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It is difficult in five hundred words to do justice to over five hundred pages (including extensive notes and the bibliography) covering five thousand years of world history. David Graeber must be the planet's most erudite anarchist. This book is not ideally organized, but it is original, highly entertaining, and could hardly be more topical (the author was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011).
The ostensible subject is debt, which in Graeber's analysis is the key to the history of money, economy, and the fate of our species. He sets out to demolish not just the economists' myth that money originates in barter but also the entire tradition of liberal political theory. Drawing instead on anthropological materials but also on philology and an impressive range of historical sources covering the major civilizations of Eurasia, he outlines how money originated as a unit of account in what he terms (following Keith Hart) "human economies." Its transformation into a medium of commercial exchange was a process driven by violence, slavery, and the repression of women. Graeber moves effortlessly around the world to illustrate the workings of "social currencies," usually just as they were about to be engulfed by expanding commercial economies. He then traces the history of money as we know it as a long-term oscillation between the principles of bullion and credit money, from the temples of Ancient Mesopotamia down to Richard Nixon's abandonment of gold in 1971. Quite early...