The History of Debt

The way violence, or the threat of violence, turns human relations into mathematics will crop up again and again over the course of this book. The resulting dilemmas appear to be as old as civilization itself. We can observe the process in the very earliest records from ancient mesopotamia. It still lies underneath the essential fabric of our institutions to day, state and market. Our most basic conceptions of the nature of freedom, morality, sociality have been shaped by a history of war, conquest and slavery.