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In his
Debt: The First 5000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber put forward a new grand narrative of world history. In
Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East, John Weisweiler explores the implications of this theory for historians of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. On the one hand, it assesses how well the interpretations advanced in
Debt fit current understandings of ancient economies. On the other hand, it sketches a history of ancient credit systems which takes seriously the dual nature of debt as both quantifiable economic reality and immeasurable social obligation.
List of contents
- Preface
- 1 The Currency-Slavery-Warfare Complex: David Graeber and the History of Value in Antiquity
- John Weisweiler
- 2 Beyond Debt: Markets and Morality in First-Millennium-BCE Babylonia
- Reinhard Pirngruber
- 3 Cosmic Debt in Greece and India
- Richard Seaford
- 4 Private Debts in Classical Greece: Bond of Friendship, Curse of hatred?
- Moritz Hinsch
- 5 Debt, Death, and Destruction in Ancient Rome
- Lisa Eberle
- 6 The Poetics and Politics of Exchange in Roman Agronomy
- Neville Morley
- 7 Monetization, Marketization and State Formation: The Later Roman Empire as an Axial Age Economy
- John Weisweiler
- 8 Zoroastrian Materialism: Religion, Empire, and Their Critics in Graeber's Late Axial Age
- Richard Payne
- 9 Debt, Debt Bondage, and the Early Islamic Economy
- Michael Bonner
- 10 Debt's Fourth Millennium Seen From Below: How Papyri Modify the Picture
- Arietta Papaconstantinou
- 11 After the Axial Age: Debt and Obligation in the European Early Middle Ages
- Alice Rio
- 12 Afterword
- Keith Hart
About the author
John Weisweiler is University Lecturer in Ancient History and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is co-editor of Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East and author of From Republican Empire to Universal State: Senators, Emperors, Senators and Local Elites in Early Imperial and Late-Antique Rome.
Summary
In his Debt: The First 5000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber put forward a new grand narrative of world history. From the Late Bronze Age onwards, all across the Near East and Mediterranean, relationships of mutual obligation were transformed into quantifiable and legally enforceable debts. Graeber suggests that this transformation made possible new economic institutions, such as IOUs, coinage, and chattel slavery. It also led to the emergence of modes of thought that have shaped Eurasian philosophical and religious traditions ever since.
Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East explores the implications of this theory for the history of the Mediterranean and Near East. A distinguished group of ancient historians assesses how well Graeber's interpretations fit current understandings of ancient and late antique economies. At the same time, this volume offers a history of premodern credit systems which takes seriously the dual nature of debt as both quantifiable economic reality and immeasurable social obligation. By exploring the diverse ways in which social relationships were quantified in different ancient and late antique societies, the work introduces a method of writing the history of premodern systems of exchange that departs from the currently dominant paradigm of neo-institutional economics.
Additional text
Beyond the documenting of contrarian facts, the individual studies are valuable historical analyses of debt both as an economic fact, as an instrument of social coercion, and as a moral category of thought (as well as related matters).
