69; 2007:91–94), wage-labor contracts in the ancient world were primarily a matter of the rental of slaves—a practice that in Mesopotamia is first documented only in neo-Babylonian times (Oppenheim 1964:78, VerSteeg 2000:70–71; for an Egyptian parallel VerSteeg 2002:197).

[354] The entire issue has been complicated by Herodotus’ claim (1.199) 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 certainly false, but it has caused the terms of debate to become rather confused between people insisting on the importance of “hierodules” or even claiming that all prostitution 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 involving temple women, at least some of whom were paid for their services, definitely did take place (Gallery 1980; Yoffee 1998; Stol 1995:138–39) The devadasi analogy incidentally was first to my knowledge proposed in Yoffee 1998:336. On devadasis in general: Orr 2000, Jordan 2003, Vijaisri 2004.

[355] Kramer 1963:116, Bahrani 2001: 59–60.

[356] A similar reading can be found in Bottéro 1992:96, but without the ambivalence, which Lerner (1980:247) emphasizes.

[357] See Lerner 1980, Van Der Toorn 1989, Lambert 1992.

[358] Also, in many places, small-scale female traders are likened to or confused with prostitutes, simply because they have multiple ongoing relationships with unrelated men (for a contemporary Kazakh example: Nazpary 2001)—and the roles can sometimes overlap.

[359] Diakonoff (1982). Loose bands of pastoral nomads or refugees, who also sometimes doubled as soldiers, were often referred to generically as hapiru or habiru, both in Mesopotamia and to the West. This might be the origin of the term “Hebrew,” another group that according to their own histories had fled from bondage, wandered with their flocks in the desert, and eventually descended as conquerors on urban society.

[360] Herodotus 1.199, also Strabo 16.1.20.

[361] Revelations 17.4–5. Revelations seems to follow the perspective of the followers of Peter more than those of Paul. I observe in passing that Rastafarianism, the main prophetic voice today that makes use of the image of Babylon as corruption and oppression—though it does tend to play down the imagery of sexual corruption—has in practice been very much about the reassertion of patriarchal authority among the poor.

[362] 1980:249–54; 1989:123–40. The main textual source is Driver & Miles 1935; also Cardascia 1969.

[363] 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 1995:128). Not only does this demonstrate the degree to which the veil was a symbol of encompassment in some man’s domestic authority; it might also have been the source from which the later Assyrian practice was eventually adopted.

[364] My take on Confucianism follows Deng’s (1999) somewhat unconventional approach. See Watson 1980 on the commoditization 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 (2000, 2001:148–49, 190) emphasizes that the case of China confirms his “general sociological law,” that societies that practice brideprice will also allow debt slavery (Testart, Lécrivain, Karadimas & Govoroff 2001), 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 far as in Korea, where after the invasion of Hideyoshi, a law was passed decreeing that only women could be enslaved.

[365] Tambiah (1973, 1989) was the first to make what is now the standard critique of Goody’s argument. Goody prefers to see these as indirect dowry payments since they were normally passed to the family (1990:178–97).

[366] On Homeric honor: Finley 1954:118–19, 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 2004:26–30, Finley 1954:67–70). Needless to say, Homeric society lacked the legalistic precision of the Irish notion of “honor price” but the principles were broadly the same, since tīme could mean not only “honor” but “penalty” and “compensation.”

[367] Tīme is not used for the “price” of commodities in the Iliad or the Odyssey, but then prices of commodities are 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.

[368] Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 2.2. He is referring to the great crisis leading to Solon’s reforms, the famous “shaking off of burdens” of c. 594 bc.

[369] Greek 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., Westermann 1955; Finley 1974, 1981; Wiedemann 1981; Dandamaev 1984; Westbrook 1995), not only because most Near Eastern “slaves” were not technically slaves at all but redeemable debt pawns, who therefore at least in theory could not be arbitrarily abused, but because even those who were absolute private property had greater rights.

[370] “Self-sufficiency is an end and what is best” (Aristotle Politics 1256–58; see Finley 1974:109–11, Veyne 1979, for classic discussions of what this meant in practice.)

[371] The argument here follows Kurke 2002. On the public brothels, see Halperin 1990, Kurke 1996. There actually were Temple prostitutes in Greece too, mostly famously in Corinth, where Strabo (8.6.20) claimed that the Temple of Aphrodite owned a thousand of them, apparently, slaves who had been dedicated to the temple by pious worshipers.

[372] As noted in the quote from David Sutton (2004) above. For a sampling of the anthropological literature on honor in contemporary Greek society, see: Campbell 1964, Peristiany 1965, Schneider 1971, Herzfeld 1980, 1985, Just 2001.

[373] On the impropriety of women’s work outside the household, see Brock 1994. On segregation of women in general: Keuls 1985, Cohen 1987, Just 1989, Loraux 1993.

[374] The evidence is overwhelming, but until recently has been largely ignored. Llewellyn-Jones (2003) notes that the practice began as an aristocratic affectation, but that by the fifth century, all respectable women “were veiled daily and routinely, at least in public or in front of non-related men” (ibid:14).

[375] van Reden 1997:174, referencing Herodotus 7.233, Plutarch’s Pericles, 26.4.

[376] A woman who one of them, Achilles, had personally reduced to slavery. Briseis was from the Trojan town of Lyrnessus, 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 insists 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.

[377] Homeric warriors weren’t really aristocrats at all, or if they were, as Calhoun puts it (1934:308) they were aristocrats “only in the loosest sense of the word.” Mostly they were just a collection of local chieftains and ambitious warriors.

[378] 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 heroic 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 described the earth as the “common whore of all mankind,” whose womb produces gold, which is money [Timon of Athens 4.3.42–45].)

[379] Seaford 2002 in his review of Kurke notes that Greek sources regularly go back and forth on this.

[380] In the Odyssey (11.488–91), famously, 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.

[381] Free porne were always the daughters of foreigners or resident aliens. So, incidentally, were the aristocrats’ courtesans.

[382] The reader will observe that even in the anecdotes that follow, women simply don’t appear. We have no idea who Polemarchus’ wife was.

[383] Recall here that pederasty was technically 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 under the pretense that no intercourse was actually taking place; as a result, almost anyone could be accused of former impropriety. The most famous case here is Aeschines’ Against Timarchus (see van Reden 2003:120–23, also Dillon 2003:117–28.) Exactly the same dilemmas resurface in Rome, where Cicero, for instance, accused 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” himself, as a youth, to Julius Cesar, among other powerful patrons (Suetonius Augustus 68).

[384] The most famous cases were Athens, Corinth, and Megara (Asheri 1969; St. Croix 1981; Finley 1981:156–57.)

[385] The law was called the palintokia and is known mainly from Plutarch (Moralia 295D, apparently drawing on a lost Aristotelian Constitution of the Megarians.) Almost everything about it is at issue in current scholarship (Asheri 1969:14–16; Figueria 1985:149–56, Millettt 1989: 21–22; Hudson 1992:31; Bryant 1994:100–044). Hudson for instance argues that since the event is said to have happened around 540 bc, 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 interesting that all Greek sources treat this as a most radical and outrageous populist measure—despite the fact that similar measures became standard Catholic policy during most of the European Middle Ages.

[386] It is entirely unclear whether loans at interest even existed in this early period, since the first apparent reference to interest is from roughly 475 bc, and the first utterly clear ones from the later part of that same century (Bogaert 1966, 1968; Finley 1981; Millett 1991a: 44–45; Hudson 1992).

[387] Compare for example Leviticus 25:35–37, which stipulates that it is permissible to make an impoverished “fellow countryman” a client or tenant, but not to give him an interest-bearing loan.

[388] As Hesiod emphasizes in Works and Days (II 344–63); he’s our main source on such matters. Paul Millett (1991a:30–35) provides a close reading of this passage, to illustrate the ambiguities 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 Greek economy has long been preoccupied by what’s still (rather anachronistically) 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 commercial lending, which is tangential to my present concerns.

[389] The story is so striking because Nasruddin almost never elsewhere behaves in a way that a contemporary audience would consider unfair or exploitative. 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.

[390] “Against Nicostratus” (Demosthenes 53). My version largely follows Millet (1991a:53–59) but also draws on Trevett 1992, Dillon 2002:94–100, Harris 2006:261–63). The interpretation of Nicostratus’ motives is my own; Dillon, for example, suspects that the entire story of his kidnapping and ransom at Aegina was made up—though if that were the case, one would imagine Apollodorus would have eventually found out and told the jurors. The text doesn’t explicitly say that Nicostratus was an aristocrat, but this seems the most plausible explanation of why someone might have a comfortable 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, over-lavish—generosity (see Ballin 1978; Trevett 1992).

[391] 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 reprehensible behavior (Millett 1991a:26). All philosophers who touched on the subject, starting with Plato (Laws 742c, 921c) and Aristotle (Politics 1258c) denounced interest as immoral. Obviously not everyone felt that way. Here as in the Middle East, from whence the custom had spread (Hudson 1992), the dilemma was that charging interest made obvious sense in the case of commercial loans, but easily became abusive in the case of consumer loans.

[392] It’s not clear whether debt slavery, or at least debt peonage, was anywhere entirely eliminated, and debt crises continued to occur at regular intervals in cities other than Athens (Asheri 1969; St. Croix 1981). Some (Rhodes 1981:118–27; Cairns 1991; Harris 2006:249–80) believe that debt bondage was not even entirely eliminated in Athens. Millett (1991a:76) is probably right to say that imperial capitals like Athens, and later Rome, fended off the dangers of debt crises and resulting unrest less by forbidding the practice than by funneling tribute money into social programs that provided a constant source of funds for the poor, making usury largely unnecessary.

[393] Millett 1991b:189–92. The same was true in Roman Galilee (Goodman 1983:55), and presumably in Rome as well (Howgego 1992:13).

[394] the Furies, who pursue Orestes to avenge his killing of his mother, insist that they are collecting a debt due in blood (Aeschylus, Eumenides 260, 319.) Millett (1991a:6–7) compiles a number of examples. Korver (1934, cf. Millet 1991:29–32) demonstrates that there was never any formal distinction between “gift” and “loan”; the two continually shaded into each other.

[395] The two were seen to be connected: Herodotus, famously, argued that for the Persians, the greatest crime was to lie, and that they therefore forbade the loaning of money at interest since it would necessarily give rise to untruthful behavior (1.138).

[396] Plato Republic 331c.

[397] Plato Republic 345d. My reading is strongly influenced here by that of Marc Shell (1978). Shell’s essay is important, but sadly neglected, as Classicists only seem to cite each other (at least, on the subject of the Classics).

[398] What Polemarchus is invoking of course is the logic of the heroic gift, and of the feud. If someone helps or harms you, you pay them back the same or better. Polemarchus actually says that there are two circumstances when it’s easiest to do this: in war, and in banking.

[399] The Republic was written in 380 bc, and these events took place in 388/7. See Thesleff 1989:5, DuBois 2003:153–54, for the dates and references to ancient and contemporary scholarship on the issue, 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 birthplace, incidentally—was then at war with Athens.) But the lines blurred. Curiously, Diogenes the Cynic, a younger contemporary 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 (unsurprising considering that he rejected 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 three had the experience of standing on an auction block demonstrates that such things really could happen to anyone.

[400] Plato recounts the events in his Seventh Letter to Dion, but Annikeris only appears in Diogenes Laertius 3.19–20.

[401] Ihering 1877.

