Debt

by David Graeber

  93. It’s hard to overstate this. Even the famous “Laffer Curve,” by which the Reagan Administration in the 1980s tried to argue that cutting taxes would increase government revenue by stimulating economic activity, is often called the Khaldun-Laffer curve because it was first proposed, as a general principle, in Ibn Khaldun’s 1377 Muqaddimah.

  94. Goitein 1957 for the rise of the “Middle Eastern bourgeoisie.”

  95. “Crying down” acted as a de facto tax increase, since one would now need to pay more ecus to make up a tax rate fixed in shillings. Since wages were fixed in pounds, shillings, and pence, this also had the effect of raising their value, and hence it was usually popular. “Crying up” by contrast had the effect of lowering the effective value of the units of account. This could be useful to reduce a king’s—or his allies’—personal debt measured in such units, but it also undercut the income of wage-earners and those on any sort of fixed income and so was often protested.

  96. Langholm 1979, Wood 2002:73–76.

  97. On the patristic literature on usury: Maloney 1983; Gordon 1989; Moser 2000; Holman 2002:112–26; Jones 2004:25–30.

  98. Matthew 5:42

  99. St Basil of Caesarea, Homilia II in Psalmum XIV (PG 29, 268–69).

  100. op cit.

  101. op cit.

  102. Ambrose De Officiis 2.25.89.

  103. Ambrose De Tobia 15:51. See Nelson 1949:3–5, Gordon 1989:114–118.

  104. Though not entirely. It’s worthy to note that the main supply of slaves to the empire at this time came from Germanic barbarians outside the empire, who were acquired either through war or debt.

  105. “If each one,” he wrote, “after having taken from his personal wealth whatever would satisfy his personal needs, would leave what was superfluous to those who lack every necessity, there would be no rich or poor” (In Illiud Lucae 49D)—Basil himself had been born an aristocrat, but he had sold off his landed estates and distributed the proceeds to the poor.

  106. Homilia II in Psalmum XIV (PG 29, 277C). The reference is to Proverbs 19.17.

  107. Summa 8.3.1.3: “since grace is freely given, it excludes the idea of debt … In [no] sense does debt imply that God owes anything to another creature.”

  108. Clavero (1986) sees this as a basic conflict over the nature of the contract, and hence the legal basis of human relations in European history: usury, and by extension profit, was denounced, but rent, the basis of feudal relations, was never challenged.

  109. Gordon 1989:115. “What is commerce,” wrote Cassiodorus (485–585), “except to want to sell dear that which can be bought cheap? Therefore those merchants are detestable who, with no consideration of God’s justice, burden their wares more with perjury than value. Them the Lord evicted them from the Temple saying, ‘Do not make my Father’s house into a den of thieves” (in Langholm 1996:454).

  110. On the Jewish legal tradition concerning usury, see Stein 1953, 1955; Kirschenbaum 1985.

  111. Poliakov 1977:21.

  112. Nelson (1949) assumed that the “Exception” was often held to apply to relations between Christians and Jews, but Noonan (1957:101–2) insists that it was mainly held to apply only to “heretics and infidels, particularly the Saracens,” and by some, not even to them.

  113. Up to 52 percent with security, up to 120 percent without (Homer 1987:91).

  114. Debtor’s prisons, in the sense of prisons exclusively for debtors, existed in England only after 1263, but the imprisonment of debtors has a much longer history. Above all, Jewish lenders seem to have been employed as the means of transforming virtual, credit money into coinage, collecting the family silver from insolvent debtors, and turning it over to royal mints. They also won title to a great deal of land from defaulting debtors, most of which ended up in the hands of barons or monasteries (Singer 1964; Bowers 1983; Schofield & Mayhew 2002).

  115. Roger of Wendower, Flowers of History 252–53. Roger doesn’t name the victim; in some later versions his name is Abraham, in others, Isaac.

