Debt

by David Graeber

  Rabelais places the encomium in the mouth of one Panurge, a wandering scholar and man of extreme classical erudition who, he observes, “knew sixty-three ways of making money—the most honorable and most routine of which was stealing.”65 The good-natured giant Pantagruel adopts Panurge and even provides him with a respectable income, but it bothers him that Panurge continues to spend money like water and remains up to his ears in debt. Wouldn’t it be better, Pantagruel suggests, to be able to pay his creditors?

  Panurge responds with horror: “God forbid that I should ever be out of debt!” Debt is, in fact, the very basis of his philosophy:

  Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever praying God to grant you a good, long and blessed life. Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men’s spoil.66

  Above all else, they will always be praying that you come into money. It’s like those ancient slaves destined to be sacrificed at their masters’ funerals. When they wished their master long life and good health, they genuinely meant it! What’s more, debt can make you into a kind of god, who can make something (money, well-wishing creditors) out of absolutely nothing.

  Worse still: I give myself to bonnie Saint Bobelin if all my life I have not reckoned debts to be, as it were, a connection and colligation between Heaven and Earth (uniquely preserving the lineage of Man without which, I say, all human beings would soon perish) and perhaps to be that great World Soul which, according to the Academics, gives life to all things.

  That it really is so, evoke tranquilly in your mind the Idea and Form of a world—take if you like the thirtieth of the worlds imagined by Metrodorus—in which there were no debtors or lenders at all. A universe sans debts! Amongst the heavenly bodies there would be no regular course whatsoever: all would be in disarray. Jupiter, reckoning that he owed no debt to Saturn, would dispossess him of his sphere, and with his Homeric chain hold in suspension all the Intelligences, gods, heavens, daemons, geniuses, heroes, devils, earth, sea and all the elements … The Moon would remain dark and bloody; why should the Sun share his light with her? He is under no obligation. The Sun would never shine on their Earth; the heavenly bodies would pour no good influences down upon it.

  Between the elements there will be no mutual sharing of qualities, no alternation, no transmutation whatsoever, one will not think itself obliged to the other; it has lent it nothing. From earth no longer will water be made, nor water transmuted into air; from air fire will not be made, and fire will not warm the earth. Earth will bring forth nothing but monsters, Titans, giants. The rain will not rain, the light will shed no light, the wind will not blow, and there will be no summer, no autumn, Lucifer will tear off his bonds and, sallying forth from deepest Hell with the Furies, the Vengeances and the horned devils, will seek to turf the gods of both the greater and lesser nations out from their nests in the heavens.

  And what’s more, if human beings owed nothing to one another, life would “be no better than a dog-fight”—a mere unruly brawl.

  Amongst human beings none will save another; it will be no good a man shouting Help! Fire! I’m drowning! Murder! Nobody will come and help him. Why? Because he has lent nothing: and no one owes him anything. No one has anything to lose by his fire, his shipwreck, his fall, or his death. He has lent nothing. And: he would lend nothing either hereafter.

  In short, Faith, Hope and Charity would be banished from this world.

  Panurge—a man without a family, alone, whose entire calling in life was getting large amounts of money and then spending it—serves as a fitting prophet for the world that was just beginning to emerge. His perspective of course is that of a wealthy debtor—not one liable to be trundled off to some pestiferous dungeon for failure to pay. Still, what he is describing is the logical conclusion, the reductio ad absurdum, which Rabelais as always lays out with cheerful perversity, of the assumptions about the world as exchange slumbering behind all our pleasant bourgeois formalities (which Rabelais himself, incidentally, detested—the book is basically a mixture of classical erudition and dirty jokes).

  And what he says is true. If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts. Without them, no one would owe anything to anybody. A world without debt would revert to primordial chaos, a war of all against all; no one would feel the slightest responsibility for one another; the simple fact of being human would have no significance; we would all become isolated planets who couldn’t even be counted on to maintain our proper orbits.

  Pantagruel will have none of it. His own feelings on the matter, he says, can be summed up with one line from the Apostle Paul: “Owe no man anything, save mutual love and affection.”67 Then, in an appropriately biblical gesture, he declares, “From your past debts I shall free you.”

  “What can I do but thank you?” Panurge replies.

  Chapter Six

  GAMES WITH SEX AND DEATH

  WHEN WE RETURN to an examination of conventional economic history, one thing that jumps out is how much has been made to disappear. Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism), but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to seek mutual advantage, melt away into the background.

  As a result, we end up with a sanitized view of the way actual business is conducted. The tidy world of shops and malls is the quintessential middle-class environment, but at either the top or the bottom of the system, the world of financiers or of gangsters, deals are often made in ways not so completely different from ways that the Gunwinggu or Nambikwara make them—at least in that sex, drugs, music, extravagant displays of food, and the potential for violence do often play parts.

