# Debt David Graeber's anthropological history of debt — the book that demolished the economics-textbook origin story in which barter precedes money and money precedes credit. Drawing on five millennia of evidence from Mesopotamia onward, Graeber shows the sequence ran the other way: **credit systems came first**, and coinage emerged later, largely to pay soldiers. What gets moralized as personal obligation ("one must pay one's debts") is, historically, a power relation enforced by violence — and periodically dissolved by jubilee. ## The Argument Graeber distinguishes everyday "baseline communism" and reciprocal exchange from debt proper, which requires quantification and enforceability. He traces alternating epochs of virtual credit money and bullion, links the rise of coinage to slavery and standing armies, and argues that debt morality has repeatedly served to justify hierarchy — from debt peonage to IMF structural adjustment. The closing chapters connect 1971 (Nixon closing the gold window) to the modern financialized order and the 2008 bailout asymmetry: debts of the powerful are negotiable; debts of the powerless are sacred. ## RWKB Relevance Foundational heterodox-economics text for the vault's inequality and financial-power threads — the anthropological rebuttal to free-market origin myths that underwrite austerity politics. Graeber (also a coiner of "We are the 99%") sits opposite the vault's Austrian/Chicago canon as counter-canon. The book is the most widely read popularization of the [[Credit Theory of Money]], and leans directly on Alfred Mitchell-Innes's 1913–14 articles.