David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years can be seen both as an anthropologist’s contribution to the new global history and as the intellectual credo of an anti-capitalist scholar-activist. The project of writing a history of financial contrivances nicely combines a deconstruction of debt and the case for seeing the crash of 2008 as a critical turning point. In this optic, recent events are a further twist in an age-old contest between rich and poor, creditors and debtors, the money machine and the cause of human survival and flourishing. It is written with engaging good humour and a winning radical generosity. ‘Perhaps the world really does owe you a living’, Graeber suggests. In the tradition of Lafargue and Bakunin, he puts in a good word for the non-industrious poor: ‘At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknoweldge.’ It is easy to see why his book has won such a wide readership among the indebted young students, workers and non-workers of the Occupy movement.

Debt does not present a linear narrative. The first half of the book comprises wide-ranging chapters on the notions of obligation, barter, redemption and honour. There then follows what might at first appear to be a conventional chronological sequence, starting with pre-history, proceeding via the Ancient Middle East, Rome and Greece, China and India, before moving on to the Axial Age (800 bc to 600 ad), the Middle Ages, the ‘Age of the Great Capitalist Empires’ and, finally, the period since 1971—dubbed ‘the Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined’. The apparent sequence of historical stages is often interrupted, as Graeber moves from discussions of medieval Ireland to contemporary Africa, from Roman law to the Middle Passage. He often dwells on trans-temporal similarities, linking the past, even the distant past, with recent events; the propensity of markets to spin out of control is a recurrent theme. You would have to be very well read not to learn a lot from these fascinating discussions, in which Graeber, like Marx, often cites literature—Rabelais, Goethe, the Bible, the 1001 Nights—rather than the great economists, to drive home his critique.

In Debt’s opening chapters, Graeber draws on a range of anthropological research to make his case that the disembedded markets, money and debt of neo-classical economic theory are abstract and arbitrary constructs of comparatively recent invention. Real exchange always brought together not just two individuals, seen as price-givers or -takers, but two (or more) social worlds, with partially overlapping claims, assumptions and expectations. The apparently simple act of exchange always generated uneven obligations and discrepant temporalities. Debt and credit were vital enablers, as were such devices as the payment of fees to initiate exchange, or even the small change of polite discourse—‘much obliged’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ all being terms expressive of personal indebtedness.

What turns an obligation into a debt, Graeber observes, is that it can be denominated and calculated in quantitative terms, prompting the thought that money and the market reduce quality to quantity. However, he is aiming at a further conclusion. He demolishes the idea that barter was the first type of economy, seeing it as less important than the evolution of money:

We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually discover credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental by-product of the use of coinage or paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency.

Prior to generalized exchange, he explains, many societies had different currencies, some dedicated to petty transactions geared to everyday consumption, others devoted to regulating and promoting basic human relationships. Thus he cites the case of tribal societies in Africa and North America which have had special currencies to facilitate marriage, or to prevent endless feuding stemming from a homicide. A clan or family’s loss of a daughter seemingly creates a right to receive ‘payment’ in brass rods, or whale’s teeth, or wampum. Similar tokens of special value would be offered where a family member had been murdered. The ‘currency’ employed was not part of any system of equivalents—as Graeber observes of the Tiv people of rural Nigeria, ‘no amount of okra could get you a brass rod, just as, in principle, no amount of brass rods could give you full rights to a woman’—but was rather limited to recording a special obligation, which could only begin to be settled when it became possible to offer a marriage partner in restitution. Even then, it was not until the marriage had produced children that the restitution would truly commence. As with bride-wealth payments, the offer of brass rods or wampum was not a price but a device for recording an obligation that no currency could discharge.

Another form of obligation was blood debts, which could easily engender dependence as debtors pledged themselves or their own children as pawns. In normal conditions the debt might be easy to discharge once the harvest was in, or when the drought ended, and pawnship in itself was not necessarily onerous. But if conditions did not improve, and if trading networks gave new options to creditors, then discharging the debt might ultimately require the debtor to pay over the bodies of their family members. Traders could seize the pawns of debtors who had defaulted: Graeber notes that this was one source of slave trafficking in general and the Atlantic slave trade in particular. (However, it should be noted that the gender imbalance of the Atlantic traffic—with two thirds of its victims being men or boys—was very different from the typical pattern of pawnship, whose victims were disproportionately female.)