  Consider the case of Neil Bush (George W.’s brother) who, during divorce proceedings with his wife, admitted to multiple infidelities with women who, he claimed, would mysteriously appear at his hotel-room door after important business meetings in Thailand and Hong Kong.

  “You have to admit it’s pretty remarkable,” remarked one of his wife’s attorneys, “for a man to go to a hotel-room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her.”

  “It was very unusual,” Bush replied, admitting however that this had happened to him on numerous occasions.

  “Were they prostitutes?”

  “I don’t know.”1

  In fact, such things seem almost par for the course when really big money comes into play.

  In this light, the economists’ insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian.

  As a result, though, the histories we tell are full of blank spaces, and the women in them seem to appear out of nowhere, without explanation, much like the Thai women who appeared at Bush’s door. Recall the passage cited in Chapter Three, from numismatist Philip Grierson, about money in the barbarian law codes:

  Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal), with considerable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal …2

  How is it possible to read this passage without immediately stopping at the end of the first line? “Bondmaids”? Doesn’t that mean “slaves?” (It does.) In ancient Ireland, female slaves were so plentiful and important that they came to function as currency. How did that happen? And if we are trying to understand the origins of money, here, isn’t the fact that people are using one another as currency at all interesting or significant?3 Yet
none of the sources on money remark much on it. It would seem that by the time of the law codes, slave girls were not actually traded, but just used as units of account. Still, they must have been traded at some point. Who were they? How were they enslaved? Were they captured in war, sold by their parents, or reduced to slavery through debt? Were they a major trade item? The answer to all these questions would seem to be yes, but it’s hard to say more because the history remains largely unwritten.4

  Or let’s return to the parable of the ungrateful servant. “Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.” How did that happen? Note that we’re not even speaking of debt service here (he is already his creditor’s servant), but outright slavery. How did a man’s wife and children come to be considered no different than his sheep and crockery—as property to be liquidated on the occasion of default? Was it normal for a man in first-century Palestine to be able to sell his wife? (It wasn’t.)5 If he didn’t own her, why was someone else allowed to sell her if he couldn’t pay his debts?

  The same could be asked of the story in Nehemiah. It’s hard not to empathize with the distress of a father watching his daughter taken off by strangers. On the other hand, one might also ask: Why weren’t they taking him? The daughter hadn’t borrowed any money.

  It’s not as if it is ordinary for fathers in traditional societies to be able to sell their children. This is a practice with a very specific history: it appears in the great agrarian civilizations, from Sumer to Rome to China, right around the time when we also start to see evidence of money, markets, and interest-bearing loans; later, more gradually, it also appears in those surrounding hinterlands that supplied those civilizations with slaves.6 What’s more, if we examine the historical evidence, there seems good reason to believe that the very obsession with patriarchal honor that so defines “tradition” in the Middle East and Mediterranean world itself arose alongside the father’s power to alienate his children—as a reaction to what were seen as the moral perils of the market. All of this is treated as somehow outside the bounds of economic history.

  Excluding all this is deceptive not only because it excludes the main purposes to which money was actually put in the past, but because it doesn’t give us a clear vision of the present. After all, who were those Thai women who so mysteriously appeared at Neil Bush’s hotel door? Almost certainly, they were children of indebted parents. Likely as not, they were contractual debt peons themselves.7

  Focusing on the sex industry would be deceptive, though. Then as now, most women in debt bondage spend the vast majority of their time sewing, preparing soups, and scouring latrines. Even in the Bible, the admonition in the Ten Commandments not to “covet thy neighbor’s wife” clearly referred not to lust in one’s heart (adultery had already been covered in commandment number seven), but to the prospect of taking her as a debt-peon—in other words, as a servant to sweep one’s yard and hang out the laundry.8 In most such matters, sexual exploitation was at best incidental (usually illegal, sometimes practiced anyway, symbolically important.) Again, once we remove some of our usual blinders, we can see that matters have changed far less, over the course of the last five thousand years or so, than we really like to think.

  These blinders are all the more ironic when one looks at the anthropological literature on what used to be called “primitive money”—that is, the sort one encounters in places where there are no states or markets—whether Iroquois wampum, African cloth money, or Solomon Island feather money, and discovers that such money is used almost exclusively for the kinds of transactions that economists don’t like to have to talk about.

  In fact, the term “primitive money” is deceptive for this very reason, since it suggests that we are dealing with a crude version of the kind of currencies we use today. But this is precisely what we don’t find. Often, such currencies are never used to buy and sell anything at all.9 Instead, they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers—almost anything but trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry.