  116. Matthew Prior, in Bolles 1837:13.

  117. Or even, for that matter, Nietzsche’s fantasies of the origins of justice in mutilation. Where one was a projection onto Jews of atrocities actually committed against Jews, Nietzsche was writing in an age where actual “savages” were often punished by similar tortures and mutilations for failure to pay their debts to the colonial tax authorities, as later became a most notorious scandal in Leopold’s Belgian Congo.

  118. Mundill (2002), Brand (2003).

  119. Cohn 1972:80.

  120. Peter Cantor, in Nelson 1949:10–11.

  121. It was a firm from Cahors, for instance, who received the property of the English Jews when the latter were finally expelled in 1290. Though for a long time, Lombards and Cahorsins were themselves dependent on royal favor and hardly in much better position than the Jews. In France, the kings seemed to expropriate and expel Jews and Lombards alternately (Poliakov 1977:42).

  122. Noonan 1957:18–19; Le Goff 1990:23–27.

  123. There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men profit from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a profit out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term “interest” (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. “Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural” (Aristotle, Politics 1258b). The Nicomachean Ethics (1121b) is equally damning. For the best general analysis of the Aristotelean tradition on usury: Langholm 1984.

  124. Noonan 1957:105–12; Langholm 1984:50.

  125. The technical term for the lost income is lucrum cessans: see O’Brien 1920: 107–10, Noonan 1957:114–28, Langholm 1992:60–61; 1998:75; Spufford 1989:260.

  126. As German merchants also did in the Baltic cities of the Hanseatic alliance. On the Medici bank as a case in point, see de Roover 1946, 1963, Parks 2005.

  127. The situation in Venice, a pioneer in these matters, is telling: there was no merchant guild, but only craft guilds, since guilds were essentially created as protection against the government, and in Venice, the merchants were the government (MacKenney 1987; Mauro 1993:259–60).

  128. They were accused of both heresy and sodomy: see Barber 1978.

  129. One cannot “prove” the Islamic inspiration of European bills of exchange, but considering the amount of trade between the two sides of the Mediterranean, denying it seems bizarre. Braudel (1995:816–17) proposes that the idea must have reached Europe through Jewish merchants, who we know to have long been using them in Egypt.

  130. On bills of exchange: Usher 1914; de Roover 1967; Boyer-Xambeu, Deleplace, and Gillard 1994; Munro 2003b:542–46; Denzel 2006. There were innumerable currencies, any of which might at any time be “cried up,” “cried down,” or otherwise fluctuate in value. Bills of exchange also allowed merchants to effectively engage in currency speculation, and even get around usury laws, once it became possible to pay for one bill of exchange by writing a different bill of exchange, due in several months’ time, for a slightly higher sum. This was called “dry exchange” (de Roover 1944), and over time the Church became increasingly skeptical, causing yet another round of financial creativity to get around the laws. It’s worthy of note that the rates of interest on such commercial loans were generally quite low: twelve percent at the highest, in dramatic contrast to consumer loans. This is a sign of the increasingly lower risk of such transactions (see Homer 1987 for a history of interest rates).

  131. Lane 1934.

  132. “In very many respects, such as the organization of slave labor, management of colonies, imperial administration, commercial institutions, maritime technolog
y and navigation, and naval gunnery, the Italian city-states were the direct forerunners of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, to the shaping of which the Italians contributed so heavily, and in the profits of which they so largely shared” (Brady 1997:150).

  133. They appear to have used Greek serfs at first, and sometimes Arabs captured in the Crusades, and only later, Africans. Still, this was the economic model that was eventually transported by Portuguese merchants to Atlantic islands like the Canaries, then eventually to the Caribbean (Verlinden 1970, Phillips 1985:93–97, Solow 1987, Wartburg 1995).

  134. Scammell 1981:173–75.

  135. Spufford 1988:142

  136 On the notion of adventure: Auerbach 1946, Nerlich 1977.

  137. Duby (1973) makes this point. The “round table” was originally a type of tournament, and especially in the 1300s, it became common to make such tournaments explicit imitations of King Arthur’s court, with knights entering the contests taking on roles from them: Galahad, Gawain, Bors, etc.