[402] Rights “in rem,” or “in the thing,” are considered to be held “against all the world,” since “a duty is incumbent on all persons whatsoever to abstain from acts injurious 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 (2007:177–178) notes that Proudhon (1840) was correct in insisting that the “absolute” nature of property rights in the French Civil Code and other paradigmatic 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.

[403] 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 jurists did see 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.

[404] “The paradigmatic relation between a person and a thing is that of ownership, yet the omans themselves seemed never to have defined it. To them, it was a power relation—a form of potestas—directly exercised over the physical thing itself” (Samuel 2003:302).

[405] In earliest Roman law (the Twelve Tablets of c450 bc) slaves were still people, but of diminished worth, since injuries against them counted as 50 percent those of a free person (Twelve Tablets VIII.10). By the late Republic, around the time of the emergence of the concept of dominium, slaves had been redefined as res, things, and injuries to them had the same legal status as injuries to farm animals (Watson 1987:46)

[406] Patterson: “it is difficult to understand why the Romans would want to invent the idea of a relation between a person 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).

[407] It does not appear in the Twelve Tablets or early legal documents.

[408] 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 proportion of any known society.

[409] Digest 9.2.11 pr., Ulpian in the 18^thbook on the Edict.

[410] The examples are from Digest 47.2.36 pr., Ulpian in the 41^st book on Sabinus, and Digest 9.2.33 pr, Paulus’ second book to Plautius, respectively.

[411] See Saller (1984) on domus versus 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 1968, Flandrin 1979, Duby 1982:220–23, Ozment 1983; Herlihy 1985)

[412] Westbrook 1999:207 goes through the three known cases of this really happening. 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 illegitimately, he could be punished.

[413] Or to enthralled them. In fact the Law of the Twelve Tablets (III.1) itself seems to be an attempt to reform or moderate even harsher practices, as al-Wahid (Elwahed 1931:81–82) was perhaps the first to point out.

[414] Finley notes that the sexual availability of slaves “is treated as a commonplace in the Graeco-Roman literature” (1980:143; see Saller 1987:98–99, Glancey 2006:50–57).

[415] There is a lively debate about whether breeding slaves was ever extensively 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.

[416] True, Roman citizens could not legally enthralled one another; but they could be enslaved by foreigners, and pirates and kidnappers rarely put too fine a point on such things.

[417] The Chinese emperor Wang Mang was so fastidious on this point, for instance, that he once ordered one of his own sons put to death for the arbitrary murder of a slave (Testart 1998:23.)

[418] The lex Petronia. Technically it bans owners from ordering slaves to “fight the wild beasts,” a popular public entertainment: “fight,” though, is usually a euphemism, since those fighting hungry lions were not provided with weapons, or obviously inadequate ones. It was only a century later, under Hadrian (117–138 ad), that owners were forbidden to kill their slaves, maintain private dungeons for them or practice other cruel and excessive punishments. Interestingly, the gradual limitation of the power of slave-owners was accompanied by increasing state power, expansion of citizenship, but also the return of various forms of debt-bondage and the creation of dependent peasantry (Finley 1972:92–93; 1981:164–65).

[419] Thus Livy (41.9.11) notes in 177 bc the senate actually passed a law to prevent Italians who were not Roman citizens from selling relatives into slavery in this way in order to become citizens.

[420] The phrase is preserved in the work of the elder Seneca (Controversias 4.7) and noted by Finley (1980:96), among others. There is a detailed discussion in Butrica 2006:210–23.

[421] Wirszubski 1950. On the etymology, see Benveniste 1963:262–72. Similarly 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 social relations.

[422] Florentius in Justinian’s Institutes (1.5.4.1). Some suggest that the word “natural” in the first sentence was only inserted in later editions, perhaps in the fourth century. The position that slavery is a product of force enshrined in law, contrary to nature, however, goes back at least to the fourth century bc, when Aristotle (Politics 1253b20–23) explicitly takes issue with it (see Cambiano 1987).

[423] Already in the that century, lawyers like Azo and Bracton began asking: If this is true, wouldn’t that mean a serf is a free man too? (Harding 1980:424 note 6; see also Buckland 1908:1, Watson 1987).

[424] Ulpian wrote that “everyone was born free under the law of nature” and that slavery was a result of the ius gentium (“law of nations”), the common legal usages of mankind. Some later jurists added that property was originally common 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 systemized by Church thinkers like Gratian much later, during the twelfth-century revival of Roman law.

[425] Princeps legibus solutus est (“the sovereign is not bound by the laws”), a phrase initially coined by Ulpian and repeated by Justinian (1.3 pr.) This was a very new notion in the ancient world; the Greeks, for instance, had insisted that while men could do as they liked with their women, children, and slaves, any ruler who exploited their own subjects in the same way was the definition of a tyrant. 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 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 Publica 3.23, Westbrook 1999:204.)

[426] In the Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough (1957:216); see Clanchy 1993:2–5.

[427] Aylmer 1980.

[428] To be fair, a classical liberal would insist that this is the logical conclusion with starting out from the notion of freedom as active instead of passive (or as philosophers put it, that there are “subjective rights”)—that is, seeing freedom not just as others’ obligations to allow us to do whatever the law or custom says we can do, but to do anything that is not specifically forbidden, and that this has had tremendous liberating 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.

[429] Tuck 1979:49, cf. Tully 1993:252, Blackburn 1997:63–64.

[430] Note here that in this period, the justification was not based on any assumption of racial inferiority—racial ideologies came later—but rather on the assumption that African laws were legitimate and should be considered binding, at least on Africans.

[431] I’ve made the argument that wage labor is rooted in slavery extensively in the past—see e.g., Graeber 2006.

[432] This is the reason, as C.B. MacPherson (1962) explained, that when “human rights abuses” are evoked in the newspapers, it is only when governments can be seen as trespassing on some victim’s person or possessions—say, by raping, torturing, or killing them. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like just about all similar documents, also speaks of universal rights to food and shelter, but one never reads about governments committing “human rights abuses” when they eliminate price supports on basic foodstuffs, even if it leads to widespread malnutrition, or for razing shantytowns or kicking the homeless out of shelters.

[433] One can trace the notion back as least as far back as Seneca, who in the first century ad, argued that slaves could be free in their minds, since force only applied 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.

[434] See Roitman 2003:224 for one author 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 2001.

[435] One can tell how unusual slavery was by informants’ assumptions that slaves would have no idea that this was to be their fate.

[436] Significantly, at the very moment when his social existence was the only existence he had left. The mass killing of slaves at the funerals of kings, or grandees, has been documented from ancient Gaul, to Sumer, China, and the Americas.

[437] Iliad 9:342–44.

[438] Evans-Pritchard 1948:36; cf., Sahlins 1981. For a good example of identification of kings and slaves, Feeley-Harnik 1982. Obviously, everyone is well aware that kings do have families, friends, lovers, etc—the point is that this is always seen as something of a problem, since he should be king to all his subjects equally.

[439] Regarding the influence of Roman law on the liberal tradition, it is fascinating to note that the very earliest author we have on record who laid out something like Smith’s model, where money, and ultimately coinage, is invented as an aid to commerce, was another Roman jurist, Paulus: Digest 18.1.1.

[440] But it has by no means been eliminated. (If anyone is inclined to doubt this, I recommend they take a stroll through their neighborhood ignoring all property rights, and see just how long it takes for the weapons to come out.)

[441] “Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver,” wrote the notorious cynic Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911:49). Certainly 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.

[442] One of the few authors I know who’s confronted the question head-on is Pierre Dockés (1979), who makes a convincing 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 afterwards. It is certainly interesting that since the nineteenth century at least, the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” 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.

[443] Robin Blackburn makes this argument 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 complicated 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 marketed in North Africa and the Middle East.

[444] 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: “If 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 Greek coin—or if he had seen one, it had not impressed him. The punch-marked coin is made by an entirely different metallurgical process” (Schaps 2006:9).

[445] Pruessner (1928) was perhaps the first to point this out.

[446] They appear to have been widely used by Old Assyrian merchants operating in Anatolia (Veenhof 1997).

[447] Powell (1978, 1979, 1999:14–18) provides an excellent assessment of the evidence, emphasizing that Babylonians did not produce scales accurate enough to measure the tiny amounts 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 therefore presumably acted as they do in small-scale markets in Africa and Central Asia, today, building up lists of trustworthy clients to whom they could extend credit over time (e.g., Hart 1999:201, Nazpary 2001).

[448] Hudson 2002:21–23, who hypothesizes that the time element was important as merchants would presumably otherwise delay to employ the funds as long as possible. See Renger 1984, 1994; Meiroop 2005.

[449] I’m referring here to Qirad and Mudaraba arrangements, similar to the ancient and Medieval Mediterranean Commenda (Udovitch 1970, Ray 1997).

[450] Herodotus 1.138.

[451] Herodotus 3.102–5.

[452] Mieroop 2002:63, 2005:29. He notes that Enmetena’s total grain income in any one year was roughly 37 million liters, making the sum he claims to be owed more than one thousand times his own palace’s annual revenue.

[453] Lambert 1971; Lemche 1979:16.

[454] Hudson 1993 provides the most detailed overview of this literature.

[455] Hudson 1993:20.

[456] Grierson 1977:17, citing Cerny 1954:907.

[457] Bleiberg 2002

[458] One authority states categorically: “I do not know of debt-annulment decrees issued by any Pharaoh” (Jasnow 2001:42), and adds that there is no evidence for debt-bondage until the very late Demotic period. This is the same period when Greek sources begin to speak of both.

[459] VerSteeg 2002:199; see Lorton 1977:42–44.

[460] This in certain ways resembles the legal loopholes created in both the Medieval Christian and Islamic worlds, where interest was formally banned: see chapter 10 below.

[461] Diodorus Siculus 1.79. See Westermann 1955:50–51 for a comparison of Greek and Egyptian sources on the subject.

[462] The history of the dissemination of interest-bearing debt is only beginning to be reconstructed. It does not yet appear in Ebla (c. 2500 bc), in Old or Middle Kingdom Egypt, or in Mycenaean Greece, 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 Greece, and even later to places like Germany.

[463] In Chinese historiography, in fact, this whole epoch is known as “the feudal period.”)

[464] The Guanzi, cited in Schaps 2006:20.

[465] Yung-Ti (2006) has recently argued that they weren’t, though we wouldn’t really know. Thierry (1992:39–41) simply assumes they were, providing much evidence of their use both as units of account and means of payment, but none of their use for buying and selling.

[466] At any rate, cowries were definitely being used as the equivalent of coins in later periods, and the government periodically either suppressed their use or reintroduced 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.

[467] Scheidel 2004:5.

[468] 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 regard; the strings were used to record both obligations we would consider financial, and others we would consider ritual, since as in so many Eurasian languages, the words “debt” and “sin” were the same in Quechua as well (Quitter & Urton 2002:270).

[469] L. Yang (1971:5) finds the first reliable literary reference to loans at interest in the fourth century bc. Peng (1994:98–101) notes that the earliest surviving records (the oracle bones and inscriptions) do not mention loans, but there’s no reason they would; he also assembles most of the available literary references, finds many references to loans in early periods, 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.

[470] Yan tie lun I 2/4b2–6, in Gale (1967):12.

[471] Guanzi (73 12), Rickett (1998:397)

[472] 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 change hands; sons and grandsons are sold to pay debts; merchants make vast profits, and even petty tradesmen set up business and realize unheard 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 1922:218.

[473] Jaspers 1949.

[474] Parkes 1959:71.

