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  • Published: 9 December 2014
  • ISBN: 9781612194202
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 566
Categories:

Debt

The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded





A revised and updated edition of the international bestseller, to be launched with major advertising push -- just months before the launch of Graeber's new book with Melville House

Now in paperback, the updated and expanded edition: David Graeber’s “fresh . . . fascinating . . . thought-provoking . . . and exceedingly timely” (Financial Times) history of debt 

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.

  • Published: 9 December 2014
  • ISBN: 9781612194202
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 566
Categories:

About the author

David Graeber

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.

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