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Debt: The First 5,000 Years cover

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

  • FINISHED
  • Finished September 2019
  • First published 2011

economics anthropology history

Graeber argues that credit and debt came before coins and markets, and that moral ideas about owing shaped states and religions.   He traces how debt has been used to justify violence and slavery across five thousand years.