[475] Or, if one must be even more precise, we should probably end it in 632 ad, with the death of the Prophet.

[476] Obviously Vedic Hinduism is earlier; I am referring to Hinduism as a self-conscious religion, which is generally seen as having taken shape in reaction to Buddhism and Jainism around this time.

[477] The date used to be set much earlier, at 650 or even 700 bc, but recent archaeology 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.

[478] Prakash & Singh 1968, Dhavalikar 1974, Kosambi 1981, Gupta & Hardaker 1995. The latest accepted dates for the appearance of coinage in India, based on radiocarbon analysis, is circa 400 bc (Erdosy 1988:115, 1995:113).

[479] Kosambi (1981) notes that there seems to be a direct connection between the first of these and Bronze Age Harappan 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 continued 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 contact, it also seems reasonable to assume that they continued to employ older commercial techniques, and, indeed, “promissory notes” do appear as familiar practices in our earliest literary sources, such as the Jakatas (Rhys Davids 1901:16, Thapar 1995:125, 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 further trimmed, but the inspiration of earlier credit practices seems likely. Kosambi later confirms this: “The marks would correspond to modern countersignatures on bills or checks cleared through business houses.” (1996:178–79)

[480] Our first literary record of coinage in China is of a kingdom that reformed its currency system in 524 bc—which means that it already had a currency system, and presumably had for some time (Li 1985:372).

[481] Schaps 2006:34. For a similar recent argument, Schoenberger 2008.

[482] Of course the very first 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 (Kraay 1964, Price 1983, Schaps 2004, Vickers 1985). A real market society in Greece, for instance, could only be said to exist when, as in the fifth century, ordinary citizens went to the market carrying minuscule coins of stamped silver or copper in their cheeks.

[483] First proposed by Cook (1958), the explanation has since lost favor (Price 1983, Kraay 1964, Wallace 1987, Schaps 2004:96–101; though cf. Ingham 2004:100)—largely, on the argument that one cannot pay soldiers with coins unless there are already markets with people willing to accept the coins. This strikes me as a weak objection, since the absence of coinage does not imply the absence of either money or markets; almost all parties 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 everyday currency, seem to give much consideration 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 became acceptable currency simply by insisting that they were the only acceptable means of payment for obligations to the state itself.

[484] Most of the earliest known Greek bankers were of Phoenician descent, and it’s quite possible that they first introduced the concept of interest there (Hudson 1992).

[485] Elayi & Elayi 1992.

[486] Starr 1977:113; see Lee 2000.

[487] 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.

[488] The great exception was of course Sparta, which refused to issue its own coinage but developed a system whereby aristocrats adopted a strict military lifestyle and trained permanently for war.

[489] Aristotle himself noted the connection when he emphasized that the constitution of a Greek state could be predicted by the main army of its military: aristocracies if they relied on cavalry (since horses were very expensive), oligarchies in the case of heavy infantry (since armor was not cheap), democracy in the case of light infantry or navies (since anyone could wield a sling or row a boat) (Politics 4.3.1289b33–44, 13.1297b16–24, 6.7.1321a6–14).

[490] Keyt (1997:103) summarizing Politics 1304b27–31.

[491] Thucydides (6.97.7) claimed that 20,000 escaped from the mines in 421 bc, which is probably exaggerated, but most sources estimate at least 10,000 for most of that century, generally working shackled and under atrocious conditions (Robinson 1973).

[492] Ingham 2004:99–100.

[493] MacDonald 2006:43.

[494] On Alexander’s armies monetary needs, Davies 1996:80 in turn, 83; on his logistics more generally, Engels 1978. The figure 120,000 includes not only actual troops but servants, camp-followers, and so forth.

[495] Green 1993:366.

[496] The Roman institution was called nexum, 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, 330–32.

[497] Hence, most of the scandalous stories that sparked uprisings against debt bondage centered on dramatic cases of physical or sexual abuse; of course, once debt bondage was abolished and household labor was instead supplied by slaves, such abuse was considered normal and acceptable.

[498] The first bronze coins paid to soldiers seem to have been coined around 400 bc (Scheidel 2006), but this was the traditional date according to Roman historians.

[499] What I am arguing flies in the face of much of the conventional scholarly wisdom, summed up best perhaps by Moses Finley when he wrote “in Greece 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, Greek and Roman solutions were both more limited and more temporary than he supposed.

[500] Ioannatou 2006 for a good example. Cataline’s conspiracy of 63 bc was an alliance of indebted aristocrats and desperate peasants. On continued Republican debt and land redistribution campaigns: Mitchell 1993.

[501] Howgego makes this point: “If less is heard of debt under the Principate it may well be because political stability removed the opportunity for the expression of discontent. This argument is supported by the way in which debt reemerges as an issue at times of open revolt” (1992:13).

[502] Plutarch, Moralia, 828f—831a.

[503] There is, needless to say, a vast and conflicting literature, but probably the best source is Banaji (2001). He emphasizes in the late empire, “debt was the essential means by which employers enforced control over the supply of labor, fragmenting the solidarity of workers and ‘personalizing’ relations between owners and employes” (ibid:205), a situation he compares interestingly to India.

[504] Kosambi 1966, Sharma 1968, Misra 1976, Altekar 1977:109–38. 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, Greek city-states could be described the same way.

[505] In other words, they looked more like Sparta than like Athens. The slaves were also collectively owned (Chakravarti 1985:48–49.) Again, one has to wonder how much this was really the general rule, but I yield to the predominant scholarly opinion on such matters.

[506] Arthasastra 2.12.27. See Schaps 2006:18 for a nice comparative commentary.

[507] Thapar 2002:34, Dikshitar 1948.

[508] There were also taxes, of course, usually ranging from 1/6 to 1/4 of total yield (Kosambi 1996:316; Sihag 2005), but taxes also served as a way to bring goods to the market.

[509] So Kosambi 1966:152–57.

[510] And wage labor, two phenomena that, as so often in the ancient world, largely overlapped: the common phrase for workers used in texts from the period was dasa-karmakara, “slave-hireling” with the assumption that slaves and laborers worked together and were barely distinguishable (Chakravarti 1985). On the predominance of slavery, see Sharma 1958, Rai 1981. The extent is contested, but early Buddhist texts do seem to assume that any wealthy family would normally have domestic slaves—which certainly wasn’t true in other periods.

[511] Punch-marked coins were also eventually replaced, after Alexander’s brief conquest of the Indus Valley and his establishment of Greek colonists in Afghanistan, by Aegean-style coins, ultimately causing the entire Indian tradition to disappear (Kosambi 1981, Gupta & Hardaker 1985.)

[512] It’s referred to as the “Pillar Edict” (Norman 1975:16).

[513] There’s a good deal of debate as to when: Schopen (1994) emphasizes there is little evidence for substantial Buddhist monasteries until the first century ad, perhaps three centuries later. This has a great deal of bearing on monetarization too, as we’ll see.

[514] “The private trader was regarded as a thorn (kantaka), a public enemy just short of a national calamity, by Arth. 4.2, taxed and fined for malpractises of which many are taken for granted” (Kosambi 1996:243).

[515] Those wishing to become monks had to first affirm that they were not themselves debtors (just as they also had to promise they weren’t runaway slaves); but there was no rule saying the monastery 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.

[516] Similarly, Buddhist monks are not allowed to see an army, if they can possibly avoid it (Pacittiya, 48–51).

[517] Lewis 1990.

[518] Wilbur 1943, 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 merchants, craftsmen, and the “poor and idle” to themselves be “confiscated as slaves” (Lewis 1990:61–62).

[519] Scheidel (2006, 2007, 2009) has considered the matter at length and concluded that Chinese currency took the unusual form that it did for two maibn reasons: (1) the historical coincidence that Qin (which used bronze coins) defeated Chu (which used gold) in the civil wars, and subsequent conservatism, 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 republic, was not surrounded by states accustomed to other forms of currency.

[520] Pythagoras was, as far as we know, the first to take the latter course, founding a secret political society that for a while had control over the levers of political power in the Greek cities of southern Italy.

[521] Hadot 1995, 2002. In the ancient world, Christianity was recognized as a philosophy largely because it had its own forms of ascetic practice.

[522] On the Tillers: Graham 1979, 1994:67–110. They seem to have flourished around the same time as Mo Di, the founder of Mohism (roughly 470–391 bc). The Tillers ultimately vanished, leaving behind mainly a series of treatises on agricultural technology, but they had a tremendous influence on early Taoism—which, in turn, became the favorite philosophy for peasant rebels for many centuries to come, starting with the Yellow Turbans of 184 ad. Eventually, Taoism was displaced by messianic forms of Buddhism as the favorite ideology of rebellious peasants.

[523] Wei-Ming 1986, Graham 1989, Schwartz 1986.

[524] Legend has it that after one Pythagorean mathematician discovered the existence of irrational numbers, other members of the sect took him on a cruise and dropped him overboard. For an extended discussion of the relation of early Pythagoreanism (530–400 bc) to the rise of a cash economy, see Seaford 2004:266–75).

[525] At least if my own experience in Madagascar is anything to go on.

[526] War is quite similar: it’s also an area in which it’s possible to imagine everyone 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 11 below.

[527] Not to be confused with the unrelated Confucian term li, meaning “ritual” or “etiquette.” Later, li became the word for “interest”—that is, not only “self-interest,” but also “interest payment” (e.g., Cartier 1988:26–27). I should note that my argument here is slightly unconventional. Schwartz (1985:145–51) notes that in Confucius, “profit” has a purely pejorative meaning, and he argues that it was subversively reinterpreted by Mo Di. I find it unlikely that Confucius represents conventional wisdom at this time; while his writings are the earliest we have on the subject, his position was clearly marginal for centuries after his death. I am assuming instead that the Legalist tradition reflected the common wisdom even before Confucius—or certainly, Mencius.

[528] Zhan Guo Ce (“Strategies of the Warring States”) no. 109, 7.175

[529] Annuals of Lü Buwei, 8/5.4.

[530] See Ames (1994) for a discussion of key terms: si li (self-interest), shi (strategic advantage), and li min (public profit).

[531] Book of Lord Shang 947–48, Duyvendak 1928:65.

[532] Kosambi’s translation (1965:142); the Encyclopedia Britannica prefers “handbook on profit” (entry for “CĀrvĀka”); Altekar (1977:3), “the science of wealth.”

[533] Nag & Dikshitar 1927:15. Kosambi argues that the Mauryan polity was thus based on a fundamental contradiction: “a moral law-abiding population ruled by a completely amoral king” (1996:237). Yet such a situation is hardly unusual, before or since.

[534] Thucydides 5.85-113 (cf. 3.36–49). The event took place in 416 bc, around the same time that Lord Shang and Kautilya were writing. Significantly, Thucydides’ own objections to such behavior are not explicitly moral but center on showing that it was not to the “long-term profit” of the empire (Kallet 2001:19). On Thucydides’ own utilitarian materialism more generally, see Sahlins 2004.

[535] Mozi 6:7B, in Hansen 2000:137

[536] Mencius 4.1, in Duyvendak 1928:76–77. He appears to be referring to a distinction originally made by Confucius himself: “the superior person understands what is right while the inferior person only understands what is personally profitable” (Analects 7.4.16).

[537] The Mohist path—overtly embrace financial logic—was the less well trodden. We’ve already seen how in India and Greece, attempts to frame morality 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.

[538] Leenhardt 1979:164.

