For instance, if slavery is debt, then debt can lead to slavery. There is good reason to believe that it was just this operation that made it possible to create something like our contemporary form of money to begin with, since what anthropologists used to refer to as ‘primitive money', the kind that one finds in stateless societies (Solomon Island feather money, Iroquois wampum), was mostly used to arrange marriages, resolve blood feuds, and fiddle with other sorts of relations between people, rather than to buy and sell commodities. In this case, absolute debt becomes (in another context, that of the market) no longer absolute. First of all, as we all know, it is another typical - perhaps defining - feature of slavery that slaves can be bought or sold. This sort of logic has at least two very interesting consequences, though they might be said to pull in rather contrary directions. Your debt to your owner is all that now exists. He can in principle extract anything he wants, and all debts - obligations - you may owe to others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that others owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable.

If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Let me start with the institution of slavery, whose role, I think, is key. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence - but also, the systematic threat of violence - maintained by the contemporary state. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy'. What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history.

Debt the first 5000