Filed under: collapse, colonialism, dollar collapse, economy, empire, fascism, history, infowar, interesting, politics
via Metafilter Debt, slavery, and violence in history.
A wealth of information
Debt: The first five thousand years. Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (previously) writes about “debt and debt money in human history” in Eurozine. Lots of thought-provoking stuff here; I’ll put a sample in the extended description. (Via wood s lot.)
Commodity money, particularly in the form of gold and silver, is distinguished from credit money most of all by one spectacular feature: it can be stolen. Since an ingot of gold or silver is an object without a pedigree, throughout much of history bullion has served the same role as the contemporary drug dealer’s suitcase full of dollar bills, as an object without a history that will be accepted in exchange for other valuables just about anywhere, with no questions asked. As a result, one can see the last 5 000 years of human history as the history of a kind of alternation. Credit systems seem to arise, and to become dominant, in periods of relative social peace, across networks of trust, whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions, whilst precious metals replace them in periods characterised by widespread plunder. Predatory lending systems certainly exist at every period, but they seem to have had the most damaging effects in periods when money was most easily convertible into cash.
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