[539] This interpretation does fly fairly directly in the face of the main thrust of scholarship on the issue, which tends instead to emphasize the “transcendental” nature of Axial Age ideas (e.g., Schwartz 1975, Eisenstadt 1982, 1984, 1986, Roetz 1993, Bellah 2005).

[540] The Greek system actually began with Fire, Air, and Water, and the Indian with Fire, Water, and Earth, though in each case there were numerous elaborations. The Chinese elemental system was fivefold: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water.

[541] In Christianity, at least in the Augustinian 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 Frankfort (1948:342–44)—a peculiarity of the Judeo-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 partake of the divine (see Hoitenga 1991:112–14, for the conflict in Augustine’s own ideas here).

[542] Shell’s essay “The Ring of Gyges” (1978) has already been cited in the last chapter, in my discussion of Plato; Seaford 1998, 2004.

[543] This is based on the fact that Miletus 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 (Kraay 1964:67).

[544] Heraclitus was from the nearby Ionian city of Ephesus and Pythagoras originally 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 Greek philosophy, again, at just the period when the Greek cities there became thoroughly monetarized. Athens became the center of Greek 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.

[545] Or as Seaford (2004:208) puts it, echoing Anaximander’s description of his primal substance, “a distinct, eternal, impersonal, all-embracing, unlimited, homogeneous, eternally moving, abstract, regulating substance, destination for all things as well as their origin” (or, at least, “all things” that were available for purchase.)

[546] Seaford 2004:136–46; see Picard 1975; Wallace 1987; Harris 2008a:10. Purely “fiduciary” money is of course what a metalist would call “fiat” or “token” money, or a Keynesian, “chartal money.” Despite Finley’s arguments to the contrary (1980:141, 196), just 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.

[547] In the case of truly large states like the Roman or Mauryan empires, inflation did eventually result, but the full effects were not felt for at least a century (see Ingham 2002:101–4, Kessler & Temin 2008, Harris 2008b for some good discussions of the Roman situation.)

[548] Seaford 2004:138–39.

[549] I am partly inspired here by Marcel Mauss’s arguments about of the concept of substance (Allen 1998).

[550] Hence, as we’ll see Aristotle’s position that a coin was only a social convention (Nicomachean Ethics 1133a29–31) remained very much a minority view in the ancient world. It did become the predominant view later, in the Middle Ages.

[551] He is known as PĀyĀsi in the Buddhist scriptures, Paesi in the Jaina (see Bronkhorst 2007:143–159 for a good discussion of these earliest Indian materialists; for the later materialist school, to which Kautilya is said to belong, see Chattopadhyaya 1994. Jaspers (1951:135), writing of India, notes the appearance of “all philosophical trends, including skepticism and materialism, sophistry and nihilism”—a significant list, since it’s obviously not a list of “all” philosophical trends at all, but only the most materialist.

[552] In The Republic it is rejected out of hand. In India, as I’ve argued, the Hindu tradition only appears to embrace it. Buddhists, Jains, and other oppositional philosophies didn’t use the term at all.

[553] Philo of Alexandria, writing around the time of Christ, says of the Essenes: “not a single slave is to be found among them, but all are free, exchanging services with each other, and they denounce the owners of slaves, not merely for their injustice in outraging the law of equality, but also for their impiety in annulling the statute of nature” (Quod omnis probus liber sit 79). The Therapeutae, another Jewish group, group rejected all forms of property, but looked on slavery “to be a thing absolutely and wholly contrary to nature, for nature has created all men free” (De Vita Contemplativa 70). The similarity to Roman law ideas is notable. Jewish groups are unusually well documented; if similar sects existed in, say, Thrace, or Numidia, we probably wouldn’t know.

[554] 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).

[555] 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.

[556] Dockés (1979:62–70) provides a good overview of the situation—literally, 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).

[557] As we’ve seen, Kosambi saw Magadha as a peak of monetarization. R.S. Sharma (2001:119–62) argues that coinage remained commonplace under the Guptas (280 to 550 ad) but then abruptly disappeared almost everywhere thereafter. However, even if he is right that the total number of coins in circulation did not diminish until then, he himself 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.

[558] For an overview: R.S. Sharma 1965, Kane 1968 III:411–61, Chatterjee 1971. Schopen (1994) especially emphasizes that the techniques grow more sophisticated over the course of the Middle Ages, for instance, developing bookkeeping techniques for combining compound interest with partial repayments.

[559] Documents on the regulation of monastic affairs pay a great deal of attention to the details: how when the money was lent out, contracts would be signed, sealed, and deposited in the temple before 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 investment, and so forth (Schopen 1994).

[560] From the Arab dinar, which in turn derives from the Roman denarius. It is unclear whether such sums were actually paid in coins at this point: one early monastic manual, for example, speaking of objects that might be relegated to the Inexhaustible Treasuries and thus put out at interest, mentions “gold and silver, whether in the form of coins, finished or raw, in large or small quantities, pure or alloyed, or whether in the form of utensils, finished or unfinished” (MahĀsĀmghika Vinaya, in Gernet 1956 [1995:165]).

[561] Fleet 1888: 260–62, as translated in Schopen 1994:532–33. One need hardly remark on the irony of this emphasis on eternity emerging within Buddhism, a religion founded on the recognition of the impermanence of all worldly attachments.

[562] The commercial loans are documented from an inscription at the West Indian monastery at Karle (Levi 1938: 145; Gernet 1956 [1995:164]; Barreau 1961:444–47), the assemblies from later Tamil temples (Ayyar 1982:40–68, 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 families wishing to support a specific ceremony or, say, an educational project might receive a 500-rupee loan “in perpetuity” and then be expected to provide 800 rupees a year to organize the ceremony. The responsibilities are then inherited, though the “loan” can be transferred (Miller 1961, Murphy 1961).

[563] Kalhana, Rajatarangini 7.1091–98; see Basham 1948, Riepe 1961:44n49.) The monks were apparently Ajivkas, who still existed at this time.

[564] Naskar 1996, R.S. Sharma 2001:45–66, 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 rejected.

[565] Manusmrti 8.5.257. Significantly, the debt to other humans vanishes entirely in these texts.

[566] Manusmrti 8.5.270–72. A Sudra’s tongue would also be cut off for insulting a member of the twice-born castes (8.270).

[567] R.S. Sharma 1958, 1987, Chauhan 2003.

[568] “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, YĀjñavalkya Smrti 8.5.419), or even “Sudras must be reduced to slavery, either by purchase or without purchase, because they were created by God for the sake or serving others (8.5.413).

[569] Kautilya allowed 60 percent for commercial loans, 120 percent “for enterprises that involve journeys through forests,” and twice that for those that involve shipping goods by sea (Arthasastra 3.11; one later code, YĀjñavalkya Smrti 2.38 follows this.)

[570] YĀjñavalkya Smrti 2.37, Manusmrti 8.143, Visnusmrti 5.6.2, see Kane 1968 III:421.

[571] R.S. Sharma 1965:68. 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, specifying 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)

[572] Dumont (1966).

[573] Gyan Prakash (2003:184) makes this point for the colonial period: when one-time caste hierarchies began to be treated instead as matters of debt bondage, subordinates turned into persons who had equal rights, but whose rights were temporarily “suspended.”

[574] To be fair, one could also argue that indebted peasants are also likely to be in command of more resources, and thus be more capable of organizing a rebellion. We know very little about popular insurrections in Medieval India (though see Guha (1999). Palat (1986, 1988:205–15; Kosambi 1996:392–93), but the total number of such revolts seems to have been relatively low in comparison to Europe and certainly in comparison to China, where rebellion was almost ceaseless.

[575] “No one knows just how many rebellions have taken place in Chinese history. From the official record there were several thousand incidents within just three years from 613 to 615 ad, probably one thousand events a year (Wei Z. ad 656: ch. “Report of the Imperial Historians”). According to Parsons, during the period 1629–44, there were as many as 234,185 insurrections in China, averaging 43 events per day, or 1.8 outbreaks per hour” (Deng 1999:220).

[576] Following Deng (1999).

[577] Huang 1999:231.

[578] These loans appear to have been an extension of the logic of the state granaries, which stockpiled food; some to sell at strategic moments to keep prices low, some to distribute free in times of famine; some to loan at low interest to provide an alternative to usurers.

[579] Huang op cit; cf. Zhuoyun & Dull 1980:22–24. For his complex currency reforms: Peng 1994:111–14.

[580] Generally, interest rates were set at a maximum of 20 percent and compound interest was banned. Chinese authorities eventually also adopted the Indian principle that interest should not be allowed to exceed the principal (Cartier 1988:28; Yang 1971:92–103).

[581] Braudel 1979; Wallerstein 1991, 2001.

[582] I am here especially following the work of Boy Bin Wong (1997, 2002; also Mielants 2001, 2007.) Granted, most Braudelans only see later dynasties like the Ming as fully embodying this principle, but I think it can be projected backwards.

[583] So, for instance, while markets themselves were considered beneficial, the government also systematically intervened to prevent price fluctuations, 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).

[584] 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.

[585] Zürcher 1958:282.

[586] Gernet 1956 (1999: 241–42); for the following discussion see Gernet 1960, Jan 1965, Kieschnick 1997, Benn 1998, 2007.

[587] Tsan-ning (919-1001 ad) quoted in Jan 1965:263. Others 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, leaped 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 2007:95, 108; cf. Ohnuma 2007).

[588] Tu Mu, cited in Gernet 1956 (1995:245).

[589] This might come as something of a surprise, since the phrase is used so often in contemporary Western popular usage, “karmic debt” becoming something of a New Age cliché. But it seems to strike a much more intuitive chord with Euro-Americans than it ever did in India. Despite the close association of debt and sin in the Indian tradition, most early Buddhist schools avoided the concept—largely because it implied a continuity of the self, which they saw as ephemeral and ultimately illusory. The exception were the Sammitiya, called “personalists” as they did believe in an enduring self, who developed the notion of aviprĀāśa, whereby the results of good or bad actions—karma—“endure like a sheet of paper on which a debt is inscribed” as an unconscious element of the self that passes from one life to another (Lamotte 1997:22–24, 86–90; Lusthaus 2002:209–10). The idea might have died with that sect had it not been taken up by the famous Mahayana philosopher NĀgĀrjuna, who compared it to an “imperishable promissory note” (Kalupahana 1991:54–55, 249; Pasadika 1997). His MĀdhyamaka school in turn became the Sanlun or “Three Treatise” school in 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) (Hubbard 2001).

[590] Commentary on the Dharma of the Inexhaustible Storehouse of the Mahayana Universe, as translated by Hubbard (2001:265), with a few changes based on Gernet (1956 [1995:246]).

[591] In Hubbord 2001:266.

[592] 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 parents generally. Interestingly, the same notion of an infinite and unpayable “milk-debt” to one’s mother also appears in Turkey (White 2004:75–76).

[593] Sutra for the Recompense of Gratitude cited in 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 specifically for his mother’s sake.

[594] 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 in general, see Hardaker 1892, Kuznets 1933. On China specifically: Gernet 1956 [1995:170–73], Yang 1971:71–73, Whelan 1979. In a remarkable parallel, the first “formal” 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.)

[595] Gernet 1956 [1995:142–86], Ch’en 1964:262–65; Collins 1986:66–71; Peng 1994:243–45. It would seem that Taoist monasteries, which also multiplied in this period, banned making loans (Kohn 2002:76), perhaps in part to mark a distinction.