  138. Also at a time when technological changes, especially the invention of the crossbow and the rise of professional armies, were beginning to render knights’ role in combat increasingly irrelevant (Vance 1973).

  139. Kelly 1937:10.

  140. See Schoenberger 2008 for a recent and compelling take: comparing the role of war mobilization in creating markets in Greece and Rome to Western Europe in the High Middle Ages.

  141. Wolf 1954.

  142. A point originally made by Vance (1986:48). The similarity is more obvious in the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, written perhaps twenty years later, in which knights “roam freely over Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, to Baghdad, Armenia, India, Ceylon” (Adolf 1957:113)—and Islamic references are legion (Adolf 1947, 1957)—that is, areas known to Europeans of the time only through trade. The fact that actual merchants, on those rare occasions when they appear, are never sympathetic characters has little bearing.

  143. Wagner, Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage (1848)—which in English is “World History as Told in Saga.” I am taking my account of Wagner’s argument from another wonderful, if sometimes extravagant, essay by Marc Shell called “Accounting for the Grail” (1992:37–38). Wagner’s argument is really more complicated: it centers on the failed attempt by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to subdue the Italian city-states and the abandonment of his principle that property can only flow from the king; instead, we have the rise of mercantile private property, which is echoed by financial abstraction.

  144. Shell sees the Grail as a transformation of the older notion of the cornucopia or inexhaustible purse in an age “just beginning to be acquainted with checks and credit”—noting the connection of the legend with the Templars, and fact that Chretien—whose name means “Christian”—was likely, for that reason, to have been a converted Jew. Wolfram also claimed that he got the legend from a Jewish source (Shell 1992:44–45).

  145. Even China was often split and fractured. Just about all the great empire-building projects of the Middle Ages were the work not of professional armies, but of nomadic peoples: the Arabs, Mongols, Tatars, and Turks.

  146. Nicomachean Ethics 1133a29–31.

  147. He compares money not only to a postman, but also, to a “ruler,” who also stands outside society to govern and regulate our interactions. It’s interesting to note that Thomas Aquinas, who might have been directly influenced by Ghazali (Ghazanfar 2000), did accept Aristotle’s argument that money was a social convention that humans could just as easily change. For a while, in the late Middle Ages, this became the predominant Catholic view.

  148. As far as I know, the only scholar to have pointed out the connection is Bernard Faure, a French student of Japanese Buddhism: Faure 1998:798, 2000:225.

  149. Later still, as cash transactions became more common, the term was applied to small sums of cash offered as down-payment, rather in the sense of English “earnest money.” On symbola in general: Beauchet 1897; Jones 1956:217; Shell 1978:32–35.

  150. Descat 1995:986.

  151. Aristotle On Interepretation 1.16–17. Whitaker (2002:10) thus observes that for Aristotle, “the meaning of a word is fixed by convention, just as the importance attached to a tally, token, or ticket depends on agreement between the parties concerned.”

  152. Nicomachean Ethics 1133a29–31.

  153. But they believed that these formulae summed up or “drew together” the essence of those secret truths that the Mysteries revealed—“symbolon,” being derived the verb symballein, meaning “to gather, bring together, or compare.”

  154. Müri 1931, Meyer 1999. The only knowledge we have of such symbola comes from Christian sources; Christians later adopted their own symbolon, the Creed, and this remained the primary referent of the term “symbol” throughout the Middle Ages (Ladner 1979).

  155. Or pseudo-Dionysius, since the real Dionysius the Areopagite was a first-century Athenian converted to Christianity by St. Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius’ works are an attempt to reconcile neo-Platonism, with its notion of philosophy as the process of the liberation of the soul from material creation and its reunification with the divine, with Christian orthodoxy. Unfortunately, his most relevant work, Symbolic Theology, has been lost, but his surviving works all bear on the issue to some degree.

  156. In Barasch 1993:161.

  157. Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Celestial Hierarchy 141A–C. On Dionysius’ theory of symbolism in general, and its influence, see Barasch 1993:158–80, also Goux 1990:67, Gadamer 2004:63–64.

