Debt: The First 5,000 Years

A revised and updated edition of the international bestseller. Graeber, one of the early organisers of Occupy Wall Street and a well regarded academic, presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom; he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods, long before the invention of cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we first see a society divided between debtors and creditors.