[596] Gernet 1956 [1995:228], where he famously wrote, “the donors to the Inexhaustible Treasuries were shareholders, not in the economic domain but that of religion.” As far as I know, the only contemporary scholar who has fully embraced 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 historiography 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 market—but firm rejection 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 available, which they’re not, it’s difficult to know what terms like “serf,” “slave,” and “wage-laborer” actually meant in practice.

[597] Gernet 1956 [1995:116–39], Ch’en 1964:269–71, on land reclamation and monastic slaves.

[598] “It 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” Gernet 1956 (1995:104–5, 211).

[599] Gernet 1956 [1995:22].

[600] See Adamek 2005, Walsh 2007.

[601] This is probably why abstractions like Truth, Justice, and Freedom are so often represented as women.

[602] Marco Polo observed the practice in the southern province 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 before 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 is, and gets back the piece of stick the other had” (Benedetto 1931:193). See also Yang 1971:92, Kan 1978, Peng 1994:320, 330, 508, Trombert 1995:12–15. Tallies of this sort seem, according to Kan, to have preceded writing; and one legend claims that the same man, a minister to the Yellow Emperor, invented both writing and tally contracts simultaneously (Trombert 1995:13).

[603] Graham 1960:179.

[604] Actually the similarity 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).

[605] Or one might better say, turning them at one snap from monetary debts to moral ones, since 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 tallies had been matched, Feng brought forth a false order to forgive these debts, and he burned the tallies. The people all cheered” (ibid:100n9). For Tibetan parallels, see Uebach 2008.

[606] Similar things happened in England, where early contracts were also broken in half in imitation of tally sticks: the phrase “indentured 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 I:218).

[607] L. Yang 1971:52; Peng 1994:329–31. Peng perceptively notes “this method of matching tallies to withdraw cash was actually an outgrowth of the process used in borrowing money, except that the movement over time of loans was transformed into a movement over space” (1994:330).

[608] They were called “deposit shops”—and L. Yang (1971:78–80) calls them “proto-banks.” Peng (1994:323–27) notes something along these lines was already operating, at least for merchants and travelers, under the Tang, but the government had strict controls preventing bankers from reinvesting the money.

[609] The practice began in Sichuan, which had its own peculiar form of cash, in iron, not bronze, and therefore much more unwieldy.

[610] Peng 1994:508, also 515, 833. All this is very much like the token money that circulated in much of Europe in the Middle Ages.

[611] The most important scholarly exponent of this view is von Glahn (1994, though Peng \[1994\] holds to something close), and it seems the prevailing one among economists, popular and otherwise.

[612] Diagram from MacDonald 2003:65.

[613] One of the favorite images employed when remembering the rule of the Legalists, under the much-hated First 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.

[614] See Bulliet 1979 (also Lapidus 2003:141–46) on the process of conversion. Bulliet also emphasizes (ibid:129) that the main effect of mass conversion was to make the ostensible justification 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 attack; as of course, for similar reasons, it has in much of the Islamic world today.

[615] “Most of the time the lower circles paid their taxes through their heads, and looked after themselves. Similarly the government received the taxes and provided 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 luxurious ostentation” (Pearson 1982:54).

[616] The proverb appears, attributed to the Prophet himself, 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 nothing more detestable to Allah than a religious scholar who visits an official’ …” etc. This attitude has by no means disappeared. A strong majority of Iranian ayatollahs, for example, oppose the idea of an Islamic state, on the grounds that it would necessarily corrupt religion.

[617] Lombard 1947, Grierson 1960. This is often represented as a wise policy of refusal to “debase” the coinage, but it might equally be read as meaning that the caliph’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 (Ashtor 1976:257).

[618] MacDonald 2003:64. Gradually this became unsupportable and Muslim empires adopted the more typically Medieval iqta’ system, whereby soldiers were granted the tax revenues from specific territories.

[619] Neither have slaves been employed as soldiers since, except in temporary and anomalous circumstance (e.g., by the Manchus, or in Barbados).

[620] It seems significant that (1) the “inquisition” of 832, the failed Abbasid attempt to take control of the ulema; (2) the most important mass conversion of the Caliphate’s subjects to Islam, peaking around 825–850; and (3) the definitive ascent of Turkish slave soldiers in Abbasid armies, often dated to 838, all roughly corresponded in time.

[621] Elwahed 1931:111–35. As he puts it (ibid:127), “the inalienability of liberty is one of the fundamental and uncontested principles of Islam.” 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 courts will recognize any resultant ownership claims. I note that this is the diametrical opposite of the “natural law” approach that later developed in Europe.

[622] There is a certain controversy here: some scholars, including some contemporary 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 misinterpretation (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 Iraq itself as part of the process of the creation of grassroots Islam, which would actually reinforce my general argument.

[623] The best records we have are actually from a community of Jewish merchants in Geniza, in twelfth-century Egypt, who observed the ban on interest even in dealings with one another. The one area where we regularly hear of interest being charged is the one area 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 exclusively, from Jewish or Christian bankers—to pay their troops. Obliging a request for such an illegal loan was a dangerous business, but refusing even more so (for Abbasid examples, see Ray 1997:68–70, mainly drawing from Fischel 1937).

[624] There were also a whole host of legal subterfuges (called hiyal) that one might undertake if one were absolutely determined to charge interest: for instance, buying one’s debtor’s house for the amount of the loan, charging them rent for it, and then allowing 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 disapproved. It used to be assumed that these methods were widely employed, since most economic historians assumed interest 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 1997:58–59).

[625] Mez 1922:448, quoted in Labib 1969:89. Note that Basra, the city where everyone in the market paid by check, was also the city where, a century later, Mongol attempts to introduce government-issue paper money were so doggedly resisted. The word sakk is incidentally the origin of the English “check.” The ultimate origins of sakk are contested: Ashtor (1972:555) suggests they were Byzantine; Chosky (1988), Persian.

[626] Goitein (1966, 1967, 1973) provides a detailed summary of financial practices among Jewish merchants in twelfth-century Egypt. Almost every transaction involved credit to some degree. Checks, remarkably similar even in appearance to the kind used today, were in common usage—though sealed bags of metal coins were even more common in everyday transactions.

[627] 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 government should enforce commercial standards and regulations. It seems, however, that this rarely came to much in practice.

[628] Udovitch 1970:71–74.

[629] Sarakhsi in Udovitch 1975:11, who has a good discussion of the issues involved. Likewise Ray 1997:59–60.

[630] This should surely also be of interest to students of Pierre Bourdieu, who made a famous argument, based on his study of Kabyle society in Algeria, that a man’s honor in such a society is a form of “symbolic capital,” analogous to but more important than economic capital, since it is possible to turn honor into 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.

[631] Following K.N. Chaudhuri (1985:197). The expansion of Islam was spearheaded by both Sufi brotherhoods and legal scholars; many merchants doubled as either or both. The scholarly literature here is unusually rich. See, for instance: Chaudhuri 1985, 1990; Risso 1995; Subrahmanyam 1996; Barendtse 2002; Beaujard 2005.

[632] In Goody 1996:91.

[633] M. Lombard 2003:177–79.

[634] Burton’s translation; 1934 IV:2013.

[635] And what’s more, officials employed their own person bankers, and themselves made extensive use of credit instruments such as suftaja both for transfer of tax payments, and the secreting away of ill-gotten gains (Hodgson 1974 I:301, Udovitch 1975:8, Ray 1994:69–71.)

[636] “For Mohammed this natural regulation of the market corresponds to a cosmic regulation. Prices rise and fall as night follows day, as low tides follow high, and price imposition is not only an injustice to the merchant, but a disordering of the natural order of things” (Essid 1995:153).

[637] 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 fuller discussion of Mohammed’s views on price formation, see Tuma 1965, Essid 1988, 1995.

[638] Hosseini 1998:672, 2003:37: “Both indicate that animals, such as dogs, do not exchange one bone for another.”

[639] Hosseini 1998, 2003. Smith says he visited such a factory himself, which may well be true, but the example of the eighteen steps originally appears in the entry “Épingle” in Volume 5 of the French Encyclopedie, published in 1755, twenty years earlier. Hosseini also notes that “Smith’s personal library contained the Latin translations of some of the works of Persian (and Arab) scholars of the medieval period” (Hosseini 1998:679), suggesting that he might have lifted them from the originals directly. Other important sources for Islamic precedents for later economic theory include: Rodison 1978, Islahi 1985, Essid 1988, 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 philosophy: Decartes’ cogito, for example, seems to derive from Ibn Sina (a.k.a. Avicenna), Hume’s famous 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.

[640] Tusi’s Nasirean Ethics, in Sun 2008:409.

[641] Ghazanfar & Islahi 2003:58; Ghazanfar 2003:32–33.

[642] 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 repayment” (Ghazali Ihya Ulum al Din II:79–82, cited in Ghazanfar & Islahi 1997:22)—the latter of course recalling Luke 6:35.

[643] Ghazali in Ghazanfar & Islahi 1997:27.

[644] Ibid:32.

[645] Ibid:32.

[646] Ibid:35. On postmen in Medieval Islam: Goitein 1964. Ghazali’s position here recalls and is no doubt influenced by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1121b): that since money is a social convention meant to facilitate exchange, diverting it into usury defies its purpose; but its ultimate 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 Aquinas was likely directly influenced by him (Ghazanfar 2000).

[647] It’s hard to overstate this. Even the famous “Laffer Curve,” by which the Reagan Administration in the 1980s tried to argue that cutting taxes would increase government revenue by stimulating economic activity, is often called the Khaldun-Laffer curve because it was first proposed, as a general principle, in Ibn Khaldun’s 1377 Muqaddimah.

[648] Goitein 1957 for the rise of the “Middle Eastern bourgeoisie.”

[649] “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 of wage-earners and those on any sort of fixed income and so was often protested.

[650] Langholm 1979, Wood 2002:73–76.

[651] On the patristic literature on usury: Maloney 1983; Gordon 1989; Moser 2000; Holman 2002:112–26; Jones 2004:25–30.

[652] Matthew 5:42

[653] St Basil of Caesarea, Homilia II in Psalmum XIV (PG 29, 268–69).

[654] op cit.

[655] op cit.

[656] Ambrose De Officiis 2.25.89.

[657] Ambrose De Tobia 15:51. See Nelson 1949:3–5, Gordon 1989:114–118.

[658] Though not entirely. It’s worthy to note that the main supply of slaves to the empire at this time came from Germanic barbarians outside the empire, who were acquired either through war or debt.

[659] “If each one,” he wrote, “after 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 Illiud Lucae 49D)—Basil himself had been born an aristocrat, but he had sold off his landed estates and distributed the proceeds to the poor.

[660] Homilia II in Psalmum XIV (PG 29, 277C). The reference is to Proverbs 19.17.

[661] Summa 8.3.1.3: “since grace is freely given, it excludes the idea of debt … In [no] sense does debt imply that God owes anything to another creature.”

[662] Clavero (1986) sees this as a basic conflict over the nature of the contract, and hence the legal basis of human relations in European history: usury, and by extension profit, was denounced, but rent, the basis of feudal relations, was never challenged.

[663] Gordon 1989:115. “What is commerce,” wrote Cassiodorus (485–585), “except to want to sell dear that which can be bought cheap? Therefore those merchants are detestable who, with no consideration of God’s justice, burden their wares more with perjury 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).

[664] On the Jewish legal tradition concerning usury, see Stein 1953, 1955; Kirschenbaum 1985.

[665] Poliakov 1977:21.

