Debt: The First 5000 Years of History

This book is a large-scale and revolutionary study of the history of commodity-money relations from ancient times to the present, undertaken by American anthropologist, professor at the London School of Economics, and activist, one of the "anti-leaders" of the Occupy Wall Street movement, David Graeber (1961–2020). Graeber, relying on anthropological methods, puts forward the thesis that the category of debt underlies what we traditionally call the economy, which can take on forms of money, barter, collateral, credit, stocks, and so on at different stages of society's development. One of the imperatives of the book is to wrest the economy from the clutches of "professional economists" who have proven their inadequacy during the last global crisis and to place it in a broader context of cultural history, political science, sociology, and other humanities. For a wide range of readers.