  158. He calls them, like communion, “gifts that are granted to us in symbolic mode.” On the Celestial Hierarchy 124A.

  159. Mathews 1934:283. Compare the definition of symbolon:

  A. tally, i.e. each of two halves or corresponding pieces of a knucklebone or other object, which two guest friends, or any two contracting parties, broke between them, each party keeping one piece, in order to have proof of the identity of the presenter of the other.

  B. of other devices having the same purpose, e.g. a seal-impression on wax,

  1. any token serving as proof of identity

  2. guarantee

  3. token, esp. of goodwill After Liddell and Scott 1940:1676–77, without the examples, and with the Greek words for “knucklebone” and “guest-friend” rendered into English.

  160. Rotours 1952:6. On fu (or qi, another name for debt tallies that could be used more generally for “tokens”) more generally: Rotours 1952, Kaltenmark 1960, Kan 1978, Faure 2000:221–29: Falkenhausen 2005.

  161. There is a curious tension here: the will of heaven is also in a certain sense the will of the people, and Chinese thinkers varied on where they placed the emphasis. Xunzi, for instance, assumed that the authority of the king is based on the confidence of the people. He also argued that while confidence among the people is maintained by contracts ensured by the matching of tally sticks, under a truly just king, social trust will be such that such objects will become unnecessary (Roetz 1993:73–74).

  162. Kohn 2000:330. Similarly in Japan: Faure 2000:227.

  163. In the Encyclopedia of Taoism they are described as “diagrams, conceived as a form of celestial writing, that derive their power from the matching celestial counterpart kept by the deities who bestowed them” (Bokenkamp 2008:35). On Taoist fu: Kaltenmark 1960; Seidel 1983; Strickmann 2002:190–91; Verellen 2006; on Buddhist parallels, see Faure 1998; Robson 2008.

  164. Sasso 1978; the origins of the yin-yang symbol remain obscure and contested but those Sinologists I’ve consulted find this plausible. The generic word for “symbol” in contemporary Chinese is fúhào, which is directly derived from fu.

  165. Insofar as I’m weighing in on the “Why didn’t the Islamic world develop modern capitalism?” debate, then, it seems to me that both Udovitch’s argument (1975:19–21) that the Islamic world never developed impersonal credit mechanisms, and Ray’s objection (1997:39–40) that the ban on interest and insurance was more important, c
arry weight. Ray’s suggestion that differences in inheritance laws might play a role also deserves investigation.

  166. Maitland 1908:54.

  167. Davis 1904.

  168. In the Platonic sense: just as any particular, physical bird we might happen to see on a nearby fruit tree is merely a token of the general idea of “bird” (which is immaterial, abstract, angelic), so do the various physical, mortal individuals who join together to make up a corporation become an abstract, angelic Idea. Kantorowicz argues that it took a number of intellectual innovations to make the notion of the corporation possible: notably, the idea of the aeon or aevum, eternal time, that is, time that lasts forever, as opposed to the Augustinian eternity which is outside of time entirely and was considered the habitation of the angels, to the revival of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite (1957:280–81).

  169. Kantorowicz 1957:282–83.

  170. Islamic law, for instance, not only did not develop the notion of fictive persons, but steadfastly resisted recognizing corporations until quite recently (Kuran 2005).

  171. Mainly Randall Collins (1986:52–58), who also makes the comparison with China; cf. Coleman 1988.

  172. See Nerlich 1987:121–24.

  Chapter Eleven

  1. On English wages, see Dyer 1989; on English festive life, there is a vast literature, but a good recent source is Humphrey 2001. Silvia Federici (2004) provides a compelling recent synthesis.

  2. For a very small sampling of more recent debates over the “price revolution,” see Hamilton 1934, Cipolla 1967, Flynn 1982, Goldstone 1984, 1991, Fisher 1989, Munro 2003a, 2007. The main argument is between monetarists who continue to argue that increase in the amount of specie is ultimately responsible for the inflation, and those who emphasize the role of rapid population increase, though most specific arguments are considerably more nuanced.