[666] Nelson (1949) assumed that the “Exception” was often held to apply to relations between Christians and Jews, but Noonan (1957:101–2) insists that it was mainly held to apply only to “heretics and infidels, particularly the Saracens,” and by some, not even to them.

[667] Up to 52 percent with security, up to 120 percent without (Homer 1987:91).

[668] Debtor’s prisons, in the sense of prisons exclusively for debtors, existed in England only after 1263, but the imprisonment of debtors has a much longer history. Above all, Jewish lenders seem to have been employed as the means of transforming virtual, credit money into coinage, collecting the family 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).

[669] 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.

[670] Matthew Prior, in Bolles 1837:13.

[671] Or even, for that matter, Nietzsche’s fantasies of the origins of justice in mutilation. Where one was a projection onto Jews of atrocities actually committed against Jews, Nietzsche was writing in an age where actual “savages” were often punished by similar tortures and mutilations for failure to pay their debts to the colonial tax authorities, as later became a most notorious scandal in Leopold’s Belgian Congo.

[672] Mundill (2002), Brand (2003).

[673] Cohn 1972:80.

[674] Peter Cantor, in Nelson 1949:10–11.

[675] It was a firm from Cahors, for instance, 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 kings seemed to expropriate and expel Jews and Lombards alternately (Poliakov 1977:42).

[676] Noonan 1957:18–19; Le Goff 1990:23–27.

[677] There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men profit from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a profit out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term “interest” (tokos), 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 (1121b) is equally damning. For the best general analysis of the Aristotelean tradition on usury: Langholm 1984.

[678] Noonan 1957:105–12; Langholm 1984:50.

[679] The technical term for the lost income is lucrum cessans: see O’Brien 1920: 107–10, Noonan 1957:114–28, Langholm 1992:60–61; 1998:75; Spufford 1989:260.

[680] As German merchants also did in the Baltic cities of the Hanseatic alliance. On the Medici bank as a case in point, see de Roover 1946, 1963, Parks 2005.

[681] The situation in Venice, a pioneer in these matters, is telling: 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 government (MacKenney 1987; Mauro 1993:259–60).

[682] They were accused of both heresy and sodomy: see Barber 1978.

[683] One cannot “prove” the Islamic inspiration of European bills of exchange, but considering the amount of trade between the two sides of the Mediterranean, denying it seems bizarre. Braudel (1995:816–17) proposes that the idea must have reached Europe through Jewish merchants, who we know to have long been using them in Egypt.

[684] On bills of exchange: Usher 1914; de Roover 1967; Boyer-Xambeu, Deleplace, and Gillard 1994; Munro 2003b:542–46; Denzel 2006. There were innumerable currencies, 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 possible 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 contrast to consumer loans. This is a sign of the increasingly lower risk of such transactions (see Homer 1987 for a history of interest rates).

[685] Lane 1934.

[686] “In very many respects, such as the organization of slave labor, management of colonies, imperial administration, commercial institutions, maritime technology and navigation, and naval gunnery, the Italian city-states were the direct forerunners of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, to the shaping of which the Italians contributed so heavily, and in the profits of which they so largely shared” (Brady 1997:150).

[687] They appear to have used Greek serfs at first, and sometimes Arabs captured in the Crusades, and only later, Africans. Still, this was the economic model that was eventually transported by Portuguese merchants to Atlantic islands like the Canaries, then eventually to the Caribbean (Verlinden 1970, Phillips 1985:93–97, Solow 1987, Wartburg 1995).

[688] Scammell 1981:173–75.

[689] Spufford 1988:142

[690] On the notion of adventure: Auerbach 1946, Nerlich 1977.

[691] Duby (1973) makes this point. The “round table” was originally a type of tournament, and especially in the 1300s, it became common to make such tournaments explicit imitations of King Arthur’s court, with knights entering the contests taking on roles from them: Galahad, Gawain, Bors, etc.

[692] Also at a time when technological changes, especially the invention of the crossbow and the rise of professional armies, were beginning to render knights’ role in combat increasingly irrelevant (Vance 1973).

[693] Kelly 1937:10.

[694] See Schoenberger 2008 for a recent and compelling take: comparing the role of war mobilization in creating markets in Greece and Rome to Western Europe in the High Middle Ages.

[695] Wolf 1954.

[696] A point originally made by Vance (1986:48). The similarity is more obvious in the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, written perhaps twenty years later, in which knights “roam freely over Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, to Baghdad, Armenia, India, Ceylon” (Adolf 1957:113)—and Islamic references are legion (Adolf 1947, 1957)—that is, areas known to Europeans of the time only through trade. The fact that actual merchants, on those rare occasions when they appear, are never sympathetic characters has little bearing.

[697] Wagner, Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage (1848)—which in English is “World History as Told in Saga.” I am taking my account of Wagner’s argument from another wonderful, if sometimes extravagant, essay by Marc Shell called “Accounting for the Grail” (1992:37–38). Wagner’s argument is really more complicated: it centers on the failed attempt by the Holy Roman Emperor 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.

[698] Shell sees the Grail as a transformation of the older notion of the cornucopia or inexhaustible purse in an age “just beginning to be acquainted with checks and credit”—noting the connection of the legend with the Templars, and fact that Chretien—whose name means “Christian”—was likely, for that reason, to have been a converted Jew. Wolfram also claimed that he got the legend from a Jewish source (Shell 1992:44–45).

[699] Even China was often split and fractured. Just about all the great empire-building projects of the Middle Ages were the work not of professional armies, but of nomadic peoples: the Arabs, Mongols, Tatars, and Turks.

[700] Nicomachean Ethics 1133a29–31.

[701] He compares money not only 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 directly influenced by Ghazali (Ghazanfar 2000), did accept Aristotle’s argument that money was a social convention that humans could just as easily change. For a while, in the late Middle Ages, this became the predominant Catholic view.

[702] As far as I know, the only scholar to have pointed out the connection is Bernard Faure, a French student of Japanese Buddhism: Faure 1998:798, 2000:225.

[703] Later still, as cash transactions became 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 general: Beauchet 1897; Jones 1956:217; Shell 1978:32–35.

[704] Descat 1995:986.

[705] Aristotle On Interepretation 1.16–17. Whitaker (2002:10) thus observes that for Aristotle, “the meaning of a word is fixed by convention, just as the importance attached to a tally, token, or ticket depends on agreement between the parties concerned.”

[706] Nicomachean Ethics 1133a29–31.

[707] But they believed that these formulas summed 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.”

[708] Müri 1931, Meyer 1999. The only knowledge we have of such symbola comes from Christian sources; Christians later adopted their own symbolon, the Creed, and this remained the primary referent of the term “symbol” throughout the Middle Ages (Ladner 1979).

[709] Or pseudo-Dionysius, since the real Dionysius the Areopagite was a first-century Athenian converted to Christianity 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 divine, with Christian orthodoxy. Unfortunately, his most relevant work, Symbolic Theology, has been lost, but his surviving works all bear on the issue to some degree.

[710] In Barasch 1993:161.

[711] Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Celestial Hierarchy 141A–C. On Dionysius’ theory of symbolism in general, and its influence, see Barasch 1993:158–80, also Goux 1990:67, Gadamer 2004:63–64.

[712] He calls them, like communion, “gifts that are granted to us in symbolic mode.” On the Celestial Hierarchy 124A.

[713] Mathews 1934:283. Compare the definition of symbolon:
A. tally, i.e. each of two halves or corresponding pieces of a knucklebone or other object, 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 presenter of the other.
B. of other devices having the same purpose, e.g. a seal-impression on wax,
1. any token serving as proof of identity
2. guarantee
3. token, esp. of goodwill
After Liddell and Scott 1940:1676–77, without the examples, and with the Greek words for “knucklebone” and “guest-friend” rendered into English.

[714] Rotours 1952:6. On fu (or qi, another name for debt tallies that could be used more generally for “tokens”) more generally: Rotours 1952, Kaltenmark 1960, Kan 1978, Faure 2000:221–29: Falkenhausen 2005.

[715] There is a curious tension here: the will of heaven is also in a certain sense the will of the people, and Chinese thinkers varied on where they placed the emphasis. 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 just king, social trust will be such that such objects will become unnecessary (Roetz 1993:73–74).

[716] Kohn 2000:330. Similarly in Japan: Faure 2000:227.

[717] In the Encyclopedia of Taoism they are described as “diagrams, conceived as a form of celestial writing, that derive their power from the matching celestial counterpart kept by the deities who bestowed them” (Bokenkamp 2008:35). On Taoist fu: Kaltenmark 1960; Seidel 1983; Strickmann 2002:190–91; Verellen 2006; on Buddhist parallels, see Faure 1998; Robson 2008.

[718] Sasso 1978; the origins of the yin-yang symbol remain obscure and contested but those Sinologists I’ve consulted find this plausible. The generic word for “symbol” in contemporary Chinese is fúhào, which is directly derived from fu.

[719] Insofar as I’m weighing in on the “Why didn’t the Islamic world develop modern capitalism?” debate, then, it seems to me that both Udovitch’s argument (1975:19–21) that the Islamic world never developed impersonal credit mechanisms, and Ray’s objection (1997:39–40) that the ban on interest and insurance was more important, carry weight. Ray’s suggestion that differences in inheritance laws might play a role also deserves investigation.

[720] Maitland 1908:54.

[721] Davis 1904.

[722] In the Platonic sense: just 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. Kantorowicz argues that it took a number of intellectual innovations to make the notion of the corporation possible: notably, the idea of the eon or aevum, eternal time, that is, time that lasts forever, as opposed to the Augustinian eternity which is outside of time entirely and was considered the habitation of the angels, to the revival of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite (1957:280–81).

[723] Kantorowicz 1957:282–83.

[724] Islamic law, for instance, not only did not develop the notion of fictive persons, but steadfastly resisted recognizing corporations until quite recently (Kuran 2005).

[725] Mainly Randall Collins (1986:52–58), who also makes the comparison with China; cf. Coleman 1988.

[726] See Nerlich 1987:121–24.

[727] On English wages, see Dyer 1989; on English festive life, there is a vast literature, but a good recent source is Humphrey 2001. Silvia Federici (2004) provides a compelling recent synthesis.

[728] For a very small sampling of more recent debates over the “price revolution,” see Hamilton 1934, Cipolla 1967, Flynn 1982, Goldstone 1984, 1991, Fisher 1989, Munro 2003a, 2007. The main argument is between monetarists who continue to argue that increase in the amount of specie is ultimately responsible for the inflation, and those who emphasize the role of rapid population increase, though most specific arguments are considerably more nuanced.

[729] 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 hidden away, causing all sorts of difficulties for commerce. In the 1460s, the shortage of specie in cities like Lisbon had been so acute that merchant ships visiting with cargoes full of wares often had to return home without selling anything (Spufford 1988:339–62).

[730] Brook 1998. Needless to say, I’m simplifying enormously: another problem was the growth of landlordism, with many smallholders falling in debt to landlords 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 smallholders became so heavy that many felt forced to sell their lands to the powerful families in exchange for tenancy agreements to free those lands from taxes.

[731] Chinese historians count 77 different “miners’ revolts” during the 1430s and ‘40s (Harrison 1965:103–4; cf. Tong 1992:60–64; Gernet 1982:414). Between 1445 and 1449 these became a serious threat as silver miners under a rebel leader named Ye Zongliu made common cause with tenant farmers and the urban poor in overpopulated Fujian and Shaxian, sparking an uprising that spread to a number of different provinces, seizing a number of cities and expelling much of the landed gentry.

