In a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom, Graeber radically challenges our understanding of debt. He illustrates how for more than 5000 years long before the invention of coins or bills, there existed debtors and creditors who used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods. He argues that Madagascar was held to be indebted to France because France invaded it, reminds us that texts from Vedic India included God in credit systems and shows how the dollar changed European society forever in the sixteenth century. Debt, the first 5000 years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history of how it has defined the evolution of human society and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of the economy.
David Graeber
David Graeber teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire and Direct Action: An Ethnography. He has written for Harper's, the Nation, the Baffler, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New Left Review. In the summer of 2011, he worked with a small group of activists to plan Occupy Wall Street. In Time's 2012 'Person of the Year' feature on 'The Protestor', Kurt Anderson wrote that Graeber nudged the group to a fresh vision, a long-term encampment in a public space, an improvised democratic protest village without pre-appointed leaders, committed to a general critique, the US economy is broken, politics is corrupted by big money but with no immediate call for specific legislative or executive action. It was also Graeber, a lifelong hater of corporate smoke and mirrors, who coined the movement's ingenious slogan, 'We are the 99 percent'.
David Graeber
Penguin India