  Often, these currencies were extremely important, so much so that social life itself might be said to revolve around getting and disposing of the stuff. Clearly, though, they mark a totally different conception of what money, or indeed an economy, is actually about. I’ve decided therefore to refer to them as “social currencies,” and the economies that employ them as “human economies.” By this I mean not that these societies are necessarily in any way more humane (some are quite humane; others extraordinarily brutal), but only that they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.

  Historically, commercial economies—market economies, as we now like to call them—are a relative newcomer. For most of human history, human economies predominated. To even begin to write a genuine history of debt, then, we have to start by asking: What sort of debts, what sort of credits and debits, do people accumulate in human economies? And what happens when human economies begin to give away to or are taken over by commercial ones? This is another way of asking the question, “How do mere obligations turn into debts?”—but it means not just asking the question in the abstract, but examining the historical record to try to reconstruct what actually did happen.

  This is what I will do over the course of the next two chapters. First I will look at the role of money in human economies, then describe what can happen when human economies are suddenly incorporated into the economic orbits of larger, commercial ones. The African slave trade will serve as a particularly catastrophic case in point. Then, in the next chapter, I will return to the first emergence of commercial economies in early civilizations of Europe and the Middle East.

  Money as Inadequate Substitute

  The most interesting theory of the origin of money is the one recently put forward by a French economist-turned-anthropologist named Philippe Rospabé. While his work is largely unknown in the English-speaking world, it’s quite ingenious, and it bears directly on our problem. Rospabé’s argument is that “primitive money” was not originally a way to pay debts of any sort. It’s a way of recognizing the existence of debts that cannot possibly be paid. His argument is worth considering in detail.

  In most human economies, money is used first and foremost to arrange marriages. The simplest and probably most common way of doing this was by being presented as what used to be called “bride-price”: a suitor’s family would deliver a certain number of dog teeth, or cowries, or brass rings, or whatever is the local social currency, to a woman’s family, and they would present their daughter as his bride. It’s easy to see why this might be interpreted as buying a women, and many colonial officials in Africa and Oceania in the early part of the twentieth century did indeed come to that conclusion. The practice caused something of a scandal, and by 1926, the League of Nations was debating banning the practice as a form of slavery. Anthropologists objected. Really, they explained, this was nothing like the purchase of, say, an ox—let alone a pair of sandals. After all, if you buy an ox, you don’t have any responsibilities to the ox. What you are really buying is the right to dispose of the ox in any way that pleases you. Marriage is entirely different, since a husband will normally have just as many responsibilities toward his wife as his wife will have toward him. It’s a way of rearranging relations between people. Second of all, if you were really buying a wife, you’d be able to sell her. Finally, the real significance of the payment concerns the status of the woman’s children: if he’s buying anything, it’s the right to call her offspring his own.10

  The anthropologists ended up winning the argument, and “bride-price” was dutifully redubbed “bridewealth.” But they never really answered the question: What is actually happening her
e? When a Fijian suitor’s family presents a whale tooth to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage, is this an advance payment for the services the woman will provide in cultivating her future husband’s gardens? Or is he purchasing the future fertility of her womb? Or is this a pure formality, the equivalent of the dollar that has to change hands in order to seal a contract? According to Rospabé, it’s none of these. The whale tooth, however valuable, is not a form of payment. It is really an acknowledgment that one is asking for something so uniquely valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible. The only appropriate payment for the gift of a woman is the gift of another woman; in the meantime, all one can do is to acknowledge the outstanding debt.

  There are places where suitors say this quite explicitly. Consider the Tiv of Central Nigeria, who we have already met briefly in the last chapter. Most of our information on the Tiv comes from mid-century, when they were still under British colonial rule.11 Everyone at that time insisted that a proper marriage should take the form of an exchange of sisters. One man gives his sister in marriage to another, that man marries the sister of his newfound brother-in-law. This is the perfect marriage because the only thing one can really give in exchange for a woman is another woman.

  Obviously, even if every family had exactly equal numbers of brothers and sisters, things couldn’t always work this neatly. Say I marry your sister but you don’t want to marry mine (because, say, you don’t like her, or because she’s only five years old). In that case, you become her “guardian,” which means you can claim the right to dispose of her in marriage to someone else—for instance, someone whose sister you actually do wish to marry. This system quickly grew into a complex system in which most important men became guardians of numerous “wards,” often scattered over wide areas; they would swap and trade them and in the process accumulate numerous wives for themselves, while less-fortunate men were only able to marry late in life, or not at all.12