[732] Von Glahn (1996:70–82) documents the process. Gernet (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 1581 (Huang 1974, see Arrighi, Hui, Hung and Seldon 2003:272–73).

[733] Wong 1997, Pomeranz 2000, Arrighi 2007, among many others who make this point.

[734] Pomeranz 2000:273.

[735] The value of silver in China (as measured in gold) remained, through the sixteenth century, roughly twice what it was in Lisbon or Antwerp (Flynn & Giráldez 1995, 2002).

[736] von Glahn 1996b:440; Atwell 1998.

[737] Chalis 1978:157.

[738] China had its own “age of exploration” in the early fifteenth century, but it was not followed by mass conquest and enslavement.

[739] It’s possible that they were wrong. Generally populations did decline by 90 percent even in areas where no direct genocide was taking place. But in most places, after a generation or so, populations started recovering; in Hispaniola and many parts of Mexico and Peru, around the mines, the ultimate death rate was more like 100 percent.

[740] Todorov 1984:137–38; for the original, Icazbalceta 2008:23–26.

[741] 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 destroyed in the process of seizing those riches” (Stannard 1993:221).

[742] Bernal Díaz 1963:43.

[743] Bernal Díaz: the quote is a synthesis of the Lockhart translation (1844 II:120) and Cohen translation (1963:412), though these appear to be based on slightly different originals.

[744] Bernal Díaz op cit.

[745] Cortés 1868:141.

[746] Most of the conquistadors had similar stories. Balboa came to the Americas to flee his creditors; Pizarro borrowed so heavily to outfit his expedition 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 possessions 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 immediately tried to put his remaining estates to auction.

[747] e.g., Pagden 1986.

[748] Gibson 1964:253. All this is disturbingly reminiscent of global politics nowadays, in which the United Nations, for example, will urge poor countries to make education free and available to everyone, and then the International Monetary Fund (which is, legally, actually a part of the United Nations) will insist that those same countries do exactly the opposite, imposing school fees as part of broader “economic reforms” as a condition of refinancing the country’s loans.

[749] Following William Pietz (1985:8), who studied early merchant adventurer’s accounts of West Africa; though Todorov (1984:129–31) on the very similar perspective of the conquistadors.

[750] Some did go bankrupt—for instance, one branch of the Fuggers. But this was surprisingly rare.

[751] Martin Luther, Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, 1524, cited in Nelson 1949:50.

[752] In Luther’s time the main issue was a practice called Zinskauf, technically rent on leased property, which was basically a disguised form of interest-bearing loan.

[753] In Baker 1974:53–54. The reference to Paul is in Romans 13:7.

[754] He argued that the fact that Deuteronomy allows usury under any circumstances 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 irrelevant in different ones.

[755] And in fact, this is what “capital” originally meant. The term itself goes back to Latin capitale, which meant “funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money, or money carrying interest” (Braudel 1992:232). It appears in English in the mid–sixteenth century largely as a term borrowed from Italian bookkeeping techniques (Cannan 1921, Richard 1926) for what remained when one squared property, credits, and debts; though until the nineteenth century, English sources generally preferred the word “stock”—in part, one suspects, because “capital” was so closely associated with usury.

[756] Nations that, after all, also practiced usury on one another: Nelson 1949:76.

[757] Ben Nelson emphasized this in an important book, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood.

[758] Midelfort 1996:39.

[759] Zmora 2006:6–8. Public financing at this period largely meant disguised interest-bearing loans from the minor nobility, who were also the stratum from which local administrators were drawn.

[760] On church lands: Dixon 2002:91. On Casimir’s gambling debts: Janssen 1910 IV:147. His overall debt rose to half a million guilders in 1528, and over three quarters of a million by 1541 (Zmora 2006:13n55.)

[761] He was 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.

[762] From “Report of the Margrave’s Commander, Michel Gross from Trock-au,” in Scott & Scribner 1991:301. The sums are based on a promise of 1 florin per execution, ½ per mutilation. We do not know if Casimir ever paid this particular debt.

[763] For some relevant accounts of the revolt and repression: Seebohm 1877:141–45; Janssen 1910 IV:323–26; Blickle 1977; Enders 1979; Vice 1988; Robisheaux 1989:48–67, Sea 2007. Casimir is said to have ultimately settled into exacting fines, eventually demanding some 104,000 guldens in compensation from his subjects.

[764] Linebaugh (2008) makes a beautiful analysis of this sort of phenomenon in his essay on the social origins of the Magna Carta.

[765] It is telling that despite the endless reprisals against commoners, none of the German princes or nobility, even those who openly collaborated with the rebels, was held accountable in any way.

[766] Muldrew 1993a, 1993b, 1996, 1998, 2001; cf. MacIntosh 1988; Zell 1996, Waswo 2004, Ingram 2006, Valenze 2006, 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 unnecessary, since I suspect that the latter does identify changes that are happening on a deeper structural level less accessible to explicit discourse (see Graeber 1997).

[767] Muldrew (2001:92) estimates that in c. 1600, eight thousand London merchants might have possessed as much as one-third of all the cash in England.

[768] Williamson 1889; Whiting 1971; Mathias 1979b; Valenze 2006:34–40.

[769] Gold and silver were a very small part of household wealth: inventories reveal on average fifteen shillings of credit for every one in coin (Muldrew 1998).

[770] This principle of a right to livelihood is key to what E.P. Thompson famously called “moral economy of the crowd” (1971) in eighteenth-century England, a notion that Muldrew (1993a) thinks can be applied to these credit systems as a whole.

[771] Stout 1742:74–75, parts of the same passage are cited in Muldrew 1993a:178, and 1998:152.

[772] To be more precise, either piety (in the Calvinist case) or good natured sociality (in the case of those that opposed them in the name of older festive values)—in the years before the civil war, many parish governments were divided between the “godly” and “good honest men” (Hunt 1983:146)

[773] Shepherd 2000, Walker 1996; for my own take on “life-cycle service” and wage labor, see, again, Graeber 1997.

[774] Hill 1972:39–56, Wrightson & Levine 1979, Beier 1985.

[775] Muldrew 2001:84.

[776] For a classic statement on the connection of Tudor markets, festivals, and morality, see Agnew (1986).

[777] Johnson 2004:56–58. On the two conceptions of justice: 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 considering the degree of general mutual engagement (Ghazanfar 2003) it seems likely.

[778] Gerard de Malynes’s Maintenance of Free Trade (1622), cited in Muldrew 1998:98, also Muldrew 2001:83.

[779] Chaucer is full of this sort of thing: the Wife of Bath has much to say about conjugal debts (e.g., Cottar 1969). It was really in the period of about 1400–1600 that everything came to be so framed as debt, presumably reflecting the first stirrings of possessive individualism, and attempts to reconcile it to older moral paradigms. Guth (2008), a legal historian, thus calls these centuries “the age of debt,” one which was then replaced after 1600 by an “age of contract.”

[780] Davenant 1771:152.

[781] Marshall Sahlins (1996, 2008) has been emphasizing the theological roots of Hobbes for some time. Much of the following analysis draws on his influence.

[782] Hobbes himself doesn’t use the term “self-interest” but does speak of “particular,” “private,” and “common” interests.

[783] De L’Esprit 53, cited in Hirschman 1986:45. Exploring the contrast between Shang’s “profit” and Helvétius’ “interest” would be a telling history in itself. They are not the same concept.

[784] “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, general sense in the sixteenth. Hobbes doesn’t use “self-interest,” though he speaks of “private” and “common” interests; but that term was already current, having appeared in the work of Machiavelli’s friend Francesco Guicciadini in 1512. It becomes commonplace in the eighteenth century (see Hirschman 1977, 1992, especially chapter 2, “on the concept of interest”; Dumont 1981; Myers 1983, Heilbron 1998).

[785] Sée (1928:187) notes that until around 1800, “interesse” was the common word for “capital” in French; in English the preferred word was “stock.” It is curious to note that Adam Smith, for one, actually returns to the Augustinian usage, “self-love,” in his famous passage about the butcher and the baker (Wealth of Nations 1.2.2).

[786] Beier 1985:159–63; cf. Dobb 1946:234. Consorting with gypsies was also a capital crime. In the case of vagrancy, justices found it so difficult to find anyone willing to press charges against vagrants that they were eventually forced to reduce the penalty to public whipping.

[787] In Walker 1996:244.

[788] Helmholtz 1986, Brand 2002, Guth 2008.

[789] Helmholz 1986, Muldrew 1998:255, Schofield & Mayhew 2002, Guth 2008).

[790] Stout 1742:121.

[791] “The horrors of the Fleet and Marshalsea 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 attempt was made to distinguish the fraudulent from the unfortunate debtor. The rich rogue—able, but unwilling to pay his debts—might riot in luxury and debauchery, while his poor unlucky fellow-prisoner was left to starve and rot on the ‘common side’ ” (Hallam 1866 V:269–70.)

[792] I do not want to argue that the more familiar narrative of “primitive accumulation,” of the enclosure of common lands and rise of private property, the dislocation of thousands of one-time cottagers who became landless laborers, is false. I simply highlight a less familiar side of the story. It’s especially helpful to highlight 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 is 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.

[793] “Personal credit received a bad press in the eighteenth century. It was frequently said that it was wrong to go into debt simply to pay for everyday consumption goods. A cash economy was celebrated and the virtues of prudent housekeeping and parsimony extolled. Consequently retail credit, pawnbroking, and moneylending were all attacked, with both borrowers and lenders the targets” (Hoppit 1990:312–13.)

[794] Wealth of Nations 1.2.2.

[795] Muldrew makes this point: 1993:163.

[796] Theory of Moral Sentiments 4.1.10.

[797] “The man who borrows in order to spend will soon be ruined, and he who lends to him 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 imagine” (Wealth of Nations 2.4.2). He does occasionally acknowledge the existence of retail credit, but he grants it no significance.

[798] Reeves 1999. Reeves, like Servet (1994, 2001) shows that many were aware of the variability of money-stuffs: Puffendorf, for example, made a long list of them.

[799] 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 diamonds are so expensive, though useless, and water, which is useful in all sorts of ways, hardly worth anything at all? The usual solution was: diamonds are the eternal form of water. (Galileo, who objected to the entire premise, 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 arguments.) See Wennerlind 2003, who notes, interestingly, that most European governments employed alchemists in the seventeenth century in order to manufacture gold and silver for coins; it’s only when these schemes definitively failed that the governments moved to paper currency.

[800] Kindleberger 1984; Boyer-Xambeu, Deleplace, & Gillard 1994; Ingham 2004:171. 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 existed at the time, but by “discounting” bills of exchange.

[801] Usher (1934, 1944) originally introduced 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.

[802] Spufford 1988:258, drawing on Usher 1943:239–42. While deposit notes were used, private bank notes, based on credit, only appear quite late—from London goldsmiths, who also acted as bankers, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

[803] See Munro 2003b for a useful summary.

[804] MacDonald 2006:156.

[805] Tomas de Mercado in Flynn 1978:400.

[806] See Flynn 1979; Braudel 1992:522–23; Stein & Stein 2000: 501–05, 960–62; Tortella & Comín 2002. The number of juros in circulation went from 3.6 million ducats in 1516 to 80.4 million in 1598.

[807] The most famous exponent of this position was Nicholas Barbon (1690), who argued that “money is a value made by law” and a measure in just the same manner as inches or hours or fluid ounces. He also emphasized that most money was credit anyway.

[808] Locke (1691:144) also cited in Caffentzis 1989:46–47, which remains the most insightful summary of the debate and its implications. Compare Perlman & McCann 1998:117–20; Letwin 2003:71–78; Valenze 2006:40–43.

[809] We tend to forget that the materialism of the Marxist tradition is not some radical departure—Marx was, like Nietzsche, taking bourgeois assumptions (though in his case, different ones) and pushing them in directions that would outrage their original proponents. Anyway, there is good reason to believe that what we now call “historical materialism” is really Engels’ addition to the project—Engels being himself nothing if not bourgeois in background and sensibilities (he was a stalwart of the Cologne stock exchange).

[810] Macaulay 1886:485—the original essay was published in the Spectator, March 1, 1711.

[811] 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 ability to turn mere paper into something as good as gold, this was clearly meant as a joke; by the seventeenth century most European monarchs actually did employ alchemists to try to produce gold from base metals; it was only their failure that led to the adoption of paper money (Wennerlend 2003).

[812] It’s not as if suspicions about money didn’t exist—but they tended to focus, instead, on moral and metaphysical issues (e.g., “the theft of time”).

[813] Said to have been given at a talk at the University of Texas in 1927, but in fact, while the passage is endlessly cited in recent books and especially on the internet, it cannot be attested to before roughly 1975. The first two lines appear to actually derive from a British investment adviser named L.L.B. Angas in 1937: “The modern Banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process 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 1937:20–21). The other parts of the quote are probably later inventions—and Lord Stamp never suggested anything like this in his published writings. A similar line, “the bank hath benefit of all interest which it creates out of nothing” attributed to William Patterson, the first director of the Bank of England, is likewise first attested to only in the 1930s, and is also almost certainly apocryphal.

[814] Joint-stock corporations were created in the beginning of the colonial period, with the famous East India Company 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 Giovanni Arrighi (1994) has pointed out, the heyday of British capitalism was marked by small family 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 bureaucratic corporate capitalism.

[815] MacKay 1854:52.

[816] MacKay 1854:53–54.

[817] Spyer 1997.

[818] Prakash 2003:209–16.

[819] Hardenburg & Casement 1913; the story has been analyzed most famously, and insightfully, by Mick Taussig (1984, 1987).

[820] Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^th edition (1911): entry for “Putumayo.”

[821] As 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 refused to trade with anybody else.

[822] This is a point demonstrated in great detail in an important book by Yann Moulier-Boutang (1997), which unfortunately has never been translated into English.

[823] Davies 1975:59. “Indentured” comes from the “indentations” or notches on a tally again, since these were widely used as contracts for those who, like most indentured servants, couldn’t read (Blackstone 1827 I:218).

[824] Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) provides the classic analysis of this “second serfdom.

[825] This was true, incidentally, across the class spectrum: everyone was expected to do this, from lowly milkmaids and apprentices to “ladies in waiting” and knight’s pages. This was one reason, incidentally, why indentured-service contracts did not seem like much of a jump in the seventeenth century: they were simply lengthening the term of contracted employment 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.

[826] The very word “proletariat” in a way alludes to this, as it’s taken from a Roman term for “those who have children.”

[827] C.L.R. James 1938; Eric Williams 1944.

[828] “Many devices were available by which businessmen economized in the use of cash in wage payments—payment could be made only at long intervals; payment might consist in giving claims on others (truck payment, tickets or vouchers to authorize purchasing from shops, etc., the provision of private notes and tokens)”—Mathias 1979a:95.

[829] Actually the full list is: “cabbage, chips, waxers, sweepings, sockings, wastages, blessing, lays, dead men, onces, primage, furthing, dunnage, portage, wines, vails, tinge, buggings, 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 Linebaugh 1982, Rule 1986:115–17).

[830] Tebbutt 1983:49. On pawnbroking in general: Hardaker 1892, Hudson 1982, Caskey 1994, Fitzpatrick 2001.

[831] Linebaugh 1993: 371–404.

[832] Usually in order to conclude that today, of course, we are living in an entirely different world, because clearly that’s not true any more. It might help here to remind the reader that Marx saw himself as writing a “critique of political economy”—that is, of theory and practice of economics of his day.

[833] See the Lockhart translation of Bernal Díaz (Díaz 1844 II:396), which gives several versions of the story, drawn from different sources.

[834] Clenninden 1991:144.

[835] 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 ultimately gambling debts. “The mentality of the gambler who directly stakes his person in the game is closer to that of the warrior, 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).

[836] This is incidentally why complaints about the immorality of deficits are so profoundly 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 limits to this. This is why U.S. financial elites, led by Alan Greenspan, panicked 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.

[837] Wallerstein 1989.

[838] 1988:600.

[839] Britain passed its first bankruptcy law in 1542.

[840] 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 happened to him when his time came due.

[841] Sonenscher (2007) gives a long and detailed history of these debates.

[842] One might trace a religious element 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.

[843] I was first put on to the significance of the date by fellow anthropologist Chris Gregory (1998: 265–96; also Hudson 2003a). 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.

[844] One plausible-sounding version, which cites rather small amounts of bullion, can be found at: www.rediff.com/money/2001/nov/17wtc.htm. For a more entertaining, fictional version: www.rense.com/general73/confess.htm.

[845] “The Federal Reserve Bank of New York: the Key to the Gold Vault” (newyorkfed.org/education/addpub/goldvaul.pdf).

[846] As a minor aside, I remember from the time also reading news reports noting that there were, in fact, a number of expensive jewelry shops in the arcades directly beneath the Towers, and that all the gold in them did in fact disappear. Presumably they were pocketed by rescue workers, but considering the circumstances, it would seem there were no serious objections—at least, I’ve never heard anything about the matter being further investigated, let alone prosecuted.

[847] 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 just like the Church … It’s got a pope, the chairman; and a college of cardinals, the governors and bank presidents; and a curia, the senior staff. The equivalent of the laity is the commercial banks … We even have different orders of religious thought like Jesuits and Franciscans and Dominicans only we call them pragmatists and monetarists and neo-Keynesians” (ibid:54).

[848] This is 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 classically Marxist version developing the connection since Nixon’s time, see Custers 2007. For a more mainstream neoclassical treatments of the connection, see MacDonald & Gastman 2001, MacDonald 2006.

[849] Senator Fullbright, in McDermott 2008:190.

[850] I note that this flies directly in the face of the intent of the United States Constitution (1.8.5), 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 creating a central bank. The United States still observes the letter of the law: United 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.

[851] 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 fractional reserve rate: just how many dollars these banks can “lend”—effectively, create—for every dollar they borrow from the Fed, or have on deposit, or can otherwise count as assets. Technically this is 10 to 1, but a variety of legal loopholes allow banks to go considerably higher.

[852] Which does raise the rather interesting question of what its gold reserves are actually for.

[853] Indeed, perhaps the greatest compromise 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.

[854] Or, to put the money in the United 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” (2002a: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 might be received: see below.

[855] Hudson 2002a:12.

[856] As many have remarked, the three countries that switched to the euro around this time—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—were precisely those singled out by Bush as his “Axis of Evil.” 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 from euro-skeptics like the UK.

[857] For a few representative takes on the relation of the dollar and empire: from a neoclassical economic perspective, Ferguson (2001, 2004), from a radical Keynesian perspective, Hudson (2003a), from a Marxist one, Brenner (2002).

[858] Even the CIA now ordinarily refers to such arrangements as “slavery,” though technically debt peonage is different.

[859] Compare this to the deficit/military chart above, on page 366—the curve is effectively identical.

[860] See dailybail.com/home/china-warns-us-about-debt-monetization.html, accessed December 22, 2009. The story is based on a piece from the Wall Street Journal, “Don’t Monetize the Debt: The president of the Dallas Fed on inflation risk and central bank independence” (Mary Anastasia O’Grady, WSJ, May 23, 2009.) I should add that in popular usage nowadays, “to monetize the debt” is generally used as a synonym for “printing money” to pay debt. This usage has become almost 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.

[861] The arrangement is sometimes referred to as Bretton Woods II (Dooley, Folkerts-Landau & Garber 2004, 2009): effectively, an 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 United States. Since real wages in the United States have either stagnated or retreated continually since the 1970s, this, and the accumulation of consumer debt, is the only reason living standards in the United States have not precipitously declined.

[862] On Zheng He, see Dreyer 2006, Wade 2004, Wake 1997. On the tribute trade in general: Moses 1967, Yü 1967, Hamashita 1994, 2003; Di Cosmo & Wyatt 2005.

[863] The argument here follows Arrighi, Hui, Hung and Selden 2003, some elements of which were echoed in Arrighi’s last work, Adam Smith in Beijing (2007).

[864] Japan of course was something of an exception, since it had arguably achieved something like First World status even before this.

[865] Keynes 1936:345.

[866] See www.irle.berkeley.edu/events/spring08/feller/

[867] The key legislation was the “Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act” of 1980, which struck down all federal usury laws: ostensibly, in reaction to the rampant inflation of the late 1970s, 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 interest ceilings in place, but institutions like credit-card companies were allowed to observe the laws of the state in which they are registered, no matter where they operated. This is why most are registered in South Dakota, which has no maximum interest rate.

[868] The first is from Thomas Friedman (1999) in a cocky and vacuous book called The Lexus and the OIive Tree, the second from Randy Martin (2002) in a book of the same name.

[869] In America this “universal otherness” is accomplished above all through racism. This is why most small retailing in the United 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 extending 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 ethnic lines becomes one where everyone is assumed to be Amalek.

[870] Gilder 1981:266, cited in Cooper 2008:7. Cooper’s essay is a brilliant exploration of the relation between debt imperialism—a phrase she seems to have coined, inspired by Hudson—and evangelical Christianity, and it is heartily recommended. See also Naylor 1985.

[871] Robertson 1992:153. In Cooper again: op cit.

[872] Atwood 2008:42.

[873] 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 understanding of “consumers’ ” actual motivations. Rationally, since CDs 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.

[874] 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 (2006), 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 large part inspired by the Midnight Notes collective, who argue that, however paradoxically, “neoliberalism has thrown open a new dimension of struggle between capital and the working 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 theory (Graeber 2001).

[875] Elyachar 2002:510.

[876] See for instance, “India’s micro-finance suicide epidemic,” Soutik Biswas, BBC News South Asia, 16 December 2010, http.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11997571

[877] 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, just to ensure that there’s no possible chance that protesters can feel they have succeeded in doing so themselves.

[878] In practice, it mainly consists of “interest-free” banking arrangements 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 if profit-sharing banks are competing with more conventional ones in the same marketplace, those who anticipate that their enterprises will yield high profits will gravitate toward the ones offering fixed-interest loans, and only those who anticipate lower profits will turn to the profit-sharing option (Kuran 1995:162). For a transition to no-interest banking to work, it would have to be total.

[879] Under the Caliphate, to guarantee the money supply; in China, through systematic intervention to stabilize markets and prevent capitalistic monopolies; later, in the United States and other North Atlantic republics, through allowing the monetization of its own debt.

[880] 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. Actually I don’t think this is in any way a bad thing—at the very least, it’s endlessly productive. The distortions born of violence strike me as uniquely insidious.

[881] von Mises 1949:540–41. The original German text was published in 1940 and presumably composed a year or two previous.

[882] Ferguson 2007:iv.

[883] 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 incessant labors. I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic—to their often justifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.

Chronology :

January 06, 2021 : Notes -- Added.

January 17, 2022 : Notes -- Updated.

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